I've probably said before, but the reason I like learning languages is because of the look on people's faces when I speak their language to them.
What I didn't realise was how far back this went.
My dad was a teacher at my high school, and I knew the main janitor before I knew most of the teachers. Lucien, the janny, was from France, and by a couple of years into high school I would say "Bonjour" to him - I couldn't say much else, but it was enough.
When my dad started talking about him this Christmas, the main memory in my head was just a smile - the delight of being spoken to in his own language, even for a moment. It was the same sensation that I've seen so many times since, and I started to wonder why it had taken me so long to start learning languages properly, and then I realised that I've stopped learning again.
I remember that all through my late teens and early twenties, I was keen on the idea of learning languages, and I picked up a couple of books here and there but never got anywhere. I only started to get the proper motivation back when I started speaking broken high-school Italian to a young woman serving in a local sandwich shop. Again I tried picking up the old books, and again I put them down.
As it turns out, restarting a half-forgotten language was really hard - if you attempt to read notes on things you already sort of know, you switch off, so that's when I switched to new languages: Spanish and then Scottish Gaelic. After that, returning to tidy up my French and Italian was a lot easier.
But right now, I'm not really learning, or relearning, or even consolidating anything. Why not? Maybe it's because I can already give lots of people the satisfaction of hearing their own language. More likely, though, it's just because I'm not meeting enough non-English-speaking people. That would be understandable, I suppose. Last summer I moved to an island off the north-west coast of Scotland, where I'm studying full-time, and there aren't many foreigners in the area at all.
What there is, though, is a lot of native speakers of Gaelic, and I just keep falling back to English.
Am I just being lazy? Or is my brain overworked? Or am I just being antisocial?
Probably a bit of each. I really want to get back on track this year, and start learning something new. To that end, I'm starting to plan my summer holidays now -- an epic cycle journey across part of Europe. I need to take in at least one area which requires a new language, and at the moment, I think Germany fits the bill. I've already got a solid basis to build on, so I just need to build fluency and vocab and see where I can get to.
Even just thinking about it, I can start to feel some of the anticipation building.
19 August 2015
The folly of trying to pronounce a place "like the natives do"
Well intentioned people often insist on trying to pronounce placenames in the "authentic" native form, even when there's a well-known variation in their own language.
At times, that change is remarkably successful, such as the change of "Peking" to "Beijing". There is an argument that this is futile, however, as the Chinese phonemes are rarely that close to English ones, and the tones of the Chinese are completely absent.
About a fortnight ago, the TV was marking the 70th anniversary of the brutal slaughter of the people of Hiroshima.
Now, most of us say "hiROshima", but a few people say "HEEroSHEEma". I thought about it a bit, and I figured that the first one is probably right, as the second one sounds like two words. I then looked up on the internet, and felt a bit sheepish when I read that the name means "wide island" in Japanese. Two words? Oh. But then I brought up Forvo and nope -- it's pronounced as one word.
So why do we end up with two forms in English?
It's all about perception. There are multiple things that you might detect. First up, there's word stress. In Japanese, Hiroshima is stressed on the second syllable, which is how I pronounce it in English. However, a knock-on effect of English stress is that adjacent syllables are weakened, so the Is are both I-schwa in English. However, in Japanese, vowels are generally clear, and vowel reduction is a matter of length, not vowel quality.
When the English speaker's ear hears Hiroshima, it either notes the correct stress, and fails to perceive the "EE" sounds, or it hears the EE sounds and fails to perceive the correct stress.
Which of these is further from the original? From an English speaker's perspective, it's impossible to say -- you need to make reference to the original language. I do not know for sure, but as Japanese has far fewer vowels than English, I would imagine hiROshima is readily recognised for the intended meaning, and that HEEroSHEEma would be pretty hard to process.
So it's a bit of a fool's errand trying to be "authentic", in my book.
At times, that change is remarkably successful, such as the change of "Peking" to "Beijing". There is an argument that this is futile, however, as the Chinese phonemes are rarely that close to English ones, and the tones of the Chinese are completely absent.
About a fortnight ago, the TV was marking the 70th anniversary of the brutal slaughter of the people of Hiroshima.
Now, most of us say "hiROshima", but a few people say "HEEroSHEEma". I thought about it a bit, and I figured that the first one is probably right, as the second one sounds like two words. I then looked up on the internet, and felt a bit sheepish when I read that the name means "wide island" in Japanese. Two words? Oh. But then I brought up Forvo and nope -- it's pronounced as one word.
So why do we end up with two forms in English?
It's all about perception. There are multiple things that you might detect. First up, there's word stress. In Japanese, Hiroshima is stressed on the second syllable, which is how I pronounce it in English. However, a knock-on effect of English stress is that adjacent syllables are weakened, so the Is are both I-schwa in English. However, in Japanese, vowels are generally clear, and vowel reduction is a matter of length, not vowel quality.
When the English speaker's ear hears Hiroshima, it either notes the correct stress, and fails to perceive the "EE" sounds, or it hears the EE sounds and fails to perceive the correct stress.
Which of these is further from the original? From an English speaker's perspective, it's impossible to say -- you need to make reference to the original language. I do not know for sure, but as Japanese has far fewer vowels than English, I would imagine hiROshima is readily recognised for the intended meaning, and that HEEroSHEEma would be pretty hard to process.
So it's a bit of a fool's errand trying to be "authentic", in my book.
30 July 2015
Language following
Last week, I was at a party in Edinburgh to mark Peruvian independence day. As I was leaving, I heard someone refusing a drink because "tengo que manejar" -- "I have to drive".
Funnily enough, I've had a couple of discussions recently about that very word "drive". It all started with a discussion on a Welsh-language Facebook group. The traditional word presented there was gyrru, whereas people often tend to use the term dreifio, presented there as an Anglicism. Strangely enough, the very next day, I ran into an old university classmate of mine, Carwyn, who was up from Wales to visit a conference in Edinburgh. When I asked him which word he would use to say "drive", his answer was "probably the wrong one", which I immediately took to mean dreifio.
I explained to him why I felt that dreifio was less of an Anglicism than gyrru.
How so?
This is a phenomenon that I call "dictionary following", for wont of a better term. (If there's a widely-accepted alternative name, please do let me know in the comments.) It's a peculiar form of language change that minority languages seem particularly prone to undergoing, where a word-form in one language gets locked to the changing meaning of a single equivalent in another language.
Edit: An Cionnfhaolach over at IrishLanguageForum.com tells me that this transferrence of all meanings for a word in one language to a similar word in another is called a "semantic loan".
In this case, the dictionary word gyrru is a word that means to spur animals onwards -- it's "drive" as in "driving cattle": what drovers do. The modern sense of "drive" comes via the idea of forcing carthorses forward, and thus the English word has broadened.
Across Europe, the equivalent word often evolved analogously. The French and Italian equivalent term is actually to "conduct" a car, and in Spanish, you either "conduct" or "handle" your car -- which is where manejar comes into the equation (manejar = manage = handle; mano = hand).
It's too easy to focus on the grammatical and lexical items as being the characteristics of a language, but if that is not underpinned by idiomatic usage and unique linguistic metaphors, then it doesn't feel like a complete language; and for me at least, much of the joy of learning and speaking that language is lost.
So for me, I'm happier to adopt the English "drive" morpheme into languages like Gaelic and Welsh than to adopt the English metaphor with a native room and claim that this is somehow "purer".
Funnily enough, I've had a couple of discussions recently about that very word "drive". It all started with a discussion on a Welsh-language Facebook group. The traditional word presented there was gyrru, whereas people often tend to use the term dreifio, presented there as an Anglicism. Strangely enough, the very next day, I ran into an old university classmate of mine, Carwyn, who was up from Wales to visit a conference in Edinburgh. When I asked him which word he would use to say "drive", his answer was "probably the wrong one", which I immediately took to mean dreifio.
I explained to him why I felt that dreifio was less of an Anglicism than gyrru.
How so?
This is a phenomenon that I call "dictionary following", for wont of a better term. (If there's a widely-accepted alternative name, please do let me know in the comments.) It's a peculiar form of language change that minority languages seem particularly prone to undergoing, where a word-form in one language gets locked to the changing meaning of a single equivalent in another language.
Edit: An Cionnfhaolach over at IrishLanguageForum.com tells me that this transferrence of all meanings for a word in one language to a similar word in another is called a "semantic loan".
In this case, the dictionary word gyrru is a word that means to spur animals onwards -- it's "drive" as in "driving cattle": what drovers do. The modern sense of "drive" comes via the idea of forcing carthorses forward, and thus the English word has broadened.
Across Europe, the equivalent word often evolved analogously. The French and Italian equivalent term is actually to "conduct" a car, and in Spanish, you either "conduct" or "handle" your car -- which is where manejar comes into the equation (manejar = manage = handle; mano = hand).
It's too easy to focus on the grammatical and lexical items as being the characteristics of a language, but if that is not underpinned by idiomatic usage and unique linguistic metaphors, then it doesn't feel like a complete language; and for me at least, much of the joy of learning and speaking that language is lost.
So for me, I'm happier to adopt the English "drive" morpheme into languages like Gaelic and Welsh than to adopt the English metaphor with a native room and claim that this is somehow "purer".
20 July 2015
Undefined article error
No, Blogger isn't on the blink, that's the intended title of the article.
The error in question is the continued use of classical terminology for grammatical articles: specifically the terms definite article and indefinite article. For over a decade, I tried to reconcile the grammatical feature with the common sense of the words "definite" and "indefinite" -- i.e. certain and uncertain -- but it made no sense at all.
It wasn't until I started discussing grammar in foreign languages that I clicked what I'd been missing all along -- the terms we use are basically a mistranslation of classical terminology.
The English word definite has diverged drastically from its etymological roots, but this is not true in the Romance languages on mainland Europe. When the French say défini or the Spanish say definido, what they are actually saying is defined.
That's right, the definite article is really the defined article, which means the indefinite article must be the undefined article. From that perspective, everything seems to make much more sense.
Plenty of languages survive quite well without any articles -- they are essentially redundant as even in English, in a lot of circumstances you can drop them without losing any information in the sentence.
What I'd never got my head round was that the articles don't add any information to the sentence -- they simply act as a sort of "signpost" to information that already exists elsewhere. But most importantly, it refers to the listener's frame of reference and not the speakers.
What the definite article flags up is essentially "you know which one I mean", and the indefinite article says "you don't know which one I mean". If I say "You should go home -- the wife'll be waiting," context says I'm talking about your wife, but if I say "I should go home -- the wife'll be waiting," then you know that I'm talking about my wife. And if I say "a friend of mine is coming to visit," I'm telling you that I don't expect you to know which one I'm talking about. But in both cases, if you delete the articles, I would still make the assumption of yours/mine or that I'm not sure in the second.
Now I know that isn't very clear, but to be honest, I still haven't got this that clear in my own head.
This "signposting" idea is pretty abstract, so describing it is pretty difficult. But to be fair, it's no more abstract than the phenomenon it's describing, and the more I think about articles, the more weird and abstract they look to me. For something at first class so basic, they are incredibly complex.
I suppose I'll be working for years trying to work out the best way to teach, discuss and describe them, but for now I'll satisfy myself with using the terms defined and undefined in place of definite and indefinite, because at the very least we'll be one step closer to a meaningful definition.
The error in question is the continued use of classical terminology for grammatical articles: specifically the terms definite article and indefinite article. For over a decade, I tried to reconcile the grammatical feature with the common sense of the words "definite" and "indefinite" -- i.e. certain and uncertain -- but it made no sense at all.
It wasn't until I started discussing grammar in foreign languages that I clicked what I'd been missing all along -- the terms we use are basically a mistranslation of classical terminology.
The English word definite has diverged drastically from its etymological roots, but this is not true in the Romance languages on mainland Europe. When the French say défini or the Spanish say definido, what they are actually saying is defined.
That's right, the definite article is really the defined article, which means the indefinite article must be the undefined article. From that perspective, everything seems to make much more sense.
Plenty of languages survive quite well without any articles -- they are essentially redundant as even in English, in a lot of circumstances you can drop them without losing any information in the sentence.
What I'd never got my head round was that the articles don't add any information to the sentence -- they simply act as a sort of "signpost" to information that already exists elsewhere. But most importantly, it refers to the listener's frame of reference and not the speakers.
What the definite article flags up is essentially "you know which one I mean", and the indefinite article says "you don't know which one I mean". If I say "You should go home -- the wife'll be waiting," context says I'm talking about your wife, but if I say "I should go home -- the wife'll be waiting," then you know that I'm talking about my wife. And if I say "a friend of mine is coming to visit," I'm telling you that I don't expect you to know which one I'm talking about. But in both cases, if you delete the articles, I would still make the assumption of yours/mine or that I'm not sure in the second.
Now I know that isn't very clear, but to be honest, I still haven't got this that clear in my own head.
This "signposting" idea is pretty abstract, so describing it is pretty difficult. But to be fair, it's no more abstract than the phenomenon it's describing, and the more I think about articles, the more weird and abstract they look to me. For something at first class so basic, they are incredibly complex.
I suppose I'll be working for years trying to work out the best way to teach, discuss and describe them, but for now I'll satisfy myself with using the terms defined and undefined in place of definite and indefinite, because at the very least we'll be one step closer to a meaningful definition.
12 April 2015
I would of written this headline properly, but...
I wanted to revisit an old theme today. A lot of people still complain about people writing would of instead of would have. There's a saying in linguistics: there's no such thing as a common error (for native speakers) because standard language is (or should be) a statistical norm of what people actually say or write, and a legitimate standard is one that accepts all common variations (hence modern English spellcheckers accepting both "all right" and "alright" -- and as if just to cause maximum embarassment, the Firefox spellchecker doesn't like "alright"... or "spellchecker").
If people write "would of", it's because in their internal model of the English language, they do not see the verb "to have" in there at all. I was looking back at an earlier blog post on this topic, and I saw that I used the phrase "the "error" only occurs when have is used as a second auxiliary". Spot the mistake.
Standard Modern English clauses can only ever have one auxiliary -- there is no "I will can..." or "I would can...", you either have to switch to a copular construction ("I will be able to...") or inflect, eg can to could: I could tell him (if you want).
The have of the perfect aspect in English has traditionally been slightly ambiguous as to whether it's an auxiliary or not. Placement of adverbs gives us an indication of what's going on: "I always have time for it" is fine where "*I have always time for it" feels quite odd and stilted, whereas perfect have is perfectly OK with having such adverbs after it, which makes it look like an auxiliary: "I have always been lucky".
Negatives (and questions) take us further: "I don't have a car" is far more natural to many English speakers than "I haven't a car", but "*I don't have been to Russia" is clearly wrong, and "I haven't been to Russia" is the only possible correction.
So, let's say that the history of the perfect-aspect-have has been one of becoming more and more like the auxiliary verbs. English has, over time, lost the ability to have more than one auxiliary verb in a clause. Those two changes, taken in parallel, means the construction "would have" is in the process of becoming impossible in English.
What do we have instead? Well, like I said before, I see it as the formation of a new suffix, one that is applied to auxiliary verbs to indicate perfect aspect.
I would argue that we already have one established, recognised auxiliary suffix in English: -ould. This first appeared as "would" (or rather "wolde"), the past form (both indicative and subjunctive of "willan" (will). Notice that there are two changes here -- firstly the grammatical vowel change i->o (->ou), and the suffixing of past D. The same changes from first principles could describe shall giving us should, even though the exact vowel change is different, but cannot account for can giving us could, as the N->L change isn't typical in English. Furthermore, it is not a commonly observed pattern for people to spell could would and should differently. Therefore -ould must be a single morpheme common to all three words.
If this is the case, then adding another suffix to that seems perfectly sensible, and we've got coulda, woulda, shoulda; or could've, would've, should've; or coodov, woodov, shoodov or however you want to write it.
Of course, this same perfective suffix can be applied to certain auxiliaries without the -ould suffix:
The case for writing "have" is purely etymological, it doesn't fit the evidence from "mistakes", and it presents a rather more complex model of the language than the alternative I present. It's a complexity that is possible, but I believe only insofar as it is as a transitional form between two stable conditions. I think we should let the language take that final evolutionary step to find a stable state.
If people write "would of", it's because in their internal model of the English language, they do not see the verb "to have" in there at all. I was looking back at an earlier blog post on this topic, and I saw that I used the phrase "the "error" only occurs when have is used as a second auxiliary". Spot the mistake.
Standard Modern English clauses can only ever have one auxiliary -- there is no "I will can..." or "I would can...", you either have to switch to a copular construction ("I will be able to...") or inflect, eg can to could: I could tell him (if you want).
The have of the perfect aspect in English has traditionally been slightly ambiguous as to whether it's an auxiliary or not. Placement of adverbs gives us an indication of what's going on: "I always have time for it" is fine where "*
Negatives (and questions) take us further: "I don't have a car" is far more natural to many English speakers than "I haven't a car", but "*
So, let's say that the history of the perfect-aspect-have has been one of becoming more and more like the auxiliary verbs. English has, over time, lost the ability to have more than one auxiliary verb in a clause. Those two changes, taken in parallel, means the construction "would have" is in the process of becoming impossible in English.
What do we have instead? Well, like I said before, I see it as the formation of a new suffix, one that is applied to auxiliary verbs to indicate perfect aspect.
I would argue that we already have one established, recognised auxiliary suffix in English: -ould. This first appeared as "would" (or rather "wolde"), the past form (both indicative and subjunctive of "willan" (will). Notice that there are two changes here -- firstly the grammatical vowel change i->o (->ou), and the suffixing of past D. The same changes from first principles could describe shall giving us should, even though the exact vowel change is different, but cannot account for can giving us could, as the N->L change isn't typical in English. Furthermore, it is not a commonly observed pattern for people to spell could would and should differently. Therefore -ould must be a single morpheme common to all three words.
If this is the case, then adding another suffix to that seems perfectly sensible, and we've got coulda, woulda, shoulda; or could've, would've, should've; or coodov, woodov, shoodov or however you want to write it.
Of course, this same perfective suffix can be applied to certain auxiliaries without the -ould suffix:
- must: that must've been him etc.
- will: he'll've been told by now
The case for writing "have" is purely etymological, it doesn't fit the evidence from "mistakes", and it presents a rather more complex model of the language than the alternative I present. It's a complexity that is possible, but I believe only insofar as it is as a transitional form between two stable conditions. I think we should let the language take that final evolutionary step to find a stable state.
02 April 2015
The UK's privatisation agenda hits immigrants and language students
I normally try not to put too much politics into a language blog, but this time it definitely deserves it. I have never been a fan of privatising public infrastructure, as it typically shifts the burden of cost to those who can least afford it. This case is no exception.
I discovered through a news story shared on Facebook this morning that the UK's Home Office is changing the English language prerequisites for visas. Previously, the SQA (the public sector exam board for Scotland) had an ESOL qualification that was recognised by the Home Office, but this will be struck off the list, which will now consist only of two exams -- the big ones, the expensive ones: Cambridge and Trinity.
The site reporting it, having nationalist inclinations, chose to focus on the angle that Westminster was trying to undermine Scotland's education sector. As a left-leaning site, though, they failed to spot the bigger picture: this is about privatisation.
The current UK government is determined to dismantle whatever public infrastructure that remains to us, and leave the populace at the mercy of marketplace economics. (Which does make this a Westminster vs Holyrood issue, to an extent, as the Scottish Government is far less keen on privatisation.)
But anyone involved in the language teaching sector will know roughly how expensive the private sector exams are, and anyone teaching English in the UK will have seen firsthand how little their students can afford these tests.
Forcing more immigrants into expensive exams (which many criticise for not being a good measure of language ability anyway) is just making life harder for some of the most vulnerable members of our society, because make no mistake -- an immigrant is a member of our society, regardless of what the majority of politicians and newspapers tell us.
I discovered through a news story shared on Facebook this morning that the UK's Home Office is changing the English language prerequisites for visas. Previously, the SQA (the public sector exam board for Scotland) had an ESOL qualification that was recognised by the Home Office, but this will be struck off the list, which will now consist only of two exams -- the big ones, the expensive ones: Cambridge and Trinity.
The site reporting it, having nationalist inclinations, chose to focus on the angle that Westminster was trying to undermine Scotland's education sector. As a left-leaning site, though, they failed to spot the bigger picture: this is about privatisation.
The current UK government is determined to dismantle whatever public infrastructure that remains to us, and leave the populace at the mercy of marketplace economics. (Which does make this a Westminster vs Holyrood issue, to an extent, as the Scottish Government is far less keen on privatisation.)
But anyone involved in the language teaching sector will know roughly how expensive the private sector exams are, and anyone teaching English in the UK will have seen firsthand how little their students can afford these tests.
Forcing more immigrants into expensive exams (which many criticise for not being a good measure of language ability anyway) is just making life harder for some of the most vulnerable members of our society, because make no mistake -- an immigrant is a member of our society, regardless of what the majority of politicians and newspapers tell us.
23 February 2015
Well-rounded learning...?
I just stumbled across a post from last year on the Guardian's language learning blog. It's by a guy trying to learn Spanish using only Duolingo, and I thought his feedback was quite interesting.
The author Alan Haburchak, found himself struggling to internalise the grammar of Spanish as there is no conscious presentation of verb tables. I found similar problems using the course for German -- not with the verbs (I'd done most of the verb system via the Michel Thomas course already), but with the articles. The declension of the articles in German is more complex than verb conjugation, because there are so many sets of overlaps. There is no marking for gender for plural, but gender is marked in singular. The feminine declension matches the plural declension in 3 out of 4 cases. Masculine and neuter declensions match in genitive and dative, but not nominative and accusative... and the neuter nominative and accusative are the same as each other, but not the masculine ones. I'll stop now because I've probably lost you, and that's only half of it. And when you've finished with the definite articles, there's the indefinite ones too, and the adjective endings which are more complicated again. Certain patterns are shared, certain are distinct.
Trying to learn such a complex and arbitrary pattern from examples is, I think, pretty much impossible. So much information is obscured (not least of all the gender of the noun) that you cannot generalise. The end result is an ability to read fairly comfortably, but not to reproduce.
Since I started looking at tables myself, I've found the German course much easier, but still not trivial. Alan's doubt was about whether this was a general problem with "naturalistic" learning, or just his own habits formed through school language classes. I could (and maybe should) have the same doubt, but I just cannot fathom how anyone would intuit these patterns without some conscious knowledge to help them sort through the tangle.
The author Alan Haburchak, found himself struggling to internalise the grammar of Spanish as there is no conscious presentation of verb tables. I found similar problems using the course for German -- not with the verbs (I'd done most of the verb system via the Michel Thomas course already), but with the articles. The declension of the articles in German is more complex than verb conjugation, because there are so many sets of overlaps. There is no marking for gender for plural, but gender is marked in singular. The feminine declension matches the plural declension in 3 out of 4 cases. Masculine and neuter declensions match in genitive and dative, but not nominative and accusative... and the neuter nominative and accusative are the same as each other, but not the masculine ones. I'll stop now because I've probably lost you, and that's only half of it. And when you've finished with the definite articles, there's the indefinite ones too, and the adjective endings which are more complicated again. Certain patterns are shared, certain are distinct.
Trying to learn such a complex and arbitrary pattern from examples is, I think, pretty much impossible. So much information is obscured (not least of all the gender of the noun) that you cannot generalise. The end result is an ability to read fairly comfortably, but not to reproduce.
Since I started looking at tables myself, I've found the German course much easier, but still not trivial. Alan's doubt was about whether this was a general problem with "naturalistic" learning, or just his own habits formed through school language classes. I could (and maybe should) have the same doubt, but I just cannot fathom how anyone would intuit these patterns without some conscious knowledge to help them sort through the tangle.
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