Let’s have a little fun and check out the linguistics behind our favorite interweb felines! While cats might not really be able to learn a foreign language, LOLcats have won our hearts with their endearing language.
Check out this fascinating video by Lauren Gawne: “I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak.”
Once you’ve watched the video, try out this fun LOLspeak translator and leave us a comment in LOLspeak!
Happy Friday Everyone!
Here is a fascinating lecture from linguist Steve Pinker on TED Talks about Language and Thought. Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds — and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.
In his lecture, Pinker says, “Languages is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another. And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick.”
What are YOUR thoughts on the subject?
Happy Thursday Everyone!
For those who have not yet heard about TED Talks, get ready to have your world rocked, (in a very educational way). TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing people together from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED.com now hosts the best talks and performances from TED and partners that are available to the world. They believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world and we here at Mango couldn’t agree more.
In honor of Theory Thursday, I wanted to share a really interesting video from TED.com. Ethan Zeckerman, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, provides a really interesting discussion about the clever strategies to open up social media channels, such as Twitter, and read the news in languages you don’t even know.
Check out Zeckerman’s Talk, Listening to Global Voices. This Talk is thought provoking and inspiring. The Talk ties into social media and global communication and how much the two are interconnected this day and age.
We would love to hear your thoughts. How have you seen social media change global communication? What has your experience been like using social media to connect and understand international topics, relations and/or ideas?
Learning a new language can be exhilarating, but oftentimes the most challenging part of adopting a whole new vocabulary can be actually pronouncing the words. How on earth do you say “xie xie” ? Enter the International Phonetic Alphabet.
With the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), all of the world’s languages and accents – no matter how difficult – are at your disposal! First developed in 1888 by the Association Phonétique Internationale (International Phonetic Association), IPA is a standardized collection of symbols used to transcribe the sounds of all the world’s languages (otherwise known as those funky symbols you see next to dictionary definitions). Independent of the idiosyncrasies of individual languages, the IPA shows sounds in a way that spelling never could. For example, using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, you can represent the difference between “bow” (as in to respectfully lower your head) and “bow” (as in what you wear in your pigtails). So, homonyms – you’re on red alert!
Apart from academia, though, the IPA has a multitude of uses. Classical singers often use the alphabet to study and practice the sounds of other languages they sing but do not necessarily learn. Speech pathologists also use the IPA both when recording speech impediments and diagnosing disorders. And, perhaps most importantly, the Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network (SATERN) recommends using the IPA when communicating via text about international disasters. Basically, the IPA can save your life!
Of course, there are other phonetic alphabets as well, like the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA) and the Revista de Filología Española (RFE), however the IPA is the most widely used by linguists and civilians alike since it isn’t specific to any country or language. Overall, the IPA is the way to go if you want to understand more about the sounds and phonetics of any language!
Interested in the IPA? You’re in luck! Mango is excited to now be the exclusive licensed distributor of IPAflashcards. Pick up an IPAflashcards deck of your own and visit IPAflashcards.com for more information.
How have you used the International Phonetic Alphabet? Has the IPA helped you learn a new language?
I’d like to share a couple funny and cute linguistics stories in this blog. I will be talking about how bilinguals recognize and speak words in each of their languages. What? That doesn’t sound cute? Just hang in there. I promise that this will be a cute but informative linguistic blog.
I am the mother of four children who are all bilingual in English and Spanish. Some time ago I was sitting with my now nine-year old son (I think he was 7 or maybe 8 at the time) as he read to me “The Digging-est Dog” by Al Perkins. He was doing an excellent job, but when he got to the page that reads, “I dug up fences, I dug up gates” without realizing his mistake he very confidently read, “I dug up fences, I dug up cats.”
So why would my son read “cats” instead of “gates”? Obviously “cats” and “gates” don’t rhyme or even really look similar, at least not in English. However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, my children are bilingual in English and Spanish. Well, the Spanish word for “cats” is “gatos.” Ahhh, you say! “Gatos” and “gates” look very much alike! It is easy to see how he could mistake “gates” for this other word “gatos.” What makes this case even more interesting is that while his brain apparently recognized the Spanish word “gatos” he produced the English translation for this word: “cats.” Although my son was reading in English and produced an English word, “cats,” it is evident that his Spanish lexicon (or mental dictionary or vocabulary list) was still very much active.
On another occasion, my older son asked me if he could fill and use a salt shaker I had brought back from Cuernavaca, Mexico. To which I replied, “No! You can’t use that! It’s a memory!” Does it seem strange that I referred to a salt shaker as a “memory”? Well, it may help to know that the word for souvenir in Spanish is “recuerdo” which literally translates to…you got it…“memory.”
Yet another time, I recall shopping for a digital video camera with my husband. We had picked out the camera, a bunch of editing software and additional accessories. My husband approached the salesman who was assisting us and asked, “So, how much for todo?” The salesman just smiled and continued to talk about the different features of the products we had chosen. My husband asked again, “How much for todo?” I was standing right beside my husband and could not figure out why the salesman was not answering him. Until of course it dawned on me that while I understood my husband’s question, the salesman who obviously did not speak Spanish, did not, because my husband was mixing the two languages: English and Spanish.
The focus of research in bilingualism for a long time was whether or not bilinguals have a single lexicon (mental dictionary) that comprises all of the words they know in both of their languages, or separate lexicons. And additionally, whether access to these is selective or not. Multiple theories to address these questions have been proposed.
One of these, the hierarchical model, proposes that the lexicons are combined at the conceptual level but separate at the word representational level. Basically bilinguals have separate “dictionaries” but that the entry for a particular word in each language links back to the same “meaning” or “concept.”
Another theory is the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model (BIA). This theory argues that letter strands activate possible lexical candidates (words) in both languages, which then compete for activation.
As with many questions in the field of Linguistics and specifically bilingualism, whether bilinguals have one or two “mental dictionaries” and how they access these is still not fully understood. However, for me as a Linguist it is exciting to be able to point to and analyze these everyday aspects of real life and apply it to my passion for languages.
Have you experienced a situation where you interchanged your “mental dictionaries”?
“Just google it.”
“He texted me yesterday.”
“He liked my Facebook status.”
“Did you read my tweet?”
Our language is infused with technological influence. Consider this sentence:
“He liked my status.”
Ten years ago this would have been a weird sentence, implying that a man appreciated the speaker’s marital status perhaps? But today, we understand this to mean that a man clicked the “like” button underneath the speaker’s post on Facebook.
Speaking of Facebook, at this year’s f8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg discussed updates that will affect the language of Facebook:
“When we started, the vocabulary was really limited. You could only express a small number of things, like who you were friends with. Then last year, when we introduced the Open Graph, we added nouns, so you could like anything that you wanted. This year, we’re adding verbs. We’re going to make it so you can connect to anything in any way you want. It is all part of building this language for how people connect.”
Check out this fascinating article that examines the effect this change will have on the way we speak. You can also watch Zuckerberg’s entire keynote speech here.
What do you think of Facebook’s impact on language? Do you have examples of technology’s influence on vernacular?
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russian
With the release of many e-readers, like the Nook, Kindle, iPad, Tablet, etc., books have become available to us at the touch of a button. Not only can we get millions of books electronically but nowadays we don’t even have to read them if we put on our headphones and tune in while multitasking with audio books.
With the availability to provide a plethora of books to readers within seconds, the demand for classic books translated into many different languages has significantly increased.
One of my favorite books is Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I originally read, or struggled to read, the book in its native language, Russian (this was my mother’s brilliant idea to get her 12 year old to learn Russian). When I found out that Crime and Punishment was on the summer list of books to read for my 11th grade English class, I was one of the very, very few who were ecstatic.
After having many discussions about the book in class, I realized many of the students were frustrated with this particular reading assignment. Aside from 576 page time commitment, I noticed that English students were having a hard time with understanding the content of the book. Having read the book in Russian and English, the problem seemed to be in the translation. I couldn’t help but wonder, how much of the book’s original context got lost in translation?
It seems like there are just some cultural concepts that cannot be translated into another language. I noticed this also, when I read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. To many people’s surprise, I enjoyed the book in Russian more than in its original language, English. It seemed like there was more sarcasm that exuded from the main character in the Russian version. Some would say that this would depend on how proficient one is in a language, but I would challenge that by saying that English is my strongest language yet the the Russian version of the American classic appealed more to me.
This led me to think about the practice of translation and what that process incorporates. I recently came across linguisticblog.com, a great blog that has posts about all things linguist and language theory related. There was a great post, My Translation Theory by guest blogger Aleksandra Milcic Radovanovic that talks about the art of translation.
Radovanovic says, “During translation, the translator does not judge, he is open to every idea that can cross the author’s mind.” She explains that the translator is more like an actor and needs to put aside their own personal emotions and personality to play the character they are assigned, or in this case, to translate an original piece to another language without adding their personal thoughts. She goes on to say, “It is not always possible to discover what the author’s intention was: to provide information or to provoke an aesthetic experience. Therefore, the translator must serve the author, stand behind him trying not to miss any of his ideas.”
Is it true that there are just some things that are not possible to fully translate into another language? That no matter how professional and experienced the translator is, some of the context will get altered a bit due to the language of the book?
What are YOUR thoughts? Have you experienced this when reading a book that has been translated from its original language?
I recently took a trip to the beautiful city of Austin, Texas. Besides the record-breaking heat, the amazing night life, and the delicious and diverse food, one of the things that I noticed is the use of Spanglish.
As a passionate student of the Spanish language I was fascinated with the popularity of this dialect, one that combines Spanish and English and that has become socially accepted and encouraged.
Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and author of, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, says Spanglish changes so fast it’s hard to pin down. His book includes a Spanglish dictionary. Some examples: “Backupear” is to back up a car, “yarda” is yard, “pregneada” is pregnant.
Here are some definitions from his book:
carpeta (kar-PE-tah) — carpet.
chopin (TCHO-peen) — 1.Shopping center mall. 2. n., going shopping.
deiof (dey-OF) — day off.
frizer (FREE-zer) — refrigerator.
grocear (gro-SEAR) — to acquire groceries.
jonrón (khon-RON) — home run.
There has been an ongoing debate among academics and politicians about taking Spanglish more seriously and recognizing it as an official dialect. Many feel like using Spanglish takes away from fully learning and appreciating either the English language or Spanish, while others believe that it is a way of self-expression and serves as a representation of a new culture, one that incorporates both Spanish and English.
Stavans goes on to say that “poets, novelists and essayists have realized that it [Spanglish] is the key to the soul of a large portion of the population. Spanglish is a creative way also of saying, ‘I am an American and I have my own style, my own taste, my own tongue.’”
In Spanglish, one would say “parquear” which means “to park.” Using the initial letters and sounds of the English word with the correct er/ar ending to represent the Spanish verbs, Spanglish words and phrases are created.
The use of Spanglish has been produced by close border contact with large bilingual communities on the northern side along the United States-Mexico border and many US states such as California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, and Florida.
Personally I think it’s awesome to combine two languages to create a new way of expression and communication that represents both cultures and traditions.
What do you think about Spanglish?
Kelly, one of our rockstar linguists shares loads of linguistic and cultural information on our new Hawaiian course with the Mango Elves. There is even a really cool picture of the owners in hula skirts! VERY funny!
Have you been to Hawai’i and learned some of the local language? Please share some tips!
Our linguists live and breathe language. And every once in awhile they really geek out and we love it! Kelly and Liliana came in wearing fun “Wug” shirts today. We all wanted to know what is a Wug…the Wug Test was designed by Jean Berko Gleason in 1958 as way to investigate how children learn the plural and inflectional morphemes.
Check out this video of Kelly and Liliana explaining the test.
By the way, they got their shirts from The Wug Store on Cafepress.
