Saturday, October 18, 2008
Notes on the "habla"
Counting Your Words
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Overheard: "Legitly"
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
BREAKING NEWS
Monday, September 1, 2008
End of summer musings
Hey, guys! As we're transitioning from summer to fall and high school to college, thought I might take this opportunity to look back and forward—that is, to recap some things I've been thinking about in August and the direction those thoughts are leading me in for school, maybe. So as I've mentioned, I took Spanish conversation classes at Berlitz this summer. They kind of shuffled me through instructors, but I guess I didn't mind too much because it meant I got to see four or five different perspectives on the Spanish language.
I noticed there were more or less two types of instructors—those who were concerned with the purity of the Spanish they spoke, taught, and demanded of students, and those who were content to speak somewhat Anglicized Spanish after having lived in the States for a while (“tenemos un picnic” and “es muy nice”). To me, this Anglicized Spanish was a wonderful example of language change, and it was easy and interesting to see how and wear English had left its mark. Yet other instructors saw this as wholly negative—a contamination of language rather than a natural change. I almost got into a terrible argument with one instructor who was hell-bent on teaching me “lo mas puro” when she told me that despite variations from country to country, "solo hay un espanol"—there’s only one "Spanish." Well, I would have fought her had I been able to express myself properly in not-English.
But above all, each instructor said to me that I'd know that I'd have achieved some kind of fluency if I dreamed "in Spanish." I've heard that before about learning a language, as I'm sure you guys have. I'm wondering to what extent there's any scientific backing to that claim, especially because there's reason to doubt that we think (or dream, in this case) in any particular language at all! We've talked about Chapter 3 of Pinker's The Language Instinct, in which Pinker tells us that we do not think in words, or even in images. The "language" of our minds, he says, is "mentalese"--an idea pioneered by American cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. (If you Google "mentalese," there are a few good links... look into it!)
Tangentially, this also came up when my dad and I were talking about translated texts, and lamenting their inadequacy in precisely expressing the idea communicated in the original language. We were reading something that had been written in Spanish but translated into English by the author himself. I said I thought this might be better than having a third party translator do the job, because the author knew best what he wanted to express with each particular word/phrase in Spanish, and could therefore carry it over into English. But does this actually fix our “lost in translation” problem? Or, does it still matter that the idea was originally expressed in Spanish? How does this affect the outcome of the translation? Is the translation true to the way the idea was conceived? What if there is no real way of translating a particular idea or concept wholly and precisely? What if, in the language of translation, there were no good words? One language could be better to express a particular idea than another. This got me wondering about whether we conceive of thoughts in a particular language, and how and why some languages communicate certain concepts better than others.
Anyway, these questions are part of a larger one: Can thoughts exist outside language? Or, what is the relationship between language and cognition?
A second fundamental question for me is the extent to which culture affects language (and perhaps vice versa?), especially if language is a pre-programmed human capacity. In other words, do grammar and culture in fact mesh? I understand how culture could affect language on a lexical level; however apocryphal the story that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow may be, it certainly proves the point. Yet I wonder whether culture impacts language on other levels? For example, what about syntax? Is the fact that verbs come at the very end of a sentence in an SVO language like Latin just pure coincidence? Random? Chance? Or is it affected by an external factor, like the culture, biology, or even geography (Jared Diamond style) of the people and place that develop a language? These are the kinds of questions that I want to be able to answer in college—through the study of linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, etc., and through spending time abroad observing the relationship between the culture and language of a particular place. I’m ready.
--Amy
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Hello, London!
So it turns out London is a linguist's (or lexicographer's) paradise! I've just returned from a week-long trip there with my family, and learned a whole lot about both Egyptian hieroglyphic script and the first real dictionary of the English language. I thought I'd share, and suggest, perhaps, a field trip!
The first awesome thing about London is that there are a million different people there from every corner of the world, so walking down the street you hear every language imaginable--from German to Arabic to Urdu. I guess that's not much different from New York, except the distribution of languages is different (there's a LOT of Arabic, and a LOT of Hindi or Urdu, as well as a higher concentration of non-Spanish Romance languages).
But unlike New York, London can claim possession of the original Rosetta Stone! I saw it at the British Museum, and made my sister take like a billion pictures of me in front of it. Here's one:
I've also included a picture of one of the signs posted on the exhibit, which explains the basics of how the Egyptian hieroglyphic script works. The reason the Rosetta Stone is so important is that it helped scholars (specifically, British scientist Thomas Young and French scholar Jean-François Champollion) to finally decipher hieroglyphics in 1822. The stele, created in 196 BC, records a decree of Ptolemy V in three different written languages: ancient Greek (interestingly, I believe this was the language used by the Egyptian government at the time), and the two Egyptian language scripts, hieroglyphic and Demotic. (Hope I explained that correctly... you might want to fact check because I'm not sure whether hieroglyphic and Demotic are different scripts or both different scripts and different languages. I do know Demotic comes later in Egyptian history). Anyway, scholars had difficulty deciphering hieroglyphics for many years, as the sign reads:
"...Because hieroglyphic signs look like pictures, they assumed that all hieroglyphs were images recording ideas without language. In fact hieroglyphs recorded the ancient Egyptian language with a mixture of sound and picture signs." The word cat is written by combining the signs standing for the sounds /mi/ + /i/ + /w/ as well as the picture sign for "cat" (as shown, as picture of a cat). Incidentally, the Egyptian word for cat would sound something like "miw." It's easy to tell this word was derived from the "meow" sound made by cats!
While in London, we also made a trip to the 17 Gough Square home of Dr. Samuel Johnson, where he wrote the first real dictionary of the English language over the course of nine years, from 1746 to 1755. Other English dictionaries had been published before, but never an authoritative one on the scale and scope of Johnson's. Johnson most notably included quotations from great works of English literature to illustrate his definitions of particular words. The first edition of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language contained over 110,000 quotations! This practice was considered innovative, and its influence has endured to the present day; the Oxford English Dictionary today continues to include quotations with many of its definitions.
But I found Johnson's treatment of word definitions even more interesting. Originally, Johnson believed that there were "at most seven different senses of a word." He identified the "natural and primitive signification," the "consequential meaning," the "metaphorical sense," the "poetical sense," the "familiar sense," the "burlesque sense," and "the peculiar sense, in which a word is found in any great author" (I like that one). But eventually he realized how limited his semantic philosophy was, and eventually came to permit as many definitions as he could find. Ultimately, he listed 134 definitions for the verb "to take," which took up roughly 8,000 words (and five whole pages) in his dictionary! As we know, words with multiple meanings can have their definitions listed in dictionaries in one of any number of different orders (the particular order depends on the choice of the publisher)--chronologically, in order frequency, etc. Johnson chose to list his definitions from the most tangible, literal sense of a word to the most literary, figurative, or abstract sense.
Today Johnson's dictionary is still praised for both the literary merit and thoroughness of its definitions. Just don't look for any entries under "X," since Johnson believed no real English words began with the letter! Johnson, a real character whose sense of humor always shone through in his definitions (he defined the word "oats" as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"), defined lexicographer in his dictionary as "a harmless drudge." The irony is hilarious; he proved lexicographers to be anything but that!
--Amy
Georgia
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Laurence Urdang Dies at 81
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Ammon Shea reads the O.E.D.
The review is peppered with examples of a few of Shea's encounters with exotic verba--from "obmutescence" to "petrichor" to "glove"--and is well worth a read just for that. For those interested, Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages also garnered praise from likes of William Safire and Erin McKean.
--Amy
Monday, July 28, 2008
Reading Reexamined
“Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.”
Here we encounter again the question of how and to what extent literacy and the written word (something altogether separate from spoken language, a more innate ability) changes the wiring of the brain. Now the question has become whether and how reading on the internet—since it uses different skills than reading in print—affects our brain’s circuitry in a different way. As a child of the web generation, this really hits home for me. Worth a look.
--Amy
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Tales From the Third Grade
First, I have a seven-year-old boy named Jason, who is of Chinese descent, but was born in the United States. His parents speak Cantonese (most of his family is from Hong Kong), some Mandarin, and English. His mother has also lived in Paris and speaks fluent French, and is teaching him a little bit. He has two-year-old twin siblings, who only speak Cantonese. One day a couple of weeks ago, Jason was telling me about how he goes to Chinese school to learn how to write in Chinese, and how even though Cantonese and Mandarin are different, they have the same writing system. He told me how he found learning to write Chinese very hard, because you have to memorize lots of characters—one for each word. I said, “It’s not like English, is it? Because in English we have letters that stand for sounds instead of words. The sounds all put together make up the word.” At this point, another boy piped up: “Yeah, that’s why English is the easiest to read! Because the letters stand for sounds! But it’s also the hardest to pronounce, because we have letters like ‘ph’ that make the wrong sound.”
So these kids not only have phonemic awareness, but also an idea of how writing systems vary in different cultures for different languages—which is more than can be said for many adults today. In short, these kids are AMAZING!
Jason tells me that he is “A little bit Chinese, a little bit English, and a little bit French,” because these are the languages that he speaks. He speaks English best, followed by Chinese, since as a baby his parents spoke both languages to him, but he has spent more time immersed in English because he goes to public school in the United States. He speaks only a little bit of French because of his mother, yet still counts this as part of his linguistic, and therefore ethnic identity. On the subject of language and identity, this is kind of a revolutionary idea. Jason looks Asian, and clearly grew up in a home with some Chinese customs—to any person on the street, he would just be an “Asian kid.” But to Jason, his ethnic identity is much more complex. He feels that because he speaks English and French also, he therefore partakes of the cultures that speak these languages, and therefore they make up part of his ethnic identity.
Jason may learn later that most of the world does not see ethnic identity in this way. Or, Jason may simply be part of a post-racial generation—where our definitions of “identity” are based on culture (I include language in this, even if some linguists might disagree) rather than biology (in race or in ethnic group).
Pamella is eight-years-old and grew up in a bilingual household, speaking both Spanish and English. Her father is Colombian and her mother is Peruvian. Like Jason, she makes fine distinctions between different dialects. She knows that her family speaks Spanish, but sees a distinction between the way her mother’s family and her father’s speak Spanish. “It’s the same language but it’s different. Sometimes they have different words for the same thing.” I tried to explain to her that it’s the same with British and American English. Pamella also says that speaks “more Peruvian than Colombian,” because her mother and grandmother speak Peruvian Spanish. For me, this just reaffirms the mother’s critical role in teaching language to her children (from “baby talk” in infancy and beyond). Sometimes I wonder if it had been my mother who spoke Spanish in my family, if I might have picked it up as a child. Quién sabe?
I like to practice my Spanish with Pamella sometimes, but I’ve noticed that whenever I speak to her, she’ll answer me in English. I used to think she did that because my Spanish was so poor. Then my Spanish instructor at Berlitz told me that the same was true of her kids, who are bilingual. I realized that the same is true of many other bilingual families I’ve known. (And now think about all the kids our age who have told you that they can understand a language that their family speaks… but can’t speak it.) Is it because the non-English language becomes secondary for the child after living and going to school in the English-speaking United States? I wonder.
Sometimes the counselors also have to speak to parents who speak little English. One day, I got this fabulous note from an ELL parent—a juicy ELL writing sample:
“To. Recky
This is Seoyoung’s mom.
She is gonna be absent tomorrow.
We are going to go to North Carolina to visit my aunt.
Thanks for your understand.”
Of course, I read this and absolutely loved it! Look at Seoyoung’s mother’s brilliant use of “gonna” as an English idiom. She’s a bit ahead of the curve, since “gonna” isn’t really accepted as legitimate in written English yet (though it should be and probably will be soon enough). She also chooses “thanks” as the informal, abbreviated form of “thank you.” She has mastered the present progressive-plus-infinitive construction, demonstrated in “we are going to go.” She also recognizes and makes use of two different meanings of the verb “to go” (she knows “going to” expresses an event in the future, as opposed to the general meaning of the verb, which expresses movement). She only misses by using “understand” instead of the gerund form “understanding,” where she means for the word to function as a noun—the object. Not sure what’s going on with her use of the period instead of the colon in “To. Recky”—though I do know some Koreans who use it instead of a comma in writing letters (ex. “Dear Amy.”), or for some reason include it at the end of titles (ex. “An Introduction to Hungarian Folklore.”). Otherwise, this note is completely clear, coherent, and understandable. Seoyoung’s mom showcases ELL at its finest.
--Amy
Monday, July 21, 2008
On "romance languages," "litmus tests" and other matters of grave import
1) Amy's comment to Kim about the stereotype of Spanish as a "passionate" language got me thinking about similar biases and misconceptions regarding other languages. The question is, are these stereotypes ever based on real characteristics of a given language, or do they simply reflect cultural biases? To wit: Is French really the most "beautiful" or the most "musical" language? Anyone have any other examples?
2) In response to Kim's call to compile a list of superlatives, I have a nomination for the most unnnecessary word: "litmus." Why is it that no one puts anything simply to the test anymore? Nowadays, one must apply a "litmus test." It brings me back painfully to my high school Chem Lab days (which resulted in a C grade), and which I would rather repress. Please: Let's bring back plain old tests.
3) Vocabulary Word of the Day: aphasia It's a goody, describing a rare and weird condition in which one loses the power to use language. Look it up if you don't believe me. Duh-h-h-h-....
4) Recommended reading: Virginia Heffernan's column in the NY Times Magazine yesterday. She wrestles with the problem of how to transcribe and report online language faithfully. It's amusing.
Waxing aphasic daily,
-Richrod
Thursday, July 17, 2008
FIELD TRIP!
Thought this might be of interest to all of you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/theater/17bway.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
The above is a link to an article in the Arts section of today's NYT: "Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! in Bilingual ‘West Side’"
“They will speak Spanish where they would naturally,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would be used to aid the audience. “The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting because they are much less inhibited. I don’t think many eyes are going to stray to the translation.”
Who needs supertitles? We certainly don't. A bilingual performance=language at its finest. So come February, we're all going. This would be an unforgettable TFS experience.
-Kim K.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
David Foster Wallace
I'm going to try to find a copy of the essay on the internet so that everyone can read it properly, but in the meantime, something interesting that Wallace brings up is the role of the dictionary in language. He explains that when Webster's Third endorsed the words "OK" and "ain't," there was uproar among many linguists, and the response of Webster editor Philip Gove was this: "A dictionary should be have no truck with artifical notions of correctness or superiority. It should be DESCRIPTIVE and not PRESCRIPTIVE" (caps added for emphasis). Then, Wallace explains that this led to linguistic conservatives being labeled as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.
It's interesting to consider what camp you fall into. Should a dictionary should dictate the way people SHOULD speak, or do you think a dictionary should chronicle how people DO speak?
My response to the above question: If a dictionary does not document the way people DO speak, the language will not be able to evolve cohesively. That is, a divide between the way people do speak and the way they are supposed to speak would grow, and possibly lead to high and low forms of the language (Amy, remember the tapes we listened to about "H" and "L"?). If a dictionary does document the way people do speak, the language may evolve cohesively, but is that necessarily superior or inferior to the above option? I think it is superior, because if it ends up with the educated elite speaking the high version of the language and the rest speaking the low--and it typically would end this way, I believe--then the language difference is going to reinforce differences in social class and make for a stratified society that, eventually, won't even be able to communicate across classes.
I think this came up in Fluent once, but we never discussed it fully...so here's an opportunity now!
--Erica
Friday, July 11, 2008
Age and Language
-Angela
Yes, I know I ramble a lot.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Update: different languages, different mindsets?
Anyway, on the subject of language immersion, I guess I wanted to throw out a related question... I'm wondering what role cultural immersion plays neurologically when using and "getting into" an L2. (Current language pedagogy insists on cultural fluency as a vital part of foreign language learning; we tell ourselves that the best way to learn a language is to go abroad and immerse ourselves in the culture of the place; and even Senor Damken imparts the mantra to us: "Grammar and culture mesh.") I could be wrong, but I think the Chomsky types would say that culture actually plays a minimal role (seeking to erase that perception of language as being an outgrowth of culture) in achieving fluency. I'm not sure if the linguistics benefits of being abroad go beyond simply having a steady stream of authentic, varied input in L2. If we could recreate that situation in the United States, and just surround a test subject with native speakers of the subject's second language (so that the L2 only was spoken around the test subject for an extended period of time)... I wonder if having that experience in the United States vs. in the foreign country would make any difference in how involved the test subject became in the language (cognitively speaking) and whether or not the test subject acquired the same kind of fluency he would abroad (i.e. immersed in the culture). Desperately seeking research...
Also check out this video on TED. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh works with bonobo apes that have acquired written language! The whole thing is really interesting (the apes also seem to understand human language--English in this case), but things start getting really crazy around 10:55, where she shows us clips of the apes using lexical symbols to communicate with humans! The conclusion she draws from this is somewhat spottier, I think. My sense is that maybe bonobo apes tell us that humans aren't the only species with a language gene--or the capacity to acquire language, however it is built-in. By contrast, Savage-Rumbaugh seems to believe that, in light of the bonobos' abilities, we must reconsider whether our talents (language, writing, etc.) are biologically-programmed and unique to us, or whether they're a function of exposure to culture. She's right in that writing is, in fact, a cultural invention rather than a hard-wired ability. But I'm still not willing to attribute the bonobos' ability to acquire language to culture/socialization.
--Amy
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Hooked on phonics?
But I wanted to post on ELL (English Language Learning, formerly known as ESL or English as a Second Language) and phonics because I’ve gotten really into phonology and language acquisition over the past month (through tutoring as well as chatting with some of my ELL second grade campers at Recky’s). I actually got some old phonics textbooks out of my second grader teacher (you never know where you can find excellent resources… ask around).
So I guess what triggered this was thinking about the different pronunciation of “woman” versus “women” in English. The only semantic difference is that one word is singular and the other is plural. Woman is made plural by changing the –an to –en (as in “man” to “men”), and making plurals this way in a language is kind of strange to begin with (if I were a second grader, I’d be asking, “Wait, aren’t you supposed to just add –s to a word to make it plural?”). Even stranger is the accompanying change in the pronunciation of the first syllable (from WUH-man to WIH-men… or something like that; “Wait, the letter ‘o’ doesn’t make that sound!”). I was wondering how an English Language Learner comes to master such bizarre changes of pronunciation like that in English, since there are so many bizarre cases like that out there. (It’s like the Stanley Fish thing we talked about… “ghoti” could realistically be another spelling of the word “fish,” if we use the way “gh” is said in “cough” (/f/), the way “o” is said in “women” (/I/ or a short “i” sound), and the way “ti” is said in the word “intuition” (/š/ or “sh”).)
This brings us to the issue of phonics as an area of an instruction, for native speakers as well as learners—which is a huge debacle in education now. Phonics involves teaching children to associate English letters with certain sounds, as well as to put letters together making sound blends (like “ch” and “tr”). So in essence, it seeks to teach which letters produce each phoneme, which in turn helps children to understand the composition of words, so that they can eventually begin to decode unknown words (based on letter/sound correlation). There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that this is a very effective way of teaching young children to read (almost counterintuitively, because we know English has SO MANY exceptions where the resulting pronunciation of a word seems completely nonsensical given the way it’s spelled). Regardless, it seems most every major study has come to the conclusion that phonics IS in fact very effective (Wikipedia gives a nice summary under the “phonics” entry… the information seems correct since I’ve also read it from journals The Reading Teacher and American Educator). Yet for some reason a strong opposition remains (not sure what their argument is…considered too juvenile for students, maybe? Or perhaps for the same reasons we don’t teach grammar (an equally un-sexy subject) anymore… wait, I can’t think of any good reasons for not teaching grammar). Apparently it’s even bitterly opposed within our school district (I get the sense Mrs. McDonough is running the “Underground Railroad” of phonics programs with Mrs. Fox at Stillman. The other three schools do not teach phonics). Maybe this isn’t a problem if our schools ultimately produce competent readers… but oftentimes they don’t—and as a nation we lag behind many other industrialized countries in reading level of students. Why don’t we use the time-tested, research-backed tools we have available to help our kids to become better readers?
With regard to phonics and ELL, apparently there is also a place in the classroom for phonics instruction in the student’s native language, because if a student develops phonemic awareness in one language (Spanish for example, given 80% of ELLs in the U.S. use Spanish as their primary language), she can transfer phonemic awareness from one language to another, according to an article in The Reading Teacher (“Conciencia Fonémica en Español (Phonemic Awareness in Spanish)” by Hallie Kay Yopp & Lilia Stapleton, February 2008). “Encouraging English-language learners to build phonemic awareness in their native language leads to gains in their English reading skills.” The abstract can be found here. If you want an actual copy, let me know. ELL is actually the most interesting thing in the world. I wish I had paid more attention to it while we were still in school (CSI internship?).
And then there’s the most elusive aspect of ELL and second language acquisition in general—the question of the accent! For those of us who went to the Swarthmore conference on sign language acquisition, we’ll remember how Deborah Chen-Pichler talked about having an “accent” (in the form of hand shape) as an M2 (mode 2) learner of ASL. As with any other language, it seems as though if one learns it after a certain point in her childhood, one is forever doomed to speak it with a foreign accent (with rare Alon Harish-type exceptions). This seems to correspond with the whole critical period idea… at some point we stop absorbing language like little sponges, and acquisition becomes a difficult, draining, conscious process (as most of us know through our high school studies)… though apparently there have been all sorts of recent challenges to the critical period hypothesis (según Maestra Giblin). I should really look into that and post for y’all (also, an unrelated thought—but can we please revive the second person plural pronoun? It’s so necessary!).
In any case, se supone que most every ELL student who learns after a certain age will have some accent, even if he speaks perfect English otherwise. Yet I’ve noticed that some of my kids who are still within the “critical period” and often speak English at home still have accents. In particular, I have an Israeli girl who speaks to her parents in a mix of English and Hebrew, and she speaks normal English, but with a very think Hebrew accent! Meanwhile, I have two twins brothers who speak almost exclusively Hebrew at home, and they have no accent at all. Why? I think the problem is that the girl learned English from her parents, who speak it well but likely with a very heavy accent. Meanwhile, since the twin brothers learned English exclusively outside the home, they didn’t retain an accent (since they’re still young enough to completely learn a another language without an accent). I was talking to my second grade teacher about this, who was telling me how her Korean kids who come in with no knowledge of English end up speaking better sometimes than Israeli kids who learned English at home. Of course that doesn’t always happen, since I know plenty of people who grew up in bilingual households speak without an accent. But I thought this was worth reporting since more than one person has noticed this among Tenafly kids.
In conclusion, let's storm the Board of Education and demand changes in the reading curriculum. Then we can teach phonics to ELLs in underprivileged school districts. I'm down!
--Amy
just an idea...
A quick proposal:
You guys know know how the American Dialect Society has that convention where it comes up with Words of the Year awards under the categories of, "Most Creative," "Most Unnecessary," "Most Outrageous," etc.? Pues, I was thinking, the Fluent (Dialect) Society could hold its own type of convention sometime later in the year, obv. via the Internet. And, we can come up with our own list. It would be a cute way of staying in touch. (This was another one of my many sponatenous ideas at work today. I hate archiving).
-Kim Kirschenbaum
Monday, July 7, 2008
A highly-recommended website!
While soldiering at work today, I somehow landed on the following website:
http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/guide/
It's called "Double-Tongued Dictionary." It’s basically a compilation of undocumented and underappreciated words. The site focuses on slang, jargon and new words. The blog posts under “Lexicographer’s Rules” are great. One post, from April 1st, 2008, entitled, “Saying it Wrong on Purpose,” really hit close to home. Although the post specifically focuses on words we intentionally pronounce incorrectly in our day to-day conversations (the post mentions “liberry,” “cowinkidink, etc.), I think the same can truly be applied to the way we approach the written word, too. Amy and I, and I’m sure plenty of others who are reading this post (if anyone is even reading it), have recently made a pastime out of deliberately spelling words wrong. “High” instead of “hi,” “chrue” instead of “true,” “kollege” instead of “college…” the list goes on. We do this, the post suggests, because it’s ironic, we enjoy making fun of ourselves (or rather, other people), and it’s just plain fun! The post is definitely interesting and informative. After reading it, I spent the rest of my idle time at work trying to come up with spoonerisms. Check out the post if: 1. you want to learn what a spoonerism is 2. you want to enrich your already-fab. understanding of linguistics 3. you want to make the world a better place
Hope everyone is having a fab. Summer! I miss you all!!!
-Kim Kirchenbaum (yes, I purposely spelled my last name wrong. Some people never seem to get it right…even after you pay them $130)
Friday, July 4, 2008
Different languages, different mindsets?
"...Anyway, I was thinking about how different languages sometimes utilize different parts of the brain. I realized that whenever I think in English, I have to go with the English pronounciation and whatnot. Even when I'm reading about something Chinese and I know the Chinese equivalent for the English word, I have to use the English version. It's most noticeable with city names and proper nouns, but if I start using in one language, it takes a conscious effort to switch. I guess this is a part of why I don't really understand people who can combine languages, like Spanglish. For me, when I took at one language, I can't translate it word for word. I can get the gist of it, but that's about it. If you want me to translate Chinese to English, it's going to sound terrible. On the other hand, if you give me both translations, I can tell you if the translator did a good job or not. It's almost as if I need to be in a different mindset in order to speak a different language."
So I guess I have a bunch of questions to throw out there:
1. Has anyone had or does anyone know of a similar experience (having trouble "switching" languages)?
2. Why does it happen? Do different languages actually utilize different parts of the brain (in the way Chinese and English reading do, according to the dyslexia studies we looked at last month)? How and why does the brain "get used to" operating in a specific language?
I want to find some research to make sure what we seem to be sensing isn't just folk psychology... but please feel free to weigh in (especially if you find info on the web or otherwise) so we can get to the bottom of this!
--Amy
Happy Fourth of July, Everyone!
On an unrelated note, I found this article on Slate.com that deals with catchphrases - like "Make it work," "My bad," and "Not so much" - and how they cycle through the modern lexicon. It considers pop culture influences and developing technology as different factors that affect the longevity of phrases in English, and also contains some lighthearted commentary on what phrases have overstayed their welcome. Not really scientific or technical, but still worth the read.
--Alison
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Links for the summer
If you found Ms. McKean to be particularly charming, you also can watch her speak at Google:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1588634025806636713&q=erin+mckean+video&ei=yElsSKn9JYTErwLP2pyiDw&hl=en
She talks about the top 10 things she wishes people knew about dictionaries. (Who knew we were supposed to read the "front matter" of our dictionaries before using them? McKean also talks about it in an interview here: http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2005-11/2005-11-30-voa1.cfm.)
More pertinent videos can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/words_about_words.html
I especially recommend the Pinker one, but Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, Zeresenay Alemseged, and Murray Gell-Mann are all on my to-do list.
Also, some of you guys wanted the link for the eggcorn database. Alison helpfully included it on the sidebar. Now there's no way any of us can possibly get bored this summer. These links should, as Senora might say, "keep us cooking."
--Amy
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Official Fluent Society Blog!
We also have an e-mail address, if you feel so inclined to use it. the.fluent.society@gmail.com
More to follow!
--Amy