Tinker, Tailor

I can’t remember how it happened, but it occured to me that the words linguini and linguist are similar.

Do they come from the same root?

I did know that linguist comes from the Latin lingua meaning tongue. That’s where we get lingua franca as well.

But linguini, the Italian pasta thingy?

I was disappointed that I didn’t put more thought into it before looking it up, because the relationship turns out to be quite obvious, especially for someone who’s interested in word origins or etymology.

Don’t make my mistake - ponder over it for a minute before reading on.

Linguini, I should have guessed, comes from Italian. And Italian, I should know very well, comes from Latin.

So, DUH! Linguini does come from the same latin root lingua. And obviously, it’s named after the tongue because it’s flat like a tongue.

Etymology is so cool.

P.S. Those of you who notice that language is vaguely similar to lingua will also be pleased to note that language came from Old French langage, which came from Latin lingua. (French, like Italian, comes from Latin.)

P.P.S. A handful (or more) of you might be interested to note that cunni- comes from the Latin word cunnus which refers to the vulva.

Enough language education for today

A friend of mine told me that she would be sent to attend a course in Applied Linguistics.

“Applied Linguistics! That would be fun!” I exclaimed.

She gave me the why-not-you-do-it-for-me-instead look.

“Linguistics would help you understand how languages work,” I offered, hoping that it would excite her a little.

She gave me the why-not-you-do-it-for-me-instead look.

“Linguistics will help you understand English better,” I offered, hoping that it would appeal to her love for English.

She gave me the why-not-you-do-it-for-me-instead look.

Fast forward a few weeks, before I finally managed to find a good illustration to show why linguistics is relevant, and so I tried it out on her over coffee.

“You know in English, you can begin some words with the ‘in-’ prefix to indicate the negative right?”

“Right…”

“Like ‘inflexible’ or ‘intangible’ or ‘incorrect’.”

“Okay…”

“But how come the negative of words starting with a ‘p’ always begin with ‘im-’ instead of ‘in-’? Like ‘impolite’ or ‘impossible’ or ‘imperfect’? It’s never ‘inpolite’ or ‘inpossible’.”

I could see the gears churning in her head as she tried to find ‘p’ words that could be negated by ‘in-’ instead of ‘im-’. But of course she couldn’t.

“So do you know why?” I asked her again, barely suppressing my superior smirk.

“Well, it just is,” she declared.

“So you’re saying that you don’t know why right?” I had to force her into admitting defeat first.

“You mean there’s actually a reason?”

“That’s where linguistics comes in,” I said triumphantly, while trying not to be too obnoxious about it. “Linguistics can explain why. Actually, this applies to ‘b’ words and ‘m’ words as well, like ‘imbalance’ and ‘immature’. You won’t be able to find negative words starting with ‘inb’ or ‘inm’ or ‘inp’.”

Of course she couldn’t.

“So are you gonna explain to me why?” she said impatiently (not iMpatiently, not iNpatiently), interrupting my victory lap.

I cleared my throat in preparation for my lecture.

“This has to do with a branch of linguistics called ‘phonology‘ which deals with the sounds of a language. And this actually has to do with physics as well as psychology and perhaps even sociology.

“When you say out words beginning with ‘b’, ‘m’, or ‘p’, your lips actually start in the same position - your lips are closed together or pursed. [In linguistics, we classify these 3 consonants as bilabials, which literally means 2 (bi) lips (labia).]

“Because of that, it’s actually physically more difficult to say ‘inp-’ or ‘inb-’ - try it yourself - it feels weird right?”

She started mouthing ‘iNpossible’ and ‘iMpossible’, comparing the two.

“The ‘im-’ words actually started as ‘in-’ words, but eventually the ‘in-’ starts sounding like ‘im-’ when followed by those 3 consonants, especially when you say it fast.

“And because it’s physically easier to say ‘im-’ instead of ‘in-’, eventually with enough people saying ‘im-’, it became ‘im-’. [I think the linguists call this the regressive assimilation of consonants. Whatever.]

“It all makes sense right?” I asked her.

She had to agree.

Well, she’s still not terribly excited about attending the course, but at least she’s seeing some relevance. And now she knows why it’s iMpossible and not iNpossible.

[Of course, the conversation was reconstructed and modified. I don’t have perfect recall.]

Looks like not everyone in China knows Mandarin. In fact, almost half the Chinese population in China don’t know Mandarin (the official figure is 47% in 2004).

Bah.

(via Pinyin News - At least 40% of people in PRC can’t speak Mandarin: official)

How do you pronounce Javier Solana? (He’s the European Union foreign policy chief.)

It doesn’t really matter. But since young, I’ve been quite particular about getting my pronunciation right for some reason, so BBC’s Pronunciation Unit’s blog helps feed my obsession. I can’t believe it but I actually read through every one of their posts.

And oh, Javier Solana is pronounced khav-YAIR sol-AA-nuh (-kh as in Scottish loch, and loch isn’t pronounced lock). Hope that helps

If you see an ang moh with a Chinese tattoo that you can’t make any sense out of, it may not be because your command of the language sucks (like mine).

The tattoo parlour they visited probably got their translation reference from this site: Chinese/Kanji & Egyptian Flash/Design Sheets. Click on any of the images and scroll all the way down - you’ll even find the Chinese alphabet!

(via Hanzi Smatter: Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved)

I was at CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia - it’s one of the exhibitions which I go to every year (except 2003, when it was cancelled due to SARS).

While most of the floorspace of CommunicAsia was occupied by exhibitors showing their back-end technologies and hardware, the booths that draw the most crowds are usually the large mobile phone companies - Sony-Ericsson, LG, Motorola, Samsung, and so on. (Come to think of it, I didn’t see the Nokia booth.) I’m not sure what draws the crowds - is it the barely-dressed girls? or the cool handsets? Probably a combination of both.

But the booth that really impressed me was of this Israeli company Zlango, at Hall 5 booth B3-10. See their blog for a diagram of the booth.

I stopped in my tracks outside their booth - there were cutesy icons all over the booth walls. The only words were the logo and the tagline “Pic. Talk”.

Mystified, I asked the guy in the booth (there were no pretty booth girls) to explain his product.

It’s basically a new kind of universal language (think Esperanto), where concepts are represented by pictures or icons (think Chinese, a long time ago), and Zlango messages could be sent through the mobile phone (using a Java client).

For example, a message with the 3 following icons - person pointing to self; heart; person pointing to you - would translate “me love you”.

Interesting concept.

“Children love it!” he told me.

“So what age group is it targeted at?”

I forgot the lower age target (10? 12?), but it was up to 25 years old, which surprised me (explaining why I forgot the lower age).

Of course I was sceptical.

“It seems fun, but it doesn’t look practical!” I protested. Try chatting with someone using MSN Messenger icons exclusively.

He turned on his mobile phone, and showed me the Zlango messages that he sent to his colleague, like one announcing that he just arrived at the airport.

“But you can’t represent complex ideas with this!”

He grabbed this little booklet, with lots of little icons. It was Little Red Riding Hood in Zlango.

“But I can’t make sense out of it,” I told him.

That’s when he told me that the icons are designed such that after you go through the dictionary, you’d easily be able to remember what they represent.

“How many pictures do you have in the dictionary?”

“Over 200.”

Didn’t seem like much.

“Users can also add their own pictures, or use words if necessary.”

“And how long does it take to learn the vocabulary and get the hang of things?” Can’t be less than a week.

“About 1 hour.”

Ok, seems impressive.

I asked him if the whole concept was linguistically sound. He claimed that it was - they had linguists developing the concept. I did probe him a little more (but not too much) on the liguistic side of things, and he managed to remain quite convincing.

I left the booth very intrigued, but not totally convinced.

Then just now, I took out the Little Red Riding Hood booklet that he gave me. I took a couple of minutes looking through the relevant dictionary (about 50+ icons), then I tested myself by reading the story.

Damn. It works. I can actually comprehend it quite easily.

Take a look at their online Little Red Riding Hood. The story starts with something like “much much time before mother say little redridinghood…”, or “a long time ago, mother says to little red riding hood…”.
Click on the ‘#’ near the bottom right for the translation.

And check out their booth if you’re there.

(See also a blog mention of Zlango.)

Wengu is a pretty awesome site on Chinese classics in English done by the French. According to the welcome page:

This site allows you to read some Chinese classic texts in original language and with some translations.

So now you can read 孫子兵法 (Sun Zi’s Art of War) in it’s original Chinese with great ease, even if your Chinese character recognition capabilities suck like a vacuum. Just put your mouse over the offending character, and the pinyin and definition will magically appear.

I wish I had this in school.

Check out the other classics as well.

(via languagehat.com)

Consider this from Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3:

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

A lot of people would declare that his should be used instead of their, including some self-proclaimed grammar experts (I call them grammar terrorists).

I have been using the singular they occasionally, especially when I don’t want to specify the gender. For example, I might write:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on their face.

instead of:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on that person’s face.

In this case, there isn’t much difference. But if I continue on the narrative, the use of that person can become more cumbersome. Consider:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on that person’s face. Nor did I like the person’s smell, as I soon discovered.

which doesn’t read as smooth as:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on their face. Nor did I like their smell, as I soon discovered.

Don’t like it? Let me quote from Language Log (Shakespeare used they with singular antecedents so there):

By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don’t try to tell us that it’s grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare’s rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn’t ungrammatical, it isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don’t buy what they’re selling.

I wish I knew this stuff when I was in secondary school - I definitely would have used the singular they in my next English composition, and hope that my English teacher would fall for my trap and put a bright red circle around my carefully-placed they, then we could have a heated argument where I would quote Shakespeare and the rest, and finally prove to them that I was indeed correct (as usual), and thus obnoxiously show my superiority over them.

Sometimes I wonder why so many of my teachers couldn’t stand me.

(I’m still in a didactic mood - this is somewhat of a continuation of my last post.)

Normally, when I hear “Jesus Christ”, it’s exclaimed with much frustration from the lips of an American friend. “Jesus Christ! What the hell is going on?!?”

You get the idea.

But since X’mas is approaching, the original non-profane usage of the name seems to be picking up.

By the way, the “Christ” in “Jesus Christ” is not the last name or surname. You shouldn’t be calling him “Mister Christ” if you met him today (some people claim to have met him so it’s not that farfetched).

Christians had better know that “Christ” is actually a title (not a surname), which means “Anointed” or “the Anointed One”. You might have come across the word “Messiah”, which means the same. (Messiah is from hebrew; christ is from greek.)

And not too many people realise that “Jesus” and “Joshua” are the same in greek.

This is why, in Hebrews 4:8 of the bible, you’ll find that the New International Version (NIV) reads:

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day.

while the King James Version (KJV) reads:

For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day.

Both were translated from similar greek texts, but the latter one (KJV) got it wrong. They got it wrong since 1611 when it was first published, and they never corrected it even after the last revision in 1769, the revision in use today, although most KJV users mistakenly think they’re using the original 1611 version…

Okay, I better stop myself before I get more boring. I think there are jingle bells jingling in my head…

I feel rather didactic at the moment, so I’ve decided to reveal something I discovered for myself only a few years back. How I wish someone had told me this much earlier.

I remember asking my dad why Christmas was often spelt X’mas. I was probably around 8 then.

He told me that ‘X’ is (obviously) a cross, and the cross represents Christ. Thus Christmas can be written as X’mas. Simple?

Sorry dad - that was quite clever, but quite wrong.

Christmas is sometimes spelt X’mas because the greek letter Χ (Chi) was used to represent Christ. Christ is Χριστος (Christos) in greek, which was sometimes abbreviated to Χς (Chi sigma - the first and last letters of Χριστος), and sometimes further abbreviated to Χ (Chi).

Why all this greek? That’s because the New Testament of the Bible was written in greek (the New Testament is the part of the Bible that’s centered around Jesus Christ).

So there you go. Ho ho ho.

Omniglot - a guide to written language.

A great site if you’re into written language, alphabets, scripts, etc.

From the site’s about page:

This site contains details of most alphabets and other writing systems currently in use, as well as quite a few ancient and invented ones. It also includes information about some of the languages written with those writing systems, multilingual texts, tips on learning languages, a book store, some useful phrases in many different languages, and a ever-growing collection of links to language-related resources.

There were some questions on tenses in Chinese in my Chinese Grammar post, so I thought it was interesting enough to talk about it briefly here.

Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar (pg 29) has an excellent summary on Chinese tenses, if you understand the grammar terms:

One feature common to all verbs in Chinese is that they do not conjugate for tense. The time of the action specified by the verb is normally indicated by placing a time expression before the verb or at the beginning of the sentence. Chinese verbs do have to be related to aspect, however, in that there needs to be some indication of whether the action has been completed, is on-going, or is part of past experience. This is achieved by introducing an aspect marker le, guo, or zhe as a suffix to the verb, or zài directly before the verb. Action verbs without aspect markers usually express habitual action or intention.

I was thinking of explaining the above in detail, but it’s too tedious because quite a bit of background knowledge is required. Maybe another post, if I’m up to it. Anyway, I hope this is helpful in some way.

When I was reading a book on Chinese grammar, I got a number of responses from those who know me.

Some would simply shake their heads, sigh, and walk away. Yet another weird book he’s reading, they must be thinking.

Others would ask, “Chinese got grammar meh?”

“Every language has grammar,” I would reply, “even Singlish has grammar!”

And a few would ask, “you mean you need to learn this?”

Of which I would reply, “those of us who’ve known Chinese since young already know the grammar intrinsically, but would you know how to explain it, say, to an angmoh friend who’s trying to learn Chinese? I doubt.”

To the last 2 groups, I often like to ask them this:

“How do you say ‘that person is very tall’ in Mandarin?”

“那个人很高” would be their typical reply.

“Ok. Then how do you say ‘that person is tall’?”

Pause.

“Ermmm… ‘那个人高’? No…”

“You see,” I explain slightly condescendingly, “we can say ‘那个人很高’ but we can’t say ‘那个人高’. Why? This is Chinese grammar.”

They get it.

* * * * *

In case you’re still wondering how to translate “that person is tall”, I’d probably translate it “那个人长的高” (”that person has grown tall”). There seems to be no straightforward way of translating it.

The grammar book I was reading says that “that person is tall” should be “那个人很高”, and “that person is very tall” is “那个人非常高”. I would disagree with this in the Singapore context, since I would understand “那个人非常高” to be closer to “that person is extremely tall”.

But hey, I was never a good student of the Chinese language, so take my views with some crystals of salt.

Abecedaria has some information on Chinese dyslexia:

Dyslexia is often associated with an inability to either percieve or create the correct orientation in a letter or character. The classic visual image of dyslexic writing showed frequent reversals between the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’. In this view it would be difficult to impossible to be dyslexic in the Chinese writing system. However, this view is outdated, perhaps by 20-30 years according to this article.

[…]

In fact, it is not neccesary for the actual symbols to represent reflected sets like ‘b’ and ‘d’ for children to have this confusion. The component parts of a Chinese character offer as much opportunity for difficulty to Chinese children as the various letter shapes, and irregular spellings offer English children. There is also a difference in phonological processing at a certain level. However, that is one component of the problem, not all.

If you’re incredibly interested in the topic, check out this very long article.

Addendum: Gary Feng has more bibliographic information, and includes an interesting image of Chinese dyslexia.

* * * * *

Anyway, this reminds me of an old (and short) post where I observed that it’s easier to read the mirror image of Chinese text than English text.

Maybe it’s just me, since I find it quite easy to recognise reversed text. For instance, in Dan Brown’s hyperpopular Da Vinci Code, one of the puzzles given was reversed English text. Because I recognised it instantly, that part of the novel drove me insane because I had to plough through 2 pages of silly discussions between the 2 male characters (forgot their names) trying to figure out what script it was. Felt like ripping out those pages. Okay, many of the anagrams in the book were easy too, but that’s another post…

Maybe it’s just me, because I have this habit of writing reversed English text when I’m bored. Come to think of it, I’ve never tried doing that for Chinese. I’ll do it later.

If you’re starting to think that there’s no value in writing reverse, here are some good uses I have found:

If you’re outside a room that has condensation (due to aircon) on its glass partition, it’s fun to write silly messages reversed on the glass so the people inside can read. Fine, I know it’s show-off, but it’s still fun.

Or write a reversed message on a piece of paper, and hand it to a primary school kid, and tell her to decode the secret message by holding the paper against the light and viewing it from the other side. The look of admiration is priceless.

Conclusion: it is fun and useful to write in reverse.

I loved Hànyǔ Pīnyīn.

In secondary school, the Chinese language teacher would sometimes pick one of us to read a passage from the textbook. I found that I could read better and faster if I read the Pīnyīn printed below the Chinese characters instead of the characters themselves. Yes it was bad.

Anyway here’s a useful site dedicated to Pīnyīn - Pīnyīn.info. Check out it’s useful links page too.

Here’s a Pinyin News blog. I found it a while back, but never really had the time or enough interest to follow it.

(From The Math Gene, which I recently reviewed.)

Chinese and Japanese kids consistently outperform their American and European counterparts in mathematical tests. Besides cultural and school system differences, language seems to play a part in the disparity.

Doing arithmetic, and in particular learning multiplication tables, is simply easier for Chinese and Japanese children, because their number words are shorter and simpler…

I’m glad that my mom made me memorise the multiplication table in Chinese as a kid. I still remember those tormented days going “二一二, 二二四, 二三六, 二四八… ”

There’s more:

The grammatical rules for building up number words in Chinese and Japanese are also much easier than in English or other European languages. For instance, the Chinese rule for making words for numbers past ten is simple: 11 is ten one, 12 is ten two, 13 is ten three, and so on, up to two ten for 20, two ten one for 21 […]. Think how much more complicated is the English system […]. A recent study by Kevin Miller showed that language differences cause English-speaking children to lag a whole year behind their Chinese counterparts in learning to count.

Last and certainly not least,

In addition to being easier to learn, the Chinese number word system also makes elementary arithmetic easier, because the language rules closely follow the base-10 structure of the Arabic system.

On a somewhat coincidental note, I happen to be reading a book on Chinese grammar. Not sure if I’ll ever finish it though - grammars aren’t always the most exciting bedtime material…

No, there’s no gene for mathematics per se, and the author Keith Devlin admits it freely in the Math Gene, but he does argue that we have a genetic predisposition and an innate facility for mathematics, just like we have for language (see Steve Pinker’s excellent The Language Instinct).

The book’s subtitle is much more descriptive: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip.

I can’t remember exactly what convinced me to read this book, but I suppose it’s the comments on the back cover, such as these:

… Compulsory (and compulsive) reading for anyone who loves math - and anyone who hates it…
- Ian Stewart

For a long time I suspected there was some connection between our ability to do math and our possesion of language. Now that connection is made dazzlingly clear…
- Derek Bickerton

Very hard to resist, particularly for someone like me who loves books that combine or relate 2 or more different fields together.

The book starts off talking about math, going into some of the foundations of numbers, counting, and math itself, and takes pains to correct many myths and misconceptions about mathematics and mathematicians, like

• Mathematicians have a good head for figures. (Some do, some don’t.)
• Mathematicians like adding up long columns of numbers in their head. (Surely, no one likes this.)
[…]
• Mathematicians are not creative. (If you believe this, you certainly don’t know what mathematics is about.)
• There is no such thing as beauty in mathematics. (Philistine!)
• Mathematics is predictable. If involves following precise rules. (Like music, drama, sculpture, painting, writing novels, chess, and football?)
• In mathematics, there is always a right answer. (And it’s in the back of the book.)

He likes messing with your mind too:

Quick, what is 8 times 7? It’s 54, right?
Or is it 64? Or 56, perhaps? If you are like most people, each of these answers seems “reasonable.” Why is it that, despite hours of drill in elementary school, most of us have so much trouble with our multiplication table?

As expected, a good part of the book talks about language and linguistics (structure, syntax, etc.), and theories on how the human brain evolved and developed for language.

And how mathematical ability is essentially another use of our language ability - the central point of this book.

* * * * *

Even if you don’t agree with the author’s central point or his arguments leading up to it, I think this book is worth reading as it covers good ground on both mathematics and linguistics, with loads of interesting tidbits, some of which I hope to mention in the future posts. Check the trackbacks.

A Japanese guide to Japanese grammar has an interesting approach to learning Japanese (via Languagehat)

In the Introduction, Tae Kim points out some weaknesses with the approach of the typical Japanese textbook:

The problem with conventional textbooks is that they often have the following goals.

1. They want readers to be able to use functional and polite Japanese as quickly as possible.
2. They don’t want to scare readers away with terrifying Japanese script and Chinese characters.
3. They want to teach you how to say English phrases in Japanese.

Traditionally with romance languages such as Spanish, these goals presented no problems or were nonexistent due to the similarities to English. However, because Japanese is different in just about every way down to the fundamental ways of thinking, these goals create many of the confusing textbooks you see on the market today. They are usually filled with complicated rules and countless number of grammar for specific English phrases. They also contain almost no kanji and so when you finally arrive in Japan, lo and behold, you discover you can’t read menus, maps, or essentially anything at all because the book decided you weren’t smart enough to memorize Chinese characters.

The root of this problem lies in the fact that these textbooks try to teach you Japanese with English. They want to teach you on the first page how to say, “Hi, my name is Smith,” but they don’t tell you about all the arbitrary decisions that were made behind your back. They probably decided to use the polite form even though learning the polite form before the dictionary form makes no sense. They also might have decided to include the subject even though it’s not necessary and excluded most of the time. In fact, the most common way to say something like “My name is Smith” in Japanese is to say “am Smith”. That’s because most of the information is understood from the context and is therefore excluded. But does the textbook explain the way things work in Japanese fundamentally? No, because they’re too busy trying to push you out the door with “useful” phrases right off the bat. The result is a confusing mess of “use this if you want to say this” type of text and the reader is left with a feeling of confusion about how things actually work.

The solution to this problem is to explain Japanese from a Japanese point of view. Take Japanese and explain how it works and forget about trying to force what you want to say in English into Japanese. […]

Sounds good to me. I’ll come back to this site if I ever decide to learn Japanese. The other resources that might be very helpful in learning the language would include manga, J-pop songs and Japanese pron movies.

I just learnt today that in Malay, tuhan is god, and hantu is ghost.

Hmmmm….

Later, I learnt that mata air (mata is eye, air is water) is boyfriend/girlfriend (it can also mean fountain or well), and air mata is tears.

The result of the reversals?

P.S. I’m sure there are more of such examples. Tell me if you know of more.

The Evolution of Present-Day English. I must read this as soon as I have the time.