Xtranormal

By Simon

Today I came across an interesting-looking site called Xtranormal that use text-to-speech and other clever stuff – they call it ‘text-to-movie’ – to make animated films.

You just choose your characters and setting, and then type in the dialogue. You can also play with the cameras, animate the characters, and add other effects.

What interests me particularly about this program is that you can choose voices in a variety of languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Dutch, and I think this could be a useful language learning and teaching tool.

Here’s a short bilingual (English and Mandarin) film I put together:

[Update] It didn’t accept quite a few of the Chinese characters I tried to use, so you can only use very simple phrases. Here’s another short film in French and English:

Twndis

By Simon

Twndis [‘tʊmdɪs] (nm, pl: twndisau) = funnel – also twnffat [‘tʊmfat]

I discovered the Welsh words twndis and twnffat last night. I’m not sure why the subject of funnels came up in conversation, but these words particularly appealed to me, especially the latter.

This morning I found out that the word tundish is used for funnel in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that it originally meant “a funnel made to fit into the bung of a tun”. A tun is a large cask, but I’m sure you knew that [source]. These days a tundish is sort of funnel used in metal casting, and also in plumbing [source].

Tundish appears to be related to the Welsh word twndis, and the word tun is possibly of Celtic origin: – from the Middle Irish tunna, and the Old Irish toun (hide, skin).

Words for funnel in the Modern Celtic languages come from the same root: as well as twndis in Welsh, there’s tunnadair (funnel, filler, tunning-dish, tunner) in Scottish Gaelic, tonnadóir in Irish, tunneyder in Manx and tum in Breton.

I’m not sure of the etymology of twmffat, but ffat on it’s own means slap or pat, and ffatio means to slap.

Effortlessness

By Simon

When you listen to someone speaking a foreign language, whether it’s yourself of someone else, you may notice that some aspects of the pronunciation and intonation are more exaggerated and seem to be quite effortful, especially if you compare them to a native speaker of the same language.

This struck me particularly when listening to the new recordings of Greenlandic phrases, which were made by a learner of Greenlandic from the Czech Republic, and then listening to a Greenlandic news broadcast on YouTube. The native speaker pronunciation seems to flow effortlessly, while the learner’s pronunciation seems more effortful. Having said that though, the uvular plosive /q/ and doubled consonants of Greenlandic do seem to interrupt the smooth flow somewhat, even in the native speakers.

When I first started learning Mandarin Chinese I was taught to pronounce each syllable clearly and separately with exaggerated tones. About five years later I was more of less fluent and didn’t distinguish the tones as much, except in careful, formal speech, and tended to run syllables together a bit, though perhaps not as much as native speakers.

With a lot of careful listening and practise, you can acquire good pronunciation in a foreign language. It does take time though, unless you’re a very good mimic.

Even in your native language there may be certain sounds that trip you up. For example the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (as in three) did not exist in my original idiolect – a sort of modified RP with Lancastrian influences – and I didn’t know there was a difference in pronunciation between three and free until I learnt some phonetics at university. These days I tend to use /θ/, though it sometimes still requires conscious effort.

Xenoglossy – Are the Reports True?

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by Carrie Oakley

There’s a general theory that if the news is sensational, it cannot be true; however, in certain cases, truth is stranger than fiction and so sensational that it is hard to accept it as fact. Of late, there have been a few news reports of people waking up from comas or accidents and speaking another language fluently, one they’ve never conversed in before or even learned properly. The Croatian teenager who woke up and could converse in German is one such case while the accident victim from Czechoslovakia the Czech Republic who could speak fluent English after he recovered is another. The scientific term for this phenomenon is of course the title of this article – xenoglossy.

For the layman who reads these news items, the question is not “Is it really possible?” but “How is it possible?” After all, these are not sleazy tabloids that are reporting the news but respectable and reputable newspapers and publishing houses. However, papers have taken to reporting half-truths nowadays, so we can safely say that these are not miraculous happenings. So how is it that people are able to speak in a whole new tongue without putting in the effort and time to learn it the natural way? It takes most of us the better part of a year to master a language, and even then, unless we keep practicing it, we don’t retain fluency. If that is so, does brain trauma make it possible to learn a new tongue?

On closer examination of the above mentioned two cases, it was found that the Czech victim’s claims of conversing in fluent English were propagated by the people around him at the time of the accident, his friends and others known to him. So while he may have spoken a few words in English, the report could have been grossly exaggerated. And in the case of the Croatian girl, she had been taking German lessons through self-help books and could understand enough to watch German programs on television.

The point is, you don’t end up speaking a new tongue that you’ve never come in contact with after you undergo psychological and physical trauma; and while your recovery may be miraculous, there’s nothing spectacular about speaking an almost new language. While the exact reason for the change in preferred tongue is not known, experts speculate that it could be because of damage in the speech centers of the brain that causes selective aphasia – you forget how to converse in the language you’re fluent in, and because our body tries to adapt, it automatically communicates in this other language that you are familiar with but not necessarily fluent in.

The sensationalism is caused because the victims’ families and friends would have never heard them conversing in the new language ever, so to them it is a sort of miracle. But what the brain does not know, it cannot acquire after a trauma. Yes, xenoglossy is possible, but only when the foundation has already been laid for the new language.

About the writer

Carrie Oakley, who writes on the topic of online college . Carrie welcomes your comments at her email id: carrie.oakley1983(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

Word of the day – Sny

By Simon

I’ve heard today’s word sny in the Czech phrase hezký sny and from the context I thought that it meant “sleep well” or something similar. I knew that hezký meant beautiful or pretty and assumed that sny meant sleep.

When I finally got round to looking it up, I discovered that it means “nice dreams”. Hezký has a number of meanings, including pretty, seemly, sweet, attractive, becoming, bonny, comely, fine, neat, endearing, fair, good-looking, handsome, nice, smart, good, lovely, and so on.

Sny means dreams or moonshine, and is the plural of sen, which also means ambition, vision or sleep. The verb, to dream, is snít.

Do you have any interesting ways of wishing some one a good night?

One I know is “Good night, sleep tight, hope the bedbugs don’t bite”.