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senzacaponecoda · 6 years

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One thing I forgot to mention: before numbers symbols like 1,2,3 were invented in India, what ancient people used to do was just use letters. While the Romans eventually invented a convoluted system of IXVCDM most near-eastern cultures just used their alphabet in its order to represent numbers. A was one, B was two, and so on. At the tenth letter, however, instead of giving weird numbers like 17 their own whole letter, they started counting by 10s, and at the 19th letter (because the tenth letter was the first tens letter, so the eleventh would be the second and so on), by hundreds, since people were more likely to go “about 20″ than “exactly 17″ or whatever. This made the alphabet order important, however, since mixing it up between two places would get different numbers of items. A:

A depicted an ox head, ‘alep in Phoenician. The Egyptian word was k3w, pronounced something like “karru”. But the phoenician word began with a sound called a “glottal stop”. In English it’s found in the middle of “uh-oh”, and wasn’t merely a break in these languages, but a full fledged consonant. But because of its weakness, this was the letter used most often as a “mother of reading” as I explained in the last post. Since the “ee” sound was associated with the /j/-sound, and since the “oo” sound was associated with the /w/-sound, ‘alep came to be associated with the “ah” sound by default. And so while ‘aleph in Hebrew or ‘alif in Arabic are still “mothers of reading”, when the Greeks borrowed the letter for themselves and their very different from Semitic language, they used it for the /a/ sound. The Egyptians used a vulture for this sound in their own language. Aleph came to be pronounced Alpha by the Greeks. Most A’s have the value 1. B: B originally comes from the floor plan of a house - beyt’. You would have an opening for a door as well, and through cursive writing eventually came to have a sort of P shape (or Pluto shape), before the bottom tail curved closed too, giving B. Beyt became Beta. Most B’s have the value 2. Egyptian used a symbol of a foot and leg for /b/. C, G: C was originally a throwing stick, gaml. A throwing stick being basically what a boomerang is - you’d throw it at an animal you want to stun. Later on, after Mesopotamian traders introduced the Camel from East Asia to the Middle East, people began interpreting the word as giml, or camel. Whence Greek Gamma. The Greek alphabet wasn’t passed directly from the Greeks to the ancient Romans. First the Greeks had colonies in Italy, and traded with the Etruscans, who spoke a language quite unlike both Greek and Latin and unlike Arabic or Egyptian. And the Etruscan language seemed to lack voiced stops, like B D G, a profile kind of like Mandarin today, where B D G are really p t k, and P T K are very harsh, aspirated p’, t’, k’. The Etruscans ended up using C, K, and Q almost interchangably and for both the /g/ and /k/ sounds; just for aesthetic reasons, C came before E and I, K before A, and Q before O and V (more on that in a bit). But Latin needed both /g/ and /k/ letters, and later on a teacher invented G, with a little Greek Gamma (not as curved) on it, whence G. But the old practice was retained in some abbreviations: GAIVS was C. As for G’s placement, at this time, because Latin didn’t really have a /z/ sound of its own, Z wasn’t being used except as a number. So the Romans had this gap of sorts in Z’s original place, and put G there instead. When they reintroduced Z, they added it at the end. This is why G has the value of 3 in most languages, instead of 7 or something. Egyptian used a jar with food inside as their symbol for /g/.

D was probably originally a kind of fish, being something like digg, and was drawn kind of like a Jesus fish. Later on, the shape kind of simplified, and people started calling it dalet, because it looked to them like a door. This became delta in Greek; Latin’s D is Greek’s delta but round, like C is gamma but round. Most D’s have a value of 4. Egyptian might not have had an actual /d/ in their language, but the closest equivalent sound was written with a hand.

E was a complicated sign in Egyptian used to mark words of jubilation or celebration, and was a depiction of a man with his arms over his head. Jubilation was something like hili in Phoenician, and by then the symbol was already abstract and a bunch of lines connected to other lines. So it was reinterpreted as he, and made the simple /h/ sound like in English hey. At one point, Greek didn’t have /h/-sounds at all. So, like Aleph, it was repurposed, this time for the vowel beside it, e. Later, the “ah”-”ee” sound, /ai/, like English I or eye, became an “eh” sound, like in the French words maison or lait. And this was the same as the sound E made, so the Greeks started calling E “simple E” or E-psilon to distinguish it from AI. Most E’s have the value 5. The Egyptian /h/ sound was written with an angular spiral, a stand in related to the floor plan of beyt’, maybe meaning courtyard or reed shelter.

F, U, V, W, Y:

Y was originally a drawing a hook, called waw in Phoenician, and made the /w/ sound. As a semivowel, Y was relatively unstable, and sometimes there were situations where the consonant /w/, without any vowels beside it, would become the “oo” sound between other consonants. This is the first “split”: Greek took the F-shaped varient for its /w/ sound, and the Y-shaped variant for its /u/ sound.

The /w/ sound eventually disappeared in Greek, but not before they started trading with the Etruscans, who had kind of weird language. At the time, Greek’s phi was still more of a p-sound than an f-sound as well. Since Etruscan didn’t really have phonetic voicing, the /v/ and /f/ sounds were interchangible. And /w/ likes to become v, which is why languages like German and Polish use it as such. So Etruscan made a huge leap, using F for /f/ instead of /w/. And passed it on to the Romans. Most W’s have a value of 6 because of this convolution.

Y had been written in the shape of V in Etruscan, although they weren’t thought of as separate letters any more than we think of the a that looks like an o and the a that looks like a 2 as separate letters. This form was passed into Latin. And in Classical Latin, V always made the /u/ or /w/ sounds.

Greek’s OY then did a similar thing as its AI, fusing together into a different sound. So Y was called Y-psilon to show it as a simpler, shorter, and different from OY. At the same time, Greek’s Y came to be pronounced like French’s u, or German’s ü, (or Finnish’s y) basically an “ee” sound while making a kissy face. Because of this, even though they were just variants of the same letter, Latin reborrowed Y to contrast with V, which made them separate letters. And dropping the kissy face on “ee” means y was just pronounced “ee”, the same as I, which is why Y and I work pretty much the same way in English.

Now, in Latin, where /u/ sounds were /u/ sounds and where /w/ sounds were /w/ sounds was pretty predictable. Since they were similar, there was no reason to use anything but V for both of them. Even when Latin’s /w/ became /v/ in most daughter languages, where that was was still predictable, and so there was no need for a separate /u/ and /w/. But around the time of the reformation, German started getting written a lot more. And German’s (then) /w/ and /u/ sounds weren’t always predictable. So they had this convention of writing /w/ later /v/ as VV and /u/ as V. And this convention spread to Polish.

But in England, with all their French words dragging in /v/, they had /w/, /v/, and /u/, and all in unpredictable places compared to Latin; they weren’t complementary. There was already a convention to write V like v at the beginning of words and like u in the middle, so the English ended up splitting V and U into different letters. This post-dates the US, believe it or not: the Declaration of Independence still used u/v as variants of each other. Because of how late this was, not all languages using the Latin alphabet even recognized W or U as separate letters going into the 20th century.

So through a really convoluted mess, we got F, V, U, W, and Y all from the same letter, waw.

The Egyptian equivalents were a quail chick for /w/, which could be a mother of reading as well, a horned viper for /f/, and either didn’t have or didn’t need symbols for /u/, /v/, and /y/. That said, using Y as /j/-sound like yeah/jah, Egyptians did a complicated thing I’ll get to when I talk about I and J.

(continued, idk, in the future)

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eternalstateofoctober · 4 years

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for the asks, 18, 19 and 20 please!

thank you, dear anon 😎❤ (20 answered!)

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language?Finnish is not spoken the way it is written! It’s pronounced the exact same but not spoken!

This is complicated to explain but we have spoken Finnish (puhekieli) and written Finnish (kirjakieli which is the one one learns, finds in the papers, dictionaries, academic text etc.) Maybe an example could help? This is just so very fascinating to me idk...The sentence ”I’m Matti Virtanen and I’m thirty-one. I live in Helsinki and I have a red car but it’s broken right now.”, in written Finnish is ”Minä olen Matti Nieminen, ja minä olen kolmekymmentäyksi. Minä asun Helsingissä ja minulla on punainen auto, mutta se on rikki juuri nyt.”and that sentence is the absolute same as the spoken Finnish ”Mä oo Matti Niemine, ja mä oo kolkytyks. Mä asu Helsingis ja mul o punane auto, mut se o rikki just ny.”That’s the way I’d say it but then there are all the other dialects and just people’s ways of speaking in general (since a dialect’s just a regional thing ofc) that twist words any way they like like me = minä -> mä -> mää -> mie, now = nyt -> ny -> nyte, so it could also be anything as twisted as ”Mie oon Matti Niemine ja mie oon kolkytäyks. Mie assun Hesaassa ja miul punaane auto, mut se o rikki just ny.”That’s quite a northern way, quite Oulu I’d say. Longer vowels... But the dialects are not completely written out like that in say, text messages. Just spoken. And not every written Finnish version of a word is always replaced. People say bicycle/bike = polkupyörä just as much as they say pyörä or fillari. A good example actually since the English word can also be completely changed lol. But yeah. I’m not a linguist.

19. do you like your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem?well i’m not patriotic pretty much at all but sure they’re all fine lol

#*hannibal voice* hello anon #it talks #ask meme #suomi

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geekybiologist · 7 years

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Finnish is actually a really interesting language.

Like did you know we have free word order?

So if you want to say for example “I’ll make porridge for breakfast today” that would be:

Teen tänään puuroa aamiaiseksi. Tänään teen puuroa aamiaiseksi. Aamiaiseksi teen tänään puuroa. Puuroa tänään aamiaiseksi teen. Aamiaiseksi tänään puuroa teen. Tänään aamiaiseksi teen puuroa. ... and so on.

All 24 versions are grammatically correct and work as well as the next, although some do have a more poetic ring to them than others, which makes them less used overall. Still you can basically start any sentence and come up with-, or change how you want it to end mid-sentence and still have it sound smooth and be grammatically correct. (This comes in handy if you’re prone to opening your mouth before you sort out your thoughts. It comes less in handy when you’re used to talking like that, but speak in another language and are thus making a fool out of yourself).

Even though the Finnish language is supposed to be one of the hardest languages to learn, this makes it pretty easy, does it not?

Speaking of, another thing that makes Finnish easy is how words are pronounced exactly as they’re written. In addition, the Finnish alphabet, while technically consisting of 29 letters (same as the English one plus åäö), doesn’t use a good portion of those letters because other letters can produce the same sounds (c is replaced with k or s, q replaced with k, x replaced with ks, å is even known as ‘Swedish o’ and not present in a single word of Finnish origin, but useful for the Swedish names you still encounter here). You’ll never have to wonder what letter a sound uses when you’re writing in Finnish because there’s only ever one option!

Now while you’re all thinking about how Finnish isn’t really that difficult after all, I have to present to you one of the things I find most fascinating - the difference between written and spoken Finnish as well as how we view formality.

We’re not a very polite bunch of people and it shows in our language. We don’t have a real formal language and we even go so far as to prefer slang over standard language, since it sounds a bit stiff and formal (goes for everyone the elderly, teachers, professors and bosses all included). A classic example is how we call people ‘it’ instead of ‘they/them’, and I’ve even been called ‘that’ and it wasn’t particularly rude (though I’m not sure how well this translates for you to realize the difference/meaning). While not having a formal language is a dream for me when I’m learning languages, since I’m not used to having one and it stresses me out to pick the correct level of formality, it get’s a bit tricky for those learning Finnish. Let me show you examples! (borrowing them from this site)

Our sentence in standard form: Minä lähden töihin, sinä menet kouluun (I’m going to work, you’re going to school)

Pronouns (minä - I, sinä - you) almost always get shortened (minä -> mä, sinä -> sä) because it’s just easier that way.

The letter d is one of those the Finnish language doesn’t like that much. It wasn’t originally part of Finnish phonetics (fun fact it’s actually not present in our national epic) and it has been easily replaced by t in in loan words resist the urge to joke about how ‘the d’ doesn’t fit our mouths, however it has become more common and is used in, uh, let me skip the difficult terminology and just say when we conjugate words. Our dislike to use it still remains though and we often leave it out.

N is another letter that easily disappears, particularly from the end of words or from in between consonants.

And with this what we’re left with is:

Minä lähden töihin, sinä menet kouluun. Mä lähe töihi, sä meet kouluu.

So basically once you’ve studied standard Finnish, which is what all the textbooks teach, and come here eager to put your knowledge to use, you’ll be shocked not to hear anyone speak the way you’ve learned it! Isn’t that encouraging!!? :D

#finnish #language is fun #my nonsense #suomi #finland

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lingthusiasm · 7 years

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 6 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: and I'm Lauren Gawne. And today we're going to be talking about the International Phonetic Alphabet. But first -- it was International Mother Language Day in February and even though it was a couple of weeks ago now on February the 21st, I think it's still worth saying a belated 'Happy Mother Language Day' to you Gretchen!

Gretchen: Happy Mother Language Day to you! Which we are wishing in our of mother languages of English, which is kind of boring.

Lauren: Both wishing it our mother languages. Do you have any other heritage languages that you wish to acknowledge?

Gretchen: I mean, technically Scottish Gaelic is probably a long time ago a mother language for me, but my ancestors were lowland Scots so it's a really long time ago.

Lauren: Well happy Scots Gaelic day

Gretchen: Do you have any other?

Lauren: My grandmaternal language is Polish and thanks to generally typical Australian attitudes towards non-English speaking in the 1960s that wasn't passed on to any of my mother's generation at all. So yeah it's still a very recent part of our family history. I'm the only grandchild who ever learnt enough Polish to speak with my grandmother in her mother tongue

Gretchen: Oh that's cool

Lauren: Which is cool, I wish I still spoke that much

Gretchen: Well I mean it's cool that you learned it, it's not cool that no one else did

Lauren: It's probably questionable how much Polish I remember today. And yeah, I always like to think of my Nan and my lack of opportunities to learn Polish on February 21st. What have you been up to or what's coming up?

Gretchen: Well, by the time this episode goes out I will have been to South by Southwest, where I will have done a panel with Erin Mckean and Jane Solomon and Ben Zimmer

Lauren: How are you not going to like die of fangirling at people?!

Gretchen: Because I've already met all of them anyway?

Lauren: Awwww I'm so jelly

Gretchen: But they're really cool and I'm really excited to be on a panel with them! We're going to be talking about 'Word curation: Dictionaries, tech, and the future' which will happen by the time you guys get this episode so you can check out the hashtag that I'm sure will have some action on it and we'll link to that in the show notes.

Lauren: I'm really excited for that panel. I'm looking forward to it hopefully - is it going to be recorded? Am I going to be able to see it as a non South by Southwest attendee?

Gretchen: I think there's going to be an audio recording on soundcloud that South by Southwest is going to put up online because they've done that for previous years. So I can't promise that they'll do that again but they seem to like doing it in previous years, I don't know why they wouldn't do it again so we'll link to that if we have it.

Lauren: Yay, excellent!

[Music]

Gretchen: So there's a problem when you learn to spell English, which is that it's really hard to spell English.

Lauren: It's really a lifelong learning process as far as I'm concerned

Gretchen: It's a lifelong learning process. You know, some languages don't have spelling bees because their spelling systems are so consistent they don't need them - we can only wish! So, the English spelling system is especially ridiculous, it's got silent letters, it's got something around 14 vowels but only five letters to write them in.

My favorite demonstration of this is that there's a phrase that has all of the English vowels and the phrase goes - I have to have to say it in a non-rhotic accent because it only works that way - the phrase goes 'Who would know aught of art must learn, act and then take his ease'. And each of those words has a different vowel in it.

Lauren: Cool!

Gretchen: And that's one way of remembering the vowels

Lauren: That's a nifty sentence!

Gretchen: Yeah, but if you try to write that down in English it's hard

Lauren: With the English orthography that we have, or the English writing system - orthography - that we have

Gretchen: And spelling systems are also inconsistent across different languages. Even languages that are consistent in themselves are often inconsistent when you compare them with each other. So, some languages use the letter J for the /dʒ/ sound [as in Jane], some languages use it for the /ʒ/ sound like French [Jean], some languages use it for the 'y' /j/ sound like German as in 'Jan' or 'Johann Sebastian Bach', some languages use it for the /x/ sound as in Spanish like 'Juan'. There's a whole bunch of different sounds you can use the same letter for depending on your language

Lauren: There's a really great tumblr post that kind of encapsulates this variety in the ways different alphabets that are based on the same alphabet English is based on, use their orthographies in different ways which we'll link to. When I first read this I was like oh look someone's just posting in Norwegian or Danish or something, but then if you sit there and read it and you know the orthographic conventions in different languages it says something along the lines of 'I wonder if English speakers will notice that I'm writing this in English but using the spelling conventions of my language'

Gretchen: And yeah a whole bunch of people have certain different versions of it - there's a Finnish one which is pretty good, there's an Irish one which is fantastic

Lauren: It's good, because once you know what the phrase is that gives you a feel for what the conventions are in different languages. For example I found the Polish one really easy to read and then for some of the others I was just basically guessing because I knew what the sentence was, and it really nicely illustrates this problem that we have that we all learn different spelling conventions for different languages

Gretchen: And we're not the first people to have noticed this problem! In fact people have been realizing this problem for quite a long time, as long as people have been writing with different systems. And it became especially apparent as writing systems became standardised in the 1700s and 1800s, when dictionaries are becoming popular and people were starting to write in a standardised sort of way and looking at other languages and realising that their standardisations were converging on something different

Lauren: I really love that historically there was no consistent spelling conventions, and so in Old English text we actually have a good idea of the different common literate dialects of people who lived in Mercia or people who live in Cumbria and because the way that they wrote English really reflected the way their accent worked. Once spelling systems became standardized that stopped being the case

Gretchen: It also became really difficult people for who are trying to learn English because even if you learn the spelling systems, then you pronounce the words the way they look and people look at you like "that's not actually how it's pronounced" and you're like "how was I supposed to remember that?" Various people came up with various proposals for spelling reform for either just like a more phonetic way of writing English in total, or for ways of adapting English words so that it could be used for specialised purposes like people who are learning the language, or people who want to write down specific things and annotate exactly how they're said

Lauren: And some people went for massive 'let's create an entirely new alphabet', some people just wanted some small reforms. So Noah Webster is probably one of the people who had the most impressive effect on English especially on American English. It was Webster who decided to take and consistently use conventions like 'i-z-e' instead of 'i-s-e' and using words like colour without the 'u' instead of with the 'u' as part of this attempt to make English spelling more realistically reflect the language that was being spoken

Gretchen: Yeah and there were other British reformers that were trying to do this, so there was a guy named Henry Sweet who came up with an alphabet called the Romic /ɹomɪk/ alphabet or the Romic /ɹɑmɪk/ alphabet, I'm not actually sure how to pronounce the name of this alphabet, which...

Lauren: If only was written down some where in a consistently pronounceable script!

Gretchen: If only! He didn't seem to actually write the name of his own alphabet anywhere in a consistent script so that's a shame. And that was based on mostly Roman letters but with adaptations for sounds that English had and Latin hadn't. And then there was Alexander Ellis who was apparently the real-life origin of Henry Higgins from 'My Fair Lady'

Lauren: Really?!

Gretchen: I dunno, that's what Wikipedia says!

Lauren: Okay, because I'm going to invoke the supremacy of David Crystal, if that's okay. I don't know if Crystal officially trumps Wikipedia, but in his book called 'Wordsmiths and Warriors' he says if Higgins is anyone it has to be Daniel Jones who is a phonetician who is very influential in terms of like codifying the vowel system. So what we think of is the modern International Phonetic Alphabet vowel space kind of started with Daniel Jones' cardinal vowels

Gretchen: I mean I don't know it could have been a composite or something

Lauren: I think to be honest that the most likely is that there was a genre of gentleman academic at the time who's very interested in these topics. Anyway, there was a lot of work being invested in generating some kind of writing system that accurately reflected speech

Gretchen: Yeah and so they made the International Phonetic Association in the late 1800s, which confusingly enough also has the acronym IPA, and they had some meetings and they were like, “yeah, we need to come up with a system for this”

Lauren: So the IPA is where the IPA was created

Gretchen: Yeah I hope they were all drinking IPA but I can't guarantee that

Lauren: In our reenactment that is definitely what's happening

Gretchen: Yeah, when we when we all get dressed up in historic costume (bagsies Henry Sweet), then we will all drink IPA

Lauren: I'm Daniel Jones apparently - no wait, I'm going to dress up as Cardinal Vowel, I always thought that would be a great linguist costume

Gretchen: Ah that's great! Were cardinal vowels invented yet?

Lauren: Well it was Daniel Jones who did that, I don't know when he was working

Gretchen: Oh ok good

Lauren: I mean we'll have to have a whole episode just talking about vowels and how they work, but that was kind of a thing that was figured out at the time

Gretchen: Yeah and they came up with some principles for future development of this International Phonetic Alphabet and these were: each symbol should have its own distinctive sound and the same symbol should be used for the same sound across all languages

Lauren: So instead of having the J sound sounding like /dʒ/ or /ʒ/ or /j/ or /x/ across different languages, every time that sound was used it would be used for exactly the same sound

Gretchen: Every time that *symbol* was used

Lauren: Yes sorry every time that symbol was used it would be used for the same sound

Gretchen: They also came up with some principles that influenced which symbols ended up being chosen for which sounds. So they decided to use as many ordinary Roman letters as possible and to have a very minimal number of new letters, and to use what they called quote unquote “international” usage to decide the sound for each symbol

Lauren: So they wouldn't like, take the symbol that we have for 's' and decide 'oh we're going to make that the sound for 'l' because we're crazy people'

Gretchen: Yeah, they didn't do that. But the other thing is, so if we look at the vowels, the IPA vowels look kind of weird from an English perspective. So the IPA uses the letter that we think of as 'i' to represent the 'ee' /i/ sound and uses the letter we think of as 'e' to represent the 'eh' /e/ sound and so on. And this doesn't make sense for English, but it does make sense when you look at a whole bunch of other languages like Spanish and Italian, and the way the Roman alphabet has been used for non-European languages generally falls along these principles as well. So they said, “Look, even though we're English speakers we're going to not do the English things”

Lauren: Okay, so they really did go with this kind of international general preference

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, they're still eurocentric, they're still starting with European languages and kind of working their way outwards, but they were at least not completely Anglo-centric, which is helpful here, because English does some weird stuff with its sounds

Lauren: Yeah and we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet, a few more if we kind of pull everything from across European languages, and there are so many more sounds that the world's languages can make, so once we've run out of kind of standard letters where do we go from there?

Gretchen: Where we are from there is often Greek letters or Latinised looking versions of Greek letters because those were familiar to these creators. Another thing that they did was they would rotate letters. and this was partly because the shapes are still familiar if you do that and partly because this is the 1800s and people were typing with metal bits of type. So if you just take a lowercase 'e' and turn it upside down, you can just print your new character by flipping or rotating an existing metal type bit rather than casting a new one

Lauren: I have a really nice example from Australia, so I was at a workshop the other day and a colleague was showing me a booklet of Kamilaroi, so it's a language from the New England area of New South Wales in Australia, and William Ridley was working on this language in 1856. So this is even before the IPA was codified. And these languages have a sound like an English sound but you may not notice it in English because it's a sound at the end of words like 'sing' or 'bring', that /ŋ/ sound, but that sound can occur anywhere so you can have it at the start of the word as well as at the end. This /ŋ/ sound now has a symbol in the IPA that looks like an 'n' with a little tail and it's called an 'engma'

Gretchen: Yeah kind of like an 'n' with a 'g' tail shoved on it

Lauren: Yeah, and Ridley is one of the first people who adopted this symbol for use in his describing languages work in the 1850s, which was before the 1880s when the IPA was established. But this symbol had begun to be used for this /ŋ/ and it makes sense because it's like an 'n' and a 'g' squashed together. But when he sent it to the typesetters for his booklet they didn't have a /ŋ/ and so they just turned a capital 'G' upside down which sounds a bit crazy and it looks a bit crazy it looks like it's just full of upside down 'G's, but it meant that that was a way that they could represent this /ŋ/ sound. Apparently he sent it to some other journal in Europe and they just turned it all into a 'z'

Gretchen: Wow, a 'z'!

Lauren: Yeeeah

Gretchen: Wow, that's really bad! So I guess that's why it's good that another principle the IPA had was that the look of the new letters should suggest the sound they represent, so once you've learned the kind of basic ones and if you see a couple languages and you have a sense of what's used in other languages then you can often guess fairly accurately what an IPA letter is going to be like. So it's better to have a symbol for /ŋ/'that looks like an 'n' and a 'g' shoved together because that's how it's often written in different languages, a bit like an 'n' sound, a bit like a 'g' sound.

Another one of their principles was that diacritics should be avoided where possible. So adding extra little like accent marks or other types of small bits on top of letters was something that they tried to avoid for their basic sounds. Diacritics were only was supposed to be for if there's a modified version of a sound, but not for basic sounds in general. So in the current IPA, you still get these rotated letters, which must make the IPA very difficult for people who are dyslexic; you get small capitals; you get Greek stuff like the Greek letter theta is used for the 'th' /θ/ sound, and the runic and ultimately Icelandic sound /ð/ -- so the symbol that looks like an 'o' with kind of a cross above it, that’s from Icelandic and it used to be in English before the Normans came, that got borrowed back in -- so borrowing from other established systems. Because then you could just go to Iceland and grab some of their metal type bits, I don't know, or go to Greece and get some from them

Lauren: It's something that was a problem with the original metal type but it's also been a problem for a long time with modern software. So for a long time computers didn't really have fonts that expanded beyond the kind of really basic font set of like English and French and some diacritics and some special things. If you have some older software or if you look at older digital documents you have, y’know, people using capital 'A' for particular vowel sounds, vowel characters in the IPA that are symbols in the IPA that aren't in regular type or y’know schwa would be a capital 'E' for example

Gretchen: Yeah you can even see this on some old websites, people will use a different system that only uses the basic 26, plus capitals to do the extra stuff or maybe some places use like an 'at' sign @ to indicate a schwa, because we've also had a different version of this encoding problem with technology

Lauren: So it's not just the metal type it's also modern computing

Gretchen: It's also the byte! It's the type and the byte!

Lauren: The type and the byte have been a problem, it's getting better

Gretchen: It's getting better thanks to Unicode, thanks Unicode! So yeah the first version from 1887 was designed to work for sounds in English, French, and German because that's what they were doing at the time. It's a bit weird compared to the modern IPA because we're used to seeing it as a chart and they just gave a list of symbols and keywords that stuff was found in for various languages. So they'd say something like okay this 'a' symbol is going to be like the sound in English 'father' or this symbol is going to be like the sound in German 'Bach' and they just give the keywords like sometimes you see in the front of the dictionary. And then later, so they kept on working on it in the late 1800s and then by the year they expanded, published a version that included Arabic and a few other languages’ sounds, that’s when they finally publish it as a table for the first time

Lauren: So why would it be in it table, for people who aren't familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet?

Gretchen: The cool thing about the table is -- so our English alphabet that you learn as a kid is 'ABCD' in no particular order, that's just the order it is, that's just for historical reasons -- but the table is ordered based on how the sounds are produced. So sounds get produced with constriction in various parts of the mouth and with different degrees of constriction once you're in that place

Lauren: So it's a nice feature based table of all the kind of combination of features in particular places

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. If you superimpose a mouth onto that table, it looks a bit weird but you can kind of do it and you can see where each of the sounds is produced

Lauren: I have a link somewhere to an audible IPA chart so you can click on the sounds and hear what they sound like, but the ones on the very left side are all produced with just the lips like /p/, and the very front of the mouth. And then the ones at the very right edge are all the way back at the far back of the mouth, and that's things like your velar sounds like /g/ get made with that soft bit there or your uvula like right down in the very far back in the mouth

Gretchen: Yeah, it goes from your lips, through your mouth along the roof of your mouth and back into your throat. And the weird thing about this version from 1900 is that it's a mirror image of that so it has 'p' and 'b', your labial sounds on the right instead of on the left

Lauren: Oh no, that would confuse me so much

Gretchen: You can see an image of it on Wikipedia, it's all like typewritten, we'll link to that

Lauren: Wow, awesome

Gretchen: But it looks really weird, and they also have the vowel chart and the consonant chart on the same chart

Lauren: Right, okay!

Gretchen: They just have like a really wide section where the vowels go

Lauren: How weird!

Gretchen: Yeah, which is something else that changed later

Lauren: So there's now a table for the consonants, there's a few consonants that don't even fit, and then there's a vowel chart that's a separate thing, but it's very similar principle like it starts at the front of the mouth and goes back

Gretchen: Yeah, and what's cool is that the version that we use today is actually very very similar to the version that was solidified in 1932, which was quite a while ago. There were some adjustments made in 1989 and then after that it's just like 'oh well we need to add this one symbol because we found some languages that use it' but pretty much it stays very similar for quite a long time once it's established

Lauren: Nice. So it goes from left to right all the different places in the mouth, and then from top to bottom there are different ways just looking at the consonants, the ways to pronounce different consonants so you have the very plosive sounds like /b/, /k/, /d/, /t/ - we call them stops - along one row and your nasal sounds, so your /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, sounds along another row...

Gretchen: It kind of goes in order of how much you need to drop your jaw. So if you think about the sounds in the top row, your mouth is the most closed when you're making like a 'p' or a 'b'. You have to literally close your mouth for a second, you have to close your lips to make those sounds. Whereas if you're making a sound like 'r' /ɹ/ you don't have to actually close anything you're letting the sounds kinda come through. So the 'r' /ɹ/ sounds are near the bottom, but the /p, b/ sounds are near the top

Lauren: I mean that's the thing I found super neat about it when I was studying the IPA in undergrad was just how elegantly it captures all these different parameters in one table

Gretchen: Yeah, just to realize that someone has thought this through, thinking 'ok what are all the permutations you could put your mouth in and which ones do people actually use and let's organize this'

Lauren: And English just uses one subset of it

Gretchen: Yeah, every language is going to pick some subset of the sounds in this table, or if it doesn't we have to add something. So one of the cool things that you can do with the IPA because it's based on different positions the mouth can be in is adapt it to other mouth stuff. For example, Lauren Ackerman, who has the linguistics blog 'Wug Life', has made a table of emoji with their mouth positions as if they're making sounds in the IPA. So you can look at this table and she has things like the surprised emoji, which has kind of a round mouth and so that's like an 'oo' /u/ sound because you have to round your lips for that, and the 'ee' /i/ is kind of like a smile, and it is completely ludicrous but also great

Lauren: These are the important things that linguists do with their downtime

Gretchen: Yeah and the other cool thing you can do with the IPA is because you can use it to represent mouth sounds is you can write beatboxing in IPA, because beatboxing is done with the mouth

Lauren: Oh yeah, that must look amazing!

Gretchen: It looks so cool! I have a picture of it, of a chart that some beatboxing linguist researchers made

Lauren: That is awesome

Gretchen: So we'll link to that too

Gretchen: I mean we both have a lot of love for the International Phonetic Alphabet, obviously it's something we engage with a lot in all varieties of linguistic work. I think it's worth mentioning though that like, it's not perfect for everything, it can get really annoying sometimes.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: Particularly, as I mentioned in terms of the fact that font encoding on computers is still a problem, you still occasionally will get proofs back from a publisher for a journal article and all the engma, they're all mysteriously like really ugly still, we haven't quite got there with them being part of the font set for every single font

Gretchen: Yeah and it can be hard to write on a normal keyboard

Lauren: Yeah it's also really annoying to write on a normal keyboard sometimes. Also especially in the vowels, like I get a bit of like IPA anxiety when I use IPA and share it with people publicly, especially for long passages of text it's not always that easy to transcribe things

Gretchen: Yeah, and as fluent writers we've gotten used to the Byzantine nature of the English spelling system and we we also know how to talk, but thinking about how you talk in a more conscious way to say 'what sound am I saying here, what sound am I saying there' -- that’s different. So it can be hard to write extended passages in IPA. I know if I make a blog post that has an English sentence or two in IPA, I'll inevitably get some corrections from a linguist or something that says “I think you're probably producing this sound here” and I'm like “Oh yeah you're right” because there's no spellcheck for IPA

Lauren: Yeah and also even if there were a spellcheck, you and I would produce different IPA transcriptions for our own pronunciation of things

Gretchen: Yeah and we're pretty good with understanding people's different pronunciations of things when we're hearing them, because I guess humans have a lot of evolutionary practice at that, but for reading things we have a fairly standardised system. I remember when I was still a young linguist back when John Wells's phonetic blog was active. He's a well-known British linguist who's involved in some of the history of the IPA and he used to keep a blog and he would sometimes write full posts in IPA. And they were really interesting for me to read, to practice but I also found them very difficult because he would be transcribing his own accent. And he was British and so he wouldn't write all these 'r' /ɹ/ after vowels that I would, so I had to figure out where all these /ɹ/ were supposed to be. I'd end up reading his post out loud to myself and hearing the British accent being like “oh yeah this is what he's trying to say”

Lauren: You would be saying it in his accent?

Gretchen: Yeah, I'd be saying it in his accent, because you can write someone's accent, which is the cool thing but also the more challenging thing about reading IPA

Lauren: Linguists also talk about broad IPA and narrow IPA transcription - so like, you can do a kind of rough-and-ready, mostly correct transcription, or actually if you are a phonetician and you're looking really closely at how people actually articulate things, you discover all kinds of things that you need to transcribe to capture the correct and accurate transcription but which people don't hear kind of consciously or would find really weird when you've represented it to them

Gretchen: Yeah or don't notice

Lauren: And there's often like phonological processes, like when you tell people that the vowel that they use in the middle of 'handbag' is actually, for native speakers if they say it quickly, it often becomes 'hambag'

Gretchen: 'hambag', like a ham sandwich

Lauren: Yeah, like a bag-o-ham. If you write it out in IPA, people are like ‘that's incorrect,’ and you're like 'well that's what you said'

Gretchen: There's a fun story about that, so English speakers also often say 'sammich' instead of 'sandwich' because the 'm' the like the nasal sound becomes like the 'w'. Except for Anglo-Italians; so in Canada there's like Italian Torontonians and Italian Montrealers and people who grew up in those communities often have a particular accent. So in that accent they say 'sangwich' instead of sammich' because in Italian the 'w' sound is kind of more velar whereas in English it's more labial and so it like pulls the nasal along with it to be a different sound

Lauren: And when you start transcribing things in really close IPA you can see those distinctions, it's really cool

Gretchen: Yeah and we often just reduce the vowels in words that we’re saying quickly or in the small unimportant function words we often reduce the vowels all to schwa or something like that

Lauren: I still remember in in my undergraduate class learning that English vowels will often change into schwa, this is the /ə/ sound in unstressed syllables and it just made me realize that for a certain set of words, that's why I was really bad at spelling them. Because you sit there and you're like 'is it amu... amuni ammunition?'. I mean, is it ammunitiON or is it ammunitiAN? That’s not a great word to use as an example but it's the first one that came to mind. For certain vowels, because it's unstressed and it's a schwa, it’s possible that any of the vowel letters could be used to spell it. So you just have to memorize what the spelling is because your pronunciation doesn't help you. And that's why I tell people I'm bad at English spelling - it’s not my fault, it's the fault of my stress system and orthography!

Gretchen: The other thing is, is sometimes English orthography gives you useful cues to distinguish between certain words or when a suffix who's added sometimes the stress changes and you have to recover vowels that are kind of there but had turned into schwa. So if you take a word like 'electric' which becomes 'electricity' - in some senses it's weird that it's spelled with a 'c' and not with a 'k' or an 's' because 'c' is completely redundant, it always makes one of those two sounds, but it does reflect that when it's 'electric' with the 'k' sound and then when you add an '-ity' to it, the 'k' sound becomes an 's' sound because that's what happens with 'c', but it doesn't happen with 'k'. Or the vowels also change - with 'electric', 'electricity' you get different sorts of vowels. So it's kind of useful to have some of this stuff there that was historically there and has changed in its sound. But it also creates this extra layer of complication. Or you can get used to speed reading because a word always looks like the same in spelling whereas if you had to speed read a whole bunch of different accents then an unfamiliar accent might be harder to speed read, but then again it's harder to learn spelling in the first place if you have an accent that's less similar to the spelling system

Lauren: But we still love the IPA for all of the occasional detriments that occur

Gretchen: We still love it and it's still useful to have it as an option to write something very specifically even if you don’t want to do that all the tim. I find if I'm meeting somebody and they have a name I haven't heard before, then I write it in IPA and then I can pronounce it correctly when I'm talking back to them. People like it when you pronounce their names correctly.

Lauren: That's handy. The Journal of the International Phonetic Association used to accept articles written in IPA, which blows my mind. So people would write about some feature of phonetics and they would do the whole thing in the IPA. I think it very quickly became apparent that that was more labour both to produce and to consume than there was any benefit in doing that, for many of the reasons that we've already mentioned

Gretchen: Like, 'hi I'm going to write about like long vowels in Sussex' or something and that whole thing would be in IPA

Lauren: Yes, I think academics clearly had more time on their hands 50 years ago.

Gretchen: I mean, to be fair, I have played IPA Scrabble, which is like Scrabble, but you do it in IPA

Lauren: Do you just kind of argue for your own pronunciation or do you have to do it in your own dialect?

Gretchen: The way that I've done it is I combined IPA Scrabble with Descriptivist Scrabble, which is a little bit like those bluffing games, so as long as you can convince other people that it's a word then it's a word

Lauren: Ah, I like that

Gretchen: Yeah, because like, dictionaries are arbitrary authorities anyway, so with Descriptivist Scrabble you can just use whatever means you have at your disposal to convince people that it's a word. Of course choosing an obvious word like dog or something is going to be easier to convince people than saying--

Lauren: blergh?

Gretchen: Yeah, than saying “blerg is a word, honestly it means a colour kind of like grey and blue at the same time” but you can try!

Lauren: There are heaps of cool things people have done with the IPA including someone has made a set of IPA Scrabble

Gretchen: Yeah so I posted on All Things Linguistic a set of frequencies and scores that you can use for IPA Scrabble tiles, because I made it with a friend in undergrad and we had figured this out. We just cut out bits of cardboard to make them, and then some undergrads at Yale came across this post and decided to get their friend who has like a wood cutting machine to cut these out of these gorgeous wood tiles and they sent me some photos which I've also posted. You can see those on the blog, they're amazing, so yeah so someone has made a wooden IPA set that I still have not played but it’s really cool

Lauren: IPA characters also make for popular tattoos because they're quite beautiful, so I've definitely seen a schwa tattoo and I've seen a glottal stop which is a little bit like a question mark - it's our logo!

Gretchen: It is also our logo. Do people get whole words in IPA or like phrases in IPA tattooed on them?

Lauren: Mmm I haven't seen any but if anyone has we will definitely be interested in seeing it

Gretchen: If you know any IPA tattoos please send them to us

Lauren: Well I've seen a couple but not that long

Gretchen: There's also a whole version of Alice in Wonderland that's published in IPA - so this takes us back to the Journal of Phonetics - and she's like talking to the Mad Hatter and so on and it's all in IPA. The weird thing about this particular version is that this publisher decided to also have capital letters

Lauren: Huh, interesting

Gretchen: And of course they had to make capital versions for all of the IPA letters

Lauren: Wow, that's commitment

Gretchen: Because you know if you think about it capitals are redundant, they don't add any extra phonetic information to a sound, so the IPA doesn't use them. And sometimes the IPA uses small cap versions of a letter to indicate a different sound because it's an extra symbol. And so instead this person decided that no, if I'm going to write it as a book I'm going to make capitals and so yeah it's very interesting how they decided them.

Lauren: Yeah, there you go. My IPA nerd craft activity was to cross stitch the consonant chart, I did that quite a few years ago and it's a very useful adornment in the office when you just need to quickly refer to some of the symbols. I also was going to do the vowel chart but the modern vowel chart is very very complicated and messy which is why I went with Jones's much more elegant original cardinal vowels

Gretchen: Ahh so you did a simplified version

Lauren: Yep I'll put links to those in the show notes

Gretchen: And you also did a cookie cutter, right?

Lauren: Oh yeah! I made a schwa cookie cutter for Christmas last year, just what you need, and it's a 3D printable cookie cutter, so you can also download that design and print your own and make your own gingerbread schwa or shortbread schwas.

Gretchen: That's great. There's also an IPA version of the game 2048, which came out when the game 2048 was popular - so that's the one where you like slide the tiles around and you try to combine to make bigger and bigger things. And so you start with a schwa and then you combine them to make an engma, which makes no sense phonetically, and then you combine them to make an esh. Again, this won't teach you anything about phonetics

Lauren: But it goes into more and more elaborate and less frequent forms

Gretchen: Yeah it does get to more and more elaborate stuff, like you end up with like a glottalised bilabial click or something like that

Lauren: Right, it doesn't officially teach you anything about the IPA but it is a good excuse for a distraction

Gretchen: You should not do it if you're a student and you're about to write an exam on the IPA, this is not a good way to procrastinate

Lauren: Official warning!

Gretchen: Instead you should play IPA scrabble

Lauren: Much better way!

Gretchen: Which will teach you some more about the IPA

Lauren: Or read Alice in Wonderland

Gretchen: There's also a fun sketch from the sketch comedy show John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, which is a sketch where some characters encounter some skeletons and the skeletons are pirates but these skeletons cannot tell you that there are pirates because they don't have any lips, so they cannot produce the 'p', sound so they call themselves 'kirates',

Lauren: Awww

Gretchen: And the characters who encounter them are very confused, like 'what are you?' 'we're kirates, I said we're kirates!'. Anyway, I am probably not doing it justice but you should listen to it, we have a link to that as well

Lauren: Excellent

Gretchen: Although they don't make the point which I kept thinking, which was like 'Well, if the don't have any lips, they probably don't have any tongues either, so they probably can't produce any sounds because they're skeletons'

Lauren: They probably don't have any kind of pulmonic air flow ability

Gretchen: Like all they can do is clack

Lauren: Yup, Morse code?

Gretchen: Yeah! So skeletons can communicate with us in Morse code, there we go

Lauren: Yeah. I was going to say sign language just because I always seem to want to mention sign languages because they're always cool

Gretchen: Oh yeah please do

Lauren: it's worth pointing out that like obviously the IPA is for all spoken languages, if you haven't figured that out by this point in the podcast, I'll just make that abundantly clear. It’s for all oral languages. In individual sign languages people talk about like phonemes and morphemes in terms of hand shapes so there are some hand shapes that are possible in some sign languages that don't occur in others. And so you have a similar kind of basic feature sets that you can refer to in in sign languages. But because it uses a more complex modal articulation system and it isn't just limited to the mouth, then it's a bit more complicated cross-sign-linguistically, but they do have their own kind of equivalent of phonemes or phonetics

Gretchen: There's a couple different standardised sign transcription systems, I don't know if any of them have caught on at an international level in the same way to the IPA has, I mean to be fair there there are other phonetic transcription systems that aren't the IPA, it's just the IPA has caught on more than the others. But you can transcribe signs, there's a couple different ways of doing that. There's also the fact that sign languages have alphabets that they use to borrow words in from spoken languages among other functions and within that there are sign equivalents of at least some IPA characters, which I know because I've been to linguistics conferences and seen interpreters signing talks and they will sign a particular IPA symbol when the person who's giving the presentation is talking about that particular IPA symbol

Lauren: There you go

Gretchen: Yeah, I cannot recite any of them for you, but I remember noticing it and thinking 'huh, ok I guess that's what they're doing’

Lauren: Man, awesome!

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow at @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo

Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our producer is Claire and our music by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic! [Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #ipa #International Phonetic Alphabet #phonetics #phonology #lingthusiasm #episode 6 #transcript #transcripts #podcast #accessibility

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eurolinguiste · 7 years

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Welcome to this year’s second post as a part of the Language Reading Challenge.

As a quick recap, here are the books we’ve read so far this year:

January // Book about your native language

The guidelines to participate are available here and you can also join up by commenting on the posts here at Eurolinguiste or by becoming a part of the group on Goodreads.

This month, the challenge was to read a book in your target language (translation of a book from your native language). So I chose to read a book by one of my favorite authors, Patrick Rothfuss. The title of the book in Spanish is El Nombre del Viento, or in English, The Name of the Wind.

El Nombre del Viento by Patrick Rothfuss

I’ve mentioned before that I love reading fantasy/science-fiction. It’s one of my many favorite genres and lately, it’s become one of my best language learning resources for when I hit that intermediate/advanced stage in a language.

Patrick Rothfuss became one of my favorite authors in the genre for a variety of reasons (his craft, his storytelling style, the list goes on…), but more notably, the fact that his protagonist is a language-learning musician. I couldn’t relate to a character any more than I do with Kvothe if I tried.

When I was browsing his shop, The Tinker’s Packs, I first discovered the Croatian edition of his book, then went on to see that they had several translations of his work available. After the difficulty of getting Game of Thrones in Croatian, seeing a book that I love in the language so easily available had me floored and I knew that I had to get it. I then wondered what other languages his books were translated into and started making my wishlist.

Through the Tinker’s Packs, I could get his books in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, French, Russian, Croatian, Italian, Catalan, Czech, Hebrew, Greek, Finnish, Dutch, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, German, Estonian, etc. Granted, I don’t speak all of those languages, so it was easy to narrow the list down, but I still ordered the books in Korean, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Croatian. Plus, my purchase went towards helping out the Worldbuilders charity which was a pretty big plus.

A post shared by Shannon Kennedy (@eurolinguiste) on Oct 25, 2016 at 6:13pm PDT

So back to The Name of the Wind.

The Name of the Wind is the first book in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller series. Kvothe, the main character in the book, is quick-witted and sharp-tongued, a university student and a talented musician. Like much of modern fantasy, The Kingkiller Chronicles, has several invented languages. And in the first book, Rothfuss uses different languages to illustrate the relationships between characters, to further embellish scenes, and to world-build. He talks somewhat about the language learning process, but not as in-depth as he does in the second book (so I’ll save that for later).

Some of my favorite bits about language learning:

– The use of the Temic language between Kvothe and Bast to show their friendship. In an early scene, Kvothe switches into the Temic language to joke with Bast, and the banter is well-employed. The main character also uses language to sometimes establish rapport with other characters – much in the same way we do (‘Hey, look, I speak the same language as you! Let’s be friends!’). – The Chronicler’s shorthand writing system which Kvothe picks up within moments. This was used to show Kvothe’s aptitude for languages and the description of the shorthand system is just vague enough to sound like it could exist.

—¿ Es cierto que aprendiste temán en un solo día?

Kvothe esbozó una sonrisa y agachó la cabeza. —De eso hace mucho tiempo. Casi lo había olvidado. Tardé un día y medio, para ser exactos. Un día y medio sin dormir.

[…]

—¿ Aprendiste todo el idioma entero?

—No, claro que no —contestó Kvothe con cierta irritación—. Solo una parte. Una parte importante, desde luego, pero no creo que se pueda aprender todo de nada, y menos de un idioma.

Rothfuss, Patrick (2013-09-03). El nombre del viento: Cronicas del asesino de reyes: Primero dia (Spanish Edition) (Kindle Locations 1317-1324). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“Did you really learn Tema in a day?”

Kvothe gave a faint smile and looked down at the table. “That’s an old story. I’d almost forgotten. It took a day and a half, actually. A day and a half with no sleep.”

[…]

“Did you learn the whole language?”

“No. Of course not,” Kvothe said rather testily. “Only a portion of it. A large portion to be sure, but I don’t believe you can ever learn all of anything, let alone a language.”

Rothfuss, Patrick (2007-03-27). The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle Book 1) (p. 51). DAW. Kindle Edition.

– The Tolkein-like historical depth to the languages even if the languages themselves aren’t as developed.

—Eso sí lo sé —dijo Ben—. Son siete. De eso puedes estar seguro. De hecho, su mismo nombre lo dice: Chaen significa siete. Chaen-dian significa «siete de ellos». De ahí viene Chandrian.

—No lo sabía —repuso mi padre—. Chaen. ¿En qué idioma? ¿En íllico?

—Parece temán —comentó mi madre.

—Tienes buen oído —dijo Ben—. En realidad es témico. Es unos mil años anterior al temán.

Rothfuss, Patrick (2013-09-03). El nombre del viento: Cronicas del asesino de reyes: Primero dia (Spanish Edition) (Kindle Locations 2034-2040). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“That I can answer,” Ben said. “Seven. You can hold to that with some certainty. It’s part of their name, actually. Chaen means seven. Chaen-dian means ‘seven of them.’ Chandrian.”

“I didn’t know that,” my father said. “Chaen. What language is that? Yllish?”

“Sounds like Tema,” my mother said.

“You’ve got a good ear,” Ben said to her. “It’s Temic, actually. Predates Tema by about a thousand years.”

Rothfuss, Patrick (2007-03-27). The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle Book 1) (p. 82). DAW. Kindle Edition.

– The fact that people who speak different languages in the story don’t have magical total mastery of the primary language of the book.

— …adláteres. —Pronunció despacio la última palabra—. ¿Se dice así? ¿Adláteres?

Asentí, y Wilem puso cara de satisfacción. Entonces frunció el ceño. —Ahora que me acuerdo, hay una frase extraña en tu idioma. La gente siempre me pregunta por el camino de Tinuë. «¿ Cómo está el camino de Tinuë?», dicen. ¿Qué significa?

Sonreí.

—Es un modismo. Significa…

—Ya sé qué es un modismo —me interrumpió Wilem—. ¿Qué significa ese en concreto?

—Ah —dije, un tanto abochornado—. Solo es un saludo. Es como preguntar «¿ Cómo va todo?», o «¿ Qué hay?».

—Eso también es un modismo —protestó Wilem—. Vuestro idioma está plagado de tonterías. Me extraña que os entendáis. «¿ Cómo va todo?» ¿Va adónde? —Sacudió la cabeza.

—A Tinuë, por lo visto —dije sonriendo—. Tuan volgen oketh ama —añadí. Era uno de mis modismos siaru favoritos. Significaba «No para quitarle importancia—.

Rothfuss, Patrick (2013-09-03). El nombre del viento: Cronicas del asesino de reyes: Primero dia (Spanish Edition) (Kindle Locations 6501-6521). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“…coterie.” He pronounced the last word slowly. “Is that the right word? Coterie?”

I nodded, and Wilem looked vaguely self-satisfied. Then he frowned. “That makes me remember something strange in your language. People are always asking me about the road to Tinuë. Endlessly they say, ‘how is the road to Tinuë?’ What does it mean?”

I smiled. “It’s an idiomatic piece of the language. That means—”

“I know what an idiom is,” Wilem interrupted. “What does this one mean?”

“Oh,” I said, slightly embarrassed. “It’s just a greeting. It’s kind of like asking ‘how is your day?’ or ‘how is everything going?’”

“That is also an idiom.” Wilem grumbled. “Your language is thick with nonsense. I wonder how any of you understand each other. How is everything going? Going where?” He shook his head.

“Tinuë, apparently.” I grinned at him. “Tuan volgen oketh ama.” I said, using one of my favorite Siaru idioms. It meant ‘don’t let it make you crazy’ but it translated literally as: ‘don’t put a spoon in your eye over it.’

Rothfuss, Patrick (2007-03-27). The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle Book 1) (pp. 273-274). DAW. Kindle Edition.

– Just the fact that Patrick Rothfuss put that much thought into his characters speaking different languages, learning different languages, and that they’re always learning no matter how well you speak a language. It definitely beats some of the other portrayals of language learning I’ve read where characters just magically pick up a language without any effort or prior experience. It’s refreshing to see something more authentic.

On Reading Translations

You may have noticed that as a part of this challenge you’re asked to read two books in your target language. One is intended to be a translation of a work originally written in your native language and the other a work that is originally written in your target language.

Why?

Because you gain different things by reading both.

In reading translations you benefit from already knowing the story because you’ve likely already read the work in your native language. You also benefit from the language because it’s going to be written differently as a translation that it would be as a work originally conceived in your target language. Plus reading a translation guarantees that the book is available in your native language to use for reference if needed.

In reading works originally published in your target language you get to benefit from the language. As I mentioned above, things are written completely different when they are originally conceived in a language rather than translated into it.

That being said, reading translations gives you the opportunity to work with material you know and love (like Patrick Rothfuss’ work for me). This is so valuable because it increases the odds that you’re going to enjoy the tools you’re using to learn your target language because you aren’t just using boring old textbooks or flashcards to learn a language. You’re actually ‘living’ in the language and using materials that you enjoy.

Title: El Nombre del Viento Author: Patrick Rothfuss Pages: 880 pgs Publisher: Vintage Espanol Publication Date: September 3, 2013

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