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English is a fascinating language, particularly in that most of our words come from other languages. While most words come from some sort of root words that have travelled from ancient languages to more modern lexicons, some come from myths and stories of gods and goddesses, particularly from stories from ancient Greece. Here are a few fascinating English words with roots dating back to stories of Zeus and his fellow gods.
If you’re familiar with Greek myths, then you’ll immediately recognize the name of the Titan who was forced to hold up the heavens after angering the Olympians. Even if you didn’t recognize his name from myth though, you certainly recognized the modern use of the term for a group of maps. The connection is logical, but it wasn’t used in the cartography until the sixteenth century.
Image Via Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez [Wikipedia]
These words may not seem to have much in common definition-wise, but there is a good reason they start with the same root –they are both related to time. Chronology deals with the way events happened over the course of time and chronic describes something that takes place over a long period of time. Wondering where we got these words? Well, they are all related to Chronos, the god of time.
Image Via Jorbasa [Flickr]
This is one of the more famous Greek stories-turned-words. In the ancient tales, Echo was a mountain nymph who talks excessively with her gorgeous voice. Her voice was so lovely that she would often distract Zeus’ wife Hera with her long and entertaining stories while Zeus would sneak away and make love with the other mountain nymphs. When Hera found out about Echo’s role in her husband’s activities, she punished her by taking away her ability to speak, except in repetition of the words of others.
There are many differing ends to the story, but in all of them, Echo eventually dies in some heartbreaking manner, leaving her voice to haunt the earth, where it can still be heard to this day.
This endearing little children’s book will bring out the Wookiee in your family tree, and comes complete with sound unit so you can hear the proper pronunciation of words in Wookinese Wookian Wookiee language.
Guaranteed to be hours of fun for you and/or your kid, unless the gutteral sounds of Wookiees gets on your nerves, in which case you will probably want to burn this book! Check out the advert videos and see for yourself if you can handle the process of learning to speak like a true Wookiee.
–via SuperPunch
The metaphors we use for the world of computers are kind of weird, as illustrated in ths video. The first word is the only part that might be NSFW. -via Buzzfeed
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All day, every September 19th, we celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day by basically saying “Arrrr!” But that sort of language is from another time and place (mainly Hollywood) -modern day pirates don’t talk like that. Real pirates in the modern world are liable to speak Somali, or other languages heard around the Horn of Africa.
The Horn of Africa is without question the hotbed of piracy today. A quick glance at the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre Live Piracy Map shows a dense thicket of attacks, and even though some analysis indicates that the areas of attacks may be decreasing in size, and that the frequency of successful attacks is decreasing, the density of attack is increasing and the risk of attacks remains high. And the focus of this activity remains Somalia.
What languages are these pirates saying? Based on the IMB’s reported risk zones, and country data for Somalia from the CIA’s World Factbook, they are probably speaking in Somali, Arabic (probably a Yemeni dialect), Italian (a vestige of Somalia’s colonial heritage) or English.
Wired’s Danger Room blog has a handy chart with common phrases you may need if you encounter these pirates, in English, Somali, and Yemeni. Link -via Boing Boing
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If parrots can learn words from humans, it’s only logical that parrots can teach others how to speak those words. As it turns out, it’s been happening so often that many people in Australia claimed to be hearing voices coming from the trees only to eventually discover the words were actually coming from a band of cockatoos that included one previous pet.
Perhaps the most interesting effect of this is that in large Australian cities, the cockatoos keep their vocabulary sharp through frequent interactions with humans. As a result, apparently, if you say hello to a crowd of cockatoos, it’s not unlikely that you’ll get a relatively articulate answer.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’d love to have a conversation with a wild cockatoo, even if it is just a step away from taking over human civilization.
Link Via Geekosystem Image Via rggoldie [Flickr]
When we were very young, we learned how to place things in order: first second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. Some of us went on to decorate cakes that wished children a Happy Birthday with their age specified as an ordinal number. But occasionally, the numeric abbreviation for an ordinal gets messed up. Cake Wrecks has eight, count ‘em, eight cakes with the ordinals 1th, 2th, and 3th. Link
You may have heard of Pronunciation Book, a YouTube channel in which English words and names are pronounced for the purpose of helping non-English speakers. Videos have been added steadily for over a year. Pronunciation Manual, on the other hand, is a channel with ridiculously incorrect pronunciations that look just like the videos from Pronunciation Book. Woe to the English student who gets the two sources mixed up! Link -via Laughing Squid
Pony is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and “A” is her student in Japan. They do lessons via Skype. As an exercise, Pony sends “A” strange found photos, and she writes a few sentences about each one. The result is a taste of Japanese humor rendered in intermediate English. Link -via Gorilla Mask
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There are certain words that only exist in one language, evolved from one culture and do not translate into any other. Here is a list of some of the most interesting including my favorite, this Russian word:
Toska Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
The BBC News Magazine recently posted an article about “Americanisms” creeping into the English language (meaning British English in this case). That article brought many responses, as British readers shared their pet peeves about the language as spoken by Americans. Some are just examples of bad grammar.
2. The next time someone tells you something is the “least worst option”, tell them that their most best option is learning grammar. Mike Ayres, Bodmin, Cornwall
40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase “that’ll learn you” – when the English (and more correct) version was always “that’ll teach you”. What a ridiculous phrase! Tabitha, London
41. I really hate the phrase: “Where’s it at?” This is not more efficient or informative than “where is it?” It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating. Adam, London
While others are purely cultural differences.
14. I caught myself saying “shopping cart” instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I’ve never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow
18. Take-out rather than takeaway! Simon Ball, Worcester
29. I’m a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York
36. Surely the most irritating is: “You do the Math.” Math? It’s MATHS. Michael Zealey, London
And a couple are just inexplicable.
20. “A half hour” instead of “half an hour”. EJB, Devon
44. My brother now uses the term “season” for a TV series. Hideous. D Henderson, Edinburgh
Do all these complaints make perfect sense on the eastern side of the pond? Read the rest at the followup article. Link -via J-Walk Blog
(Image credit: Flickr user Chris Turner)
To
be or not to be ... is not a question in the invented language of E-Prime.
TopTenz explains:
Another language constructed to make a philosophical point, E-Prime is simply a version of English that forbids all forms of the verb ‘to be’ (is, was, were, etc).
According to Alfred Korzybski, who promoted the language in his 1933 book Science and Sanity, E-Prime can be used to sharpen critical thinking and make ideas clearer. For example, in E-prime a person can’t say ‘This is an awful movie’: it must be rephrased as ‘I dislike this movie.’ ‘You’re wrong’ is also impossible: instead he must say ‘I disagree with you.’ Because of this, it’s easier for speakers and listeners distinguish fact from opinion.
On the other hand, following E-Prime to the letter becomes burdensome: ‘This is a flower’ must become something like ‘English speakers call this a flower.’ Today, E-Prime remains popular, but mostly just as an interesting thought exercise to improve clarity.
Read more about the Top 10 Invented Languages: Link
For years scientists have known that each parrot has a unique call that other birds use to address them, but now they’ve discovered that the parents of the species are responsible for naming their chicks. They observed the parent birds using a different call for each chick long before the babies can communicate.
Link Image via TJL23 [Fllickr]
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Here is something that none of us probably think about. If the language you speak does not accommodate words for certain areas of human culture it may change the way you see the world. In one interesting example a language that had no number words made it hard for its speakers to count accurately.
Although number words and counting are a fixture of life in most cultures from the time we are old enough to play hide-and-go-seek, some languages have only a handful of number words. In a paper published in 2008, MIT cognitive neuroscientist Michael Frank and colleagues demonstrated that Pirahã, a language spoken by a small Amazonian community, has no number words at all. The research team simply asked Pirahã speakers to count different numbers of batteries, nuts and other common objects. Rather than having a word consistently used to describe “one X” a different word for “two Xs” and yet another word for “three Xs,” the Pirahã used hói to describe a small number of objects, hoí to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. Basically, these words mean “around one,” “some” and “many.”
There are some words in foreign languages that just don’t have a direct translation to English. Here now is a list of twenty of them. Your failure to learn them will give me plenty of schadenfreude.
When linguists refer to “untranslatable” words, the idea is not that a word cannot somehow be explained in another language, but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another. This often is due to different social and cultural contexts that have shaped how the word is used.
Morse Code used to be used (and to some extent still is) during war time to communicate in the field, in the air and to report that the Titanic was sinking. It used to be a highly specialized technical skill that took lots of training. Now however you can let everyone know the Germans are coming by typing your message into this handy text to Morse Code translator. Link
Alexia Sloane is only ten years old, but she got the opportunity to work as an interpreter at the European Parliament in Brussels. Alexia received an exception to the age 14 minimum rule because she is fluent in English, French, Spanish, and Mandarin, and is now learning German -and she does a great job interpreting. Did I mention that Alexia is blind?
Alexia has been tri-lingual since birth as her mother, a teacher, is half French and half Spanish, while her father, Richard, is English.
She started talking and communicating in all three languages before she lost her sight but adapted quickly to her blindness. By the age of four, she was reading and writing in Braille.
When she was six, Alexia added Mandarin to her portfolio. She will soon be sitting a GCSE in the language having achieved an A* in French and Spanish last year. The girl is now learning German at school in Cambridge.
Alexia has wanted to be an interpreter since she was six and chose to go to the European Parliament as her prize when she won a young achiever of the year award.
(Image credit: Geoff Robinson)
Do all languages in the world originate from a single "mother tongue"?
By studying phonemes – the consonants, vowels and tonal elements of languages, biologist Quentin D. Atkinson has claimed to discover that human languages originated in Africa:
Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.
Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.
This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to determine what they are talking about.
The missing sock? Or something more profound?
Via Reddit, where it is speculated that they are Italian (because of all the hand gestures).
The first use of the word “tsunami” in an English language publication was in the September 1896 issue of National Geographic Magazine. Eliza Ruhama Scidmore used the Japanese term to describe what we used to call a tidal wave or (more correctly) an earthquake wave.
Scidmore’s article in National Geographic gave the world a gripping insight into the horror of the 1896 tsunami. A few survivors, who saw it advancing in the darkness, reported its height as 80 to 100 feet, she wrote.
“With a difference of but thirty minutes in time between the southern and northern points, it struck the San-Riku coast and in a trice obliterated towns and villages.”
In what today looks like an eery precursor of the 2011 tsunami in the same part of Japan, the 1896 wave “washed away and wrecked 9,313 houses, stranded some larger craft–steamers, schooners, and junks–and crushed or carried away 10,000 fishing boats…Thousands of acres of arable land were turned to wastes, projecting rocks offshore were broken, overturned, or moved hundreds of yards, shallows and bars were formed, and in some localities the entire shoreline was changed,” Scidmore reported.
Read more about the 1896 disaster at NatGeo Newswatch. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
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On one hand, you have to feel for someone who is working in a language they don’t know. On the other hand, these are too funny to not pass along! In some cases, you kind of know what they are trying to say, but the writer just doesn’t quite get there. Others are totally off in the ozone. Link
The following is an article from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
by Susanne Fuchs1, Melanie Weirich1, Christian Kroos2, Natalie Fecher1, Daniel Pape3,
and Sabine Koppetsch4
If one walks through the first level of the main building at the Humboldt University in Berlin and looks at the portraits of the researchers who studied there, became professors, and in some cases won Nobel prizes, one may conclude that the most important visual signs of a famous person are being a man and having a beard.
Wearing a beard has a long socio-cultural tradition going at least back to the Pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians associated facial hair with the sexual, religious and social power of the monarch. Indeed, Queen Hatshepsut wore a bodkin beard after her accession to the throne (Wietig, 2005). Lack of facial hair was long considered a sign of weakness
or divine punishment. The first recorded radical shavings were ordered by Alexander the Great to prevent Persians pulling his soldiers’ beards during hand-to-hand fighting. Another tradition relates beards with fertility.
Today, belief in bearded monarchs, male or female, has declined. The general acceptance of facial hair and specific styles of facial hair appears dependent on sex, culture, nation, and fashion. According to the American Mustache Institute, mustache acceptance is between 16 and 35% in the U.S., though between 72 and 94% in Germany. This paper concerns the influence of facial hair on audio-visual speech intelligibility in noise. It is known that watching the speaker’s face increases the intelligibility of speech in noisy environments (Grant and Seitz, 2000). By observing the cyclical opening and closing of the visible jaw, an observer can identify the rhythmic structure of the spoken utterance or even the focus of a particular sequence (Dohen, Lœvenbruck, and Hill, 2005).
Facial hair can cover parts of the face such as the upper lip, the teeth, and the larynx. This modifies the visible area of the open mouth, and hence facial hair is responsible for a kind of natural impoverishment of the visual speech signal. Under normal conditions such impoverishment may be marginal for the intelligibility of speech, since auditory information is fully available. However, under noisy conditions such as a cocktail party (in audiovisual speech research terms: multi-talker babble noise), visual cues may be crucial for increasing speech intelligibility (assuming that listeners want to understand their communicative partners). Based on these considerations, we hypothesize that:
(1) Facial hair hiding visible articulatory movements leads to lower speech intelligibility under noisy auditory conditions, longer reaction time, and lower confidence in recognizing the relevant target words.
(2) The shape and location of the beard is crucial for the reduced speech intelligibility in noise. A mustache hiding upper lip movement has a larger impact on visual speech intelligibility than a long chin beard, hiding the larynx only. So in terms of speech intelligibility, is it time for a shave?
more …
It’s a simple quiz game. It gives you a word, and you decide whether it’s a cheese or font. How hard could this be? After all, I buy cheese at the grocery store and I have many fonts on my computer. Surprise! There are way more of both in the world than I realized. Link -Thanks, Ginny Turner!
When you come across text you can’t read, can you at least identify the language? Maybe sometimes? In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you’ll be given characters from languages not easily typed on your keyboard, and you match it to the language. It’s not easy -I only got three right. Surely you can beat that! Link
by Richard Lederer
The Comedian of the Keyboard, also known as The Unmelancholy Dane, exited the earthly stage December 23rd, 2000. Victor Borge, the irrepressible musical humorist, didn’t quite make it into the true third millennium, but he lived almost 92 very full years and performed more than a 100 nights a year right up until the spotlight winked out.
Borge left the world a triple legacy. Born in Copenhagen to a family of musicians, Borge became a fine pianist and conductor. Too, he was that rare comedian who never used foul language and never made fun of anyone. “The smile is the shortest distance between two people,” he observed. Most astonishingly, he became a genius in his second language — English, which he learned by spending day after day in movie theaters.
Many years ago, Victor Borge created the game of inflationary language. Since prices keep going up, he reasoned, why shouldn’t language go up too? In English, there are words that contain the sounds of numbers, such as “wonder” (one), “before” (four) and “decorate” (eight). If we inflate each sound by one number, we come up with a string of puns — “twoder,” “befive” and “decornine.”
Here is a story based on Borge’s idea. This tale invites you to read and hear inflationary language in all its inflated wonder — oops, make that “twoder” and to remember the linguistically pyrotechnic genius of The Clown Prince of Denmark.
Twice upon a time there lived a boy named Jack in the twoderful land of Califivenia. Two day Jack, a double-minded lad, decided three go fifth three seek his fivetune.
After making sure that Jack nine a sandwich and drank some Eight-Up, his mother elevenderly said, “Threedeloo, threedeloo. Try three be back by next Threesday.” Then she cheered, “Three, five, seven, nine. Who do we apprecinine? Jack, Jack, yay!”
Jack set fifth and soon met a man wearing a four-piece suit and a threepee. Fifthrightly Jack asked the man, “I’m a Califivenian. Are you two three?”
“Cerelevenly,” replied the man, offiving the high six. “Anytwo five elevennis?”
“Not threeday,” answered Jack inelevently. “But can you help me three locnine my fivetune?”
“Sure,” said the man. “Let me sell you these twoderful beans.”
Jack’s inthreeition told him that the man was a three-faced triple-crosser. Elevensely Jack shouted, “I’m not behind the nine ball. I’m a college gradunine, and I know what rights our fivefathers crenined in the Constithreetion. Now let’s get down three baseven about these beans.”
The man tripled over with laughter. “Now hold on a third,” he responded. “There’s no need three make such a three-do about these beans. If you twot, I’ll give them three you.”
Well, there’s no need three elabornine on the rest of the tale. Jack oned in on the giant and two the battle for the golden eggs. His mother and he lived happily fivever after — and so on, and so on, and so fifth.
© Copyright 2000 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the Jan-Feb 2001 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Whaaat? You didn’t know that prairie dogs have their own language? (Cue Dramatic Prairie Dog clip)
Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Nothern Arizona University spent 30 years studying "prairiedogese" and cracked the secret of how prairie dogs communicate with each other:
During his analysis, Slobodchikoff noticed something: Even though the human call was consistently different from the other calls, there was still significant variation between the individual human calls. He began to wonder whether the little rodents could possibly be describing their predators — not just differentiating hawk from human, but actually saying something about the particular human or coyote or hawk that was approaching.
So he devised a test. He had four (human) volunteers walk through a prairie dog village, and he dressed all the humans exactly the same — except for their shirts. Each volunteer walked through the community four times: once in a blue shirt, once in a yellow, once in green and once in gray.
He found, to his delight, that the calls broke down into groups based on the color of the volunteer’s shirt. "I was astounded," says Slobodchikoff. But what astounded him even more, was that further analysis revealed that the calls also clustered based on other characteristics, like the height of the human. "Essentially they were saying, ‘Here comes the tall human in the blue,’ versus, ‘Here comes the short human in the yellow,’ " says Slobodchikoff.
Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of NPR’s Morning Edition have the fascinating story, including a Flash feature where you can hear the different prairie dog calls: Link
Stanford University has an ongoing study of how children learn language. Part of that study is how they learn color names. They found it to be difficult for a lot of children -in fact, their parents worried that they might be colorblind!
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”
Why does this matter? It has to do with how attention works. In conversation, people have to track what’s being talked about, and they often do this visually. This is particularly so if they’re trying to make sense of whatever it is someone is going on about. Indeed, should I start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner” you’re apt to begin discretely looking around for the mystery person or object.
Kids do the exact same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you’re talking about before you hit them with the color. Say “the balloon is red,” for example, and you will have helped to narrow “red-ness” to being an attribute of the balloon, and not some general property of the world at large. This helps kids discern what about the balloon makes it red.
When the researchers switched the color and noun, they found a significant improvement in performance over the children’s baseline performances, compared to the children who received prenominal training. Link -via TYWKIWBI
(Image credit: Flickr user wine me up)
Archaeologists find them; linguists try to read them, but even after years of study, some writings are indecipherable. Some are from unknown languages, others were written in code. All are baffling. An example is the Rohonc Codex.
This most peculiar script is written from right to left, and seems to mix up runes, straight and rounded characters in the style of Old Hungarian – but it defies all attempts at translation. This bamboozling manuscript was given to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Count Battyany in 1852, and is is believed to have been written in medieval times. Appearing to be hand-scripted, and illustrated with crude black and white sketches, the writing is simply not decipherable in any way. However, code-breakers have managed to at least ascertain that the language involved consists of 42 letters and over 200 different symbols, some non-alphabetic, as well as other symbols which see only occasional use.
The Rohonc Codex is just one of seven untranslated manuscripts in this list at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
Professors and students at Budapest’s ELTE-MTA Theoretical Linguistics Programme celebrate the 20th anniversary of their department with a cover of “We Are The World.”
There comes a time
When we heed a certain call,
When linguists must come together as one.
There are people speaking,
They bind and c-command;
It’s grammar, the greatest gift of all.
We can’t go on
Pretending day by day
That we know our language works in the brain.
We are all a part of
God’s linguist family,
And the truth, you know, grammar’s all we need.
The full lyrics are available in the YouTube pulldown box. Via Language Log, where there is some relevant commentary.
Animals communicate with each other in ways we can’t imagine, but there are a few we’ve figured out. Oh, we can’t translate everything yet, but we know how some do it. Environmental Graffiti looks at five animals that have their own languages. For example, some frogs chatter away in a language we can’t even hear!
The frogs’ calls have to compete with other animals’ loud signals. These calls are perceived as very loud to humans. However, there are frogs that communicate only through ultrasound. Their frequency is too high for the human ear to hear. The Huia cavitympanum species that lives in Borneo is the only species known to man that communicates only through high-pitched sounds.
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There are many familiar terms you read on the internet, but if they came up in conversation, you might not pronounce the words the same as other people do -because you’ve only seen them typed! Geekosystem has a pronunciation guide for 21 words and phrases that you may not have ever heard spoken out loud. But if you ever do, you’ll be correct. Take, for example, the word “Cthulhu”.
4) Cthulhu
Created by H.P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu is a humongous cosmic entity resembling a blend of an octopus, dragon and humanoid. Bordering on a ridiculous mishmash that would be found laughable in today’s horror scene, Cthulhu is still widely-known and loved amongst literature buffs and geeks the world over.
* The Mystery: Probably doesn’t need a list of common mispronunciations, but it’s safe to say every letter in the name other than the “l” can be pronounced one way or another.
* The Answer: Wikipedia says H.P. Lovecraft once transcribed the pronunciation as “Khlûl-hloo,” though didn’t pronounce it that way at other times. Now commonplace, the accepted pronunciation is “ka-thoo-loo;” that is, if you accept a pronunciation from a source other than the creator of the word. Lovecraft didn’t seem to have any consistent way of pronouncing it though, so we’re all better off settling on the common way described above.
You’ll also want to check out the best way to pronounce FAQ, Ubuntu, and meme, among others. Link
(Image credit: the NeatoShop)
