Category: Languages

Nihonggo Ga Skoshi Wakarimas!

Was in the bookstore today and couldn’t resist picking up a starter pack for Pimsleur Japanese. Had been thinking about getting one since I’ve been going to the Mitsuwa Market lately to get Japanese low-carb noodles and have had a need to ask basic questions of salespeople who aren’t always totally fluent in English.

As soon as I got back to my pickup, I eagerly popped the first lesson into my CD player and heard the following conversation (NOTE: all spellings are phoenetic, and there are other ways to say the same things):

MAN: Sumima-sen, Aygo ga wakarimas ka?

WOMAN: Iyeh, wakarimas-sen. Nihonggo ga wakarimas ka?

MAN: Hai, skoshi wakarimas.

WOMAN: Anata wa Amerikajin dess ka?

MAN: Hai, watashi wa Amerikajin dess.

The CD then started to teach me what I needed to understand this conversation, starting with sumima-sen. I knew immediately what this would mean: “Excuse me.” That’s the first thing you get taught in every Pimsleur langauge course, for a very good reason: You’ll need it a lot!–both to start conversations with people and to apologize for the mistakes that you (as a beginner) will make at first.

You keep learning for the next twenty or so minutes, and then they play the conversation that you heard at the beginning over again. Suddenly, you realize that you understand everything being said in the conversation. Translated, it’s:

MAN: Excuse me, do you understand English?

WOMAN: No, I don’t understand it. Do you understand Japanese?

MAN: Yes, I understand a little.

WOMAN: Are you an American?

MAN: Yes, I am an American.

Of course, I’d know what it says even without the lesson. Every Pimsleur set starts with the same conversation adapated to whatever language you’re learning. So far, I’ve been through this same conversation in (modern) Hebrew, (modern) Greek, (Syrian) Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Spanish, German, and maybe one or two others. Whenever I start a new Pimsleur course, I have a nostalgic “I’m home” and “Here we go again” feeling because of the initial conversation.

It’s a handy little conversation to know. The things that get said are things that you’ll need to know how to say and understand in the new language.

The genius of Pimsleur language courses is that they tell you want you most need to know first and start you directly on how to speak conversationally, without memorizing lots of grammar and paradigms first. How many other language programs do you know that will have you understanding complete, if short, conversations like this one in less than thirty minutes?

I’m looking forward to trying my hand at Pimsleur Japanese. Every language has its own genius, and Japanese will be interesting. Unlike some Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Vietnamese), it does not have an extensive tonal system. The main tone we have in English is raising our voice at the end of a sentence to form a question, but in Chinese virtually every word has a normal, high, rising, falling, or dipsy-doodle tone that functions basically like an extra consonant in the word and completely changes its meaning. It’s part of what gives Chinese English-speakers their musical accent, but it’s so hard for English-speakers to master that when I first started studying Mandarin I had trouble distinguishing individual words out of the stream of sound and tone. Fortunately, Japanese is like English in that it rarely uses tones. That will make it easier.

Another thing that will make it easier is that Japanese (like Chinese) is not a heavily inflected language. That means that the words don’t change their forms as often as in some languages (like Latin, which has a bugbear system of inflection for nouns, or Arabic, which has a bugbear system of inflection for verbs). Japanese is a low-inflection language so, for example, it doesn’t normally distinguish singular nouns from plural nouns. For example, the word jidosha can mean either “car” or “cars.” Thus there are no plural endings to memorize.

Also–as in Latin–there are no articles (a, an, the) to memorize, so jidosha can mean “car,” “a car,” “the car,” “cars,” “some cars,” “the cars.”

The bugbear for Japanese will be its word order. Japanese is what linguists call a “head-last” language, where as English is a “head-first” language. This concept is a little hard to explain (it has to do with where you put the most grammatically important part of a phrase), but the upshot is that the word order in Japanese often will be backwards of what English word order will be. Other times, it will seem pretty scrambled from an English perspective.

But that’s part of the fun! I’m trying, over the course of time, to try learning one of every major kind of language. Studying Mandarin, for example, helped give me some exposure to a tonal language. Studying Japanese will help give me some exposure to a head-last language. Ultimately, I want to get around to aggultinating languages like Swahili or some of the American Indian languages, which have monster huge verbs that can encode all of the information of a whole sentence in just the verb. (Klingon is another agglutinating language.)

Isn’t it cool how God designed the human faculty for language?

Fortunately, in Pimsleur, you don’t need to know or learn all the grammar I just described. You get the grammar you need by osmosis from conversation–the same way you did when you learned English as a baby (or whatever you learned as a baby)–without having to study a grammar book.

In the end, it’s pretty simple. In fact, I bet that you can use just the information from the Japanese and English conversations above to figure out what the title of the post means. Here’s a clue in case you need more help (the stuff in parentheses represent what the untranslatable particles ga, ka, and wa mean):

MAN: Excuse me, English (<--subject) understand (question)?

WOMAN: No, understand not. Japanese (<--subject) understand (question)?

MAN: Yes, a little understand.

WOMAN: You (predicate–>) American are (question)?

MAN: Yes, I (predicate–>) American am.

Armed with this knowledge, can you translate the title of this post?

IRONIC NOTE: After I left the bookstore, I discovered that the main kind of Japanese low-carb noodles are now available at the ordinary Vons grocery store across the street from me. Sheesh! Well, it won’t dampen my interest in Japanese. Languages are cool, and there’s still all those other Japanese low-carb products to get at Mitsuwa.

“And”?

In one of the comments boxes, a reader writes:

Jimmy, I NEED to hijacked this entry because you are the only competent people on this matter as far as I know. So please bear with me

Douay Rheims
Zech 9:9
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion, shout for joy, O daughter of Jerusalem: BEHOLD THY KING will come to thee, the just and saviour: he is poor, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

Is there an “and” in the hebrew text?

I know that Zec is not talking about two different Ass. It’s a Hebrew literary style. However in the RSV, the “and” is gone. I’m thinking that they took it off to compensate for the Hebrew literary style understanding (to make the reader understand that there’s no two animals). But my guess is that there’s actually an “and” in the Hebrew.

Help!

Happy to oblige. Sorry I couldn’t do so sooner, but while I was on vacation I didn’t have a copy of the Hebrew text handy.

The answer to your question is that there is an “and” at this point in the Hebrew text of this verse.

This verse is often commented upon apologetically since some see here a difficulty regarding what Jesus rode during the triumphal entry. (As with all alleged contradictions in the Bible, however, this one has a good solution.) Let me know if you need more info on that.

BTW, when you have an off-topic question there’s no need to commandeer a comments box to get the message to me. Just use the e-mail address that I have on the site, and I’ll try to oblige. 🙂

"And"?

In one of the comments boxes, a reader writes:

Jimmy, I NEED to hijacked this entry because you are the only competent people on this matter as far as I know. So please bear with me

Douay Rheims

Zech 9:9

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion, shout for joy, O daughter of Jerusalem: BEHOLD THY KING will come to thee, the just and saviour: he is poor, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

Is there an “and” in the hebrew text?

I know that Zec is not talking about two different Ass. It’s a Hebrew literary style. However in the RSV, the “and” is gone. I’m thinking that they took it off to compensate for the Hebrew literary style understanding (to make the reader understand that there’s no two animals). But my guess is that there’s actually an “and” in the Hebrew.

Help!

Happy to oblige. Sorry I couldn’t do so sooner, but while I was on vacation I didn’t have a copy of the Hebrew text handy.

The answer to your question is that there is an “and” at this point in the Hebrew text of this verse.

This verse is often commented upon apologetically since some see here a difficulty regarding what Jesus rode during the triumphal entry. (As with all alleged contradictions in the Bible, however, this one has a good solution.) Let me know if you need more info on that.

BTW, when you have an off-topic question there’s no need to commandeer a comments box to get the message to me. Just use the e-mail address that I have on the site, and I’ll try to oblige. 🙂

Children On Animal Talk

pigOnomatopoeia (words that sound like what they symbolize) doesn’t play a very large role in human languages. There are a few words that are onomatopoetic, such as the English hush, swish, or clink. One area, however, where all languages use onomatopoeia is animal noises. Humans always make up words for animal noises that are imitations of the actual sounds animals make.

Some humans are more successful in this than others, and it’s interesting to compare the words for animal sounds in different languages and see which ones are closest to what the animals actually sound like. It seems to me, for instance, that the Spanish word for “oink”–which is tru-tru–is closer to the noise pigs make than “oink” is.

In case you didn’t see it in a story I linked yesterday, there is an initiative called The Quack Project which records children attempting to represent the noises of different animals. They’re interesting to listen to. Often the kids are being too influenced by the word that they have been taught the animals say. Other times, though, they are quite close.

To me it seemed, for instance, that the kids who speak Cantonese has more actual experience with pigs than other kids. Both the Italian kids and the Columbian Spanish kids both had variants on “oink.” But the Cantonese were so dead-on that it’s almost impossible to spell their imitation (kkchhh! fff! is about as close as I can come).

Animal Talk

Regional differences in the noises we make aren’t just confined to humans. A recent study in England showed that urban ducks are loudmouths compared to their country cousins. (Of course, we humans are far too suave and sophisticated for something like that to hold true among us.)

Researches plan to turn their attention next to the dialectical differences among the wolves in Tex Avery cartoons.

“Just look at a cartoon like Little Rural Riding Hood (1949),” one researcher said. “In that cartoon Country Wolf has a pronounced, rustic ‘aw, shucks, golly’ manner of speech, with marked differences in vowelization, consonantal dropping, cadence, word choice, and even syntax when compared to his cousin, City Wolf, who basically sounds like Charles Bouyer.”

“Compare those two to The Wolf From Down South, who appears in cartoons such as Sheep Wrecked (1958) and Blackboard Jumble (1959). He always speaks in a friendly, laid-back, ‘Hey, y’all!’ manner with an accent and intonations that could come from any of the Gulf South states.”

“These can’t be attributed to anything other than regional differences,” the researcher noted, “because all three wolves were voiced by actor Dawes Butler, meaning that the biological substrate for each wolf’s vocal capacities was identical.”

John 6:44–Correcting An Old Mistake

Put up a file on the treatment of the Greek in John 6:44 in my old debate notes.

Excerpt:

When I looked up that passage and compared what I wrote with the Greek text, my response was to ask, “What the heck was I thinking? That analysis is unsupportable! That translation is horrendous! I would never accept something like that from one of my Greek students. Was I severely sleep deprived when I wrote that or something?”

Septuagint & Other Greek Resources

A reader writes:

Jimmy, I noticed that there are no books concerning the Septuagint. Do you know of any interlinear versions? While it’s use will naturally bring up the issue of canonicity with non-catholics, wouldn’t it be usefull in establishing contextual usages? An example that comes to mind was when I was trying to establish the usage of Trogos in John 6 as literal to a friend of mine. I found only two other occurances in the N.T. external to John 6. I gave up on the only online version I found when I realized it was universally translated every word for “eat” as Estheo. (I don’t know greek but as an engineer I recognized enough of the letters to get suspicius when the letters were spelling Phegos.)

Putting together an interlinear is a very difficult thing, and they don’t sell that great to begin with. I am not aware of anybody who has put together a Septuagint interlinear in book form. Normally it is either published with straight Greek text or as a diaglot (i.e., a work with two languages on the same page or on facing pages, but not woven together line by line in interlinear fashion). Here’s an example of a Septuagint-English diaglot.

There’s also an NIV Hebrew-Greek-English triglot Old Testament that Amazon has available from their used bookstore contacts.

Though there is no print interlinear of the Septuagint, there is one available in .pdf form, which you can get from www.ApostolicBible.com. It can be ordered on CD-Rom for sixty bucks or downloaded it for forty three. Here’s a peek inside it:

lxxinterlinear

Now, you may notice that there’s something odd here. The words in the English lines are not strictly lined up under the corresponding Greek words. In Gen. 1:1, for example, the Greek line has “epoiesen h theos,” which in literal word order is “[he] made the God” (putting the verb before its subject) but which the English line has rendered idiomatically as “God made.” The same thing happens in 1:3 with “God said.”

This is not standard practice for an interlinear, and since I can’t find adequate online statements about who made this interlinear, what their agenda was, and how rigorous they were in doing it, there may be imperfections or biases in the thing, so fair warning.

Another way to accomplish the same effect (and which would be far better than buying the Septuagint in .pdf form) would be to use Bible software, opening a Septuagint window and linking it to an English window with corresponding words highlighted.

It sounds like, though, that what you’re after may not require a Septuagint at all (interlinear or otherwise). If you want to do primary source research, you would need the text of the Septuagint–for it is quite useful in fleshing out our knowledge of how words were used–but there’s probably a much simpler way to get the info that you’re after. A good Greek dictionary will tie together not only word usages from the Greek NT and the Septuagint but also from extra-biblical sources, and it’s *much* easier (and more reliable) to figure out a dictionary entry than to do your own primary source research. A professional Greek scholar might need to do the latter, but for a normal person’s purposes, a good dictionary is the way to go.

Though there are more detailed dictionaries available, the Abbott-Smith lexicon is a fairly simple one to use that includes data from the Septuagint, extra-biblical sources, and the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. Little Kittel would be a step up in detail from Abbott-Smith, but it isn’t comprehensive and you have to be careful with it since the authors of the work it’s based on had an agenda (they were trying to write a theological encyclopedia disguised as a Greek dictionary). It still can be useful; you just have to be careful. There are also more detailed dictionaries, but they’re probably more than what you’re looking for.

If you need an English-Hebrew/Greek dictionary (i.e., one organized by English word order) so you can see what different words are translated as a particular English term, a good basic one is Vine’s Expository Dictionary. It’s not exhaustive (and the scholarship is a bit out of date), but it’s a place to begin. Bible software also frequently can perform this function.

P.S. The verb you’re after in John 6 is trogo, not trogos.

Septuagint & Other Greek Resources

A reader writes:

Jimmy, I noticed that there are no books concerning the Septuagint. Do you know of any interlinear versions? While it’s use will naturally bring up the issue of canonicity with non-catholics, wouldn’t it be usefull in establishing contextual usages? An example that comes to mind was when I was trying to establish the usage of Trogos in John 6 as literal to a friend of mine. I found only two other occurances in the N.T. external to John 6. I gave up on the only online version I found when I realized it was universally translated every word for “eat” as Estheo. (I don’t know greek but as an engineer I recognized enough of the letters to get suspicius when the letters were spelling Phegos.)

Putting together an interlinear is a very difficult thing, and they don’t sell that great to begin with. I am not aware of anybody who has put together a Septuagint interlinear in book form. Normally it is either published with straight Greek text or as a diaglot (i.e., a work with two languages on the same page or on facing pages, but not woven together line by line in interlinear fashion). Here’s an example of a Septuagint-English diaglot.

There’s also an NIV Hebrew-Greek-English triglot Old Testament that Amazon has available from their used bookstore contacts.

Though there is no print interlinear of the Septuagint, there is one available in .pdf form, which you can get from www.ApostolicBible.com. It can be ordered on CD-Rom for sixty bucks or downloaded it for forty three. Here’s a peek inside it:

lxxinterlinear

Now, you may notice that there’s something odd here. The words in the English lines are not strictly lined up under the corresponding Greek words. In Gen. 1:1, for example, the Greek line has “epoiesen h theos,” which in literal word order is “[he] made the God” (putting the verb before its subject) but which the English line has rendered idiomatically as “God made.” The same thing happens in 1:3 with “God said.”

This is not standard practice for an interlinear, and since I can’t find adequate online statements about who made this interlinear, what their agenda was, and how rigorous they were in doing it, there may be imperfections or biases in the thing, so fair warning.

Another way to accomplish the same effect (and which would be far better than buying the Septuagint in .pdf form) would be to use Bible software, opening a Septuagint window and linking it to an English window with corresponding words highlighted.

It sounds like, though, that what you’re after may not require a Septuagint at all (interlinear or otherwise). If you want to do primary source research, you would need the text of the Septuagint–for it is quite useful in fleshing out our knowledge of how words were used–but there’s probably a much simpler way to get the info that you’re after. A good Greek dictionary will tie together not only word usages from the Greek NT and the Septuagint but also from extra-biblical sources, and it’s *much* easier (and more reliable) to figure out a dictionary entry than to do your own primary source research. A professional Greek scholar might need to do the latter, but for a normal person’s purposes, a good dictionary is the way to go.

Though there are more detailed dictionaries available, the Abbott-Smith lexicon is a fairly simple one to use that includes data from the Septuagint, extra-biblical sources, and the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. Little Kittel would be a step up in detail from Abbott-Smith, but it isn’t comprehensive and you have to be careful with it since the authors of the work it’s based on had an agenda (they were trying to write a theological encyclopedia disguised as a Greek dictionary). It still can be useful; you just have to be careful. There are also more detailed dictionaries, but they’re probably more than what you’re looking for.

If you need an English-Hebrew/Greek dictionary (i.e., one organized by English word order) so you can see what different words are translated as a particular English term, a good basic one is Vine’s Expository Dictionary. It’s not exhaustive (and the scholarship is a bit out of date), but it’s a place to begin. Bible software also frequently can perform this function.

P.S. The verb you’re after in John 6 is trogo, not trogos.

“For English, Please Press 1”

As y’all know, I’m extremely language-friendly. I love other languages, and I love learning them. I think people should be encouraged to learn more (particularly Americans, who are notoriously monolingual).

But I agree with this editorial about the multicultural situation in Maryland.

English is the national language of the US, and efforts that weaken that need to be curbed.

I understand having multilingual access for certain vital services (e.g., having translators of common immigrant languages on staff at hospitals), but cultures don’t cohere well if they don’t have a common language, so apart from truly essential services, integration into the linguistic mainstream is to be encouraged.

I’m not asking anything here of others that I wouldn’t apply to myself. If I were living in Mexico, I would consider it my duty to beef up my Spanish skills as quickly as possible and wouldn’t expect government or business to do lots of things for me in English. If I were in Germany, I’d start hitting my Pimsleur German tapes. Even if I were living in France (shudder), I’d start studying French.

If (by some bizarre circumstance) I had become a citizen of another nation and had the right to vote, I especially wouldn’t consider it incumbent on that nation to print ballots in English just to accomodate me. If I couldn’t take the trouble to learn the local language well enough to vote in it, I wouldn’t consider myself well enough educated in local affairs to cast a vote responsibly. It would be better for me to withhold my vote. If I felt a pressing need to vote, I’d start studying the local language.

"For English, Please Press 1"

As y’all know, I’m extremely language-friendly. I love other languages, and I love learning them. I think people should be encouraged to learn more (particularly Americans, who are notoriously monolingual).

But I agree with this editorial about the multicultural situation in Maryland.

English is the national language of the US, and efforts that weaken that need to be curbed.

I understand having multilingual access for certain vital services (e.g., having translators of common immigrant languages on staff at hospitals), but cultures don’t cohere well if they don’t have a common language, so apart from truly essential services, integration into the linguistic mainstream is to be encouraged.

I’m not asking anything here of others that I wouldn’t apply to myself. If I were living in Mexico, I would consider it my duty to beef up my Spanish skills as quickly as possible and wouldn’t expect government or business to do lots of things for me in English. If I were in Germany, I’d start hitting my Pimsleur German tapes. Even if I were living in France (shudder), I’d start studying French.

If (by some bizarre circumstance) I had become a citizen of another nation and had the right to vote, I especially wouldn’t consider it incumbent on that nation to print ballots in English just to accomodate me. If I couldn’t take the trouble to learn the local language well enough to vote in it, I wouldn’t consider myself well enough educated in local affairs to cast a vote responsibly. It would be better for me to withhold my vote. If I felt a pressing need to vote, I’d start studying the local language.