East Meets West 283 – Lingua Changa

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We talk about beards, dragon names, grammar nazis, and the evolution of language.

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/EastMeetsWest283-LinguaChanga/eastmeetswest283.mp3

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http://twitter.com/derrickc82 Derrick Chen

Guys! Guys! ?????that in the future, the ?? we’ll all be speaking ? that of what we see in the universe of Firefly!

Perhaps I’m biased, but I really find Chinese a fascinating language to read up on, not just to learn as a language, but to understand the political and sociological impact it’s had for thousands of years. This concept of ??, the language of the Han (people), is unbelievably charged as it has unified a nation and a people group around the world.

The first emperor of China standardized the language to unify the then warring states. Its influence is still seen and heard today in Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese as entire vocabularies and scripts were imported from China over a millennium ago. Even today, the Chinese government is careful in asserting that its various regions speak different “dialects,” even though a Cantonese speaker will not be able to understand a person speaking in Sichuan or Wu dialect. At its best, it’s like a Parisian trying to understand Sicilian. Yet, we all share the same written language… sort of… With the split between the PRC supported simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan), it can get tricky at times as one side visits the other (to what Tony was saying). Crazier yet was how my old Chinese school had to call in the police when parents got into physical altercations with one another, fighting over whether the school should be teaching traditional or simplified Chinese as well as pinyin (using the Latin alphabet when typing) over zhuyin (the Taiwanese bopomofo “alphabet” input method).

For an extra kick for anyone who does speak Chinese, it’s worth looking up Old Chinese (????) or Middle Chinese (????) on YouTube. Just when you thought learning Shakespeare was hard…
George Corley

I wish so much that I could have been *on* this episode, or at least in the chatroom. Below is a bunch of nerding out and probably-overkill factchecking
- Klingon is weird not because the sounds themselves are hard or unusual, per se, but because they are in a weird arrangement. If you look at the IPA consonant chart for Klingon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Phonology ) against virtually any natural language, you may see that the sounds Klingon has don’t fall into the typical pattern. I could go further but that goes into some arcane phonological theory.
- Many English grammar “rules” are not anything like what English actually does. Rules like “avoid final prepositions”, “don’t split infinitives”, and “don’t start a sentence with a conjunction” simply don’t make sense given what we actually know of English. For example, the injunction against splitting infinitives is inspired by Latin. Of course, in Latin, the infinitive is an inflected form of the verb, so of course you can’t split ire — it’s one word. But English introduces an infinitive phrase with to + the bare form, and virtually everyone inserts adverbs between to and the verb. In fact there are cases where it sounds ridiculous to avoid doing that, just as the injunction against final prepositions leads to hilariously awkward phrases like “up with which I will not put”.
- Brian is right on with Ebonics — in my opinion it is a completely different language — sepecifically a creole of English and various African languages brought over with the slaves. There may be a dialect continuum, but other than that.
- “Ask” as “aks” — actually dates back to Old English, which had two forms “ascian” and “acsian” with roughly equal distribution.
- I’m not sure if the Globish phenomenon will really go anywhere. Surely it will stay there for a while, but when English eventually wanes as a lingua franca, I’m sure it will go away, though there will be a few English varieties remaining that are heavily influenced by local languages, such as Indian English.
- Singlish (aka Singaporean English) is a creole of English, Malay, and various Chinese languages.
- The success of English as a lingua franca is much more about the economic success of English-speaking cultures than about anything else. As much as the Académie Francaise wants to control French, I suspect that they are ignored more often than not in everyday conversation.
- I have no freaking idea what Roger is talking about with “simplification” in Mandarin. Taiwan and mainland Mandarin have drifted apart naturally, but I think the only deliberate simplification that occurred was in the characters.- Lingua Franca was an Italian-based trade language used throughout the Mediterranean during the Rennaisance. Its name later became synonymous with the phenomenon of a widespread language used for communication over an area where many other languages are spoken.
- Eileen speaks Tagalog? That’s freaking awesome!
- Mandarin has the most native speakers by most estimates, but if you count second-language speakers, English wins handily.
- The kinds of abbreviations that we see in textspeak and Internet speak are similar to what has occurred in the era of the telegraph and in every situation where writing is constrained — including Roman milestones. Those things usually don’t make it into common use outside of those specific context, and I don’t see the textspeak conventions being any different.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
http://twitter.com/derrickc82 Derrick Chen

Even Mandarin varies from city to city, region to region. Beijing Mandarin, for example, has a lot of local phrases, slang, and slight differences in grammar and pronunciation that can confuse a Mandarin speaker from another region. I believe Roger was talking about these differences when he was talking about the “simplification” of Mandarin in mainland China.
Richard

please don’t take this the wrong way.. but most of you speak American not English, yep I know we call it English, but it’s not the same… I listened to the show today and muttered to myself for an hour, cause I could not to you :) but.. still love the show
Tom T Walker

Under episodes 262 I wrote a comment about book publisher INformal collusion around eBooks, which has prevented the cost savings that publishers enjoy under the eBook model from being passed on to consumers. Your response was a bit condescending as if the comment was from a radical conspiracy theorist. Not that you said such, but such was present your dismissive tone and comments. Now the government is suing the publishers for FORMAL collusion, a worse offence than I accused them of, and publishers have settled, effectively admitting guilt. Just thought I’d point that out. :-)