Month: July 2006

Word of the day – mimesis

By Simon

mimesis, noun = the imitative representation of nature or human behaviour; any disease that shows symptoms of another disease; a condition in a hysterical patient that mimics an organic disease; representation of another person’s alleged words in a speech.

Origin: from the Greek μιμεισθαι (mimeisthai) – to imitate.

Related words include mime, mimic, mimicry and mimetic.

I came across this word in a post on No-sword about the crazy-sounding Japanese sport of Sports Chanbara (スポーツチャンバラ). When discussing the origin of the word chanbara, which is an abbreviation of chanchan barabara (チャンチャンバラバラ), No-sword says the the chanchan part “is mimesis for the sound of swords clashing”. I hadn’t seen this word before so had to look it up in the dictionary, and I like the sound of it. This is also an example of onomatopeia, something that’s quite common in Japanese.

Snowclones

By Simon

Snowclones are adaptable templates for clichés popular with journalists and writers. For example, X is the new Y, A doesn’t know the meaning of B, and C is D’s middle name. Just replace the letters with words and you have a cliché you can use in quite a wide range of circumstances.

Wikipedia defines a snowclone as: “a neologism used to describe a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context”

Here are a few examples:

grey is the new black
coders are from Mars, designers are from Venus
the only good language is a dead language
the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines
the internet is the best thing since sliced bread
the word surrender is not in my dictionary

There are many more templates on Answers.com

The term snowclone was coined by Glen Whitman, an Associate Professor of Economics, California State University, Northridge, on 15th January 2004. There’s more discussion of this topic on Language Log.

Textbook language

By Simon

Yesterday I was discussing language learning with a friend and he mentioned that when he was in Japan studying Japanese, it was fairly easy to understand the other students, but very difficult to understand the Japanese themselves.

If you learn a language from a textbook and/or in a class, it’s often quite a surprise to discover that native speakers of your target language don’t speak textbook: they don’t necessarily give model answers to your questions, or speak in complete sentences, and they tend to use a lot of words you haven’t heard before, including slang. Most of your fellow students, and other people who have learnt the language as a second/foreign language, speak textbook, so they are usually easier to understand than native speakers.

Some textbooks claim to teach you the slang and other more colloquial aspects of language, but they tend to become out-of-date quite quickly because language is constantly changing.

In order to learn the language that native speakers use, you have to spend as much time as possible listening and speaking to them.

What language is this?

By Simon

Here’s a challenge for you – can you identify the following language and translate it into English?

Nangeguaqavoq sitkasigpai

A few clues – it appears in a book by an author with an alliterative name. The title of the book includes a reference to a certain biblical garden. The people who speak this language live in places where it’s cold most of the time.

Good luck!

Dictionaries – what are they for?

By Simon

Many people see dictionaries as major sources of authority on language-related matters. If a word is not in the dictionary, then it can’t possibly exist, even if you hear it every day in the conversations of others. Dictionaries are there to tell us what words ‘really mean’, and how they ‘should’ be used and pronounced. These types of attitudes could be called prescriptive.

There is however another view of the function of dictionaries: that they should provide a description that is as objective as possible of a particular language, including information about pronunciation, meanings, etymology and usage.

While composing this, I starting wondering whether anybody has ever compiled an oral dictionary, i.e. a dictionary of spoken language consisting of recordings of words, definitions and examples of usage. Such a dictionary would be very interesting, and particularly useful for language students.

This post was inspired by one of the books I’m reading at the moment: Proper English – Myths and Misunderstandings about Language, by Ronald Wardhaugh.

Language X is better for activity Y, or is it?

By Simon

The seems to be a common belief that some languages are better suited to certain types of activities than others. For example, Emperor Charles V apparently said “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my dog.”

Some people believe that certain languages are not suitable for such things as literature, romance, poetry, pop music or stand-up comedy. Which languages they view in this way might depend on their own linguistic background, nationality and ethnicity. Such beliefs aren’t necessarily about the languages themselves but rather about the people who speak them.

In theory, every language has the same expressive potential, i.e. what you can say in one language can be said in any other language. In practise, some languages lack the vocabulary to talk about certain things, though there’s no reason why the necessary words couldn’t be coined or borrowed if people felt the need to discuss such matters. For example, in the fields of computing and related technologies, English is the dominant language. Speakers of other languages tend to borrow and/or adapt English words to talk about such things, or coin words from the native stock.

If you speak more than one language, do you use each of your languages to talk about different things or to talk to different people, like Charles V?

Word of the day – 闋 (què)

By Simon

闋 (què) – to close or shut the door after finishing something; to be at rest; to end; the expiry of a period of mourning; a numerical adjunct for songs; empty, blank

In addition to all the above meanings, this character is also used as a measure word (量詞 [量词] liàngcí) for words (詞 [词] cí) and indeed measure words themselves. Measure words or classifiers are used when counting things in Chinese, and also in Japanese, Thai and a number of other languages of East Asia. In English we have a few measure words, such as a box of matches, a sheet of paper, a pint of milk, a can of worms, etc. In Chinese there are about 150 such words and they have to be used when you add a number to a noun.

You can’t just say, for example, two tables, or three letters, instead you have to add a measure word between the number and the noun – for tables the measure word is 張 [张] (zhāng), which means sheet and is used for flat objects (paper, tables, etc.), faces, bows, paintings, tickets and constellations, e.g. 兩張桌子 (liǎng zhāng zhuòzi) – two tables. For letters the measure word is 封 (fēng), e.g. 三封信 (sān fēng xìn) – three letters (the kind you put in an envelope).

Fortunately there is a default measure word 個 [个] (ge) which you can use if you can’t remember the correct one.

Learning Russian and Manx

By Simon

I’ve been learning Russian with Rosetta Stone for just over six months now and don’t feel like I’m making much progress. The Rosetta Stone Russian course is a fairly effective way of learning vocabulary and some sentence patterns, but not particularly useful if you want to learn how to converse in Russian. So I’m considering trying a different course. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the Teach Yourself Russian courses seem to be pretty good.

Why am I learning Russian? Well, a knowledge of that language would be quite useful to me when editing websites in Russian, and I am quite interested in Russian literature. I’ve read and enjoyed some Russian novels and short stories in English and French translation, and would quite like to be able to read them and others in the original – it will be quite a while before I can do that though, I think.

Ec y traa cheddin, ta mee gynsaghey Gaelg myrgeddin. Shegin dou jannoo ymmyd mennick jeh fockleyr, agh ta fys ennagh aym er y Ghaelg nish. Ta mee goaill gynsaghey çhengaghyn, ny çhengaghyn Celtiagh er lheh, as ta treisht orrym bee Gaelg flaaoil aym dy leah.

At the same time, I’ve also been learning Manx, and can now understand, speak, read and write it, at least to some extent, with frequent reference to a dictionary. The Manx courses I’ve been using are more focused on everyday language, and I’m more motivated to learn Manx.

Traditional v Simplified Characters (繁體或简体)

By Simon

This morning not long after I switched on my computer two people were wanting to chat to me on MSN messenger, one from China and one from Taiwan. I had to keep on changing from writing in simplified to traditional characters but occasionally forgot, much to their confusion. At the same time I was also writing email in English – multitaskingtastic! (now that’s a bit of a tonguetwister) I use pinyin input for both types of characters, so it’s easy for me switch between them.

This got me thinking about whether those familiar with simplified characters and read traditional characters, and vice versa. My impression is that it’s easier for traditional character users to read simplified characters than the other way round, but I may be wrong.

Which do you prefer, traditional of simplified characters? I can read and write both kinds and prefer the traditional ones. The traditional characters just look more elegant to me and preserve the semantic and phonetic clues that have been lost in many of the simplified characters.

如果你是用简体字的，你会不会看得懂繁体字？你觉得哪一种字比较好看？

如果你使用繁體子的，你會不會看得懂簡體字？你覺得哪一種字比較好看？

tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh’a’

By Simon

The title of today’s post means “Do you speak Klingon?”. Apparently the New Theatre in Cardiff is looking for anybody who speaks Klingon to perform in a play they’re planning to stage soon. I heard this on Radio Cymru (the Welsh language radio station) this morning.

Dw i’n di clywed ar Radio Cymru y bore ma bod y Theatr Newydd Caerdydd yn chwilio am bobol sy’n siarad Klingon i berfformio mewn drama bydd nhw yn llwyfannu cyn bo hir.

So do any of you speak Klingon?

Felly, dych unrhywun ohonoch chi yn siarad Klingon?