Language Trainers Blog

For the new year, give your acquaintances the gift of pronouncing their names correctly.  It’s a basic courtesy, but it’s not uncommon to come across a name you’ve never heard before, and it’s often uncomfortable to have to ask someone how to pronounce their name (especially if you have communicated by email or other written communication).

Hear Names has a large database of names from all over the world, sorted by language or region.  If you come across an unfamiliar name through the course of your work day, through study, or in a newspaper, look it up on Hear Names, see its origin, and hear a native speaker pronounce it for you.  They even have famous figures’ names for your convenience.  And if you can’t find the name you’re looking for, there is a request feature so you can ask for a recording.

Even if you think you know how to pronounce someone’s name, it might be worth looking it up.  For example, Claudia is pronounced differently in the US from how it is in Germany.  And, of course, don’t be afraid to double-check with the person themselves.  Not everyone uses a standard pronunciation.

Source: Readable Blog

Some people love it, some people hate it, a lot of people need it, and for many, it’s all they have.  But how many people celebrate the diversity that is the English language?  A staggering 2 billion people speak it to some degree, and the minority are native speakers.  It’s often claimed that it’s a difficult language that cannibalises words from everywhere, but to many, this is a sign of progress and something to be glad of.

The English Project has taken it upon themselves to designate October 13 English Language Day.  Because October 13 (in 1362) was the first time an English speech was used to open parliament in the UK, the theme of the first English Language Day is the often-confusing topic of legal language.  As even native speakers can find legalese difficult, it puts native and non-native speakers on more of an even playing field.

Check out the Ideas page to get some inspiration for how to celebrate.  Even if you’re not in the UK, you can participate by logging onto the website and filling in the survey.

I stumbled across yet another online dictionary service the other day, but this one offers a little bit more than the standard single word definition service.  MyDictionary.net offers dictionaries in twelve different languages, as well as translating words and phrases between these.  It also has a foreign language keyboard display, which is handy, though quite tiny.

My favourite feature has to be the recent search display.  The main page displays the last 20 or 50 searches completed, and I find it fascinating to see what words and phrases people are looking up.

Here are some of the recent searches I’ve seen so far:

The ordinary or predictable:
¡buena suerte! (Spanish) - good luck!/God speed! (English)
mon petit (French) - my little (English)
saladier (French) - bowl (English)

The technical:
βραδυσεισμός (Greek) - bradyseism (English - a geological term)

The oddly specific:
a prueba de humedad (Spanish) - damp-proof (English)
sordid merchant (English) - 市侩 / shi4kuai4(Chinese - according to the two translators I use, this means ‘Philistine’ and ‘money grubber’)

The obscure idiom:
tip (somebody) the wink (English) - информация: давать частную информацию, намекнуть, знак: делать знак украдкой, подмигивать (Russian)

What were the last things you needed translations for?

I know I’ve said that Americans don’t spell as well as the British, but there’s no doubting that the institution of the National Spelling Bee is given much more attention, time, and effort in the USA.

Last week, 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar from Kansas won the coveted spelling bee trophy by correctly spelling the word Laodicean.  The Round 16 word, meaning to be indifferent, especially in religion, put her ahead of the the two runners up, who misspelled menhir (an upright stone monument, carried around by Obelix in the Asterix comics) and Maecenas (a patron or supporter of the arts).

The months of training, which even included skipping her own birthday celebrations, paid off for Shivashankar, as she took home her prizes, worth over US$30,000.  She plans to be a neurosurgeon one day, but said that nothing would ever replace spelling.

It’s unlikely that most of us have ever heard of the majority of the words in the later rounds of the bee.  It’s even less likely that we’d have the opportunity to use them in real life.  Many of them have been adopted into English from other languages, making an already irregular spelling system even more difficult.  Here are a few for you to consider:

phoresy - a non-parasitic relationship where one organism carries another.

guayabera - a type of loose men’s shirt or lightweight jacket, popular in Latin America.

sophrosyne - moderation, discretion.

reredos - a decorative screen used on an altar.

Fourth-placed Kyle Mou tripped up on schizaffin, which I’ve had trouble even finding a definition for (a few different sources seem to think it means ‘characterised by a slender build with slight muscle definition’).  I think these kids deserve a lot of credit for their dedication, hard work, bravery (I don’t think I could go on national TV to spell words most people can’t even pronounce, let alone spell) and doing their bit to keep obscure vocabulary alive.

Full article from the BBC.

I’m not really a fan of acronyms like LOL (laugh[ing] out loud), so I tend to stick with the written representations of laughing sounds, and the ones I usually use are hahaha (that’s funny!), hehehe (that’s kind of mean!), and hee (cute! squee!).

I’ve always thought the Spanish versions - jajaja, jejeje, jijiji - were really cute, but I have a tendency to read jajaja in a German accent, so it says ‘yes yes yes’.

Here are a few more ways* to show your humour in other languages:

Chinese
哈哈 / ha ha
嘿嘿 / hei hei
呵呵 / he he

Russian
ха-ха-ха (hahaha)
хи-хи (heehee)

Malaysian
kahkahkah (hahaha from comic books)

Turkish

eki eki (used in comics, as the older way of laughing)
muhaha (evil laughter)
nihaha (evil laughter)
puhaha, uhaha, zuhaha (used if something’s really funny)

German
hnhnhn, hmhmhm, chrchrchr (giggle)

My favourite at the moment is a Chinese coworker’s use of hohoho.  I don’t think she really means to sound like Santa Claus, but it brightens my day.

*Many of these examples are from WordReference Forums.

When I was writing about my love of eggcorns (misheard words or phrases that still somehow make sense), I wondered how often they happen in foreign languages, especially for learners.  I got a bit of an answer recently.

One of my favourite things to order here in Asia is what is usually translated to a fruit ’smoothie’.  It’s not exactly what a western smoothie would be, and they’re usually made of fresh fruit blended with ice and sugar syrup.  Almost any fruit smoothie makes a delicious frozen snack or dessert.

For a while, I had only heard other people order them, and never seen it written down.  What I heard was bīngchá (冰茶), which means ice(d) tea.  I was a little bit confused, as iced tea is something completely different, but it kind of made sense.  Eventually I saw a menu, which showed 冰沙, instead, so I looked up the second character (shā).  The word for smoothie is bīngshā, or shābīng, meaning ice(d) sand or sand ice.

It makes much more sense to me now, and I created my very own eggcorn.  Has this happened to anyone else?

You’d think that the word ‘billion’ would mean the same to all English speakers, but, in fact, the two different meanings of the word are vastly different - 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 (one thousand million and one million million).  The first is the current ‘global’ understanding of the word (using the short scale, sometimes known as American usage), and the second, much larger number, uses the long scale or British usage.  As the numbers get bigger, the difference between them gets larger, as the short scale increases by thousands (e.g. a trillion is a thousand billions, or 10¹²), and the long scale increases by millions (e.g. a trillion is a million (long scale) billions, or 10¹⁸).

Most countries use the short scale, these days, but many still use the long scale.  Some countries, such as France and England, have used both scales at different times in history, so it’s important to check sources if you ever come across billion, trillion, etc in older publications.

The French word billion, German Billion; Dutch biljoen; Swedish biljon; Finnish biljoona; Danish billion; Spanish billón and the Portuguese word bilião all refer to 10¹², being long scale terms. Therefore, each of these words translates to the modern English word: “trillion” (10¹² in the short scale), and not “billion” (10⁹ in the short scale).

On the other hand, the Brazilian Portuguese word bilhão (note the alternate spelling to the European Portuguese variant) and the Welsh word biliwn both refer to 10⁹, being short scale terms. Each of these words translates to the English word “billion” (10⁹ in the short scale).  [Wikipedia.]

I think the best thing to do if you have to communicate in such large numbers is just to use the numerals instead of the words!

A person’s family name can tell a lot about their ethnicity, family history, even what their ancestors did for jobs.  Many older names reflect occupations, such as Baker, Tailor, Smith, and Cook. Surnames can sometimes give clues about where a family comes from, even down to a town or village.

There are a lot of genealogy resources available if you are interested in researching your own family name, or that of your friends. Behind the Name has family names from many different cultures and languages, from Basque to Icelandic, Romanian to Sikh.  An interesting addition is the Statistics option, which allows you to see how common a certain name is in the USA or England and Wales.

The Mandarin Chinese surnames Wang and Li are the most common surnames in the world, with over 90 million people each.

Just out of interest, my surname was ranked 459th out of 88,799 names in the US census of 1990.  You can also tell that my family is from a Cantonese-speaking part of China, as the English transliteration is ‘Wong’, not ‘Huang’ (which is a Mandarin spelling).

One of my favourite linguistic phenomena is the eggcorn.  It occurs when a person hears something slightly different to what was said, but the misheard form still makes some sort of sense.  If a person never sees the phrase written down, it’s very possible for them to think that their interpretation is the correct version.

A good example is the word eggcorn itself, which some people believe is the correct pronunciation and spelling of acorn.  It qualifies as a true eggcorn, because acorns are egg-shaped, and corn is a kind of seed, so eggcorn almost makes sense.

A little digging around the internet has revealed some gems, and the Eggcorn Database is a great source.  It encourages public submission, discussion, and possible etymologies.  It even includes some that it doesn’t technically classify as eggcorns.

Here are some of my favourites:

• (chocolate) eclair >> eggclair
• (social) leper >> leopard
• an arm and a leg >> a nominal egg
• eau de cologne >> odor cologne
• cold-hearted >> coal-hearted

Social leopards

The Chinese government has been reported to have plans to release a list of about 8,000 characters that they recommend be used for everyday purposes, including textbooks, documents, and names for newborn babies.  Limitations in updating technology to recognise all of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters in existence means that it is very difficult for the government to implement nationwide electronic ID cards, as well as digitisation of texts.  Their solution, rather than adding thousands of characters that most people will never use, is to restrict new baby names, as well as require people with very unusual names to change them.

Everyday Chinese involves about 3,500 characters, and the recommended 8,000 simplified characters are reportedly enough to convey “almost any concept in any field”.  This doesn’t bode well for the some 60 million Chinese people with obscure names, who may have to choose simpler names in order to receive the mandatory ID cards.

Government officials suggest that names have gotten out of hand, with too many parents picking the most obscure characters they can find or even making up characters, like linguistic fashion accessories. But many Chinese couples take pride in searching the rich archives of classical Chinese to find a distinctive, pleasing name, partly to help their children stand out in a society with strikingly few surnames.

By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans.

At last count, China’s Wangs were leading with more than 92 million, followed by 91 million Lis and 86 million Zhangs. To refer to an unidentified person — the equivalent of “just anybody” in English — one Chinese saying can be loosely translated this way: “some Zhang, some Li.”

While I don’t agree with people having to change their names for the sake of convenience for the government, cultures that have an alphabet-based written language can’t compare to this situation.  In English, we have our standard 26 letters, along with numbers, and various punctuation marks.  We occasionally adopt accent marks when we borrow from other languages.  In Chinese, the computer systems must recognise thousands upon thousands of characters.  Many countries also forbid parents to name their children potentially offensive or damaging names, and names with numerals in them have been denied (such as baby 4Real, who was later named Superman).

I think it would also be quite frustrating not being able to input one’s own name on a computer, or have to describe it to someone who had never even seen the character before, but then again, both my English and Chinese names are pretty common.

Full article from NYTimes.com.