The language magazine for young readers - Babel Magazine | The … · 2020. 3. 19. · means farter! Are you, or is someone you know, a fingó? 10 How do humans beings speak: Vowels

The language magazine for young readers

Issue 2

American?Do You Speak

Part Two: Vowels

And Consonants

How do we

SPEAK?

Football or Soccer?

Biscuit or Cookie?

Standing

Out From

The CrowdHow To Be Deviant

(In A Good Way)

Are You A

EVEN Babies Are!

Mind Reader?

Also Inside:

Meet David Crystal

Language Puzzles

Animal Fact File

3www.lingozine.com

06 Word Of The Issue:‘Toilet’

10 Ask A Linguist:How many languages are there?

12Standing Out From The Crowd

14 The Complete And Utter History Of English: Part 1

LANGUAGE GAMES

04 Filip’s Philatelic Fix

05 Tallying In Teleut

21 Wordsearch

26 Guess The Author

27 Family Reunions

30 Moritz’s Muddled Menu

What’s inside!

18Do You Speak American?

22Are You A Mind Reader?

24Lingo Penpal:We meet James from Peru

28Famous Linguists:David Crystal

FEATURES

08

2216 26

CONTACT US

Phone

0044 (0)113 328 0211

EMAIL

[email protected]

POST

Lingo Magazine

Linguistics & Modern

Languages

West Building

University of

Huddersfield,

Queensgate,

Huddersfield,

HD1 3DH, UK

Editors

Lesley Jeffries

Dan McIntyre

Assistant Editor

Hazel Price

Contributors

Lesley Jeffries

Dan McIntyre

Tristan Miller

Arden Murphy-Viner

Lynne Murphy

Hazel Price

Jack Wilson

French

7

8

5

3

6

2

4

1

9

1 la toile d’araignéecobweb

2 la lunemoon

3 le fantômeghost

4 une araignéespider

5 le toitroof

6 la chauve-sourisbat

7 la fenêtrewindow

8 la maison hantéehaunted house

9 la porte grinçantecreaky door

LanguageFactLingo rhymes with fingó, which in Hungarian means farter! Are you, or is someone you know, a fingó?

10

How do humans beings speak:Vowels and consonants

4 5Lingo Magazine www.lingozine.com

LANGUAGELANGUAGE

Answers on page 32Answers on page 32

puzzlespuzzlesTallying in TeleutFilip’s Philatelic Fix

Filip is an avid stamp collector. He recently received a collection of old Russian-language stamps, but not knowing any Russian, he is having trouble identifying the people depicted on them. This is because Russian is written in a different alphabet, known as Cyrillic, whereas English uses a version of the Latin alphabet. The table below shows one common way of transliterating (changing letters) between the two alphabets. For example, Filip’s name would be transliterated as Филип. (Note that just like English, Russian letters come in both capital and lowercase forms.)

Can you use the table to identify the historical figures on Filip’s six stamps?

Russian EnglishА а A aБ б B bВ в V vГ г G gД д D dЕ е E eЁ ё Ë ëЖ ж ZH zhЗ з Z zИ и I iЙ й Ĭ ĭК к K kЛ л L lМ м M mН н N nО о O oП п P pР р R rС с S sТ т T tУ у U uФ ф F fХ х KH khЦ ц TS tsЧ ч CH chШ ш SH shЩ щ SHCH shchЪ ъ “ “Ы ы Ȳ ȳЬ ь ‘ ‘Э э É éЮ ю IU iuЯ я IA ia

Freda is travelling to Western Siberia to meet her penpal, Sargadan. Sargadan’s mother tongue is Teleut, a language distantly related to Turkish, and Freda is keen to learn a few words to impress Sargadan’s family. Sargadan had prepared some vocabulary lists for her to study, including the table of numbers below. Freda starts studying Sargadan’s material on her flight over, and discovers that Sargadan has forgotten to fill in some of the numbers in the table! However, she finds that there is still enough information in the table to figure out and fill in the missing words. Can you do the same?

1 pir 25

2 26 ǰirme alty

3 üč 27

4 tört 28 ǰirme segis

5 peš 29

6 alty 30 odus

7 31

8 segis 32

9 togus 33

10 on 34

11 on pir 35 odus peš

12 36

13 on üč 37

14 38

15 on peš 39

16 on alty 40

17 41 ķyryķ pir

18 on segis 42 ķyryķ èki

19 on togus 43

20 ǰirme 44 ķyryķ tört

21 45

22 ǰirme èki 46 ķyryķ alty

23 47 ķyryķ ǰeti

24 ǰirme tört 48


The word toilet has its roots in the French language and is believed to come from the word toile, which was a general word for a cloth. Over time, this French word crept into English and appeared in various forms (tulate, tulat, tolat and even toylet – standard spelling wasn’t a strong point back then!) from about 1538. In the late 1600s, toilet meant a type of cloth that could be used to cover a dressing table, and the cloth that covered a man’s shoulders when shaving. Back then, toilet could even describe the material worn to cover women’s faces, so we can say that women once wore toilets on their heads!

Using ‘toilet’ to describe a cloth of some kind lasted until the 19th century when the meaning of the word changed to refer to a room where you washed (what we might now call the bathroom), and then changed again in the 20th

century to mean the thing we now know as the toilet. Toilet is such an intriguing word, in fact, that some linguists interested in how words are used found 26 slightly different meanings for it!

Toilet is a funny word and as well as changing historically, the thing we now know as the toilet has lots of different names to refer to it. You might have been told off by your grandparents for calling it a toilet and this is because, historically, ‘lavatory’ was the polite way to discuss the toilet (at least this is what the Queen calls it!). In fact, all words for toilet avoid referring directly to the thing itself. Another word that was historically used to mean toilet is ‘privy’ which typically meant a toilet that was outside. When searching the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED)*, there are stacks of words related to privy, ranging from bog to wardrobe. ◙

CHECK IT OUT!

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) is bursting with information about the history of words.

Why not head over to the HTOED online and search some words for yourself?www.oed.com/thesaurus/

hen you think of the word ‘toilet’ you might be thinking of the stinky loo at school or the

thing you are very happy to see when you have been on a long trip and are bursting for a wee. But, the word toilet has not always referred to the place you go to do your, ahem, business. For example, it once referred to the cloth covering a dressing table - and you certainly wouldn’t want to do your business there!

*TOILETWWord Issue:of the


WardrobeThis word was used in the late 14th and early 15th centuries to mean toilet. Perhaps your friends would be a bit worried if you told them you were going to the wardrobe for a wee now, though!

ShieldIn 1535, this word was used to describe a toilet seat, and then later to describe the toilet itself. This type of shield probably wasn’t very good at protecting you in battle!

OfficeThis word was used to describe the loo from 1727. You didn’t have to wear a shirt and tie to go to this office!

TOTALLY WEIRD WORDS FOR THE LOO


In future issues we will look in detail at the different speech sounds used in English and other languages, but before we do that, we are going to think about the difference between vowels and consonants. In many languages, including English, there are 21 consonants and 5 vowels (aeiou) in the written alphabet, but these written signs are not equivalent to individual sounds, so we need to think instead about how speech sounds are produced.

The first thing we need to notice is that there is a basic difference between the way that consonants and vowels affect the airflow out of the lungs. Consonants obstruct the airflow at some point between the larynx and the lips whereas for vowels the only partial obstruction is in the larynx, where the vocal folds produce voicing. After that, the air simply flows out through the mouth and the air bounces around this resonating cavity, which makes the vowel loud enough to be heard. Different vowel sounds are made by the mouth being moved into a

different shape.Other differences between

consonants and vowels are related to this basic difference. For example, consonants involve speakers moving the ‘articulators’ (e.g. tongue, teeth, lips) towards each other and then away again. So, consonants are dynamic because they involve a set of movements. Vowels, however, are more static as they are mainly produced while the articulators are still. Once the mouth shape is in place, the vowel sound is made simply by the echoing effect of the air leaving the larynx and bouncing around on its way out.

All vowels in English (and most other human languages) are voiced, which means that the air is set vibrating as it passes through the vocal folds. This means that they have a pitch, like music. As a result of their stillness and their voicing, vowels are the centre of syllables in all languages and the main way in which human beings can sing words with a musical effect.

The consonants, on the other hand, provide the boundaries between syllables. They are like the fences between fields in the countryside, with the vowels being the fields themselves! Though some consonants can be voiced (e.g. /d/) and thus carry a pitch, they are too short to have much musical effect. Some consonants have potential length too (e.g. /ssssssss/), but even the voiced ones (e.g. /zzzzzzzz/) are less musical to hear than vowels.

Although most speech sounds can be clearly identified as

either a consonant or a vowel as we have defined them above, some sounds have features of both.

First, there is a small group of consonant sounds which are both dynamic because they involve movement and also rather vowel-like since they don’t obstruct the airflow so much as ‘squeeze’ it a bit. These are known as ‘semi-vowels’ and include /l/ and /w/. See below for more on vowels and consonants.

Secondly, there are vowel sounds called ‘diphthongs’. They consist of a sequence of two vowels within a single syllable and because there is inevitably movement from one of the vowels to the other, they appear to challenge the reputation of vowels as static sounds. See below for some more on diphthongs. ◙

n Issue 1, we saw how we speak using the air passing from our lungs

through the larynx (and the vocal folds) and then out through the mouth or nose. Once the air reaches the larynx, there are two different things that can happen. It can pass through the vocal folds without obstruction, which produces voiceless sounds. Or it can be partly obstructed by the vocal folds so that they start vibrating, resulting in a singing sound. We say these sounds are voiced.

PART TWOWhat are vowels and consonants?

How

HumanBeings

Do

SPEAK?

In order to really feel the difference

between vowels and consonants,

try saying the following sounds on

their own (note that it is difficult to

pronounce consonants without a

vowel after them!): /d/, /m/, /l/.

Now try saying individual (pure)

vowels, such as /i:/, which is the

vowel in ‘key’ or /u:/, which is the

vowel in ‘zoo’.

You should be able to see that the

first set, the consonants, involve

movement – particularly the release

of the obstruction to the airflow.

By contrast, the sound of the vowel is

produced after the mouth has got to

the required shape and not during the

movement of articulators.

VOWELS & CONSONANTS:

DIPHTHONGS:Try saying the following diphthongs without any consonants around them:/ei/ (as in ‘day’)/ai/ (as in ‘pie’)/au/ (as in ‘cow’)Can you feel your mouth move between one vowel and another? Slow the transition down to really feel what is happening.Why can we still say that diphthongs are vowels and not consonants?

SEMI-VOWELS:Try out these words, which have a semi-vowel at the beginning and the end:

Try saying the semi-vowels on their own:/l/, /r/, /j/ (/j/ is like ‘y’) and /w/What do your articulators do when you say these? Do they seem more like consonants or vowels to you?

I

9www.lingozine.com

YELL ROW WAY

8 Lingo Magazine


That ought to be an easy question to answer, right? You just add them all up and there you go. Unsurprisingly, it’s a bit more complicated than that. First of all, there’s the problem of what counts as a language. English is quite different from Spanish but is Spanish really so different from French? And is French so very different from Italian? Basically, what are the boundaries between languages?

Then there’s the problem of deciding whether something counts as a language or a dialect. In England, we would tend to say that Yorkshire English and West Midlands (or Black Country) English are dialects of British English. There are differences between them in grammar and vocabulary but basically they are just variants of the same language. But defining a language is not a purely linguistic matter. Sometimes political issues come into play as well.

For instance, the Czech and Slovak languages are pretty similar so if you speak Czech it’s likely that you’d be able to understand Slovak too. So why don’t we describe them

as dialects of the same language? That’s partly down to politics and the fact that the Czechs and the Slovaks were very keen to distinguish themselves as different from one another when the areas where they lived were combined to form a new state, Czechoslovakia, after the First World War. It turns out that having your own language is a really useful way of asserting your identity. So it was useful to the Czechs and Slovaks to describe their languages as languages and not dialects. Think about it another way: imagine if civil war broke out between Birmingham and Sheffield. All of a sudden Brummies might be talking about Yorkshire as a different language in order to make it clear that those nasty Sheffielders are nothing like them!

Added to all these complications is the fact that languages are always changing. Things don’t stay the same for very long and it can be difficult for linguists to keep up. Furthermore, there are languages out there that we just don’t know very much about yet, so it’s hard to say whether they really are different

from other languages or whether they are dialects.

But with all that said, we can make some estimates. Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com) is an online resource that lists all the known languages in the world. (That’s natural human languages, so no waggle dances, Klingon or Parseltongue!) At the time of writing, Ethnologue lists the total number of languages in the world as 7102. But of these, 1531 are said to be in trouble and 916 are reported to be dying. A language is said to have died when there is no one left who speaks it as a first language. David Crystal (see Famous Linguists) has estimated that, on average, a language dies out every two weeks. On this calculation, those 916 endangered languages could be gone within the next 35 years or so. Not a very cheery thought, eh? Just think about what we lose when a language dies out. ◙

linguistAsk a

How many languages are there in the world?

Q AQ A

10 11Lingo Magazine www.lingozine.co.uk

Languages under threat:

A’ou Spoken in Southwest China, this language is spoken by just 50 people.

Awetí This threatened language from Central Brazil had 170 native speakers in 2011.

Gugubera This language spoken in Northern Australia had 100 speakers in 2006.

Ume Saami This language spoken in Sweden is nearly extinct. It is spoken by just 20 people.

11www.lingozine.com


Have a look at this newspaper headline:

This was a story about a whale that had become stranded in the River Thames. Most of the daily papers in Britain covered the story, meaning that the whale achieved a level of fame not often reached by aquatic marine mammals. And this just happened to be in the same week that Celebrity Big Brother was on TV. Blubber is a thick layer of tissue under a whale’s skin. And it sounds a bit like brother. And the whale had become a celebrity. You can see what the journalists did, can’t you? By exploiting the similarity in sound between blubber and brother, they managed to break readers’ expectations of how the phrase would end. As a result they created a headline that was unusual and memorable. And a bit cheesy.

Linguists call this kind of effect foregrounding. A foregrounded bit of language is anything that attracts your attention by standing out from the background (i.e. what you expect). The way to make something stand out from the linguistic background is to deviate from what the reader expects. In

the Celebrity Big Blubber example, the foregrounding comes from the unexpected word. You can get foregrounding effects by deviating from other areas of language too, not just words.

Semantic deviationSemantics is the area of language that deals with meaning. When The Beatles* sang ‘Eight Days a Week’, the title was memorable because it was a semantic deviation. There aren’t eight days in a week, there are seven. Does that make the song title meaningless? No, it foregrounds it!

Graphological deviationGraphology refers to the appearance of language on the page. Look at the speech bubble in the second frame of this extract from the graphic novel From Hell (by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell). You can’t read it as the writing is too small. That’s graphological foregrounding, as it deviates from what’s normal. It creates the effect of you the reader being too far away from the characters to be able to hear what they’re saying.

Syntactic deviationSyntax refers to the structure of sentences. When David Gilmour from Pink Floyd** sang ‘We don’t need no education’, his English teacher was covering her ears. That’s because in Standard British English we don’t use more than one negative in the same clause. But David’s a rock star and doesn’t have to listen to his English teacher anymore. And the syntactic foregrounding reflects the song’s theme of protest against the educational establishment. You rebel, David.

So remember: foregrounding is a result of deviation from what is normal and expected. And foregrounded language attracts attention. Got it?

How To Be Deviant(In A Good Way)

Standing Out From

The Crowd

People have pretty fixed ideas about what counts as normal. If you turn up to a football match wearing a tutu and ballet shoes, you’re going to look pretty odd when everyone else is wearing football shirts. You’d stick out a mile and as a result you’d attract quite a bit of attention (some of it probably unwanted).

You can get the same kind of effect in language if you break people’s expectations.

* The Beatles were a band that you

really ought to know about.

** What? You haven’t heard of Pink

Floyd either?!

(Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell, 2004, p.1)

Got it?!


In 43 AD, the Romans invaded Britain, much to the disappointment of the average Roman soldier who had no doubt been hoping for a posting somewhere hot. The Romans built impressive houses, installed heating and complained about the local food. (The local Britons couldn’t understand them of course as the Romans did their complaining in Latin). Britain was slowly becoming civilised.

But by 410 AD things were not looking good. The Roman Empire was collapsing and the Roman soldiers in Britain were needed back home. So the Romans packed up and left and the Britons promptly forgot how to work the central heating and mend the roads. Then things got worse.

Pretty soon after the Romans had gone, the Scots and the Picts (the marauders from the borders) decided they quite liked the look of what we now call England. And going on holiday there just wasn’t enough. So the Picts and the Scots started attacking the poor little Britons and nicking their land. Well, you’d be a bit

peeved, wouldn’t you, if you were a Briton?So the Brits shouted for the Romans

but the Romans had problems of their own. They couldn’t spare any soldiers to fend off those pesky Picts. So then the Brits tried the Saxons in northern Germany, who were more than happy to help…in return for some land. What could possibly go wrong?

The Saxons started arriving in 449 AD, quickly followed by the Angles and the Jutes from Denmark. They soon saw off the Scots and the Picts but…well, you know when you have really annoying relatives to stay and they just won’t go home? It was a bit like that.

So the poor Britons once again found themselves outnumbered. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes (or Anglo-Saxons for short) had succeeded in doing exactly what they had been employed to prevent the Picts and Scots from doing. And not only that, but they spoke weird Germanic dialects. And over time, these dialects began to mix and out of the melting pot emerged the language that we now call Old English. Because it’s very old...

PART IRaucous Romans, barmy Britons, pesky Picts and shrewd Scots

43 AD to 500 AD

HistoryENgLisH

e

y

To be

continued

Complete and Utter

(Without the Boring Bits)

LanguageFact

In Chinese, ‘Have you eaten’ is often used as a greeting in the same way that English speakers say ‘hello’. Young Chinese people don’t use this as much as older people though.


Pavement or sidewalk? Aubergine or eggplant? Zed or zee? The answers aren’t right or wrong; they’re here or there: Great

Britain or the United States of America.

American?Do You SpeakPART 1

HONEY BEESYou might think that communicating

is something that only humans do, but you’d be wrong. Linguists have studied how animals communicate with each other for years and they have found out some really cool things about animals because of this. Take, for example, the honey bee.

These bees have a lot more to them than appetite for nectar and a mean sting. They are, in fact, very intelligent. Being a bee can be tough - think about all that work! Bees need to visit lots of flowers to get the nectar to make honey and this can involve flying a long way each day (some reports say that to make one jar of honey, a honey bee needs to visit 1 million flowers!). One way that bees communicate to make their busy buzzy lives easier is by dancing (and I’m not talking about the kind of dancing that your uncle does at Christmas!).

The ‘waggle dance’ is something that forager bees do to tell other bees in their colony where they can find a good source of nectar. The waggle dance consists of runs and turns that the bees perform in a figure 8. This tells the other bees in the colony whether the food is near or far and in which direction it can be found. The angle that the bee turns when dancing tells the other bees the direction of the source of food in relation to the sun. How much the bee waggles on the runs tell the bees how far they are from the source. The longer the bee dances, the better the food source is. Some research has even suggested that bees can tell the difference between colours. Clever eh!

So, we know that bees communicate but is the waggle dance actually language? What do you think?

ANIMAL LANGUAGE FACTFILE

Did you know?

Some scientists have found that honey bees also do a ‘tremble dance’. This dance is believed to be used by forager honey bees when they need some help collecting nectar.

_

Some scientists have suggested that waggle dancing might be part of a honey bee’s genetic make-up rather than being something that it learns how to do.

Watch honey bees do the waggle dance on the National Geographic website at:video.nationalgeographic.com/video/weirdest-bees-dance



British Americannoughts and crosses tic-tac-toe

bucket and spade shovel and pail

climbing frame monkey bars

see-saw teeter-totter

sandpit sandbox

draughts checkers

Ludo Parcheesi

Cluedo Clue

football soccer

American football football

Snakes and Ladders Chutes and Ladders

building a den building a fort

paper, scissors, stone rock, paper, scissors

Chinese whispers the telephone game

British Americanjumpers and cardigans sweaters

pinafore dress jumper

trainers sneakers

pyjamas pajamas

dungarees bib overalls

fancy dress dress-up

pants, knickers underwear

trousers pants

babygro onesie

waistcoat vest

vest undershirt

handbag purse

British Americanreception kindergarten

year 1 1st grade

primary school elementary school

secondary school high school

university college

head teacher principal

school holidays school vacation

marks grades

maths math

public school private school

state school public school

revision studying

British Americanbiscuit cookie

icing frosting

chips fries

crisps chips

coriander cilantro

aubergine eggplant

courgette zucchini

spring onion green onion

rocket arugula

pudding dessert

starter appetizer

sweets candy

fairy cake cupcake

British AmericanVs Play

Things you wear

At school

Things you can eat

Vocabular y differ ences


British and American Englishes differ in many ways. The easiest differences to notice are:

pronunciationAccents mean we pronounce sounds in different ways. Both America and Britain each have many different accents, so it can be hard to define what makes an accent ‘British’ or ‘American’, but the two countries do sound different. Listen for the ‘o’ in hot to hear one difference. The ‘t’ sound is another to listen for: American pronunciations of bitter and matter will sound more like bidder and madder to British ears. Some words are pronounced differently too, like tomato (tomahto, tomayto) and herb, which Americans say without the ‘h’. (And don’t think that Americans dropped the ‘h’! The word was pronounced ‘erb’ until some British people started adding the ‘h’ in the 1850s.)

vocabularyDo girls wear hair clips or barrettes? Does a play have an interval or an intermission? Do you climb on a climbing frame or a jungle gym? If you said the second one, you’re probably American. There are hundreds of differences like these.

spelling Some spelling differences we see often, like colour/color and centre/center. But did you know about other differences like mollusk/mollusc and palaeontologist/paleontologist?

American English got its start when British settlers started colonies in North America. So why don’t we speak the same now? Here are three of the many reasons:

Reason 1 Sometimes British English changed and American didn’t. When America was settled in the 1600s and 1700s, English in Britain was very different from how it is today. The accents in the southeast of England mostly changed after English people went to America, and so American accents have some things in common with northern accents in Britain today, like saying the r’s in farmer and having the same vowel in bath and bat. American English also uses words that Britain stopped using like period (for full stop), transportation (instead of transport) and gotten (instead of got).

Reason 2People needed new words for new things. Nowadays, people in America and Europe find out about new inventions and discoveries at about the same time. But before air travel, television and computers, language travelled more slowly. So when people had new things, they invented new words. In the early days of cars, America had automobiles and trucks with hoods and trunks that drove on a highway, while Britain had motorcars and lorries that had bonnets and boots and drove on a motorway. When new vegetables were introduced to our diets, we borrowed names from different languages. Britain has courgette and rocket (or roquette) from nearby France, while America has zucchini [zoo-KEY-knee] and arugula [uh-ROO-gyu-luh] from its Italian immigrants.

Reason 3New country, new language. It’s mostly Noah Webster’s fault that American spelling is different from other English-speaking

countries’. Webster, who was born in 1758, was America’s first dictionary-writer and wrote the spelling book that American

schoolchildren used for 100 years. Since Americans had just fought a war in order to be independent from the British,

Webster felt that Americans should make their language different from British — and better too.

He tried to make English spelling look more like it sounds, so he changed labour to labor

and gaol to jail. (Some people in the UK like Webster’s spelling better, too!)

Some people worry

that television and the internet are making British

English more like American. They think that American English is “taking

over” and that British people won’t sound British anymore. They shouldn’t worry too much. Americans

borrow British words too, and our accents are becoming more different. Wherever English is, it won’t stop changing!

LANGUAGE

Answers on page 33

puzzlesWordsearch

C A B R E U J I N R A S T N E M E V A P

E N E U P A L B A T H J L K A S L U M E

N C R T R O E T I R O V A F L U K Q N L

T W G Y B N A R T B K L N A G S O K S P

R Q F B R I T I O L N V W E C E U K A M

E A A K I L R N A R E Y U N L O S W T A

R X V I S H O L I D A Y N B A P L A V X

E R O W U F U E T Y A Q N C O L N O C M

T E U O R W S I F U J D E V N R K O R I

Y M R U N P E M K L A Y X I E K L I N L

U N I I K Y R I K L S W R A S L I L H S

V B T F L H S B A R T Y L I A P Q A J T

G C E N T E R S J A K I S L H J S N Y U

F Y E H U M N K L A S P N O K A T O T B

S U N K R W I M J E Y H E B U P R A R J

A P G L L B R U O L O C K L O P E K I L

D L O M W E A N R U J S I D E W A L K M

B N O I T A C A V E R Y H A E M O P S V

R F I P M I O T X W Q O B E Z I L A E R

Y U P A N T S U D X Y W C I V B O K U P

Did you notice?The differences in British English and American English work in two ways in the wordsearch. Sometimes the spellings of the words are different e.g. color and colour, and sometimes the word changes e.g. holiday and vacation.Can you spot some patterns in the differences in the spelling of American and British English words?

Pants / Trousers

Color / Colour

Favorite / Favourite

Center / Centre

Realize / Realise

Vacation / Holiday

Sidewalk / Pavement

Tub / Bath


MIND READING BABIESJust like the alien and his plant, when adults talk to babies they often point at things and say what they are called. This is one way that children learn the names for things. It’s possible that children simply learn the names for things because they are looking at the object and hearing the sound, but if this were the case, there would be lots of funny cases of children calling their toys rather interesting names after seeing their parents trip over them! What children pay attention to is not just the word and the object but what the adult is trying to do and to do this the child must be a mind reader.

Children are aware of what adults are trying to do with words. Children do not learn words that adults say by mistake For example if an adult was to say “I’m going to hang this coat on that hook” only to miss the hook and say “whoops” the child does not learn that “hang” means to throw the coat on the floor.

Glarp!

Imagine you are at your friend Jess’s house with another friend, Ben. Jess asks Ben this question:

What does Ben mean? Well, we need to fill in a bit more detail.

SCENARIO 1: Ben loves the X Factor and always watches it SCENARIO 2: Ben’s family love the X Factor but he hates it

Are you a

Mind Reader?

GLARP!Imagine you are stranded on an alien planet and you don’t know what the creatures that live there look like let alone what language they speak. You encounter a horrible looking green creature. He points at a nearby plant and utters “glarp”. What does this mean? Can you guess? It could be the alien word for ‘plant’, the word for the type of plant it is, the word for ‘edible’, it could even be the word for the colour of the plant. There are loads of things our creature could mean by uttering “glarp”. This might sound like a rather ridiculous scenario, but it is in fact quite similar to one every baby faces as they learn their first language (but hopefully without the green creature!).

You might think that this is rather obvious, but it is very important. Many researchers have suggested that this mind reading ability is what makes humans unique. No other creature on the planet, even our closest ancestor the chimpanzee, can make the same judgements about other people’s minds as we can. We are so good at it that we even read the minds of animals - think about the last time you thought about how a dog was feeling. Mind reading is what we evolved to do when we became the first talking ape and it is what babies learn to do when they learn their first words.

So, in answer to the question “are you a mind reader?”, the answer is no, you cannot jump into other people’s thoughts on the bus by putting your fingers on your temple. BUT, you are reading minds everyday and it is one of the most important things you are able to do.

In the case of scenario 1, you might think that what Ben meant was ‘no, I don’t want go to the cinema because I will miss my favourite TV programme’, whereas in scenario 2, you might think that he means ‘yes, I do want to go to the cinema because it means I won’t have to watch the X Factor’. How is it the case that Ben, using the same words can mean two completely opposite

things? To understand what Ben means, we become mind readers; we are thinking about Ben’s thoughts and working out how his behavior is linked.

By now you probably think that mind reading is pretty easy. In fact, it is so easy that even a baby can do it. Many linguists believe that it is through mind reading that babies learn their first words.

JESS: Do you want to go the

cinema on Saturday night? BEN: X Factor is on TV on Saturday night


Most of you probably think the answer to this

question is “no”. If you are thinking of the kind of mind reading that is

done by putting your fingers on your temples and jumping into other

people’s minds, then you’d be right. That kind

of mind reading still only exists in films. But

true mind reading is something most people

do every day. What’s more, it’s part of how we use and learn language.

LanguageFactThe word for ‘underpants’ is the same in Dutch and Afrikaans. It’s ‘onderbroek’.


James has attended SKIP since he was a small child. To find out more about SKIP, head over to www.skipperu.org


Supporting Kids in Peru

(SKIP) is a charity that works with economically disadvantaged families in El Porvenir and Alto Trujillo which are on the North Coast of Peru. SKIP aims to help children in these areas get access to an education. Through getting an education, SKIP believes that children and their families can make positive changes to their community.

Lingo

In this issue we meet James, who lives in Peru and is 15 years old.

In Peru about 83% of the population

speak Spanish, which is the country’s

main official language. Spanish is

part of the Ibero-Romance groups

of languages and is second only

to Mandarin in terms of its native

speakers worldwide. —Peru also has up to 150 indigenous

languages still spoken within the

country – although historians think

that could once have been as high as

700! Today, the most widely spoken of

these languages is Quechua.

—Quechua is a Native American

Language and was the language of the

huge Incan Empire that once spread

across the Andes Mountains. Today,

about 9 million people speak Quechua

across 6 South American countries, and

in Peru it is still used by about 13% of

the population. —Many loanwords from Quechua are

commonly used in Peruvian Spanish,

even in non-Quechua speaking regions.

The most common of these are papa

(potato), cuy (guinea pig), and wawa

(baby). There are even some Quechua

words that can be found in English, for

example: llama, guano and jerky.

Factfile: Peru

Penpal

Peru

What languages do you speak? ¿Cuales idiomas hablas?

I speak Spanish and English.

Who do you speak English with? ¿Con quien hablas inglés?

I speak it with my teachers and friends at SKIP, my teacher at school and my sister is learning English too.

Do you like being able to speak another language? Why? ¿Te gusta poder hablar otro idioma? ¿Por que?

Yes, I like it because I think it is interesting to communicate with different people. It is also important for my life, to get a good job I need to know languages.

What are the differences between English and Spanish? ¿Cuales son las diferencias entre el inglés y el español?

Conjugation and verbs.

What are the similarities? ¿Cuales son las similaridades?

They have the same aim, to help people communicate and have dialogue.

What other languages would you like to learn? Why? ¿Cuales son los otros idiomas que te gustaría aprender? ¿Por que?

Mandarin, as I have been told it is the world language of the future. I would also like to learn French as it sounds so beautiful - also my sister is learning it.

What other languages do people speak in Peru? Do you know any phrases in another native language? ¿Cuales otros idiomas hablan en Peru? ¿Sabes decir algun frase?

We speak Quechua and Aymara. My communications teacher taught me some Quechua ‘ala lay, acha chan and aya yau’ which means ‘very cold, very hot and something hurts.’

What is your favourite word in English? Why? ¿Cual es tu palabra favorita en inglés? ¿Por que?

‘Keep On’ because it means to continue to follow your dreams and keep trying.

What is your favourite word in Spanish? What does it mean? ¿Cual es tu idioma favorita en inglés? ¿Por que?

‘Triunfar’- because it means we succeed. When you are triumphant you are satisfied.

What important Spanish word or phrase would you teach someone who was visiting Peru and didn’t speak any Spanish? What does it mean? ¿Cual palabra o frase en español enseñarias a alguien quien iba a visitar a Perú sin hablar español? ¿Que significa?

Esta Bien – because people say it a lot! As a question or a statement. It means “It’s ok.”

26 27www.lingozine.com

LANGUAGE

Answers on page 33

Family Reunions

English Catalan Faroese A B Canimal animal djór animal shtazë dierbad dolent ringur rău keq slegblood sang blóð sânge gjak bloedbone os bein os eshtër beencome venir koma veni vij komcorrect correcto rættur corect drejtë regcount contar telja număra numëroj teldrink beure drekka bea pi drinkfloat flotar flóta pluti pluskoj dryfflower flor blóma floare lule blomforest floresta skógur pădure pyll woudfruit fruto frukt fruct frutë vruggrass herba gras iarbă bar grashand mà hond mână dorë handheart cor hjarta cord zemër hartlake lago vatn lac liqen meermoon lluna máni lună hënë maanmountain montaña fjall munte mal bergsalt sal salt sare kripë soutsing cantar syngja cânta këndoj sing

Extract 1 by Jeff KinneyFirst of all, let me get something straight: this is a JOURNAL, not a diary. I know what it says on the cover, but when Mom went out to buy this thing I SPECIFICALLY told her to get one that didn’t say “diary” on it.

Extract 2 by R. L. Stine“Hey, Jodie – wait up!” I turned and squinted into the bright sunlight. My brother, Mark, was still on the concrete train platform. The train had clattered off. I could see it snaking its way through the low green meadows in the distance.

Extract 3 byIf there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years of being a kid, it’s that you have ZERO control over your own life. Ever since school let out, I haven’t had anything I’ve needed to DO or anywhere I’ve need to BE. But then, out of the blue THIS happened. This isn’t the first time Mom has sprung a trip on us without any warning.

Extract 4 byMom’s always saying that friends will come and go but family is forever. Well, if that’s true, I could be in for a rough ride. I mean I love my family and all, but I’m just not sure we were meant to LIVE together.

Extract 5 by“Pick a card. Any card.”I held the deck up to Ava and Courtney. They’re in my class. Ava Munroe and Courtney Jackson. The both laughed. “Steven, we know this trick,” Ava said.

Extract 6 by “When a werewolf creeps up behind you at night, he steps so silently, you can’t hear a thing. You don’t know the werewolf is there until you feel his hot, sour breath on the back of your neck.” I leaned over and blew a big blast of hot air onto the back of Tyler Brown’s neck. The kid’s eyes bulged out and he made a sick, choking sound. I love babysitting for Tyler.

Can you spot any patterns in the spellings of certain words (for a clue go to page 18!)

Jeff Kinney or

R. L. Stine?

Here are six opening paragraphs from stories by two different authors - three by Jeff Kinney, and three by R. L. Stine. Which author wrote which extract and how do you know? To help you get started, we have told you who wrote the first two extracts.

Guess theauthor!

Tips! Can you

spot any

patterns

in the first

lines of the

extracts?

Are there any similarities between the topics of the extracts?

Do you notice

any differences

between how

the words look

in the extracts?

puzzles

Bonus question: What language family do you think English might be a member of – Romance, Germanic, or something else?

Just as with people, languages can be related to each other by their descent from a common ancestor. For example, the Romance family consists of languages descended from the Latin language spoken in Ancient Rome, while languages in the Germanic family evolved from Proto-Germanic, a language spoken thousands of years ago in northern Europe.

The table below lists twenty English words along with their translations into Catalan, which is a Romance language, and Faroese, a Germanic language. The other columns show words in three further languages, which we’ve labelled A, B, and C. One of these languages is a Romance language, one of them is Germanic, and one of them is neither. Can you tell which is which?

Answers on page 33


David Crystal is one of the most famous linguists in the world. Most professional linguists work in universities but David is unusual because he works for himself. He write books and articles and travels the world talking about language. Not a bad job, eh?

David started out as a phonetician. That’s someone who studies the sounds of language. He began his career in 1962, working as a research assistant on a project at University College London called the Survey of English Usage. This was a project to collect a million words of spoken and written English, to see how people really used language.

After leaving the Survey of English Usage, David worked at the universities of Bangor and Reading. But in 1984 he decided to leave Reading and become a freelance linguist. This meant he was able to devote much more time to research and writing. David has written about such topics as how languages die out, what language

on the internet is like, and why text messaging is not about to cause the collapse of the English language. (Did you know, for instance, that in order to use text-message style abbreviations successfully, you have to be able to spell properly in the first place?).

David has written lots of influential books, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Txtng: The gr8 db8, Language and the Internet and Pronouncing Shakespeare (about how Shakespeare’s plays would have sounded when they were first performed). He has also written books with his son Ben (You Say Potato: A Book About Accents) and his wife Hilary (Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain). He also spends a lot of his time giving lectures and

visiting schools to talk about language.

If you want to know more about language and how it works, David’s books are a great place start!

You can also check out his website: www.davidcrystal.com

Famous Linguists

David Crystal

LanguageFact‘Je suis ce que je suis, et si je suis ce que je suis, qu’est-ce que je suis?’ is a French tongue-twister and means ‘I am what I am, and if I am what I am, what am I?’


LANGUAGE

Answers on page 34

Moritz’s Muddled Menu

puzzles

Moritz Mayr lives in Vienna, where he runs a small guest house. Lately he’s been getting a lot of English-speaking customers, so he decides to produce an English version of his restaurant’s menu. When he gets the English menu back from the print shop, he discovers that the printer has put all the dishes in the wrong order! Below you can see the original menu in the Austrian dialect of German, along with the mixed-up English menu.

Can you match the English menu items to the Austrian ones?

Once you’ve got the English menu in the right order, see if you can figure out how to write the following foods in Austrian German:

1. salad

2. tomato

3. cake

4. liver dumpling

5. cauliflower soup

6. apricot dumpling with whipped cream

7. fried liver with onions

8. ham hock with potato soup

9. pork cutlet with Brussels sprouts and horseradish

10. cake with plum compote

Finally, recall from the menu headings that the translation of “main courses” is “Hauptspeisen”. In German the word “Speisen” means “dishes”, and the prefix “haupt-” means “main”, so “Hauptspeisen” really means “main dishes”. The word “Speisen” also occurs in the other two menu headings, “Vorspeisen” and “Nachspeisen”.

What do you think the prefixes “vor-” and “nach-” might mean?


LANGUAGEpuzzles

The answers!PAGE 4Filip’s Philatelic Fix

The names on the six stamps are transliterated as follows:

1 LIUDVIG VAN BETKHOVEN2 GALILEO GALILEĬ3 AL’BERT ÉĬNSHTEĬN4 MAKHATMA GANDI5 CHARLZ DIKKENS6 ISAAK N’IUTON

In addition to the names, each stamp also has the text “POCHTA SSSR” (Post of the USSR), which marks its country of origin, and a value in kopecks (“K” or “KOP.”)

If you’re already familiar with the people on the stamps, you’ll realize that their names are spelled a bit differently in Russian. In English, we know these people as follows:

Ludwig van Beethoven (composer)Galileo Galilei (astronomer)Albert Einstein (physicist)Mahatma Gandhi (Indian national leader)Charles Dickens (author)Isaac Newton (mathematician and physicist)

Now that you know how to transliterate between English and Russian, see if you can transliterate your own name into Russian. (Note that not every English letter has a corresponding letter in Russian, so you might need to improvise!)

PAGE 5Tallying in Teleut

In Teleut, the numbers from 1 to 10 have simple names. After that, the names form a regular pattern. The words for 11 through 19 are the same as the words for 1 through 9, except that you write the word for 10 (“on”) before them. Similarly, the words for 21 through 29 are formed by combining the word for 20 (“ǰirme”) with the words for 1 through 9, and so on for the numbers in the 30s, 40s, etc. Here is Sargadan’s complete number table:

Just as human relatives tend to resemble one another, so too do languages from the same family. This resemblance is usually easy to see in the vocabulary of sister languages. Did you notice the similarity between most of the words in Column A and the Catalan words, and between most of the words in Column C and Faroese? Some of the pairs are exact matches (like “os” in Column A and Catalan, or “gras” in Column C and Faroese) and many more are very close (like “cord” and “cor”, or “blom” and “blóma”). Only a few of the word pairs are completely different (like “dolent” and “rău”, or “berg” and “fjall”). By contrast, most of the words in Column A don’t look

anything like the Faroese words, and those in Column C are usually very different from the Catalan ones.

The reason for these similarities and differences should be clear: the words in Column A come from a Romance language like Catalan, and the ones in Column C come from a Germanic language like Faroese. And this is, in fact, the case: Column A is Romanian, a Romance language spoken in eastern Europe, and Column C is Afrikaans, a Germanic language of southern Africa.

On the whole, the words in Column B don’t tend to resemble the words in any of the other

columns, so you probably guessed that this language is neither Romance nor Germanic. In fact, the words are from Albanian, a language of southern Europe which is in a separate family.

And what about our bonus question? You may have noticed that about half the English words resemble the Germanic ones, and about half of them resemble the Romance ones. This is because English has roots in both families! English originated as a Germanic language, but over time it has inherited a significant amount of vocabulary and other features from Romance languages such as French and Latin.

1 pir 25 ǰirme peš

2 èki 26 ǰirme alty

3 üč 27 ǰirme ǰeti

4 tört 28 ǰirme segis

5 peš 29 ǰirme togus

6 alty 30 odus

7 ǰeti 31 odus pir

8 segis 32 odus èki

9 togus 33 odus üč

10 on 34 odus tört

11 on pir 35 odus peš

12 on èki 36 odus alty

13 on üč 37 odus ǰeti

14 on tört 38 odus segis

15 on peš 39 odus togus

16 on alty 40 ķyryķ

17 on ǰeti 41 ķyryķ pir

18 on segis 42 ķyryķ èki

19 on togus 43 ķyryķ üč

20 ǰirme 44 ķyryķ tört

21 ǰirme pir 45 ķyryķ peš

22 ǰirme èki 46 ķyryķ alty

23 ǰirme üč 47 ķyryķ ǰeti

24 ǰirme tört 48 ķyryķ segis

In case you’re wondering, the Teleut numbers for 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 are as follows:

50 ölü60 alton70 ǰeton80 segizon90 toguzon100 ǰüs

Now you should be able to count up to 100 in Teleut!

PAGE 21Wordsearch

PAGE 26Guess the auther

PAGE 27Family Reunions

C A B R E U J I N R A S T N E M E V A P

E N E U P A L B A T H J L K A S L U M E

N C R T R O E T I R O V A F L U K Q N L

T W G Y B N A R T B K L N A G S O K S P

R Q F B R I T I O L N V W E C E U K A M

E A A K I L R N A R E Y U N L O S W T A

R X V I S H O L I D A Y N B A P L A V X

E R O W U F U E T Y A Q N C O L N O C M

T E U O R W S I F U J D E V N R K O R I

Y M R U N P E M K L A Y X I E K L I N L

U N I I K Y R I K L S W R A S L I L H S

V B T F L H S B A R T Y L I A P Q A J T

G C E N T E R S J A K I S L H J S N Y U

F Y E H U M N K L A S P N O K A T O T B

S U N K R W I M J E Y H E B U P R A R J

A P G L L B R U O L O C K L O P E K I L

D L O M W E A N R U J S I D E W A L K M

B N O I T A C A V E R Y H A E M O P S V

R F I P M I O T X W Q O B E Z I L A E R

Y U P A N T S U D X Y W C I V B O K U P

Extract 1: Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney

Extract 3: The Long Haul, Jeff Kinney

Extract 4: Hard Luck, Jeff Kinney

Extract 2: Goosebumps: The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, R. L. Stine

Extract 5: Goosebumps: Night of the Giant Everything, R.L. Stine

Extract 6: Goosebumps: Vampire Breath, R.L. Stine

How did you know?

Did you spot the speech marks? All of the opening paragraphs by R.L Stine start with speech. The speech is also given by someone in the first person, ‘I’.

Did you notice similarities in the topic? The stories written by Jeff Kinney all discuss family, particularly the character’s mother.

In all of Jeff Kinney’s stories, we imagine the character emphasising the words because they are capitalised. This does not happen in the extracts by R.L. Stine.

Did you notice the American spellings in the extracts by Jeff Kinney? The character writes about his ‘mom’ not his ‘mum’.


PAGE 31Moritz’s Muddled Menu

The correct English menu is as follows:

The German prefixes “vor-” and “nach-” mean “before” and “after”, respectively. If you guessed correctly, then gut gemacht (well done)!

1 Salat2 Paradeiser3 Kuchen4 Leberknödel5 Karfiolsuppe6 Marillenknödel mit Schlagobers7 Gebratene Leber mit Zwiebeln8 Stelze mit Erdäpfelsuppe9 Schweineschnitzel mit Sprossenkohl und Kren10 Kuchen mit Zwetschkenröster

The Austrian German translations of the foods are as follows:

LanguageFact

‘Estar más sano que una pera’ is a Spanish phrase which means ‘to be healthier than a pear’. This saying can be used like the phrase ‘as fit as a fiddle’ in English.

French

7

8

5

3

6

2

4

1

9

1 L’oieGoose

2 La chèvreGoat

3 La vacheCow

4 La pouleChicken

5 Le cochonPig

6 Le moutonSheep

7 Les PommesApples

8 L’AgriculteurFarmer

9 Le SoleilSun

36 Lingo Magazine

We are pleased to announce that Lingo will be at:

Language Show Live Olympia London, 16 -18 October 2015

Come to stand 804 to find out about Lingo, meet the team and grab some freebies!

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Documents

The language magazine for young readers - Babel Magazine | The … · 2020. 3. 19. · means farter! Are you, or is someone you know, a fingó? 10 How do humans beings speak: Vowels