Category: Languages

A reader writes:

Hi Jimmy,

I’m a big fan of yours.  There are certainly a lot of vocabulary
resources for NT Greek, but I’ve never seen a Latin vocabulary
frequency list for the Vulgate (in book form, any way).  Do you know
of one?

I’m afraid I don’t, but would love to have one.

For those who may not know, a word frequency list is a list of which words are most common in a given text or language. These lists are invaluable study tools for people trying to learn a language because, by studying the most common words first, you will be able to speak or read the language much quicker.

For example, if you were learning English, you would be advised to start by learning words like "the," "is," "house," and "blue" rather than words like "triumphalistically," "absquatulate," "boll-weevil," and "chartreuse." If you focus on learning the latter kind of words first, it will be a looooong time before you start understanding ordinary sentences.

People in recent years have created word frequency lists for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Aramaic part of the Old Testament and the Septuagint (if I am not mistaken) and a whole bunch of other texts. They have made learning these langauges much easier.

Unfortunatley, I don’t know of one for the Vulgate. If anyone out there does, please use the comments box to tell us!

Barring that, I should mention that a few years ago I took some steps toward creating such a word frequency list for the Neo-Vulgate (New Testament, if I recall correctly) but was unable to finish the project. I still have the files, and they could be converted into such a list (and into something even more useful), but I don’t have the time to complete it myself. I’d need help.

The problem is that Latin is a highly inflected language, meaning its words change form a lot. The frequency list that I have is of inflected forms, which is no good for learning–at least not the way traditional courses work. To convert it into a usable list, a person (or group of persons) or a computer program would have to go down the list and uninflect the words (that is, put them back into the dictionary form students need to memorize) and then combine the resulting word totals.

This is something that could be done by machine. In fact, I already know of a program that will parse Latin words for you, and part of that means giving the dictionary form of the word. It would be possible to largely automate the process–likely using the parsing program I already know about–but I don’t have the programming skills needed to pull the pieces together.

If someone (or someones) out there do and would like to take a crack at this, use the comments box or e-mail me.

Incidentaly, it would be possible to use the list to create something even more useful–a morphologically tagged Neo-Vulgate. This would assign a code to each word of the Vulgate New Testament that contains its parsing information. Such things already exist for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew & Aramaic Old Testament, and they are useful for people trying to figure out hard word forms. Nothing like it exists for the Vulgate (so far as I know), but with the right programmer and a couple of people who speak Latin, it would be possible to construct one far more easily than in the past.

Either of these two projects could also lead to other helpful learning tools that exist for Greek and Hebrew but not for Latin.

If anyone out there would be able and interested in helping out with any of this, lemme know!

 

Yesterday I posted an Engrish Christmas greeting from Japan.

Down yonder, our first three commenters riffed on this by quoting and adapting different aspects of the most famous Engrish of them all:

"All your base are belong to us."

In case you missed it when this was all the rage on the Internet, FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT.

Funny stuff!

I can’t help chuckling at the part where guys put the saying up around town and it gets misinterpreted as an alarming threat in a post-9/11 world.

In case you don’t know what Engrish is, FIND OUT THAT, TOO and VISIT THE MAIN ENGRISH SITE.

Thanking to Japan! We wish you also are Happy New Year!

[SOURCE.]

Cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal.

Drudge reports:

TiVo is sending news organizations cease-and-desist letters to keep them from using TiVo as a verb… Developing…

Guess the folks at TiVo aren’t as good a sports as the good folks at Hormel.

Just can’t stop languages from developing, guys.

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Jimmy, you write that one only needs to learn to read a Biblical language.

I’m inclined to differ, I would have learned Greek far better, had I
learned to -speak- it, likewise with Hebrew, save that far less of it
stuck. Most of my classmates had been engineers, and the learning was
directed toward purely left-brained, list-learning thinkers.

But that isn’t how humans learn and use language. I tend to suspect
– strongly? that we’d understand the Bible better if we could actually
speak it, read it aloud and understand it, and thereby better catch
nuances and emphases that grammatical commentaries – such as the blue
one from the Vatican, as helpful as they can be – can enable us to do.

Treating the text as computer code may, I am inclined to think,
cause us to misinterpret from time to time. Think of Shakespeare, or
Donne.

What think you?

I agree that a person will learn a langauge better if he learns how to speak it (meaning "knows how to generate his own sentences in it") rather than just understand it (meaning "knowing what a person or a text is saying").

I think it’s a very good thing for students to learn to speak a language as well as understand it, and as they progress in their knowledge of the language, they should learn to do so.

In my article, though, I was concerned with encouraging students who are just beginning in a language. When one is at this stage, most people are so intimidated that they simply quit trying to learn the language. It is imperative, therefore, to do everything possible to make the process less intimidating until the student gains the sense that he really does have the ability to master a language.

One way of doing that is not demanding that beginning students immediately learn sentence generation. The ability to generate sentences is not the goal of biblical language studies; the understanding of biblical texts is. The quicker the students get the satisfaction of understanding texts, the more they will be motivated to continue their studies.

Learning sentence generation is of benefit to students, but in my judgment it’s better not to tax beginners with this.

HISTORIAN JOHN LUCAKS ANSWERS THIS QUESTION.

As to why it happened, the nut of his answer is this:

Beneath these political and ideological sentiments there was the sense,
more or less apparent, of a general disappointment with liberal ideals.
There was the inclination, sometimes fatal, of liberals to take the
ideas of the Enlightenment to extremes: to propagate a public morality
devoid of, if not altogether opposed to, religion; to insist more and
more on institutionalizing the promotion of justice, at times even at
the expense of truth; to emphasize freedom of speech, often at the
expense of thought; to make abortion legal; to approve same-sex
marriages and affirmative action.

To an increasing mass of Americans, "liberal" began to mean — rightly
or wrongly — a toleration, if not a promotion, of what many considered
to be immoralities.

That’s why it happened, but the context of when and how it happened is most interesting.

CHECK IT OUT.

HISTORIAN JOHN LUCAKS ANSWERS THIS QUESTION.

As to why it happened, the nut of his answer is this:

Beneath these political and ideological sentiments there was the sense,

more or less apparent, of a general disappointment with liberal ideals.

There was the inclination, sometimes fatal, of liberals to take the

ideas of the Enlightenment to extremes: to propagate a public morality

devoid of, if not altogether opposed to, religion; to insist more and

more on institutionalizing the promotion of justice, at times even at

the expense of truth; to emphasize freedom of speech, often at the

expense of thought; to make abortion legal; to approve same-sex

marriages and affirmative action.

To an increasing mass of Americans, "liberal" began to mean — rightly

or wrongly — a toleration, if not a promotion, of what many considered

to be immoralities.

That’s why it happened, but the context of when and how it happened is most interesting.

CHECK IT OUT.

So . . .

HERE’S A STORY ABOUT NEW INTERNET TERMS

(Specifically, "monkeyfishing," "jump the shark," and "pajamahadeen.")

It correctly explains the origin and meaning of the term "monkeyfishing" (which, as an item of Internet jargon, refers to a form of excessive credulity, particularly in the media; offline it refers to using electricity or explosives to go fishing.)

He also gets the origin and meaning of "pajamahadeen" right (i.e., a term originating in the Dan Rather forged documents scandal meaning, more or less, "bloggers who aggressively fact check things").

But when it comes to "jump the shark" the author get it dramatically wrong!

He claims (correctly) that it has its reputed origin in a Happy Days epsidoe in which Fonzie goes water skiing and literally jumps a shark but he goes on to (incorrectly) explain its meaning as follows:

"Jumping the shark" thus came to mean any wildly
excessive activity designed to attract attention to a person or group
in a popularity tailspin. As, for example, "Aging poptart Britney
Spears finally jumped the shark by marrying a high school friend for
two days in Las Vegas."

Wrong.

Engaging in excessive activity to attract attention is something one can do in the act of jumping the shark, but that’s not what the term means.

Jumping the shark is the point at which a TV series (or something else) passes its peak of quality and begins to markedly decline in quality. This is, in fact, explained on the premier site devoted to jumping the shark, namely, JumpTheShark.Com:

It’s a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on . . . it’s all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it jumping the shark.

And it’s not just those folks who say this. For example, check out Wikipedia’s discussion of the term.

In fact, if you check the dictionaries Onelook lists as having the term, they all agree on the "past its peak" definition.

So, what happend? Did the author of the column just not cross-check the story he’d got on the meaning of "jump the shark"?

Sounds like monkeyfishing to me.

I hope this paper hasn’t jumped the shark.

Call in the pajamahadeen!

Okay.

So I’m reading on WorldWideWords.Org and they have this section on (allegedly) "weird words."

On the page for hornswoggle, they state that it is "often assumed to be one of those highfalutin words like absquatulate and rambunctious that frontier Americans were so fond of creating."

WHAT???

I’ll gladly admit (in fact, I’ll proudly insist) that 19th century Americans had a real word-factory going, but by what set of criteria is rambunctious a "highfalutin" word???

That’s a real sockdolager! Those scalawags are trying to hornswoggle us on this one! I’ve a mind to absquatulate their web site and skedaddle! What a bunch of consarned snollygosters!

[DICTIONARY LINK FOR THE 19TH-CENTURALLY CHALLENGED.]