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Posts Tagged ‘language’

The Philadelphia Accent Under Siege

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 9, 2014| 11 Comments »

Though I can’t say I’m crazy about the Philadelphia accent — or, for that matter, the accents of other places I’ve lived, like Boston’s, Minnesota’s, and Rochester’s — I really would hate to see it go.

I do like trying to identify where new acquaintances might be from. And the homogenization of regional accents just seems a loss. Maybe not a loss on the scale of endangered languages, but a part of a regional culture we’re likely to miss once it’s extinct like the heath hen.

This was in the NY Times recently: “The Philadelphia regional accent remains arguably the most distinctive, and least imitable, accent in North America. Let’s not argue about this. Ask anyone to do a Lawn Guyland accent or a charming Southern drawl and that person will approximate it. Same goes for a Texas twang or New Orleans yat, a Valley Girl totally omigod.

“Philly-South Jersey patois is a bit harder: No vowel escapes diphthongery, no hard consonant is safe from a mid-palate dent. Extra syllables pile up so as to avoid inconvenient tongue contact or mouth closure. If you forget to listen closely, the Philadelphia, or Filelfia, accent may sound like mumbled Mandarin without the tonal shifts.

“Some dialects can be transcribed onto the page, but the Philadelphia accent really has to be heard to be believed. And when an accent goes silent, so do its speakers. A recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania reported that, like many regional phenomena, the Philly sound is conforming more and more with the mainstream of Northern accents. And that’s a shame.

“The beauty of the Philly accent, and I should point out it’s mostly to whites that these sweeping statements apply, is its mashing-up of the Northern and Southern. Nowhere but in the Delaware Valley can you hear those rounded vowels — soda is sewda, house is hay-ouse — a clear influence from Baltimore and points south.”

More at the NY Times, here. The article is by Daniel Nester. (Nester? Not related to I.H. Nester, my Philadelphia father-in-law’s long ago employer? Now, that would be a small world.)

By the way, if you are interested in the Penn study, check out the National Public Radio interview: “Students of Penn linguistics professor Bill Labov have been walking around some 89 Philadelphia neighborhoods for four decades. At the school’s linguistics lab, they have shelves and shelves of recorded conversations from Philadelphians born in 1888 all the way to 1992.” More here.

Graphic: Jennifer Daniel
Can you identify the sawf pressel, the wooder, torsts (as in ” ‘Lannic city is too torsty ennymore”), a samalem, arnj juyce, a sennid cannle, a miskeeda, and the tayyin rowll (Italian roll)?

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Language and Personality

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day I was chatting with my three-year-old grandson about language. I can’t remember how we got started, but I found myself talking to him in “Goose Latin,” which was all the rage when I was about 10. He listened with a bemused look on his face and then said politely, “I don’t know that language.”

I may not be able to speak anything but English and a few lines of French poetry, but I do love learning about language. So I appreciated receiving this tidbit from the Economist magazine on how language interacts with personality.

The reporter RLG writes, “Many multilinguals report different personalities, or even different worldviews, when they speak their different languages.

“It’s an exciting notion, the idea that one’s very self could be broadened by the mastery of two or more languages. In obvious ways (exposure to new friends, literature and so forth) the self really is broadened. Yet it is different to claim—as many people do—to have a different personality when using a different language. A former Economist colleague, for example, reported being ruder in Hebrew than in English. So what is going on here?

“Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called ‘Whorfianism,’ this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist, which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought. …

“Bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. …

“What of ‘crib’ bilinguals, raised in two languages? Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.

“Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages.”

If you’re interested, there’s a great deal more explanation at the Economist, here.

Photo: Alamy

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Speaking in Code

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 19, 2013| 2 Comments »

Did you ever have a secret language?

I spoke a lot of Goose Latin when I was about 10. (How-fow do-foo you-foo spee-feak goo-foose La-fa-ti-fin? Tha-fat i-fis my-fi se-fee-cre-fet.) I don’t think my mother had much trouble cracking the code.

I have always been interested in how people disguise what they are really thinking when they speak, and I once made a video about having an extremely polite tea with someone I didn’t like, using a voiceover for my true thoughts.

A more serious reason for speaking in code was described in a Boston Globe article by Joshua J. Friedman last month.

“To communicate while living under an authoritarian regime requires a special sort of linguistic creativity. As a new paper by Nassima Neggaz in the journal Language, Discourse & Society reports, one solution that Syrians have found is to speak in codes. …

“Neggaz interviewed approximately 20 members of several close groups of relatives and university friends in Homs, Hama, and Damascus about the codes they used between 1980 and 2011. She found that members of one group, to speak of someone who was hiding from the regime, would say that the person was ‘sick,’ mardan. Members of another group would say that he was ‘studying’ (‘am yadruss) or that he was ‘taking exams’ (‘andu fhussat).

“To describe someone who was being detained or who was in jail, it was common to say that this person was ‘at his aunt’s house’ (huwa fi bayt khaltu). To suggest that a person was an informer, some speakers would say khattu heluw: ‘His handwriting is beautiful.’ ” More here.

Image: Christoph Niemann for Time, content.time.co

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No Easy Translation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 17, 2013| 2 Comments »

In Sweden, mangata is the word for the roadlike reflection the moon casts on the water. In Finland there’s a word for the distance reindeer can travel comfortably before taking a break: poronkusema. A terrific German word that people familiar with Concord, Massachusetts, will appreciate is Waldeinsamkeit. What do you think it means? Yep. “A feeling of solitude, being alone in the woods and a connectedness to nature.”

National Public Radio staff say:  “Just as good writing demands brevity, so, too, does spoken language. Sentences and phrases get whittled down over time. One result: single words that are packed with meaning, words that are so succinct and detailed in what they connote in one language that they may have no corresponding word in another language.

“Such words aroused the curiosity of the folks at a website called Maptia, which aims to encourage people to tell stories about places.

” ‘We wanted to know how they used their language to tell their stories,’ Maptia co-founder and CEO Dorothy Sanders tells All Things Considered host Robert Siegel.

“So they asked people across the globe to give them examples of words that didn’t translate easily to English.”

I loved this report. You will, too.  Read more at NPR, here.

Art: National Public Radio, “All Things Considered”

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Language at High Altitudes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a good one from The Atlantic for all you linguists out there.

Richard Solash reports, “A new study claims that mountains may have influenced a special class of sounds occurring in almost all of the languages of the Caucasus.

“In the 10th century, an Arab geographer described the Caucasus region as a ‘mountain of tongues.’ The nickname has stuck to this day, likely because of how well it captures two of the area’s main features: its dramatic cliffs and its array of languages.

“But new and controversial research by a U.S. linguist suggests that the ‘mountains’ may have more to do with the ‘tongues’ than anyone has guessed.

“In a study published last month in the journal Plos One, Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami, claims that a special class of sounds occurring in almost all of the languages of the Caucasus may be due to ‘the direct influence’ of the region’s high altitude.

“Everett’s conclusion applies beyond the Caucasus as well. He offers apparent proof that the rare sounds, known as ‘ejectives,’ are far more likely to occur in regions of high elevation worldwide.”

More at The Atlantic, where you will also find a great map of languages in the Caucasus..

Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Greater Caucasus Mountain Range

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Zebra Finches Have Something to Tell You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2013| 2 Comments »

I was reminded of a recent science article this morning. Erik was speaking Swedish to my one-year-old grandson, and John said he shows the three-year-old foreign-language cartoons because it’s a great age to get an ear for them.

I recalled something interesting in the NY Times. Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist wrote, “Babies learn to speak months after they begin to understand language. As they are learning to talk, they babble …

“But when babies babble, what are they actually doing? And why does it take them so long to begin speaking?

“Insights into these mysteries of human language acquisition are now coming from a surprising source: songbirds.

“Researchers who focus on infant language and those who specialize in birdsong have teamed up in a new study suggesting that learning the transitions between syllables — from “da” to “do” and “do” to “da” — is the crucial bottleneck between babbling and speaking. …

“The lead author, Dina Lipkind, a psychology researcher at Hunter College in Manhattan [said], “What we’re showing is that babbling is not only to learn sounds, but also to learn transitions between sounds.” …

“At first, however, the scientists behind these findings weren’t studying human infants at all. They were studying birds.

“ ‘When I got into this, I never believed we were going to learn about human speech,’ said Ofer Tchernichovski, a birdsong researcher at Hunter and the senior author of the study, published [in] the journal Nature. …

“Dr. Tchernichovski and Gary Marcus, who studies infant language learning at New York University and who helped design the study, discussed the results. Could the difficulty learning transitions in songbirds hold true for human infants?

“By analyzing an existing data set of recordings of infant babbling, they found that as babies introduce a new syllable into their repertory, they first tend to repeat it (‘do-do-do’). Then, like the birds, they begin appending it to the beginning or end of syllable strings (‘do-da-da’ or ‘da-da-do’), eventually inserting it between other syllables (‘da-do–da’).” More.

Photo: Iva Ljubicic
A juvenile zebra finch, right, perched next to a plastic model, which helps the bird learn to sing. Researchers have discovered that babies learn to babble much as birds learn to sing.

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A Delirium of Swallows

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 25, 2013| 6 Comments »

I took a walk on Lakeside Drive today and saw scores (hundreds?) of swallows swooping and wheeling like berserk bats toward the lake, upside down over the road, then sideways and shuddering back toward the lake again in a group dance with no obvious explanation.

When I went online and Googled “swallows going berserk,” I found an Audubon blog post in New Hampshire that used that exact phrase. But the author  thought the swallows were just feeding and happy to see spring arrive.

I have decided that the collective noun for swallow should be “delirium,” as in “a delirium of swallows.”

Are you into collective nouns for birds and animals? They can be a lot of fun, with terms going back hundreds of years. Find your favorites at Wikipedia, here. A congregation of alligators, a rabble of bees, a coalition of cheetah, a gulp of cormorants, a consortium of crabs, a murder of crows — and I am only in the c’s!

Be sure to use “a delirium of swallows” as your next opportunity and appear to know something esoteric that no one else knows.

Video: John Downer Productions

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Music for Vanishing Languages

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2013| Leave a Comment »

As I mentioned the other day in the post about the Latin newscast on Finnish radio, I am interested in endangered languages.

Now a composer who is also interested has melded voices of  threatened languages with his music.

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim writes at the NY Times that the “Vanishing Languages” project by Kevin James, “a New York-based trombonist and composer, is a rare hybrid of conservation effort and memorial, new music and ancient languages.

“Prodded by Unesco statistics that predict that by the end of the century half of the world’s 6,000 languages will be extinct, Mr. James spent months in the field tracking down and recording the last remaining speakers of four critically endangered tongues: Hokkaido Ainu, an aboriginal language from northern Japan, the American Indian Quileute from western Washington, and Dalabon and Jawoyn, aboriginal languages from Arnhem Land in Australia.”

Reviewing a concert James gave at a New York venue, da Fonseca-Wollheim says, “ ‘Counting in Quileute,’ which opens with bells struck and bowed and swung in the air and ends with the ring of a Buddhist prayer bowl, had a strong ritualistic feel to it.

“The often puzzling actions of the players — flutists whispering into mouthpieces, a cellist tapping with both hands on the fingerboard as if playing a recorder — appeared like a secret choreography designed to bring forth the voices of the dead filtered through the crackle of old phonographs.

“The imperfections of these old recordings, which Mr. James used alongside those he made recently in the field, show how heavily smudged the window is that we have on these vanishing cultures. And yet at times it seemed as if it were these voices who were willing the performance into existence.” (Isn’t da Fonseca-Wollheim a lovely writer?) More.

For a couple other blog discussions of endangered language, click here or here.

Photo: Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Leah Scholes of Speak Percussion using a double bass bow to play a bowl as part of “Vanishing Languages.”

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Saving Latin. Wait. What?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2013| Leave a Comment »

When you consider all the minority languages that are endangered today — many of which I’ve blogged about (for example, here) — it seems a bit perverse to be bringing back Latin on the radio. But as one more way to interest people in languages, how bad can it be?

For the Finns, who have to speak many languages because hardly anyone speaks theirs, it’s just one more.

As John Tagliabue wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, the Internet has given a boost to “a weekly summary of world events and news broadcast by Finnish state radio — not in Finnish, but in classical Latin. …

“In recent weeks, the subjects have included the financial crisis in Cyprus, an unusually brilliant aurora borealis and the election of Pope Francis. …

“It may be no coincidence that the broadcast began in 1989, the year Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Finns turned toward Western Europe. For educated Finns, Latin had long been the country’s link to Western culture, and they were required to study the language in school. …

“While the broadcasts once went out over the airwaves, with shortwave reception for listeners outside Finland, more and more listeners tune in to the program’s Web site, through podcasts and MP3 downloads.” More.

Image: Wikipedia
Cicero Denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, 1882–1888. It’s what Suzanne’s Mom thinks of when she thinks “Latin.”

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Rare Scots Dialect Spoken No More

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve written several posts on the threat to languages that have few speakers — and on the linguistic preservationists racing against time. (Here, for example.)

Why does language extinction matter, you ask? Because language embodies so much about culture. We are poorer in being ignorant of how different people live and in having a chance to learn taken away from us.

Now the last speaker of a rare Scots dialect is gone. Writes the Associated Press, “In a remote fishing town on the tip of Scotland’s Black Isle, the last native speaker of the Cromarty dialect has passed away, taking with him a little fragment of the English linguistic mosaic.

“Academics said [October 3] that Bobby Hogg, who was 92 when he died … was the last person fluent in the dialect once common to the seaside town of Cromarty, 175 miles (280 kilometers) north of Edinburgh.

“ ‘I think that’s a terrible thing,’ said Robert Millar, a linguist at the University of Aberdeen in northern Scotland. ‘The more diversity in terms of nature we have, the healthier we are. It’s the same with language.’ …

“It’s part of a relentless trend toward standardization which has driven many regional dialects and local languages into oblivion. Linguists often debate how to define and differentiate the world’s many dialects, but most agree that urbanization, compulsory education and mass media have conspired to iron out many of the kinks that make rural speech unique.” More.

Photograph: Am Baile-High Life Highland/Associated Press.
Bobby Hogg, who recently passed away aged 92.

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Learning Basic Baby

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2012| 7 Comments »

It says here, at Pacific Standard, that learning a second language translates into clearer thinking. No surprises there, but good to have evidence.

In Providence this week, a certain baby I know is showing an affinity for more than one language. His mother thinks he finds his father’s Swedish soothing, especially when sung in a low voice.

While the baby is tuning in to Swedish and English, his parents are studying a language called Basic Baby. It’s the world’s oldest language. In its simplest form, it involves crying: “You’re doing this wrong — try a different tack.” Or silence: “You’re doing this right.” At higher levels, it gets more complex. For example, you may be doing something right, but there is still crying: “This digestive business feels totally weird.”

Basic Baby is not too hard to learn if you (a) pay attention, (b) realize that you will figure it out eventually. It was your own first language. If you are  rusty, maybe you just need to bone up a bit.

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Language is Funny

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on March 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Language can be funny.

 

I like thinking about all the ways that the sign in a local shop window — “Craft Butchery” — could be read. Maybe the term is familiar to you, but it struck me funny. “We butcher arts and crafts”?

I guess it all depends on the meaning of “craft.” Small craft, as in small craft warning? “Hurricane predicted. Ignore this small craft advisory and invite craft butchery.”

If I saw the sign in Salem, I might conclude it was short for witchcraft butchery, but I still wouldn’t know if it was butchery by witchcraft or butchery of witchcraft.

Well, as you likely assumed straight off, the store sells cuts of meat. And the butcher is an artisan in his field.

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Bilingual Benefits

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 16, 2012| 5 Comments »

Like many Swedes, Erik is fluent in several languages and understands others. It’s a riot to hear him “conversing” with Svein. Svein says something in Norwegian. Erik answers in Swedish.

Language skill has come in handy for both Erik and Suzanne recently, as they are able to converse with the Honduran worker who is painting their new residence. Not only will the paint job be better, but Erik thinks he may have found a new group with whom to play pick-up soccer.

Beyond such practical matters, speaking other languages can improve brain capability and even keep Alzheimer’s patients functioning longer, as Jessica Marshall writes at Discovery News. The longer you speak two languages, the better.

“Being able to use two languages and never knowing which one you’re going to use right now rewires your brain. The attentional executive system which is crucial for all higher thought — it’s the most important cognitive piece in how we think — that system seems to be enhanced.” Read more.

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Saving Minority Languages Through Song

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 17, 2011| 2 Comments »

Thousands of languages are becoming extinct as the last of the people who speak them die off.

In a race against time, some determined souls who value the richness and insights that individual languages provide are making efforts to save as many minority languages as possible. We posted about that here.

Today National Public Radio had a feature on another approach to preservation, the Liet International Song Contest.

“Auditions are now underway for next May’s Eurovision Song Contest — that often-ridiculed television spectacle that has drawn millions of viewers around the world every year since 1956. In 2012 the host country will be Azerbaijan, since that country fielded last year’s winner. The show’s performers rely on outlandish costumes, dance moves and gimmicks to grab attention because most viewers can’t understand what they’re singing. But language is at the heart of another Eurovision-sponsored song and performance competition this weekend in Italy. The Liet International Song Contest is a very serious attempt to keep some of the continent’s neglected languages alive.”

Read more.’

 

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Esperantists in the Subway

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2011| 8 Comments »

When you have a doctor’s appointment in the morning and go to work late, you see a whole different crowd riding the subway. In the summer after rush hour, there are a lot of families on outings. A woman and a boy of about 11 got on and sat near me. The boy began to tell his mother that he had been reading about a made-up language called Esperanto. She said she had heard of it and thought it had been popular a long time ago but hadn’t worked out. An older kid they didn’t know chimed in to confirm the woman’s view. Esperanto was intended to be used as an international language, but nobody spoke it anymore.

That was too much for me. “Well,” I said, “hundreds of thousands of people speak it. I speak it.” If I may say so, the boy and his mother were delighted. Could I speak a few words, they asked?

“Mi parolas Esperanto,” I said. The boy repeated the “I Speak Esperanto” phrase several times. He then wanted to know “hello.” “Saluton,” I said. I told him and his mother why Ludwig Zamenhoff had felt a need for such a language more than 100 years ago in a war-torn part of Eastern Europe.

When the woman and the boy were leaving the train, they asked how to say “good-bye” and told me good-bye in Esperanto.

Now get this. Here is William Shatner, long before “Star Trek,” in a spooky black and white movie called “Incubus” — filmed in Esperanto!

That is so bizarre, I thought at first it must be a hoax. Maybe some Esperantists dubbed it for a joke on YouTube, I thought. But Wikipedia is very careful about such things, and it confirms that William Shatner performed in a movie in Esperanto that was thought to be lost. The recently rediscovered print had subtitles in French, which have now been converted to English. Read Wikipedia here. (Read my previous post on invented languages here.)

And just in case you are now inspired to learn the language, this little clip offers a pretty good lesson.

I hope the boy on the subway finds it. A terrifically curious and open-minded young man.

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