The virtual linguist

Texas German

Texas German is spoken by the fifth and sixth generations of early German immigrants to Texas. In interviews with some of these people in a BBC piece (here), we discover that future generations of these families are unlikely to continue to speak German. The people interviewed (probably in their sixties) said that they had spoken nothing but German in the family when they were children, but after the War many Texan Germans preferred to speak English to their children.

 

Professor Hans Boas of the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas has been recording the speech of Texan Germans, and has established that a) there are many variations within the language - the German of no two speakers is identical, and b) it is different from the German spoken in Germany. Mouth movements have been affected by the speakers' knowledge of English, and English vocabulary has crept into the language, as in the sentence "Die Kuh ist über die fence gejumpt" (the cow jumped over the fence).

 

Here's the short description and video.

Dothraki

The inventor of Dothraki, an invented language spoken by a group in the television series Game of Thrones, appeared on Radio 4's Today programme yesterday (listen for a few more days here).

 

David Peterson of the Language Creation Society said it took him between three and four months to devise the language, first organising the grammar, and then fleshing out the vocabulary. It has around 3,700 words. He said that the television producers initially had no intention of writing a whole new organised language, instead thinking that the actors could just utter gibberish. There are two problems with taking this approach. One is that, in this case, the producers and director did not like the end result, and the other is that many fans of cult series notice every little detail, such as someone saying the same words that are translated in the subtitles as meaning something different each time.

 

There is a little bit of spoken Dothraki on the BBC clip. There is more information about the make-up of the language - sounds, grammar etc - on its Wikipedia page.

Latin today

Finland’s national broadcaster YLI broadcasts the news in Latin (see here), so Latin is alive and well in Finland. It is still much used elsewhere, not least in the Vatican, and, indeed, Pope Benedict announced his resignation in Latin. Only a handful of Catholic priests speak Latin fluently. One of them is American Reginald Foster who runs a Latin summer school in Rome. He sounds quite a character – he gives his students 'home-play' (ludi domestici), not homework (see his Wikipedia page). Linguist Nicholas Ostler runs a few Latin sites on the internet (interretialis) (see here).

 

Latin was very important in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, but gradually fell out of use. The last major work in Latin to be produced in Britain was Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica of 1687, according to this interesting piece about Latin on the BBC website today.

Manx

The last native speaker of Manx, the indigenous language of the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, died in 1974 and in the 1990s UNESCO pronounced the language extinct, but as a piece on the BBC website this week shows, it is very much alive, and interest is growing. The BBC has several pages of articles written in Manx (see here).

 

In the mid-19th century many islanders were monolingual, speaking Manx only, but difficult economic conditions forced many inhabitants to travel to England to find work, and parents often avoided teaching their children Manx, feeling that it was not going to be of any economic use. Even nowadays on the island there are some long-time residents who feel that the Manx language is a sign of backwardness. And as recently as the 1960s Manx speakers would find themselves getting involved in brawls, such were the feelings the language evoked.

 

Manx is related to Scottish and Irish Gaelic. The island itself (sometimes called Mann, as well as the Isle of Man) has a very chequered history of conquest and invasion. A thousand years ago it was, along with the Hebrides, part of a Norse kingdom. In 1266 Mann was ceded to Scotland, only coming under English control in the early 15th century. The ‘Man’ of Isle of Man is not related to the English word ‘man’. It refers to an ancient sea god of Irish mythology, Manannan mac Lir.

 

The Isle of Man is a British Crown Dependency. It is not part of the United Kingdom, nor of the European Union. Its parliament, the Tynwald, founded by Viking raiders in AD979, lays claim to being the oldest continuous parliament in the world (the Icelandic parliament, the Althing, is older, but it has not sat continuously). Like the Althing, the Tynwald’s name comes from the Old Norse thing, meaning ‘assembly’. 

 

See the BBC article on a Manx-language primary school, and hear children speaking the language here.

Pope tweets in Latin

The Pope has made his first tweet in Latin - he already tweets in eight modern languages. He wrote "Orare semper, iustitiam factitare, amare probitatem, humiles Secum ambulare", which translates ""pray constantly, do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with Him".

 

There were an interesting few minutes on this morning's Today programme on Radio 4 (here) where commentators discussed the merits, or otherwise, of Latin on Twitter. Although Latin is said to be a concise language, the Pope refers to Twitter in Latin as pagina publica breviloquentis (concise, public page), which itself is not a particularly concise phrase.

 

Peter Jones from the Friends of Classics said an alternative translation would have been to use the Latin for chirrup or twitter in the avian sense, which is pipiare. He said a translation of Twitterati would be pipiantes, the present participle. When asked for his advice about a tweet in Latin, he suggested Juvenal's phrase Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes (loosely translated as 'Many suffer from the incurable disease of tweeting').

 

Listen to the BBC piece here, and read the story here.

Silbo Gomero

Silbo Gomero is an old whistling language used on the Canary island of Gomera. It is based on a regional variety of spoken Spanish with a small number of vowels and consonants. But the language existed before the Spanish arrived - it has been adapted to Spanish since.

 

The island of Gomera contains mountains, valleys and ravines, making it an arduous process to go from one place to another, and the whistling language came about to help inhabitants communicate with one another. It can be heard up to two miles away.

 

Locals say that the whistling language was in widespread use in the 1940s and 50s. Like slang and secret languages it was often used by locals to ensure that outsiders couldn't understand them. It later declined as economic difficulties caused some locals to emigrate, and as the road network improved, and these days mobile phones enable long-distance communication.

 

There was a revival of interest in Silbo Gomero in the 1990s, and it is now a compulsory subject in primary schools on the island.

 

The BBC website has an article on Silbo Gomero, with a video from a school classroom and a radio clip. See it here.

Languages in New York

About 800 languages are spoken in New York, and some of these are languages threatened with extinction. Some languages that still have a few speakers in New York are no longer spoken in their place of origin – Gottscheerisch, a dialect of German, and Garifuna, an Arawak language from Honduras and Belize, for example.

 

There has been a short series of BBC radio programmes about languages (listen here), and the third one was about the languages spoken in New York. The BBC site also has a written report on the subject (here). It reports how there is a resurgence of interest in Yiddish, which began to wane as children of immigrants were more likely to speak English than Yiddish, unlike their parents.

English Vinglish

There aren't many feature films, let alone comedies, about learning English, but the Bollywood film English Vinglish is a recent one that has received good reviews (and which I will go and see if and when it comes to a local cinema - I think I might have missed it when it came out about a month ago). It's about an Indian woman, teased by her family about her poor English, who enrols on a language course while visiting New York to stay with relatives (watch the trailer here).

 

I'm not exactly sure about the significance of the title and, in particular, Vinglish. It could be that Hindi forms reduplicative words (examples of reduplicative words in English include nitty-gritty, hocus-pocus) using the letter V for the second element (and this Wikipedia page suggests it does). Or, the vin of Vinglish could be a play on the word 'win'.

 

English as spoken by speakers of Hindi is sometimes called Hinglish. There are other words for other varieties of English spoken elsewhere, which are imbued with vocabulary and features of the home language, including Thaiglish (Thailand) and Konglish (South Korea). Those last two examples are not in the OED, but other varieties of English, or varieties of other languages heavily influenced by English, are. They are listed below with their OED definitions:

Chinglish: A mixture of Chinese and English; esp. a variety of English used by speakers of Chinese or in a bilingual Chinese and English context, typically incorporating some Chinese vocabulary or constructions, or English terms specific to a Chinese context.

Hinglish: Esp. in India: a mixture of Hindi and English; esp. a variety of English used by speakers of Hindi (or in a bilingual Hindi and English context), characterized by frequent use of Hindi vocabulary or constructions.

Japlish: A blend of Japanese and English spoken in Japan: either the Japanese language freely interlarded with English expressions or the English language spoken in an unidiomatic way by a Japanese speaker. (This is the oldest entry among this list - it went into the OED in 1976 and hasn't been updated since. Spanglish and Yinglish went in in the 1980s, and the others only within the last ten years.)

Singlish: An informal variety of English spoken in Singapore, incorporating elements of Chinese and Malay. (There is also another entry for Singlish: An informal variety of English spoken in Sri Lanka, incorporating elements of Sinhala.)

Spanglish: A type of Spanish contaminated by English words and forms of expression, spoken in Latin America.

Yinglish: A jocular name for a blend of English and Yiddish spoken in the United States; a form of English containing many Yiddishisms

Deciphering proto-Elamite

To date, attempts to decipher proto-Elamite, a 5000-year-old writing system developed in what is now Iran, have failed, but academics at Oxford University may be close to a breakthrough, reports the BBC (in this article).

 

Over a thousand clay tablets inscribed with the writing survive, but, even though other ancient writing systems, such as ancient Egyptian and Sumerian, have been deciphered, it has proved very difficult to understand proto-Elamite. One reason for this is that no bilingual texts have been found (and it was the discovery of the bilingual Rosetta Stone that was the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics - see this old post). Another reason is that there seem to be many errors in the writing, making it difficult to spot patterns.

 

The reason that the article predicts a breakthrough is that a new machine now exists which will 'read' the texts more clearly and make the markings more visible. Researcher Dr Jacob Dahl took the machine over to the Louvre museum in Paris, where there is a significant collection of the tablets.

 

Dr Dahl may not fully understand most of the writing, but he has gleaned enough to give an idea of the society that used the writing system. He can tell that the clay tablets mostly relate to accounting or trading matters (early texts often do - the Rosetta Stone text contains information about taxes). The society was hierarchical with the masses at the bottom subsisting on meagre diets. The upper echelons may have had a life expectancy similar to today's, according to Dr Dahl.

 

Here is the BBC piece with a picture of a tablet showing the writing.

Hartz IV

I am sending this post from Berlin. I have learnt a number of new German words and expressions while I've been here. Before this week I would have said "arbeitslos" for "unemployed", but I have come across a new (for me) expression, namely Hartz IV (or Hartz 4), which is used to mean "unemployed" or "unemployment". Apparently people say things like "Mein Vater ist Hartz IV" (my father is unemployed). 

 

Peter Hartz was an adviser to former Chancellor Schröder, and a top businessman. He devised a series of reforms to do with unemployment benefits, called the Hartz-Konzept. There have been various 'incarnations' or 'amendments' to the original idea, and so far the 'concept' is up to number 4, hence the number 4 in the expression. Herr Hartz later suffered a severe fall from grace (see this BBC article).

 

I've been trying to think off the top of my head of similar expressions in English, ie those containing the name of a politician. I can think of the modern "Boris bikes" ie the bicycles parked all over London which can be hired by the hour. They are named after current London mayor Boris Johnson, who introduced the scheme. The term "Baker day" is sometimes still used in schools, I think. Kenneth Baker was Margaret Thatcher's education minister in the 1980s, when he introduced in-service training days for teachers, which were soon dubbed "Baker days". Then there were the Bevin boys, young men conscripted during the Second World War who were sent to work in the mines. They were named after the wartime Labour minister Ernest Bevin.