In this brief podcast, I will be discussing a brief history of the English language. I will move on to the similarities in Scandinavian languages and their "uniqueness."
If the player isn't working, I've given you a link to the podcast.
Similarities in language
I had some trouble finding a second person to answer a few questions about foreign language over all. There were a few that would have been really great to hear from but I ended up empty handed. Then it occurred to me that my mom has always find some way to communicate to non-English speakers. Through this she has grasped a small vocabulary of Papiamento (a Caribbean pidgin of Dutch, English, Spanish, and some Native American languages), and some Spanish dialects. She's been to Europe and spent some time in the the Caribbean. She's encountered many languages that intrigue her curiosity. So I believe that her input is vital.
1. What exactly in a language do you notice first? Is it the culture, the personality of the person that is speaking it? What exactly is it when you encounter another language that you notice?
When I first encounter a language, I almost immediately notice the culture, the attitude around it. It sounds so unique and enticing, so much that I want to know where they are from. If they attempt to communicate with me, that's a plus too!
2. What is the most striking appeal of a foreign language to you?
I would have to say it's sound, especially the melody. Some languages flow so poetically, while others are very guttural and harsh sounding. I prefer the flowing ones and not so much the ones that have harsh starts and stops.
3. Do you feel that the culture of the language is the most important factor in determining if you will study it? If not, then what is?
I would have to say once again it is the culture that is the most convincing. Some cultures are too reserved, while some are too free and talk far too much and loud. If the people do not want to talk to me, I'm not going to be interested in them.
4. Is a classroom your favorite way to learn the language? Or do you feel to efficiently learn it you must go abroad?Or do you feel that you need a few classes to get the basics and then go abroad to fully learn it?
I definitely would love to be living in the country as I am learning it. I might consider a class for the basics, but I'd rather just buy a small book and take it with me. One of the reasons to fully understand a language is to get to know the people. Basically I'm saying that I'd go anywhere and learn on the go.
5. Does it depend on the country? For example, would you rather study in an environment that is war torn and threatened by terrorism daily? Or would you rather be in a peaceful society that has genuinely communicative people?
I remember when I was in Switzerland trying to get on the subway. Everyone was looking at me like I was a foolish tourist. But there was this elderly man that came up to me and started speaking to me in German, when he figured out I didn't speak that, he switched to French. Then he tried Spanish. He then spoke a few words in English and told me that I had to visit an old famous church. It was this attempt of communication that meant a lot to me. That type of communication is what draws me to a certain language. Of course I would like to go anywhere, but if it is a country that is plagued with war, forget it.
6. Do you prefer a literal or symbolic language?
I love picture words. Things that make sense. I want a word that represents exactly what it means. For example, in a country that does not have electricity, they will not have a word for a "dishwasher." It may be more along the lines of a "bowlwasher." What I mean is that "a person that washes bowls." This means that there should be the word for the object, a word for the actor, and a word for the action. I prefer languages that have a lower morpheme-to-word ratio meaning Isolating. A simple language. Those that tend to just stick everything together is very confusing to me.
Today feels like a great day for interviews. I was able to get a "few" words out of one my long time friends, Charles A. Perrine, that shares the same interest of language. One of the tasks that his job requires is working with a transcription company via a translation service. So he has quite the experience when it comes to having to listen to a variety of foreign languages.
1. What is the most striking appeal of a foreign language to you? Is it the sound? The prosody?
As said above, sound is a big part of my interest in a language, so yes, prosody is important. However, it's not the only point of interest, nor necessarily the most striking for every language. What primarily makes a language appeal to me is different for each language, and often unique to that language, or at least uncommon outside it. This is due, I think, to a habit of being fascinated with things for the sake of nothing but esotericism.
Russian, for example, attracts me with the aesthetic of its script and with the mysterious but vaguely familiar culture behind the language. Mandarin offers a refreshing focus on tone rather than inflection and a beautiful writing system that promises a lifetime of study. The agglutinative Finnish hits the other end of the scale with unfamiliar and challenging grammar.
2. What draws you to a specific language? What convinces you to learn it?
Necessity would certainly do the trick, if it were there. As it is, the attraction to a language is decided by subjective evaluations of the aesthetic of its script and speech, expectations of how well I would like the culture (I anticipate visiting a country relevant to the language I take the time to study), and, to a lesser extent, such quantitative matters as how many people in the world I might find speaking the language or how desperately employers seek those people.
3. Do you prefer a language that utilizes a writing system that is similar to the one you use now? Do you prefer a literal or a figurative language? Meaning, do you like something to mean exactly what they say, or poetic and a much deeper meaning known exclusively to the culture?
The further a foreign language deviates from the familiar alphabetical writing system, the more it must compensate by having less to worry about in other areas. This is just me, though, and my lack of time to really dive into an all-around challenging project. If I had nothing but free time, though, I would get as far away from familiarity in the writing system as I could -- again, for the sake of the esoteric. Here in the real world, I find myself more attracted to languages using a non-Roman alphabet, so that they offer a dose of oddity while not being too much to deal with.
I've never dabbled in any language out of necessity, so abstractness has certainly never been undesirable, and the idea of having to unravel a wholly different way of thinking can be greatly exciting. Sometimes pragmatism takes over and I find myself indecisive in this regard.
4. Do you prefer an isolating or an agglutinative language? Would it be easier for you to understand an expressed idea that basically represents a sentence? Or do you want a language that has one simple morpheme for each and every idea?
Agglutinative languages are fearsome but it would be amazing to master such a thing. Isolating languages certainly would seem to simplify things. English is more toward that end of the scale, besides, so isolating languages seem somewhat more accessible for it. I imagine that an agglutinative language wouldn't necessarily be any more difficult to understand once the rules of the thing were learned, but a more modular approach would result in one less aspect to wrestle with.
5. What is the essence of language? What do you want out of leaning a new language?
Communication with people who offer fascinating new -- or like-minded -- ideas, the nature of which is hinted at by the characteristics of the language itself, is the primary goal. Access to an unfamiliar mentality is in there, too. Any language offers these in some way. Aesthetic may decide which language I focus on first, but in the end it would be wonderful to be able to have some connection with any given person in the world by way of ability to communicate.
Hello, readers! I'm Elle of easyusabledesign.blogspot.com, and I'm here today to tell you a little about what I've learned about Japanese.
Japanese is one of those languages that most people know is hard to learn, but only the people who have tried to learn it really know why. There are a lot of reasons why, actually, but today I'll be focusing mainly on the different aspects of Japanese's written language.
Historically, the Japanese language didn't actually have a written language when it was created. And even when they did integrate a written language, it was piggybacked off of an already existing language- namely, Chinese (Japanese Language, 2012). After two thousand years of adapting the Chinese characters for their own uses, only about five thousand kanji are commonly used in the Japanese language (How many kanji are there? 2012), and of these only about 40% retain are actually based off of Chinese counterparts (Japanese Language History, 2012).
Consider this kanji:In both Japanese and Chinese, this character means "house". However, combine the character with the character for large, 大, to make 大家, and suddenly you've got "everyone" in Chinese and several distinct meanings in Japanese- "expert", "landlord/lady", or "rich family" (Ahlstrom, 2012).
More recently, Japanese has adopted two alphabets, used for various reasons- カタカナ, or katakana, andひらがな, hiragana. Katakana is typically used to phonetically spell out loanwords from other languages, while hiragana is used to write out particles of speech and write out pronunciations for kanji. Unlike Kanji, each character in katakana or hiragana represents a phoneme. Katakana's characters tend to be sharper, whereas hiragana's tend to be more rounded.
Lastly, I present to you the least often used of the different Japanese alphabets- Romaji. It's a bit of a stretch (to me, at least) to call it an alphabet on its own, seeing as it is the Latin alphabet exactly, but it is typically used to introduce non-Japanese speakers to the phonetics of Japanese words while skipping the added task of learning an entirely new alphabet.
So here, we have the word "House" written in all four of the different Japanese writing styles:
家 (Kanji)Thanks for reading!
Sources:
Ahlstrom, Kim. Denshi Jisho. (2012) Retrieved from jisho.org.
Japanese Language History. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.foreigntranslations.com/languages/japanese-translation/japanese-language-history/.
Japanese Language. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/site/japanese_article.html.
How many kanji are there? (2012) Retrieved from http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/how-many-kanji.html.
What is Morphology? Well in linguistics it is a term that refers to the formation of a language. This involves the morpheme, which is the smallest unit in a language. Sometimes it can be a word, but generally it is not. For example, The word unforgivable is three morphemes. The prefix "un-", the root forgive, and the suffix "-able." A low morpheme per word (Isolating) language means little to one morpheme representing a word (Loos, 2004). Purely Isolating Languages almost always have a ratio of morpheme to word of one. Chinese is a prime example of this. If you look at the sentence "I sold my dog yesterday," in Mandarin, "my" is two separate morphemes and yesterday is one morpheme instead of being two as in English.
The other type of morphology is a Synthetic Language. It is essentially the opposite of Isolating. That means that instead of having low morpheme to word, it has a high morpheme to word ratio (Loos, 2004). This is the majority of most languages. But there are some that are far more synthetic than others. Sometimes this is to the point where literally one word can represent an idea that needs to be explained in a sentence in lower-morpheme-order languages.
For example, in Yupik, tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq is a word that consists of seven morphemes (Loos, 2004). Which of course in English is 13 words. The idea in the word expresses "He had yet to say that he was going to hunt reindeer again." This is an extreme, and falls under the category, agglutinative, literally meaning to glue together (Loos, 2004). However there is Fusional language. These similarly have a lot of morphemes per word, but are rather unintelligible. They are consisting of suffixes, root mutations, and prefixes. They are put together so well, each part cannot be deciphered unless looked upon as a whole. For example, the medical word hypercholesterolemia derived from Greek, is formed by "hyper-," meaning elevated, "cholesterol," "em," meaning blood, and "-ia" which is a grammatical ending (Loos, 2004).
Besides the morphemes being perfectly fused together, there are some languages that undergo change during conjugation. Romance languages deal with this heavily. Take the Spanish word Hablar, to speak. The stem is Habl, to express "I speak," you add an -o to form Hablo. If you wanted to express "I spoke," you add an "é" to form hablé. Some verbs require a root change when indicating tense and mood (Loos, 2004). Which of course, is very well known for Romance languages since there conjugation schemes seem to be nearly endless.
So basically you can break down into two forms of morphologies:
So you decide. Do you want to speak a language that has a word for everything and grammar being the least of your problems, a language that deals with just as much grammar as you deal with now (that being English), words that contain numerous compounds, or would you rather learn a language that is involved in high context or low context? It's your decision. Go with what interests you most.
Sources
Loos, E. E. (2004). What is an isolating language?. In D. Day Jr., P. Jordan & J. Wingate (Eds.), Glossary of linguistic terms. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/contents.htm
Loos, E. E. (2004). What is a polysynthetic language?. In D. Day Jr., P. Jordan & J. Wingate (Eds.), Glossary of linguistic terms. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm
Basically it all boils down to the basic part of a language, the sentence. Several sentences make a paragraph. Several paragraphs make a story. We all like stories; they help us create a world of fantasy and freedom. Now all languages have stories, and they tell them differently. The chance that all languages developed the same formation is essentially zero. Less than half of the word's languages (based on population) follow a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) formation. about the same portion uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). The rest of the world uses Verb-Subject-Object (VSO)(Meyer, 2010).
SOV essentially means that in a sentence, verb comes last (Boeree). In a way it similar to speaking like Yoda would. For example, if I were to say "That meal was delicious," in a standard SOV language it would become, "That meal delicious it was." "I fed my dog this morning before work," would become "My dog this morning before work I fed."
SVO is used in English syntax. As you read this sentence, you can clearly see its usage. This would be an easy concept for a beginner in a foreign language to grasp. If you were visiting Sweden and wanted to tell someone that you wanted to eat pizza you would say: "Jag vill äta vissa pizza." It means exactly that and no worry of having to rearrange parts of the sentence to match its order. Jag, the subject (I), vill äta, the verb (want to eat), and vissa pizza, the object (some pizza).
Basically there are three main structures in use. Of course they will seem different to you, but that is normal. If you want a challenge, you could attempt Russian. It has no rules on order and all are used in common day speak (Meyer, 2010). So saying, "I like apples," "Like I apples," and "I apples like," mean the same thing.
Sources
Boeree, G. (n.d.). Basic language structures. Retrieved from http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/basiclangstruct.html
Meyer, C. F. (2010). Introducing English linguistics. (p. 36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MWbrvUiYzSkC&pg=PA36
