Category: Language

Measuring your progress

By Simon

When learning a language it’s sometimes helpful and useful to get an idea of how well you’re progressing. There are a number of ways to do this, including taking language proficiency tests, setting yourself a task to complete using only the language you’re learning, or seeing how much you understand when you listen to or read the language.

When I read things in a foreign language, I try to understand as much as possible without using a dictionary. Any words I don’t know I try to guess from the context. At first I can understand very little, but as my knowledge of the language improves I start to understand a lot more. One way I gauge my progress is to count how many words I have to look up per sentence, paragraph or page. When I can read whole pages or even chapters of books without reaching for a dictionary, I know I’m making good progress. There may be a few words I’m not sure about, but I tend to leave them, as long as they’re not key to my understand of the text.

When listening to a foreign language, on the radio for example, I try to get the gist of what they’re talking about from the words I understand. If I know more of the language in question, I can fill in more of the details. Understanding the news in a foreign language is relatively easy as I’ve usually heard or read the news in English beforehand and know what to expect. Understanding other material can be more of a challenge.

Phrasebottles

By Simon

Photo of one of the Bottles in Translation

A teacher from Colorado, Steve Margolin, has come up with an interesting idea – water bottles with a hundred commonly-used phrases printed on them. The phrases are in Spanish, French or Italian with their English equivalents. He calls them “Bottles in Translation” – I coined an alternative name for them – phrasebottles.

While travelling in Europe he realised that he was using the same phrases all the time, and got frustrated with having to keep flicking through his dictionaries and phrasebooks to find them. So he thought it would be really handy to have the phrase on something he carried with him all the time – his waterbottle.

A number of my phrasebooks have the most commonly-used phrases printed on the insides of their front and/or back covers. Others have pull out card with such phrases on them.

Source: www.courier-journal.com

Word of the day – rompre

By Simon

rompre /ʁɔ̃pʁ/ verb = to break (up/off/with) / séparer en deux parties, briser, mettre en pièces

Examples of usage
En tombant de cheval, il s’est rompu le cou.
– he broke his leg neck falling off a horse

rompre ses chaînes
– to break one’s chains

tu nous romps la tête avec ta musique
– you’re deafening us with your music

ils ont rompu (leurs fiançailles)
– they’ve broken it off, they’ve broken off their engagement

il va se rompre les os / le cou
– he’s going to break his neck

As we haven’t had a French word of the day for a while, I thought it was time for one. To remember this word I think of someone romping around breaking things.

More nyms

By Simon

The nym family has many offspring, including exonym and endonym, as discussed yesterday. Here are a few more of their unruly brood:

Homonyms
These are words that are pronounced the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. For example: write (to inscribe), right (correct/opposite of left), rite (ritual) and wright (a maker); night (opposite of day), knight (a chess piece). Many more English homonyms are listed here.

Heteronyms
Words spelled the same, but pronounced differently and having different meanings, e.g. bass (low) and bass (a type of fish); polish (to shine) and Polish (from Poland). Some heteronyms are distinguished by the placement of the stress, others by pronouncation. Polish/polish is also an example of a capitonym, a word that has a different meaning when capitalized.

Antagonyms/Contranyms
These are words with two meanings that contradict each other, such as assume: to actually have (to assume office) vs. to hope to have (he assumed he would be elected). Another example is custom (ordinary vs. special) — It was custom in these parts to have your boots custom made. More examples can be found here.

Anacronym
An acronym that is so well established that its origin as an abbreviation is no longer widely known (a portmanteau of anachronism + acronym), for example scuba and laser.

Ananym
A name written backward and used as a pseudonym.

Eponym
A word derived from the name of a person. For example the sandwich is named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792), and the word boycott comes from a certain 19th century Irish landlord, Charles C. Boycott (1832-1897).

Exonyms and endonyms

By Simon

Peking is an example of an exonym, a name given to a place or group of people by foreigners. Other exonyms for places in China include Canton, Amoy, Macau and China itself. The endonyms or autonyms (native names) for these places are 广州 (Guǎngzhōu in Mandarin, Gwóngjàu in Cantonese); 厦门 (Xiàmén), 澳門 (Ngoumún) and 中国 (Zhōngguó).

English exonyms for countries in Europe include:

Croatia (Hrvatska), Finland (Suomi), Germany (Deutschland), Hungary (Magyarország), Poland (Polska), Spain (España), Sweden (Sverige) and Wales (Cymru)

English exonyms for cities in Europe include:

Copenhagen (København), Moscow (Москва/Moskva), Prague (Praha), Rome (Roma), The Hague (Den Haag), Munich (München), Cologne (Köln), Vienna (Wien) and Warsaw (Warszawa)

(the endonyms are shown in brackets)

Exonyms are used in other languages, of course, not just in English. For example, London is called Londres in French, Spanish and Portuguese, Londra in Italian and Romanian, Llundain in Welsh, Lunnain in Scottish Gaelic, ロンドン (rondon) in Japanese, and 倫敦 [伦敦] (Lúndūn) in Mandarin.

You can find the native names (endonym/autonyms) of all the countries of the world here and the native names of many languages here, and a good place to find both exonyms and endonyms of countries, cities, languages, etc. is www.geonames.de

The northern capital

By Simon

Beijing in Chinese

The capital of the People’s Republic of China used to be known as Peking in English and many other languages. Since 1949 it’s been known as Beijing, which is often mispronounced: the J in jing is not pronounced /ʒ/ (/Z/) as in pleasure, but more like jing, as in jingle.

Or if you want to be strictly accurate, Beijing is pronounced /pei˨˩˦ tɕɪŋ˥˥/ (/pei_\_/ ts\iN_H/), the first syllable has a rising tone, and the second has a high level tone. Where the /ʒ/ (/Z/) pronunciation for the J comes from is a mystery to me. Any ideas anyone?

Peking is the Postal System Pinyin version of Beijing. Postal System Pinyin was introduced in Shanghai in 1906 and was based on a romanization system developed by French missionaries 400 years earlier when the Chinese word for capital, 京, was pronounced /kʲiŋ/ (/k’iN/).

The literal meaning of Peking/Beijing is ‘Northern Capital’. There is also a Southern Capital, Nanjing (南京), and an Eastern Capital, Tōkyō (東京), which is Dongjing in Chinese. There is no Xijing (西京) or Eastern Capital though.

Between 1928 and 1949, Beijing was known as Beiping (北平) ‘Northern Peace’ in China because Nanjing was the capital for the Kuomintang government.

Another alternative name for Beijing is Yanjing (燕京), which refers to the State of Yan that existed during the Zhou dynasty (1022 – 256 BC).

Portmanteaux

By Simon

photo of a portmanteau

A portmanteau is a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments. The word comes from the Middle French porter (to carry) and manteau (mantle). In modern French the word means coat rack.

A portmanteau word or portmanteau is one that fuses several grammatical inflections, or one that combines parts of two or more words. The first definition is the one used by linguists, who know portmanteaux of the second type as blends.

The term portmanteau was coined by Lewis Carroll and first appeared in his book, Through the Looking Glass, in 1871. When explaining the word slithy from Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy … You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

Other portmanteaux in English include brunch (breakfast + lunch), smog (smoke + fog), aquarobics (aqua – aerobics), infomercial (information + comercial), advertorial (advertisement + editorial), and of course blog (web + log).

An interesting portmanteau I came across today was snickanas (snickers + bananas) – a snack one of my friends invented.

Main source: Wikipedia

I think I’ll pass on the parsing

By Simon

As children few of us know any grammatical terminology, yet we’re still able to speak grammatically. In school we might be taught the ‘grammar’ of our own language. Traditionally, in English-speaking countries at least, this has consisted mainly of parsing sentences – an exercise that involves labelling the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc). Recently though, there’s been a trend to avoid teaching any kind of grammar at all, at least in the UK.

Those taught to parse sentences seem keen to point out that many people ‘don’t know their grammar’ these days, with the implication that this is a bad thing. However, even people who don’t know, or are not sure of, the difference between nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. are able to cobble together grammatically correct sentences.

The origin of parsing sentences goes back to ancient Greece: the Greeks developed a description or grammar of their language in order to teach it to non-Greeks. The most famous Greek grammarian, Dionysius Thrax, established the idea of parts of speech, which he based on the ideas of Aristotle. In his Téchnē, written in the 2nd century BC, he stated that Greek had eight parts of speech: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction. Adjectives were a sub-class of nouns. To ‘know one’s grammar’ was essentially a matter of being able to parse sentences and name the parts of speech. Syntax was usually ignored.

The Greek model was copied by the Romans and adapted to Latin, a language different to Greek in many ways. The Latin model was later used for many other languages, few of which were much like Latin or Greek.

Were you taught grammar at school? How was it taught, and do you remember much of it?