Deceiving appearances

English is a mélange of roots and forms from various languages.  This creates a rich language but unfortunately quite a lot of confusion. It can make guessing the meaning of word a bit of a crap shoot.

Here are some examples in the form of a short quiz.

1   “Appositive” is

a.      A type of blood

b.      Another name for something

c.       Negative

2 “Tortuous” is

a.      Curvy

b.      Painful

c.       Tasty like a cake

3  An infamous person is 

a.      Unknown

b.      Well known in limited circles

c.       Known for doing awful things

     An “inflammable” substance is

a.      Gasoline

b.      Water

c.       A gasoline can

5 To “ululate” is

a.      To constantly be tardy

b.      To sing Swiss mountain songs

c.       To imitate the calls of wolves

     A bimonthly magazine appears

a.      Twice a month

b.      Every two months

c.       Both a and b

7 A positive charge in electronics has

a.      Lost electrons

b.      Gained electronics

c.       Sometimes a and sometime b

8 A parkway is a place

a.      To park

b.      To drive

c.       To play football
A scarified road
a. has been the scene of many deaths.
b. is in the middle of repavement
c. has many warning signs.

In all honesty, if you didn’t know any of the answers, you probably still can express yourself perfectly well.  Still, English scholars, i.e., those who enjoy using the language to its best, actually enjoy the peculiarity of the language. As for the answers, to be really nasty, I won’t give the answers.  That way, you will remember what the word means! However, if you are unsure about any, write me.

Musical Roots

It is true that a rose is a rose is a rose, but why is it a rose? The answer to that is like Tolstoy’s description of an unhappy marriage: each one has its own story.  Music styles have come and gone, leaving behind a rich and forgotten history of how that style got is name.

Some are easier than others.  For example, ragtime music, currently most represented by the songs of Scott Joplin, comes from the word ragged.  According to the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime, composers took a standard 2/4 or 4/4 rhythm and made it ragged, i.e. put the emphasis on the offbeat. There was even a gerund form describing the process of taking a standard 4/4 song and make it ragtime: ragging.  There is one amazing historical note in many senses: in 1895, Earnest Hogan, an African American no less, published and sold ONE MILLLION of copies of the first known sheet music of a rag, called (I am not making this up): "All Coons Look Alike to Me." I don’t know what is more amazing, the million copies at the time or the social commentary.  I am glad times have changed.

In other cases, the key is the sound.  For example, the origin of reggae, once again according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggae, is probably an attempt to express the offbeat emphasis of its rhythm, possibly working off an existing Creole word, streggae, a loose woman. Other explanations, more academic exist, but intuitively it sounds quite probable.  Slightly more obscurely, the term hip hop, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_music, apparently comes from a musician making fun of a friend that had just enlisted in the army.  The phase was used with the sting being how you have to “hip hop” in the army. He (and we) got quite an earful.

The most obscure word origin I have ever heard regards a wonderful form of Cajun music and dancing (I really enjoy watching the dancing: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFVBghVUSwk) called Zydeco.  According to the usual source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zydeco, the name comes from the French phrase Les haricots ne sont pas salés, meaning the snap beans are not salty, whatever that means, with theories not lacking.  The music and instruments are not sophisticated but very homey. I strongly believe that 97 out of 100 people anywhere except in Louisiana have no idea what Zydeco music is, let alone the origin of the term. Ignorance is not bliss.

Feel free to send me any wonderfully obscure musical origins so I can add a post-post, accent on the first beat.

Language Inequality or the Joy of Challenges - Part 2

As was explained in the previous post, each language poses a different level of challenge to those who wish to learn it, depending on various factors.

4. Syntax. Linguist theorist claim that human brains are wired into in the subject-verb-object structure, meaning that people instinctively expect and understand that order.   Whether this is true or not, languages not bound by this order, i.e. those that use the case system require more energy to learn and understand but are much freer in terms of sentence construction.  A comparison of English and Russian demonstrates this point.  While English may have many words to learn, once the learner recognizes that a given word is a noun, it requires no more effort to process and apply that word.  The writer/speaker can place that noun in that form in any place where that word as a noun can enter.  For example, the form of the word shelf is the same in the following sentences: The shelf is not straight; Line up the shelf; The bottle is on the shelf. The caveat is that the order of words is vital importance and follows strict rules.  You cannot randomly mix up them up without changing the meaning.  By contrast, Russian, like other case-languages, places various suffixes to nouns depending on its function in the sentence or what the word before it. The meaning of all this complexity is that learners of the Russian language do not have the tools to understand or write a proper Russian sentence until they learn all six cases (which is still easier to do than the 19 cases of Finnish).  So, students of Russian earn their rewards.  On the other hand, once this skill is attained, it is hard to make an error in sentence construction since almost anything is allowed.

5. Roots. The rule in regards to learning a language is that the fewer roots there are, the easier the language. In other words, you get more miles (kilometers) for every word you learn.  So, Hebrew, a non-developing language for so long, is extremely easy to learn in that perspective while English is simply hell.  The other issue with roots is familiarity. To a certain point, being familiar with the roots from another language eases the process radically. English speakers generally do not struggle with Spanish because many of the words sound familiar.  It can happen that too much familiarity brings confusion.  I studied Italian for several years.  I had to remember the spelling differences between it and French, a more familiar language for me.  For example, the word and is et in French but e in Italian.  The same issue might arise among speakers of Slavic languages, among others.  It always helps to have some knowledge in advance.

6. Intonation and tone. All languages have intonations, the manner in which various kinds of sentences are spoken, i.e. statement, question, exclamation, etc.  This voice control varies from language to language and country to country and presents the greatest challenge to mastering a language since it requires conscious retraining of your voice.  For example, English has limited up/down waves when making a statement: I bought a car.  There is almost no difference in tone between the first and last word.  In Russian, with the equivalent sentence, the first word would have a normal tone but the volume would decrease until the last word almost disappears.  French, by contrast, will resemble a sine wave pattern, up and down.  In Italian, well, it would like an opera, to my ear at least.  However, a far greater learning challenge is tone-based languages, such as Chinese.  The same sound can have numerous meanings, all depending on the tone of the pronunciation. Small children pick up those tones quickly but most adults struggle to master them.

So, it should be clear that no language is a piece of cake in all aspects nor is any language impossible to learn.  Natural talent can be factor but motivation, time and effort can overcome any difficulty a language can pose.  Every language opens the world and its people.  This investment is clearly worthwhile. 

These are a few of my favorite things

As a connoisseur of linguistic delights, I have learned to appreciate the unique ways each language approaches communication, often wishing that the “trick” could be copied to other languages.

Here is a partial list of my personal language favorites:

French – The word si expressing disagreement to a negative statement:  “You don’t want another piece of cake” “Si”, i.e. yes I do.

Russian: the pronoun свой [svoi], which refers to the person in the subject: I, you, s/he, we:, they see свой face.

Spanish: the upside down question mark at the beginning of a question: ¿You understand?

Hebrew: The intense use of roots, making learning new vocabulary much easier: write, dictate, address, letter, correspond all have the same root, כתב [katav].

English: the lack of agreement in gender and number between adjectives and nouns, massively reducing the chances of error in making sentences, as large hand(s), not large(s) hand(s).

Italian: The natural sing-song rhyme of the language that leaves you no option but to smile: Io amo parlare italiano tutto il giorno.

Alas, nothing is perfect; here are a few aspects of these languages I am less fond of, namely:

French: the lack of firm rules to know whether a noun is masculine or feminine, which has caused me to spend a lot of time checking dictionaries.

Russian: the awful tendency of Russian to have one page of exceptions for every page of rules; believe me on this point.

Spanish: the subjunctive mode will quickly change your opinion that Spanish is an easy language to learn.

Hebrew: the binyanim or verb groups have always defied my understanding; call this a personal taste.

English: The spelling system, based on a wide base of extremely varied pronunciation patterns, is beyond logic.

Italian: Listening to Italian, how can you take the message seriously?

So, while I am also fond of raindrops, whiskers, kettles, and mittens, those are also a few of my favorite things.

Verb(al)izing

In root-poor languages, such as Hebrew, all roots are used to their maximum in terms of producing noun, verb, and adjective forms.  For example, in French, the root grand comes out grandir, grandeur, and grand in the verb, noun, and adjective forms, respectively.  Likewise, in Hebrew, the root גדל [gimel, dalet, lamed] produces גדול, גודל ,לגדול [legdol, godel, and gadol].  Therefore, a learner can quickly ascertain the pattern and make educated guesses as to the relevant form of a word.  This clearly makes learning to speak a language much easier.

Alas, English is extremely rich in roots, deriving them from a multitude of different languages and developing them at different times in history.  All this renders it very difficult to “guess” the verb form.  In countless cases, there is no verb while in others the change is unpredictable.  An example of the latter is the relation between effect and affect, advice and advise, and satisfaction and satisfy.

The following are a few patterns that allow a reader to guess the meaning of a verb:

a.      Ize  / (UK)  ise – Modern English tends to add this suffix to a noun or adjective to create an easily understandable verb.  Examples include capitalize, modernize, standardize, and that old law school classic, shepardize.

b.      En- or –en – Following old German grammar, adding an en at the beginning or end of some words transforms them into verbs, often adding the meaning to give: encourage and empower as compared to widen and threaten.

c.       ception -> ceive – All nouns that end in ception become ceive in the verb: reception – receive, conception – conceive, deception – deceive, perception – perceive.

d.      Drop the tion – By droping the tion in the noun form, many verbs are formed: relation – relate, construction – construct, investigation – investigate.

As mentioned, it is unfortunately quite difficult to verbalize all of the strategies for making verbs.  The best way to know the form is to listen and read English, learning intuitively.