Language Trainers Blog

A new education strategy from the UK government is recommending that teachers stop teaching the traditional spelling ‘rule’ “I before E except after C”.

Although it’s familiar to generations of English speakers, the National Strategies document Support for Spelling says there are too many exceptions to the rule, and the mnemonic could be more confusing than useful.  Though they say that it is useful only for ee sounds (as in receive), the rule still has exceptions - seize, seizure, and the ee versions of either and neither.

Campaigners for plain English and simple spelling reforms have taken this as support for their cause, but Judy Parkinson, author of I Before E (Except After C): Old-School Ways to Remember Stuff, suggests that teachers should be able to make up their own minds about using the phrase in their classes.

For instance, one predominantly American variation of the rhyme includes the lines “…or when it sounds like an A; as in neighbour and weigh“.  This happily deals with the exceptions veil, beige, eight, and sleigh.

I think it would be more trouble than it’s worth to try to include all of these other exceptions: counterfeit, leisure, caffeine, science, ancient, foreign…

Full article from Times Online.

Unless you’ve been living under a virtual rock recently, you’ll know about the so-called microblogging service Twitter.  It allows businesses, news media, celebrities, and individuals to broadcast their thoughts in 140 character tweets, as well as keep up with all manner of other people and organisations.  Best of all, you don’t have to be connected to a PC, or even the internet.  Most functions can be accessed by mobile phone (depending on what country you’re in), and communicating is as easy as sending a text message (SMS).

After skimming over Online Colleges’ extensive collection of 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom, I started thinking about practical uses for tweeting in the language classroom (or, more specifically, outside the language classroom).

From the Communication section:

1. Direct Tweet. [Teachers] and students can contact each other through direct Tweets without having to share cell phone numbers.
2. Get to know your classmates. A class Twitter group will help facilitate [teachers] and students getting to know each other, especially if the class is part of a more intimate setting such as a seminar.
3. Collaborate on projects. When working together on projects, set up a group using an app like Tweetworks to facilitate communication between everyone working together.
4. Make announcements. [Teachers] can send out reminders about upcoming tests, project due dates, or any news that needs to be shared via Twitter.
5. Share interesting websites. Both [teachers] and students can post interesting websites that are relevant to their class.
6. Daily learning. Twitter feeds happen much more frequently than the two or three times a day a student is in class, therefore using Twitter in the classroom means there is a daily opportunity for learning.

More specific to language learning:

1. Practice a foreign language. Language classes can take advantage of the opportunity to communicate in the target language of the class by finding native speakers on Twitter.
2. Follow mentors. If [teachers] or other key figures in your field of study are on Twitter, follow them to keep up with their research and activities.
3. Follow an idea, word, or event. Send “track ___” with whatever word, event, or idea you want to follow in the blank, and you will receive Tweets that contain that keyword.

Teachers can set students short assignments that they have to complete in 140 characters or less.  Students can post interesting new words or points they learn, and can learn from peers around the world.  Post interesting news stories or websites about your chosen language.

The length restriction is a bit of a double-edged sword in that what you will see from native speakers will often be informal abbreviations, or internet slang, but at the same time, because communication is key, learners won’t have to worry too much about spelling and grammar.

It could be worth finding out if your language teacher or fellow students uses the service, or look up a few interesting people who tweet in your target language.  There are a lot of possibilities out there for this kind of thing, and I’d be interested to hear about your experiences.

A sign in Birmingham does a good job of reminding us why spacing and typography are important.

Spotted by Michael James and posted in the Telegraph Sign Language series.

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?

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).

Back in 1985, cognitive scientists at Princeton University began work on a lexical database called WordNet.  It’s essentially a dictionary and thesaurus which groups and links words according to their meanings.  WordNet provides users with synsets, which are groups of words or phrases which essentially mean the same thing.  It’s a great tool for writers, students, language learners, and anyone who needs a definition, synonym, or broader view of a word or phrase.  WordNet is searchable online, and a downloadable application is also available.

A fantastic extension of WordNet is VisuWords, which allows you to see a visual interpretation of the WordNet links for words of your choice, or random words.  Each visual map shows the possible meanings and synsets for the central word and the relationships between them all.  It’s also interactive, allowing you to move parts around to see them more clearly, and synsets move around in quite a calming and hypnotic way.  The above image is what comes up when you plug ‘language’ into the search engine.

WordNet has inspired wordnets for many different languages, and a full list can be found on the Global WordNet Association website.  Many of them are browsable online (e.g. MultiWordNet On-line*), and some also have visual interfaces (e.g. Asian WordNet Project**, aimsigh.com (Irish)).  The GWA’s aim is to integrate as many wordnets together as possible, to make a global grid.

*Searchable in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Romanian, and Latin.
**Searchable in Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Bengali, Indonesian, and others.

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.