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	Videos HFAQ Quiz List Advice Column Confessions Urban Legends Keyword: Krazy Majors Worldview Gift Shop Services Beta Lab Sauget Contact	AO 26-sided alphabet dice, a.k.a. the Rhombitruncated Cuboctahedron. 8 hexagonal faces 6 octagonal faces 12 square faces AN Postcard celebrates 5 months of quality entertainment and education.  Visitors arrive from all over the world! AM The "Sleeping Camel" blog features thoughts on Arabic language and culture.  Click image to enjoy. AL Yale Romanization of Asian languages has gotten buried by more recent systems, but in 1945, it was cutting edge and represented an impressive, sweeping effort to tear down language walls.   At that time, there were already several systems in place to transliterate Asian languages, but they mostly held by the linguistic elite.  But what happens when you have to train hundreds of thousands of G.I. Joe's to suddenly start speaking intelligible Cantonese?  Yale!  Yale actually encompassed four romanization systems, one for each language: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean.  It was designed to be intuitive for ordinary American soldiers at first glance.    In 2009, Cantonese and Korean still use Yale as a standard, but Mandarin has evolved to Pinyin, and Japanese remains with the Hepburn system from 1887.  Time for some math!   1854 - U.S. Navy shows up in Japan with steam-power warships and blows the doors off Japan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Perry_(naval_officer) 1887 - James Hepburn publishes his Romanization system for Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization Time elapsed between military domination and language domination: 33 years.   AK In a perfect world... AJ What do Froot Loops, fast cards, and frosty drinks all have in common?  Guarani !   When Spain and Portugal carved up South America, most of the locals fell in line and accepted their new European overlords.   When the dust settled, only one native language, Guarani,  was preserved with "official language" status (in Paraguay).   Ever relevant, the language is the source of English words like toucan, jaguar, and tapioca.  Three cheers for Guarani, a true survivor! AI This picture was made for Pericles, my language colleague.  Pericles is thick into some Hebrew books these days, and got to feeling that Hebrew was a re-hash of every other spoken human language.  To pep things up a little, I cobbled together this image.  Keep at it! AH Alphabet Hitman  /ælfə bɛt hɪt mæn/  noun  - an agent responsible for replacing foreign writing systems with that of his home country.   You can keep your language, but you have to write it with my alphabet.  For example, instead of a Russian writing спасибо, they would write "spasibo".    Romanization and transliteration imply the same process.  Ostensibly, this helps to lower communication barriers and add clarity, but I like it for the sport.   Why go to a ranch and shoot quails?  For the sport.   Why kill off the Hanzi with Hanyu Pinyin and Kanji with Romaji?  Because it's fun to do bad things! The guy behind Romanization.com and Pinyin.info takes his Romanization seriously.   His focus is street signs in Taiwan.  Apparently, many Taiwanese road signs are listed in Hanzi (characters) with Romanization spellings below.  However, Taiwan uses outdated systems such as Wade-Giles and Tongyong Pinyin, and these crazyfunky spellings are wrapped up in local cultural pride.   The webmaster is pushing hard for a switch to signage in Hanyu Pinyin. I understand the desire to see Hanyu Pinyin, but I think new signage would be a waste of money.  The most important thing is getting the locals comfortable with seeing the 26 letters of the alphabet all around them as a substitute for characters.   Mission accomplished! Move on!  I say, take the momentum to the Mainland.  In a new place, you can start fresh with the Hanyu Pinyin conventions.  All in all, bravo on your efforts to catalog the process, sir. AG Pinyin is sexy again.  Sure, pinyin has been functional for 50 years, but how about it's raw physical beauty?  After all, there's something hot about depopularizing an advanced system of ideograms and replacing it with a phonetic alphabet.  This campaign is targeted at Asians, so I used a chinese model this time.  Credit for the text goes to Simon at Omniglot.  Translation: I also enjoy reading, listening to music, watching films, playing various musical instruments, singing, travelling, inline skating, cycling, unicycling and juggling.   Is this picture too racy? Too bad!  When you get your own website, you can go do whatever you want with it.   I'll be the first to admit, instead of majoring in languages, I should have kept them as a hobby.  Scratch that - as a fetish.   The only thing wrong with that picture above, is that I don't have 10,000,000 copies and a helicopter to distribute them with over the biggest cities in China.  (Also, source of image is http://farm1.static.flickr.com/105/307734686_226cd9af18.jpg - thank you for letting me borrow it ) AF Now that all Chinese kids learn pinyin before characters, will characters become superfluous and disappear?  As more people use computers with Pinyin IMEs (input method editors), penmanship will collapse, and characters could soon be seen as an unnecessarily difficult extension.  The trick is in training the Chinese to create public road signs, billboards, and documents in pinyin only.  Put a sexy woman next to a big block of pinyin text, and pretty soon all those diacritics will look sexy, too.  (Above is an image I created - a quick and dirty shot at this concept - pinyin sample lifted from omniglot.com.)  While it might seem that the tone marks will just junk up the romanization, it still beats laboring over characters.  I searched online for public signage in pinyin, and I found some awesome content on the site Pinyin.info .   AE Let's all memorize the NATO phonetic alphabet!  It's easy to learn and comes in handy over the phone.  I called an account holder of mine today, and it made communicating long strings of letters very clear.  At the end of the conversation, she thanked me for using that terminology, and asked if I had been in the military.  Nope, but I'm honored all the same! Letters Alpha - Bravo - Charlie - Delta - Echo - Foxtrot - Golf - Hotel - India - Juliet - Kilo - Lima - Mike - November - Oscar - Papa - Quebec - Romeo - Sierra - Tango - Uniform - Victor - Whiskey - X-ray - Yankee - Zulu Numbers 0 - Zero  , 1 - Wun  , 2 - Two  ,  3 - Tree  ,  4 - Fower , 5 - Fife  , 6 - Six  , 7 - Seven ,  8 - Ait  , 9 - Niner   AD Social strata and languages are one.  I often reference my personal experience on this topic.  I can converse in Spanish, German, Russian, and Mandarin, but my opportunities to use each of those vary widely.  For example... Spanish - I almost never use it, because I don't associate with low income laborers and kitchen workers.  If I'm ever in a neighborhood where all the signs are in Spanish, my only thought is, "Let's get the hell out of here". German - never use it, but for the opposite reason.  I only hear it in elite citcles, like in engineering labs at Harvard, and at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' conference.   Russian and Mandarin - I keep those sharp, because the native speakers occupy my social rung, giving me ample chance to practice.  Those are the people who quickly become my friends, classmates, co-workers, customers, and lovers, and the exchange of words flows easily. So who gives a hoot about all that?  I do, because it means we are sitting on an untapped, linguistic gold mine!   In local high schools, most kids learn Spanish.  Out of all the foreign language choices, Spanish has the reputation of the being the easiest. Spanish classes have the highest student enrollment and the most teachers to accomodate.  Conscientious parents read that Hispanics are flocking into the U.S., so they sign their kids up for private Spanish lessons when they are in elementary schools.  Sounds great, but it all fails.  All the Spanish neighborhoods are poverty-stricken ghettos, so nobody goes there, which means nobody practices, and everyone forgets what they learned.  American middle-class folks will only ever learn as much Spanish as they learn Ebonics, because both represent the same things.   So, let's just put all the money behind Mandarin and drop Spanish.  What do we have to lose?  The most popular program (Spanish) is a total flop anyways, so we might as well try something new.   Chinese is harder, but kids are more likely to use it with their peers.  Again, what's the downside - all kids forget their Chinese by adulthood?  Worst case scenario, it gets the same pathetic results as Spanish.  Better case scenario, white kids learn words from the classroom, then test them out on native classmates and co-workers they meet in their daily lives.  Chinese is the language of good grades, hard work, and ambition - what parent could argue with that type of influence of their children?  Best case scenario, they make lasting friendships with those peers, continue to practice Mandarin, and wind up fluent by the age of 25.   Sounds pretty damn good to me.   What are we waiting for? AC Colonization,  a.k.a. what American history teachers like to ignore.   Americans as a whole tend to have amnesia when it comes to what was happening in the world between 1500 and 1900.  We can recite facts about Egypt from 5000 years ago, but we've never even heard of the Boer Wars (100 years ago), or the Opium Wars (160 years ago).   In fact, Americans are even stupid about our OWN history!  For example, who remembers that the tea we dumped into Boston Harbor was grown in India?  Maybe this December 16, we should celebrate the anniversary by throwing Indian call-center workers into the ocean!   But I digress.  What I'd like to know is, why did some colonial languages stick, while others retreated?  English lasted in India after independence, Spanish hung onto Latin America after independence, but Dutch seems to have been forgotten in Indonesia.  Why, why, why? AB English Portal is a team of English teachers in Europe quickly expanding their reach to the whole globe.   Get connected to the action at their sites, English-Portal.com and  Talk-and-Learn.com AA James Brady from Ireland is pioneering language learning games in Facebook applications.   A short bio, in his own words:   "James is fascinated by rapid language learning and continues to work on 2d and 3d games which will help people become fluent in foreign languages rapidly. He is also co-author of the 3d game programming book, The Beginners Guide to the C4 Engine." AZ Buffalax : the accidental genius.   Several years ago, a regular guy from Ohio starting posting videos on Youtube.  The concept was simple - listen to a foreign song, and pretend they were singing in English.  Then, write down the English phrases it sounds like they are singing as subtitles.  Voila, a fake "translation".   I love this game, because it forces you to listen to and accurately record phonetic sounds, even when you don't understand them.   Great way to lampoon a music video, even better way to train yourself to acquire new languages.   Buffalax youtube samples here. Y In troubled times, Urban Dictionary is our insurance policy on the English language.  We've got Radio Free Asia,  Bible-thumping missionaries, English schools on every square foot of the planet, and now internet sites like Facebook are helping to push the English alphabet down everyone's throats.   Americans are driving hard and fast to grow our cultural and linguistic empire.  But,  there is a downside:  pidgins and creoles.   Basically, English is getting f****cked up.   The muscle required to enforce proper grammar and  word usage is left out of the budget, so foreign populations are only learning the language half-baked and botching the rest.  At home, we have plenty of slang, leet-speak, "ebonics",  and humorous misspellings of English words, but we also have an unspoken rule that these are CORRECT ways to misspell English.   As I mentioned,  Urban Dictionary is like a safety net, an insurance policy that provides coverage limits up to 4,000,000 misspelled words in the event of a young, rebellious subculture.   But, the mutant cocktails of English and native languages in places like Indonesia and Nigeria require more effort to catalog, let alone set straight.  Solution: fund efforts to promote standard English in the most influential regions of foreign countries! Nip the problem in the bud. X American Sign Language ain't like English.  Verbs don't conjugate, nouns don't inflect, and it uses OSV instead of SVO.  I think.  But actually, the grammar is three-dimensional.   God knows there's no case endings, and even word order is apparently less important.  Instead of those, you just draw a picture of your sentence in the air, so there's no grammatical ambiguity anyways.  Now I'm curious about other countries' respective sign languages.  Do sign languages compete just like spoken languages?   Is there sign language etymology?  If all of these countries have their own system, where did each one evolve from?   W Alphabets are pretty much the best thing ever.   The king of kings is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  As of 2009, the IPA is about 120 years young.  Credit for invention goes to the French.  Today, the driving force behind the phonetic alphabet is the International Phonetic Association.  Besides being universally useful for learning and maintaining every language on the planet, the IPA can also be used to teach yourself how to speak or sing backwards (without recording software).  Dig deeper into this subject matter by visiting the official website of the IPA.   V Today marks the beginning of a new concept I'm trying, where I title these posts on a base-26 system, so I can use the English alphabet instead of numbers.  This is my 22nd post, hence the letter "V".  Next post will be "W".  The traditional zero will be held by "Z", so the 26th post will be written as "AZ".   March 16, 2009 I don't know a lot about Cantonese, except it sounds like jacked-up Mandarin with more consonants.   At least with Mandarin, pinyin destroyed all other transliteration methods and really helped to clear up the mess of characters.  However, the situation with Cantonese looks uglier.  This omniglot article details the five competing romanization systems for Cantonese, with no clear victor in sight.   March 15, 2009 Video interview with the inventor of Pinyin, Zhou Youguang.  In fifty years, this guy boosted literacy in China from 20% to 90%.  Translation:  he taught  ONE BILLION PEOPLE how to read.  Perspective -  there are about 7 billion people on earth total.  Name a more significant linguistic development!  YOU CAN'T DO IT! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/feb/20/zhaou.youguang.pinyin .   March 13, 2009 Serious language learners know that you can boost your skills by video-chatting with native speakers over the internet.   Step one - download skype .  Step two - register with a language exchange website to chat with a native speaker. Popular ones include xLingo, SharedTalk, Language-Buddy, and MyLanguageExchange.   You help them with English, they help you with whatever you want to learn.   Everyone wins, and it's f-r-e-e.   March 11, 2009 Set up your computer to type in multiple languages!  I often toggle my keyboard between English, Mandarin, Russian, and German.   Given, I busted my chops to learn Cyrillic and Pinyin at one point, but the computer does the rest of the work beautifully.  Microsoft tutorial here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/winxp/yourlanguage.mspx . March 10, 2009 Briefly revisiting the usefulness of Wikipedia as a translation tool:  Suppose you want to watch "The Sopranos" for free on a Chinese site like youku.com or tudou.com , but when you search the site in English, the results are lacking.  You might need to find the Chinese name of the TV show.  First, go the wiki page for the TV show.  Click the link for the Chinese version of the article on the left side, labeled 中文 (zhongwen) .  Copy the characters in the title of the article, and paste them into the video site search bar.   This technique should open many doors which are closed to English-only searches. March 9, 2009 How can you translate things for free online?  The classic tool is Babelfish , which handles about a dozen European and Asian languages.  Google Translate is another useful tool, which can be used to automatically translate entire web pages while you surf.   For individual words, and less common languages, google a phrase like "Swahili online dictionary", and there should be a handful of free resources.  Lesser known linguist hack:  Wikipedia.  Many topics are translated into other languages, and you can see the language list on the left side of the Wiki page.   Feb 28, 2009 I thought Western alphabets evolved from Hieroglyphics.  I was wrong.  They evolved from Hieratic.  What is hieratic?  According to scholars, it was a syllabic/phonetic script that was used parallel to hieroglyphics.  Everyone in ancient Egypt learned hieratic; it was taught to all students and used in all business documents.  Only a very select elite went on to learn hieroglyphics.   Why don't American school children learn about Hieratic if it was more important?  Probably because it's boring and just looks like Arabic.   As it turns out, ancient Egyptian writing systems were a big ugly mess.  There were phonetic scripts being used alongside pictograph scripts (glyphs), as well as simplified versions of the glyphs, like Demotic.   It's no wonder someone carved the original Rosetta Stone, which even included Greek, to sort out the chaos.  The whole thing smacks of the situation in modern China.  Many people are hanging onto traditional characters, even as the government pushes the simplified version.  Multiple attempts to use Western alphabets like Wade-Giles and Pinyin are piling on layers of confusion.  Meanwhile, Taiwan is bucking the trend with its own bopomofo phonetic system, which is a combination of all of those.   It's fun to watch humanity copying the same mistakes it made 5,000 years ago.  If history is any indicator of the future, pinyin and bopomofo will eventually win out over characters, but not for another 1,500 years.  lol. Feb 27, 2009 What's the best way to prevent lousy foreigners from learning your home language?  ADD TONES!  I wonder if any other feature is more subtle and more discouraging.  Americans like to hate on Chinese for being tonal, but I enjoy pointing out that even English is tonal.  For proof, I can hum the phrase "I don't know" with my mouth closed, and my friends always understand the meaning.   Dave Kolmer, an ESL teacher in Thailand, submitted this graph of the five tones of Thai: Feb 26, 2009 I met a woman today who had done missionary work in Mozambique and Ghana.   When I asked her the inevitable question about languages, she mentioned that many foreign workers there use Rosetta Stone software to learn the local languages.   According to her, Rosetta Stone was the preferred system of U.S. government workers for several years.  When a more sophisticated software tool was developed, the government switched over, and "kicked Rosetta Stone to the public".  I'd be very curious to know what that latest government-caliber training tool is.  Anybody know? Feb 25, 2009 Foreign languages: sure, they're fun, but do they sell well?  I did a handcount of language book allocation at a Borders bookstore in St.Louis, MO to the total amount of bookshelf space in the store.  Out of approximately 400 shelving sections, 8 were filled with language books (2%).  Of those 8 sections, 4 were dedicated to Spanish.  Among the other 4, the biggest players were French and Italian.   Since when is Italian so popular?  Although, now that I think about it, my college roommate did study abroad in Italy for a semester.  Plus, Rosetta Stone, the hot new language software package, loves to tout its one-liner about an American farm kid learning Italian to impress a European supermodel.  Maybe I've just been in  Italian-denial, since it's the same as Spanish, except less people speak it.   Not to mention, in the last 500 years, all the Italians managed to conquer was Ethiopia.  Big deal! Feb 24, 2009 Today I feature the classics.  For a good laugh at tragically translated Asian English, try Engrish.com .  Incidentally, the company that produces LOLcat images also created their own knock-off version of Engrish - Engrishfunny.com.   Feb 19, 2009 My friends have been circulating this one - someone created a Russian version of lolcats and added humorous translations. http://rolcats.com Feb 17, 2009 Daily Updates are taking a temporary break.  Please entertain yourself with previous posts, and check out all of the links on the left. Feb 16, 2009 1. The secret is out!  Americans' favorite TV shows and movies may have been scrubbed from Youtube and Google Video, but the Chinese equivalents of those video sites are still happy to host our copyrighted stuff.   You can indulge your love of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "The Sopranos" on sites like youku.com and tudou.com FOR FREE .  Plus, you're not downloading, only streaming, so it's legal.  God knows what's going on behind the scenes at those websites; it seems like they're being sued by American production companies at the same time that American venture capital money is being poured into them $10 million at a time.  Nevermind the fact that the sites are in Mandarin - just use your own brain to recognize the search bar, and type your query in English.     Feb 15, 2009 1.   Indonesia is not on the radar of most Americans.  We don't have an easy stereotype for a country whose people are essentially Asian, and 86% of them are Muslim.   But as a linguist, you should sit up and pay attention to the Indonesian language for several reasons.  They use a Latin alphabet with no annoying diacritics, no tones, and no conjugation.  Did I mention they clock in around #10 on the list of the most widely spoken languages in the world?   Feb 14, 2009  ♥ 1.  Your Valentine's Day gift from Postcard is the website etymonline.com .  When you absolutely must know the origin of an English word, but don't feel like paying for access to the O.E.D.,  Etymonline is your solution.  The website is an extremely impressive, one-man operation.   Feb 13, 2009 1. There are a handful of related languages in China, among them Mandarin and Cantonese.   In Shanghai, you'll hear another local variation, classified by linguists as the Wu branch of the Sino-Tibetan family.   For decades, the Chinese government has been working to suppress Shanghainese; most recently, by requiring very young children to speak only Mandarin in school.   The topic is very controversial, and many believe that the language will disappear within a generation. Feb 12, 2009 1.   Something strange is afoot among the powers that shape the English language.  Am I the only one who noticed that the continent South America disappeared?  In three of the largest and most influential news sources in English, the "world" sections have omitted the phrase "South America" and have replaced it with "The Americas".  Let's just call it "Earth" and have that include the Moon, too!  Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, given things like the Monroe Doctrine, SOA/WHINSEC, and the other 10,000 cases of U.S. intervention in South America.    2.  Ethnologue.com is a super thorough listing of the world's languages.  By their count, there are 6,912 remaining in the world.   Feb 11, 2009 1.  Stephanie from Chicago recommends the site  savethewords.org  .  It's run by the Oxford University Press, and suggests many creative and aggressive ways to bring obscure words back to life.   The eye-popping colors and individual words yelling at you should keep you entertained while you procrastinate doing real work! 2.  Most English speakers in the United States are probably oblivious, but the rest of the world knows the realities of language extinction.  The idea that languages compete and kill each other like animals is fascinating to me.  The research cited in this article argues that languages with jobs and money will grow until they eat the poor ones alive.    http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s928593.htm Feb 10, 2009 1. Ever heard of the Korean Wave?  For the last ten years, people all over Asia are going wild for Korean pop culture. Today there are fan clubs springing up on every continent!  I had never heard of it until tonight, when I connected the dots between what I heard from Indonesia and the USA.  Look out for it!  By the way, if you're already in love with Korean culture, you might like this t-shirt design .  It reads "Korean Fever Forever" - my own creation, inspired by Shauna in St.Louis, MO.     2.   Athia in Bandung, Indonesia is promoting efforts to preserve the local language, Sundanese.   Within the last decade, the government has cut school curriculum which supported the language.   There are 27 million speakers of Sundanese, and many are worried that the language is now endangered. 3.   Umghar from Morocco is leading a cause to unify and preserve the Berber/Tamazight language.  Until their website launches, they are using a facebook page  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tutlayt-Tamazight-Amazigh-Berber-Language/29752997613. Feb 9, 2009 1. First post ever is dedicated to Simon at Omniglot.  If you've never heard of Omniglot, you are living in a cave.  This guy runs an astounding online resource for learning about the writing systems of the world.  Omniglot.com