We Learn Our Language in the Womb
No wonder learning a new language can be more difficult the older you get. We were learning our individual languages before we were even born! That’s what researchers revealed in a release today by Current Biology.
It seems that fetuses not only warm to the sound of mother’s voice as they gestate, they also are being programmed in the direct patterns inherent in certain languages. By the time we are born, our dialect is determined.
Wermke’s team recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old. That analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns’ cry melodies, based on their mother tongue.
Specifically, French newborns tend to cry with a rising melody contour, whereas German newborns seem to prefer a falling melody contour in their crying. Those patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, Wermke said.
ScienceDaily has a brief story about this new knowledge: Link
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Place Names with Definite Articles
Why is it called The Hague instead of just Hague? New York City has Manhattan and The Bronx. Why not The Manhattan? Or just Bronx? And when did The Ukraine become plain Ukraine? It turns out that place names with definite articles all have a different story to explain the name, and different languages have their own peculiar rules and exceptions for naming places.
Those who live in The Hague never stopped using an old-fashioned name that described the place according to its medieval use. We get the official name Den Haag from Des Graven Hage, which means “the counts’ hedge” and refers to the fact that Dutch noblemen once used the land for hunting.
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Language Map of Europe
Languages correspond only imprecisely with political borders, which are designated by the superimposed red lines. The map at the linked source can be supersized for more detailed examination.
Link. The English version of this map was created by Postmann Michael in 2007; it has subsequently undergone several revisions, and there are continuing doubts regarding the accuracy of some of the language borders.
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America’s Most Annoying Phrase
A recent poll asked Americans what the most annoying phrase they’ve heard is, and 47% of respondents answered “whatever”. It is believed that this is the actual phrase they found annoying, and not just a dismissive response to the question.
Other candidates for most irritating phrases: “you know” netted 25 percent of the vote; “it is what it is” got 11 percent; “anyway” got 7 percent; and “at the end of the day” ended the day with 2 percent.
Some geographic tendencies also emerged. “Whatever,” for example, is more loathed in the Midwest – where it annoys 55 percent of respondents – than it is in the Northeast, where it bothers 35 percent.
Link -via Simply Left Behind
(image credit: Flickr user Shiny Things)
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Interpreting the UN
The United Nations is in session, with leaders and representatives from all over the world meeting to exchange ideas. Just how can they do that, when they speak so many different languages?
The United Nations hires about 120 interpreters—not to be confused with translators, who translate text—who are considered the best in their profession. No education is required, but roughly 70 percent of the members of the American Translators Association have college degrees. Interpreters slot the languages they know into three categories: A, B, and C.
Interpreters work under strict protocols, which you can read about at Slate Magazine. Link
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Translation Party
Translation Party is where you can type in an English phrase and have it translated into Japanese and back again, several times until it gets as funny as it can be. I tried “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” and you can see what the final result was. Link -via the Presurfer
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Talk Like Shakespeare Day
Today is the 445th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. In honor of this occasion, today is Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Here are some ways to do it:
1. Instead of you, say thou. Instead of y’all, say thee.
2. Rhymed couplets are all the rage.
3. Men are Sirrah, ladies are Mistress, and your friends are all called Cousin.
4. Instead of cursing, try calling your tormenters jackanapes or canker-blossoms or poisonous bunch-back’d toads.
5. Don’t waste time saying “it,” just use the letter “t” (’tis, t’will, I’ll do’t).
6. Verse for lovers, prose for ruffians, songs for clowns.
7. When in doubt, add the letters “eth” to the end of verbs (he runneth, he trippeth, he falleth).
8. To add weight to your opinions, try starting them with methinks, mayhaps, in sooth or wherefore.
9. When wooing ladies: try comparing her to a summer’s day. If that fails, say “Get thee to a nunnery!”
10. When wooing lads: try dressing up like a man. If that fails, throw him in the Tower, banish his friends and claim the throne.
Forsooth, ’tis a pity methinks, if no one deigns to understandeth me. Link -via the Presurfer
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12 Food Phrases Explained
I’d better make a quick disclaimer on this one: sometimes there are many theories as to how a phrase came about. These 12 explanations are just some of the possible origins. We’ve been using some of these phrases for so long that we’ve lost the original meanings, so our explanation of them is based on the the best guesses of linguists and historians. Take the explanations with a grain of salt (haha).
1. “Not worth his salt.” In Roman times, salt was a highly valued commodity used for trading. To say a soldier was not worth his salt was the same as saying he wasn’t worth his salary; he was absolutely worthless. Photo from What’s Cooking America.
2. “Pie in the sky” is actually only half of the phrase – the whole thing is “there’ll be pie in the sky when you die,” and it’s a sarcastic remark that means heaven is a silly notion.
3. Money is sometimes called “dough” or “bread” because money is what puts the bread on the table. By that logic, the two are basically interchangeable.
4. “Egg on your face” may come from the times of Victorian live theater. While we’re most familiar with the fall guy getting a pie in his face, Victorian theater had the embarrassed party getting raw eggs cracked over his head. However, another explanation suggests that people who eat eggs often get yolk all over their faces, which is embarrassing. Photo from DippingEgg.com.
5. “Won’t amount to a hill of beans” (or the like) comes from the practice of planting bean seeds in clumps in a mound of soil (the hill). This is a very small hill indeed, so saying you won’t amount to a hill of beans is pretty insulting.
6. “Apple of my eye” is thought to have originated from an old English idea that the pupil of the eye was solid, like an apple. So the “apple of my eye” is the pupil of my eye. I guess that sort of poetically means what catches my attention most.
7. “Cool as a cucumber” exists because the high water content of a cucumber keeps them pretty cold. Lettuce and celery both have high water contents as well, but I guess “cool as lettuce” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Photo from FoodMomiac.
8. “Cream of the crop” is because if you have a pail of freshly-squeezed milk, the cream will rise to the top of the pail because of the high fat content. Since cream is so rich and delicious, it’s considered the best – so if you’re the cream of the crop, you’re obviously the best!
9. “Top banana” and “Second banana” probably come from the same place. The term comes from the early 1900s vaudeville days, and may have come from comedian Frank Lebowitz, who used bananas in his act.
10. “The greatest thing since sliced bread” is pretty self-explanatory – how great is it to just pull out a couple of pieces of bread and not have to be bothered with getting out a knife and trying to cut even slices without hacking up the loaf? It’s hard to believe, but pre-sliced bread actually wasn’t really a practice until 1928 and wasn’t marketed until 1930 by Wonder Bread.
11. “Cut the mustard” has always seemed pretty strange to me, but it actually makes sense: it means to be up to a challenge. And if you think about it, cutting mustard? Pretty difficult. Photo from English Shop.
12. “Dollars to doughnuts” means “most assuredly,” which I explain because I’m not sure how common it is. I use it, but I don’t know if it’s weird midwest slang or what. An example would be, “Dollars to doughnuts, Heath Ledger is going to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.” Anyway, it comes from the fact that if you’re willing to bet dollars to something that’s essentially worthless (although Homer Simpson would probably argue with you), you must be pretty sure that you’re right. Variations include dollars to buttons, cobwebs and dumplings.
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Untranslatable Words
Sometimes there are words that cannot be translated into another language without losing some of its meaning. According to the BBC and 1,000 linguists, the most difficult word to translate is "ilunga". A word in the Tshiluba language, which is spoken in south-east Congo. "Ilunga", when attempted to translate into English means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".
In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person”.
Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.
Although the definitions seem fairly precise, the problem is trying to convey the local references associated with such words, says Jurga Zilinskiene, head of Today Translations, which carried out the survey.
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Scientist Designs Program to Translate Alien Languages
If Little Green Men are one day discovered they’re certainly not going to speak fluent English. Scientists fear this may make any alien contact impossible to understand and could create some very awkward circumstances for the rest of us.
Leeds Metropolitian University’s Dr. John Elliott has devised software he believes will decipher the structure of any alien’s language which would be the first step in understanding what the potential invader of Earth may be saying, declaring or demanding. Elliott’s program is
designed to compare an alien language to a database of 60 different known languages in the world and search for ones that have similar structure.
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10 Extinct Languages in the USA
When I was a wee undergrad, I remember a professor in my class saying that in biology, "extinction is the name of the game."
Sadly, it seems that this rule of thumb also extends to language: linguists have argued that half of the world’s 6,000 languages will be lost this century.
Our pal mental_floss has an intriguing post about such 10 languages that have gone extinct in the United States in the past few decades alone:
1. The Eyak language was spoken near the mouth of the Copper River in Alaska up until about two days ago. January 21 was the day that Marie Smith Jones died, the last known full-blooded Eyak and the only person known to be fluent in the language. She tried to help preserve it by creating a dictionary so others could learn it someday. Although Marie had nine children, none of them learned the language because it was considered improper to speak anything but English at the time.
2. Yana was last spoken in north-central California about 95 years ago by the Yahi people. The last native speaker went by the name Ishi, and, like Marie Smith Jones, was instrumental in preserving the language (with help from linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir). Ishi and his family were around during the Three Knolls Massacre of 1865, which killed off about half of the remaining Yahi people. The rest of them slowly died off, and when Ishi (which means “man” in Yana) succumbed to tuberculosis in 1916, that was the end of the spoken language. Ishi’s story has been featured in several books and movies.
Link – via i met a possum
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Yo Comments Are Whack!
(YouTube link)
Alexandra and Lizz encourage YouTube commenters to learn proper grammar and spelling, and scale back on the hate talk. -via Everlasting Blort
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Buzzwords of 2008
Lexicographer Grant Barrett assembled a list of the Buzzwords of 2008 for The New York Times. The biggest part of the words came from the US presidential race, and a big chunk were inspired by the economic meltdown. A couple were born from the Beijing Olympics. But the biggest is a verb turned into a noun for use on the internet. Link -via the Presurfer
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