What language do pirates speak?

Answer: the Pitkern language.

In 1789, a bunch of pirates settled on a remote island in Tahiti. They couldn't communicate too well with the natives, so they made up their own language - a creole mixture of 18th century English and Tahitian. Pitkern has survived to the modern days and currently boasts around a hundred speakers. Arrr, matey. Happy new yeARRR!

Examples (source: Wikipedia.)

Whata way ye?	How are you?
About ye gwen?	Where are you going?
You gwen whihi up suppa?	Are you going to cook supper?
I nor believe.	I don't think so.
Ye like-a sum whettles?	Would you like some food?
Do' mine.	It doesn't matter.
Wa sing yourley doing?	What are you doing? What are you up to?
I se gwen ah big shep.	I'm going to the ship.
Humuch shep corl ya?	How often do ships come here?
Cooshoo!	Good!

Happy Holidays!

Bioengineered singing mouse developing language?

From the article: Researchers at the University of Osaka accidentally removed a mouse's ability to squeak; as a result it tweets like a bird. Scientists believe that this may be allowing the mouse to develop a simple language.

More here:http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-national/bioengineered-singing-mouse-developing-language

We're getting closer to Universal Translators!

This app for iPhone incorporates augmented reality into translation! Point your iDevice to a sign in Spanish, watch it get translated to English in real time. Amazing. The app is available for free, just search for "Word Lens" on iTunes.

Xibipiio and the Piraha tribe

Linguistics professor Daniel Everett explains the Piraha tribe word "xibipiio", a concept that does not exist in any other language:





EDIT: The complete video is available here:
http://fora.tv/2009/03/20/Daniel_Everett_Endangered_Languages_and_Lost_Knowledge


Some of the most salient points if you don't have time to watch the entire hour and a half long video:


-The Piraha have no creation myths.
-No counting words except "relatively big" amount and "relatively small" amount.
-Their concept of time is not linear.  They do not understand the idea that "Future" and "Past" are separate. They have a word for "now", and a word for "some time away from now", which could be both in the future and in the past. 
-No recursion, which is a supposedly essential part of human language! Chomsky might not be too happy about this...

Random Word Generator

There's a really neat random word generator here:

http://www.fourteenminutes.com/fun/words/index.cgi?start=bl

It uses Markov Chains to determine probability of letters appearing next to each other and generates mostly pronounceable stuff!

Some great words I got after playing with it for a minute or two:

Smokboswor

Fixilits

Pickletator

Woothropulation

Moozes

Bleam

I think Pickletator is my favourite.

Ghoti = Fish

If you have a Mac, try this:
1. Open any text editor.
2. Type ghoti.
3. Activate text-to-speech.

Alex, the built-in computer voice, pronounces "ghoti" as "fish"! Why?

This is a very old joke about the irregularities in English spelling:

"gh" is pronounced "f", like in "tough"
"o" is pronounced "i", like in "women"
"ti" is pronounced "sh" like in "rational"

Pronunciation help in 258 languages!

Have you ever struggled with the pronunciation of a particular word in a foreign language? (Try saying " Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" three times fast.) Forvo attempts to help with this problem. There are currently 775220 pronunciations available, most recorded by native speakers. You can also join as a member and add your own pronunciation! Sadly, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is not available yet. If you speak Welsh, you should do everyone in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch a favour and add it.

Scary books and bunnyhugs

Scary books: One of the scariest, most violent books ever written is now available online in multiple languages! You can read the translations side-by-side, which is really handy if you're learning a foreign language and don't mind some disturbing content.  Warning: it's not safe reading for children or people who lack critical thinking skills. http://unbound.biola.edu/

Bunnyhugs: Apparently, that's what people in Saskatchewan call hoodies. Someone should send a team of linguists over there to find out if they still speak English or not.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bunnyhug

A fellow linguistics student explores where the odd word came from here:
http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/story.html?id=70fc9c9d-86e4-48f4-9d81-6d4079334a66

Happy Halloween!

Five stages of LaTeX

 (So, who hasn't struggled with LaTeX? If you haven't, you must be a lowly first year student. Don't worry, it will descend on you like an angry dragon in one of your second year courses.)

Denial:  "Pfft, a new way to format documents? Whatever man. I can type papers at 800 words-per-minute with my eyes closed, using nothing but Wikipedia and a twig held in one toe.

I'll leave it till the night before it's due."

(A week later.)

Anger:  WHAT THE @#$!&(-English expletive infixation-)^&*! IS THIS CONFUSING MESS OF CODE!!! AAAAARGH!  CURSE YOU, LaTeX! *sounds of a hundred Macbooks being flung against the wall in sheer frustration*

(2 hours later.)

Depression:  (If you are whiny) "I can't do it. I just...can't do it. I am a worthless blob of matter floating through the universe, like a plastic bag in the wind. Actually, I'm pretty sure the plastic bag has higher IQ than me and would probably be able to code in LaTeX with no problems. Waaaaaaah. Waaaaah. *sounds of poorly suppressed sobbing into a pillow*

(If you are not whiny, you'll probably just bear the pain in silence while staring at the ceiling and hoping for an asteroid to hit your bedroom before tomorrow morning's class.)

Bargaining: "If I force myself to keep learning, I'll buy myself a pumpkin pie later. No, A MILLION PUMPKIN PIES!" (Replace pumpkin pie with whatever you happen to be addicted to at the moment.)

(16 hours, 3 pumpkin pie slices, and 5 thoroughly read LaTeX manuals later)

Acceptance: Hurray! It wooooorks! Party time! Oh yeah! Who's a LaTeX superstar!
What do you mean none of my friends want to hear about my LaTeX success at  3: 30 am? THEY MUST KNOW.

I'm on the last stage. I think eventually all the students will get there, even if it's a little hard at first. So hang in there and don't forget those { !

Oh - FYI, I made a list of resources for LaTeX learners here.

Back to school...

 Summer's almost over! If you haven't been keeping track of recent linguistics news over the break, here are a few articles to get caught up:

"Ancient Language Mystery Deepens"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10924743

 "Does Language Shape How We Think?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me

"Study Suggests Grammar is Grimmer than Chomsky Claims"
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/browse/ne/uninews/grammargrimmer

An old anecdote

J.L.Austin, a linguistics professor, was giving a lecture at Oxford University:

"In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

The perks of knowing Klingon?

I don't know how true this story is (I read it on a SciFi forum and it sounds more like an urban legend than anything) but here it is:
A Trekkie got lost in Japan without any maps or money. He couldn't ask anyone for directions, since he didn't speak a word of Japanese and none of the people he approached spoke English. But just as he was about to resign himself to life as a hobo on the streets of Tokyo, he saw a man in a Star Trek uniform. The Trekkie asked him for directions in Klingon and to his surprise, the man in the uniform replied! He was able to get back to the hotel after that. (With his new Klingon friend? I'd imagine they would walk arm-in-arm discussing the nutritional benefits of Gagh. )

A celebration of accents and dialects!

Do you speak English with an accent? If so, there's a party and you're invited! Well. I lied. It's not really a party, but it's pretty neat nevertheless. It's a showcase of all the different ways people speak English - from Ireland to South Africa! Feel free to "donate" a recording of your accent to the online collection here:

http://librivox.org/celebration-of-dialects-and-accents-vol-1/

(Oh and if you've never heard of this website before, you don't know what you're missing. They have hundreds of thousands of free Project Gutenberg audio-books recorded by volunteers and it's all completely free. Did I mention that it's free? As in, legally free? You don't see THAT very often. Yay for free stuff!)

Some great study aids

Need to memorize a whole bunch of stuff in a few days because finals are coming up and you're freaking out? Try these links:

http://quizlet.com/  - build your own flashcards or use other people's collections.
http://spacefem.com/mnemonics/ - mnemonic generator for when you're not creative enough to come up with your own.
http://ichi2.net/anki/ - open-source flashcards with spaced repetition, supports images, audio and LaTeX.

Return of Sneakywords

Yes, we're back! A short summer vacation is coming up so I'll finally be able to post in here again. So what was I doing all this time? Mainly filling out piles upon piles of worksheets and stressing out about my evil Spanish exams.

A few things will change. I decided I'm not going to go through grammar rules and stuff like that, because a) it can already be found elsewhere on the internet and b) it's boring as hell to write about. So, a big sorry goes out to any grammar-loving dorks* out there who actually read those entries. I'll try to organize things a bit better, maybe do themed articles on certain days and so on.
Anyhow, looking forward to writing more here! Cheers!

*Disclaimer: By dorks I mean my smartest readers. And of course, grammar is very important. It's just not too exciti- It is very exciting. Please don't hurt me, team of burly Grammar Nazis.

Gibberish or not?

Here's an interesting experiment: try listening to this video and see if you can make out anything.




Then, try watching the one below while reading the lyrics. Do you hear words now?



Are you SURE you heard them? Yes? Me too. But guess what - they weren't real. The entire song is just nonsensical syllables. Seeing the words is what prompted us to hear them.

Weird French idiom of the day

"Devenir chêvre"
Literal translation: Become a goat
Meaning: To become very angry.

I've never seen an angry goat, but in Russia to call someone a goat (Kozel) is an insult too. It means something along the lines of "rude asshole."
We also have a proverb that all men are goats! (It's true.)

If you can read this, consider yourself lucky.

From an article on illiterate Canadians found here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/education/canada-shame.html

"When you think of literacy in Canada now, at the beginning of the 21st century, you probably expect to see a rate of close to 100 per cent. That would be wrong. The actual numbers are nowhere near that and should embarrass us all.

• Nearly 15 per cent of Canadians can't understand the writing on simple medicine labels such as on an Aspirin bottle, a failing that could seriously limit the ability of a parent, for example, to determine the dangers for a child.
• An additional 27 per cent can't figure out simple information like the warnings on a hazardous materials sheet, the kinds of warning that set out workplace dangers such as risks to the eyes and skin.

In total, 42 per cent of Canadians are semi-illiterate."

42%??? That's insane. I can't imagine not being able to read. Being semi-literate might be even worse than being fully illiterate - what if you saw a bottle that said "POISON! DO NOT EAT!" and all you could read was "EAT"? If you live in Canada and you'd like to help others learn to read, here are some organizations that are looking for volunteers:

Toronto:

http://www.mtml.ca

http://parkdaleprojectread.org/

http://www.worldlit.ca/

Literacy through Hip Hop - http://www.lthh.org/

Montreal:

http://tleliteracy.com/

http://bluemetropolis.org/index.php?id=66

http://cabm.net/en/node/717693

http://www.frontiercollege.ca/english_literacy.html

http://cabm.net/en/node/717866

Vancouver:

http://www.literacybc.ca/

http://www2.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/DBs/Redbook/orgPgs/1/11961.html

http://www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/find/details/adult_learning_centre

http://www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/find/details/literacy_resources

Ottawa:

http://www.occl.ca/

http://www.frontiercollege.ca/english/literacy/ottawa.html

Edmonton:

http://www.famlit.ca/

http://www.literacyday.ca/

http://www.cent4lit.com/

http://www.informedmonton.com/public/agency/0988.htm

Exhausted.

Today's Spanish class was nothing but worksheets for three hours. My hand still hurts from filling out all those useless papers. I'm angry and I feel ripped off - is that kind of "teaching" worth hundreds of dollars in tuition? I don't think so! Also, the prof didn't bother to explain anything and the grammar rules in the worksheets were disjointed and confusing. I'll have to work with my own books over the weekend in order to figure things out.

Although my prof neglected to mention it, today is Cinco de Mayo! Way to go Mexico for beating the French!

French pronouns

French has 5 types of pronouns, all of which are annoying to learn.

Subject pronouns

Je (I)
Tu (You)
Vous (Polite "you")
Il/Elle (He/she)
Nous (We)
Vous (You plural)
Ills/Elles (They. Elles is used for many girls together, and ils is used for a combination of girls and boys.)

Direct object pronouns

First of all, what's a direct object? Direct objects are nouns that are affected by the action (verb) directly. For example: The rabbit ate a carrot."Carrot" is a direct object here, because it's the thing being eaten.

Direct object pronouns are words that replace direct object nouns. Here's how you do it in French:

"Tu prends l'avion." (You take the airplane) becomes "Tu le prends" (You it take.) The D.O.P. is moved to the front of the verb.

Me/m' (me)
Te/t' (you)
Vous (polite you)
Le, la, l' (him, her)
Nous (us)
Vous (you plural)
Les (them)

Je le mange. (I'm eating it.)
Il la voit. (He sees her.)
Je t'aime. (I love you.)
Tu m'aimes. (You love me.)

Indirect object pronouns

Indirect object pronouns receive the verb action indirectly. They are usually preceded by a preposition. (To, for, by...) "I gave the carrot to the rabbit." Carrot is a direct object here and rabbit is an indirect object.

Me/m' (me)
Te/t' (you)
Vous (polite you)
Lui (him, her)
Nous (us)
Vous (you pl.)
Leur (them)

Je lui parle. I'm talking to him.
Il leur achète des livres. He buys books for them.
Je vous donne le pain. I'm giving the bread to you.
Elle m'a écrit. She wrote to me.
Je le lui donne. I give it to him.

Reflexive pronouns

See this page for help with those beasts:
http://www.learn-french-help.com/french-reflexive-pronouns.html

Disjunctive (Stressed) pronouns:

Stressed pronouns emphasize that it's you, he, she, etc. that's doing something.
They're also used after c'est and ce sont to answer questions.

moi
toi
vous
lui, soi, elle
nous
vous
eux, elles

Check out some examples here:
http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/French/Grammar/Syntax/Pronouns/French-Syntax-Pronouns_Determiners-Disjunctive_Pronouns.html

French articles, plurals and gender

Most languages which incorporate gender also have word endings that designate a word as masculine or feminine. But not French! French likes being complicated. There are no clear cut rules* about what word gets what gender, so your options are:

1) Learn the gender along with the word (i.e. learn "pomme" as "lapomme")
2) (Slacker option) Use only "le" or only "la" all the time. You'll get it right 50% of the time.

*-e and -ion are usually feminine endings, but there are exceptions.

So let's look at the articles:

The:
Le (masculine singular)
La (feminine sing.)
L' (contraction of la or le)
Les (plural of masculine or feminine.)

A:
Un (m. sing.)
Une (f. sing)

Some/any:

Du (m. sing)
de la (f. sing.)
de l' (contraction)
des (m. and f. plural)

If you have "de" and "le" together, replace it with "du". "De" and "les" together becomes "des."

Plurals:

You could form plurals by...

-adding s (valise ---> valises)
-adding x to words that end in "au" or "eu" (neveu ---> neveux)
-changing the ending "al" to "aux" (journal ---> journaux)

Note: words ending in s and x don't change. (autobus---> autobus) (prix ---->prix)

The perils of introducing yourself in Spanish.

Let's say your name is Fred and you want to introduce yourself to your new Spanish friend Pedro. Here's what you should say:

Hola Pedro! Me llamo Fred. (Hi Pedro! I call myself Fred.)
Tengo 23 años. (I am 23 years old.)

Pay attention to the sounds! A small change could be disastrous:

Me lamo Fred. (I lick myself Fred.)
Tengo 23 anos. (I have 23 anuses.)

I made the llamo/lamo mistake in class today. Now I know that the difference between ll and l is very important. The same thing goes for n and ñ...the accent is not just there for decoration!

Stuff that helps

I'll be adding more to this post later, as I sift through my bookmarks and weed out all the broken links. (Note for poor students: All of the stuff below is either free or it can be found by asking your friendly neighbourhood pirate. They usually hang out in a Bay of some sort. Don't tell anyone I sent you.)

Software:
Rosetta Stone - A flashcard program with voice recognition, it's pretty good at teaching pronunciation but not much else. It's fun to use though and I like playing around with it.

TellMeMore - I hated this one. It was buggy and confusing to use. In the amount of time I spent swearing at it because of the constant crashes, I could've learnt 8 irregular verbs!

Books:

Hugo's Learn French in 3 Months/Hugo's Learn Spanish in 3 Months

These language teaching series are awesome. If you work through the weekly assignments, you will have a solid understanding of grammar in...well..about 3 months! The explanations are simple and the book comes with CDs where every exercise is read out loud. They even explain the harder aspects of grammar, for example the subjunctive in French.

Children's storybooks with audio

You can find these in your local library. Get a ton of them! You can also read and listen to stories online. For French, try http://www.iletaitunehistoire.com/ (you will need to make a free account.) Another great website for multilingual story-telling is http://www.banq.qc.ca/portail_jeunes/raconte_moi/

Free podcasts on iTunes:

These vary in quality, so be sure to listen to samples before downloading a whole series.
Here are a few good ones that I tried:

Coffeebreak French- a fun and easy language podcast for complete beginners. The teacher speaks with a heavy Scottish accent in English, which is kind of funny, but his French accent sounds authentic. Also check out Coffeebreak Spanish by the same people.

Walk, talk, and learn French - videos starring an overly enthusiastic French guy who'll take you on a tour of Paris while teaching you some basic phrases.

Where it all begins...

Learning English was a real pain in the butt. The pain, the tears, the recurring nightmares about showing up to my E.S.L. exam without any pants. Fortunately, that's all a distant memory to me now. I no longer confuse word order: "Good today grammar I learn!", or forget that English is genderless: "The orange fruit, he is so nice, yes?", or mispronounce things with embarrassing results: "Can I have a shit of paper? No. Vait. Two shits of paper, please." In short, I am fluent.
It was difficult to get to that point, but I miss the challenge of figuring out all the puzzles of a new language. That's why I have a new goal: learning French and Spanish at the same time.
Am I crazy for attempting to study both simultaneously? Probably. It will be much harder than just focusing all my effort on just one language, but I've got some advantages too:

-After learning a brand new alphabet, I feel like I already conquered a small part of all languages that use it.(My first language is Russian and Cyrillic doesn't mash well with Latin. In Russian, H is pronounced N, P is R, backwards R is the Ya sound...you get the idea.)

-I already have a good grasp on basic French grammar and have a decent enough vocabulary to understand 70-90% of most conversations. Or at least 70-90% of most Bob L'Eponge episodes.

-French and Spanish are similar because they come from the same language family. Some people might find the similarities confusing, but I enjoy finding them while keeping track of the differences.

-Taking classes in both languages at university will provide structure and help organize my study times. I'll even have access to a fancy language lab! Whatever that is. I haven't tried it yet.

-Spanish is a damn sexy language. I especially like the rrrrolling RRRRRs since I can already rrrroll them in Rrrrrrussian!

Tomorrow is my first class. Spanish days are Mondays and Wednesdays and French days are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays shall be nap days. I'll update this blog as often as I can (which is probably not that often because I'm lazy.)

Adieu/Adios!