Recently in Language Category

Although these videos parody 1950s vintage math education videos, I think they may be very helpful for students wrestling with the grim laws of Germanic philology. For one thing, they pronounce the early Germanic and Latin forms - always a help

Thank you AvunlcularFeldspar...wherever you are.

Part 1 Embedded below

If you're familiar with the alumnus/alumni plural rule and the symoposium/symposia rule, then you know about what I will call the "classical" plural or Latin or Greek words in which we match the Latin/Greek singular with the Latin/Greek plural.

You may also be familiar with the "neo-classical" plurals in which English speakers create Latinate plurals which never actually existed in Latin (these are probably a class of hypercorrection). A famous case octopi (many octopuses). As Ask Oxford will explain, octopus (ὀκτώπους) is actually a Greek word with the Greek plural octopodes.

I like to collect these - not to make fun of people who don't know enough Latin or Greek, but because they show interesting insights into how grammars work with foreign borrowings. The one thing speakers DON'T do is replicate the grammar of the original language (although they may be trying).

As you may imagine, English speakers who encounter any vaguely technical term ending with -us will wonder if the plural is -i or not. Hence we see other new inventions like opus~opi (original Latin plural was opera) and omnibus~omnibi (techincally omnibus is already plural in Latin). In fact one speaker asked if an -is word had an -i plural (warning: taboo word ahead in link). This is not an odd question because both -us and -is are pronounced /əs/.

But one which was unique was someone said "apparatuses...apparata"? First I thought, shouldn't that be apparati? I know I never hear apparati, but that is what I would expect on a naive level, and it may even be the original Latin plural.

Instead, the speaker is using the -um ~ -a plural similar to symposium/symposia, but in English this is normally restricted to -um or some -on words. Is this speaker actually conflating the two rules to one Classical plural -a?

Or...is the final -at syllabus in the root throwing him off. Other famous -a plurals include automata, errata, strata and data. It's possibly that this speaker has a rule that any techincal term with a final -at in the root will have an -a plural. An interesting kink in the long thread of "neo-classic" plurals.

And a final message to my anonymous data source - please don't be embarrassed. We're ALL confused by this technical jargon.

This is an article which attempts to explain how English would be written if the Chinese hanzi system were adapted as it is in the the modern era

http://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

Interestingly - it's not all pictograms, and some syllables may be rhyming with proto-West Germanic (yikes)

This is a Powerpoint parody in which the speaker (Doug Zongkers) makes his case using only the word chicken. That means that the only communicative element left is intonation (changes in pitch over the course of the speech) - and surprisingly that can be a lot of information.

The highlight for me is at the end when the speaker takes questions. Despite using only the word chicken the intonation alone makes you feel that the two speakers are having a very dynamic dialogue with an great exchange of ideas. Really interesting demonstration of the role of intonation. Now I'm really interested in learning more about chickens.

As the action adventure show Burn Notice ended last week, the lead character Michael said that the mysterious agent Carla spoke "Arabic with a Kurdish accent". Hmmm.

What could this mean? First, I should note that Kurdish is actually a separate language from Arabic. In fact Kurdish is very distantly related to English (but more closely related to Persian and Pushto).

So "Arabic with a Kurdish accent does not mean Carla is speaking Arabic with a native accent, but rather that she has somehow picked up Arabic with a foreign accent (e.g. it would be like a French person learning to speak English with a Mexican accent). I initially thought this might be another TV screw up, but I decided to see if "Arabic with a Kurdish accent" was plausible.

If you look at the UCLA Kurdish Map, you'll see that the Kurds are a minority group living in several countries including Turkey, Armenia, Iran and Iraq. Because they are a minority group, it's likely than many are bilingual in Kurdish and the main language of the country they are currently living in. The candidate countries would be Turkey (Turkish), Armenia (Armenian and possibly Russian), Iran (Persian/Farsi) and ... Iraq (Arabic!).

So I would guess that "Arabic with a Kurdish accent" would mean Northern Iraq. Interestingly, there may be people of Kurdish heritage in northern Iraq who now primarily speak Arabic, but may be maintaining Kurdish phonology (i.e. "a Kurdish accent"). This would be similar to speakers of Hiberno-English (Irish English) who only speak English, but with phonolofical features of Irish (Gaelic) or even some New York English speakers of Latino descent who mostly speak English, but with a slight Spanish accent

I'll be interested to see if mystery agent Carla has indeed spent some time in northern Iraq (it would make plot sense). I'll also be curious to see if she speaks both Kurdish and Arabic....

I've been lax in my blogging, so I thought I would add some reviews of books which are written for non-specialists but focus on some aspect of linguistics. I will start with the anthology Language in the USA

Book Product Details (from Amazon.com)

Paperback: 520 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (June 28, 2004)
ISBN-10: 052177747X
ISBN-13: 978-0521777476

Summary

This is a collection of articles covering different aspects of linguistic culture in the United States. The first part covers regional American English including origins, distinctiveness of the general accent, regional varietes, "social varieties" and a chapter on African American English and one on American Sign Language. The second part covers non-English with a focus on Spanish as well as creoles, Native American languages and multilingualism. The third section is an overview of different "sociolinguistic" issues including education, teen slang, gender/sexuality and cyberspace language.

My review

As you can see from the list above the goal of this book is to educate readers about the linguistic facts behind various "hot" policy and cultural topics. As such, the articles are written by discipline experts and include an overview of the field, specific data, a detailed bibliography and recommendations for further research.

Generally speaking, I would say the articles are successful because while they are not technical, they provide important details that clarify the underlying issues. For instance most people are familiar with American Sign Language (ASL) but may not realize it it has a grammar distinct from English, comes in regional varieties and has shown linguistic change over time. Hence ASL does have a unique linguistic heritage which is different from English.

The tone is generally non-preachy, which is good idea when the goal is to explain that commonly held views of language may be ... uh-hmm... dead wrong. More importantly, the academic tone of the articles lends crucial credibility to research fields like the study of hip-hop which might otherwise be considered "frivolous" by the general public. Another valuable factor is that many articles discuss research methods of past history of the discipline. Understanding where the data comes from is crucial for being able to track future debates where language and policy/culture collide.

As with any anthology, the articles vary in quality, but two particularly strong articles are "Spanish in the Northeast" and "Spanish in the Southwest". Although Spanish is the second largest language in the United States, these two articles show that not all Spanish speakers in the U.S. are alike.

For instance, "Spanish in the Northeast" article explains most speakers in the northeast have historically emigrated from the Caribbean and explains some of the history of immigrants from different countries. An example from the article is that in the middle of the 20th century, Anglos tended to regard the Cuban and Dominican communities more sympathetically then the Puerto Rican community because Cubans/Dominican immigrants were considered political refugees while Puerto Ricans were merely considered to be poor citizens from a U.S. colony. The recent situation in the northeast is now more complicated because of immigrants from other parts of Latin America including Mexican immigrants which previously had emigrated primarily to the Southwest

The "Spanish in the Southwest" article includes a discussion of the long contact between Spanish and English speakers in the region - enough so that there are Spanish vocabulary words unique to the region. It also mentions an important point that a significant number of speakers may be of Hispanic or Mexican heritage but are actually monolingual English speakers. Timing of immigration is an important factor.

Although most of the articles are well-written, there are a few glitches. One gap is that there is no key for the special phonetic symbols used in different articles. On the one hand, I don't think you can have a rational discussion of pronunciation for long without understanding how a transcription system works, but then again so few Americans learn it that a key is essential. Some articles do explain the underlying pronunciation mechanisms, but it's a fine line to walk.

Ironically, another weak area is coverage of regional American English. While it does cover the basics, it doesn't really touch on the details that many "mainstream" English speakers are interested in. Then again regional English could cover an entire book and they are available. Some of my favorites in that vein are the The Story of English and Do You Speak American?

One of the ongoing challenges facing the field of linguistics is how to translate important research insights into a format that non-specialists can understand. I think Language in the USA does an admirable job of trying to bridge the gap between researcher and citizen, hopefully without losing too much data in the process.

My Rating

I'll give a 4.5 out of 5

The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (http://wals.info/feature) from the Max Planck Digital Library is a great new resource that maps languages with phonological, morphological or syntactic features.

For instance, someone asked if front-rounded vowels (e.g. German /ü,ö/ or French /œ/) were only found in languages originating from northern Eurasia. The map at http://wals.info/feature/11 actually shows that while most languages with front round vowels are in Northern Eurasia, there are a few further south in tropical regions including a few in the Amazon basin. In case you're wondering the maps are in the Google maps format and can be exported into KML and XML format.

The sources are well cited so the data is trustworthy and lots of features are mapped out. There's also a subsidiary set of language profile pages. A nice academically rich use of Web 2.0 technlogy.

The SIL group is using a new term I think should become more common - the macrolanguage A macrolanguage is basically a set of related languages that share a common "identity" even though speakers can't normally understand each other.

The most famous macrolanguage is probably Chinese. It is fairly well-known that a speaker from Beijing speaking Mandarin Chinese will often have difficulty understanding a Cantonese Chinese speaker from Hong Kong...unless someone has taken a formal class in the other form. Normally, these are called Chinese dialects but the differences are so great that linguists do classify them as separate languages. Interestingly, each of these languages can also have regional variations (many regional variations of Mandarin Chinese are found in Northern China).

Chinese is not alone by the way. Other macrolanguages include Arabic, Cree, Hmong, Quechua (as spoken in the Incan Empire), and Norweigian. I suspect that you could thrown in some other candidates like German and Italian.

As you can imagine, I definitely prefer the term macrolanguage over dialect for Chinese because it removes the confusion of regional dialects where everyone can understand each other (e.g. most English dialects) and those which are really separate languages (e.g. Chinese "dialects"). The term macrolanguage also acknowledges the strong cultural link between the speakers of the related languages.

I really hope this term takes hold...because I really think it will simplify other discussions about language (like language code). After all, it was just this year that a language technology guru claimed that English had no "true dialects." I think he meant to say that English hasn't reached macrolanguage status yet.

I've been following an interesting discussion on whether a "conversational" approach should be used for Latin or not.

For modern language courses, the behavioral objectives are fairly obvious. After 2-3 semesters of a language, you want to be able to walk into a cafe or bar, read the menu and order the beverage you want (or figure out how to get the train to Marseilles, or get the latest scoop from ¡Hola! magazine. That is you want a certain level of listening, reading and speaking proficiency with enough writing thrown in to fill out an application or compose a quick thank you note.

These days a conversational approach is advocated so that students learn to communicate in the target language "on their feet". Exposure to native language speech input is also recommended whenever possible so that leaners can parse audio.

With classical languages like Latin and Greek, the objectives may be different. For instance, Attic Greek (i.e. the language Sophocles spoke) is what you need to read the original Ancient Greek literature. If you're in Greece, Attic Greek is helpful for reading street signs and monument inscriptions. But if you want to order some ouzo in Athens, you probably need to learn Modern Greek. That is, learning classical languages is usually about being able to read in the target language - not being able to speak it.

Can the conversational approach help here? Interestingly many of the Latin teachers said they DID advocate the conversational approach. Apparently learning Latin without using it conversationally was a little be too "abstract" for students. I'll admit that my Latin teacher burned in the supine into my brain with "correctives" like horrible dictu (or "Ugh! Horrible Latin!"). Interestlngly Latin has taken on a life of its own as a living language community. You can even get your news (nuntii) in Latin. Clearly, there's something to this.

It should be noted that traditional Latin pedagogy then focused more on grammar and translation. The idea was that if you understood in detail how the Latin phrase or sentence was bulf, you that you would be able to read Latin by "deconstructing" the combination of words and grammatical endings. In practice though, I would say that the result is that many students can recite a lot of paradigms but end up having troubles reading actual texts from Cicero.

But...even with the conversational approach, I wonder if you hit a wall. I'm glad we have "modernized" Latin, but it can't be the same as what Cicero wrote. It's a form of Latin spoken mostly by speakers of modern European languages - none of which much resemble Latin anymore. Even modern Italian has very different syntax than Classical Latin.

What I found was that even with "conversation" and "grammar", I had great trouble parsing Cicero - I could translate the words, but couldn't string them together so that they meant anything. There's a certain pragmatic logic in Latin that is lost in literal translation. After all Qui/Cui bono doesn't literally mean "Who benefits?" but "Good for whom?"

I would say that I didn't truly understand how to learn Classical languages until I took Middle Welsh. Although we did learn some grammar, the focus wasn't being able to speak or even translate anything. Instead we just picked up an actual text with a glossary in the back and plowed through. I took notes in the text, but it was so small that I learned to only translate the key vocabulary words I didn't get. The more "simple" words I could memorize, the faster the reading went. In other words I was learning to read the syntax directly. I had slight indigestion that I would not be able to order a mead in Middle Welsh, but then again, this is not really possible anyway.

Another benefit to the "learn as you read approach" is that you may not be thrown off by minor inconsistencies. Many medieval languages were "flexible" in terms of grammar and spelling - it really is more important that you be able to recognize a potential irregular past tense rather than that you know exactly what it is.

When I thought about it, I realized this is probably the best approach - after all you are trying to read the language, and sometimes you may need to read an undiscovered document which may contain new verb forms as well as previously unattested vocabulary. Sometimes reading ancient texts is a decoding exercise.

In the end, it's about the reading and neither the speaking or the translation. There's just one remaining problem - by the time I had gotten to Middle Welsh, I had Modern Welsh under my belt. If you're starting from scratch, it really can be an interesting chicken and egg challenge.

A post from Heidi Harley on Language Log mentioned a study in which French teenage native speakers showed a lot of variation in "assigning" genders of French nouns. That is for any given word, some teens would think it was masculine gender and others would think it was feminine gender - even if a French dictionary only assigned it to one gender.

To be honest, I'm not terribly surprised at this. Because of the ways French word-final sounds have evolved, the phonological distinction between genders is very weak in Modern French. Compare this to Spanish where most words ending with -o are masculine and most words ending with -a are feminine. The major cues for determining gender of a word in French might be processes like definite article agreement (le vs la) or pronoun replacement (il vs. elle)...and they may not be salient enough for speakers to make consistent judgments.

To me this is evidence that grammatical gender assignment is often based on phonology. A common historical change in gender assignment is for a noun to be reassigned to another gender because it's ending is more typical of a different gender. A notable example is the Latin word laurus 'laurel tree' which was grammatically feminine in Classical Latin but has changed to masculine gender in Italian il lauro (Italian is a descendant of Latin). The French data here is consistent with this idea that phonology is a factor in determining consistent gender. If there is no regular "rule" or phonological cure, you would expect lots of variation.

On an interesting side note, the research also found that adult speakers were much more consistent in their gender assignments than the teens were. Something has happened between generations. This is very speculative, but I wonder if attitudes towards standard grammar or standard grammar education are changing.

I'm thinking irregular English past tense. Almost all native speakers acquire a set of irregular past tense, but there's actually a lot of variation. For instance in the U.S. the "correct" past tense of bring is brought, but variations like brang (similar to ring/rang) and brung (as in You Got To Dance with Them What Brung You by Molly Ivins). FYI - Neil Diamond used brang in the song Play Me ("Song she sang to me/Song she brang to me.")

I definitely recall several 3rd grade grammar lessons which required us to memorize "correct" irregular past tense forms (whereas we never had to memorize Question Formation). I suspect 3rd grade French children get to memorize genders of nouns. In fact, I just found a French Guess the Gender game for children, so it's probably a "tricky grammar point." So..if the method of grammar instruction changes, you could have the natural variation surfacing again in a population.

I honestly don't know what grammar instruction is like in modern France, but it would be worthwhile for a researcher to check (without thinking the apocalypse is coming of course).

If nothing else, it would seem like a fascinating historical linguistic phenomenon is in progress.

P.S. On the difficulty of assigning genders by phonology, a French grammar site notes that "If you study these 40 word endings, it is possible to determine the gender of 75% of French nouns with almost 95% precision." Hmmm!