This poster dishes out highly reliable information, regardless of the topic. Here's one on linguistics as it relates to German pronunciation.
I like his first example [PORSCHE] and also his final example [Der Name der Rose . . .(v, Umberto Eco)]. Well played, indeed.
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linguistics. Show all posts
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Rhabarberbarbara is back!
POSTED by Mental Floss via Languagehat
Here's How Crazy-Long German Words are Made
Image credit: Youtube
German
is known for its extra long compound words. When Mark Twain complained
that some German words were “so long they have a perspective,” he was
thinking of words like Freundschaftsbezeigungen (demonstrations of friendship) and Generalstaatsverordnetenver= sammlungen
(general states representatives meetings). Long German words were in
the news this year when many sources reported that Germany had “lost its
longest word” because the European Union removed a law from its books
called (*ahem*): Rindfleischetikettierungs überwachungs= aufgabenübertragungsgesetz (the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling).
But Germany had not in fact lost its longest word, because the process for forming these words is an active, productive part of the language, and the potential exists for creating words even longer, if so needed in the moment. How does that process work?
This lively animation takes you, step by step, through what’s involved in creating the word Rhababerbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel, a completely valid (and probably never before uttered) word.
Though video is in German, that shouldn’t deter you. The artwork makes it pretty clear what’s happening, meaningwise. Here are a few clues to help you follow the steps:
1. There’s a girl named Barbara.
2. She is known for her rhubarb cake.
3. So they call her “Rhubarb Barbara.”
4. To sell her cake, she opens a bar.
5. It is frequented by three barbarians.
6. They have beards.
7. When they want to get their beards groomed they go to the barber.
8. He goes to their bar to eat some cake, and then wants to drink a special beer.
9. You can only get his special beer at a special bar that sells it.
10. Where the bartender's name is Barbie.
11. She’s the Barbie of the bar where the beer of the beard barber for the barbarians of Rhubarb’s Barbara’s bar is sold. -- Yes, that's all in one single word.
12. At the end, the barbarians, the barber, Barbie, and Barbara all go to the bar for a beer.
-- After this, no wonder! Prost!
Hat tip to Languagehat.
But Germany had not in fact lost its longest word, because the process for forming these words is an active, productive part of the language, and the potential exists for creating words even longer, if so needed in the moment. How does that process work?
This lively animation takes you, step by step, through what’s involved in creating the word Rhababerbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel, a completely valid (and probably never before uttered) word.
Though video is in German, that shouldn’t deter you. The artwork makes it pretty clear what’s happening, meaningwise. Here are a few clues to help you follow the steps:
1. There’s a girl named Barbara.
2. She is known for her rhubarb cake.
3. So they call her “Rhubarb Barbara.”
4. To sell her cake, she opens a bar.
5. It is frequented by three barbarians.
6. They have beards.
7. When they want to get their beards groomed they go to the barber.
8. He goes to their bar to eat some cake, and then wants to drink a special beer.
9. You can only get his special beer at a special bar that sells it.
10. Where the bartender's name is Barbie.
11. She’s the Barbie of the bar where the beer of the beard barber for the barbarians of Rhubarb’s Barbara’s bar is sold. -- Yes, that's all in one single word.
12. At the end, the barbarians, the barber, Barbie, and Barbara all go to the bar for a beer.
-- After this, no wonder! Prost!
Hat tip to Languagehat.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
German Language on a roll
When German Words Travel, Our Zeitgeist Goes Oom-Pah-Pah
Why do Finnish buses take coffee breaks? And why are the French always
puzzled when they look at a skylight? It's because they use words of
German origin, sometimes without even realizing it.
Learning German is for many students an excercise in delayed gratification
Many students of the German language -- especially those who suffered
their way through cruel, Teutonic grammar drills, lost their sense of
orientation trying to order their German words correctly, or wounded
both their tongues and sense of self-esteem with sharp, unpronounceable
compound words -- get rather surprised when they come to Germany and
hear the language of Goethe in actual use.
People in Germany are often invited to attend "ein Meeting," asked to bring along their "down-geloadete" information and told "sorry" (with a rolling "r") when somebody bumps into them on the street.
But -- even in the age of digital communication, dominated by the English language and US American pop culture -- it is not only English words that cross national and linguistic borders.
The German Language Council recently organized an international contest called "Word Migrations." People from 70 countries -- ranging from Mexico to Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea to Nigeria -- participated in the linguistic hunt for German words that "migrated" to other languages. Over 6,000 such words were submitted. A winner was drawn from the entries and the award ceremony took place Thursday in Munich.
Coffee break par excellence
"The response to our first advertisement was enormous," said Rudolf Hoberg of the Association for the German Language, one of the organizations participating in the German Language Council.
The winning entry also showed that Germany is not only a language of profound philosophy and utmost, technical efficiency, but also a language of leisure and procrastination.
Susanne Bätjer from Germany was wondering why a Finnish public-transit bus, which she saw in 2005, had the word "Kaffepaussi" displayed on its automated destination display. Do Finnish buses really take coffee breaks? Bätjer learned in the end that the German word for coffee break had acquired an additional, slightly different, meaning in Finnish: "out of order."
Some German words -- such as kindergarten, zeitgeist, and sauerkraut -- have long been known as German imports into the English language. But the goal of the project was to go beyond the obvious examples and explore the extent to which German words have infiltrated other languages.
"We wanted to find out what German words are used on an everyday basis in other countries," Hoberg said.
A colorful collection
The results of this survey -- which one could best place in the category of linguistic anthropology -- told a fascinating story of German technical expertise, colonial history, cultural stereotypes and a delightful sense of humor.
The Turkish rail system was started in 1913 with German assistance, which is why Turkish train conductors always cry "fertik" ("fertig" -- ready or finished in German) when the train is about to leave the station. In Cameroon, once a German colony, train stations are called "banop" ("Bahnhof"). If one is anesthetized in Tanzania, they are -- all joking aside -- "nusu kaput" (half-broken). In Afrikaans, the language of Dutch settlers in South Africa, an impatient German is an "Aberjetzte" ("aber jetzt" in German means "on the double" or "ASAP").
"The vocabulary of the German language is far better known abroad than we thought," Hoberg said.
And even though contributions came from all over the word -- the Russians raise a glass of vodka to "Brudershaft," a gesture of friendship and brotherhood (German "Brüderschaft"), while some American presidential candidates can be best described as wishy-washy (from German "wischi-waschi," lacking a clear-cut standpoint) -- most of the words were submitted from Eastern Europe and Anglo-Saxon cultural areas.
What's that?
It may come as a surprise, however, that the most frequently submitted entry was the French word for skylight -- "vasistas." In the original German, "was ist das" means, literally, "what's that?" Yet most French speakers probably don't pay attention to the fact that skylights in French provoke, etymologically speaking, a sense of puzzled inquiry about the state of the world.
It is also unlikely that Japanese students who have an odd student job called "arubaito" realize that they are, from an etymological point of view, part of Germany's labor-intensive work culture ("Arbeit" means work in German).
"The project does not attempt a linguistic investigation," Hoberg said. "Some words that were sent in might well be only passing fads."
Whether as temporary guest workers in foreign languages, or as naturalized citizens, German words have long left the confines of the German-speaking world. A large collection of colorful cross-linguistic gems -- along with personal anecdotes and insights into the way cultures collide and enrich each other -- has now been collected and published as a book under the title "Ausgewanderte Wörter" (available in German only).
People in Germany are often invited to attend "ein Meeting," asked to bring along their "down-geloadete" information and told "sorry" (with a rolling "r") when somebody bumps into them on the street.
But -- even in the age of digital communication, dominated by the English language and US American pop culture -- it is not only English words that cross national and linguistic borders.
The German Language Council recently organized an international contest called "Word Migrations." People from 70 countries -- ranging from Mexico to Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea to Nigeria -- participated in the linguistic hunt for German words that "migrated" to other languages. Over 6,000 such words were submitted. A winner was drawn from the entries and the award ceremony took place Thursday in Munich.
Coffee break par excellence
"The response to our first advertisement was enormous," said Rudolf Hoberg of the Association for the German Language, one of the organizations participating in the German Language Council.
The winning entry also showed that Germany is not only a language of profound philosophy and utmost, technical efficiency, but also a language of leisure and procrastination.
Susanne Bätjer from Germany was wondering why a Finnish public-transit bus, which she saw in 2005, had the word "Kaffepaussi" displayed on its automated destination display. Do Finnish buses really take coffee breaks? Bätjer learned in the end that the German word for coffee break had acquired an additional, slightly different, meaning in Finnish: "out of order."
Some German words -- such as kindergarten, zeitgeist, and sauerkraut -- have long been known as German imports into the English language. But the goal of the project was to go beyond the obvious examples and explore the extent to which German words have infiltrated other languages.
"We wanted to find out what German words are used on an everyday basis in other countries," Hoberg said.
A colorful collection
The results of this survey -- which one could best place in the category of linguistic anthropology -- told a fascinating story of German technical expertise, colonial history, cultural stereotypes and a delightful sense of humor.
The Turkish rail system was started in 1913 with German assistance, which is why Turkish train conductors always cry "fertik" ("fertig" -- ready or finished in German) when the train is about to leave the station. In Cameroon, once a German colony, train stations are called "banop" ("Bahnhof"). If one is anesthetized in Tanzania, they are -- all joking aside -- "nusu kaput" (half-broken). In Afrikaans, the language of Dutch settlers in South Africa, an impatient German is an "Aberjetzte" ("aber jetzt" in German means "on the double" or "ASAP").
"The vocabulary of the German language is far better known abroad than we thought," Hoberg said.
And even though contributions came from all over the word -- the Russians raise a glass of vodka to "Brudershaft," a gesture of friendship and brotherhood (German "Brüderschaft"), while some American presidential candidates can be best described as wishy-washy (from German "wischi-waschi," lacking a clear-cut standpoint) -- most of the words were submitted from Eastern Europe and Anglo-Saxon cultural areas.
What's that?
It may come as a surprise, however, that the most frequently submitted entry was the French word for skylight -- "vasistas." In the original German, "was ist das" means, literally, "what's that?" Yet most French speakers probably don't pay attention to the fact that skylights in French provoke, etymologically speaking, a sense of puzzled inquiry about the state of the world.
It is also unlikely that Japanese students who have an odd student job called "arubaito" realize that they are, from an etymological point of view, part of Germany's labor-intensive work culture ("Arbeit" means work in German).
"The project does not attempt a linguistic investigation," Hoberg said. "Some words that were sent in might well be only passing fads."
Whether as temporary guest workers in foreign languages, or as naturalized citizens, German words have long left the confines of the German-speaking world. A large collection of colorful cross-linguistic gems -- along with personal anecdotes and insights into the way cultures collide and enrich each other -- has now been collected and published as a book under the title "Ausgewanderte Wörter" (available in German only).
Saturday, August 25, 2012
NY Times on Origin of English
-- Historians are split between 2 camps, we might identify as the wheel (chariot-driven warriors), and the hoe (peaceful farmers). Here is some new evidence in the debate.
Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say
By NICHOLAS WADE Published: August 23, 2012
Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.
The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.
Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.
The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.
The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,” they report.
But despite its advanced statistical methods, their study may not convince everyone.
The researchers started with a menu of vocabulary items that are known to be resistant to linguistic change, like pronouns, parts of the body and family relations, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. Words that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral word are known as cognates. Thus “mother,” “mutter” (German), “mat’ ” (Russian), “madar” (Persian), “matka” (Polish) and “mater” (Latin) are all cognates derived from the proto-Indo-European word “mehter.”
Dr. Atkinson and his colleagues then scored each set of words on the vocabulary menu for the 103 languages. In languages where the word was a cognate, the researchers assigned it a score of 1; in those where the cognate had been replaced with an unrelated word, it was scored 0. Each language could thus be represented by a string of 1’s and 0’s, and the researchers could compute the most likely family tree showing the relationships among the 103 languages.
A computer was then supplied with known dates of language splits. Romanian and other Romance languages, for instance, started to diverge from Latin after A.D. 270, when Roman troops pulled back from the Roman province of Dacia. Applying those dates to a few branches in its tree, the computer was able to estimate dates for all the rest.
The computer was also given geographical information about the present range of each language and told to work out the likeliest pathways of distribution from an origin, given the probable family tree of descent. The calculation pointed to Anatolia, particularly a lozenge-shaped area in what is now southern Turkey, as the most plausible origin — a region that had also been proposed as the origin of Indo-European by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in 1987, because it was the source from which agriculture spread to Europe.
Dr. Atkinson’s work has integrated a large amount of information with a computational method that has proved successful in evolutionary studies. But his results may not sway supporters of the rival theory, who believe the Indo-European languages were spread some 5,000 years later by warlike pastoralists who conquered Europe and India from the Black Sea steppe.
A key piece of their evidence is that proto-Indo-European had a vocabulary for chariots and wagons that included words for “wheel,” “axle,” “harness-pole” and “to go or convey in a vehicle.” These words have numerous descendants in the Indo-European daughter languages. So Indo-European itself cannot have fragmented into those daughter languages, historical linguists argue, before the invention of chariots and wagons, the earliest known examples of which date to 3500 B.C. This would rule out any connection between Indo-European and the spread of agriculture from Anatolia, which occurred much earlier.
“I see the wheeled-vehicle evidence as a trump card over any evolutionary tree,” said David Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College who studies Indo-European origins.
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