How Language Works

My summer reading included David Crystal’s book How Language Works. It’s an easy-to-understand explanation of many aspects of language, including how we physically are able to speak and to understand language, how and when children learn languages, different writing systems, sign language, what dialects are, pidgins and creoles, and teaching languages. In short, this book is a good introduction to what language is and does.

There’s even a brief section on translation and interpretation. This section includes the following paragraph that defines what translators do and are:

“Translators aim to produce a text that is as faithful to the original as circumstances require or permit, and yet that reads as if it were written originally in the target language. They aim to be ‘invisible people’ – transferring content without drawing attention to the considerable artistic and technical skills involved in the process. The complexity of the task is apparent, but its importance is often underestimated, and its practitioners’ social status and legal rights undervalued. Some countries view translation as a menial, clerical task, and pay their translators accordingly. Others (such as the Japanese) regard it as a major intellectual discipline in its own right. The question of status is currently much debated.”

Saving Endangered Languages

About two years ago, I read Dr. K. David Harrison's book When Languages Die and subsequently posted about it here. Dr. Harrison then suggested that I read a book called Saving Languages, by Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley.

It is very interesting to read and think about these two books. Dr. Harrison writes about what happens when we lose a language and Dr. Grenoble and Dr. Whaley write about how we can prevent that from happening, and thus they should be read in that order.

Saving Languages talks about working in a "community-driven, bottom-up" way, which means that it is the people themselves who should decide whether to save their tongue and how, and not the government or other authorities. Dr. Grenoble and Dr. Whaley also give suggestions for how languages can be revitalized.

In their book, they discuss issues of literacy (which is a very important topic, in part since many people are not literate and/or written language is not always prioritized or emphasized, how language policies in countries can affect revitalization (for example, Syria apparently bans the use of Kurdish), attitudes towards language, and the influence of religious groups (Bible translations can be the first or only texts in certain languages or missionaries can be the first foreigners to learn a certain tongue). They also give information on different kinds of revitalization systems, such as total-immersion programs (which they say are the best but are not always possible), partial-immersion or bilingual programs (which they say tend to develop into transitional programs, and they do not advocate this idea), teaching the language as a second language, community-based programs, master-apprentice programs (so elders work with language learners, and this takes place solely in the language to be taught and involves real-life situations and activities, and focuses on oral skills), language-reclamation models (reviving languages that are not longer spoken, and also documenting (though this is not really resuscitating a language, merely recording it, though it helps in reviving a tongue).

In addition, they discuss creating or standardizing a written form of a language, issues of orthography, the usage of different scripts (some groups choose a certain script or other aspects of orthography deliberately to avoid having one like that of the majority language, such as how the Inuit based their alphabet on a Cree one rather than the Roman one, as a way of showing identity, or how Croatian uses the Roman alphabet while Serbian uses Cyrillic). And they give advice for creating a language program, looking into financial, language, and human resources, assessing the vitality of a language, and the needs of the community as well as their attitudes; as well as for avoiding potential problem situations, both internal and external to the community. And Dr. Grenoble and Dr. Whaley use case studies to explore different ways of saving and revitalizing languages.

Dr. Harrison's When Languages Die and Dr. Grenoble and Dr. Whaley's Saving Languages are fascinating books, and I recommend them both.

Biting the Wax Tadpole by Elizabeth Little

When I was on a trip to Vienna, I stayed with a friend (a fellow translator) who had a wonderful book collection. I didn’t have time to read them all, unfortunately (I’m hoping she invites me back so I can!), but I did read Biting the Wax Tadpole by Elizabeth Little. The title is entertaining, as is the whole book. Basically, it’s a light romp around the world’s languages in 200 pages.

Ms. Little’s book is about grammar and how it works in different languages. She claims (or admits, it’s hard to tell which!) that she isn’t very good at learning languages, but she does enjoy thinking about how grammar works around the world. Among other things, she writes about the 18 cases in Hungarian and the 17 in Basque and she discusses deponent verbs (i.e. verbs that look passive but are actually active). She gives examples from Swedish, Sami, Swahili, Khmer, Tibetan, Hausa, Tlingit, German, Ngiti, and many other languages in order to show what is similar or different among the many languages and their grammar.

My one complaint is the lack of a bibliography, but nevertheless, it was enjoyable for me to read one chilly night in Vienna.

Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries

I’m happy to announce that Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries has now been published. It is a volume of essays based on the Nordic Translation Conference that was held last year and it is the first collection solely on Nordic translation.

Article Round-Up

Time for another article round-up!

The first article is on the growing strength of Latin courses. As someone who studied Latin (and even attended the Latin School of Chicago!), I was happy to read that.

Next is a piece on text analysis and the use of words.

The article on preserving the Arapaho language also has an accompanying video.

Speaking of videos, I also liked this brief one featuring physicist Murray Gell-Mann talking about languages.

This review made me want to read of Roy Blount Jr.’s new book The Alphabet Juice.

Penultimately, here is an article on on urban fiction, or “street lit”.

And finally, the piece on translation and the U.S. This article includes quotes such as the following:

It is a commonly held assumption that Americans don’t like to read authors who write in languages they don’t understand. That belief persists here in Frankfurt, where publishers from 100 countries show off a smorgasbord of their best — or at least best-selling — books.
By and large, the American publishers spend most of the week in Hall 8, the enormous exhibit space where English-language publishers hold court.
…
“When you look at how much is paid for a mediocre midlist author” in the United States, he said, “and how much you have to pay to get a world-class author who has been translated into 18 languages, it is ridiculous that more people don’t invest in buying great literature.” Mr. Godine said he had purchased the rights to a foreign book for as little as $2,000.

A Lovely Tree

Not long ago, I read Ett Träd Med Vida Grenar: De Indoeuropeiska Språkens Historia by Ola Wikander. In case you don’t know Swedish, the title is A Tree with Wide Branches: A History of the Indoeuropean Languages. And in fact, the only problem with this book is that as of now, it’s only in Swedish. I hope it will be available to readers in other countries soon, as it is quite interesting.

Mr. Wikander is a young Ph.D. student and translator in Sweden who is already the author of several books on “dead” languages, as well as co-author, with his father, of a novel. In this book, he discusses the science of reconstructing what is called proto-Indoeuropean (PIE), or the language from which stem all the Indoeuropean languages, including Swedish, English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Romanian, and many more. The purpose of this field, as he thoroughly explains in his book, is not just to reconstruct this language for the fun of it (although he includes some examples of writing people have attempted to do in PIE in modern times), but is in part to understand the cultures and languages that have helped shape Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world.

Mr. Wikander is a talented writer who manages at times to make this science seem like a mystery, in that it is exciting to learn about how the reconstruction work is done and how Indoeuropeanists can use the reconstructed vocabulary, and other evidence, such as archaeology, come to conclusions about where those who spoke PIE lived (probably the south Russian steppes) and what their culture was like.

If you can read Swedish, I recommend this book and also Mr. Wikander’s blog. If not, you’ll have to wait for a translation!

Alfie the Apostrophe

A friend of mine who works at a library and knows about my love for punctuation, especially apostrophes, and my interest in children’s literature recently bought me a children’s book as a present. Called Alfie the Apostrophe, it is by Moira Rose Donohue and illustrated by JoAnn Adinolfi.

Little Alfie is in a talent show and he wonders how he can possibly compete with the exclamation points and question marks and commas (some wonder if he isn’t just an upside-down comma himself!) and the rest of the gang. You’ll have to read the book to see if Alfie the Apostrophe’s magic show wins him first place!

A fun book for any children and/or punctuation-fans you may know!

Much Ado About Language Books

I like to read books about language. Often the books are rather serious (not so for “Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson, but in general). So I enjoyed getting the chance to read something much lighter.

Richard Watson Todd’s “Much Ado About English” is a short, easy-to-read, and entertaining book about the English language. Sure, it is educational, too (for example, many chapters have little exercises, although they are mostly fun), but basically you just find yourself giggling and shaking your head at how illogical English can be.

Every brief chapter (usually around three pages) is about a different topic, such as slang, wordplay, British versus American English, pronunciation, making plurals, and much more. You learn a lot of random but interesting facts, such as that the word “penguin” comes from the Welsh “pen gwyn”, which means “white head”, and that “bizarre” comes from the Basque word “bizar”, which means “beard.” Then you are invited to try out your new knowledge by making guesses about other words or phrases.

The section on “self-contradictory sentences” is quite amusing, when you consider sentences such as “This vacuum cleaner really sucks” (is that good or bad?) and “Her intelligence is legendary” (does that mean the legend is true or false?). You’ll be wondering how people actually communicate in English.

I’m always looking for suggestions for books about language, so email me if you have any ideas. During the summer, I’d especially like to read some entertaining books, like Todd’s was.

More on Yiddish: From Translator Eric Dickens

The last post was on Yiddish. In response to that, translator Eric Dickens very kindly sent me an email with a lot of helpful websites. He graciously agreed to let me share it with you. Here it is:

YIDDISH WORLDWIDE - anno 2008

Yiddish, once the language of European Jews, especially the poorer, less assimilated ones in the small towns or shtetls in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, may never again become the international lingua franca it once was, but it has lately been undergoing something of a revival. There are currently various courses in European cities ranging from Vilnius in Lithuania, to Paris and Oxford, as well as in the United States. See, for instance: http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/yiddish/ and http://www.judaicvilnius.com/en . The latter website has the programme for the Vilnius Summer Course in Yiddish 2008.

The language is basically old German, written in the Hebrew alphabet (!) and with quite a few words borrowed from Hebrew (see below). If you see it in transliterated form, the Germanic nature of the language is much in evidence, something kept hidden when written in Hebrew characters. There is a standard system of transliteration into the English language called the YIVO system.

Those interested in the language and Yiddish culture as a whole may be interested in a magazine, written mostly in English, called Pakn-Treger: http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/+10024 . This publication is aimed at the enthusiast with little knowledge of the language itself, but a general interest in the history of Yiddish and, for instance, the efforts made nowadays to rescue old books written in Yiddish from a number of cities in Uruguay and Argentina, where the communities of Yiddish speakers are dwindling. Pakn-Treger is published by the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, USA.

Students of Germanic languages who are more adventurous may even want to get a basic knowledge of Yiddish. This is best done from the primer College Yiddish which was written by Uriel Weinreich in 1949 and reprinted several times until at least 1976. It is a good, old-fashioned text book with a reading passage, vocabulary and grammar. He also produced a very serviceable two-way dictionary called Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary, in 1968. Both books can still be found in second-hand bookshops and on Amazon.

A knowledge of German helps considerably when you learn Yiddish. But as implied above, the alphabet needs a bit of learning, not least on account of the Hebrew loanwords. These are tricky for the beginner, because while the ordinary part of Yiddish has vowels and consonants, like most European languages, the Hebrew loanwords have no written vowels and, just to make things doubly tricky, are not even pronounced the same as in Biblical or Modern Hebrew, but in a Yiddish way. So in addition to your Weinreich, you need the book by Yitskhok Niborski entitled Verterbukh fun Loshn-Koydesh-shtamiker verter in Yidish which means "Dictionary of the Words With Hebrew Roots in Yiddish" (1999). And one more dictionary is very useful, if you happen to know French. This is Niborski's large Dictionnaire Yiddish-Français http://www.yiddishstore.com/yitnibdicyid.html that appeared as recently as 2002.

If you do make a serious attempt to learn Yiddish, a very helpful periodical, published in Paris by the Medem centre that publishes the Niborski dictionaries, is Yidisher Tam-Tam which is for beginner or lower intermediate level, and gives the vocabulary to a variety of reading passages in English and French translation: http://www.yiddishweb.com/tamtam.htm . You can print it off the internet or subscribe.

One of the reasons for learning Yiddish can be to read the literature written in the language. But translations do, of course, exist of most of the leading authors, such as Nobel Prizewinner Isaac (or: Yitskhok) Bashevis Singer, his brother Israel Joshua Singer and their sister Esther Kreitman. One fine poet is Abraham Sutzkever and a Modernist prose writer now being revived is Dovid (or: David) Bergelson whose books are translated by Joseph Sherman and others. Students of Yiddish can also obtain an anthology of shortish Yiddish literary passages called Mit groys fargenign, compiled by Heather Valencia of the University of Stirling in Scotland, with a couple of CDs that give you an idea of the pronunciation.

Finally, a bookshop specialising in Yiddish: http://www.yiddishstore.com/index.html .

Yiddish and Translation

I have posted on this blog about Yiddish before. Over this past weekend, I had the opportunity to read Astrid Starck-Adler’s book Yiddish: Continuity and Change, which was published in 2007 as part of the Endangered Languages and Cultures series by the Centre for Multiethnic Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. It is a short book, and there are a surprising number of typos, but there was a lot I found interesting in it, not least because there was some discussion of translation.

The book is composed of three sections. The first is on Yiddish today and possibilities for revitalizing it. The second is on gender and Jewish literature (since Hebrew was traditionally the religious language, the one for men, while Yiddish was for women, for “men who are like women”, and for the home). The last part is on contemporary Yiddish literature.

Starck-Adler mentions a variety of interesting topics in the book, such as transmitting the language to younger generations, “familial” and “convivial” ways of helping the language live on, films in or about Yiddish (such as The Last Holocaust Survivors in Eastern Europe, Castings, and Voyages), using the internet for learning Yiddish, Yiddish writers, and works such as Mayse-bukh, which were used in part to teach women about the bible (and of course this raises issues of translation and adaptation from Hebrew to English). She also discusses how the “most interesting thing about Yiddish is that it plays a twofold role: as a Jewish language, Yiddish is a factor of identity; as a language based on German it is a vector of alterity.” (26)

As for translation, Starck-Adler believes that “[s]ince the circle of Yiddish readers is so small, translation of little-known writers into other languages outside the small Yiddish world is very important for allowing their works to be more widely known” (59-60) and that “[t]ranslation from or into Yiddish or making available in a bilingual edition some important texts is one of the essential means of promoting the survival and renewal of an endangered language like Yiddish.” (48) She seems to be a strong advocate for bilingual editions, since they allow the reader to “compare the two versions of the same text, to ‘verify’ the accuracy of the core text, and, in the absence of good reliable dictionaries, we can then have access to different registers of language, which are more elaborate and more complete.” (49) Also, seeing the original language may encourage curious readers of the translated text to study it.

Finally, here is a somewhat odd comment on translation: “The importance of translations has been pointed out by Dovid Katz who thinks that a better translation than the original would help to gain interest from a bigger readership!” (19)

Usually, books on language don’t discuss translation, so it was refreshing to read a scholar’s thoughts on how translation is necessary for keeping Yiddish literature and language alive.

Impoverishment: When Languages Die

During my month-long summer “break” – in which I traveled to the U.S., visited friends and relatives, worked on my research, did translation and editing – I read around 30 books, and When Languages Die by K. David Harrison was definitely one of my favorites. Before the summer, I said I wanted to get a hold of this book, and I am so glad I did.

Dr. Harrison is a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and researches some of the world’s endangered languages, and he also co-founded the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. In his fascinating book, which discusses, among other languages, Yakut, !Xoon, O’oodham, Vilela, Nggela, and Itza Mayan, Dr. Harrison writes that in 2001, 6912 languages were spoken in the world, but just one hundred years later, half will likely be gone. “The top 10 biggest languages have hundreds of millions of speakers each, accounting for just over 50 percent of humans...The smallest half of the world’s languages–consisting of more than 3,500 languages–are spoken by a mere 0.2 percent of the global population.” So why should we care about that?

When a language dies, a unique knowledge system is lost, as is a distinct culture, and also grammar patterns, which show how people think and process information. All of this is not only interesting in and of itself, but it is also useful and important information that helps us understand the world and what it means to be a human in it. Dr. Harrison explicates, “We have seen at least three compelling reasons to safeguard and document vanishing languages. First is the fact that our human knowledge base is rapidly eroding. Most of what humans have learned over the millennia about how to thrive on this planet is encapsulated in threatened languages. If we let them slip away, we may compromise our very ability to survive as our ballooning human population strains earth’s ecosystems. A second reason is our rich patrimony of human cultural heritage, including myth and belief systems, wisdom, poetry, songs, and epic tales. Allowing our own history to be erased, we condemn ourselves to a cultural amnesia that may undermine our sense of purpose and our ability to live in peace with diverse peoples. A third reason is the great puzzle of human cognition, and our ability to understand how the mind organizes and processes information. Much of the human mind is still a black box. We cannot discern its inner workings–and we can often only know its thoughts by what comes out of it in the form of speech. Obscure languages hold at least some of the keys to unlocking the mind. For all these reasons, and with the possibility of dire consequences for failures, documenting endangered languages while they may still be heard, and revitalizing tongues that still may be viable, must be viewed as the greatest conservation challenge of our generation.”

Dr. Harrison goes on to give examples of what is unique and interesting about various languages, and what knowledge can be lost when the languages die. For example, some reindeer-herding peoples, such as the Saami in Scandinavia or the Tofa in Siberia, have detailed taxonomies for reindeer. “Döngür” is a Tofa word “male domesticated reindeer in its third year and first mating season, but not ready for mating”, but now that most Tofa people speak Russian, they have to use a long phrase, like the English translation above, to describe what previously only took one word, and that must both be more time-consuming as well as eventually lead to diminished reindeer knowledge.

A similar taxonomy-based example is from the Ifugao language, which “has an intricate vocabulary of rice technology. Their language has 27 different names for pottery vessels for storing rice wine, 30 names for types of woven baskets used to carry foods, and 130 phrases describing in detail payments made for the use of rice pond fields. It has many expressive words like “tiwātiw,” a verb meaning to frighten animals, birds or chickens away from drying rice.” Clearly, each language offers information or ideas that is helpful to its culture.

Another aspect of knowledge loss that Dr. Harrison discusses is different kinds of time-keeping. He says that more languages have no notion of the concept of a week. Instead of the system we take for granted, other cultures have ecological, lunar, or arbitrary time systems, or combinations thereof. “Natural calendar lore served as a bond firmly connecting humankind to the natural world; this bond weakens when languages die.”

Some people think that it doesn’t matter if we lose such knowledge as a word for a three-year-old male reindeer or the Tuvan word “chyzyr-chyzyr,” which Dr. Harrison defines as “the sound of the tree tops moving, swaying, cracking, or snapping as a result of bears marking trees by clawing at them and by scratching their backs up against them.” Some people say that since these kinds of words are so situational, so environment-based, cultures must not need them anymore if they are no longer using them. In other words, people find a way of saying what they want and need to say, even if they have to use a long way around, like the Tofa people now speaking Russian. But even if you believe that, it isn’t just specific words like this that disappear; cultures, ideas, information, and “unique philosophical viewpoint[s]” vanish, too.

Dr. Harrison writes, “As languages fall out of use into forgetfulness, entire genres of oral tradition–stories, songs, and epics–rapidly approach extinction. Only a small fraction have ever been recorded or set down in books. And the tales captured in books, when no longer spoken, will exist as mere shadows of a once vibrant tradition. We stand to lose volumes: entire worldviews, religious beliefs, creation myths, observations about life, technologies for how to domesticate animals and cultivate plans, histories of migration and settlement, and collective wisdom. And we will lose insight into how humans fine-tune memory to preserve and transmit epic tales.”

And studying small, endangered languages and not just the big ones teaches us about how humans think. “Imagine a zoologist describing mammals by looking only at the top hundred most common ones. It would be easier to examine dogs and cats and cows and rabbits, all of which are composed of the same building blocks as other mammals. But if we did, we would never know that a mammal could swim (whales), fly (bats), lay eggs (echidna), use tools (sea otters and orangutans), or have an inflatable balloon growing from its head (male hooded seal). Ignorance of unusual mammals would impoverish our notion of what mammals could be. It is precisely the weird and wonderful exceptions that afford us a full view of the possibilities.”

Dr. Harrison frequently uses the word “impoverish” in his book, and it perfectly captures what happens when languages die.

Why We Should Care About Languages

Not long ago, I read a review of a new book on the loss of languages, entitled When Languages Die by K. David Harrison from Swarthmore College.

I admit that the first line of the review strikes me as ignorant: “Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century.” To me, it just seems obvious that there are many reasons why people should care, not least because, as I have said so many times before on this blog, languages all offer a different perspective on the world and that it is only beneficial to open ourselves up to more ideas and views.

A quote from the review gives evidence of the profusion of variety in human language: “local calendars, such as the lunar calendar of the Natchez, provide evidence of the diffusion of non-native plants like peaches and watermelons to the lower Mississippi, which became the names for months (along with “mulberries,” “great corn,” and “chestnuts”) by the 1750s. No one speaks Natchez anymore. Some languages with words for categories called “classifiers” demonstrate how varied the ways of parsing the world: in Nivikh, a Siberian language with 300 speakers, has 27 classifiers; in Squamish, a Pacific Northwest language with 15 speakers, you use a different number depending on if you’re counting humans or animals.”

I hope to get my hands on this book during my upcoming summer holidays!

Some Recent Reading on Languages

Here are a few interesting, recent articles about language, three from the New York Times and one from the Financial Times.

The first is a book review of two books about English. Readers of this blog already know I am interested in books about language, and I plan to check out When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda and The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal, who has previously been mentioned heree.

The second piece is about the Oxford English Dictionary, and it touches on how the dictionary was created, how words make it in there, word formation, the sources of the citations in the OED, and other topics. As one person says in the article, “It’s not just about the language. It’s about tracking history through the language.”

The other two articles are about the endangered Manchu language of China. The first of these articles details the history of the Manchu people, the dynasty, and the language. Only the oldest generation in a particular region of China seems to use Manchu; an older lady, Meng Shujing, interviewed in the article thinks that only “five or six of her neighbors” can speak it fluently. She is quoted as saying, “I don’t have much time…I don’t even know if I have tomorrow, but I will use the time to teach my grandchildren. It is our language; how can we let it die? We are Manchu people.” The article states that the “disappearance of Manchu will be part of a mass extinction of languages that some experts forecast will lead to the loss of half of the world’s 6,800 languages by the end of the century.” This is a really unfortunate fact. What happens when those languages are gone?

Well, much of the history and culture that were embedded in and preserved in each lost tongue is sadly lost, or become the province of a few experts and/or people have to rely on translators to make the information available to the general public. The second of these two articles on Manchu mentions just this issue. There are apparently many documents about the Qing Dynasty in Manchu, but since so few people know the language, there are only 40 translators working on translating them (presumably to Chinese, although that is not specified): “Scholars estimate that about 20 percent of the 10 million files in the massive Qing archive in Beijing are written in Manchu.” Imagine how long it will take those 40 translators to translate all those files!

Enjoy these varied articles on language!

Books on Language – Yiddish

Continuing with books on language, this post will be on Yiddish.

I read two books on the subject not long ago, and they complemented each other well. The books were Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish by Dovid Katz and Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky.

Mr. Katz’s thick, instructive book gives the history of Yiddish, explaining where it came from, how it was used in different situations than Hebrew and Aramaic (that is, for Ashkenazi Jews; other Jews did not traditionally speak Yiddish), and how it was viewed. He also looks at Yiddish literature, who speaks Yiddish today, and other related topics.

Mr. Lansky’s book is about his personal journey with Yiddish and how he helped save Yiddish books. He was a doctoral student when he realized that as elderly, Yiddish-speaking Jews died, their children, who generally did not know Yiddish, threw out their Yiddish books. Mr. Lansky quit his program in order to save the Yiddish books, travelling around the world to do so, eventually starting the National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts as a library, center, resource place, and shop for Yiddish books. He has helped save over 1.5 million Yiddish books and his adventures are both fun and sad.

It was interesting to read the two books together, because first I learned about what the mamaloshen meant – and means – to Ashkenazi Jews, and then I read about Yiddish in modern times and what has happened to Yiddish books.

Let me know about other good books about languages!

Books on Language – Latin

To continue with the theme of books on language, I’d like to look at Latin.

I studied Latin in middle school and high school and I realized immediately that it was a really useful language for any speaker or learner of English or Romance languages (and, of course, it has influenced other tongues as well). Even though I unfortunately can’t read it today, what I remember still helps me, both as a teacher of English and also as a user of the language myself.

But though I learned the language (including all those declensions), I didn’t get a good sense of the culture surrounding it. Tore Janson’s book A Natural History of Latin fills that need. Mr. Janson explains the origins of Latin, how and why it became important, and why it is relevant today. I wish his book had been available when I was in school, because it would have helped me understand Latin in the context of its cultural and historical background.

Books on Language – English

As a certified “language nerd,” I really enjoy reading books about the history and culture behind languages. As a translator, you have to understand the grammar and vocabulary of a language, of course, and having a sense of the cultural is also important, but learning about the history of a language is not only helpful, but also fascinating. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that many people who teach languages too often ignore the cultural and historical aspects, which I happen to think would entice students and get them more excited about their language learning. Language is not just a way to communicate (unless you’re speaking Globish!), but also offers a whole culture and a worldview.

In this post and the following two, I’ll write about some of the interesting books on language that I’ve read.

My all-time favorite book on English is Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue. Mr. Bryson is an excellent, entertaining author who could probably make any subject interesting. His book enthusiastically describes the history of English, how it has become a global language, and so forth, but it also includes chapters on word play and swearing, and has examples of bad English. I admit that I laugh aloud as I read (and re-read) Mother Tongue, and I’ve shared the book with students, who found it both amusing and interesting.

The Stories of English by David Crystal has a different perspective than most language books in that it doesn’t just discuss the history of standard English but instead includes many varieties of English. Hence, the title is not The Story of English but rather The Stories. Many people view the standard varieties of languages as the only correct ones (in part because that is what is taught in school), but the fact is that the majority of the speakers of any language do not speak the standard. This book looks at the development of English, in all its varieties, over time. The prolific Mr. Crystal, by the way, has recently started a blog.

What about you? Do you have favorite books on languages?

An Inclusive English Tongue

I noticed this recent BBC article on Hinglish, which hints at what each tongue has to offer other languages and cultures. Since each language has a different way of understanding life, it has unique words and phrases that explore the world from that point of view. English has long been a promiscuous language that has blended with and taken from other tongues. Now, besides Hinglish vocabulary, we should also eagerly accept new words from Swenglish, Spanglish, Chinglish, and so forth.

One of my personal efforts towards the goal of having a more inclusive English language (and by inclusive I mean that there are more words from more languages to describe more concepts), has been to try to see the Swedish word “sambo” transferred to English. “Sambo” comes from “tillsammans” (together) and “bo” (live) and it means partners who live together without being married, as is much more common in Scandinavia than in other parts of the world. Another possible Swedish candidate is “lagom,” which means, more or less, “just right.”

What other words should the English language absorb? Maybe Christopher Moore’s book In Other Words: A Language Lover's Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World has some ideas for us.

Websites for Learning Languages

The past two posts gave general advice for learning languages. Here are some websites that could help you do that; these are just a few of the many useful websites out there, and I have focused primarily on English and the Scandinavian languages here. Don’t forget to look at the references linked to on this blog as well. Also, of course, there are lots of great self-study books for languages available. For example, my favorite book for learning English grammar is “English Grammar in Use” by Raymond Murphy; I’ve used it with dozens of students and I recommend it to those of you want to improve your grammar skills.

Here are some sites for languages in general:

The Foreign Service Institute offers free self-study courses for French, Vietnamese, Turkish, and other languages. I tried some of the Chinese course and am eager to do more.

Land of Links has lots of links about various languages

Here are some reference sites for Scandinavian languages:

Scandinavian Dictionary

New Cross-Nordic Dictionary

Some sites for Swedish:

Swedish Lessons

Swedish-English Dictionary

Danish:

Danish Grammar and Vocabulary

Norwegian:

Norwegian Learning Links

Icelandic:

Icelandic Grammar

All sorts of links about Iceland and Icelandic

Finnish:

English-Finnish Vocabulary Quizzes

Finnish-English Dictionary

Yiddish:

Der Bay

Shtetl

English:

Common Errors in English

English Page

Tower of English

English Etymology

Feel free to let me know about other interesting and useful language links!