Language Museum Blog

There’s an interesting post on The Economist’s Johnson blog looking into the debate about which language has the biggest vocabulary.

Stephen Fry apparently claimed English has the largest vocabulary by a “long, long, long, long way”. Is he right? Skipping to the end of the post (although it’s definitely worth a read):

…If I had to give a short answer to the question “does English have the biggest vocabulary?,” I’d say “Who cares?” English is a rich and beautiful language, not least because England has been conquered by Vikings and Normans, and has happily been open to foreign influence through its history. We know more of its wonderful rare words because English has been written for over a thousand years, and its many dialects are well described. That’s good enough for me. We shouldn’t need it to have the biggest vocabulary—which can’t be defined in any sensible way—to enjoy it.

I have to agree with the writer – enjoy your native language, and any new ones you’re lucky enough to pick up. You’ll constantly learn and discover new words and phrases, so who cares about the statistics?

With the football World Cup starting tomorrow, it’s time to take a look at some South African slang.

The slang is taken from South Africa’s 11 different languages, which all have constitutionally guaranteed equal status. These languages reflect the diversity of the country, and are:

Afrikaans
English
IsiNdebele
IsiXhosa
IsiZulu
Sepedi
Sesotho
Setswana
SiSwati
Tshivenda
Xitsonga

In addition a number of other languages are spoken including Khoi, Nama and San languages, sign language, and some indigenous creoles and pidgins.

Here are some examples of slang – I particularly like ‘chips! Chips!’:

Babbelas (bub-a-lars). Hangover – usually rather a bad one. From the isiZulu word for hangover isibhabhalazi. “Hello, hello. Great party last night. How’s your head? Are you a bit babbelas?”

Bra (brah) or bru. Nothing to do with underwear at all, but an informal term for “my friend” or “mate”, deriving from “brother”. ‘He’s my bra but that team he supports is rubbish.” Bru stems from the Afrikaans for brother, broer.

Chips! Chips!. Nothing you’ll find in the kebab shop around the corner but an expression of alarm or warning. “Chips! Chips! He’s off-side”

(Source: The Guardian)

A cool new application from Google will soon be able to help you translate from written words.

Google Goggles users can point their phone at a word or phrase they wish to have translated, and then fine-tune their onscreen selection to a smaller area. Using the phone’s camera, the application will recognise the language and give you an option to translate it. This makes the application perfect for globetrotters – whether you need a menu or sign translated, you can do so without the hassle of searching through a guide book or dictionary.

The application can only translate languages based on the Latin alphabet such as English, French, Italian, German and Spanish at the moment, but once the text is captured it can be quickly translated to other languages. Google are apparently confident that other languages, including Chinese, Arabic and Hindi will soon be added to the app.

Whilst the app is free, you’ll need a mobile device running Android 1.6 or higher. I’ll definitely be giving this a try on my trip to Italy next month!

Last November I posted about the internet regulator Icann approving the use of different alphabets, ending the dominance of Latin-based alphabets such as English. The new web addresses were expected in 2010, and at the start of May the new domains became available for use!

Previously web addresses could be written partly in different scripts, but the ‘country code’ (e.g. co.uk) had to be written in a Latin script. The change means that the entire address can be written in, for example, Arabic, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates the first to do so.

Unfortunately, not all computer users will be able to use the new domain names immediately as they may not have the correct fonts installed.

“You may see a mangled string of letters and numbers, and perhaps some percent signs or a couple of “xn--“s mixed into the address bar,” said Mr Davies. “Or it may not work at all.”…

“Computers never come with the complete set of fonts that will allow it to show every possible IDN [internationalised domain names] in the world.

“Often this is fixed by downloading additional language packs for the missing languages, or specifically finding and installing fonts that support the wanted languages.” (Source: BBC News)

The country codes:
Egypt: مصر (Egypt)
Saudi Arabia: السعودية (AlSaudiah)
United Arab Emirates: امارات (Emarat)

Source: Icann

If you’ve ever made up your own word and wished people all over the world would start saying it, perhaps this article will be of use.

It tracks the rise of ‘yaka-wow’, a mis-transcription of “yuck and wow” by a writer for the Times, a British newspaper. Apparently, within a day the word had gone viral and now has 95,000 hits on Google. Originating in an interview with the neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield, yaka-wow has spawned a Twitter stream and Facebook page. Why do people love the word so much?

“The main reason we’ve all been saying yaka-wow is simply because it is a cool word. It should be used more. Try saying it yourself out loud, yaka-wow, yaka-wow. Doesn’t it just make you mouth happy,” posted Alice Bell, a science communication lecturer at Imperial College London. (Source: The Times)

Honestly, I’m wondering how come so many people read an interview with a neuroscientist in the first place?

Visiting my grandparents recently, I was struck by a phrase my grandmother said frequently: “go tell that to your Dutch uncle”.

I’d never heard this before, and neither my grandfather or mother use the phrase or could tell me where it was from. A quick search doesn’t reveal anything of its origins. My grandmother used it jokingly when she thought someone was saying something fanciful or that she didn’t believe. I got the impression that the “Dutch uncle” was someone fictional, who would believe the stories you would tell.

A “Dutch uncle” is referenced here as “a term for a person who issues frank, harsh, and severe comments and criticism to educate, encourage, or admonish someone”, whereas here it is “a person who bluntly and sternly lectures or scolds someone, often with benevolent intent”. Perhaps my grandmother was using it more in the sense that the Dutch uncle was someone who would punish the story-teller for their lies.

My grandmother is in her eighties and from the West Country in England. Perhaps this is a regional idiom?

Can anyone shed any light on this strange phrase?

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’!

Most of what we hear and see about Afghanistan is war-related. The Taliban, the troops, roadside bombs, insurgents.

So it’s heartening to hear about someone who is trying to make a difference by connecting with Afghan culture.

Corporal “Taff” Edwards, a Welsh soldier, has learned to speak Dari, one of the languages spoken in Afghanistan, so he can help train men serving in their National Army.

A Welsh and English speaker, Edwards decided to start learning Dari as he wanted to learn a useful skill that would take him to the war.

Cpl Edwards underwent intensive training to prepare him for the demands of being a linguist in a war zone, and he said it was difficult to pick up.

“The training involved a lot of classroom time. All the teachers were trying their utmost but it is a very difficult language to learn,” he added.

“One of the reasons is that nothing is produced in the language – there is no Dari dictionary, there is no literature. These guys have been fighting for so long, producing books and things hasn’t been high on their list of priorities.

“So all the resources that we try and find all come from Iran as Parsi is very similar, but it is not exactly the same.”

Cpl Edwards now hopes to study Pashto. (Source: BBC)

Pashto and Dari are the two official languages of Afghanistan. Pashto was declared the National Language but Dari is probably more widely used, according to a UN estimate. There are a number of minority languages also spoken, including Nuristani and Pashai, and many Afghanis are bilingual.

Let’s hope people like Cpl Edwards can help connect with Afghan people and help them find peace and stability so they can write down their languages and encourage people to visit this incredible country.

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.

I take it for granted that most of the content I want to view on the web will be in my native language, English, and I merely have to type the website’s name into my browser to navigate to the site.

For speakers of languages with non-Latin based writing systems (including Arabic, Cyrillic and Chinese), this is not the case. To navigate to websites, they need to type in characters such as the ones you see here. And for those unfamiliar with Latin letters, this proves a hindrance to accessing content.

Last month, however, the internet regulator Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the use of different alphabets, ending the dominance of Latin alphabets such as English.

It’s been hailed as a big move which can increase accessibility to the web, especially among those unfamiliar with Latin letters:

The impact will vary by location, with more remote countries seeing the biggest expansion. Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president, called the step “a historic move toward the internationalisation of the internet … We just made the internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.” (Source: FT.com)

With the first official international web addresses expected in 2010, you could perhaps be logging on to 语言-博物院.com soon!