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

German clothing and perfume producer Joop! has tried and failed to trademark a punctuation mark.  The company attempted to claim the exclamation mark as their own, and were denied by the European Court of First Instance.  The ruling claimed that people would not automatically associate the punctuation mark with the company.  The company tried to register the symbol both on its own and in a box, and applications were declined both times.

I’m not sure what I would think about having to worry about copyright rules when using a single symbol, so I’m quite happy to hear that punctuational freedom continues!

Source: EU court rejects “!” as JOOP! trademark - CNBC.com

Besides the most basic terms in a language (greetings, numbers, how to say ‘yes’ and ‘no), swear words seem to be some of the most readily-learned phrases in foreign languages.  Just the other night, I met a Mandarin speaker whose Cantonese lexicon contained the words for ‘hello’, the numbers 1 to 10, and various ways to insult other people.  He was in the army in a Cantonese-speaking province, so this isn’t entirely unsurprising.

Why is there such a need to learn these words?  Perhaps it’s because learning other languages is sometimes so frustrating that learners want to express this.  I think it’s more that, especially in groups of younger people, swearing in a casual way is a way to connect with others, show that you are comfortable with them, and have a bit of a laugh.  As long as you choose your audience well, and don’t have conversations consisting entirely of swear words and rude gestures, I think it’s acceptable.

I’ve also found that people sometimes swear in other languages when it is inappropriate to swear in their own.  Even though many people know what the words mean, they seem to lose their potency in other languages.  For example, I’ve heard quite a few people say the German word Scheiße (scheisse) instead of the English counterpart, shit.  This has happened in social situations as well as in the workplace.

For a user-generated list of foreign swear words and phrases, have a look at YouSwear.com.  They have phrases in languages from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and they even have a Swear Phrase of the Day.

Do you have any other examples of people’s fantastic swearing abilities in foreign languages?

Image from Sianuska at Etsy.com.  ‘Old Lady’ is a foreign language sometimes, surely?

When I first heard the song It’s All About the Benjamins by Puff Daddy and friends, I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about.  This was back in 1997, though, when American slang wasn’t quite as widespread as it is now.  These days, I’m quite aware that benjamin* refers to a US $100 note, because of the portrait of former president and inventor Benjamin Franklin.  It’s more commonly used in hip-hop circles than everyday English, and has been mentioned on film (2002 film All About the Benjamins) and TV.  Puff Daddy (aka P Diddy, aka Sean Combs) has been credited with the first use of this term.  He even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary:

The OED lists him (as S. Combs) as the first citation (1994) for the word in the line “My pockets swell to the rim with Benjamins.” (from A.Word.A.Day.)

Benjamin* has also been used for many years in some European cultures to mean the youngest person in a family or group.  “The benjamin of the family”, “le benjamin de la famille” (French), “el benjamin de la familia” (Spanish), and “der Benjamin der Familie” (German) all mean the youngest child of a family.  It’s an older term that refers to the biblical Benjamin, who was the youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons.

*A word that is derived from the name of a particular person is called an eponym.

FreeRice is an excellent website that combines education and charity.  The concept is simple: answer a question correctly and the UN World Food Program will donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry family somewhere in the world.

FreeRice started out as an English vocabulary game.  They would show you a word and then give four possible definitions or synonyms.  Since then, they have added English grammar, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and several other subject areas like mathematics, chemistry, and geography.

The difficulty level automatically adjusts depending on whether you get the question right or wrong, so the more questions you get right, the harder it becomes.  A great feature is that it will tell you the correct answers to the questions you miss, and repeats them later on in the game - an excellent revision method.

The  highest English vocabulary level they use is 60.  I’ve gotten to a maximum of 50 the last few times I’ve played.  The most memorable word I’ve learned today is jalousie, which is a type of window blind.  I actually guessed the answer correctly, even though it looks like a terrible attempt at spelling ‘jealousy’.

There’s no minimum or maximum number of questions, so there’s no excuse for having no time to feed people in need.  See if you can get to the highest level in your area of expertise, or even better, in the language you’re studying.

They say that nothing is free, but the cost of this is hardly worth mentioning, and the benefits far outweigh the effort of pointing and clicking!

If you’ve ever had to type a handful of words in a foreign language, but don’t use that foreign language enough to warrant adding it to your computer’s language bar, then TypeIt.org may be what you’re looking for.

It has pages for twelve different languages, including a one that lets you type the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols for English pronunciation. Unfortunately the keyboard shortcuts only work for Internet Explorer, but even without them, it’s a simple type/click, copy, paste scenario.

If you’re worried about getting your diacritics right, and don’t want to bother with using a character map, inserting a symbol, or changing your keyboard input language (and having to remember where the right keys are in the different layout), then check it out. It has character sets for Czech, French, German, Hungarian, IPA (English), Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Conclusions cannot always be drawn about historical connections. Some words are similar in numerous languages.  Linguistic research has led to the theory of an Ur-language (Indo-European) spoken some fifty thousand years ago, from which most other languages have descended. Papa, for example, is used for ‘father’ in seventy percent of languages across the world.

Meanwhile, essential latterday vocabulary has crossed languages as easily as the jet-setting executive who uses it:

Taxi is spelt and means the same in French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, Portuguese, Hungarian and Romanian

Sauna is spelt and means the same in Finnish, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Lithuanian, Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian, Romanian and Norwegian

Bank is spelt and means the same in Afrikaans, Amharic (Ethiopia), Bengali, Creole, Danish, Dutch, Frisian (Germany and Holland), German, Gujarati (India), Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Swedish and Wolof (Senegal and Gambia)

Hotel is spelt and means the same in Afrikaans, Amharic, Asturian (Spain), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Frisian (Germany and Holland), Galician (Spain), German, Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tswana (Botswana), Ukranian and Yiddish.

When it comes to personality, some people seem to have been put on the planet to make life easier for everyone else:

 
Cooperar: (Spansih, Central America) to go along willingly with someone else to one’s own disadvantage. 

Abozzare: (Italian) to accept meekly a far from satisfactory situation. 

Ilunga: (Tshiluba, Congo) someone who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time 

Flattering
 
Vaseliner: (French) to flatter (literally, to apply Vaseline) 

Happobijin: (Japanese) a beauty to all eight directions (a sycophant) 

Radfahrer: (German) one who flatters superiors and browbeats subordinates (literally, a cyclist) 

Fawning 

The Japanese have the most vivid description for hangers-on: kingyo no funi. It literally means ‘goldfish crap’ –a reference to the way that a fish that has defecated often trails excrement behind it for some time.

Specific numbers are used in some colloquial phrases:

Mettre des queues aux zeros (French) to add tails to noughts : to overcharge

Siete (Spanish, Central America) seven : a right-angled tear

Mein Rad hat eine Acht (German) my bike has an eight : a buckled wheel

Se mettre sur son trente et un (French) to put yourself on your thirty one : to get all dressed up

Ein Gesicht wie 37 Tage Regenwetter haben (German) to have a face like thirty-seven days of rain : a long face

English enjoys an interesting advantage over all other major European languages, having adopted natural in place of grammatical gender. In studying other European languages, students labour under the heavy burden of memorizing not just the meaning of each and every noun, but the gender, too.

In the Romance languages, for example, there are two genders, thus all nouns which would otherwise be neuter are either masculine or feminine. Some help in these languages is afforded by distinctive endings, which generally characterise the two classes. But even this aid is lacking in Germanic languages, where the distribution of these three genders appears to an English speaker to be mostly arbitrary.

Thus in German, Sonne (sun) is feminine, Mond (moon) is masculine, but Kind (child), Mädchen (maiden), and Weib (wife) are neuter. This distinction must be kept in mind constantly, since it affects not only the reference of pronouns, but also determines the rules of inflection and the agreement of adjectives.

In the English language, all of this was stripped away during the Middle English period.

Gender in modern English is determined by meaning. All nouns referring to living creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all other forms are seemingly neuter - though with indeclinable definite and indefinite articles and single-termination adjectives, our only clues are the pronouns.