The Story of French

I've just started reading The Story of French by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, and it is a fantastic book. Although I'm constantly reminded of reading Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue in St. Andrews, Scotland, in the winter of 2006 and having my mind blown repeatedly.

I'm a sucker for interesting facts about language and how it changes over time, which leads me to include the following excerpt from The Story of French regarding the evolution of Anglo-Norman and subsequent formation of French, and its effect on the English language.

. . . The English language is an excellent laboratory for examining the different trends that were at work in the formation of French. For the word château, the Norman variant castel produced castle, whereas the Paris variant chastel produced chastelain and châtelaine. There are many other examples; for example, chasser (to hunt), which was pronounced chacier around Paris, but cachier in Normandy, produced chase and catch. Real, royal and regal meant the same thing in Norman, Françoys and Latin respectively, but English took them on and gave them each different meanings. The term real estate comes from two Anglo-Norman terms. Leal, loyal and legal followed the same pattern, although leal (meaning both "loyal" and "legal") has fallen out of use. Warranty and guarantee are the same word, pronounced with a Norman and a Françoys accent respectively; this difference in pronunciation also explains how Guillaume became William, guerre became war and Gaul became Walloon (p. 33).

What struck me most at first was the weight of the last sentence. I always knew that Guillaume was the French version of William, but I had never realized that in Anglo-Norman and the subsequent early incarnations of the modern French language, the pronunciation of g and w was the same, thereby drawing a relationship between guarantee and warranty that I never knew existed. It's also notable that guarantee and warranty are essentially the same word, though spelled differently. English is marvelous and fascinating to me because it can get away with making so many of the same sounds look different when written, such as the uar and arr, -ty and -tee of guarantee and warranty, respectively.

I'm only on page 33 of the book; I expect a lot of the cool stuff I find to overflow into this space. It's too good not to.

The Danske Tekster, part two

Preface: In my previous post, when I said "post a translation on Thursday," I meant that I would do so on the last Wednesday in October.

After writing my last post featuring the text in Dansk to be translated, I found that Danish: An Elementary Grammar Reader is available on Google Books. I hope nobody cheated.

Here's the original text followed by the translation.

Nu vil vi begynde. Vi vil lære dansk. Mange danske ord er i familie med ('med', with) engelske ord.

Vi er i et rum i et hus i England. her er en dør, og ('og', and) der er to vinduer. Vi kan se ud i en park, hvor der er mange børn. Solen skinner; det er en varm dag. Det er mandag den første september. I parken sidder en ung mand på ('på', on) en bænk og drømmer. På hans knæ er en åben bog. Et lille barn går i det grønne græs. Det lille barn har en ny spade i hånden; barnet vil grave et dybt hul. I et bed, hvor der er friske røde og hvide roser, går en høne og en tam ravn. En stork flyver over græsset. På græsset står en fed mand med en rød næse; han sægler iskrem. Alle børnene bil have is. Det er en varm eftersommerdag.
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Now will we begin. We will learn Danish. Many Danish words are in family with (i.e. are related to) English words.

We are in a room in a house in England. Here is a door, and there are two windows. We can see out in (i.e. into) a park, where there are many children (cf. Scotch 'bairn'). The sun (cf. Latin and French and the English word solstice) shines; it is a warm day. It is Monday and the first (of) September. In the park sits a young man on a bench and dreams. On his knees is an open book. A little child goes (i.e. is walking) in the green grass. the little child has a new spade in the hand (i.e. in his hand); the child will (i.e. wants to) dig (cf. the English noun grave) a deep hole. In a bed (i.e. flower-bed), where there are fresh red and white roses, go a hen and a tame raven. A stork flies over the grass. On the grass stands a fat man with a red nose; he sells ice-cream. All the children will have (i.e. want) ices. It is a warm after-summer-day (i.e. late summer day).

Reading the translated text, it may be rather obvious that the translation is a literal one. The interesting thing about translation is that there is often a philosophical divide regarding how to proceed with a translation (especially if a translator is working with fiction). A translator can proceed with a literal translation or choose to reshape the text to convey the original author's meaning, but not necessarily the syntax. The second option, to reshape the text, is pretty appealing from a linguistic standpoint, if only because a literal translation often produces an exit text similar to the one above: one that conveys the meaning of the original author but with a syntax that shows it was first written in another language. Reshaping a sentence according to meaning is certainly a more hands-on task for a translator, but if the exit text is to be devoid of awkward constructions (e.g., "In the park sits a young man on a bench and dreams."; "All the children will want ices."), it is important to think of the exit text's audience and not simply the author's meaning.

Filología

English has always been, and frustratingly so, a difficult language for me to comprehend. Perhaps due to my own learning style, I only really began to understand English in my second or third year of studying Spanish -- only when we started writing diarios (journal entries).

A friend of mine mentioned yesterday that he glissaded down a hill while mountaineering in Washington state. I find glissade to be such a pleasant word. Glissade is derived from the French glisser, "to slip". I think what I like best is that it is an onomatopoeic word, or a word whose sound describes its meaning. From there, I enjoy the composition of the word itself. I like the sound of the -ss- at the middle, and also the gl- at the beginning.

To digress into nit-picking, I should be able to refer to those two phonemes with something more substantial than their form (e.g., -ss-, gl-). I mean, I did take a Lingusitics 101 class in college, right? It's too bad I didn't find it more interesting at the time.

A lot of a Linguistics 101 class in college talks about phonology, the system of sounds of a language. You learn about minimal pairs (two words whose pronunciation differs only in one sound and are recognized as distinct words), allophones, morphemes, and other basic elements of historical and modern pronunciation. It's a tough subject to follow, in my opinion, but why that is I'm not entirely sure. For me, I wonder if it wasn't because I didn't associate any meaning with those words -- allophone, morpheme -- like I did with, for example, bones in the human body. The idea of a morpheme seemed just a little too distant for me to grasp (Oxford American Dictionary: "a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided [e.g., incoming: in-, -com-, -ing]").

Returning to the idea of why I like the word glissade, I instantly liked glissade when I first read it and said it to myself. Why did I like the word? Well, my first idea was to break it down by phonemes (the part of Linguistics 101 that I did grasp). The trouble is, that's about as far as I got. Phonemes have many forms and are subdivided into consonants and vowels. Additionally, phonemes of consonants are named in accordance with their place of articulation.

Because I didn't retain much from my tutelage in phonetics, I took to searching for -ss- and trying to find the name of the phoneme. Unfortunately, another dead end is my relative inability to read and/or understand the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). (When exactly do people learn the IPA in their lives, really? Is it just linguistics students who do?) In the end, I'm pretty sure that -ss- is a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative. Sitting at my desk at work, I tried to figure out the correct sounds, trying to make the sound myself and identify the place of articulation.

Try saying glissade and try working out the syllables yourself:

GLI-ssade

Further, break it down by phonemes and pay close attention to the places of articulation:

gl- (This is an affricate, or the sound created by the combination of a plosive and fricative. You will feel your epiglottis close when you make the initial g sound and thereafter feel your tongue slide along your soft palate with the l sound. It is voiced because you use your vocal chords to make the initial sound. It is a glottal stop because your epiglottis closes, thereby cutting off your air supply and making it hard to hold the sound for very long.)

-ss- (Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative; You will feel the tip of your tongue move to behind your front teeth and, if you hold the sound, you will feel some air escape through your teeth. It is voiceless because you do not use your vocal chords to make the sound. It is a fricative because it is a sound produced by the air flowing through your mouth, and it is also a sibilant because it produces a hissing sound.)

-d (Voiced alveolar plosive; You will feel your tongue hit your palate quickly. I didn't explain what a plosive is after describing the composition of an affricate, but a plosive is the sound of opening up a previously closed oral passage. It is alveolar because the sound is produced using the alveolar bone in the jaw.)

The complete idea of the pronunciation of glissade involves the glottal stop with the gl- and subsequent movement of the air through the mouth with the -ss- and reopening of the epiglottal passage with -d.

When trying to figure out the places of articulation while sitting at my desk at work, I realized just how hard it is to identify what my tongue is doing. Sounds come and go quickly, and it's hard to focus not only on the syllables, but also the tongue movement it takes to make the syllable as well as where one tongue movement ends and the construction of the next syllable begins. The process certainly lends further insight as for the difficulties we have pronouncing many words in foreign languages: just like any other muscle, your tongue may not be trained to carry out the movements necessary to make a given sound.

Oh, and here's the video of said friend in Washington state, glissading 2,000 feet down a mountain.

UPDATE: So, it turns out, it wasn't actually said friend in Washington state in the video, but rather a friend of said friend. I stand corrected!

Ortografía

The other day, I was reading and stopped at the word choice. I stared at it for a few seconds, halfway frustrated with why it stopped me dead in my tracks and halfway befuddled by the way it was spelled. I was fixated on the vowel combination of oi. Is that really normal? Is this really the only way to spell choice?

Eventually, I moved on after my brief bout of self-righteousness. I realized that my thinking that choice was misspelled was my own doing, but I'm unsure why it happened. Why do we sometimes read words and are convinced that they are misspelled?

I started with some research, but it's difficult to get relevant results from a Google search of "think that word is misspelled but is not". I assumed that it had something to do with linguistics, but it's hard to blame linguistics as a whole because it is such a multidisciplinary subject area. With the way my mind works, I wanted to define this happening with the name of a study, thereby making it easier to search for or look up on Wikipedia. No luck.

I ended up arriving to Wikipedia's page on psycholinguistics, as I realized that thinking that a word is misspelled has to be associated with a cognitive process. Psycholinguistics involves major linguistic elements, such as morphology (word structure; morphemes are the smallest units of syntax), syntax (sentence structure), phonology (sound), semantics (word meaning), or orthography (the way words are written), interpreted in terms of the cognitive processes involved with word recognition and reading. For me, my reading of choice had nothing to do with anything but orthography. It seems like much of psycholinguistics involves behavioral studies involving eye movements and reaction times. After fixating on oi and why it looked weird, I wondered if it was the way that the letter combination looked, aesthetically. Responses to orthography can often involve the way that letters look because, on a very basic level, we read shapes, which is why it isn't hard to read that one chain e-mail with words whose letters at the beginning and end were the same, but whose middle letters had been jumbled (e.g, Cmabrigde Uinervtisy). Although, it would seem that the jumbled form of the word needs to resemble its correct form (i.e., it's less obvious that Cbrmagdie Uvtiernsy is really Cambridge University).

Looking up the etymology of choice was an intriguing diversion, as I found that the Modern English choice derives from the Old French chois (v. choisir). Choice was adopted into Old English beginning with the Norman conquest of Britain in the early 11th century and, finally, halfway through the 14th century it properly replaced the previous word for choice, cyre. What I'm still curious about, though, is when the French spelling of chois was changed to the current spelling of choice. I would assume that regardless of the spelling, both words were pronounced the same (IPA: tʃɔɪs; ch ois), as English was still largely phonetic at that time, due to Old English's existence as a Germanic language.

So, I'll write off my confusion regarding the correct way to spell choice as a momentary lapse of orthography and move on. At least the English language is not only frustrating to many and challenging to those who wish to understand it, but also constantly evolving. I'm also glad for articles like this one by Joseph Berger, Struggling to Put the 'Ortho' back in Orthography. Thank goodness for constructive criticism.

Egészségetekre

Pronunciation, to me, has been a source of fascination, intimidation, and triumph. As a child I often pronounced words in many different ways, unwittingly so, and to this day I think about how many ways I pronounced "thanks" and made a fool of myself in front of my third grade classmates. It's much easier for me to reflect on that now that my world of language has been so greatly amplified via time spent overseas and multilingual friends. Now that I live in Washington, D.C., I hear a variety of languages but often I can identify them. I'm perplexed by this; I probably give myself too much credit and am grateful for having watched so many European films. Yet, I wonder if I only notice the languages because I have heard them before. The sounds of Swedish are not so uncommon to me now that I have begun to admire the films of Ingmar Bergman. In fact, I am pretty sure that I had swedes standing next to me on a Metro platform the other day; it's not because I understood at all what they were saying, but rather because the sounds and the rhythm of the language sounded weirdly familiar. And I heard the couple say jo (djo:) - the Swedish word for "yes".

However, this recognition of other languages and my ability to produce the same sounds has reaffirmed my above mentioned perspective on pronunciation. It seems that the biggest reason that a lot of people I meet don't speak foreign languages is not because they aren't interested, but because pronouncing words is a source of anxiety. The loss of naïveté is a rough moment and in the past year I've had a couple of instances in which I have realized that, plainly, I don't pronounce things as well as I think I do. This is not a bad thing. I know that French is a very hard language to speak and of the little French I speak, I thought that I was able to pronounce things decently well. After speaking French with two Frenchmen and having them correct my pronunciation errors, I realized that it's difficult to judge one's own pronunciation. Granted, I am critical of myself because I hold my pronunciation to high standards. Still, it was strange to realize that there is an interesting relationship between how I think I am pronouncing something and how it actually sounds to someone else. Case in point: Ikea.

When exiting Ikea it is hard to miss the sign that explains how to say "good-bye" in Swedish: hej då. There's a phonetic spelling on the wall that explains that the 'e' in hej is pronounced with a long a sound; yet, for the longest time I thought I was saying it correctly by saying something along the lines of haa dau. I didn't realize that I had been pronouncing it wrong until recently, when a friend explained how to pronounce it. It occurred to me that I had fooled myself. The phonetic spelling on the wall reads ha: do: (or, better put, haa dau) and intends for English speakers to recognize that the way to pronounce the Swedish word hej closely mirrors the pronunciation of the English word hay (perhaps also hey). Thus, it incorporates a long (English) a sound.

To avoid completely losing my audience, I'll digress for a moment.

The Spanish language has taught me a lot about vowel pronunciation. In Spanish, a phonetic language, the pronunciation of every word can be inferred by simply pronouncing every letter of the word. That said, the sounds of letters don't change unless they are accented, in which case the sounds are made longer. I learned how to pronounce the vowels a, e, and i by teaching myself that the pronunciation of the Spanish a mirrors the way English speakers say the a in law. The Spanish e sounds very much like the a in bay, and the i sounds like the e in me. Or, rather, the pronunciation English vowel a has been split into two vowels in Spanish, a and e, and the pronunciation of the English e is the how one pronounces the Spanish i.

In Spanish:
a = a in 'law'
e = a in 'bay'
i = e in 'me'

To return to the explanation of why I had been pronouncing hej då wrong, I realized that I had been pronouncing this foreign word by unconsciously pronouncing the vowels as if I were speaking Spanish. When I saw the phonetic spelling ha: do: I said the a based upon how I would say the a in Spanish and thought that I was correct. I had been told previously that I pronounce most words in other languages with as if I were speaking Spanish, but it was really funny to me to finally realize how true that was. It has taught me a lot about how we judge our pronunciation; it deviates from our ability to recognize what we have convinced ourselves is right and that which actually is.

Lo que fuera

Learning a foreign language likely counts as one of the cooler experiences that I have had. I remember having to write weekly essays in our "diarios" for my high school spanish class and in them trying to use all of the different locutions we had learned in class. Thinking back on the last two years of my high school spanish experience, learning Spanish was like building a mountain out of legos; the base was large and extensive, representing the importance of a good foundation, and gradually with each new verb tense or set of vocabulary the mountain crept upward into the clouds. For the sake of posterity, I can't say that I will ever reach the the peak of my spanish language mountain, but each part of the language that I learn (or relearn) always seems essential.

I've always believed that by learning a foreign language I have begun to understand the English language better. I think I should probably better acquaint myself with the proper terminology, but perhaps I have embraced my indolence because there's a certain pleasure in referring to the rules of spanish relative pronouns when speaking English. Using them a lot in English (where they are not as crucial as in Spanish) is almost directly related to my understanding of their usage in Spanish. Yet it's interesting that even though English grammar is classically Latin-based, the language has grown in such a way that English speakers can effectively communicate well even without using perfect grammar when they speak.

I recall hearing about the subjunctive well before learning about it in Spanish class. I heard from people in more advanced classes that it was pretty difficult and hard to understand, but I didn't really know what they were talking about until I learned it in class myself. I never knew that besides tenses, there were verb moods; perhaps the best thing for me to hear when I first learned about the subjunctive was that we don't really use it in English (well, I guess we do, but it's super simplified). In Spanish, verb conjugation is crucial because using subject pronouns isn't mandatory. It is to say, in English we have to use subject pronouns with verbs or who the speaker is would be unclear. The sentence I went to the store wouldn't make sense without the subject pronoun I (although colloquially, anything goes). Removing the subject pronoun I, the sentence reads went to the store. In English we have to use subject pronouns because often there aren't many verb inflections (I went; you went, he/she/it went, we went, you all went, they went). However, Spanish verbs have many inflections, such that the subject pronoun can be dropped because verb endings are different for each subject pronoun.

To show the variety of Spanish verb inflection, a basic example is the present indicative conjugation of the Spanish verb ver (to see):

yo veo [I see]
tú ves [you see]
él/ella ve [he/she sees]
nosotros vemos [we see]
vosotros veís [you all see]
ellos/ellas ven [they see]

But to avoid digressing further into pronouns, I'll say why I started writing this today: I think the subjunctive is cool. What I also think is cool is that in English we don't conjugate verbs any differently when expressing emotion, preference, desire, etc. However, in Spanish expressing emotion, preference, or desire calls for the use of the subjunctive. On my way to the library I was listening to the Silver Jews song "Death of an Heir of Sorrows" in which David Berman says "mostly I wish, I wish I was with you". I find it funny that he could also have said "I wish I were with you" and nothing would have changed at all as far as the meaning or the grammar. Yet, grammatically speaking, were is the only evidence of the past subjunctive left in English.

Studying the loss of the subjunctive in English would really require a lot of research if I were to want to discuss it much more. But, in the meantime, perhaps take a moment to think about how many times you hear was instead of were, and vice-versa, in conversation. Also, do you find that in certain instances you would use was instead of were, just as David Berman did? According to Dr Goodword's Language Blog, the past subjunctive is in its death throes, yet a lot of idiomatic expressions use were (e.g. as it were, if I were you) which leads me to wonder: are idioms the most effective means of preserving language?

Typiquement

Sometimes I think about slang expressions and neologisms. Take, for example, the question "are you going to nuke it?" Out of context one might think it to have a different meaning but somehow it has become generally acceptable to say that you are going to "nuke" a food item when you are simply going to reheat it in the microwave. Yet, I hear it all the time and only recently have I thought about how silly it sounds. I won't argue the convenience of saying "nuke" instead of "microwave" or "reheat" but I guess personally for me it seems odd.

When I first read the chapter entitled Wordplay in Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, I thought it was interesting to read of the different instances of wordplay in English. He explains that someone in the UK might come across a crossword clue of "a city in Czechoslovakia" and have to figure out that the city is Oslo (Czech-oslo-vakia). Also, the playfulness of palindromes means the phrase "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas" is read identically whether spelled backwards or forwards. By and large, I suppose the origin of wordplay isn't as important as the ability for language to grow and be semantically pliable.

While living in Spain with a couple of french guys I learned a lot about French and slang expressions. Of course, I learned all the vulgarities (even though to my ears they sound too nice to be vulgar) but also some other interesting things about wordplay in French. One day I discovered my favourite phrase in French, ce type (meaning, roughly, this guy; pronounced sə ti:p), and asked what the equivalent phrase would be for this girl; they told me that it would be cette meuf (pronounced set: møf). The usage of meuf is highly colloquial and I found out that the word meuf was actually created by inverting the consonant sounds of the French word for woman: femme (pronounced fɑ:m). [Please do tell me if I've made mistakes with the phonetic spelling]

After talking with a friend (americaine) who has spent a considerable amount of time living in France, I found out that a lot of slang words in French are hard to figure out because the words are inverted versions of the originals. For her, the trickiness of inverted sounds and duality of meaning made learning slang slightly less intuitive. There is an article on Wikipedia that explains that this type of wordplay in French is known as verlan. In fact, the word verlan is, in itself, a play on words because if you invert verlan you get lanver (l'envers), which means the inverse in French.

The Wikipedia article explains how verlan is employed as well as some idea of what it would be like if we tried to do the same sort of thing in English. Take a look for yourself, it's rather amusing.

It is also worth mentioning that Lunfardo, an argot originating in and around the Rioplatense regions of Argentina and Uruguay during the 19th century, is similar to verlan in the sense that it reverses the syllables of words to form new words and expressions. Thus, tango is also known as gotán. There are others found in its Wikipedia article. I personally enjoy feca con chele for café con leche.

Also, for anyone who has taken a look at the url of this blog and wondered what keyornew is supposed to mean, I'll only say that it is the name of a song on Mathieu Boogaerts' album Michel. I bought the record, liked the song, and then realised that it is, in fact, the name of an american city, put in verlan. Can you figure it out?

Comme ça

So, today I decided to be pro-active. I picked up the two french language books I borrowed from the library, found a blank notebook and a pencil, and began to study French. I often daydream about second language acquisition and exactly how effective certain studying methods can be. There are the computer software packages and grammar books for autodidacts and then there is simply pure immersion by way of moving to a different country. I'm a big fan of the immersion method. From the point of view of an armchair linguist (really, is there any other kind?), it's amazing to think about the many pieces to the puzzle of learning another language. For me, recognising the parts of language acquisition is hard enough because it's so easy to digress onto other topics. I find it hard to get past Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar - especially after having so many friends say that they simply have no aptitude for learning language - though I'm not sure if I wholly agree with it. So, I start to wonder about the debate of nature vs. nurture, and from there my thoughts are free to drift into any one of various fields that is somehow related to linguistics. After a few minutes I've got everything jumbled, so I let it go and feel content with liking that I like the topic.

My point is that I feel most comfortable getting to know a language (the basics; introductory stuff) in a classroom environment. I suppose this is so because it was in a classroom that I began to learn Spanish. I remember a weekend in 2005 when I decided to make flash cards to jump-start myself to study Hungarian. Sadly, it didn't work out. Though it was a half-hearted attempt, I do admit.

Being able to speak Spanish has given me this incredible ability to understand things in a bunch of other languages like French, Italian, Catalán, Portuguese. It's so involuntary at this point that to me it feels kind of like a super power. So, after taking an intro to French course at University, living with two french guys (and hanging out with all of their friends) in Spain, and already speaking another romance language, I figure that with a little extra effort learning French on my own shouldn't be completely impossible.

I started by working on the important stuff pertaining to french verbs - conjugations. I feel like the indicatif présent, passé composé, and conditionnel should nourish me for a bit, especially because French verbs don't have a ton of inflections. I've studied French before and understand certain things that I read and can get the gist of a conversation (I owe a lot to context), but I've never taken the time to learn about verb conjugations and grammar from a book. My favourite moment of studying today was learning about the passé composé and how the phrases I have bought and I bought in English can be expressed together with one phrase in French, j'ai acheté. The passé composé relies on an auxiliary verb (j'ai; avoir; to have) + a participle (acheté; acheter; to buy) in order to express the past tense. I think that's really cool because in Spanish we don't have auxiliary verbs and in English we do. I also find it fascinating that the passé composé is technically the present perfect tense (I have bought) but somewhere along the line it merged with the preterite, or passé simple, (I bought) to form the passé composé. Thus, the phrase "j'ai acheté" can now be translated into English as I have bought and I bought. The preterite (passé simple) still exists in the French language but is primarily used in literature, as stated in the book I'm reading.

I have another book I'm reading, 1001 Pitfalls in French, that explains some interesting things about vocabulary, namely the history of certain words that have a circumflex (^) or an acute accent (´).

1. A circumflex indicates where an S once existed in old French. (ex. forêt)
Note: as stated, this would imply that the modern word forêt, which means forest in
English, was once actually spelled forest in old French. Yet, this would not change the
pronounciation because words ending with -est and -êt are pronounced the
same way.

2. A word that begins with É or E indicates that at one time the word in Latin began with S.
ex. établissement [Latin stabilis]
école [Latin schola]
esprit [Latin spiritus]

3. The final E is always a Y in English. (ex. faculté [English faculty])

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Simple pleasures.