July 29, 2008 at 11:31 am
· Filed under Greek, Historic, Etymology, French, English · Posted by Wendy
In the news last week, an Athens court dismissed a case requesting that the word ‘lesbian’ be only used to refer to residents of the small island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. Three such residents requested that the word be banned from being used to refer to homosexual women. One of the plaintiffs was photographed holding a banner that proclaimed “If you are not from Lesbos / you are not a lesbian”.
“This is a good decision for lesbians everywhere,” Vassilis Chirdaris, lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Union of Greece, told Reuters. “A court in Athens could not stop people around the world from using it. It was ridiculous.”
The female poet* Sappho was famous for her love poems in ancient Greek times, and the word ‘lesbian’ was derived from her birthplace, Lesbos. It turns out that the island has become something of a popular destination for gay women, and this has provided a boost to the local tourism industry.
It’s not unheard of for certain towns or regions to restrict the use of their name for commercial purposes, and for this reason the word ‘Cognac’ can only be used to describe brandy made in that region. Unfortunately for the people of the village of Champagne, Switzerland, they can’t even use their own village name on local produce. France is very proud of its Champagne wine region, and Switzerland has, for politico-economic reasons, agreed to forbid this tiny village from using the word ‘Champagne’ on their products.
Despite all the efforts of the French, ‘champagne’ has become synonymous with almost any ’sparkling white wine’ in many places in the world, despite not being technically correct. We could use ‘methode traditionelle’, or ‘bubbly’, but it’s just not the same. ‘Champagne’ is becoming generic, which has to be somewhat of a compliment for the region, surely? Similarly, whatever the ruling had been in Athens, I doubt many people worldwide would restrict the use of the word ‘lesbian’ to the description of the 90,000 inhabitants of Lesbos.
*I’m not a fan of the word ‘poetess’, for some reason. Maybe ‘poetress’ would be better?
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July 25, 2008 at 10:34 pm
· Filed under Games, English · Posted by Wendy
Games are one of the best ways to become familiar with and practise the language that you’re learning. From simple word-matching games using flashcards, to crosswords, to popular board games.
Recently I’ve come across a new product from the makers of Scrabble® (the popular lettter tile boardgame). It’s called Scrabble® Scramble and it involves a much-smaller version of the board, 12 letter dice, and a one-minute timer. Instead of choosing seven tiles from a bag, the special shaker rolls seven dice for you, and you have one minute to place your word. Generally the rules are the same, but a maximum of two words remain on the board at any one time. The advantages to this version are that it is fast (an average game will last about 20 minutes, depending on the number of players), any number of people can play (as long as they are prepared to wait their turn), it is tiny and portable, and you can use the dice to play a lot of other word games.
I’m not usually one to plug (promote) specific products, but I’ve found the letter dice to be especially helpful in my classes, and have improvised (made up/invented) quite a few ways to use them to keep my students learning in an enjoyable way. They also seem to be fascinated by the timer, and one minute turns keep things interesting!
Variations with letter dice:
- Roll seven dice and see who can make the most words from the letters (words must be three or more letters long).
- Roll two or three dice and see who can make the most words (or who gets the first/longest word) containing all the letters.
- Use the dice to decide who will go first in games (closest to a particular letter wins).
- Use the dice to play category games (see who can name one word in each category [e.g. animals, fruit, countries] that starts with the letter rolled).
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July 24, 2008 at 11:12 pm
· Filed under Pronunciation, Korean, Different but the same, English · Posted by Wendy
When I was teaching some lovely Korean exchange students, one of the major pronunciation issues we had to work on was the difference between /p/ and /f/. It was very difficult for them to differentiate the two, as they don’t have a /f/ sound in Korean.
We had a lesson about food, and I asked what they normally ate for dinner in Korea. Rice and pish, I was told. Fish? Yes, pish. Do you like fish? Yes, I like pish.
Some dedicated pronunciation drills followed.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if ‘pish’ wasn’t a common slang word in the UK and Ireland. It is a somewhat polite version of ‘piss’, which, as well as meaning ‘urine’, is often used to talk about alcohol (usually beer). In Australia, it’s quite common to ’sink some piss’ (drink some beer), and to be ‘pissed’ is to be drunk (but to be ‘pissed’ in the USA means to be ‘pissed off’ or ‘annoyed’).
So, in some places you can buy pish, drink pish, and get downright pished. It does quite a good job of imitating a drunken (pished) slur, too.
‘Pish’ or ‘pish posh’ can also be a statement, meaning ‘rubbish!’ or ‘nonsense!’.
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July 23, 2008 at 4:59 pm
· Filed under Numbers, Cultural differences · Posted by Wendy
One last thing on numbers, for now.
Forget about base 10 and counting in lots of 10,000. Think back to when you were a child. One of the first things you were taught was probably how to count from 1 to 10. It’s always one of the first things I learn in a foreign language as well. The concept of numbers and counting seems to be essential to most cultures.
In 2004, a team from MIT discovered that an Amazonian tribe had no words for specific numbers. What they thought were words meaning ‘one’, ‘two’, and ‘many’, have recently been shown to mean something else. This time, instead of asking the Piraha tribespeople to count objects as they were added (one, two, three…), they were asked to count backwards as objects were removed from the group. It seems that the words thought to mean ‘one’, ‘two’, and ‘many’ were general terms, and had more to do with relative amounts. What they thought was ‘two’ could actually mean as many as five or six (and obviously sometimes two), ‘one’ was anything less than ‘two’, and ‘many’ was anything more.
Even though the Piraha don’t even have a number to describe ‘one’, they could still match identical-sized groups. However, in memory-matching games, they didn’t do so well. So apparently humans don’t need cardinal numbers (we do have an innate concept of ‘amount’), but it does really help us with keeping track of groups of things over time. It’s a little easier than checking your bank account and finding out that you have ‘less money than you did yesterday’. Although either way is still not very comforting.
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July 20, 2008 at 12:09 pm
· Filed under Different but the same, Numbers, French, Irish, Chinese, Cultural differences, English · Posted by Wendy
The other day I was talking about the misunderstanding that arose between a culture that counted in thousands, and a culture that counted in tens of thousands. Does it make it even more difficult when people use a different base system than we’re used to?
Most cultures these days count in a base 10 system, most likely because we have five digits on each hand to keep track of the world with. This means we count up to ten, remember that we have one lot of ten, keep counting to twenty, remember we have two lots of ten, etc. Do you think you’d have trouble with bases 2, 5, 8, 12, 20, or even 60? You might surprise yourself.
Base 2 (binary) is used primarily in computer-related fields, and relates to switches that can only be in the on or off position (1 or 0).
Base 5 has been used in many cultures (probably because we have five digits on one hand), and can be used as a sub-base for base 10, 20, or 60.
Base 8 is a counting system based on the gaps between fingers, and is used by the Yuki tribe of northern California (who also use 4 as a sub-base). There is a theory that the Proto-Indo Europeans in the Bronze age used a counting system based on eights. The word for nine, ‘newm’, is thought to have derived from ‘new’, and suggests to some linguists that nine and ten were, at some point, new numbers.
Base 12 is thought to have been related to the number of knuckles on one hand (not counting the thumb). We still have words for twelve (one dozen) and twelve twelves (one gross). We have two lots of twelve hours in a day, and twelve months in a year. Twelve is not quite as easy to multiply, but simpler to divide in than base 10.
Base 20 is possibly based on the number of human fingers and toes, and was used by the Mayan civilisation and others in South America, and in some parts of Africa. In English we still have the word ’score’ (twenty), and in French there is ‘vingt’. Eighty in French is ‘quatre-vingt’ (four twenties). There is also evidence of base 20 in Irish and Danish counting systems.
Base 60 is thought to have been a combination of bases 10 and 12, and was used by ancient Mesopotamian cultures, as well as the Chinese. As a result of the Sumerian usage, we still use base 60 to measure time and angles, with 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. The Chinese calendar has 6 cycles of 60 days in one year, and the Chinese Zodiac has four cycles of 12 (lasting 60 years).
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