Dropping letters

By Simon

George Bernard Shaw once said:

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him”

Shaw, an Irish man, was to some extent poking fun at the English, but there certainly is some truth in his statement. English speakers have been complaining about the way other people speak English for very long. The same is probably true of other languages.

One of the things people complain about is the dropping of certain letters, such as the initial h, or of the g in ing endings. This is getting things the wrong way round and assuming that we should speak as we write. English spelling certainly isn’t the most reliable guide to English pronunciation. Initial h’s aren’t being dropped – they just doesn’t exist in some dialects.

Words borrowed from French, such as hour, heir and honest are usually pronounced without the initial h most varieties of English. Moreover, in American English herb also lacks the initial h sound, though the h is pronounced in some varieties of British English.

This post was inspired by the book I’m reading at the moment: ‘A Plum in Your Mouth’ – Why the way we talk speaks volumes about us, by Andrew Taylor.

Word of the day – mac tíre

By Simon

mac tíre, noun = wolf (literally ‘son of the country(side)’). The tíre sounds roughly like cheer-uh.

I came across this Irish word while searching for the Scottish Gaelic for word for wolf, which someone asked me today. Another Irish word for wolf is faolchú, while the equivalent in Scottish Gaelic is faol or madadh allaidh (wild dog). In Manx a wolf is a filliu or moddey oaldey (wild dog).

Here are some wolf-related proverbs:

O wilku mowa, a wilk tuż (Polish)
Talk of a wolf and the wolf is here = Speak of the Devil (and he will appear).

La fame caccia il lupo dal bosco (Italian)
Hunger drives the wolf out of the woods

There are many more here, though few of them are in their original languages, unfortunately.

Dyslecsia / Dyslexia

By Simon

According to an article I came across today, dyslexic children tend to it easier to read and write Welsh, with its regular and consistent spelling system, then English, with its somewhat eccentric orthography. Similarly, few children have problems spelling other regular languages like Italian and Spanish.

However dyslexic children who start by learning Welsh, then later learn English tend to find English spelling very challenging and often use Welsh-style spelling when writing English.

Here are some examples of English spelled with Welsh phonetics:

Ddy cwic brawn ffocs jymps owfer ddy leisi dog.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Tw bi o not tw bi: ddat is ddy cwestiyn.
To be or not to be: that is the question.

The article also mentions that dyslexic children tend to have more trouble getting to grips with Welsh grammar than with English grammar.

Tones and genes

By Simon

According to an article in the New Scientist, researchers at the University of Edinburgh have demonstrated using statistical analysis that two genes, ASPM and Microcephalin, that govern aspects of brain development tend to differ between regions where tonal languages are spoken, and regions where non-tonal languages are spoken.

The article also mentions that there are some differences in brain structure between English speakers with facility for learning tonal languages and those who find such languages difficult. So if you are struggling with the tones of a language like Mandarin or Thai, maybe it’s because your brain has evolved to cope best with non-tonal languages.

Another article on this subject in Scientific American gives more details of the research:

Ladd and Dediu compared 24 linguistic features — such as subject-verb word order, passive tense, and rounded vowels — with 981 versions of the two genes found in the 49 populations studied. Most of the language contrasts could be explained by geographic or historical differences. But tone seemed to be inextricably tied to the variations of ASPM and Microcephalin observed by the authors. The mutations were absent in populations that speak tonal languages, but abundant in nontonal speakers.

Further details are available on this blog, which is written by the son of one of the researchers.

The pictures are better on the radio

By Simon

There’s a saying that “the pictures are better on the radio”. I think there’s a lot of truth in this. You construct mental pictures of the radio presenters and other people you hear, and of the events and places they describe or evoke with sound effects. There are no actual pictures to distract you and your imagination can run wild. When you watch television or films, much less is left to your imagination.

I listen to the radio a lot, and the mental images I have of the people on the radio, based solely on their voices and names, are rarely a good match for what these people actually look like. I definitely prefer radio to television and haven’t had a telly since moving to Brighton about eight years ago. Some find this strange and wonder how I manage without a telly, but I don’t miss it, and on the rare occasions I do watch it, I rarely see programmes that make me want to rush out and buy a set. I do occasionally watch DVDs on my computer though, and like going to the cinema as well.

When I hear a radio play or see a film based on a book I’ve read, the way the characters look and talk is often different to the way I imagined them. If I hear the play or see the film before reading the book, my imagination is affected by what I’ve seen and heard in the play or film.

At work, my experience is similar to Terry’s and Polly’s, as mentioned in the comments on yesterday’s post – when I finally meet people I’ve talked to a lot on the phone, they often don’t resemble my mental image of them. It is almost as if they are one person on the phone, and another in the flesh.

When talking on the phone, do you behave in a different way to when you talk to someone face-to-face?

Music and speech

By Simon

Researchers at Duke University, North Carolina, have recently discovered that 12 tone intervals of the (Western) musical scale correspond closely to the sounds of speech, according to an article on ScienceDaily.

The researchers analysed recordings of spoken English and Mandarin using spectrum analysers and compared them to musical scales. They found that 70% of the speech sounds had frequency ratios that matched the intervals between musical notes. They also believe music sounds ‘right’ to us because the notes used are similar to the sounds of speech.

Other projects they plan include one to try to find out whether the musical scales used in different countries are related to the languages spoken there. They will also investigate why we tend to perceive music a major key as happy, and that in a minor key as sad.

Maybe singing came before speech, as discussed on this blog. If this is so, then the reason why musical notes are related to speech could be because speech developed from singing, rather than the other way round.

Language switching

By Simon

According to an article I found today, a study at the University of British Columbia found that babies as young 4 months old can tell when someone has switched from one language to another just from visual clues, such as the shapes and rhythm of the speaker’s mouth and face movements.

Babies aged 4, 6 and 8 months from monolingual and bilingual families were shown silent videos of people speaking sentences first in English, then in French. The 4 and 6 month old babies paid more attention to the videos and watched them longer when the languages switched, which indicates that they noticed differences. By age of 8 months, only babies raised in bilingual homes were able to tell the difference between the languages.

Perhaps it would be interesting to have a language quiz or two featuring silent videos of people speaking different languages and asking you to try to work out how many languages were being spoken and even which ones. What do you think?

If you have an suitable videos, or know where they are available, do let me know.