Mango Languages

Lost in Traslation – Language and Culture

Hello Everyone!

I came across a really interesting article, Lost in Traslation in the Wall Street Journal, about the influence that foreign languages have on how people see the world . The author uses a few languages as examples to show that people express themselves differently when talking about the same thing because of the structure of the language. This brings up questions about the definition of “meaning.” Does the meaning change due to the language you use?

In the article the author, Lera Boroditsky, quotes Emperor of the Romans, Charlemagne, saying that “to have a second language is to have a second soul.” This is a very deep and intricate thought. While reading this article, as a person who speaks more than one language, I realized that even though speaking different languages comes naturally to me, the make up of each language has its own structure, which in turn creates a unique approach to the way a person will use it to express their thoughts.

In any language that you are fluent in you can easily put together greetings, complete sentences, questions, etc. But when comparing these in different languages you see that the structure is not the same. For example, in the article it mentions that in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, to say hello, one actually say, “Where are you going?” If you don’t know that they don’t even use terms like “left” or “right” you would have a very hard time responding to the greeting. This particular community uses a different approach for greetings than English speakers do.

The article continues, with a focus on space, time, and gender when comparing different languages. The author goes to say, “the structures that exist in our language profundity shape how we construct reality, and helps make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.” I couldn’t help and connect this to our understanding of culture. The world we live in is so diverse with so much to offer in cultural learning, what makes them all so different? To me, it’s languages, the way we express ourselves. In some languages gender is a major part of being able to communicate in other it is the idea of space and time, this all plays a major role in how people think in those languages, which in turn establishes that unique culture.

“Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?”

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with the author?

Guest Post: The Rhythm of the Words

Bret performing in a language he actually speaks

I’ve been spending the holidays with my best friend and her family, who are Russian. She (my friend) moved to the U.S. when she was 8 and has pretty much mastered the English language. She has the slightest hint of an accent on a few select words, but for the most part could easily pass as an American. Her, family, however, is much closer to the roots of their language and communicate with my friend primarily in Russian. I’d say about 75% of the conversations in the household take place in their mother language and I find myself not understanding most of what is said around me.

However, I’m still able to follow most of the back and forth. The rhythms and cadences of Russian are much different than English, yet it still has it’s own specific sound and variance which make the basic premise of the conversations decipherable, even though I don’t speak the language. I can tell when someone is frustrated, loving, concerned or curious. I can pick-up on interest levels and dynamics. I may not understand the exact specifics of the exchange, but I can absorb the overall feeling.

At first, to be honest, I thought most of the conversations sounded angry. Russian is a fairly abrupt language, full of hard consonants. Add to that the brusque nature of it’s delivery and it’s not hard to see why it took me off guard. It took a few days to settle into the specific sound of the way they talk in their native tongue. But once I did, I found that not only was I mistaken about the anger level, but that there was a unique arc to the spoken words that gave clues to their meaning.

I have found the same to be true of most languages. The have their own unique sound, that fluctuates with the feeling behind the words. I think observing and becoming familiar with these patterns is an important step in the learning of a language. Along with the definitions and assembly of sentences of a language, it’s important to learn the flow. The intent of the words comes through the pattern in which they are presented as much as it comes through the selection of the actual words.

I am new to trying to learn a second language and, admittedly, have no basis for this other than my own observation, but it’s definitely helping me on my way to comprehension and the ability to express myself in a new way. Even though I am pretty sure I can sense the feeling of what’s being spoken, I’m looking forward to learning the vocabulary to go along with rhythm, so I can finally understand what the heck these people are actually saying!

Is Cheese plural for Choose?

Hello All,
As an individual whose first language isn’t English, I thought I would take this opportunity and use this blog to express how funny (and at times hard) the English language can be. I am sure that other people who learned English as a second or even third language would agree with me.

I was very happy to come across the list below which includes words and phrases that have made me scratch my head in confusion on numerous occasions. I have been speaking English for 14 years, and to this day I come across sayings that just don’ t seem to make sense. If I learned anything, it’s that sometimes you just need to just accept things just the way they are… especially when it comes words and phrases in the English language.

Here are some examples…  you tell me…

There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in  pineapple…
Is cheese the plural of choose?
If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
In what language do people recite at a play, and play at a recital?
Ship by truck, and send cargo by ship?
Have noses that run and feet that smell?
Park on driveways and drive on parkways?
Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which  aren’t sweet, are meat.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce, and hammers don’t ham?
If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth,  beeth?
One goose, 2 geese.  So, one moose, 2 meese?
One index, two indices?
When a house burns up, it burns down.
You fill in a form by filling it out, and an alarm clock goes off by going on.
When the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.
And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it?
English muffins were not invented in England or French fries in France

How can ‘slim chance and fat chance’ be the same, while ‘wise man and a wise guy’ are opposites?

We take English for granted.  But if we  explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly,  boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

Personally, I’ve had a really hard time understanding why the word knife is spelled with a ‘k’. That’s just me.

Waht deos taht sya?

Happy Monday!

A good friend of mine came across this and thought it would be a great idea to write a blog post about it, I couldn’t agree with him more.

Please read the following paragraph:

I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt!

When I first saw this, I thought it was pretty cool. But, is it true what they say? Does the order of the letters not matter as long as the first and last are the same as the original word?

Some disagree. Maybe it’s not the letters that matter but what the word looks like that makes it easier to read.

These letter transformations break up the pattern of ascending and descending letters that are supposedly used when recognizing word shapes. If anything the myth suggests that word shapes are not important because we can still readily recognize the words despite their change in word shape.

Reading psychologists have come to the consensus that we use a parallel letter recognition model to recognize words.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thematic Roles of Predicates. Yay Grammar!

Hello again! My last blog left off with a brief introduction to different phrase types, e.g., determiner phase (DP), verb phrase (VP), etc.  So let’s take a closer look at these phrases.  For example, the phrase, “ate the apple.” This phrase is made of three components; ate (verb), the (article/determiner) and apple (noun).  We have already determined that I can’t simply string these words together in any order I wish and convey the same meaning, if any. These lexical items (words) alone do not consist of a complete proposition. Recall from my previous blog entry that a proposition is a complete thought, e.g., Jane ate the apple. In other words, each of these items needs to merge with another entity or entities in order to be well formed or have meaning in a sentence or phrase.  Now we are getting to the good stuff. Let’s start with the verb: ate. Ate alone doesn’t convey a complete thought or proposition. Rather we know that ate expresses a relationship between two other elements. That is, someone ate something.  So we can say that the verb ate needs to combine/merge with at least two other elements in order to form a complete proposition or thought. In linguistics we say that the predicate (e.g., ate, in this case) needs to combine with a theme.  The theme is merged with, or physically moved, to combine with the predicate.  That is, this predicate, ate, is in need of two themes (the some-one and the something) and therefore draws these other elements to it.  In linguistics we say that the predicate has thematic roles it must assign. The some-one of ate is given the thematic role of the agent because this is an active role.  The something of the predicate ate is referred to as, or given the thematic role of, Theme. However, the names or titles of these themes is not the most important part to remember here.  Rather, that different predicates select for, or require, different types and number of themes.  To contrast the predicate ate, there are other predicates such as, appeared, fell, etc., which only require one theme, or thematic role, that must be assigned in order to be a complete proposition, i.e., Jane appeared, Jane fell.  So we have determined that certain lexical items (words) have thematic roles that they must assign. The items and or constituents that are assigned to the predicate are referred to as its arguments.  The type and number of roles/arguments will differ depending on the predicate (lexical item/word assigning thematic roles).

The above paragraph refers mostly to verbs. However, other words require additional elements.  For example, the definite article the.   One cannot simply utter the and convey a complete thought.  The what? ‘The’ therefore requires the addition of a noun.  We can say it selects , or requires that a noun merge with it.  So, similar to how a verb/predicate selects certain thematic roles to merge with it, other elements, as we can see with ‘the’, do the same.

So in this blog we have embarked on the concept of thematic roles of predicates. We saw that different predicates select for different number and types of arguments, specifically, ate assigns (at least) two thematic roles; the eater (the Agent) and, the eaten (the Theme).  But, fell must assign (at least) one thematic role; the one who undergoes the fall (the Experiencer).

Can you think of predicates which assign more than two roles? That is, verbs that have more than two arguments?  Or, can you assign additional arguments to these predicates: ate and fell?

“Habla Espanol?”… “No, but I Do Speak Perl!”

To all the programmers and tech savvy people out there, this blog post is for you. Today we will be discussing languages. Yes, we here at Mango live and and breathe languages and one might ask, “What’s new about this blog post?” Well here goes.

Programming languages. A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine, to express algorithms precisely, or as a mode of human communication.

These languages don’t get enough credit, after all they are the reason we can provide our software to people around the world to learn foreign languages through the web. I’m talking about the C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. To many this might look like a bunch of letters and symbols and doesn’t mean much, but it should. This is the back end of all communication on the machine that you are using to read this blog.

Someone may not know Italian, Spanish, or Chinese (although they will once they start using Mango Languages) but they do know C++ and Ruby, does that make them bilingual/trilingual? It may not be a language spoken by a whole population from another country, instead it’s a language that not many even know about, which makes it pretty impressive if you ask me. Having talked to our geniuses who help put our programs together, it really does appear they speak a foreign language among themselves, through computers. Cool Stuff.

What are your thoughts? If you speak Java are you bilingual?

The World Cup: Bringing People Together One Game at a Time

Watching the World Cup go through it’s process of selecting host cities this week was fascinating. So many different countries with such varied cultures all vying to host the same international spectacle is not something we get to witness often. And what an eventful year! Not only does Russia get to host the games, forcing them to pump billions of dollars into their infrastructure to prepare, but there is also going to be the first World Cup in the Middle East when Qatar hosts the games in 2022. The average American may not realize the significance that the tournament has on world culture, but it is huge. The World Cup is an international, cross-cultural, unifying event rivaled only by the Olympics.

It got me thinking about the unification of cultures across our world. We tend to see different countries as incredibly foreign…no pun intended. We are far too often focused on the things that separate our cultures, rather than the things we share. It is profound to think that a simple game like soccer can be such a touchstone for so many citizens of the earth, regardless of where they are from.

On some level, the same could be said for language. When I was in high school, I opted to take Latin instead of Spanish. I can’t recall why…probably because there was a cute girl in the Latin class. That’s not the point. The point is, having a background in Latin has helped tremendously while studying new languages on Mango. I have found that Latin is the base for most of the romantic languages and elements can still be found in all of them. To think that a language spread out across the world and morphed into the dialog of so many different cultures is kind of awe-inspiring. Here is something that the citizens of these countries use everyday…language…and it can all be traced back to one source. Without even realizing it, the very words they say connect them to people on the other side of the Earth.

So, whether it’s a sport or simply the words we use, times like this show us that there are many things that join us with the rest of the world that we don’t usually consider. Almost as much fun as exploring the world and discovering all the things that make us unique, is exploring the world and finding the things that make us the same. I have absolutely no idea who is going to win the tournament in ’18 or ’22, but I know the world will be watching it and talking about it. Thanks to Mango and my old Latin teacher, I might just understand what they have to say.

The more I learn here on Mango, the smaller the world gets…that’s one of my favorite things about it.

Noam Chomsky- His Contribution to Linguistics

“Syntax – It’s not another tax on beer?” Continued…

In my last blog I began to delve in to the wonderful world of Syntax. I looked at the linguist definition of a sentence and more importantly the abstract idea of the proposition. I also briefly touched on word order as it is involved in sentence grammaticality. So from my previous blog we can now make two statements: 1) Sentences are abstract mental objects and, 2) word order is somehow involved in the “grammaticality” of sentences. However, we have not yet determined what role word-order plays in grammar. We will begin to look at that in this blog entry.

In her entry, Did you know languages have constituents?, my colleague briefly touched on an important component of Syntax: constituents. Constituents are a group of words which have an internal coherence. That is, they belong together. For example, the words in the phrase ‘that glass of milk‘ seem to belong to each other, as do, ‘the black wooden chair‘, ‘the big red odd shaped container’, etc. We know this because in a complete sentence all of these phrases can be replaced with one little word: it. However, compare those “constituents” to these segments: ‘the table over’, ‘wooden chair by’, and ‘big red odd‘. In contrast these segments don’t seem to belong together. They most certainly cannot be replaced in the sentences with any one word.

So now we have determined that some groups of words belong together and we call these groups constituents. Within constituents there are even smaller groups. These groups are given different titles depending on the “head” of the group. (I will explain headedness in a later blog). Some of these are: determiner phrases (DP) (sometimes referred to as noun phrases, NP), prepositional phrases (PP), adjective phrases (AdjP), adverb phrases (AP) and, verb phrases (VP). An example of a determiner phrase (DP) is ‘the container’. However, ‘the big red oddly shaped container‘ is also a DP, only a larger one also containing an adjective phrases (AdjP): big red oddly shaped container. Additionally, ‘the apple‘ is also a determiner phrase. However, ‘ate the apple‘, is a verb phrase (VP) that also contains a determiner phrase, ‘the apple‘.

Can you get creative and come up with a large phrase that contains more than one other additional phrase? What are the constituents in the phrase?

What Do You Mean?

In this post I would like to explore two subcategories of Linguistics: Semantics and Pragmatics. Semantics studies the meaning of words and sentences. The notion of meaning, however, has many facets. For example,  the words “unmarried man” and “bachelor” have the same meaning; the sentence, “The toothbrush has five legs” is meaningful only in a Lewis Carroll-like story; the sentence, “I saw her work” is ambiguous (“I saw her while she was working” or “I saw something she made”). The meaning of the two phrases in the sentence, “John killed Mary and Mary didn’t die” contradict each other.

A sentence can be well-structured but nevertheless meaningless. Let’s illustrate with the last example: “John killed Mary” is a well-structured sentence with a verb (killed), the subject  (John), and an object, the receiver of John’s action (Mary).  This is  meaningful: a male named John took the life of a female named Mary.  The same goes for the sentence, “Mary didn’t die.”  Their combination is a well-structured sentence with verbs, subjects, and objects in the correct order, but it is meaningless; this is due to the inherent meaning of the verb “kill,” which entails that the killed person has died for good and is 100% dead.  Semantics then is about the conditions a sentence has to meet in order to be meaningful.

Pragmatics on the other hand has to do with how we use meaningful, or sometimes even meaningless, sentences in order to communicate. And to communicate successfully, to understand and be understood, another factor plays the most important role: context, or everything that has to do with the circumstances in which a sentence is uttered.  For example, the sentence, “Can you open the window?”, a well-structured and meaningful sentence, can be interpreted as a question in which we ask the listener if he has the ability to open the window, or as a request for the listener to open the window.  How does the listener reach the correct interpretation? In our example, how does he understand if it is meant to be a question or a request?

According to Pragmatic theories which are based on Paul Grice (e.g. Relevance), we need to guess the speaker’s intentions, i.e., the reason why he is saying something. We put the speaker’s intentions in the right context, and we interpret the utterance. Let’s imagine we are in a stuffy room.  The listener interprets the sentence as a request, given the stuffiness of the air and guessing that the intention of the speaker is to ask him to do something.  Now imagine two burglars outside the house they want to break into. The listener interprets it as an ability question given the fact that they are outside and want to get into the house one way or another. Many times we do not make the right guess and we misinterpret the speaker’s intention, which leads to lack of communication.

We say one thing, but is that what we REALLY mean?