Category: Languages

Setve Ray has ntoiced an inertetsnig fcat aobut the hmuan mnid. (It’s alayws naet wehn one reliazes tihs!)

GET THE SOTRY!

Okay, this post has nothing at all to do with Star Trek. I just wanted to play off the title of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (arguably the best Star Trek movie thus far; it was the one where the Federation and Klingons had a warming as a sci-fi metaphor for the end of the Cold War).

This post has to do with a discussion I was having with Bill down yonder about Indonesian phonology (i.e., how Indonesians pronounce their words).

The weirdest thing I’ve noticed about Indonesian phonology so far is that K (of all letters) tends to be altered when it is word-final (i.e., at the end of a word). It isn’t simply dropped (like my Gs in “-ing”) but is replaced with a distinct glottal stop, so the word “bapak” (masculine “you”) is pronounced /bapa’/ and the word “tidak” (“no, not”) is pronounced /tida’/.

For folks who aren’t familiar with the term, a glottal stop is when, as you speak, you interrupt the airflow by closing the glottis, or the hole between your vocal chords. You can hear a glottal stop very distinctly when it’s substituted for the Ts in the Cockney pronounciation of “a little bottle” as “a li’le bo’le.”

We use glottal stops all the time in English (even those of us who aren’t Cockneys), we just don’t recognize it because we don’t have a letter for it in our alphabet. (The Arabic alphabet does have a letter for the glottal stop, however. It’s called a hamza.)

You yourself use a glottal stop whenever you pronounce distinctly a word that begins with a vowel. For example, if you aren’t talking and then say the word “apple,” you’ll have a glottal stop before the A because your vocal cords are tensed up.

You also say it in the middle of every time you say “Uh-oh!”

Betcha didn’t know that there’s a consonant in English that we all use but that is completely unnoticed by most of us!

Well, the postman finally decided to deliver the mail that accumulated while I was on vacation. One of the items I was waiting for (in fact, the main item I was waiting for) was my Pimsleur Indonesian CDs.

As y’all may recall, I’ve been wanting to improve my Indonesian skills in anticipation of this year’s Catholic Answers cruise. On the Holland America line, a lot of the staff (particularly the waiters and room stewards) tend to be from Indonesia, and on past cruises I’ve entertained these folks by speaking a little of their native language and asking their help in learning more. This year I wanted to do even more, so I ordered the Pimsleur Indonesian set. Unfortunately, this set is only 10 lessons instead of the usual 30, but at least it’ll give me a good start.

This means I’ll have to put my Japanese studies on hold until I work through the set, but with only ten lessons, that won’t take too long.

I’ve already been using the set, and am quite pleased so far. I already knew parts of the initial conversation that they use at the beginning of every Pimsleur set, which was nice.

I do have one question for Beng or any other readers who speak Indonesian: One of the sounds in the language is a trilled R. Am I right in assuming that these trilled Rs are produced with the tip of the tongue in the front of the mouth (like the Spanish trilled R) or are they produced in the back of the mouth (like the Semitic GH)? Thanks for any help!

Or even the accent of a junior linguist, such as myself.

You may find out more than you want to know.

A reader writes:

Dear Jimmy,

You are driving me crazy!! I know that you are a very literate person and pronounce other languages correctly, so why do you refuse to pronounce your “ing’s” at the end of your words instead of you just saying “in”!?

You’re drivin me crazy!!

The phenomenon you’re referring to is commonly referred to as “g-dropping” or “dropping your g’s”, though this is actually a misnomer. There is no /g/ sound in the suffix “-ing.” What we actually do when making the distinct “-ing” sound is say /in/ except we touch the back of our tongue to our velum (the soft flap of skin at the backs of our mouths) instead of touching the tip of the tongue to the ridge behind our teeth.

The thing is, “g-dropping” is an extremely common feature of the speech of English-speakers. Everybody does it to some degree, and it’s more common in some accents (pronunciation schemes) than others. One of these is the English country aristocracy’s accent. It’s also common the American Southern group of accents, which can be quite distinct: Someone from the Tidewater area of Virginia will sound very different from a Cajun, who will in turn sound different than an Appalachian.

My own accent tends to be Texan (more East Texan than West Texan), with admixtures of Ozark hill accent elements, and I do drop my g’s.

Sorry, that’s just the way I talk.

I take pride in it.

When I’m speaking someone else’s language, I make every effort to adopt their phonology, even if it means I have to practice really hard to learn to make sounds that English doesn’t use (like the Hebrew /r/, which is made at the back of the mouth, or the Arabic /gh/, which is a kind of throaty noise that sounds like a trilled /r/.)

But when I speak my own language, I use my own accent.

People make fun of my accent at their peril. (Remember that when using the comments box, below.)

Here’s a page that has a really interesting section on “g-dropping.”

You may also notice something else I tend to drop other word-final sounds when I talk. For example–like my relatives and co-regionalists–I tend to say kep’ instead of kept and an’ instead of and.

There’s actually a rule for what sounds get dropped, and I recently found out what it is: In simplified terms, a word-final stop tends to get dropped if it is preceded by a consonant with the same voicing.

Lemme ‘splain:

Certain consonants are called “stops,” because they stop the flow of air coming through your mouth. /t/ and /d/ are two examples of stops, and you’ll notice I tend to drop those a lot when they are word-final (i.e., at the end of a word).

They get dropped when immediately before them there is a consonant that has the same voicing they do.

“Voicing” refers to whether you have your vocal cords turned on or off. Some consonants we make with our vocal cords turned off (like /p/ and /t/) and other consonants we make with our vocal cords turned on (like /n/ and /d/). To see what I mean, put your hand on your throat and say those four sounds. You’ll feel vibration with /n/ and /d/ that you won’t feel with /p/ and /t/. That vibration is produced by you turning your vocal cords on as you say the sound.

Thing is, people with my accent will tend to drop a stop consonant at the end of a word if it is preceded by a consonant with the same vocal cord status.

For example, since /p/ and /t/ are both “unvoiced” (i.e., vocal cords off), I will tend to drop /t/ at the end of a word when it is preceded by /p/. That’s why I say kep’ instead of kept.

Simialrly, since /n/ and /d/ are both “voiced” (i.e., vocal cords on), I will tend to drop /d/ at the end of a word when it is preceded by /n/. That’s why I say an’ instead of and.

Similar rules (and even much more complex ones) govern every accent, and people internalize them without even realizing it. It takes the professional activity of linguists to tally up the data and figure out the unconscious rules that govern the pronunciation schemes we call accents.

Ain’t phonology a hoot?

Or even the accent of a junior linguist, such as myself.

You may find out more than you want to know.

A reader writes:

Dear Jimmy,

You are driving me crazy!! I know that you are a very literate person and pronounce other languages correctly, so why do you refuse to pronounce your “ing’s” at the end of your words instead of you just saying “in”!?

You’re drivin me crazy!!

The phenomenon you’re referring to is commonly referred to as “g-dropping” or “dropping your g’s”, though this is actually a misnomer. There is no /g/ sound in the suffix “-ing.” What we actually do when making the distinct “-ing” sound is say /in/ except we touch the back of our tongue to our velum (the soft flap of skin at the backs of our mouths) instead of touching the tip of the tongue to the ridge behind our teeth.

The thing is, “g-dropping” is an extremely common feature of the speech of English-speakers. Everybody does it to some degree, and it’s more common in some accents (pronunciation schemes) than others. One of these is the English country aristocracy’s accent. It’s also common the American Southern group of accents, which can be quite distinct: Someone from the Tidewater area of Virginia will sound very different from a Cajun, who will in turn sound different than an Appalachian.

My own accent tends to be Texan (more East Texan than West Texan), with admixtures of Ozark hill accent elements, and I do drop my g’s.

Sorry, that’s just the way I talk.

I take pride in it.

When I’m speaking someone else’s language, I make every effort to adopt their phonology, even if it means I have to practice really hard to learn to make sounds that English doesn’t use (like the Hebrew /r/, which is made at the back of the mouth, or the Arabic /gh/, which is a kind of throaty noise that sounds like a trilled /r/.)

But when I speak my own language, I use my own accent.

People make fun of my accent at their peril. (Remember that when using the comments box, below.)

Here’s a page that has a really interesting section on “g-dropping.”

You may also notice something else I tend to drop other word-final sounds when I talk. For example–like my relatives and co-regionalists–I tend to say kep’ instead of kept and an’ instead of and.

There’s actually a rule for what sounds get dropped, and I recently found out what it is: In simplified terms, a word-final stop tends to get dropped if it is preceded by a consonant with the same voicing.

Lemme ‘splain:

Certain consonants are called “stops,” because they stop the flow of air coming through your mouth. /t/ and /d/ are two examples of stops, and you’ll notice I tend to drop those a lot when they are word-final (i.e., at the end of a word).

They get dropped when immediately before them there is a consonant that has the same voicing they do.

“Voicing” refers to whether you have your vocal cords turned on or off. Some consonants we make with our vocal cords turned off (like /p/ and /t/) and other consonants we make with our vocal cords turned on (like /n/ and /d/). To see what I mean, put your hand on your throat and say those four sounds. You’ll feel vibration with /n/ and /d/ that you won’t feel with /p/ and /t/. That vibration is produced by you turning your vocal cords on as you say the sound.

Thing is, people with my accent will tend to drop a stop consonant at the end of a word if it is preceded by a consonant with the same vocal cord status.

For example, since /p/ and /t/ are both “unvoiced” (i.e., vocal cords off), I will tend to drop /t/ at the end of a word when it is preceded by /p/. That’s why I say kep’ instead of kept.

Simialrly, since /n/ and /d/ are both “voiced” (i.e., vocal cords on), I will tend to drop /d/ at the end of a word when it is preceded by /n/. That’s why I say an’ instead of and.

Similar rules (and even much more complex ones) govern every accent, and people internalize them without even realizing it. It takes the professional activity of linguists to tally up the data and figure out the unconscious rules that govern the pronunciation schemes we call accents.

Ain’t phonology a hoot?

No, it has nothing to do with technobabble on Star Trek.

Sapir and Whorf were a pair of linguists, and their hypothesis is that language plays a strong role not just in expressing thought but in shaping and controlling thought.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis undoubtedly has an element of truth in it. We do a lot of our thinking in words, and the words that we have at our disposal will make it easier for us to think certain thoughts and harder to think and express others.

Unfortunatley, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems to be too strong as it is commonly interpreted. Thinking is not as strongly determined by language as many suppose. This is clear from a variety of facts, including that we also do a lot of our thinking visually (using images rather than words) and we can make up new words and expressions for things and distinctions we can recognize even though they are not expressible using current language. We’ve also all had the experience of having an insight and then been unable (at least momentarily) to find the words to express it.

The strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its knockoffs (including some that originated before Sapir and Whorf) have also had bad consequences. For example, if you’ve ever read the novel 1984, you know about Newspeak–a revision of the English language designed to eliminate the words and thus the concepts needed to express ideas at variance with the totalitarian system IngSoc (English Socialism). Its purpose was to make politically undesirable concepts literally unthinkable.

Here’s a copy of George Orwell’s essay on The Principles of Newspeak. It’s fascinating reading, particular when–after enunciating the principles of Newspeak–Orwell gives a Newspeak translation of the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. Check it out.

The thing is, though, Newspeak wasn’t simply something Orwell came up with out of whole cloth. 1984 is a cautionary tale warning about the dehumanizing effects of Communism, and Newspeak is based on Soviet language revision as a form of propaganda.

The same impulse is behind the politically correct and gender-revisionist movements in American English: By re-engineering how people are allowed to express themselves, it is thought that the thoughts they think will be re-engineered as well.

Some new research is testing the limits of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This research involves going to cultures whose languages have severely restricted vocabularies in some areas and see if they can conceptualize things that don’t fit their language.

For example, there is the Dani people of Indonesia (ever meet any of them, Beng?) who have only two color terms: black and white. Turns out, though, that they can distinguish other colors, even though they don’t have words for them. I don’t know, but I suspect that they may have circumlocuations for other colors (e.g., “The American dollar is the same color as grass”) even though they don’t have unique words for them.

Another group is the Piraha people of Brazil, who have only three number terms: one, two, and many (which might be more accurately translated “one,” “a few,” and “many”). Turns out the Piraha display the ability to conceptualize more numbers than their counting system has terms for, though with certain numerical tasks they show marked limitations.

There’s an article from The Economist which reports on the Piraha number research. It’s not quite as well done as I’d like (e.g., it concedes more reality to the hypothesis than I think is justifiable), but it’s still fascinating stuff.

There’s also this excellent Wikipedia article which gives some of the other side of the story.

Whorf himself thought that Hopi Indians didn’t have a way to express temporal relationships the way we do and that they perceived things in a kind of non-linear, timeless way (that would radically change their understanding of physics, for example).

Needless to say, this got relativists all excited for a while.

Also needless to say, it’s complete hog slop.

The Hopi do have the concept of linear time and they can express temporal relationships in their language. Whorf simply didn’t gather enough data and pay enough attention to the data he had to realize this. In fact, it’s really embarrassing to look at later studies of this question and note that Whorf’s own data contains counterexamples to his claims about the Hopi conceptualization of time.

Sapir-Whorf has even reared its head in biblical studies. A number of years ago there were a lot of people all worked up about the way the biblical languages allegedly affected the thought of the sacred authors. Hebrew was held to result in “concrete” thought, while Greek was held to result in “abstract” thought, making the former suited to the parochial Old Testament and the latter suited to the cosmopolitan New Testament.

The kindest thing that can be said about these kinds of claims is that they are highly problematic.

Today most biblical scholars (or at least the good ones) will roll their eyes when such claims are introduced. Except for technical vocabulary, all human languages have approximately equal expressive power, and technical vocabulary is the easiest thing to add to a language when you need it. It is extremely difficult to make a whole lot out of the character of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and attribute specific theological thought to the genius of these languages. That doesn’t stop one from hearing a lot of such claims from certain quarters, though.

While we’re on the subject of technical vocabulary, let me mention one particular idea you hear sometime: that Eskimos have a huge number of words for snow that express subtle distinctions lost on us English-speakers.

It’s not true.

Total myth.

Long discredited.

Every professional linguist knows this.

Contradict the claim when you hear other people make it.

It is true, however, that the Ferengi language has 178 words for rain.

Wonder what Lt. Cmdr. Worf would make of that?

This Saturday at Mass they had seven (Count them! Seven!) babies baptized. As part of this process, the usual baptismal questions got asked (e.g., “Do you want this child baptized in the faith of the Church?”) and the seventh dad said something unusual in response . . .

SEVENTH DAD: Yes.

What was unusual about this is that the dad didn’t say what all the other parents said . . .

OTHER PARENTS: I[/We] Do.

Faced with the jarring “yes,” something occurred to me that hadn’t occurred before. I suddenly realized why we never hear this response in liturgical ceremonies. The reason is actually very simple.

Latin doesn’t have a word for “yes.”

Yes, I know. Amazing as it might seem, many languages don’t have a word for “yes.” Latin is one of them. So is Chinese. So is Irish. Other languages, like Spanish (“si”), German (“ja”), Hebrew (“ken”), Arabic (“na’am”), Aramaic (“aeh”), or Japanese (“hai”) do have a word for “yes.” Even the language of the reprobate French has such a word (“oui”).

“Yes” is a word that has a function but not a meaning. Its function (or at least its principal function) is to affirm whatever we just have been asked. The meaning of “yes” depends on what question has just been put to us. For example, if we want to give an affirmative answer to “Do you want to go to the party tonight?” we could say “yes” or “I do.” If we want to give an affirmative answer to “Are you taking calculus this semester?” we could say “yes” or “I am.” The word “yes,” not having its own meaning, thus picks up its meaning from the context in which it is used.

As a result, it’s entirely possible to live without the word. What happens in the languages that don’t have a “yes” is when speakers want to give an affirmative answer, they grab the main verb of the question and use it in a first person form. Thus “Do you?” questions get the answer “I do,” “Are you?” questions get the answer “I am,” and so forth.

That’s the way it is in Latin, so when people are asked in the liturgy whether they want to do certain things or have certain things done (“Do you take this woman?”, “Do you want which child baptized?”) the Latin original of the liturgy has the answer “I do,” and when this gets translated into English, that’s what comes across. Not even ICEL has has the khutspah to translate these with a colloquial “yes.”

This isn’t the only time when this kind of thing happens. A while ago I was reading a quotation from a British author (either Chesterton or Waugh, I forget which) in which he noted that Irishmen tend to say “I do,” “I am,” etc., where Englishmen would say “yes.” The reason, he noted, was that Irish lacks a word for “yes,” and the verb-grabbing affirmative method native to Irish has passed over into the English-language speech of Irishmen. Thinking about Irishmen I’ve known or heard, I realized he was right. They do have a greater tendency to do this in preference to using “yes.”

What I want to know is: What happens at the end of the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine in these languages? In the English version the Blue Meanies are converted from saying “No” to “Yes,” with “Yes” spelled REALLY BIG on the screen.

What do they do with that in Chinese, Irish . . . or Latin?

This Saturday at Mass they had seven (Count them! Seven!) babies baptized. As part of this process, the usual baptismal questions got asked (e.g., “Do you want this child baptized in the faith of the Church?”) and the seventh dad said something unusual in response . . .

SEVENTH DAD: Yes.

What was unusual about this is that the dad didn’t say what all the other parents said . . .

OTHER PARENTS: I[/We] Do.

Faced with the jarring “yes,” something occurred to me that hadn’t occurred before. I suddenly realized why we never hear this response in liturgical ceremonies. The reason is actually very simple.

Latin doesn’t have a word for “yes.”

Yes, I know. Amazing as it might seem, many languages don’t have a word for “yes.” Latin is one of them. So is Chinese. So is Irish. Other languages, like Spanish (“si”), German (“ja”), Hebrew (“ken”), Arabic (“na’am”), Aramaic (“aeh”), or Japanese (“hai”) do have a word for “yes.” Even the language of the reprobate French has such a word (“oui”).

“Yes” is a word that has a function but not a meaning. Its function (or at least its principal function) is to affirm whatever we just have been asked. The meaning of “yes” depends on what question has just been put to us. For example, if we want to give an affirmative answer to “Do you want to go to the party tonight?” we could say “yes” or “I do.” If we want to give an affirmative answer to “Are you taking calculus this semester?” we could say “yes” or “I am.” The word “yes,” not having its own meaning, thus picks up its meaning from the context in which it is used.

As a result, it’s entirely possible to live without the word. What happens in the languages that don’t have a “yes” is when speakers want to give an affirmative answer, they grab the main verb of the question and use it in a first person form. Thus “Do you?” questions get the answer “I do,” “Are you?” questions get the answer “I am,” and so forth.

That’s the way it is in Latin, so when people are asked in the liturgy whether they want to do certain things or have certain things done (“Do you take this woman?”, “Do you want which child baptized?”) the Latin original of the liturgy has the answer “I do,” and when this gets translated into English, that’s what comes across. Not even ICEL has has the khutspah to translate these with a colloquial “yes.”

This isn’t the only time when this kind of thing happens. A while ago I was reading a quotation from a British author (either Chesterton or Waugh, I forget which) in which he noted that Irishmen tend to say “I do,” “I am,” etc., where Englishmen would say “yes.” The reason, he noted, was that Irish lacks a word for “yes,” and the verb-grabbing affirmative method native to Irish has passed over into the English-language speech of Irishmen. Thinking about Irishmen I’ve known or heard, I realized he was right. They do have a greater tendency to do this in preference to using “yes.”

What I want to know is: What happens at the end of the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine in these languages? In the English version the Blue Meanies are converted from saying “No” to “Yes,” with “Yes” spelled REALLY BIG on the screen.

What do they do with that in Chinese, Irish . . . or Latin?

Ray mentioned that after starting Pimsleur Cantonese he quickly had occasion to use it after a Cantonese Mass when a woman started speaking to him in it.

I just had a similar unexpected experience.

One of the few flaws of the Pimsleur sets is that they don’t come with a vocabulary list, and sometimes I’m not 100% sure I’ve heard the word correctly on the CDs. Thus, whenever I’m working a Pimsleur set, I go out and buy a cheap-o phrasebook/dictionary to look up the spellings of words for confirmation. (Dover has a really good line of $4 phrasebook/dictionaries).

Tonight I went to the bookstore to get an inexpensive Japanese phrasebook/dictionary, and I couldn’t resist buying a few additional language books (e.g., a Japanese grammar, an Indonesian phrasebook, a Filipino [Tagalog] phrasebook). When I got to the checkout counter, a big, Hawaiian-shirted, Hawaiian-looking salesperson named Max looked at the books I was buying and asked if I was going to be traveling in Southeast Asia.

I said: “Naw, I’m just learning their languages.”

At which point he asked–in Japanese–if I understood Japanese.

I replied that I understand a little Japanese, and I apparently said it fluidly enough that his eyes got a little big (his surprise probably magnified by my customary cowboy attire) and he said, continuing in Japanese, that I was quite good.

I replied that I was not very good (the customary thing to say when given such a compliment in Japanese), and then added, switching to English, that I’m just starting out. He said, in English, that he was still impressed.

After paying for the books, we switched back to Japanese and I thanked him politely and we bade each other farewell.

So there you have it: proof of the effectiveness of the Pimsleur Method! Just 24 hours after starting to study Japanese and after only two half-hour lessons I successfully held my first unplanned, real-world conversation in the language. Yee-haw!

Given my previous post, you’ve no doubt encountered the word “skosh,” meaning “a little bit.” As in:

PERSON 1: Do you want some ketchup for your hotdog?

PERSON 2: Just a skosh.

You may never have encountered the word in writing, but you likely know it in its spoken form skosh.

What you probably don’t know is its origin: It’s Japanese.

In my previous post, I gave you what you needed to decode several Japanese words. One of them was skoshi, which is a popular contraction of sukoshi, which means “a little bit,” and that is where we get “skosh” (however you spell it).

That takes care of the word skosh. But what about ketchup?

It turns out, ketchup isn’t either an English word or a Japanese word. It’s a Malay word–that is, a word from Malaysia.

In Malaysia they make a sauce for food that is called kechap, and this sauce is remarkably similar to what we in the West call ketchup (not completely similar; it’s somewhat different from ketchup). That’s where the name comes from.

So what do I want on my hotdog (in a low-carb bun)?

Just a skosh of ketchup.