Language Museum

Back in 2004, I was lucky enough to spend a year in Canada. At one point I was amazed to find that some of my Canadian friends didn’t know their mobile phones had a text messaging function.

Apparently that’s changed, and dramatically – the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association will announce this week that Canadians sent 35.3 billion texts in 2009, or around 122 million per day.

All this texting has given rise to a new set of words employing the suffix ‘ting’, including ‘drexting’ (drinking and texting) and ‘chexting’ (cheating on your partner via text). The most famous (or infamous perhaps) is ‘sexting’ – sending X-rated images, messages and video via your phone – partly due to one famous golfer.

These words are most likely fads and will die out as texting become less of a novelty. It’s good to know that they still have meaning, though:

Maria Bakardjieva, who studies the socio-cultural aspects of technology, says the implications of this trend cut both ways.

“We’re stronger and richer with every new medium that allows us to connect to others,” says Bakardjieva, a professor of communication and culture at the University of Calgary. “But with texting, we’re also brutalizing written language in order to communicate. Still, it demonstrates that humans can fill any message with meaning and utility, no matter how lean.” (Source: Vancouver Sun)

Having written a few posts about invented languages such as Na’vi and Klingon, I was interested to come across this post posing questions to two experts in the field.

One of the experts is the inventor of Na’vi, the language used in the movie Avatar, so there are a few questions posed about that, with interesting responses. Here’s a sample:

One thing that always strikes me about languages is that some of them (particularly) English are such kleptomaniacs: they steal liberally from other languages they come in contact with, but they frequently seem to have rules for how things are assimilated. Japanese has a positively Ellis Island-like knack for making borrowed words sound completely different and naturalized, while at the same time using an entirely separate character set to keep them segregated. English, on the other hand, has so many words of foreign origin that most speakers aren’t even aware of it. So I’m curious, then, about the “future” of the Na’vi language: how do you expect it to change as it bumps up against English and other languages and their alien vocabulary, sounds, and concepts? — John

Paul Frommer: On Pandora there are already some borrowings from English into Na’vi – English words the locals have adopted for alien objects and concepts that have been filtered through the Na’vi sound system. “Gunship” is kunsìp; “book” is puk; “badge” is pätsì. On the other hand, some words are developed from existing elements rather than borrowed: “human” is not yumìn but rather tawtute, which literally means “sky person.”

As you’ve noted, languages differ in their readiness to borrow foreign words. Among the Na’vi-enthusiast community that has exploded in the last couple of months, the sentiment seems to be against borrowings except as placeholders until suitable native expressions are coined. So “computer” and “lawyer” are not kompìyuter and loyer but rather eltu lefngap (metal brain) and, tentatively, pängkxoyu lekoren (one who discusses rules). I expect this preference to hold as Na’vi continues to develop, especially in view of the fact that the emerging community is not limited to English speakers. (Source: Schott’s Vocab Blog)

As you can see, the questions and answers are quite long and in-depth, so be sure you have a bit of time on your hands before starting to read. Enjoy!

Last week I posted about office jargon and how it can obscure simple meanings.

Going one step further, what if your job title was jargon and obscured what you really do?

A BBC article asked readers to submit their silliest job title, and here are some of the results:

3. My job title is a waste management and disposal technician. In other words, a bin man.
Alex, Newcastle upon Tyne

5. I had the rather uninspired job title of head of inspiration for a while. I failed to live up to it.
Gav, Sydney, Australia

7. Currently on secondment, my job title has changed from the all-purpose customer services administrator to direct debit and membership and professional development stock and credit administrator.
Martin, Bromley, Kent

16. My job title is worldwide marine asset financial analyst. But what it all comes down to is I’m an accountant.
Steve Scott, Rochester, Kent, UK

24. My job title for about a year was coordinator of interpretive teaching, which entailed taking school groups round a museum. Posh name for a tour guide, basically.
James Morris, London, UK

As the writer of this blog, I suppose I could describe myself as an ‘information management specialist’. It sounds much more important than ‘blogger’ or ‘writer’ but doesn’t make it clear what I really do. Having read these titles though, perhaps I should promote myself to ‘Head of Inspiration’!

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!

Following up on yesterday’s post about industry-specific terminology, I thought I’d share with you this fun application.

The Business Speak Generator uses standard sentence structures and combines them with the latest lingo to create sentences that sound genuine. Perfect for when you’re stuck and can’t think of anything to add to that almost-complete report, the Business Speak Generator will come up with something that makes you sound smart, without the need to put a lot of thought into it.

Here’s an example:

In an era of discontinuous change, a need to overcome the limitations operationalizes excessive use of previously established frameworks.

I’m not sure that ‘operationalizes’ is really a word, but it sounds great… and scarily like reading a corporate report.

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?

New words are generally formed out of necessity – the need to communicate a new object or idea.

Whole new languages are much rarer. So it’s interesting that a whole new language has been created for a movie.

A linguistics professor at the University of Southern California has done just that, for James Cameron’s forthcoming film, Avatar. Working from the basis of a few words provided by Cameron, Paul Frommer created the Na’vi language that now consists of over 1,000 words as well as its own rules , structure and sound system.

The language is spoken by aliens from the planet Pandora, although the professor was restrained by the human actors who had to voice his creation. As well as words, Frommer added ejectives, sounds that are made in languages around the world. The finished language apparently sounds to some like an African language, to others like Japanese – no one language is predominant but Cameron hopes it sounds musical, not harsh like the famous invented language Klingon.

The professor hopes Na’vi will catch on and followers will speak the language, much like Star Trek fans do with Klingon. How successful the language becomes I suppose rests on how much people like Avatar. We shall see.

Read the full article on Paul Frommer here.

A confession: I never played with Lego as a child. I believe it was only when my younger brother was born that it even entered our house.

And it seems that I missed out not just on building brightly coloured models, but a whole section of highly creative language.

This fun article explores the diverse nomenclature of Lego pieces:

This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words? (Source: The Morning News)

The table at the end of the article is particularly awesome. What names have you heard for Lego pieces? There could be a rigorous academic study in this – linguists, it’s over to you!

The 150th anniversary of Dr Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof’s – the author of Esperanto – birth is just around the corner, to be marked by an Esperanto congress held in his birthplace of Bialystok, Poland.

I’ve briefly mentioned this conlag in previous posts, and I found an interesting BBC article about Esperanto being spoken in Israel.

Esperanto was designed to “foster harmony and coexistence” and is currently spoken by around one million people worldwide. The language appears to attract people who are both enthusiastic about the language and willing to meet and befriend others who speak it, fostering a community not unlike Zamenhof envisioned, if on a somewhat smaller scale – something that cannot be said for all languages. As an interviewee says:

“Let’s say you go to a little village in the south of France,” says Israeli Yehuda Miklaf. “You ask: Does anyone here speak English? And they say: Henri does. So you go and say to Henri: Hi, I speak English. And Henri says: That’s nice. “Then you ask: Who here speaks Esperanto? They say: Pierre does. So you come up to Pierre and say: Hi, I speak Esperanto. Pierre says: Have you had lunch? It really is like this.”

Read the full article here.

After writing about Klingon for a recent post, I was intruiged by the concept of invented languages – that is, languages that have been created by people from scratch.

Also known as constructed languages, or conlags, there seem to be a number of reasons for people creating their own languages – chief among them being “cool idea!” Others have more utopian views, such as the creator of Esperanto (probably the most famous of conlags) who envisioned his language being spoken as a second language by those all over the world as a means to promote understanding.

I’ve stumbled across a number of interesting conlags whilst searching the internet, including Toki Pona, “a minimal language that focuses on the good things in life” and Interlingua, “an international auxiliary language developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association with financing from the Rockfeller Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation, the Research Corporation and principally the family of the heiress Alice Vanderbilt Morris and her husband and children”, making it probably the most well-funded of the conlags.

Despite the dreams of their creators, however, conlags remain in the minority, as evidenced by another of their names – auxiliary languages. Whilst it’s unlikely that you will meet a fellow Toki Pona speaker on your summer holiday in Ibiza, wouldn’t it be great if you did? After all, the point of language is to enable communication.

So, you’re interested in creating your own language, check out this toolkit.