Linguistic Human Rights

By Simon

Today I came across some interesting online lecture notes by Professor Peter L Patrick of the Department of Language & Linguistics at the University of Essex. The lecture is entitled “Linguistic Human Rights: A Sociolinguistic Introduction” and covers many of the issues discussed in a recent post about language use in the work place.

There are a number of examples of people being fired for speaking Spanish in places of work with English-only rules. In many cases these people were hired because of their ability to speak Spanish and English. Their employers are effectively saying “You can speak your language when it suits me, but not when it suits you.” When cases of this kind go to court, judges often find in favour of the employers.

Con-scripts

By Simon

During the past few months only one or two constructed scripts per week have been coming into Omniglot headquarters, sometimes fewer than that. This week however, there has been a small flood of them with five new scripts so far, two of which are now online: Betacap, an alternative alphabet for English invented by Polly, and Handaues, an alphabet for a conlang invented for a calligraphy project. I’ve even been inspired to create a new script myself: Curvetic, another alternative alphabet for English.

I have numerous bits of paper scattered around my desk with ideas for con-scripts. Few of them seem to work very well when I try writing texts in them though. What I try to achieve in a script is one that looks elegant and/or could be a real writing system.

Which Mr Wang do you mean?

By Simon

On the news this morning they mentioned that China is suffering from a chronic shortage of names, which leads to many cases of mistaken identity. They gave an example of one man who was arrested by mistake – it was one of his neighbours with the same name who the police were after.

The ordinary people of China are traditional known as 老百姓 (lǎobǎixìng), which means ‘old 100 surnames’. This comes from the ancient tradition that citizens adopt one of a hundred single character surnames. Today there are up to 450 surnames in use in some areas of China, such as Beijing – though fewer in other areas. Here is a list of the current top 100 Chinese surnames.

According to an article on this topic in the Telegraph, the most popular surname in China is 王 (wáng), closely followed by 李 (lǐ), which between them account for 14% of the population or some 185 million people.

One solution being considered is to allow children to take the surnames of both parents. The Chinese government is also considering allowing a greater range of characters to be used as surnames, and also for the use of ethnic minority surnames, which are usually replaced with Chinese surname with a similar sound.

Language in the workplace

By Simon

According to an article on Eurolang, the travel company Thomas Cook has requested that staff in it’s branch in Bangor “speak English when discussing work-related matters in the workplace”. This has been interpreted as a ban on staff speaking Welsh in what is one of the strongest Welsh-speaking areas. As a result, there have been a number of protests and talk of legal action.

An article on this story on the BBC News site mentions that Thomas Cook “told staff they must conduct business conversations in English, as it is the UK’s common language.” This policy apparently applies to all non-English languages and to offices throughout the UK. This is intended to ensure clear communication, the company claims.

There’s some discussion of this story here and there’s an article about it in Welsh here.

In a polyglot office like the one I work in, the language we all have in common is English, which is the main language we use. Some of us also speak to each other in other languages such as Spanish, Italian or Mandarin.

Does your company tell you which language you should speak at work? Do you think they have any right to do so?

Word of the day – 衛星

By Simon

weixing/eisei - satellite in Chinese and Japanese

The Chinese word for satellite, 衛星 [卫星] (wèixīng) means literally ‘guard(ing)/defend(ing) star’. When I came across this word the other day while working on a Chinese version of a website, it took me a few moments to work out what it meant. Eventually I deciphered it from the context and the second character, which I knew meant star. The same characters, 衛星, are used in Japanese, but they’re pronounced eisei.

One of the things I like about Chinese is that when you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can often guess its meaning from the meanings of the individual characters.

According to this Online Etymology Dictionary, the English word satellite first appeared in writing in 1548, when it meant “follower or attendant of a superior person”. It comes from, via French, from the Latin satellitem (nom. satelles) “attendant”. It was first used to mean “man-made machinery orbiting the Earth” in 1936, when such things were theoretical. The first artificial satellite, a name used to distinguish them from natural satellites like the moon, was Sputnik 1, which was launched in 1957.

The Welsh word for satellite is lloeren, which comes from lloer, moon. In most of the other languages I’ve checked, the word is satellite or something similar.

The critical period

By Simon

There’s a hypothesis that we have a critical period for acquiring languages during our childhood, and that learning a language in later life, roughly after the age of 12 or 13, is difficult because of this. As a result of this theory, it’s widely believed that the earlier you start learning a foreign language, the more successful you’ll be.

According to an article I came across today, the different aspects of language acquisition take place at different times and rates. If there is a critical period, there probably isn’t one single one but many. We continue to improve our knowledge of our language(s) throughout our lives.

The article suggests that one reason why most of us find it difficult to learn new languages is because our brains have are set up to handle the language(s) we already know, and find other languages challenging, especially ones that differ significantly from our native ones.

The conclusion is that our language learning abilities decline with age, so the earlier you start learning languages the better, but “there is no particular age beyond which the effort is hopeless”.

Word of the day – moron

By Simon

The Welsh word moron, which means carrots, is an example of a false friend (cyfaill anwir?). The word for carrot is moronen, one of a small group of Welsh words that become shorter in the plural. Confusingly, the English word moron, which comes from the Greek for ‘foolish, dull’, has been borrowed into Welsh and has the same meaning.

Here are a few more Welsh/English false friends that I’ve noticed recently. Some look the same as English words, but are pronounced differently, so are only false friends in writing.

pan = when (pan is padell)
pant = hollow (to pant is dyhefod)
dim = nothing (dim is pŵl or aneglur)
mud = mute (mud is mwd)
hurt = silly (hurt is dolur (n) or dolurio (vb))
hen = old (hen is iâr)
brain = crows (brain is ymennydd)
nod = aim (nod is amnaid (n) or amneidio (vb))

Hypercorrection

By Simon

Hypercorrection happens when people try to avoid making one type of ‘error’ in speech or writing, but overcompensate and apply the corrections to too many words. For example, those who habitually ‘drop’ their h’s sometimes add an h an just about any word beginning with a vowel when trying to speak ‘proper’.

One case of hypercorrection that has become part of the language is the saying ‘to eat humble pie‘, meaning ‘to behave or be forced to behave humbly; to be humiliated’. To word humble in this saying comes from the word numbles, which means the offal of a deer. In the 14th century, a numble pie was one made from such offal. By the 17th century, a pie of this type was called ‘an umble pie’, which eventually acquired an initial h through hypercorrection and became ‘a humble pie’.

Numbles comes from the Old French word nombles (loins), from the Latin lumbulus (little loin).

Other words the have changed in a similar way to numbles include apron – originally napron, newt – originally ewt. This kind of change of word boundries, which is common in English, is called metanalysis.