Linguistic research

By Simon

I did some research on grammatical gender for my bilingualism class today which was similar to the experiment I tried out here last week.

The victims participants were all native speakers of Welsh and we asked them to assign male or female voices to inanimate objects, some of which are usually associated with men – (beard, hammer, screwdriver); some are usually associated with women (brooch, dress, needle); while others are semantically neutral (clock, table, television). We were trying to see whether they would be guided by the semantic or Welsh grammatical gender, and in most cases they went with the semantic gender, except for the neutral objects, for which some of them followed the Welsh genders.

Apart from the assignment of genders, I found it interesting that most of the participants learnt Welsh first and only started learning English from the age of 4 or 5, i.e. when they started school. This is quite common in this part of Wales. We also asked them estimate the percentage of Welsh and English they use. Some said they use both languages equally, others use Welsh far more than English -up to 90% of the time.

Word of the day – rhewlif

By Simon

The Welsh word rhewlif was mentioned during Iolo Willams’ programme, Byd Iolo, on Radio Cymru yesterday. At first I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, but then I realised the word was a compound of rhew (frozen) and llif (flood) and guessed that it meant glacier. He was in Patagonia at the time, so the context helped. It’s great when you can work out what a word means without having to look it up.

Another Welsh word for glacier is afon iâ (ice river). The equivalent in Irish is oighearshruth (ice river/flow) and in Chinese it’s 冰川 (bīng chuān) – ice river.

The English word glacier comes from the France glacier, which is apparently from Savoy dialect word glacière (moving mass of ice) and is related to glace (ice).

No more Latin

By Simon

A number of local councils in the UK have decided to ban their staff from using phrases of Latin origin, such as vice versa, bona fide, ad lib, QED and pro rata, in speech or writing, according to this report.

Some of the councils believe that Latin is elitist and discriminatory because not everybody understands it, especially if English is not their first language.

Suggested alternatives include ‘for this special purpose’ for ad hoc and ‘existing condition’ or ‘state of things’ for status quo.

Classicists have not welcomed this move and one described it as “absolutely bonkers” and the “linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing”, but the Plain English Campaign approve and believe that officials only use Latin to make themselves feel important.

Globalizing the Korean alphabet

By Simon

A group of linguists in Korea are looking into giving people with no written form of their language ways to write using the Korean alphabet (hangŭl), according to this article.

A number of communities they visited in Indonesia were keen on using hangŭl to write their languages and plan to send representatives to Korean to learn the alphabet, who will then to teach it to their communities.

The Korean alphabet is currently used only to write Korean, so it will be interesting to see how well it will work for other languages.

Linguistics experiment

By Simon

This is a little experiment I’ll be doing for my bilingualism class next week which I thought I’d try out on you first.

Imagine you’re making a cartoon featuring the things listed below as characters. Which ones would you assign a male voice to, and which ones would you assign a female voice to?

1. A rock 2. A tree 3. A river 4. A bear 5. A salmon 6. A boat

Could you also tell us your native language, and whether you speak any other languages fluently? If you do speak other languages, when did you acquire them, do you use them regularly, and would you consider yourself bilingual or multilingual?

Wythnos o ganeuon

By Simon

Mae’r wythnos hon wedi bod yn brysur iawn – Ddydd Sul diwethaf, canais efo’r côr cymunedol yn y Ŵyl Heddwch ym Mangor -gwahoddynt i ni ganu wrth iddyn nhw bwyta ein cinio. Nos Fawrth canais efo cór y gymdeithas gerdd yn y prifysgol, Nos Fercher canais efo’r côr cymunedol, a Nos Iau es i i gyngerdd wych gan Northern Harmony, côr ifanc o’r UDA. Yna treuliais Dydd Sadwrn yn canu mewn gweithdy canu efo Northern Harmony – roedd yn ardderchog a dysgon ni ganeuon o America, Corsica, Siorsia, De Affrica ac Ukraine. Nos Sadwrn es i gyngerdd wych gan Trio Naatyashwora, grŵp o gerddorion o Nepal.

Mae cynhadledd ryngwladol ar ddwyieithrwydd i’w chynnal ym Mangor y penwythnos hwn hefyd, ac es i ryw areithiau ddoe ac echddoe.

Seachtain na hamhráin

Bhí an seachtain seo an ghnóthach – Dé Domhnaigh seo cáite, chan mé leis an cór pobail ag an Féile Síochána i mBangor -thug iad cuireadh dúinn ag canadh agus iad ag ith ar lón. Oíche Mhairt chan mé le cór na cumann ceoil san ollscoil, Oíche Chéadaoin chan mé leis an cór pobail, Oíche Aoine chuaigh mé chuig ceolchoirm le Northern Harmony, cór óg as Meiriceá. Ansin chaith mé Dé Sathairn ag canadh i gceardlann chanta le Northern Harmony – bhí sí go hiontach agus d’fhoghlaim muid amhráin as Meiriceá, an Chorsaic, an tSeoirsia, an Afraic Theas agus an Úcráin. Oíche Shathairn chuaigh mé chuig ceolchoirm le Trio Naatyashwora, grúpa ceoltóirí as Neipeal.

Tá comhdháil idirnáisiúnta ar an dátheangachas ar siúil an deireadh seachtaine seo freisin, agus chuaigh mé chuig cúpla óráidí inné agus arú inné.

A week of songs

This week has been a busy one – last Sunday I sang with the community choir in the Peace Festival in Bangor – they invited us to sing to them while they were having lunch. On Tuesday evening I sang with the community choir again, on Wednesday evening I sang with the university music society choir, and on Thursday evening I went to an excellent concert by Northern Harmony, a young choir from the USA. Then I spent most of Saturday at a singing workshop with Northern Harmony, which was fantastic and we learnt songs from America, Corsica, Georgia, South Africa and Ukraine. On Saturday night I went to a great concert by Trio Naatyashwora, a group of musicans from Nepal.

An international conference on bilingualism is being held in Bangor this weekend as well, and I went to a few talks yesterday and on Friday.

Word of the day – optionulsory

By Simon

The term optionulsory was coined by one of my classmates the other day to refer to things that are somewhere between optional and compulsory – in this case the Linguistics Circle Research Seminars. Linguistics postgrads are expected and encouraged to attend these seminars, but are not absolutely obliged to do so.

I went to one of the seminars on Wednesday – quite an interesting talk on Spanish verbs which focused particularly on the preterite tense.

David Crystal

By Simon

We met David Crystal today and had a very interesting question and answer session with him. He’s an Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, but has so many other commitments that take him all over the world, he rarely has time to visit.

Among the topics we discussed whether it’s possible for major world languages such as English and Spanish, to live in ‘harmony’ with minority languages. David believes that this is possible, if the minority languages are supported politically and economically, and if their speakers are determined to continue using them. He gave the example of Catalonia, where major investment in the economy has been a major factor in the strength and growth of Catalan. In other regions where investment has been mainly in language teaching and language preservation organisations, the minority languages are not doing nearly as well.

We also talking about the future of English as a global language – David believes the current dominance of English is likely to continue, that the centre of English is shifting towards those who speak it as a second or foreign language, and that a new form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) could emerge. ELF is likely to be a simpler, formal style of English stripped of region and country-specific idioms and expressions. This is already happening to some extent. He also mentioned that English as a global language only started to be seriously discussed by linguistics about ten years ago.