Mark Twain proposed in jest that the English word pronounced /fIS/ ought to be spelled rather than , with pronounced /f/ as in rough, pronounced /I/ as in women, and pronounced /S/ as in nation. (8, 10)

fromLinguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages.

Writing may have been invented at least three times in history:
1. Sumerian writing in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC
2. Chinese writing along the Yellow River before 1200 BC
3. Mesoamerican writing in Guatemala and Southern Mexico a little after 500 BC (ch. 8, p. 14)

All quotes from (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages.

Soldier’s Mom posted an incredible Christmas story that I hadn’t read anywhere else.

It was about a very special train (and the ride and the destination) for some incredibly special people. It’s a great story. I know I cry over anything patriotic, but go read it. See if you don’t cry, too.

In fact Korean has not less than six politeness levels, that are realized inter alia in the pronoun system amd in verbal inflections. Sohn (1999) defines the politeness levels as follows (some details are left out):

• The plain level, which is the lowest level, is used, in general, by any speaker to any child, to one’s own younger sibling, child, or grandchild regardless of age, and to one’s daughter-in-law, and also between intimate adult friends whose friendship began in childhood.

• The intimate level is between close friends whose friendship began in childhood or adolescence.

• The familiar level is slightly more formal than the intimate level, typically used by a male adult to an adolescent such as a high school or college student or to one’s son-in-law, or between two close adult friends whose friendship began in adolescence.

• The blunt level, which is gradually disappearing from daily usage probably due to its authoritative connotations, is sometimes used by a boss to his subordinates or by an old generation husband to wife.

• The polite level is the most popular level towards an adult, and is used by both males and females in daily conversations. It is less formal than the derential level.

• The deferential level is used in formal situations such as news reports and public lectures.
(Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages ch. 7, p. 13)

I think this is very interesting. I like the idea that there are levels of politeness. It would be very interesting. Lee and Miller, science fiction authors who I like their work, have a world where politeness is like this. Trying to bring it into English is a bit of a challenge, of course.

In the traditional European rank society people generally spoke the dialect of their home area, and there was only minor variation between the ranks. On the basis of a person’s language variety you could easily locate her or him geographically, but not at all to the same degree socially.

In the end of the 18 th century and in the beginning of the 19th, this society started to change, as a consequence of industrialization, which created new social strata—particularly a working class and a bourgeoisie or middle class—and opportunities for people to improve their economical and social status.

In the book ‘Talking Proper’. The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol, Lynda Mugglestone tells the story about what happened in England. 12 For centuries England had had a standard written language, but no standard spoken language.

In the end of the 18 th century, however, this situation started to change drastically. The middle class consciously changed their speaking habits in the direction of the most prestigious variety of spoken English, which was the variety used at the royal court in London. At first, this created a situation where the upper class (the aristocracy)—who evidently could not improve their social status by any means—and the lower class (the working class) spoke the local dialect, while the middle class adopted the new spoken standard, which varied much less from place to place. (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages 7, 3)

I think that is a very interesting history. People trying to improve their lot in life by language. It does make a difference, even now. It’s hard to get a professional job if you speak ebonics, for example. (Only ebonics, I mean.)

n the end of the 18 th century, things started to change. Influenced by the orthography, members [of] the new middle class starting using the pronunciation /-ING/ instead of the traditional /-In/. As a result, a socially conditioned variation was created, where the upper class and the lower class used the conservative pronunciation /-In/, while the middle class used the innovating pronunciation /-ING/. Members of the upper class people continued to use the pronunciation /-In/ into the 20 th century, and /-In/ could be heard in parts of the aristocracy into the 1920s. The expression huntin’ and fishin’, which describes typical aristocratic activities in the English society, survived almost to our days. Today, the pronunciation /-ING/ has been adopted also by the upper class, meaning that /-In/ only survives in working class speech. Typically, the traditional /-In/ pronunciation is nowadays regarded as «careless» and as belonging to lower class sociolects. (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages ch. 7, p. 11)

So many pronunciations which are actually quite “accurate” and “correct” become low class. Many traditional Appalachian pronunciations are actually old standards.

In code switching, there is no such integration. Both languages are “on” at the same time. Code switching, therefore, presupposes a much higher degree of bilingualism than borrowing does. A speaker of Swahili can use English loanwords like soka ’soccer; football’ without knowing any English himself, because these words have already been integrated into Swahili. To participate in code-switching between Swahili and English, however, he needs to have at least a basic knowledge of both languages.

We used to do this, and I am sure they still do, at la Iglesia de Cristo de lengua espanola de Genebra, Suisa. We’d start a sentence in Spanish and then switch to French. By the end of the sentence, or the paragraph, we would have switched back. Spanish was, of course, the primary language. But everyone there lived in French speaking Switzerland, so they also spoke French. There are some words I never learned in French because I knew them in Spanish and didn’t have to learn them.

I did not, however, learn much of Catalunan. The only expression I know in that is the translation for “dunce.” (I got called it way more often than needful.)

I am reading right now in (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages about cultural versus core borrowings. Cultural are those which existed in the other culture, but not in the borrowing culture previously. Core borrowings are borrowings of words which existed in the borrowing language. Cultural borrowings are more common than core borrowings.

But the house in the US has several core borrowing words.

Is the thing you put silverware in a buffet (French), sideboard (English), or hutch (Dutch)?

Is the room you enter the house in the entry (English), foyer or foyere (French), or something else?

The Bible translation group Summer Institute of Linguistics has a database of languages, including Language Families.

Quechuan has 46 sub-groups, apparently.

But English wasn’t on the list.

Less than five percent of the world’s languages belong to one of the three remaining possible types: VOS, OVS and OSV. In other words, the subject precedes the object in more than 95 percent of all languages. (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages chapter 4 page 10)

But I remember hearing about a language, I thought it was Quechua when I started, but maybe not, that was one of these languages.

The translator wrote SVO but the language was OVS. So “God loved the world so much” translated became “The world loved God so much.” This actually matched the people’s previous religioius beliefs. This, obviously, caused lots of problems until they figured out the root cause.

Could it be number related?

Eleven is English. The same number in Japanese is ten-one.

Twelve is English. The same number in Japanese is ten-two.

Twenty-one is English. The same number in Japanese is two-ten-one.

Maybe this explains their superiority.

Is the systematic transparency of East Asian numerals one of the reasons why they perform so well in mathematics tests? Maybe. In one experiment, Japanese and American first-grade children were given a set of blocks to represent numbers. White blocks represented units, while purple blocks represented tens, so that one purple block was equivalent to ten white blocks.

The children were asked to read a number on a card and then to use the blocks to show that number. On first trial, American children tended to use only the white blocks (representing units), while Japanese children tended to use a combination of white and purple blocks, indicating that they had a better grasp of the decimal number system. Only on second trial did the American children begin to use the purple blocks as well.

In other experiments, Chinese and Korean first-graders have been shown to perform more or less like their Japanese peers. (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages chapter 1 page 15)

The Fula language of West Africa has an incredible number of words for cattle. One small dictionary lists no less than 82 words, including guddiri ‘bull without a tail’, wudde ‘cow without a tail’, jaabuye ‘cow with a large navel’, lelwaaye ‘cattle with eyes like a gazelle’, gerlaaye ‘cattle that is like a bush-fowl’, happuye ‘cow in milk after her calf has died’, mbutuye ‘cow whose calf has been killed so that she may be fattened’, and other useful terms. (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages chapter 4 page 3)

How many words does Eskimo (is that Inupiat or Yupik?) have for snow?

Geoffrey Pullum called the bluff in an article called “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax”. In fact, Pullum tentatively concludes, Eskimo seems to have only two distinct word roots for ’snow’. Even if it were true that Eskimo had so many words for ‘snow’, this would hardly matter much to students of linguistic typology. Let us use a real example to explain why. (Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages chapter 4 page 3)

So I looke up Pullum and his entry on Language Log said

Laura Martin has been inveighing against it since 1982, when she spoke to the American Anthropological Association about it as a kind of academic urban legend that anthropological linguists had been spreading. In 1986 (after four years of arm-wrestling with embarrassed anthropologist referees who would really have been happier if this did not come out) she finally published a short note on the topic in American Anthropologist.

Later I wrote a deliberately humorous article myself called “The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, attempting to publicize Laura’s work among linguists. My article has been published in five or six different places, including as the title essay of my 1991 book, which was written up in Newsweek and various other places, and has been drawn to the attention of journalists and editors. But it’s clear to me that Laura and I are just wasting our time. People have written letters to The New York Times over and over again about this, quoting from their previous letters, and it makes no difference: the Times has repeated the Eskimo claim several times. Jane Brody alone has used it at least twice, citing a different number of snow words each time, and has ignored letters about the topic.

The truth about snow words in the Eskimo languages simply doesn’t matter. If it did, I would carefully explain that there seem to be only a handful of roots that really are snow roots in the languages of the Yup’iks and Inuits, maybe four or five, not very different from the number found in English (snow, sleet, slush, blizzard). But it doesn’t matter. All that matters to journalists is that they continue to have the snowbound simile in question at their disposal for constant use whenever a line or two needs to be filled up with linguistic babble.

So really Laura Martin is the one who “called the bluff.” Pullum attempted to disseminate it. Did it work?

No.

I just asked my husband how many there are. He said “48.” I said, “No, only two, or at most four or five if you include blizzard, sleet, slush.” He said, “No way.”

And, if you want the jokes about it, go here. And I’ve actually heard others. “If Eskimos have forty-two words for snow, then the Russians have that many for beauracracy.”

If you want to give your characters a “foreign” feel to their language usage, here’s a schedule to explain how they would talk.

SOV (Japanese, Tamil, Turkish etc.)
SVO (Fula, Chinese, English etc.)
VSO (Arabic, Tongan, Welsh etc.) (chapter 4 page 1)

So Uncle Toban wouldn’t speak in a different word order than I would, or the book is written in. But perhaps the aide, when speaking to Dielli, would use a Verb Subject Object order.

LInguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages

Or if I did I didn’t remember.

The book is slightly repetitive, covering the same topics in different ways. Here we have a different discussion of consonant clusters in the coda.

In both syllable-initial and syllable-final position, consonant clusters, the juxtaposition of two or more consonants within the same syllable, are quite uncommon. Neither Swahili, Fula, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese nor Korean allow them. Some languages, like Thai, allow the juxtaposition of two consonants. The juxtaposition of three consonants, as in English sprint, is quite exceptional. The juxtaposition of five consonants in syllable-final position, as in Norwegian skjelmskt ‘roguish, waggish’ (neutral/adverbial form) and German Herbsts ‘autumn’ (genitive case) is close to unique. (chapter 3 page 14)

Note that the author does not mention English’s “strength” in this paragraph. Does the author expect you to remember or forget? (Remember so it won’t be mentioned again. Forget so it doesn’t seem repetitive.)

For an experiment, psychologist Wolfgang Kohler made two pictures. The left one was two off-center rounded shapes laid somewhat on top of the other and the right was made up of seven triangles placed touching each other (looks like a five-point star with an extra triangle on its head). Then he made two words up and asked people to identify the shapes with the words.

When he asked people which word suited which figure, nobody seemed to be in doubt that maluma was the more suitable name for the figure to the left, while takete was more suitable for the figure to the right. This and similar experiments have been repeated in a wide variety of cultural contexts, such as with Swahili-speaking children in what is now Tanzania, and the result is the same. (chapter 3 page 17)

Soft sounds, like “m” in mommy, are associated with soft/good things. (Thus the round.)
Hard sounds like “t,” “k,” are associated with not good.

What happens if you combine an m, t, and k?

In other experiments, monolingual speakers of different languages (such as English and Japanese) were presented orally with a number of word pairs in their own language and the language they did not know and then asked to match the words. For instance, speakers of English might be asked to decide which of the two Japanese words mikata and teki meant ‘enemy’ and which meant ‘friend’. (The answer is that mikata means ‘friend’, while teki means ‘enemy’.) In these and a number of similar experiments, the correctness of the answers by far exceeds what could be produced by mere chance. The sound of a word, therefore, often seems to give a hint of its meaning. (chapter 3 page 17)

I’ve read this information in regard to less polite company words. (So n, k, t is female, because it is soft but k or k, d is male because it is hard.)

from Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages

from language to language, but the progression of the colors does not.

When comparing focal colours across languages, it turns out that although the variety in colour terms is huge, the variation follows a systematic pattern. A language with only two colour terms has a word for ‘black’ and a word for ‘white’, a language with three colour terms has, in addition, a word for ‘red’, a language with four colour terms has, in addition, either ‘green’ or ‘yellow’, while a language with five colour terms has both ‘green’ and ‘yellow’, and so on (chapter 3 page 7).

If you have six terms you get blue.
If you have seven you add brown.
Up to ten terms and the extra three are pink, purple, and orange.

So how do you identify colors if you only have black and white?

Typically, in languages with two colour terms, such as the Indonesian language Lani, the word for ‘white’ covers all light and warm colours, including red and yellow, while the word for ‘black’ covers all dark and cool colours, including green and blue. (chapter 3, page

from LInguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages

In LInguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages the first chapter is a very easy read and is fascinating.

The second chapter is much less quick to read, besides being longer, it is also a fairly comprehensive description of grammar. And it doesn’t include many interesting reliefs, in terms of experiments or fascinating facts.

I did learn this:

Fricatives are defined by a narrow stricture in the oro-pharyngeal tract, causing audible friction as air passes by. Fricatives are common, but languages often have fewer fricatives than stops or nasals. Voiced fricatives are less common than voiceless ones, and are only found in addition to voiceless fricatives.

English has an exceptionally high number of fricatives, the four voiceless /f T s S/ and the four voiced /v D z Z/, as illustrated by the words thief /»Ti ̆f/, fish /»fIS/, these /»Di ̆z/, vase /»veIs/, vision /»vIZ ́n/. (50)

I have, in the past, learned what fricatives are. However, I did not remember- or perhaps even know- that English has a high number of fricatives.

Learn something new every day. That’s my motto.

And here’s something that’s chock full of new things:

Some languages accept more than one consonant in the onset and in the coda, but such congestions of sound are rather rare. European languages (and a few others) are exceptional here—cf. English words like strength /»streNT/, where the onset is /str/ and the coda is /NT/—but the languages of Europe constitute only about 3% of the languages of the world. (54)

So in that I learned:
Multiple consonants to start a word are rare.
Multiple consonants to end a word are rare.
European languages constitute only 3% of languages in the world.

That’s a pretty strong gust of new information: three things in two sentences.

And, for randomness, the th in “strength” is discussed:
“English has got sounds, for example /T/, that are quite rare; /T/ is found in Arabic and Swahili, but not in Hausa, Fula, Turkish, Modern Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. (54)”

What do dwarves and the Chinese have in common?

Well, according to the book referenced in the last post, Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages, they both have very descriptive words for what, in English, would be long familial terms.

” Chinese has eight different terms for ’cousin’ based on gender (male vs. female), age (older vs. younger) and whether or not they have the same family name (paternal vs. maternal).”

So, “my cousin Mark” would turn into a word that meant “my older male cousin on my father’s side Mark.” But it wouldn’t be done with any more words than the first. Very interesting.

Note: While I have many paternal cousins and grew up knowing them, I only have two maternal cousins. One I knew was my cousin, but she did not until her father died. (How would you like that to be your intro to your dad?) The other I may have met at my grandmother’s funeral, but he is significantly younger than I am and I don’t really remember anything except “tall teenage boy with brown hair.”

in other languages besides Korean. Here’s a discussion of an experiment on speakers and color chips.

In contrast to English, the Mexican Indian language Tarahumara does not have one term for ‘green’ and one for ‘blue’, but instead has a single term, siyóname, that covers both. In other words, where English has two concepts, ‘green’ and ‘blue’, Tarahumara has only one. How does this difference affect the perception of colours among speakers of the two languages? In one experiment, speakers of both languages were presented with three colour chips at a time. Each time, all three chips, say, A, B and C, were of different shades of colour on the scale from green to blue, with chip B being somewhere in between chips A and C:…

The subjects were asked to determine whether the distance in colour between chips A and B was greater than the distance between chips B and C or the other way around. It turned out that when the borderline between English green and blue went between chips B and C, the English speakers tended strongly to feel that the distance between chips B and C was greater than that between chips A and B, even when the actual distance between chips A and B, as measured independently, was greater. Speakers of Tarahumara did not make a similar systematic distortion.

The proposed explanation for this is that English speakers solve a difficult problem (that of determining distances between colours) by resorting to a “name strategy”. If chip A and B are both called green, while chip C is called blue, the name strategy prompts the English speaker to decide that chip C is more different from chip B than chip A is, even when the opposite is in fact the case. This strategy is not available to Tarahumara speakers, since their vocabulary does not distinguish between ‘green’ and ‘blue’.

In a second experiment, English speakers were presented with the same triads of colour chips, but in a way that only enabled them to see two chips at a time, either A and B or B and C. When they were shown chips A and B, the experimenter said: “You can see that this chip (points to A) is greener than this chip (points to B).” Everybody agreed. And when they were shown chips B and C, the experimenter said: “You can see that this chip (points to C) is bluer than this chip (points to B).” Again everybody agreed. Thus, all subjects were prompted to use both the terms green and blue to refer to chip B. When they were subsequently asked to judge the relative distance between A and B as opposed to B and C, the systematic distortion found in the first experiment had disappeared. The proposed explanation is that the name strategy was no longer available, since they had already referred to chip B by both terms. This suggests that the use of the name strategy was indeed the correct explanation for the systematic distortion in the first experiment.

To sum up, whether or not a language distinguishes between ‘green’ and ‘blue’ does seem to influence the perception of these colours. To some extent, language influences the way we perceive the world.

I got there from Wayne’s World.

I would like to read the rest of the text but haven’t found it. The clip above takes you to chapter 1, which is 21 pages long. I found it. Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages

Previous post on same topic: Blue is Green 12/28/05
Related post on colors: Colors: What they mean, what they do

Grunt Doc alerts :Three cases of measles in Houston. One patient visited five different hospitals/doctors before measles was diagnosed.

I wonder if the MMR needs to be updated often. This post purports to answer your questions, but it didn’t tell me if the boys would need a booster. It only mentions college kids possibly getting one.

I know the kids had MMR when they were 5 and 6 (respectively). I hope that was sufficient.

I spent twelve hours or so on our trip and at my in-law’s house editing my first novel to be sent out again.

I told everyone in my Christmas letter, which will soon become a new year letter, that I’d send it out again by Jan. 14.

So I need to get back to editing. When I’ve finished, does it count as one book on my new book list?