Language Museum

In January I wrote about the Business Sentence Generator, which spits out random sentences for use in corporate reports. Whilst the BSG was built for humour, a survey shows that it may not be far off the mark.

Office Angels compiled a list of office jargon from the last decade, and their top ten reads as follows:

‘We need the right pin numbers’ – ‘we need it to work’
‘A lighthouse on a cloudy night’ – coming up with a good/bright idea
‘I’m coming into this with an open kimono’ – throwing an idea out into the open but being open to criticism
‘Let’s touch base about this offline’ – ‘let’s meet up face-to-face’
‘Finger in the air figure’ – just an estimate
‘I think someone needs a bite of the realilty sandwich’ – someone needs to think a bit more practically
‘Let’s run that idea up the flagpole and see if it flies’ – simply trying out an idea
‘Let’s not try to build a chestnut fence to keep the sand-dunes in’ – face a problem head-on, rather than battling it unsuccessfully
‘Get all our ducks in a row’ – get everything in order
‘Expecting the moon on a stick’ – when clients have ridiculous expectations

These sentences seem fairly redundant – why not just say what you mean? Sporting metaphors seem increasingly common – one reason why I hate ‘touching base’. Let’s hope with the new decade we can ditch the jargon and communicate clearly with our coworkers – now that’s a lighthouse on a cloudy night!

Closed captioning (subtitles) have recently been introduced to some videos on YouTube, which could potentially be a great language learning resource. The service is in beta mode at the moment – and apparently it needs a lot of work. From Dvice.com:

Engadget first spotted how weird Apple’s iPad launch video got when the feature was activated — sometimes the text is so different from what’s being said that you wonder if Google is just having a laugh. “A high-res color display” becomes “a high risk going to split,” and when one of the designers says he doesn’t have to change himself to use the iPad, the captions make it sound like he very clearly does. If you were relying on these captions, it would be a very different commercial.

The captioning is machine-generated, so it seems the software has a ways to go before this becomes a reliable means of translation!

A fun article from the Chicago Tribune, listing the top ten mispronounced foodie words. Their list:

1. Bruschetta (broo-SKEH-tah)
2. Gnocchi (NYOH-kee)
3. Gyro (YEER-oh)
4. Huitlacoche (wheet-lah-KOH-chay)
5. Pouilly-Fuisse (poo-yee fwee-SAY)
6. Mole (MOH-lay)
7. Paczki (POONCH-key)
8. Phở (fuh)
9. Prosciutto (proh-SHOO-toe)
10. Sake (SAH-kay)

A number of years ago I worked for a cinema chain and the most common food mispronunciation I heard was ‘jalapeno’ – said as it is written rather than the correct ‘ha-la-pen-yo’. Personally, I’ve struggled with phở, the Vietnamese soup, which is said something like ‘fur/fuh’. And also ‘crepes’ – ‘creps’ rather than ‘craypes’.

This mispronunciation usually stems from unfamiliarity with the word. It’s better to mispronounce it and get to taste the food than be too scared of getting it wrong and miss out on the experience though!

What food names are you unsure of? Have you ever been corrected on your food pronunciation?

Today is Commonwealth Day, so a good time to take a look at the languages of the Commonwealth I think!

Once known as Empire Day, Commonwealth Day celebrates the 54 countries that make up the Commonwealth of Nations. Most member countries are former British colonies, and so speak English as either a first or second language. About 30% of the world’s population live in the Commonwealth – that’s over 2 BILLION people.

Canada, Singapore, Australia and South Africa are some examples of Commonwealth countries which have developed their own version of English, whilst still preferring British spellings.

Brunei – Behasa Melayu; India – Hindi (official); Tonga – Tongan; Seychelles – Seselwa Creole and Malta – Maltese are examples of some other Commonwealth countries and their languages. India alone has hundreds of languages, although Hindi and English are the two official ones.

The Commonwealth Games are due to be held later this year in New Delhi, India, so I’m sure revisit the languages of the Commonwealth then!

Read the Commonwealth message from Her Majesty The Queen here.

There’s been a lot of debate recently about language learning in schools in the UK. The government has shifted the focus of language teaching to primary schools, with high school students not required to learn a second language at GCSE level.

Interestingly, it seems that teaching a second non-English language may not be the only issue for the government. Surveys have revealed that in some parts of the country, pupils are attending school with little or no English.

A Government study found last year that some 240 different languages are spoken by schoolchildren in the home across Britain as a whole, with one-in-seven primary school pupils not speaking English as a first language across the UK.

There are 10 schools in the UK where no child speaks English as a first language, the figures show.

Staff and pupils at Fairlight Primary School in Brighton resorted to learning sign language to communicate, with children speaking 26 different languages at home in 2008. (Source: Telegraph)

A survey in Reading, England, has found that 150 languages and dialects are spoken by pupils in its area, including the Indian language of Telugu and the Ghanaian dialect of Akan. This incredible diversity is making it difficult to provide for all pupils. I wonder if, rather than seeing it as a negative thing, their knowledge could be used to help others – child to child language exchange perhaps?

Um, no. I don’t. I learned a little in school, and was apparently quite good at it, but all of that knowledge has disappeared now. My apologies to German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who is on a mission to promote his native language.

Westerwelle is promoting his global campaign called “Language of Ideas” which aims to encourage more people to speak German. And why is he promoting German over other languages?

“It is the key to more than 350 German universities and colleges, to Europe’s largest economy,” Westerwelle said. “It grants access to German literature, music, philosophy, and science, to the wealth of great European cultural traditions and, not least, it is the key to realizing one’s own goals and ideas.” (Source: Washington Post)

There are around 101 million native German speakers in Europe with more learning the language. Here in the UK, it’s generally thought that German is an ugly or harsh-sounding language, but Westerwelle calls it “beautiful”. From my experience, I can say that the sounds become more pleasing the more you hear it spoken!

Are you learning German? Do you think it’s “beautiful”?

Incredible article in New Scientist this week, about prehistoric symbols discovered in caves in southern France.

Whilst artwork on the cave walls has been studied intensively, new research has shown that previously-ignored ‘doodles’ could be evidence of a primitive precursor to writing. A postgraduate student at the University of Victoria, Canada, built a database of signs from caves all over France and the results were striking – signs drawn in the same style, appeared at numerous different sites, which could indicate the beginnings of a simple language system. The earliest recorded pictograph writing systems are thought to date to 5,000 years ago, but this discovery may change current thought.

..One of the most intriguing facts to emerge from von Petzinger’s work is that more than three-quarters of the symbols were present in the very earliest sites, from over 30,000 years ago.

“I was really surprised to discover this,” says von Petzinger. If the creative explosion occurred 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, she would have expected to see evidence of symbols being invented and discarded at this early stage, with a long period of time passing before a recognisable system emerged. Instead, it appears that by 30,000 years ago a set of symbols was already well established.

That suggests we might need to rethink our ideas about prehistoric people, von Petzinger says. “This incredible diversity and continuity of use suggests that the symbolic revolution may have occurred before the arrival of the first modern humans in Europe.” If she is right, it would push back the date of the creative explosion by tens of thousands of years.

Read the rest of the article here.

Last week I posted about how bilingualism can apparently be promoted even before babies are born. Introducing a second language at a young age seems to be a very popular idea – a mother in Scotland has won an international prize for teaching French to babies.

Fiona Moffat and her company, Lingobaby, aim to introduce a second language at a young age, and run sessions for children from birth to five years old.

“There are no expectations that they come out with French words, but often you can hear babies of about 15-16 months say bits of words like ‘bonjour’, ‘merci’ and ‘au revoir’,” she said.

Ms Moffatt said there were “huge” benefits to babies and toddlers learning foreign languages.

“If children are exposed to the sounds of a language before the age of nine months, they’re much more likely to pick the sounds out at a later age,” she said.

“We’ve also had a lot of comments from parents who are coming to classes that it just makes language learning normal.” (Source: BBC News)

I wonder exactly how much of the language these children actually pick up, or whether it’s more about laying down some foundations for learning in later years?

Subtitles. They’re there to help you out when you’re watching a foreign movie or TV show. They can be a useful tool when you’re learning a new language. But what happens when the subtitle writers get it horribly wrong? This is often the case when an English film is dubbed into another language and then subtitled back into English. Well, it seems that some hilarity ensues… Take a look at this slideshow.

Today is International Mother Language Day, designated as such by UNESCO in 1999 and first celebrated in 2000. Observed yearly by UNESCO member states, the day aims to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

The day has its origins in Language Movement Day, which was first commemorated in Bangladesh in 1952. Each year has a theme, with this year being the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures. Previous themes have included International Year of Languages (2008) and Linguistic Diversity (2002).

This year, in conjunction with International Mother Language Day, the UN will launch a new initiative called UN Language Days. These seek to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity, two of the aims of Mother Language Day. It also aims to promote equal use of all six of the UN’s official working languages – Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Russian and Arabic – through six new observance days.

UNESCO’s Director-General Irina Bokova noted in her message for the Day:

“Languages are the best vehicles of mutual understanding and tolerance. Respect for all languages is a key factor for ensuring peaceful coexistence, without exclusion, of societies and all of their members,” she said. (Source: UN)