Talkin' About Talk Date Archives

Why do Linguists love Icelandic?

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It's too bad that pop singer Bjork does most of her songs in English rather than her native tongue. Icelandic is a really interesting language with sounds not heard in most of the other major languages of the world.

Icelandic and English are related. They are both Germanic lanuages, but there have been so many changed over time you would have to be a linguist to know it. Speakers of Old English could understand the ancestor of modern Icelandic, but as one of the Icelandic tales puts it, our languages were mutually intelligible until the coming of WIlliam the Bastard.

The Icelanders evidently did not like William, who most of us call William the Conquerer.

Of the two languages, it was English that changed. Old Norse, the Viking language, is not much different now than when the Vikings came to Iceland in the ninth century. Think about that. We need a college course to get us through the Old English poem Beowulf but 1,100 years later, a modern Icelander can still read stories of the Middle Ages with ease and without a dictionary. The pronunciation of the language has changed through the years, but not much else has. Why is that?

Well, one way languages change is that the endings of words can disappear. Think of the -st ending in English words such as though hast. Icelandic did not lose many of its early forms mostly because its speakers lived for centuries in relative isolation, not much influenced by other languages.

It makes it harder to learn if you are not an Icelander because the grammar is rich and complex. But that is one of the reasons linguists love it. It offers a window on the early Germanic past.

The Icelanders love it, too, and want to keep their language just the way it is. There is, of course, pressure to change it for reasons of global communication, but Icelanders resist. Instead of adopting modern terms like telephone or telegraph, as German does -- "das telephone, das telegraf" -- the Icelanders create new vocabulary from native words or parts of words. For example, a telephone is a "talseeme" -- that is, "speech wire". And telegraph is "ritseeme" or "writewire".

They are constantly producing dictionaries to provide Icelandic terms for new words from abroad. The language is also traditional in the way most Icelanders name their children. Kids usually get their names from their father's name, not from the family. So a son named Erikor whose father's name was Harrot would be called Erikor Harroson.

If Hannot's daughter's name were Fergus Harrosdaughter. Harroson and Harrosdaughter. And when you look them up in the phone book you will find Erikor and Fergus listed under their first names.

I love the way Icelandic sounds. Listen.

[Icelandic language clip.]

That comes from one of Iceland's most famous poems, Valuspa, the Song of the Sybil.

Maybe because of long winter nights Icelanders read more books per capita than any other people in the world. Their ancient poetry, the so-called "Eddas", and their ancient prose, the sagas, are where much of the early history of the country is preserved. One of the reasons you might want to read the sagas is that they record the first discoveries of America, which the Vikings called Vinland. Read the saga of Leif Erikkson or the saga of Erik the Red for details.

No, Columbus was not the first to discover America. And honestly the ancient Icelanders may not have been either. But they were the first to write it down. And now they are out in paperback. That's the linguistic thought for the day which comes from Dr. Pardee Lowe Jr. of Falls Church, VA. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston in cooperation of the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime keep in mind that wherever you are and whatever you do ... language makes a difference.

Are Spanish and Portuguese really the same language?

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Well, if Portuguese and Spanish aren't varieties of the same language, they're surely sister languages, and very close sisters at that. If we define dialects as speech varieties that are mutually understood, we can say they are, in fact, dialects of the same language. It's not uncommon to find a speaker of say, Brazilian Portuguese, talking to an Argentinean at an airport: each speaking his own language, both understanding each other, with just occasional need to stop now and then to clarify the meaning of a word. They communicate very well most of the time, as long as they avoid using slang or talking too fast.

Communication works because Spanish and Portuguese share around 80% of their vocabulary, and most of the same grammatical structures, things like the endings on nouns and verbs. Where communication breaks down, it's often because of differences in pronunciation. Listen to these two sentences, first in Spanish, then in Portuguese:

"Meus irmaos alemaes cantam bem"
"Mis hermanos alemanes cantan bien"

For me what jumps out right away when I hear someone speaking Portuguese, are the nasal sounds that characterize the language--this is true for Brazilian Portuguese as well as Portuguese from Portugal. Did you hear the difference, for example, between hermanos (in Spanish) and Portuguese irmaos ?

In addition to some differences in grammar and word order, there are words that sound the same in both languages but have different meanings. The verb "pegar" in Portuguese, for example, means "pick up"; in Spanish it means "hit". Put that in the context of a babysitter getting instructions for care of the baby... and you can imagine some confusion.

When reading -- where, of course, pronunciation isn't a factor -- the great amount of overlap in words and grammar means that a speaker of Spanish feels almost like he's reading his own language when he picks up a Portuguese newspaper. A recent study found that educated native speakers of Spanish with no previous exposure to Portuguese could understand as much as 95% of an academic text written solely in Portuguese.

But... there are other criteria used to differentiate a dialect from a language. As the saying goes, a language has an army behind it, but a dialect doesn’t -- and Portuguese has had its own army since the founding of Portugal in the 12th century. It's had an official grammar book, giving it the status of a separate language in the eyes of the Portuguese, since 1536. Like Spanish, Portuguese came from the colloquial Latin spoken by the Romans when they were on the Iberian Peninsula -- but on the western side of the peninsula, largely separated by mountains from Spain. With separation came differences in the two languages. By the way, let's remember Galicia, a mountain region of around 3 million people in the northwest corner of Spain, just above Portugal. They speak what I'd describe as a Portuguese heavily influenced by Spanish, which some say is a dialect of Portuguese and some say is a separate language.

You may be surprised to hear that Portuguese is the fifth most widely-spoken language in the world, used on four continents. In addition to Portugal, as I've said, it's the language of Brazil, the U.S.'s largest trading partner south of the border -- and one of the few countries in South America where Spanish is not spoken. In Africa, you'll find Portuguese in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde. You can also hear it in Asia in places like the islands of East Timor, Macao in southern China, and Goa at the tip of India.

So, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to learn Portuguese. Above all, if you speak English and add either Spanish or Portuguese to your repertoire, you'll be able to talk to half the people in the world!

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Ana Maria Carvalho, Director of the Portuguese Language Program at the University of Arizona. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist . In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do, language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Marco de Pinto at September 18, 2005 08:44 AM

Posted by: webmaster at September 20, 2005 04:05 PM

What's the language of Africa?

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"Say something in African." That's something you might hear from a college freshman, talking to an African exchange student. But, of course there is no single "African language." By one count there are over 2000 distinctly separate tongues on the continent. Some are spoken by very small groups of people, maybe in only one village; others are spoken by millions. The thing to remember is that Africa, especially south of the Sahara, is one of the most multilingual regions in the world.

But what about a shared "language of Africa" like Swahili? Well, a large number of people do speak Swahili, but it's limited mostly to east Africa. Africa is a vast continent and even the most widely spoken languages cover only sub-regions.

Because of the sheer number of African languages there's a lot that we're still learning about them. Since most are only spoken tongues, with an oral tradition but no written record, they’re not easy to document. And to what extent are they related? It wasn't until 1963 that the linguist Joseph Greenberg suggested they fall into just four families: a huge one of over 1300 languages spread across most of sub-Saharan Africa; a north African family that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Amharic; a group in the middle around Chad and Uganda; and a small group called Khoisan, near the Kalahari desert.

So what are these languages like? You've probably heard an occasional word like "harambee," from Swahili, meaning pulling together, which was a rallying cry in Kenya. Or maybe the songs of Miriam Makeba. Or dialogue in the film, Amistad, in which characters portraying African slaves speak Mende, a language of present-day Sierra Leone. Because of their diversity, no language represents them all, so I'm going to pick Xhosa, because I like that click at the beginning of it. Here's a sample from the sound track of a new film version of Bizet's Carmen, spoken and sung entirely in Xhosa:

[insert Xhosa sample]

The sounds and grammar of African languages are often very different from ones we're more familiar with. Many of them, such as Yoruba in Nigeria, use tones, much like Chinese, to distinguish meaning. And the structures are sometimes intricate. I always think of German as complex, with three genders to classify nouns; but the Fulani language of West Africa has over two dozen ways to do that. Other languages have unique sounds, such as that click in Xhosa. It's been suggested that clicks are surviving remnants of the earliest sounds we humans made in communicating -- which would make these languages some of the oldest ones we know.

Old yes, but in no sense primitive. Many Westerners still believe that African languages are less capable of expressing complex thought than European tongues. I wonder what they'd say about a translation of the theory of relativity in Wolof, a language of Senegal and Gambia.

Now, with all those different languages, how do people communicate? The answer is: they find a way. Close to home, Africans commonly use more than one language in daily life. Further away, they may rely on a lingua franca like Swahili, English, or French -- or maybe a pidgin language. But with population growth and social change, language hurdles loom larger. African languages are in flux, especially in cities, where diverse peoples come together. Some are losing speakers as school systems stop -- or never started -- teaching in them. Economic incentives favor English or French. But African tongues are firmly part of the daily life, cultural identities and economic activity of the continent. So what's the future of "saying something in African"? There are probably as many answers to that as there are languages in Africa.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Donald Osborn, an independent scholar and specialist in African languages. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Kipnyango at September 23, 2005 01:23 PM

Posted by: Angel at May 14, 2006 03:33 PM

Can you use language to solve a crime?

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People who work with languages do a lot of things you probably never thought of. Think about this scenario:

It's a dark and stormy night. You're leaving a party, and when you get in your car, your car says, "Count to five." It won't start unless you do, so you count: one, two, three, four, five. "Sorry, says your car, you've had too much to drink," and shuts off.

By analyzing your voice, the car's computer knows you're intoxicated. Your voice can tell a lot about you: where you grew up, your emotional state, whether you're lying -- even who you are. And voice analysis is one of the things that linguists do; it's part of a field known as Forensic Linguistics. It's the application of linguistic science to matters concerning the law, crime, and the courts.

In voice analysis, speech is broken down electronically, using a computer, and then examined for clues about the speaker. You've probably heard it called a 'voiceprint.' Because your voice may change over time, or with illness, voiceprints aren't as accurate as
fingerprints -- which are unchanging from birth to death -- but they're a very useful tool in solving crimes.

And then there's analysis of writing. Consider The Case of the Dog Club Letters. No, this isn't a Sherlock Holmes story. It's an actual case where the committee members of a dog club received threatening, anonymous letters. Personal details in each letter hinted that the writer was actually a committee member, but which one?
A forensic linguist compared the letters with the writings of each member. Analysis of their writing styles, including punctuation, capitalization, and spelling, revealed that the letter writer was... the dog club's treasurer. He was drummed out of the club.

Ranging from doggy letters to the text of stage plays that may or may not have been written by Shakespeare, authorship can be determined by comparing patterns such as word groupings, sentence length, grammatical usages, and much more. This, by the way, is how forensic linguists used computer programs to identify the author of some of the Federalist Papers, which had been in dispute for two hundred years.

And remember those anthrax letters that followed the nine-eleven attack? The question came up: were the letters written by foreigners, suggesting a connection to nine-eleven? Analysis of the letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle showed the writer had great familiarity with the Roman alphabet, far more than most Arabic writers might have. Forensic linguistics revealed that the broken English and misspelled words were faked, and that the letters were written by a native English speaker.

A bane of education is plagiarism -- often by students who take other people's writings from the Internet. Forensic Linguistics to the rescue! The same techniques used on the Federalist Papers can be used to detect whether material is plagiarized. Computer software reads a student paper, then scans millions of written works for duplication of specific words, phrases, sentences -- even ideas.

Finally, a major concern of Forensic Linguistics is to clarify legal talk, so that people can understand the meaning of a law that may be couched in gobbledygook. For example, on the subject of expert witnesses the law reads: "Expert evidence presented to the court should be, and should be seen to be, the independent product of the expert uninfluenced as to form or content by the exigencies of litigation." The forensic linguist simplifies this to say, "Expert witnesses should be free from prejudice." Today, linguists are designing computer programs that automatically translate legalese into ordinary English.

So, there's a lot going on in this field. If you want to learn more, just Google the words 'Forensic' and 'Linguistics'. And the next time you think of crime fighting super heroes, forget the cape and bulging muscles -- and picture a laptop-toting linguist.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Robert D. Rodman, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

How good is machine translation?

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When the computer was invented, one of the first things people thought about was how you might use it to translate foreign languages. But early efforts at machine translation... fizzled. And in the late 60s and early 70s the effort was almost completely abandoned. You've probably heard the funny mis-translation stories: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" translated as the "The whisky is strong but the meat is rotten." Or the term for a device known as a "hydraulic ram" being translated as "water goat." Machines can indeed translate languages, but the Holy Grail for humans who use them -- "fully automated high quality machine translation" -- is still elusive. What's the problem here?

Well, the answer lies in the complexity of language in general. It begins at the word level. Take the word "bark": a computer doesn't know that a dog isn't covered with wood, or that a tree doesn’t make loud noises when someone approaches. Which translation of "bark" should it choose? The Spanish verb "comer" might be translated as "eat, capture, overlook, corrode, fade, itch, skip, slur, swallow, or take”, only one of which might be correct for a given sentence.

At the sentence level it gets even worse. Take this sentence: "John saw the woman in the park with a telescope". There are about five or six possible meanings for that sentence -- for starters, who do you think has the telescope, John or the woman in the park? Or is it John who's in the park? The mind boggles.

The less one language resembles another, the harder the problems of translation are. Where English has three words, "he", "she" or "it", Turkish has just one word, "on". Lacking any cues, how do you translate "on" into English? Russian has two words for "blue" where English has only one -- so if you want to translate "She's wearing a blue dress" into Russian, you have a 50% chance of choosing the right word. There are many cases in which you just can't make an exact translation between languages.

And now for the good news. Despite its limitations, there are situations in which the machine does a very good job, particularly if the topic of translation is narrow. The Canadian Meteorological Centre, for example, uses machine translation for bilingual weather reporting. In the commercial world, technical writers have learned to write manuals and parts catalogs so that computer-based translations -- let's say from Japanese to English --need only a little correction. Even on the Internet, the click of a mouse can translate entire web pages with fairly good quality, at least for some languages.

And let's remember that machine translation doesn't always have to be perfect. It can be very useful even if it has some garbles. For instance, where human translators are scarce and material to be translated is great -- as frequently happens in the post-9/11 world -- machines are widely used to "triage" material before it reaches the desk of an overworked human. The National Security Agency's "CyberTrans" software, created for the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, does precisely that: it identifies a language, corrects misspelled words, and translates some sixty-five languages into English, with quality that's usually good enough for scanning.

And the future looks good. Experts are using new approaches to machine translation, with encouraging results. The quality of Arabic-to-English translation, for example, has improved dramatically in the past five years. Machines are making multilingual chat rooms possible on the web and helping multinational military forces talk to one another. Yes, a human translator is better. But even though the goal of "fully automated high quality machine translation" is still not in sight, we've come a long way. Steady progress is being made in quality, and the use of machine translation is increasing by leaps and bounds. The machine... is here to stay.

That linguistic thought comes from Dr. David Savignac, Director of the Center for Applied Machine Translation at the National Security Agency. And this is the Five Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist . And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.