Quick Links on this Page

April 30, 2012

I want to spend more time spreading English.  So, the first thing to know, is that Americans speak differently from how we write.    To see a guide to how real, everyday spoken American English sounds, click here.    






May 18, 2011

Click image for East Asian loanwords!




Three weeks since my last post.  Why the delay?  I finished the entire 3-level course of Rosetta Stone Korean.  And, in doing so, I put myself one step closer to understanding how the East Asian languages fit together.  I made the graphic as a rough idea.  Chinese words and concepts got dumped into Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.   However, many of those languages :
1) have short words
2) rely on tones for meaning
3) have shit alphabets
4) suck at imitating sounds
So, the words get stolen and mangled the next day, then the etymology is hard to trace.  It's not my favorite area to study, but it had to be done.  My Japanese and Vietnamese is only half-finished, so when I come back to those, I'll develop this list a little better.



April 29, 2011

Lots of linguists are familiar with the DLAB (U.S. military test of language talent) but did you know the U.S. Border Patrol has its own linguistic entry exam?   They actually created an artificial language with grammar rules similar to Spanish, and use it to test job candidates for the Border Patrol to ensure they will be able to learn Spanish effectively once they were hired.  

Even crazier than that fact, is the circumstances where I learned this.  I was chatting with a Nigerian man about languages.  He said he already spoke Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Hebrew, and English, and had made a living as an interpreter.  Now that he had moved to the United States though, he was having a difficult time learning Spanish.   He had applied to work for the U.S. Border Patrol, but had failed the test with the artificial language.  At first I assumed he meant Esperanto, but then realized we were dealing a different beast altogether.  Sure enough, a quick youtube search revealed the answer.  It is a wholly new language, with a completely invented vocabulary, but with grammar rules identical to Spanish.  

Coming up next:  a test with two pieces of string, to see if people will be able to tie their shoes one day.







April 25, 2011

I think the reason I gravitate towards the Middle Eastern cluster of languages as opposed to Asian, is that the etymology and stolen words between them is easier to track.  Why?  Because there's more consonants in the Middle East.  Asia messed up when China stripped out its consonants and started learning on vowel tones for meaning.   Do you know how long it took me to put together....
Chinese:  xiansheng  (Mister, literally "first born")
Japanese: sensei  (Teacher)
Korean : seongsaeng (You/Teacher)

Way too damn long, that's how long!   Actually, Japanese Kanji makes it easy to spot the Chinese loanwords.  It's much more interesting to figure out the Chinese and Japanese words that got absorbed by Korean.  If I could crack that case, I might pick up that East Asian cluster again.  

Also, what about African languages?  I think Swahili could be my gateway into the Bantu family, since the Arabic words will be that spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.  

January 23, 2011

My language brain, graphed.  2011 is going to crucial for rounding out my Middle Eastern and Asian roots. Right click the image to view full size.  My knowledge of English is on the left for comparison to other languages.   


January 7, 2011

I don't know when or how, but I plan to study Telegu and hopefully at least understand some of it, and converse a little.  If I have no other options, I could always teach myself the alphabet, but attack the Telegu wikipedia, maybe supplementing it with some youtube videos.  Hopefully I can find a more natural and enjoyable way.  If only Rosetta Stone offered Dravidian (South Indian) languages!  Oh, and why Telegu?  I've always had in mind that I would like to learn a south Indian language, it was only a matter of picking one.  Also, I tend to bump into Telegu speakers in my daily life.  By the numbers, it is the second most widely spoken language in India after Hindi, so at this point, it's pretty much a no-brainer.   In the back of my mind, I know I'm still sleighting Bengali, but I don't an answer the that issue right now.  Just for fun, I'm going to type out some English using Telegu script.  Look how cool it is!

తెలేగు ఇస్ ప్రేట్టి ముచ్ ది కొలెస్ట్ అల్ఫబేట్ ఎవేర్ !


January 5, 2011

One topic I want to develop more is - What is the correct order to learn languages in?  For example, I believe an English speaker should learn Arabic, then Persian, then Hindi, in order to truly appreciate the layers of stolen words in Hindi.  For East Asian languages, a person should definitely have a strong command of spoken and written Chinese first, then study Japanese, in order to enjoy Japanese as the "sequel" to Chinese.   In short, you should learn languages in the same historical order that their countries invaded each other in!   Start with the dominant, central language, then move out towards the fringe.  


January 4, 2011

Surprising etymology of the day:  "Sawatdee" (Thai greeting) related to "Swastika", both via Sanksrit and Buddhist traditions of the circle of life.  For more info, google it.


January 3, 2011

I wholeheartedly recommend Meetup.com as a way to find language hobby groups in your area.  I check in with these clubs every few months, and there's always friendly people who are enthusiastic about practicing their language.  I hung out with a Spanish group tonight at a cafe and had a great time.  Favorite take away of the night:  we all reached the consensus that, from universal personal experience, the top two ways to learn a new language are:
1. Listen to music sung in that language
2. Have sex with a native speakers.




December 27, 2010

This list just blew my mind.  "Itsy bitsy" comes from Hungarian!?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Hungarian_origin



December 12, 2010

November 26， 2010

It's high time I wrote about teaching ESL abroad.  I'm going to be researching this topic over the next days or weeks a little more, in order to write intelligently about it.   But for now, here is some anecdotal knowledge, taken from my friends or their friends:  

China - three people I know went there after college to teach English for a year.  Their Chinese is so-so, certainly not fluent.

Thailand - one guy friend of mine went there and taught English at various levels for 5 years, everything from elementary to vocational business schools.  He dated a Thai woman for the entire time, and is now comfortable speaking Thai with her and in everyday life.

South Korea - At least five kids I know have taught English there after college.  I think they tend to teach at the elementary level.   I get the sense that Korea is the first choice among Americans teaching English abroad, and I believe they pay the best.  Anecdotally, I've heard of my friends SAVING about $10,000 per year while they work there.  Also, South Korea seems to be filled with Australians, British kids, and South Africans who are also teaching English there.   The white kids tend to stick together, party together, drink together.   One girl relayed that she wanted to date a white guy while she was there, but that all the white guys were only interested in the Asian girls.  Too true.   The other trend I would draw with South Korea, is that the Americans going there don't necessarily give a damn about languages.  Many of them only end up learning how to say "Anyonghaseo" (hello), but they do learn to pronounce the Korean alphabet.  

Indonesia - One guy I know through a friend became an English teacher in Indonesia through a Fulbright scholarship.  After two years of working there, he is now a university professor.  He is now fluent in Bahasa Indonesia, and conversational in a local Sumatran language.

Russian - 

My personal goal for language learning is to wrap my mind around how all of the languages in Eurasia fit together.  I always reference the "top ten" list of languages, which are really the biggest players from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.   Eurasia is one big network - if the languages aren't related, they're stealing words from each other, and if they're not stealing words, they're stealing alphabets.  I think that once I'm done with Hindi, I'll have enough pillars in place mentally to really cement my Eurasian knowledge.  

I figure I'll get to Africa eventually.  I should have at least one Niger-Congo language in my brain before I die.

I'm not so sure about indigenous American or Australian languages.  Many of those have been destroyed, and the rest of are totally unequipped to discuss modern techological advances.  

BP

BO

BN

Best map of its kind I've ever found.  Shows colorful, animated progress of European colonization from the last 500 years.  Right click image to view full size.

See an animated map of traffic stats in the keyword section

BK

BI

BH
Language Parallel #2: Measuring Systems.  Here's a map of the world, with the green countries having adopted the metric system (a.k.a. SI units), and the black ones resisting.  I grabbed this image from Metric 4 Us, a fun site about the history and usefulness of SI.  People make fun of the United States because we're one of the last hold-outs from SI, and our only company in that category is Liberia and Myanmar (Burma).   How can it be, that the wealthiest and most militarily powerful country in the world is stuck on English Imperial units (pounds, inches, gallons, etc) ?  Well, the truth is, we're not.  It's only the sad masses in the U.S. that are left behind, the government and elites of the military and all branches of science and engineering have switched to Metric long ago. I'm a logical guy, so I can see that Metric is superior to everything else.  Now, one could argue that I should embrace Esperanto for the same reason.  And to the Esperantists out there, I say "get fucked ", and "learn English ".  Math is different; math and measurements need to be logical and uniform.  Plus, math never changes, but language does.  So, I'm not ready for the metrication of the rest of language.  Languages always undergo sound shifts that undermine old spellings and slowly turn alphabets in hieroglyphics.  However, the human mouth doesn't change, and the IPA will always be in the background when we need it.   That's as metric as language will ever be, and just like SI, we can thank the French for developing the IPA.    Now, in keeping with the tradition of Postcard, here's my favorite argument for using Metric:

BG
Language Parallel #1: Numbers.   As Americans, we see ourselves as the modern torchbearer of Western Civilization, carrying the flame
passed from the Romans to the European Empires to us.  Our alphabet has been refined over time from the Greek and Phoenician systems into our modern 26-letter masterpiece, which we have spread around the world in order to civilize pre-literate savages.  Less discussed is our system of numbers (1234567890)....  Like the story of mitochondria in a cell, numbers have their own history and DNA separate from the alphabet.  While the Romans were fumbling with cumbersome stuff like MCMCXVIII,  the Hindus were streamlining the modern number system, and sharing it with the Arabs.  It wasn't until the time of the crusades that Europeans finally learned it from the Arabs.  In the last 200 years, modern "English" numbers have invaded every writing system on the planet, even ones that have resisted a complete switch to the English Alphabet.   Go ahead and up a newspaper in Tamil, Mongolian, or Amharic, you'll clearly recognize our numbers among their loop-dy loop alphabet insanity.  That should tell you something about the universality of mathematics, and it's pretty cool.   The other related chapter on this subject is the spread of the metric system (SI), but that is for another day...  

BF

With bad-ass tools like Google Translate  & Transliterate around, I just don't see how this is a good time to be in the business of written translation.  I mean, even Babelfish, who used to be the champion, looks like a cheap toy in comparison.  Now, certainly some people are getting rich running English schools, and Rosetta Stone (NYSE: RST) is hanging onto roughly $500,000,000 in equity, but overall,  I'm bearish on mom and pop translators.   The only well-funded frontier left to conquer is speech machine translation.   And really, the only piece missing there is a dynamite speech recognition technology. Surely there is software that can process a clean, grammatically correct sentence, so the only obstacle must be overcoming mumbling and slang.   Not sure if that makes me happy or sad.  






BE

Incks.com has dozens of online keyboards - for free!








BD
Bahasa Indonesia - a milestone in Romanization.  The story is, Indonesia used to use an alphabet they stole from Thailand - a general south-indic spin-off.  Somewhere in the mix, they also played around with Arabic script.  But,  once the Dutch rolled into town and took over everything, Bahasa Indonesia switched to a perfectly good romanization system.  And so it remained for 350 years.  And then suddenly, Indonesia pulls off the biggest bitch move in the history of European alphabets: they switch from Dutch style to English style.   See the chart at right for the breakdown.   Really, the main difference was replacing all their J's with Y's.  Why mess with success?  Why go through the trouble of replacing all your signs and newspapers for  such a subtle, cosmetic difference?  The message is clearly " We are no longer under the influence of the Dutch. "  And indeed, Indonesia had gained their independence from the Netherlands shortly before that.  One can also research the cozy ties between the Suharto regime and the CIA...




BC
Any language out there in the world is going to be limited to the sounds that the human mouth can make.  We all have the same teeth, throat, tongue, and lips.  For example, every language out there pretty much has to pick from this list of consonants.   Now, even though it's a short, finite list, there's still plenty of ways to combine those, especially once you throw in vowels and maybe tones.   We live in a colorful and exotic world, even though everything is made up of the same 100 elements of the periodic table.






BB
It's not everyday that you get to see English sounded out (transliterated) with foreign letters.   I mean, why the hell would anyone do that, anyways?  Imagine if the government of the United States declared "All citizens may continue speaking English, but it must be written using the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, instead of the 26 letters of our own alphabet. "  We would have murder and mayhem in the streets!  But, transliterating English is a good mental exercise, for several reasons.
1.  Stirs things up
2.  Helps teach English speakers how to pronounce other alphabets
3.  Makes English more approachable for speakers of other languages

Enjoy this language brain candy!

Here is an example of the same English sentence using multiple alphabets.

хир из эн экзампль ав зе сейм ингльиш сентэнц юзинг мультипль алфабец

BA

AY


Tens of millions of people usually die before you can change an alphabet.  Not until Britain and France had carved up the Ottoman Empire after WW1, did the Turks switch from an Arabic script to a Latin alphabet.   Then, it wasn't until the collapse of the Soviets, that Azerbaijan and other Turkic-speaking whateverstans switched over to a Latin alphabet.  

In other news, when Britain created Israel out of the same Ottoman wreckage, why didn't they slap a Latin alphabet on Hebrew?  Or force a Latin alphabet right on top of Arabic, while they were sitting in Egypt or Jordan or Iraq?   For that matter, why didn't the U.S. stamp out Kanji or Hiragana after WW2?  Hell, we could have eliminated Japanese AND Korean script in the 1850's , when we first blew the doors off those countries with American warships.  Ever heard of Shinmiyangyo?  

Here's a linguistics case study for you: White Europeans were carving up China and Africa at the same time (late 1800's).  Why did every single sub-saharan African bend over and take a Latin alphabet, but China is still using characters to this day (albeit via pinyin IMEs ^_^  )?  Why didn't the British at least force everyone in Hong Kong to speak English while they had the chance?  In a parallel universe, we could have had pinyin 100 years sooner, and characters would have gone the way of the dodo.






AX


And here we have the culmination of two decades of language study.  Pretty juvenile at first glance, but it packs a punch.  This MS Paint masterpiece plots the number of languages vs. their number of speakers in a simple, colorful way.  The yellow and red fields represents all the humans walking the earth.   Each dot/blob represents 1% of all the languages spoken.  There are nearly 7,000 languages in the world, so each dot/blog represents about 70 languages.  Besides just kinda knowing this situation intuitively, you can find evidence in the statistics from ethnologue.com.  According to them, 94% of the population speaks 6% of total languages, so 6% of population speaks the other massive 94%.  

I've been over this before.  The blobs are rockstars that everyone has heard of : English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, etc.   The dots are half-starving peon languages spoken by only two reindeer-fuckers and one blind, old man who makes his clothes out of tree bark.  That red section with the dots? You don't want to be there!  It's the leper colony of languages.  Nearly the entirety of human languages being carried forth by a sliver of people.  Basically the same concept as how most plant/animal biodiversity is packed into one remote island that humans haven't bulldozed yet.  

But wait, there's more.  That cartoon drawing should be animated.  I don't have the flash-software necessary yet, nor the time, so I'll just explain it for now.  10,000 years ago, the ENTIRE rectangle would have been red, and there probably would not have been dots or blobs, just a homogenous scattering of 100 small circles.  But, fast forward to 500 years ago, and technological innovations are letting some circles eat up other ones.  Cortez sailed to Mexico, strangled Nahuatl, and made everyone learn Spanish.   So now, those blobs are big and fat, because they've been stealing the food, water, and oxygen of everyone else, and squeezing them down into little dots.   For more perspective, think of the red area as Oklahoma, and that squeezing, ghettofication process as the Trail of Tears.   The result of stealing food from your neighbors, is that you end up with more food.   They die and you get fat.   For a language, getting fat means more dialects.  Having the über-luxury to invent things like Klingon and Elvish is like language gout.

Parting shot -  Ethnologue.com describes the inequality of language distribution as "striking".  Nice choice of words, since no one could really call it "surprising" with a straight face.  After all, we all have blood on our hands.  Plus, "striking" is also what white people with guns and horses did to the rest of the world.

Last thing, I swear - this distribution of languages with fat blobs and starving dots is very, very similar to the stock market.  Ever heard of large caps and small caps?  There's a finite amount of equity money to go around, and all those companies have to fight for it.   For every one fat Exxon, there's hundreds of broke-ass enterprises who went public with only a $10,000,000 valuation, in the desperate hopes of someone buying up the price.  


Now back to languages......





AW


Mission: Corral everyone into the yellow bubble, dead or alive.  

So, your military invaded a weaker country, now what?  Well, if you've got the manpower, make every local speak your language, and shoot everyone who doesn't obey.  Only prepared to half-ass it?  Teach the kids your language, and wait for the old people to die.  Passive-aggressive? Let them keep up their monkey-chatter, but make them switch their newspapers and street signs over to your alphabet.  Ready to be an unproductive asshole?  Invent Cyrillic and tear apart your language family.  







AV
Facebook - now available in 61 (white) languages!   Just kidding, only about 41 out of the 61 languages offered as options on Facebook are European in origin.   The rest are a mixture of Asian and Middle Eastern languages from countries which were colonized by Europeans.  But hey, as any reader of this site  (or world history) knows, who WASN'T colonized by Europeans?!  

Easy Bonus points:  
1.  Can you spot the single native African language?  
2. How about the zero indigenous Australian, North or South American languages?  
3. Can you spot the 6 languages that are non-Euro, but still use a Euro alphabet?

The Real Mystery:
Can you figure out why the first three columns are strictly alphabetized, but the fourth column is grouped based on alphabet type and language family?  


AU

Haha, get it?  No?  Then get the hell off this website.  

I have mixed feelings on conlangs (constructed languages).   I mostly have zero respect for them, and consider it a total waste of effort to invent them and to study them.  Even Esperanto,  a language significant enough that people have been killed for using it, is mostly junk.  If for no other reason, it's just another tired rehash of Euro languages, without any of the personality of the regular ones that developed organically.

 But,  I'm writing about conlangs, because some of them actually have more speakers than real languages.  For example, Klingon is growing, while hundreds of indigenous American/Australian/African languages are going extinct.  Plus, so what if a language is planned?  Isn't a planned pregnancy better than an unplanned one?  Doesn't the planned city of Saint Petersburg rival the organic Moscow?  Not to mention, what use is a dying language spoken by only two sickly, old goat-herders, with a limited vocabulary completely useless when discussing modern bond markets or petrochemical refinement?  If you think that only established languages are legitimate, just remember - at some point in distant history, even the sacred Latin roots of modern, established Euro languages were simply...invented.  





AT
I slice and dice language stats like an actuary parses mortality data.  I found a neat website that ranks world languages by number of speakers as 1st language and as 2nd language.  It also ranks language FAMILIES, which is priceless.  I agree, Mandarin has the highest number of native speakers, but I call BULLSHIT on English being #4 by total number of native and 2nd language speakers combined.  We're #1 - don't even joke about anything else.   In any case, they also have this nice map of what happens when one continent (Europe) ransacks the entire world: you get Indo-European languages on every square inch of the planet, even up the inside of an Eskimo's ass.  Also, this entire map should be green and pink.  I call bullshit on all the "gray area" countries.  I can tell you exactly which Euro language each one of those gray countries speaks, so don't try to tell me that Arabs, Chinese, and Indonesians have been impervious to Euro influence in history.   Just because you never learned about the Opium Wars, doesn't mean they didn't happen.  

AR
This is a lousy time to start a website about languages.  Why?  Well, here's a quick lesson in history.   Not too long ago, European languages went and kicked all the other languages' asses.  So, even though there's about 7,000 languages recognized today, only about 5 of them actually matter.   So what's a linguist to do about all the rest?  How can you rummage through a junk pile of 6,000 worthless languages?   You don't.  They just get more and more obscure until they wither away and die.  No one wants to read about the billions of broke, starving people in the world, we'd rather focus on a few dozen wealthy celebrities.  In the same vein, people only care about shiny rockstars like French, Spanish, and German. Do you care about Arawak or Selkup ? No, because they're on life-support in a coma, and the nurse is about to pull the plug. But,  I'll chew on a grenade before this becomes just another website called, "Learn Spanish Online", so I'm trying to find some middle ground.  Lousy time for a language website, folks.  Lousy.







AQ

If I met the guy who runs this site, we would probably have something to talk about.   Check out zompist.com for quality language-themed writing, plus statistics and politics mixed in for good measure.  



AP
Nahuatl - a language that was pillaged, burned, buried, and forgotten.  You wouldn't think twice about it, until you realized it was the source of modern words like chocolate, chili, tomato, avocado, and coyote.  Only 500 years ago, when Europeans sailed to ancient Mexico, they discovered the city of Tenochtitlan.   As sophisticated as Paris and Venice, Tenochtitlan was the seat of power of the Aztec Empire, and the men and women of the city spoke the Nahuatl language.   Of course, the Europeans killed them all, but still developed a taste for the local foods.   Tomatoes and chocolate soon found their way back to Europe, along with their original Nahuatl names.  The next time you enjoy a side of guacamole, just remember that it roughly translates to testicle sauce  in the Nahuatl language.





AO

26-sided alphabet dice, a.k.a. the Rhombitruncated Cuboctahedron.

• 8 hexagonal faces
• 6 octagonal faces
• 12 square faces
  

AN

Postcard celebrates 5 months of quality entertainment and education.  Visitors arrive from all over the world!





AM
The "Sleeping Camel" blog features thoughts on Arabic language and culture.  Click image to enjoy.






AL
Yale Romanization of Asian languages has gotten buried by more recent systems, but in 1945, it was cutting edge and represented an impressive, sweeping effort to tear down language walls.   At that time, there were already several systems in place to transliterate Asian languages, but they were mostly held by the linguistic elite.  But what happens when you have to train hundreds of thousands of G.I. Joe's to suddenly start speaking intelligible Cantonese?  Yale!  Yale actually encompassed four romanization systems, one for each language: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean.  It was designed to be intuitive for ordinary American soldiers at first glance.  

 In 2009, Cantonese and Korean still use Yale as a standard, but Mandarin has evolved to Pinyin, and Japanese remains with the Hepburn system from 1887.  Time for some math!  

1854 - U.S. Navy shows up in Japan with steam-power warships and blows the doors off Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Perry_(naval_officer)

1887 - James Hepburn publishes his Romanization system for Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization

Time elapsed between military domination and language domination: 33 years.  



AK


right click to view image full size


In a perfect world...




AJ

What do Froot Loops, fast cards, and frosty drinks all have in common?  Guarani !   When Spain and Portugal carved up South America, most of the locals fell in line and accepted their new European overlords.   When the dust settled, only one native language, Guarani,  was preserved with "official language" status (in Paraguay).   Ever relevant, the language is the source of English words like toucan, jaguar, and tapioca.  Three cheers for Guarani, a true survivor!




AI
This picture was made for Pericles, my language colleague.  Pericles is thick into some Hebrew books these days, and got to feeling that Hebrew was a re-hash of every other spoken human language.  To pep things up a little, I cobbled together this image.  Keep at it!

Alphabet Hitman  /ælfə bɛt hɪt mæn/  noun  - an agent responsible for replacing foreign writing systems with that of his home country.  

You can keep your language, but you have to write it with my alphabet.  For example, instead of a Russian writing спасибо, they would write "spasibo".    Romanization and transliteration imply the same process.  Ostensibly, this helps to lower communication barriers and add clarity, but I like it for the sport.   Why go to a ranch and shoot quails?  For the sport.   Why kill off the Hanzi with Hanyu Pinyin and Kanji with Romaji?  Because it's fun to do bad things!

The guy behind Romanization.com and Pinyin.info takes his Romanization seriously.   His focus is street signs in Taiwan.  Apparently, many Taiwanese road signs are listed in Hanzi (characters) with Romanization spellings below.  However, Taiwan uses outdated systems such as Wade-Giles and Tongyong Pinyin, and these crazyfunky spellings are wrapped up in local cultural pride.   The webmaster is pushing hard for a switch to signage in Hanyu Pinyin.

I understand the desire to see Hanyu Pinyin, but I think new signage would be a waste of money.  The most important thing is getting the locals comfortable with seeing the 26 letters of the alphabet all around them as a substitute for characters.   Mission accomplished! Move on!  I say, take the momentum to the Mainland.  In a new place, you can start fresh with the Hanyu Pinyin conventions.  All in all, bravo on your efforts to catalog the process, sir.




AG
Pinyin is sexy again.  Sure, pinyin has been functional for 50 years, but how about it's raw physical beauty?  After all, there's something hot about depopularizing an advanced system of ideograms and replacing it with a phonetic alphabet.  This campaign is targeted at Asians, so I used a Chinese model this time.  Credit for the text goes to Simon at Omniglot.  Translation: I also enjoy reading, listening to music, watching films, playing various musical instruments, singing, traveling, inline skating, cycling, unicycling and juggling.  

Is this picture too racy? Too bad!  When you get your own website, you can go do whatever you want with it.   I'll be the first to admit, instead of majoring in languages, I should have kept them as a hobby.  Scratch that - as a fetish.   The only thing wrong with that picture above, is that I don't have 10,000,000 copies and a helicopter to distribute them with over the biggest cities in China.  (Also, source of image is http://farm1.static.flickr.com/105/307734686_226cd9af18.jpg - thank you for letting me borrow it )










AF
Now that all Chinese kids learn pinyin before characters, will characters become superfluous and disappear?  As more people use computers with Pinyin IMEs (input method editors), penmanship will collapse, and characters could soon be seen as an unnecessarily difficult extension.  The trick is in training the Chinese to create public road signs, billboards, and documents in pinyin only.  Put a sexy woman next to a big block of pinyin text, and pretty soon all those diacritics will look sexy, too.  (Above is an image I created - a quick and dirty shot at this concept - pinyin sample lifted from omniglot.com.)  While it might seem that the tone marks will just junk up the romanization, it still beats laboring over characters.  I searched online for public signage in pinyin, and I found some awesome content on the site Pinyin.info .  









AE
Let's all memorize the NATO phonetic alphabet!  It's easy to learn and comes in handy over the phone.  I called an account holder of mine today, and it made communicating long strings of letters very clear.  At the end of the conversation, she thanked me for using that terminology, and asked if I had been in the military.  Nope, but I'm honored all the same!

Letters
Alpha - Bravo - Charlie - Delta - Echo - Foxtrot - Golf - Hotel - India - Juliet - Kilo - Lima - Mike -
November - Oscar - Papa - Quebec - Romeo - Sierra - Tango - Uniform - Victor - Whiskey - X-ray - Yankee - Zulu

Numbers
0 - Zero  , 1 - Wun  , 2 - Two  ,  3 - Tree  ,  4 - Fower , 5 - Fife  , 6 - Six  , 7 - Seven ,  8 - Ait  , 9 - Niner  



AD

Social strata and languages are one.  I often reference my personal experience on this topic.  I can converse in Spanish, German, Russian, and Mandarin, but my opportunities to use each of those vary widely. (Also see this map of St. Louis languages from the betalab section) For example...

Spanish - I almost never use it, because I don't associate with low income laborers and kitchen workers.  If I'm ever in a neighborhood where all the signs are in Spanish, my only thought is, "Let's get the hell out of here".
German - never use it, but for the opposite reason.  I only hear it in elite circles, like in engineering labs at Harvard, and at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' conference.  
Russian and Mandarin - I keep those sharp, because the native speakers occupy my social rung, giving me ample chance to practice.  Those are the people who quickly become my friends, classmates, co-workers, customers, and lovers, and the exchange of words flows easily.

So who gives a hoot about all that?  I do, because it means we are sitting on an untapped, linguistic gold mine!   In local high schools, most kids learn Spanish.  Out of all the foreign language choices, Spanish has the reputation of the being the easiest. Spanish classes have the highest student enrollment and the most teachers to accommodate.  Conscientious parents read that Hispanics are flocking into the U.S., so they sign their kids up for private Spanish lessons when they are in elementary schools.  Sounds great, but it all fails.  All the Spanish neighborhoods are poverty-stricken ghettos, so nobody goes there, which means nobody practices, and everyone forgets what they learned.  American middle-class folks will only ever learn as much Spanish as they learn Ebonics, because both represent the same things.  

So, let's just put all the money behind Mandarin and drop Spanish.  What do we have to lose?  The most popular program (Spanish) is a total flop anyways, so we might as well try something new.   Chinese is harder, but kids are more likely to use it with their peers.  Again, what's the downside - all kids forget their Chinese by adulthood?  Worst case scenario, it gets the same pathetic results as Spanish.  Better case scenario, white kids learn words from the classroom, then test them out on native classmates and co-workers they meet in their daily lives.  Chinese is the language of good grades, hard work, and ambition - what parent could argue with that type of influence of their children?  Best case scenario, they make lasting friendships with those peers, continue to practice Mandarin, and wind up fluent by the age of 25.   Sounds pretty damn good to me.   What are we waiting for?

AC

Colonization,  a.k.a. what American history teachers like to ignore.   Americans as a whole tend to have amnesia when it comes to what was happening in the world between 1500 and 1900.  We can recite facts about Egypt from 5000 years ago, but we've never even heard of the Boer Wars (100 years ago), or the Opium Wars (160 years ago).   In fact, Americans are even stupid about our OWN history!  For example, who remembers that the tea we dumped into Boston Harbor was grown in India?  Maybe this December 16, we should celebrate the anniversary by throwing Indian call-center workers into the ocean!  

But I digress.  What I'd like to know is, why did some colonial languages stick, while others retreated?  English lasted in India after independence, Spanish hung onto Latin America after independence, but Dutch seems to have been forgotten in Indonesia.  Why, why, why?




AB
English Portal is a team of English teachers in Europe quickly expanding their reach to the whole globe.   Get connected to the action at their sites, English-Portal.com and  Talk-and-Learn.com



AA
James Brady from Ireland is pioneering language learning games in Facebook applications.   A short bio, in his own words:  

"James is fascinated by rapid language learning and continues to work on 2d and 3d games which will help people become fluent in foreign languages rapidly. He is also co-author of the 3d game programming book, The Beginners Guide to the C4 Engine."



AZ


Buffalax : the accidental genius.   Several years ago, a regular guy from Ohio starting posting videos on Youtube.  The concept was simple - listen to a foreign song, and pretend they were singing in English.  Then, write down the English phrases it sounds like they are singing as subtitles.  Voila, a fake "translation".   I love this game, because it forces you to listen to and accurately record phonetic sounds, even when you don't understand them.   Great way to lampoon a music video, even better way to train yourself to acquire new languages.









Y
In troubled times, Urban Dictionary is our insurance policy on the English language.  We've got Radio Free Asia,  Bible-thumping missionaries, English schools on every square foot of the planet, and now internet sites like Facebook are helping to push the English alphabet down everyone's throats.   Americans are driving hard and fast to grow our cultural and linguistic empire.  But,  there is a downside:  pidgins and creoles.   Basically, English is getting f****cked up.   The muscle required to enforce proper grammar and  word usage is left out of the budget, so foreign populations are only learning the language half-baked and botching the rest.  At home, we have plenty of slang, leet-speak, "ebonics",  and humorous misspellings of English words, but we also have an unspoken rule that these are CORRECT ways to misspell English.   As I mentioned,  Urban Dictionary is like a safety net, an insurance policy that provides coverage limits up to 4,000,000 misspelled words in the event of a young, rebellious subculture.   But, the mutant cocktails of English and native languages in places like Indonesia and Nigeria require more effort to catalog, let alone set straight.  Solution: fund efforts to promote standard English in the most influential regions of foreign countries! Nip the problem in the bud.




X
American Sign Language ain't like English.  Verbs don't conjugate, nouns don't inflect, and it uses OSV instead of SVO.  I think.  But actually, the grammar is three-dimensional.   God knows there's no case endings, and even word order is apparently less important.  Instead of those, you just draw a picture of your sentence in the air, so there's no grammatical ambiguity anyways.  Now I'm curious about other countries' respective sign languages.  Do sign languages compete just like spoken languages?   Is there sign language etymology?  If all of these countries have their own system, where did each one evolve from?  





W




Alphabets are pretty much the best thing ever.   The king of kings is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  As of 2009, the IPA is about 120 years young.  Credit for invention goes to the French.  Today, the driving force behind the phonetic alphabet is the International Phonetic Association.  Besides being universally useful for learning and maintaining every language on the planet, the IPA can also be used to teach yourself how to speak or sing backwards (without recording software).  Dig deeper into this subject matter by visiting the official website of the IPA.  





V
Today marks the beginning of a new concept I'm trying, where I title these posts on a base-26 system, so I can use the English alphabet instead of numbers.  This is my 22nd post, hence the letter "V".  Next post will be "W".  The traditional zero will be held by "Z", so the 26th post will be written as "AZ".  







March 16, 2009
I don't know a lot about Cantonese, except it sounds like jacked-up Mandarin with more consonants.   At least with Mandarin, pinyin destroyed all other transliteration methods and really helped to clear up the mess of characters.  However, the situation with Cantonese looks uglier.  This omniglot article details the five competing romanization systems for Cantonese, with no clear victor in sight.  





March 15, 2009
Video interview with the inventor of Pinyin, Zhou Youguang.  In fifty years, this guy boosted literacy in China from 20% to 90%.  Translation:  he taught  ONE BILLION PEOPLE how to read.  Perspective -  there are about 7 billion people on earth total.  Name a more significant linguistic development!  YOU CAN'T DO IT!






http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/feb/20/zhaou.youguang.pinyin

Serious language learners know that you can boost your skills by video-chatting with native speakers over the internet.   Step one - download skype .  Step two - register with a language exchange website to chat with a native speaker. Popular ones include xLingo, SharedTalk, Language-Buddy, and MyLanguageExchange.   You help them with English, they help you with whatever you want to learn.   Everyone wins, and it's f-r-e-e.  

*Update: Google Talk now allows you to video-chat online.  All you need is a gmail account!

Set up your computer to type in multiple languages!  I often toggle my keyboard between English, Mandarin, Russian, and German.   Given, I busted my chops to learn Cyrillic and Pinyin at one point, but the computer does the rest of the work beautifully.  Microsoft tutorial here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/winxp/yourlanguage.mspx .








March 10, 2009
Briefly revisiting the usefulness of Wikipedia as a translation tool:  Suppose you want to watch "The Sopranos" for free on a Chinese site like youku.com or tudou.com , but when you search the site in English, the results are lacking.  You might need to find the Chinese name of the TV show.  First, go the wiki page for the TV show.  Click the link for the Chinese version of the article on the left side, labeled 中文 (zhongwen) .  Copy the characters in the title of the article, and paste them into the video site search bar.   This technique should open many doors which are closed to English-only searches.

How can you translate things for free online?  The classic tool is Babelfish, which handles about a dozen European and Asian languages.  Google Translate is another useful tool, which can be used to automatically translate entire web pages while you surf.   For individual words, and less common languages, google a phrase like "Swahili online dictionary", and there should be a handful of free resources.  Lesser known linguist hack:  Wikipedia.  Many topics are translated into other languages, and you can see the language list on the left side of the Wiki page.  

What's the best way to prevent lousy foreigners from learning your home language?  ADD TONES!  I wonder if any other feature is more subtle and more discouraging.  Americans like to hate on Chinese for being tonal, but I enjoy pointing out that even English is tonal.  For proof, I can hum the phrase "I don't know" with my mouth closed, and my friends always understand the meaning.   Dave Kolmer, an ESL teacher in Thailand, submitted this graph of the five tones of Thai:









Feb 26, 2009
I met a woman today who had done missionary work in Mozambique and Ghana.   When I asked her the inevitable question about languages, she mentioned that many foreign workers there use Rosetta Stone software to learn the local languages.   According to her, Rosetta Stone was the preferred system of U.S. government workers for several years.  When a more sophisticated software tool was developed, the government switched over, and "kicked Rosetta Stone to the public".  I'd be very curious to know what that latest government-caliber training tool is.  Anybody know?

Foreign languages: sure, they're fun, but do they sell well?  I did a handcount of language book allocation at a Borders bookstore in St.Louis, MO to the total amount of bookshelf space in the store.  Out of approximately 400 shelving sections, 8 were filled with language books (2%).  Of those 8 sections, 4 were dedicated to Spanish.  Among the other 4, the biggest players were French and Italian.   Since when is Italian so popular?  Although, now that I think about it, my college roommate did study abroad in Italy for a semester.  Plus, Rosetta Stone, the hot new language software package, loves to tout its one-liner about an American farm kid learning Italian to impress a European supermodel.  Maybe I've just been in  Italian-denial, since it's the same as Spanish, except less people speak it.   Not to mention, in the last 500 years, all the Italians managed to conquer was Ethiopia.  Big deal!

 


Feb 15, 2009
1.   Indonesia is not on the radar of most Americans.  We don't have an easy stereotype for a country whose people are essentially Asian, and 86% of them are Muslim.   But as a linguist, you should sit up and pay attention to the Indonesian language for several reasons.  They use a Latin alphabet with no annoying diacritics, no tones, and no conjugation.  Did I mention they clock in around #10 on the list of the most widely spoken languages in the world?  





Feb 14, 2009  ♥


1.  Your Valentine's Day gift from Postcard is the website etymonline.com .  When you absolutely must know the origin of an English word, but don't feel like paying for access to the O.E.D.,  Etymonline is your solution.  The website is an extremely impressive, one-man operation.  

1. There are a handful of related languages in China, among them Mandarin and Cantonese.   In Shanghai, you'll hear another local variation, classified by linguists as the Wu branch of the Sino-Tibetan family.   For decades, the Chinese government has been working to suppress Shanghainese; most recently, by requiring very young children to speak only Mandarin in school.   The topic is very controversial, and many believe that the language will disappear within a generation.

1. Ever heard of the Korean Wave?  For the last ten years, people all over Asia are going wild for Korean pop culture. Today there are fan clubs springing up on every continent!  I had never heard of it until tonight, when I connected the dots between what I heard from Indonesia and the USA.  Look out for it!  By the way, if you're already in love with Korean culture, you might like this t-shirt design .  It reads "Korean Fever Forever" - my own creation, inspired by Shauna in St.Louis, MO.    

2.   Athia in Bandung, Indonesia is promoting efforts to preserve the local language, Sundanese.   Within the last decade, the government has cut school curriculum which supported the language.   There are 27 million speakers of Sundanese, and many are worried that the language is now endangered.

3.   Umghar from Morocco is leading a cause to unify and preserve the Berber/Tamazight language.  Until their website launches, they are using a facebook page  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tutlayt-Tamazight-Amazigh-Berber-Language/29752997613.





Feb 9, 2009
1. First post ever is dedicated to Simon at Omniglot.  If you've never heard of Omniglot, you are living in a cave.  This guy runs an astounding online resource for learning about the writing systems of the world.