Parts of Speech

How languages hear each other

More from Prof. Anthony Esolen:

One of the features of my current History of the English Language class at Magdalen College is the attention I pay to how the speakers of one language hear or do not hear the sounds of another language, and "translate" those sounds into something that makes sense to them.

 

I remember the last time I was in Italy (1998, alas), I was playing the mischievous boy-professor, teaching a bunch of kids a little about baseball, by pitching a soccer ball at them against the back side of the village church, while they tried to hit it with a broomstick. When they missed, I called out, "Strike!" -- in the way that we English speakers have, not aspirating the final consonant. The kids heard it as "STRI" -- no K. If you want to imitate a Generic Furrener Speaking English, one thing to do is to aspirate every final consonant. Another thing to do is to reduce the English diphthongs O (O + OO in American; EH + OO in most British accents) and AY (AI + EE) to simple vowels. Try it ...

 

Anyway, when you don't have a certain sound in your language, it can be hard to hear it at all, or not to mishear it. Case in point: Welsh LL, the voiceless L, is a rare sound in the world's languages (though I am told that perhaps it is the "hissing" sound represented in Hebrew by the letter Shin, with the dot on the top left). English speakers could not make out what the Welshmen were saying when they uttered the name LLWYD (GRAY), and turned it sometimes into FLOYD. Americans in the southwest found it hard to hear the lightly pronounced intervocalic D in Spanish JUZGADO, so we ended up with HOOSEGOW... And of course English and French and Spanish and Portuguese speakers almost always misheard native Indian words when those languages had sounds that the European languages did not have as phonemes, such as the glottal stop, or the uvular stop now transcribed as Q, which Europeans will always render as K (C).

 

The English TH, meanwhile, is a somewhat rare phoneme in the world's languages, and is often heard as some other spirant pronounced near the front of the mouth, usually as F or V. This is true even of Cockney English (EARTH > "URF"), but it was also true as the Indo European original veered off into the Italic branch. Latin has F in place of the original TH, and that sometimes plays the devil with us as we try to find cognates: thus Latin FUMUS, SMOKE, is cognate with Greek THYMOS (and English DUST), and Latin FACERE is cognate with Greek TITHENAI and English DO. But the same thing happened in Russian: Greek THEODOROS > Russian FYODOR; Hebrew MARTHA > Russian MARFA, and so on.

That's how I think of the business of articulatory phonetics. Example: Indo European words that begin with W correspond to words in Welsh that begin with GW. Why? What does the G have to do with the W? Oddly enough, the late Latin that Italian came from did not have words beginning with GW + a vowel, until the speakers adopted German words beginning with W, and THEN they hardened the W to GW, or that is how they heard it to begin with. So we have Germanic WASTE, but Italian GUASTARE, or Germanic WALTER, but Italian GUALTIERI, or Germanic WAR, but Italian GUERRA. Similarly, Latin VULTUS, COUNTENANCE, from the same ancient root that gives us Welsh GWELD, to SEE; Indo European WER-, MAN (Latin VIR, Anglo Saxon WER), but Welsh GWR...

 

One thing we can do that might help some students learn a foreign language is to instruct them a little in how sounds are made -- how their own sounds are made, because we take those things for granted. Or this may just be my being a geek about phonetics.....

"Norse’s raw energy simmers under the surface of everything we say:" 139 Norse Words that Invaded English

139 Old Norse Words That Invaded The English Language

BY JOHN-ERIK JORDAN

Sfyria -- Greece's whistled language has lasted 2500 years

"Greece's disappearing whistled language". BBC Travel. BBC.com. 

Also at: "Greece's disappearing whistled language". BBC Travel. BBC.com. (via Wayback archive)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Busy and bury got their pronunciations from one dialect, their spellings from another.

Why do "busy" and "bury" have U's in them?

Silbo Gomero -- the long-distance whistled Spanish of La Gomera in the Canaries

"A whistled register of Spanish used by inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands to communicate over a distance of up to three miles, across the deep ravines and narrow valleys that radiate through the island." -- Wikipedia

Listen (turning on captioning helps).

 

 

 

“Translate” Shakespeare? Yes! Extremely carefully.

Modern English is a big language, sprawling over roughly 500 years of literature, and many different structures, dialects and styles, including some that brought back even older forms, the gothic thees and thous, the license poetic to rearrange where go the nouns, verbs and adjectives, the words resurrected or repurposed because they sounded more medieval and Germanic; it welcomes and absorbs words from every language, every trade, every sport;  it very well contradicts itself; it contains multitudes.  

And we need to keep that big language alive and predominant, to have people of average education able to converse with Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Milton, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Jefferson, Gibbon, Austen, Byron, the artificially archaic language of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, the Hebraic rhythms and devices of Whitman’s free verse. It isn’t hard; it comes naturally so long as students still read them and worship still includes the classic wording. But if that stops, we’ll lose access to those incomparable classics: they’ll first start to sound difficult, and then like a foreign language.

But the new effort to “translate” 39 Shakespeare plays is being done for all the right reasons; preserving the old whenever it has value, but finding replacements when it’s so decrepit that it serves no purpose but confuses and deadens the lines. And finding a way for the replacements to do the most important things that Shakespeare’s language did originally. In the hope that an audience that isn’t straining so hard to follow the language will react more immediately and fully to the words, the acting and the action, more like the original audiences did. So far, it seems to be succeeding better than anyone hoped. As productions begin, sometimes the audiences and actors haven't been able to tell that anything is new, or have mistaken Shakespeare's words for contemporary updates.

We need to keep using historic words, historic literature, historic places and historic items as long as possible; but they best connect us to history when we actually use them, and interact with them, instead of putting them in glass cases and treating them  as curiosities, trivia, and markers of leisured elitism.

How Play on! came to be: The backstory of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s translation project

 

Celts gave us our odd "helping verb" sentence structure, & other fun insights

This isn't your typical "History of English" article. It's by John McWhorter, who has a great audio course on linguistics.

English is not normal:

No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language