Category: Languages

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.

Language Learning After Childhood

A reader writes:

Hope you are well. I love the blog and enjoy especially the Language helps. I have Mounce’s Greek for the rest of Us. My wife is Puerto Rican and I want her to talk to my kids in Spanish. I would also like to learn but wonder how hard it is for an adult to learn Spanish or Latin etc.
Have you ever seen anything on this subject of adult learning of Language? Especially those that can’t travel to another country.

If you want to learn Spanish, I strongly recommend Pimsleur Spanish. This will make it far easier than typical Spanish classes. See my language resource recommendations for buying advice (i.e., how to get it the cheapest way).

As far as the ability of adults to learn langauge, it has long been noticed that adults often don’t learn them as well as children. There are two proposed explanations for this:

1. Humans have a language learning faculty that starts to degenerate once we hit puberty.

2. Adults have less time and motivation to study langauges than little children do.

When it comes to learning accents, a variant of position #1 may (or may not) be true. Adults have a terrible time learning certain sounds and accents. Fortunately for you, Spanish is not a language English-speakers have this trouble with, there are certain sounds in Eastern Arabic and Eastern Aramaic that are virtually impossible for English-speakers to pronounce (after a lot of practice, I’ve gotten to where I can do them if I pronounce them very carefully, but they aren’t natural for me).

When it comes to learning the language itself (not just how to pronounce it with a native accent), I’m convinced that position #2 is true: There is no language learning faculty that degenerates with age. Adults simply have less time and motivation compared to children.

Pimsleur was one of the things that helped convince me of this. It is modelled on the way kids learn their first language, and I was struck at how easily it was to learn using this method. After some experience with the method, I became convinced that position #1 is simply a myth. If you were to put an adult in the same position as a child, we’d do just as well–or better.

Imagine what it would be like if you were dropped into an environment in which you had no exposure to anything but your new language, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, for years. You couldn’t talk to anybody in your native language. You don’t have anything to read in it. There is no TV, movies, or radio shows in your native language. Nothing! All you can do to get your needs met is (a) cry or (b) start learning the language of the natives.

I think that if I (or anybody) were put in this situation, after six years I’d speak the language at least as well as a six-year old child. Probably better, since as an adult I’d have a leg up on babies learning a language for the first time–i.e., I already know a lot about how languages work and how to experiment to find out the new language maps onto concepts I’ve already acquired (e.g., I already know what a dog, a God, love, death, and justice are, and it’ll be a lot easier for me to figure out the local words for these concepts than it will be for a baby who has to acquire the concepts at the same time he’s learning the words). The same would go for you.

So take heart! Your ability to learn languages hasn’t degenerated with age–in fact, in some ways you’re better off learning a new language than a baby is. You may not be able to have the total immersion environment a baby has, but if you apply yourself you can achieve your language goals, and it will be easier than you think if you use the best methods (like Pimsleur).

Hieroglyphs Without Mystery

When I was a boy I was fascinated by hieroglyphs. I was also frustrated by the fact I couldn’t read them. It was the 1970s, and the Tutankhamun treasures exhibit was all the rage (as was Steve Martin’s "King Tut" song). I remember looking intently at the colorful pictures of Tut’s treasures in my parents’ National Geographic magazine, but the meaning of the hieroglyphs never revealed itself to me.

A couple of years ago, I had some language-study downtime, was looking around for a language to study just for fun, and decided to work on Middle Egyptian and the hieroglyphs it is traditionally written in. I got a few books on the subject, started studying, but didn’t get too far before I got busy and had to set the study aside.

Tutankhamun, Ruler of Thebes
A cartouche. Want to
know what it says?
Put your cursor over it.

Some months later I was having lunch with a visiting priest, and he brought along a friend of his mother’s. I didn’t know the woman’s first name, but I noticed that she was wearing a golden medallion around her neck with a cartouche on it. I leaned forward, studied the cartouche, blinked when I realized what it said, and then leaned back and announced: "Your name is Mary!" She laughed, confirmed that it was so, and explained that some years before she had visited the pyramids and they had all these medallions with people’s names on them for sale. She seemed delighted by the fact I could read her name from the medallion–perhaps because this confirmed that the salesman hadn’t lied to her about what it said.

Recently I decided to pull the books off the shelf and get back to studying them. I know that Borders and Barnes & Noble have lots of glossy, full-color books on hieroglyphs, but many of these aren’t meant to be read but to sit on your coffee table to give bored visitors to your home something to do. They’re okay, but–just like my parents’ National Geographic–pretty pictures is about all you’ll get out of them. If you’d like to get some exposure actually reading hieroglyphs, let me make a recommendation.

The best book I’ve found as an introduction to the subject is Hieroglyphs Without Mystery by Karl-Theodor Zauzich. (Don’t worry; he’s German. This kind of name is apparently normal over there.) It is head and shoulders above the others on the subject. It’s also shorter and less expensive than many of them.

After an introductory section stressing the fact that you don’t have to be a genius to learn hieroglyphics (which is true), there come the two most important parts of the book. The first of these teaches you the sounds of the hieroglyphic alphabet and other major symbols, gives some common vocabulary items, and basic grammar rules. It is the only chapter of the book where you are expected to memorize anything.

This section makes the hieroglyphic writing system quite easy to understand. In fact, the whole book is written in a way that is much simpler and easier to read than the great majority of language books I’ve used. I was particularly impressed by how the section on grammar made the rules it covered easy and intuitive to understand. It presented them far more simply and naturally than most of the language books I’ve read.

I’ve read the same grammar rules presented multiple times, because Egyptian is a Semitic language, part of the same language family as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Having studied several Semitic languages, I’ve gotten to the point where my knowledge of one feeds into the others (the same way that if you know one of the Romance languages you can guess grammar or the meaning of words in another). When I got to the vocabulary section in this book, I was a little surprised that there wasn’t that much vocabulary overlap there the other Semitic languages I’ve studied, but that’s not too odd since the others are Eastern (Asian) Semitic languages and are more closely related to each other than they are to Egyptian, which is a Western (African) Semitic language. Once I got to the grammar section, though, I was back on familiar ground. The grammar is very similar to that of the Eastern Semitic languages, so I’ve read the same things explained before. What I was taken with was how simple Herr Zauzich made it to understand the rules compared to the other books I’ve read.

sarcophagusThe third section of the book is the most important one. It’s the longest and the one that really sets this book apart from the others on hieroglyphics. Basically, Zauzich shows you photographs of a bunch of Egyptian artifacts–boxes, alabaster chests, an alabaster cup, tomb inscriptions, etc.–and then takes you by the hand and walks you through the translation of what’s written on them. Many of these artifacts are from King Tut’s tomb, including the big, gold mummy coffin whose image you’ve undoubtedly seen before (’cause I’ve just put it next to this paragraph). It’s a real charge to actually be reading and understanding what’s written in these inscriptions, particularly as you start to figure them out before Zauzich explains them. You also learn to understand Egyptian names that you’ve heard all your life. For example, Tutankhamun = tut (image) + ankh (life, living) + Amun = "Living image of Amun."

You also pick up a good bit about Egyptian culture as you go along. For example, Zauzich points out that hieroglyphics are more complicated than they need to be (though still nowhere near as complex as Chinese or Japanese writing) since a perfectly good alphabet is part of the system. The alphabet was probably invented last and did not supplant the older, more complicated symbols for a religious reason: The Egyptians viewed writing as a gift of the god Thoth, so they couldn’t junk a bunch of their symbols without hacking off the god of writing. Thus hieroglyphics persisted until Egypt was converted to Christianity, at which point the hieroglyphics associated with the old religion were dropped and the Egyptians began to use a variant of the Greek alphabet we now know as the Coptic alphabet.

I was a little surprised that Zauzich didn’t explain the cultural reason behind one sign. Thenetcher hieroglyph for the word "god" (netcher) looks like a flag on a flagpole. He notes that you need to understand the cultural background to get why this is the case, but he doesn’t go on to explain that the reason is that ancient Egyptian temples had such poles, and they came in the writing system to represent what you worshipped at a temple.

He does, however, explain one of my favorite hieroglyphs. It’s a little sparrow that Egyptians put at the end of a word as a kind of commentary when they considered a thing evil, bad, weak, or small. Egyptologists refer to it as "the evil bird." (Apparently the ancient Egyptians had a poor opinion of sparrows.)The Evil Bird

The book could do a few things better. For example, it could better explain the pronunciation of words, but it’s still an excellent work that I’d recommend as an entry point for those interested to finally discover what all those beautiful Egyptian art inscriptions say.

It’ll also give you a feel for what it’s like for Daniel Jackson to go romping all over the galaxy reading tomb walls. And you’ll never watch the movie Stargate the same way again.