Mango Languages

Can there be an international language? A guest post by Mango’s Head Linguist

Have you ever wondered if there could be an international language? Mango’s Head Linguist Lilia Mouma addresses this question in a 2-part blog post. Make sure to check back for part 2 next week.

Part 1: How and Why Are languages Abandoned and Lost
by Lilia Mouma, Head Linguist, Mango Languages 

Scientists estimate that at around 8,000 BC there were about 20,000 languages. According to the 1996 edition of the Ethnologue.org, there are 6,703 living languages in the world, where by “living” we mean that there is at least one speaker of the language. It is estimated that about one language dies every 14 days and about 25 languages die in a year. By the end of 2100, about half of these nearly 6,500 languages will have died, most of them entirely undocumented. It is also worth noting that, of these languages, 83 are spoken by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction, and at a very fast rate.

In the whole history of human language, there were several causes that led to language abandonment and loss, and they can be narrowed down to three: a) a conscious choice to abandon one’s language because the adoption of another one has more prosperous prospects b) forced abandonment of one’s language for political reasons and c) lack of timely action to keep up with the changes.

An example of the first one is urbanization – or emigration: when people go to the city to find a better job, they start speaking its dialect because this is the way to take advantage of the benefits the city has to offer.  This hope for better economic prospects leads people to not only abandon their language but in cases to go even further and force their children to learn only the new language. What is hidden behind this decision though is that people were led to believe that the only way to success was to move away from what was valued in their community and adopt those things that would make them better citizens in the new community. Most importantly, they were led to believe that their language and culture were inferior and worthless; they were made to lose their self-esteem.

An example of the second cause is the conquest of other nations and the imposition of the conqueror’s language through compulsory education. Here again, despite the efforts of people to keep their language, the worst enemy is the admission that the conqueror’s culture is superior.

As for the third case, this is mainly the reason so many languages go extinct today. The world changes and languages must adapt to change, and they don’t. Sometimes the pace is very fast.

That said, we must also consider the fact that in all of these cases people could in principle keep their language. Don’t we have so many examples of immigrants keeping both languages, their native one and their adopted one? People could have realized the danger their language faces with the rapid changes. So, we could say that the decision to abandon a language, or the result of a language loss depends ultimately on its speakers. As the veteran word-watcher and Times columnist Philip Howard said. “Language is the only absolutely true democracy. It’s not what professors of linguistics or academics or journalists [or politicians, I would add] say, but what people do. If children in the playground start using ‘wicked’ to mean terrific then that has a big effect.”

In a next post we will talk about what conditions exist today and whether these conditions can lead to the abandonment and loss of several major languages and to the final prevalence of one language.

LOLcats and Linguistics

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!

Feature Friday: Language and Thought

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?

Theory Thursday: Mental Dictionaries

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”?

The What and Who of Headedness

Hello again! My last syntax blog left off in the middle of a discussion of how some words draw other words to them in order to form a more complete thought. Recall the verb ate.  Ate has to draw to it “the someone” who did the eating and “the something” that was eaten, in order to be a complete thought. You may wonder why ate is the element that draws the others to it.  Well, ate, as we discussed before, describes a relationship between something and someone, that is, something was eaten by someone.  Apple, on the other hand, does not describe a relationship or anything for that matter.  Apple is a just a noun.  We could say, “The apple is red” or “I ate the apple.” The same logic applies to any other noun.

We also briefly discussed the definite article the and how it also draws other elements to it in order to be complete. The begs the question, “The what?” Similar to how ate begs the question, “Who/What ate what?”  I hope this better clarifies why certain types of words do the drawing, or assigning of thematic roles, while others do not.  Remember, thematic roles are simple: the jobs that need to be filled by some word in order for the predicate, or word/phrase doing the assigning, to be a more complete thought.

In these syntax blogs, we have determined that some groups of words belong together, and we call these groups constituents. We have explored that within constituents there are even smaller groups referred to as phrases.  I mentioned the names of some phrases–determiner phrases, verb phrases, etc.–and I also briefly mentioned that phrases are given different titles depending on the “head” of the group. So, we now return to this question: How do we determine the head of a phrase?  The head of a phrase is the element that assigns thematic roles, or selects other words to complete it, and consequently causes movement of these words to merge with it. This is why in the phrase “ate the apple,” ate is the head.  Ate selected the argument “the apple.” Or, said in a different way, ate assigned a thematic role to “the apple.” Additionally, the is the head of the phrase “the apple” because it selected its argument,  apple.

Can you figure out which is the head of the following phrases: Cindy’s mother; blue house; small annoying child?

Noam Chomsky- His Contribution to Linguistics

Syntax – It’s not another tax on beer?

If you follow my blog you will know that I briefly touched on syntax once before. The Linguistic Elephant in the Room: Syntax (contrary to what it sounds like, it is not an increase in the price of beer or gambling) is a subfield of linguistics which focuses mainly on the grammar of language.  This blog is just a brief introduction to some syntactic concepts.  I will follow up with additional blogs to build and expand on the concepts presented here and /or introduce additional ones.

An important concept to understand in the beginning of a look at syntax is the idea of “the sentence.”  You may think that a complete uttered or written thought is a sentence.  In part you are correct.  However, in the field of syntax the complete thought is given the term proposition, the written or spoken sentence is referred to as “the utterance.”  The actual sentence is a bit more abstract.  The “sentence” is the linguistic form of the utterance.   For example, I can say on Tuesday, “It’s a nice day today.”  And, you may use the same utterance on Wednesday.  Therefore, these two utterances have different propositional meanings; one being that Tuesday is a nice day, and the other, that Wednesday is a nice day.  However, both propositions used the same sentence or linguistic form.  However, what if we both utter the same propositional meaning, i.e., “Today is a nice day” (today being Tuesday), but you utter this in English and I utter the same proposition but in Spanish? Clearly, the form of these utterances will be different.  Therefore, we are using different sentences to express the same propositional meaning.

So the form we give to propositions is important, but what about the form?  What makes one form acceptable and another not in a given language? You may think of word order.  And, again this is partly correct. See the examples below:

(1) I picked up the mess Erik made with the cookies and juice you put out.
(2) I picked the mess Erik made with the cookies and juice you put out up.
Example (2) sounds awkward.  This may lead you to say, that the words ‘pick’ and ‘up’ seem to belong together.  However, now look at the following example:
(3) I picked the mess up.

And what about the following:
(4) I picked up the mess.
(5) I picked it up.
(6) *I picked up it.

So, it’s more than just whether ‘pick’ and ‘up’ come together in the sentence. Can you think of any other examples similar to the ones above?

Sicilian and Italian… What's the difference?

Lately, a few of us around the office have been bugging the product development team (jokingly) to come out with a Sicilian course. This begs the question, isn’t Sicilian just a dialect of Italian? It turns out there is actually a good deal of debate over this subject.

Some linguists believe that Sicilian may have actually been the first Romance Language, arising from a vulgar form of Latin spoken by Roman military men and everyday people. It is placed in the Italiano meridionale-estremo group of languages along with the Greek influenced Calabrian dialects of southern Italy, and actually has at least eleven regional dialects of its own.

The Sicilian language has been shaped by many years of foreign influence, occupation, and conquest. Unlike Italian, which is almost entirely Latin based, Sicilian has elements of Greek, Arabic, French, Catalan, and Spanish. This can be seen in many Sicilian words, like “azzizzari” (to embellish, adorn) from the Arabic “aziz” (beautiful), or “foddi” (angry), which can be traced to the Norman French “fol.”

Grammatically, Sicilian is also very different from Italian. For example, all the pronouns for I, he, she, you, and them are different in Sicilian.  Also, take into account that Sicilian does not distinguish between plural endings for verbs, using the same conjugations for masculine and feminine nouns. In Italian, the plural form differs according to gender, and there is much more concern about agreement between nouns and adjoining adjectives.

A great deal of the actual Italian influence on Sicilian has been since 1860, when, during the Italian Unification, Sicily became a part of Italy. More and more, there is risk today that the Sicilian language will eventually die out due to the influx of the Italian language into Sicily, becoming the preferred tongue among the natives. Even Sicilian emigrants, like my own family, speak a brand of the language which is different from what actual native Sicilians speak, simply because the language has changed so much even in the last 50 years.

So what’s the verdict? Have you met anyone who speaks Sicilian? Do you think that it is a language or a dialect?

Declining Nouns – My Attempt at Learning Linguist Stuff

Recently I have tasked myself with learning more about linguistics. This is most likely due to my desire to expand my global literacy, and has nothing to do with the great, fun, bright, energetic group of linguists that we employ. ☺

Following today’s work session I learned about cases.  “Cases?” you’re wondering.  “We know about cases: court cases, briefcases, containers…” No, I’m talking linguistics; I’m talking about the case system. If some of you are wondering “huh?” it’s because in English we don’t have a case system. Well no worries, because you’re about to learn.  (Editor’s note: English actually does have a case system for pronouns)

Without a doubt there are a lot of languages out there.  The general populous is aware that many languages have different letters and that most have different words.   But there are other differences.   Some languages have declining nouns.  These are nouns that change just like how some of our verbs change.  Nouns can change based on what they are doing, or what is being done to them.  Yes!  Verbs conjugate, and nouns decline.  Some sentences in some languages might involve the same noun with different declensions.  Sometimes you can even know the proper declension based on the case.  There are several cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, verbative, dative, etc., etc., etc.  Some languages have even more! vThese languages include Latin and some of the Romance languages and maybe even Romanian.

These languages (along with a handful of others) rely on the declining nouns to make sense in the same fashion that the English language relies on word order.  So while “the boy ate the dog” is clear to us based on the word order, some languages may extract the exact same meaning from “Boy dog ate” due to the amazing declining nouns.   I know…crazy stuff but very interesting!

What other declining noun examples can you think of?

Mighty Morphemes

Morphology is the study of the structure of words.

Words can be broken into morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning.

Morphemes can be words; for example giraffe, jump, purple, and quick are all morphemes and also words. However, one word can consist of one or many morphemes. Giraffes, jumped, purplish and quickly are all words but each consists of two morphemes. And, antidisestablishmentarianism is only one word but contains seven morphemes!

A few morphemes like the past tense –ed and plural –s, in English must attach to another morpheme (usually the root word, i.e., jump-ed and giraffe-s). These morphemes are referred to as bound morphemes. Morphemes that are not under this restriction are called free morphemes.

Some languages have a one to one correspondence between word and morpheme. Languages of this type are called isolating languages. For example, Classical Chinese is considered a highly isolating language where each morpheme corresponds to a single syllable and a single character. In contrast to isolating languages, agglutinative languages can form entire sentences by “gluing” affixes to the root word. Turkish is a good example of an agglutinative language. In Turkish, “Cevaplayamadıklarımızdandır” translated, “It must be one of those which we couldn’t answer” has nine morphemes!

What is the word with the highest number of morphemes you can come up with in English?