Mango Languages

Object Pronouns in English: A Blast from the Past

In today’s entry, we are going to have a little bit of a history lesson. Don’t worry – it’s easy, and yes, it has to do with linguistics! We are going to learn a little bit about pronouns in English.

Before we start talking about pronouns, though, we need to lay down a little groundwork. As most of us know, the word order of English determines whether a sentence is well-formed (grammatical) or not. Consider the following:

(1) I always wanted to be a ballerina.

(2) *A ballerina wanted I always to be.

(Notice that a common convention in linguistics is to mark ungrammatical sentences with an asterisk preceding it.)

In some languages, word order doesn’t matter as much because of something called case. Nouns and pronouns can have different cases, which indicate their grammatical function in a sentence. For example, the word “apple” could have different endings or forms (much like verb conjugations) depending on whether it’s the subject, direct object, indirect object, etc., in the sentence. This reduces or eliminates the need for word order and position, which in English gives us this information while the word itself stays the same form.

However, there are a few exceptions in English: the object pronouns. These are remnants of Old and Middle English, which actually used case quite extensively. Did you know that English is a Germanic language? German, another Germanic language of course, also uses case. Old and Middle English were more similar to German in this respect, and some pronouns – which are integral words in any language – have retained case from our language’s ancestors!

Consider the subject pronouns: I, you, he, she, it, we, you (all), and they. As their name suggests, these pronouns are used whenever you want to replace a subject noun with a pronoun: John went to the store/He went to the store.

Now let’s look at the object pronouns: me, you, him, her, it, us, you (all), and them. (Notice “you” is the same regardless of whether it’s singular or plural, subject or object! Easy!) These are used as objects in sentences. For those of you more familiar with grammar, you may know that there are direct objects as well as indirect objects – but in English, it doesn’t matter: object pronouns don’t discriminate between direct and indirect! If you’re unsure of what an object is, it’s often the noun that comes after the verb, and it’s a noun that ISN’T the subject. Let’s see some examples:

(3) I wanted to talk to her. (“I” – subject pronoun; “her” – object pronoun)

(4) She and I went to the movies with him. (“She” and “I” – subject pronouns; “him” – object pronoun. This is why “*Her and I…” is incorrect – “her” is being incorrectly used as a subject, when it’s really an object pronoun.)

(5) Jim accompanied Barbara and me. (Yes, this IS correct! Resist the urge to say “Barbara and I” – remember that “I” is only a subject pronoun, which usually comes at the beginning of sentences!)

Is it surprising to you that these words have lasted hundreds of years, despite everything else losing case marking? Are there any other words or categories of words you know of that have resisted linguistic change – in English or any other language?

Language Colors our World

Several blog entries so far have mentioned how linguistics can be applied to a great number of topics, and today’s entry is no exception. This time we are relating language and color terminology – would you ever have guessed there have been extensive studies on this topic? What is there to even discuss? Languages have names for colors and that’s that, right? Well, not exactly.

Stanley R. Witkowski and Cecil H. Brown’s article entitled “An Explanation of Color Nomenclature Universals” (1977) discusses how not only are humans “wired” to differentiate or partition the color spectrum, but these color categories are also encoded into our lexicon (vocabulary) according to the same pattern…across all languages! Witkowski and Brown summarize the findings of other researchers regarding the order in which colors are linguistically classified and given names across the languages of the world.

Specifically, all languages have a minimum of two “composite categories,” or “macrocolors” – that is, all languages differentiate between, at the very least, “macroblack” and “macrowhite.” Simply “black” and “white” aren’t accurate enough terms, because red can fall under the “macrowhite” category in some languages, while cool colors like blue and green are called by the same name, under “macroblack.”

If a language divides colors into three categories (with three color names), the next color to be partitioned out will always be red. Again, this is more accurately called “macrored,” since other colors will usually fall under this category, with red being the “focus” of the composite category.   The “focus” is the color which is judged by speakers to be the most typical or representative of the word/category.  After that, languages will either separate out yellow, or they will identify “grue” (green or blue – the focus of grue often varies among speakers).  Languages with more color terms will then separate out brown, pink, purple, and orange, but research has not indicated any particular order in the emergence of these terms.

There are even more fascinating things to learn about color nomenclature, such as the roles hue and brightness play in the naming of colors. Do you know of any languages that have a more limited set of color categories? What about a language with more divisions than your native language?

What is that Lyric? Mondegreens at their best

We’ve all been there: you’re listening to a song with a friend and singing along (possibly overzealously and off-key) and you belt out a funky line, only for your friend to look at you like you grew tentacles and inform you that the REAL lyrics are actually something much more plausible – but phonologically similar.  Possibly the most famous example is in Purple Haze, in which many people could swear that Jimi Hendrix sings “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.” (It’s even the URL of the biggest misheard lyrics site – www.kissthisguy.com.)  And if you’ve ever played the board game Mad Gab, you’ll know that this confusion in phonology is the basis of the game: players are given cards with nonsensical phrases written, which sound very similar to well-known idioms or other sayings but are notoriously difficult to hear yourself once you’ve read and processed the “meaning” of the written phrase.  Another example: one of my best friends sometimes refers to the whole “kitten caboodle.”

These “misheard lyrics” and silly homophonous phrases are called “mondegreens.”   The first usage of this term occurred in Harper Magazine’s November 1954 issue in an article by Sylvia Wright.  As a child she had misheard part of a seventeenth-century ballad:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray,

And Lady Mondegreen. (correct: “And laid him on the green.”)

You might also be familiar with a sort of reverse-mondegreen song called Mairzy Doats, which sounds like nonsense but part of the song itself clears it all up (“mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy”).  On YouTube, illustrated mondegreens and misheard lyrics are becoming more and more popular with the increased ease of making multimedia projects (and the latest trends in vocal distortion in popular music).  My personal favorite is a hilarious illustrated version of Sean Paul’s “Temperature” (WARNING: contains a couple of misheard, textually-censored expletives that aren’t actually in the song):  Sean Paul – Temperature Misheard Lyrics

What are the funniest mondegreens you’ve heard?  What was the real phrase or lyric?

Do Animals Use Language?

If you were to conduct a survey on the street asking passers-by whether they think animals use language or not, you’ll likely get a mixture of “yeas” and “nays” (and probably more than a few “I don’t knows”).   Many pet owners and animal lovers would absolutely enjoy having a conversation with the animals of the world (unless, perhaps, Finding Nemo was right about sea gulls).  Some might believe that the reason we can’t speak to and understand animals is because they simply speak a different language than we do.  But do they really possess the capabilities of language? Or is animal communication simply that – communication (not language)?

Many linguists believe that animals do not possess language.  The crucial distinction is that linguists differentiate between communication and language.  Communication (similar to “language”) can be difficult to define because it often uses other terms that, in turn, need definitions.  But generally speaking, most people understand that communication is a transmission of information, and this information is “encoded” somehow in what we loosely call symbols.  Language certainly is communication, then, but is all communication language?  Most would say no: communication is much broader, and some would argue animal communication is a part of communication that doesn’t include language.

Robbins Burling (1993) argues in “Primate Calls, Human Language, and Nonverbal Communication” that nonverbal communication (most of which he refers to as “gesture-calls”) lacks an important means of distinguishing or contrasting because it “grades” along a continuum.   He uses an example of a laugh grading into giggles, which grade into snorts, which grade into cries of objection, then cries of anguish, which then grade into sobs.   The boundaries of these are fuzzy.  Consider then language, which Burling states is very contrastive: we have thousands upon thousands of distinct words, our language distinguishes sounds from one another and tells us which are “allowed” and which aren’t, and of course we have a practically infinite number of distinct sentences that are possible.  This is only the beginning of Burling’s argument, and we should mention that he also examines the similarities of language and non-verbal communication.

Now let’s look at another person’s ideas.  Charles Hockett’s “The Problem of Universals in Language” (1966) proposes a detailed list of what he calls “design-features” of a language; these are essentially characteristics that are found in every human language and are absent in at least one known animal communication system.   This doesn’t necessarily define human language, nor does his list only show differences between communication and language.  However, some of his design-features have become very influential.  Here are some brief explanations of a few:

Arbitrariness: the form and the meaning of a signal is arbitrary; there is no logical connection between the two.  For example, there is nothing about the words “chien,” “cane,” “inu,” or “dog” that logically connects these forms with what they represent: a domesticated species of Canis that wags its tail when it’s happy and pants when it’s hot.

Prevarication: this simply means we can lie – our messages can be false, deceptive, or even meaningless.

Reflexiveness: you can use language to talk about language.

Productivity: speakers of language can invent – and understand – entirely novel messages that no one has ever uttered before.

Of course, there are many, many more arguments for and against the idea of animals possessing the capability of language.  Both sides of the aisle make compelling arguments, but the final say is up to you!  Can you think of any other differences and/or similarities between animal communication and language? Or are they one and the same?  Is there a gray area”? Let us know what you think!

Why Zombies Contribute to Linguistics

I recently watched an independent “zombie flick” called Pontypool. I’m using quotations because it’s not exactly your normal zombie movie – it was more about a disease than what the disease did to people. So what does this have to do with linguistics? Well, in Pontypool, the virus that caused mobs of cannibalistic non-persons to overrun the small eponymous Ontario town wasn’t transmitted by blood, or saliva, or anything biological.  It was in fact transmitted by “infected” words:  if a person heard an infected word, they would begin to repeat it over and over uncontrollably until they essentially couldn’t function, presumably because the virus took over. It would begin to sneak into their sentences. One victim “caught” the virus through the word “sample” – he first was talking about something “simple,” but the infection caught on and, like an uncontrollable tic, he hesitatingly asked the radio DJ he was speaking to if he had any samples to play. Sample. Sample. Samplesamplesample.

The most interesting part of this lexical disease to me was when a doctor in the movie came to the conclusion that only when you understand the infected word does it infect you as well.  As I was watching the movie, I started thinking about what this means linguistically. Judging by the doctor’s explanation, you could be infected only if you had a lexical entry stored for a given infected word and, moreover, you successfully accessed it.  At this point it seemed that this lexical entry was “unleashed” and overpowered all of the other ones stored, causing the newly zombified person to repeat the word over and over.  When the female lead character found herself becoming infected by the word “kill,” the main character tried to “replace” the word, to distract her from “kill,” by eventually saying “Kill is kiss.” He repeated this over and over so that she would, in effect, replace her lexical entry for “kill” with that of “kiss” – a sort of induced or forced aphasia, in my approximation.  This scene ended with the female character saying, “Kill me,” and the male character obliged by giving her a passionate kiss, curing her.

Another way the characters avoided infection was by speaking in a language other than English. The characters determined that only English words were infected, so the doctor spoke his thoughts aloud in Armenian while the male and female lead characters spoke French as best they could.  This part made sense to me, since a French word wouldn’t access an English lexical entry.  Even if the native English speaker accessed the corresponding translation in English after understanding it in French, it wasn’t because the word was spoken and understood in English; rather they traveled to the English entry via the French one. This interpretation assumes that bilinguals have two separate lexicons, however – one for each language.  Psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists differ in their opinions about lexicon, however. What would the implications be if both languages were stored in one common lexicon in the mind?  I think, for this movie, it would mean speaking in another language wouldn’t stop the infection. And what about the “replaced” words, like the “kill is kiss” method? Well, you could argue that this is another “indirect” access to kill’s lexical entry, via “kiss,” perhaps.

In the end, I decided to stop thinking about it because I was going to miss the rest of the movie, but it was an entertaining thought experiment. What do you think – are the “cures” plausible?  Why or why not?  Do you have a better cure for the word-zombies?

Teaching your own Language: Harder than it seems!

The main part of my job as a Project Linguist is to edit courses developed by our teachers in order to make sure that the language is broken down in such a way that a student can understand and build sentences with it, as well as to ensure that the course is linguistically sound.  Since I started at Mango in September, the variety of courses I’m responsible for have changed a little (some languages have been “traded” between the linguists for one reason or another), but no matter what, I always have several foreign languages and a few ESL (English as a Second Language) courses.

You would think that the ESL courses would be easier to edit, since the language we are teaching in those courses is, of course, English.  When I edit the foreign language courses, I am essentially a “super-student” – most of the foreign languages are languages I don’t speak, so while I am editing I am also learning.  This helps me to sympathize with future students because if I’m confused by something, the student most likely will be as well.  However, ESL is actually more difficult for me to edit.  That’s because the students in ESL courses are Polish speakers, Russian speakers, or Italian speakers, etc.  I have to put myself in the shoes of a student whose native language is something other than my own.  On top of that, because the language we are teaching in the course is my native language, sometimes I find myself taking certain grammatical structures or sound changes for granted only to remember that the student has no way of knowing them!

For example, forming the past tense with a regular English verb is quite simple on the surface: you just add –ed (or just –d) to the end. But this –ed can have three different sounds: [t], as in “picked”; [d] as in “blamed”; and [id] as in “needed”!  It’s something an English speaker doesn’t think twice about because we have mastered this since we were children, but it’s a very important sound change for an ESL student.  I have to be very self-aware of my own language in order to teach it to someone else.

In addition to that, because it is an ESL course, the entire client is in the student’s native tongue.  So the name of the chapter, the directions on the buttons, and all of the audio instructions are in, say, Polish.  In addition to that, all of the grammar and cultural notes are in Polish as well!  I use a lot of online translation sites and dictionaries to help me edit these.  The translations aren’t always perfect (sometimes hilariously odd, in fact), and I have to make sure the translation truly conveys what the sentence means in English.   English also uses a lot of synonyms to describe different concepts, but the source language might use only one word to cover the entire range of ideas.  It is difficult to teach these different “shades” of meaning to a student who knows them all by one word!  These are only a few examples of some of the challenges in editing ESL courses.

Do you have any experience teaching or explaining your native language to someone as their second language? What difficulties did you find in doing so?

Language Stew: Pidgins and Creoles

Creole Languages Map

Most people have heard the term “creole” at some point or another.  Maybe this word conjures up the smell of jambalaya or the tune of “Lady Marmalade.”  And when someone hears the word “pidgin” they most likely think of a bird flying around a parking lot.  But both of these terms actually refer to particular types of language.

A pidgin language is a simplified language that develops when two groups must communicate with one another but do not share a common language.  Pidgins historically arose when one nation colonized or enslaved another, or engaged in extensive trade with another.  It is important to note that pidgins are not “broken language,” but a simple type of language.  Pidgins often use the syntax (sentence structure and organization of words) of one parent language, and the vocabulary, or lexicon, of the other.

A creole language is simply a pidgin that has become the native language of a speaker. That is, a pidgin is always a speaker’s second (or third, or fourth…) language.  Only when a generation grows up speaking that language as its native tongue does it become a creole.

A creole rarely becomes an official language of a nation due to the common assumption that it is somehow less valid – or considered a dialect rather than a language – than one of the parent languages (often the colonizers’ language).  In this type of social situation, the “prestige” language is called the acrolect (with the other parent language known as the basilect).  There can often be several levels of mesolects that are somewhere in between.  Due to the often oppressive environment under which pidgins (and thereby creoles) arise, there is often the compulsion to speak the acrolect, which can lead to decreolization.

Do you know of any pidgins and/or creoles?  Do you know which two languages formed or contributed to each of them? How have these pidgins/creoles been treated socially and ideologically by the population – are they viewed as vulgar, imperfect, or broken?

What is a Syllable? The Ryhme & Reason

Most people know what a syllable is.  For example, you can probably answer a question like, “How many syllables does the word ‘afterthought’ have?” (The answer is 3.)   But when faced with the task of explaining what a syllable is, many people simply don’t know what to say.

First of all, a syllable is a unit that organizes speech sounds.  It’s not the smallest unit (that would be a phoneme – a given speech sound in isolation) but you can consider them the “building blocks” of words, as far as sounds go.   A syllable can be composed of three parts, although not every part is mandatory: an onset, a nucleus, and a coda. The last two (nucleus and coda) actually make up the rime (also spelled rhyme, which only makes sense!).  The rime is simply the nucleus and coda (if present) of a vowel.

Let’s discuss the nucleus first.  Just like in biology, the nucleus usually is the “center” of a syllable and is the most important part of a syllable.  Every syllable has a nucleus, and it is most often a vowel sound.   A nucleus can also be a diphthong, which is a combination of two vowel sounds, and in some cases it can also be a certain category of consonants that allow for more air passage, like [l] and [r].

The onset, as you might guess from the name, comes at the beginning of a syllable, just before the nucleus.  This can be just one phoneme, or speech sound, like the “c” in “cat.”  But it can also consist of a combination of sounds, like the “str” in “strong” – that’s three phonemes.  Syllables don’t need to have an onset, though, such as in the word “act” – the first “a” sound is the nucleus, since it’s the vowel.  Some languages require their syllables to always have onsets, some languages prohibit onsets, and some languages (like English) allow for both the presence and absence of onsets.

The coda of a vowel is also optional, from a theoretical standpoint.  Like onsets, different languages require different things in regards to codas.  The coda of a syllable is the last sound or group of sounds in the syllable.  It can be as simple as the “t” in “cat,” or as complex as the “lfths” in “twelfths.”  Again, the nucleus and coda of a syllable are what compose the rime, and if you think about it, this is exactly what we mean by something “rhyming” with something else – the two words or phrases have the exact same (or very similar) rime.  That is, they have the same nucleus and coda. So “cat” and “bat” rhyme because they share a rime in common: “-at.”

Now that you know what a syllable is, can you think of any languages that prohibit codas? That prohibit onsets? That prohibit complex onsets/codas (i.e., made of more than one sound)?

One Man’s Allophone is Another Man’s Phoneme

Phonology is the sound system of a language and how it encodes meaning. Some languages have very small inventories of sounds, whereas others have many sounds, or phonemes.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound used to make meaningful contrasts between vocal utterances. The conventional way to write a phoneme is using forward slashes. For example, /p/ is a recognizable and common sound in English (and many other languages). But did you know that not all /p/ sounds are pronounced the same way in English?

You may not have noticed it, but the /p/ in “peak” is different than the /p/ in “speak.” The former is aspirated (a term linguists use to describe the burst of air that accompanies the release), whereas the latter is unaspirated. If it’s hard for you to hear the difference, try holding your hand in front of your mouth while saying both words – you’ll feel a little puff of air when you say “peak,” but not “speak.”

In English, both of these sounds (written as [ph] and [p] respectively) are recognized as one sound. In linguistic terms, they are both allophones of the same phoneme /p/. In many other languages, though, these two sounds are separate phonemes and aren’t confused with each other at all. In fact, using [ph] in place of [p] would change the meaning of the utterance completely! Can you think of any other sounds that we mentally categorize as the same, but are actually different? (Hint: try enunciating your words very carefully and notice the differences from rapid speech…)

Language and Thought

A controversial topic in linguistics is the concept of linguistic relativity (also known as linguistic determinism, linguistic relativism, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

This hypothesis essentially claims that language influences or determines thought. That is, the way a language is structured, its vocabulary, its sounds, and all the other things that make up a language affect how a speaker actually thinks and perceives the world. The opposing argument is that thought determines language; that a person’s cognition and perception affect the characteristics of his or her language.

An example often used in the discussion of linguistic relativity is the Pirahã people, an Amazonian tribe located in Brazil. The Pirahã language has no words for numbers, for example, and the people proved unresponsive to attempts to teach them to count. There is a controversy over whether the Pirahã are incapable of actually learning numbers and counting, or whether they simply don’t need to (as their trade is mostly done through bartering). So the question is, are they unable to count because they have no number words? Or do they have no number words because they don’t need to count?

The linguistic relativity debate spans a great range of topics, but generally it asks what the relationship between language and thought is. Are you able to think without words? If you spoke a different language, would you think in a different way?