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!

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?

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.

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.

In my last post, I talked about language exchanges, and mentioned using the internet to ‘exchange’ languages with native speakers.

Serendipitously, I’ve just heard of a relatively new way of connecting with people all over the world. ChatRoulette is a website that is a mix of game and social interaction site. Users log on, and their website and microphone are activated. You are then presented with random strangers from around the globe, and you can either choose to chat to them, or skip to the next person. On the flip side, they can also choose whether to chat to you or not!

With around 10,000 worldwide users so far, ChatRoulette can’t yet rival Skype for connections. The randomness also means you may see some things you are not quite prepared for (see Wired’s piece for more info!). So, no guarantees on improving your language abilities, but most users say that the thing they most enjoy is talking to someone they otherwise never would.

Have you used ChatRoulette? What have your experiences been?

Big news yesterday with the announcement of the death of another language.

Boa Sr, the last person fluent in the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, died and took with her an ancient tribal language. The Andaman Islands are a union territory of India in the Bay of Bengal.

The Bo language was one of the ten Great Andamanese languages, and took its name from a now-extinct tribe. The languages are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia. Many of the indigenous languages survived unchanged for years, before the modern world encroached on the tribes that spoke them.

Linguists now hope that they can preserve other tribal languages, after Boa Sr spent her last years unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue. She sounds like an incredible woman – speaking Hindi and another local language as well as songs and stories in Bo. She lived through the 2004 tsunami, reportedly climbing a tree to escape the water.

“Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology,” Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. “To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else.” (Source: The Guardian)

Listen to a clip of the Bo language at the BBC website.

A new study has shown that language structure may be more closely tied to social structure than previously thought.

Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have published a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges long-held views of how languages became so different. Traditional thinking holds that languages developed because of “random change and historical drift”. The differences in space and time throughout history have evolved the separation between English and Mandarin, for example.

The “Linguistic Niche Hypothesis”, however, argues that languages evolve within particular socio-demographic niches.

The researchers found striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language — such as its population and global spread — and the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages having the most speakers — and those that have spread around the world — were found to have far simpler grammars, specifically morphology, than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions. For example, languages spoken by more than 100,000 people are almost six times more likely to have simple verb conjugations compared to languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people.

Larger populations tend to have simpler pronoun and number systems and a smaller number of cases and genders and in general do not employ complex prefixing or suffixing rules in their grammars. A consequence is that languages with long histories of adult learners have become easier to learn over time. Although a number of researchers have predicted such relationships between social and language structure, this is the first large-scale statistical test of this idea.

The results draw connections between the evolution of human language and biological organisms. Just as very distantly related organisms converge on evolutionary strategies in particular niches, languages may adapt to the social environments in which they are learned and used. (Source: Science Daily)

Last weekend, the blog Schott’s Vocab ran a competition to reveal workplace lingo.

Many professions have their own languages, with terminology that only the initiated can understand. The most obvious must be in medicine, where it can seem that doctors are speaking a foreign language with lots of long, strange word combinations.

Even if your job doesn’t have an entirely different vocabulary, you’re likely to use some work-specific language during your day that an outsider wouldn’t understand. It may be specific to your industry, company or even your particular workplace. Coming up with your own shorthand can be a good way of bonding with colleagues.

So, what interesting terms did the Schott’s readers come up with?

running heads: describes the content in the margins, but always makes me think of heads running. (Publishing)

tombstone: [...], we refer to that basic block of object information as the “tombstone”. You know, the Artist’s name, life dates, title of work, year of creation, materials, credit line. (Museums)

calendar: to schedule time on someone’s online corporate calendar program (”If you want to sit down and discuss the Pensky file, calendar me”). (Corporate/office)

Code18: for a computer user whose perceived problem isn’t due to a malfunction in the computer but with something in (or not in, more like) his/her own head, 18″ from the monitor. (IT)

I can’t imagine what non-native English speakers make of these! I’m sure other languages have their own workplace lingos also, anyone got any examples?