Some thought on my thesis

In the Chinese class for beginners, I always ask the students to remember one model-sentence "我今天在大学学习中文" based on the sentence structure "who when where do what." And then, one day I realized that these are in fact also the basic elements of human's logic, although according to Mr. Gramley (cf. a lecture in 2009), whether all linguistic groups (here I mean people who speak different languages) have the same logic remains still in debate. I believe these elements cannot be avoided when people think about an event or even how to make a speech, and I also reckon that there must be more than these forming one's thoughts. So in this case, how differently greetings are delivered or responded by native speakers of Chinese and English could also be analyzed along this line. On the one hand, these two groups may have differing logics, therefore they understand a speech distinctively; on the other hand, even though they share the same logic, affected by traditions, histories, ideologies, etc. they still judge, categorize or define these elemental concepts in different ways. Therefore, when I do the experimental part of my thesis, I could follow this line to analyze my data. 

My problem in learning a language..

This morning I tried to call my gynecologist to change my appointment with her on Thursday. Then I realized there's always this problem when I am learning a language. I always want to be nice and polite, but sometimes I do not know how to express myself in a good manner. I wander whether I should use "Sie" or "du", whether I should use "möchten" or "wollen", etc. My friends would ask, "aren't you too tied to care so much?" I mean, yes, it's sometimes exhausting, but what can I do? I know so much about language, languages, I know so clearly that there are differences between words, sentence structures, grammatical usages, so how can I ignore all of these?

This is really a big problem in my language learning process, 'cause I want to do everything RIGHT!

Die Kunst des Smalltalk: So kommen Sie leicht ins Gespräch

Smalltalk - bringt das was?

"Was hat sie, was ich nicht habe?" – Haben Sie sich das auch schon mal gefragt? Mühelos kommt sie mit anderen ins Gespräch, auf Partys lernt sie in Windeseile neue Leute kennen. Und wenn sie einen neuen Job anfängt, fällt es ihr nie schwer, mit ihren neuen Kollegen ins Gespräch zu kommen.

Smalltalk kann man lernen!

Man könnte vermuten, dass das an ihrem Charme, ihrem Aussehen, ihrer Ausstrahlung liegt. Mag sein. Vielleicht ist sie aber auch vor allem eines: verdammt gut im Bereich Smalltalk. Was das bedeutet? Nun ja, sie ist eben nicht diejenige, die am Rande eines Grüppchens steht und aus lauter Verlegenheit die Zähne nicht auseinander bekommt. Denn sie ist eingeweiht in das Erfolgsgeheimnis des leichten Plauderns.

Sie wollen wissen, was dieses Geheimnis ist, sprich mit welchen Worten Sie bei Unbekannten garantiert auf Interesse stoßen und auf welche Gesprächsthemen wirklich jeder einsteigt?

Wir haben für Sie die Kunst des Smalltalks einmal genauer unter die Lupe genommen und Tipps und Tricks rund um die kleine, gekonnte Plauderei zusammengestellt. Smalltalk zu beherrschen ist nämlich kein Privileg einer kleinen Minderheit mit einer besonders selbstbewussten Ader. Smalltalk kann jeder lernen. Man muss nur wissen, wie er funktioniert.

Grundlage 1: Fragen stellen

Meistens läuft es doch so ab: Sie stehen auf einer Party, auf der Sie so gut wie niemanden kennen, als sich irgendwer Ihrer erbarmt und Sie jemandem vorstellt. "Steffi, darf ich dir Anna vorstellen?" – Und dann? Händeschütteln, ein freundliches Lächeln. Stille. Jetzt müsste eigentlich eine von Ihnen mit dem Smalltalk beginnen. Aber wie?

Ganz einfach: Stellen Sie Fragen. Die meisten Menschen erzählen gern von sich und hören sich gern reden. Und letztlich zwingen Sie mit einer Frage Ihr Gegenüber auch zu einer Antwort. Hören Sie Ihrem Gesprächspartner während dieser aufmerksam zu, halten Sie Blickkontakt und signalisieren Sie Interesse an der Unterhaltung.

Mögliche Fragen wären zum Beispiel:

• "Woher kennen Sie denn die Gastgeberin?"
• "Ach, wir haben uns doch neulich schon bei xy gesehen, oder?" (Aber nur, wenn Sie sich sicher sind!)
• "Wo haben Sie denn dieses schöne Kleid / die schöne Tasche / die Kette her?"
• "Was trinken Sie da, das sieht super aus!"

Grundlage 2: Schüchternheit überwinden

Natürlich kann es auch sein, dass Sie zu der Gruppe schüchterner Menschen gehören, für die es eine absolute Horrorvorstellung ist, mit fremden Menschen ins Gespräch zu kommen. Seien Sie beruhigt: Sie sind mit Ihrer Schüchternheit nicht allein!

Eine amerikanische Untersuchung hat ergeben, dass jeder Zweite (51 Prozent) Angst hat, in der Öffentlichkeit zu sprechen. Was erstaunlich ist: Nur bei 15 bis 20 Prozent der Befragten sind diese Hemmungen erkennbar (stottern, meiden von Blickkontakt). Den anderen gelingt es, ihre Angst zu überspielen.

Und genau das können Sie auch lernen, denn Hemmungen und Angst vor Kommunikation sind für einen gelungenen Smalltalk natürlich alles andere als zuträglich. Sie haben als schüchterner, smalltalk-gewillter Mensch zwei Möglichkeiten: Entweder, Sie bekennen sich offen zu Ihren Hemmungen ("Ich würde mich gern mit Ihnen unterhalten, bin aber leider total schüchtern"). Oder Sie machen ein Selbstsicherheitstraining, wie es an Volkshochschulen oder von privaten Instituten angeboten wird.

Gesprächsthemen: der Klassiker

Natürlich können Sie auch Pech haben und bei dem Thema "Was machen Sie denn beruflich?" auf gereizte Gemüter stoßen. Vielleicht ist Ihr Gegenüber gerade arbeitslos oder unzufrieden in seinem Job. Vielleicht möchte sich die Person auch gerade nicht über Berufliches unterhalten. In 90 Prozent der Fälle werden Sie mit diesem Thema aber im Bereich Smalltalk Erfolg haben.

Mögliche Fragen, die Sie im Bereich Beruf & Studium stellen könnten, sind:

• "Als was arbeiten Sie?"
• "Wo arbeiten Sie?"
• "Wie sieht Ihr Berufsalltag aus?"
• "Was gefällt Ihnen an Ihrer Arbeit?"
• "Studieren Sie noch? An welcher Uni? Welcher Prof?"
• Vermeiden sollten Sie in diesem Bereich:
• Fachgespräche, wenn Sie nicht vom Fach sind
• Berufsberatungen, z.B. Anlagetipps für Ihr Geld
• Fragen nach dem Gehalt (eine gute Antwort auf diese Frage wäre: "Es könnte mehr sein")

Tabuthemen

Grundsätzlich gibt es keine Themen, die sie von vornherein von einer Unterhaltung ausschließen sollten. Vorausgesetzt natürlich, beide Gesprächspartner sind sensibel im Umgang miteinander und haben kein ausgeprägtes Talent dafür, in Fettnäpfchen zu treten.

Wenn Sie auf dem Gebiet des Smalltalks unsicher sind, ist es ratsam, folgende Themengebiete zu meiden:

• Politik
• Religion & Weltanschauung
• Geld & Geschäfte
• Krankheiten
• seelische Krisen
• Kritik am Essen, den Gastgebern und anderen Gästen
• Floskeln
• peinliche Fragen wie z.B. nach der Echtheit des Schmucks, der Haarfarbe etc.

Den Smalltalk gekonnt beenden

Ein Smalltalk heißt unter anderem auch deswegen so, weil er nicht zu lange dauern sollte. Maximal fünf Minuten, mehr nicht. Aber was kann man tun, wenn der Smalltalk-Partner nicht aufhört, zu reden? Und stattdessen immer weiter von seinem Urlaub, seinem Job, seiner Familie berichtet? Was am Anfang noch eine nette Unterhaltung war, kann nach kurzer Zeit schon in einen nervtötenden Monolog ausarten, den es irgendwie zu unterbrechen gilt. Nur wie?

Ganz einfach: Verzichten Sie darauf, sich irgendwie aus der Affäre zu ziehen ("Ich muss mal eben zur Toilette"), sondern sagen Sie offen, freundlich und ehrlich: "Ich habe mich sehr gefreut, Sie kennenzulernen. Vielleicht unterhalten wir uns später nochmal, das würde mich freuen!" Falls Sie keine Lust haben, sich später nochmal zu unterhalten, beenden Sie Ihren Satz mit: "Noch einen schönen Abend dann!"

Noch eleganter ist es, den Gesprächspartner einfach weiterzureichen. Er hat erwähnt, dass er eine bestimmte Person im Raum noch nicht kennt? Super, das ist Ihre Chance! Sagen Sie: "Kommen Sie, ich stelle Sie vor." Dann gehen Sie zu der Person und sagen etwa: "Kathrin, darf ich dir Thomas vorstellen, er interessiert sich genau wie du sehr für Südostasien!" Dann ziehen Sie sich dezent zurück.

Anti-Fettnapf-Strategien

Dass Sie bei einem Smalltalk ins Fettnäpfchen treten, kann schon mal vorkommen. Wie peinlich! Hier hilft nur eines: schnell reagieren, um den Schaden so klein wie möglich zu halten. Und so geht's:

• Abbiegen in letzter Sekunde: Wenn Sie merken, dass Sie den Satz, den Sie gerade aussprechen wollen, besser nicht zu Ende bringen sollten, dann tun Sie das auch nicht. Stammeln Sie, verlieren Sie den Faden, wechseln Sie abrupt das Thema. Das ist besser, als jemanden zu beleidigen.
• Entschuldigen: Wenn Sie den Satz schon beendet haben, hilft nur noch eine angemessene Entschuldigung weiter. Übertreiben Sie dabei nicht maßlos, sondern reagieren Sie so, wie Sie es auch erwarten würden. Alle im Raum werden froh sein, wenn sie sich wieder einem anderen Thema zuwenden können und nicht Ihr stundenlanges Entschuldigen anhören müssen.
• Bekenntnis: Wenn Sie das Gefühl haben, Sie würden den anderen durch eine Entschuldigung nur verhöhnen, dann sollten Sie sich zu Ihrem Fehler bekennen, ohne wenn und aber. Geben Sie eine kurze Begründung für Ihr Tun ab und lassen Sie sich nicht auf längere Rechtfertigungen ein.

Das Buch: 'Die Kunst des Smalltalk' Mehr Tipps und Tricks rund um das Thema Smalltalk finden Sie in:

Titel: Die Kunst des Smalltalk: Leicht ins Gespräch kommen, locker Kontakte knüpfen

Autor: Frank Naumann

Verlag: Rowohlt, rororo Sachbuch (2001)

Preis: 8,95 €

The Sims 3

I played "the sims 3" on my new Wii a few days ago. The experience was really amazing, and I have to say, it is a great game! Yes, it's the first game that I've ever played that I called great, because it's not simply a game but something about life. To me, it enclosed some true side of life that one has to focus on only a few things if one wants to get successful in some field; that it is extremely hard or even impossible for one to be successful in all the fields; that one has to learn to give something interesting up, as it's irrelevant to one's goal or the so-called "life-wish" in the game; and so on so forth.

So, I came to the idea that maybe it would also be great if we could base a similar model, through which people could learn how to succeed in communication, just like what I did in "The Sims", the sim met some other sims, talking, trying to analyse the conversation partner, and then responding in a proper way, of course, by choosing among a few options. But then, I realized that it might be impossible to realize, because there couldn't be a fixed answer. For sure some person with specific personalities would prefer to getting some specific responses; nevertheless these responses could change under differing circumstances or with the uncertainty of the emotions of the conversation partners. I guess we have all been there that sometimes we couldn't believe it's us that said this or did that, the well-known saying "OMG, is that me?!"

So, this is the human language, the marvelous and interesting human language. Only when you think you understand and get it, you realize that it's still a mystery. But you still couldn't stopping following it to see more, because you always want to know more.

So, yes, that's what I am doing, and I do love these stuff!

Branding: Need a lawyer?

IMAGINE you are trying to think of a name for a legal-services auction site. (A client needs a simple will; he describes it on the site, and lawyers bid on the job.) What did you come up with?

All right, now think of another. Then another. Do this one billion times.

Was any of the billion names you came up withShpoonkle? I'll bet it wasn't. But it was someone's name for exactly such a company. Today's deadline day so no time for more commentary here; just read Nancy Friedman, a branding and company-naming expert, on why your first billion tries did not produce Shpoonkle.

Addendum: Deadline having passed, I realised on my trip home why you probably didn't come up with "Shpoonkle": it's forbidden by English phonotactics (basically what sounds can be strung together in a native English word. "gork" is nonsense, but obeys English phonotactic rules; "gkor" is nonsense and violates the rules.) The sh- sound plus another consonant like p* can't begin a native English word: we have shmuck, shmutz, schmaltz, shmendrick, Sturm und Drang and so on. But they're all German or Yiddish, which is why Big Legal Brain mockingly called Shpoonkle "the new Yiddish-language lawyer bidding and matching service". It's one thing to come up with a name that violates English orthographic rules, I suppose. Flickr and PwC and Yahoo! have all in their way done their worst, and haven't suffered too much for it, because their names remain naturally pronounceable. It's another thing to violate English's rules of pronunciation; I have tried and failed to think of a company that has done so successfully with their brand name in English. If anyone can think of one, let us know in the comments. Otherwise, I leave you with the words of Robert Niznik, Shpoonkle's founder:

Some people don’t like change, others don’t like what they don’t understand or better yet don’t want to understand... Well, get ready, Shpoonkle is here and we are ready for the mainstream. Kleenex, Blog, Xerox, and yes even Internet were silly names people mocked and thought were ridiculous too. Now these words are part of our every day language.

Shpoonkle: could it be the next internet?

* I originally wrote that sh + consonant is forbidden, but Ben Zimmer notes that of course shr- is allowed, as in "shrimp" and "shriek". r is unusual in being a "liquid" consonant, often barely noticeable in itself and only seen in its colouring of a neighboring vowel.

Misunderstandings between native Chinese speakers

So, here's some interesting "evidence" about semantics and pragmatics I found in my daily life. 

Today, I called Aunt Qian, who recently visited her daughter in Mannheim, to wish her a prosperous Year of Rabbit. In the end of the call, I asked her as usual as I always did with my mum, "姐姐还有什么事儿吗？(Literal translation: Does my cousin have anything else?)" When I called my parents, at last I used to ask my mum like this--"爸爸还有什么事儿吗？" to be polite, and meant "Does dad have anything else to say to me?" What my mum usually does would be to ask my dad whether he wants to talk with me and the answer is usually "No, I have nothing important to say." Then we end the call. 

What surprised me today was the reply of my aunt. She didn't ask my cousin whether she wanted to speak on the phone, instead, she told me something about my cousin's health condition, saying "she's much better now, although sometimes she still feels pains". (little background info: my cousin has just given birth to a baby.) This means, my aunt has misunderstood my question as "Does everything go on well with my cousin?" which is actually another interpretation of the question but is pragmatically used at the very beginning of a conversation, simply like "How's my cousin doing?"

Right now, I'm not sure why my aunt misunderstood me. Perhaps that's her way of interpreting such kind of questions, and thus, according to her, the question has been correctly answered. I reckon in this case, she must have felt weired why I delivered such a question at the end of the conversation. If she didn't feel awkward, then the reason might probably be the differing backgrounds we grow up from: she's from South China, while I'm from the North. And people do speak differently in these two regions. 

Twice blessed

http://www.economist.com/node/13489730

Twice blessed

Bilingual babies are precocious decision-makers

Apr 16th 2009 | from PRINT EDITION

WHETHER to teach young children a second language is disputed among teachers, researchers and pushy parents. On the one hand, acquiring a new tongue is said to be far easier when young. On the other, teachers complain that children whose parents speak a language at home that is different from the one used in the classroom sometimes struggle in their lessons and are slower to reach linguistic milestones. Would 15-month-old Tarquin, they wonder, not be better off going to music classes?

The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain’s “executive function”. This allows people to organise, plan, prioritise activity, shift their attention from one thing to another and suppress habitual responses. Bilingualism is common in Trieste which, though Italian, is almost surrounded by Slovenia. So Dr Kovacs and Dr Mehler looked at 40 “preverbal” seven-month-olds, half raised in monolingual and half in bilingual households, and compared their performances in a task that needs control of executive function.A study just published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help resolve this question by getting to the nub of what is going on in a bilingual child’s brain, how a second language affects the way he thinks, and thus in what circumstances being bilingual may be helpful. Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste say that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with.

Monitoring languages and keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that even before a child can speak, a bilingual environment may speed up that function’s development. Before rushing your offspring into Tongan for Toddlers, though, there are a few caveats. For one thing, these precocious cognitive benefits have been demonstrated so far only in “crib” bilinguals—those living in households where two languages are spoken routinely. The researchers speculate that it might be the fact of having to learn two languages in the same setting that requires greater use of executive function. So whether those benefits accrue to children who learn one language at home, and one at school, remains unclear.First, the babies were trained to expect the appearance of a puppet on a screen after they had heard a set of meaningless words invented by the researchers. Then the words, and the location of the puppet, were changed. When this was done, the monoglot babies had difficulty overcoming their learnt response, even when the researchers gave them further clues that a switch had taken place. The bilingual babies, however, found it far easier to switch their attention—counteracting the previously learnt, but no longer useful response.

Tongue twisters

http://www.economist.com/node/15108609

Tongue twisters

In search of the world’s hardest language

Dec 17th 2009 | NEW YORK | from PRINT EDITION

A CERTAIN genre of books about English extols the language’s supposed difficulty and idiosyncrasy. “Crazy English”, by an American folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?”. Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth.”

Such books are usually harmless, if slightly fact-challenged. You tell “a” lie but “the” truth in many languages, partly because many lies exist but truth is rather more definite. It may be natural to think that your own tongue is complex and mysterious. But English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.

English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)

Perhaps the “hardest” language studied by many Anglophones is Latin. In it, all nouns are marked for case, an ending that tells what function the word has in a sentence (subject, direct object, possessive and so on). There are six cases, and five different patterns for declining verbs into them. This system, and its many exceptions, made for years of classroom torture for many children. But it also gives Latin a flexibility of word order. If the subject is marked as a subject with an ending, it need not come at the beginning of a sentence. This ability made many scholars of bygone days admire Latin’s majesty—and admire themselves for mastering it. Knowing Latin (and Greek, which presents similar problems) was long the sign of an educated person.English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö. “Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.

Yet are Latin and Greek truly hard? These two genetic cousins of English, in the Indo-European language family, are child’s play compared with some. Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall.

Even before learning a word, the foreigner is struck by how differently languages can sound. The uvular r’s of French and the fricative, glottal ch’s of German (and Scots) are essential to one’s imagination of these languages and their speakers. But sound systems get a lot more difficult than that. Vowels, for example, go far beyond a, e, i, o and u, and sometimes y. Those represent more than five or six sounds in English (consider the a’s in father, fate and fat.) And vowels of European languages vary more widely; think of the umlauted ones of German, or the nasal ones of French, Portuguese and Polish.

Yet much more exotic vowels exist, for example that carry tones: pitch that rises, falls, dips, stays low or high, and so on. Mandarin, the biggest language in the Chinese family, has four tones, so that what sounds just like “ma” in English has four distinct sounds, and meanings. That is relatively simple compared with other Chinese varieties. Cantonese has six tones, and Min Chinese dialects seven or eight. One tone can also affect neighbouring tones’ pronunciation through a series of complex rules.

Consonants are more complex. Some (p, t, k, m and n are common) appear in most languages, but consonants can come in a blizzard of varieties known as egressive (air coming from the nose or mouth), ingressive (air coming back in the nose and mouth), ejective (air expelled from the mouth while the breath is blocked by the glottis), pharyngealised (the pharynx constricted), palatised (the tongue raised toward the palate) and more. And languages with hard-to-pronounce consonants cluster in families. Languages in East Asia tend to have tonal vowels, those of the north-eastern Caucasus are known for consonantal complexity: Ubykh has 78 consonant sounds. Austronesian languages, by contrast, may have the simplest sounds of any language family.

Perhaps the most exotic sounds are clicks—technically “non-pulmonic” consonants that do not use the airstream from the lungs for their articulation. The best-known click languages are in southern Africa. Xhosa, widely spoken in South Africa, is known for its clicks. The first sound of the language’s name is similar to the click that English-speakers use to urge on a horse.

For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).

Beyond sound comes the problem of grammar. On this score, some European languages are far harder than are, say, Latin or Greek. Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions. Estonian’s cousins in the Finno-Ugric language group do much the same. Slavic languages force speakers, when talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not. Linguists call this “aspect”, and English has it too, for example in the distinction between “I go” and “I am going.” And to say “go” requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or other conveyance. For Russians or Poles, the journey does matter more than the destination.

Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

Agglutinating languages—that pack many bits of meaning into single words—are a source of fascination for those who do not speak them. Linguists call a single unit of meaning, whether “tree” or “un-”, a morpheme, and some languages bind them together obligatorily. The English curiosity “antidisestablishmentarianism” has seven morphemes (“anti”, “dis”, “establish”, “-ment”, “-ari""-an” and “-ism”). This is unusual in English, whereas it is common in languages such as Turkish. Turks coin fanciful phrases such as “Çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz?”, meaning “Were you one of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovakian?” But Ilker Aytürk, a linguist, offers a real-life example: “Evlerindemisçesine rahattilar”. Assuming you have just had guests who made a mess, these two words mean “They were as carefree as if they were in their own house.”

Yes we (but not you) can

This proliferation of cases, genders and agglutination, however, represents a multiplication of phenomena that are known in European languages. A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely. Take “we”. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands, “we” has two forms: “me and you” and “me and someone else (but not you)”. And Kwaio has not just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too. While English gets by with just “we”, Kwaio has “we two”, “we few” and “we many”. Each of these has two forms, one inclusive (“we including you”) and one exclusive. It is not hard to imagine social situations that would be more awkward if you were forced to make this distinction explicit.

Berik, a language of New Guinea, also requires words to encode information that no English speaker considers. Verbs have endings, often obligatory, that tell what time of day something happened; telbener means “[he] drinks in the evening”. Where verbs take objects, an ending will tell their size: kitobana means “gives three large objects to a man in the sunlight.” Some verb-endings even say where the action of the verb takes place relative to the speaker: gwerantenameans “to place a large object in a low place nearby”. Chindali, a Bantu language, has a similar feature. One cannot say simply that something happened; the verb ending shows whether it happened just now, earlier today, yesterday or before yesterday. The future tense works in the same way.

A fierce debate exists in linguistics between those, such as Noam Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in the brain and those who do not. The latter view was propounded by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist of the early 20th century, who argued that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s habits of thought.

With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.Whorfianism has been criticised for years, but it has been making a comeback. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University, for example, points to the Kuuk Thaayorre, aboriginals of northern Australia who have no words for “left” or “right”, using instead absolute directions such as “north” and “south-east” (as in “You have an ant on your south-west leg”). Ms Boroditsky says that any Kuuk Thaayorre child knows which way is south-east at any given time, whereas a roomful of Stanford professors, if asked to point south-east quickly, do little better than chance. The standard Kuuk Thayoorre greeting is “where are you going?”, with an answer being something like “north-north-east, in the middle distance.” Not knowing which direction is which, Ms Boroditsky notes, a Westerner could not get past “hello”. Universalists retort that such neo-Whorfians are finding trivial surface features of language: the claim that language truly constricts thinking is still not proven.

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

Linguists ask precisely how language works in the brain, and examples such as Tuyuca’s evidentiality are their raw material. More may be found, as only a few hundred of the world’s 6,000 languages have been extensively mapped, and new ways will appear for them to be difficult. Yet many are spoken by mere hundreds of people. Fewer than 1,000 people speak Tuyuca. Ubykh died in 1992. Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Linguists are racing to learn what they can before the forces of modernisation and globalisation quieten the strangest tongues.

Language barriers

http://www.economist.com/node/3104346

Language barriers

Can a concept exist without words to describe it?

Aug 19th 2004 | from PRINT EDITION

TAKE heart, those of you who struggled with maths at school. It seems that words for exact numbers do not exist in all languages. And if someone has no word for a number, he may have no notion of what that number means.

The Pirahã, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, use a system of counting called “one-two-many”. In this, the word for “one” translates to “roughly one” (similar to “one or two” in English), the word for “two” means “a slightly larger amount than one” (similar to “a few” in English), and the word for “many” means “a much larger amount”. In a paper just published inScience, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question.

This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought.

While there is no dispute that language influences what people think about, evidence suggesting it determines thought is inconclusive. For example, in 1972, Eleanor Rosch and Karl Heider investigated the colour-naming abilities of the Dani people of Indonesia. The Dani have words for only two colours: black and white. But Dr Rosch and Dr Heider found that, even so, Dani could distinguish and comprehend other colours. That does not support the deterministic version of the Whorf hypothesis.

While recognising that there are such things as colours for which you have no name is certainly a cognitive leap, it may not be a good test of Whorf's ideas. Colours, after all, are out there everywhere. Numbers, by contrast, are abstract, so may be a better test. Dr Gordon therefore spent a month with the Pirahã and elicited the help of seven of them to see how far their grasp of numbers extended.

Using objects with which the participants were familiar (sticks, nuts and—perhaps surprisingly—small batteries), he asked his subjects to perform a variety of tasks designed to measure their ability to count. Most of these tests involved the participant matching the number and layout of a group of objects that Dr Gordon had arranged on a table.

The tests began simply, with a row of, say, seven evenly spaced batteries. Gradually, they got more complicated. The more complicated tests included tasks such as matching numbers of unevenly spaced objects, replicating the number of objects from memory, and copying a number of straight lines from a drawing.

In the tests that involved matching the number and layout of objects they could see, participants were pretty good when faced with two or three items, but found it harder to cope as the number of items rose. Once it was beyond eight, they were getting it right only three-quarters of the time. The only exception was in those tests that used unevenly spaced objects—an arrangement that can be perceived as a group of clusters. Here, performance fell off when the number of objects was six, but shot up again when it was between seven and ten. Dr Gordon suggests that the participants used a “chunking” strategy, counting the clusters and the numbers of objects within each cluster separately.

Things were worse when the participants had to remember the number of objects in a layout and replicate it “blind”, rather than matching a layout they could see. In this case the success rate dropped to zero when the number of items became, in terms of their language, “many”. And line drawing produced the worst results of all—though that could have had as much to do with the fact that drawing is not part of Pirahã culture as it did with the difficulties of numerical abstraction. Indeed, Dr Gordon described the task of reproducing straight lines as being accomplished only with “heavy sighs and groans”.

The Pirahã are a people who have steadfastly resisted assimilation into mainstream Brazilian culture. Their commerce takes the form of barter, with no need to exchange money. Exact numbers do not exist in their language simply because there is no need for them. And in this case, what you do not need, you do not have. At least in the field of maths, it seems, Whorf was right.