David Crystal update

Here is a lovely interview with David Crystal that took place at the Harrogate IATEFL Conference a few days ago. Crystal discusses ‘Wordsmiths and Warriors’ and his latest reference book.

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2014/sessions/2014-04-02/interview-david-crystal

German Language Shift

It may seem odd to mother tongue English speakers, but many nouns in modern languages have genders. English used to have both genders and cases but they were left behind as the language evolved and became more simplified. Not every language evolved in the same way; German and many other modern languages retained both of these linguistic features.  However, it seems that this may be beginning to change.

As Mark Twain said, ‘in German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.’ These thoughts on gender equality and what is ‘politically correct’ has prompted reconsideration to the use of noun-genders in their language and whether it is sexist.

The Federal Ministry Justice now encourages all businesses should use the neuter form in their official paperwork and advert campaigns. If all German speakers were to use neuter forms when addresses mixed-sex groups and object, this could solve their problem.

However, some theorists believe that the trend will flip and the female form will become more prominent. For example, it is much more common now to see the feminine form in job advertisements.

An alternative method is to create new, gender-neutral nouns out of the verbs. For example, instead of studenten, it is increasingly common to use studierende , which translates as ‘those that study’. However, this method of avoiding question is only functional if there is a corresponding verb. Although in this example, studieren is the verb to study, many nouns do not have related verbs. Such as the noun polizist (policeman) could not be manipulated in the same way as there is no verb meaning ‘to police’ that would work. 

However, other linguists, such as Luise Pusch, believe that both of these methods are too laborious and that the only feasible solution is to eradicate all genders in the language.

Many people will raise the question whether a language can be transformed through political changes and the will of the public. Anatol Stefanowitsch, a linguist at Berlin's Free University said "It's hard to transform grammar through legislation, and even if so, such changes often happen over centuries." Also, we are unaware of the percentage of speakers who would abide by these changes, it is likely that many people would not conform or want to change their language.

This was recently posed online, regarding this topic: “yes, to achieve that fluency, I had to work jolly hard. But once the language has been learnt, it is very easy to understand why it has three genders. Were it to lose those genders, and become "gender-neutral", the language would lose so much of its clarity and beauty.”

To conclude, although genders may cause confusion in learners and possibly some tension in Germany, it is still to be seen whether any firm changes will occur. Personally, I believe that we ought to let languages evolve by themselves, without governmental intervention – it is the public that should decide the future of their language.

As sourced from Mark Twain’s Notebook:

A dog is "der Hund"; a woman is "die Frau"; a horse is "das Pferd"; now you put that dog in the genitive case, and is he the same dog he was before? No, sir; he is "des Hundes"; put him in the dative case and what is he? Why, he is "dem Hund." Now you snatch him into the accusative case and how is it with him? Why, he is "den Hunden." But suppose he happens to be twins and you have to pluralize him- what then? Why, they'll swat that twin dog around through the 4 cases until he'll think he's an entire international dog-show all in is own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that- I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way. Well, it's just the same with a cat. They start her in at the nominative singular in good health and fair to look upon, and they sweat her through all the 4 cases and the 16 the's and when she limps out through the accusative plural you wouldn't recognize her for the same being. Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.

What does English sound like to non-speakers?

If you do not know a language, although the words may not mean anything, it is possible to pick up ‘sounds’ or ‘accents’.

Catherine Tate picked up on this when she used an exaggerated form in her ‘interpreter scene’ where she imitated 7 languages by picking up on few words/ sounds that she remembered are stereotypically similar to that language. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNKn5ykP9PU. Although the words do not mean anything, it is funny because the viewers have these same generalisations about the languages.

A similar video was released a few days ago but it has already had almost 3 million views. It is clever because ‘smoukahontas’ (her myspace name) says a few sentences in gobbledygook, but it sounds similar to what foreigners would hear. If I heard some people talking in one of these languages (apart from English/ Spanish) I would think that they were the genuine language, so I think she achieved her goal – it is even possible to know the language she is imitating from the sounds. I noticed in the comments most people say that their languages are wrong but the others sound pretty much like they hear, which is the point. Someone who is proficient in the language is able to pick out subtleties in accent and pronunciation that non-speakers could not detect. This comment caught my eye: ‘WOW, portuguese sounds strange like that? It's so bizarre!’. This comment shows that it can be weird to hear your own language with nonsensical words because instead of thinking about meaning, you only think about the sounds, which is fascinating.

This same idea can be used in songs. The following song is nonsense, but it uses English words so it sounds English (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz04IBZqfFE). This is similar to a linguistic article written by Mark Liberman, entitled ‘yaourter’ (‘chanter en yaourt’). This is a french word which is when someone sings in a language their unfamiliar with, they tend to use nonsense words that sound like the target language. It is apparently quite common for the French to sing in ‘anglais yaurt’. For example, ‘"Like a candle in the wind" becomes something like "Lagaakadeuh izeu wiiii" – 'eu' being the French sound, similar to the 'i' in "bird".)’ This is fascinating because the singer joins 3 words together as they are unfamiliar with the language they cannot hear the ‘gaps’ between words like native speakers can.

The whole article can be found here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1593 

Another way to identify the sounds in languages is by looking at onomatopoeias because although they aim to imitate the noise of an object, they do reflect the language spoken and they are different in each language. There was an interesting interview with Derek Abbott on radio four about the different ways of representing animal noises. For example, they used the example of duck noises. Below is a table of some of the representations for duck noises.

Language	Representation of duck noise
English	Quack, quack
French	Coin, coin
Italian	Qua, qua
Japanese	Ga, ga
Danish	Rap, rap

As you can see from the table, most of the words contain the ‘qua’ sound apart from the Japanese and the Danish.

Looking at other noises is also very interesting. For example, in English we have four different words to represent bird noises and the word we use depends on the size of the bird. For example, a big bird would ‘squark’ where as a smaller one would ‘chirp’. Most languages had two or three equivalents to these but interestingly, very few had a word for ‘squark’. This may be due to having fewer large birds in the country, but I think this is unlikely. 

 Abbott found that the largest variation of names was of sheep. Around 50% began with ‘b’ (i.e baa) but many also began with ‘m’.

We can conclude from the animal noises that although people hear the same noise, they think about it differently depending on the sounds in their own language, so it is really useful to compare. 

Although we will never know what it is like as a non-English speaker to listen to the English language, we can assume that they would hear a string of syllables where the words are not separated correctly and that the sounds would be very similar to those in the videos that we have discussed.

Spanish Films - appreciating cinema

On Friday, I attended at Modern Language Film Day at Birmingham University. We had one talk together and then split off into our languages to do some focused lectures on individual films. I chose to do the Spanish workshops so we discussed Almodovar (Volver) and El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) 

The first talk addressed how cinema became an art form. W. D. Griffiths (1875-1948), an early film producer, has had been called "the father of film technique" and "the man who invented Hollywood”. He was special because recognised modern filming techniques that had radicalised the industry and he was able to use them for effect. The close-up was a very modern and although we often see close-up shots on the television, in this era it was unheard of. Griffiths had many complaints, saying that seeing ‘floating heads’ is impractical because you don’t see such a thing in real life or in the theatre. It is true, when looking at people; it is rare to be close enough to only see their face, therefore it was shocking and uncomfortable for viewers, but also had a large impact. Griffiths also developed scene editing, and began to flip between scenes. This was also controversial, and critics said that the viewers were unable to follow these scene changes. Many films in those times had one continuous set, like in theatres, therefore radical scene changes were unnecessary, but with this development films were able to become more sophisticated and complicated. This shows that, to a certain extent, viewers need to be able to ‘learn’ and become accustomed to watch a film because films are presented very differently to real life. 

Volver (Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar is a very infamous Spanish director, who has been internationally recognised throughout his career.  Almodóvar tends to explore very controversial topics including homosexuality, transgenderism and the role of women in society.

Volver means ‘return’ or ‘come back’ in English, which highlights a prevalent theme of remembering the past. The main song by Carlos Gardel in the 30s contains the lyrics:

Volver

con la frente marchita

las nieves del tiempo

platearon mi sien. […]

Tengo miedo del encuentro

con el pasado que vuelve

a enfrentarse con mi vida.

Tengo miedo de las noches

que pobladas de recuerdos

encadenen mi soñar.

Return

with my forehead all wrinkled,

My temples turned silver

by time’s falling snow

I am frightened of the meeting

With the past that is returning

to confront my life.

I am frightened of the night times

When my dreams are linked and fleeting

And old memories come to stay.

This song shows that although the protagonist, acted by Penelope Cruz, wants the past and her memories to return, she is scared of the past, therefore she has a very complicated relationship with the past. 

The film also addresses the theme of familial secrets, as it has a history of incest and murders. For example, a wife murders her husband for cheating, and there are no legal consequences of her actions. This shows injustice as although she is able to create a justice, she does commit a more serious crime than he does, and she does not pay the price for her misdoings. The role of women here is crucial as they are then able to support each other without men.

Laberinto del Fauno (Guillermo del Toro)

Pan’s Labyrinth was released in 2006, but was set in 1944 which was five years after the Spanish civil war, when Franco was in power. 

This film tells the story of two worlds, the first is Spanish history of the aftermath of the civil war and of the dictatorship, and the other is a fantastical world. In the first scene, we see a distressed young girl and then the camera zooms into one of her eyes, where we are transported into this mythical world. On first appearance, it can appear that this world lies within here; however, an alternative interpretation is that the girl is the point of contact between the worlds.

The girl was accused of making up this world, and her parents banned her from reading story books because they believed that they made her too creative and accepting of magical stories. The lecturer told us that story books used to be for adults, and they used to be much more scary and graphic, only more recently were they toned down and aimed at children. Therefore, this whole second world could be seen as an ‘olden day’ story book.

The father (Videl) is a crucial part of the story because he is a franquist and therefore conveys the idea of the military. One of Franco’s key slogans was that Spain was ‘una, grande y libre’ (united, grand and free). However, this was a lie because in the film we can see that it is divided, due to the hiding ‘maquis’ (republicans), it is weak and repressed by the dictatorship. Another saying of this time was that Franco aimed for ‘eternal Spain’ and for continuity. Vidal was looking for immortality in the film, however, his daughter sacrificed her life to save someone else, and by doing this, she became immortal in the mythical world. 

 

From looking at these two films in particular, we can conclude that watching films is a fantastic way to appreciate culture and to learn a language. But we need to learn how to watch them actively, so that we are able to see the hidden details and controversial themes that turn cinema into an art form.