Language Trainers Blog

The United Nations HQ in New York celebrated Chinese Language Day on Thursday (April 20th) with a series of special events. The day has been celebrated since 2010, and the April date was selected from Guyu to honour Cangjie, the legendary figure in Ancient China credited with inventing Chinese characters 5000 years ago.

The day featured displays of traditional Chinese dancing, musical performances, art exhibits and a demonstration by the Chinese Health Qigong Association.

The UN Department of Public Information (DPI) introduced language days in 2010 to celebrate each of it’s official languages and to encourage cultural diversity. Chinese is one of the six official languages of the UN, along with Arabic, Russian, French, Spanish and English.

The other official UN Language Days were selected for their historical importance connected with each language:

• French (20 March – International Day of Francophonie)
• English (23 April – William Shakespeare’s birthday)
• Russian (6 June – Alexander Pushkin’s birthday)
• Spanish (12 October – Dia de la Hispanidad)
• Arabic (18 December – the date the General Assembly designated Arabic as the sixth official language of the United Nations in 1973)

There are some trademarked brands which have entered the English language as the word to use for any brand of that item. Sellotape, Hoover and Biro are all examples of this. The one I tend to use the most is Google. The latest word to be added to that list is iPad, which now seems to be the generic term for a tablet computer.

The trouble with this, though, is that brands which become synonymous with the product’s identity often lose the trademark altogether. If it is legally deemed to be too “generic” to be a trademark, then inferior products can use the name on their own packaging. This can be demonstrated with the case of aspirin. Aspirin was developed by a German company, Bayer AG, and was registered as a trademark in 1899. The company held the worldwide patent, but in 1917, Bayer’s patent for the product expired. Following World War I, aspirin lost it’s status as a registered trademark in the USA, UK, France and Russia as part of war reparations. Today, Bayer still holds the trademark in 80 countries, which means that in these countries, the word Aspirin must be printed with a capital A. Aspirin is a generically used term in Australia and New Zealand. Bayer also held the trademark for heroin, which was trademarked in 1898 as a morphine substitute.

A new mobile phone app is being developed to help save an endangered Aboriginal language.

Iwaidja is a language which is thousands of years old and is spoken on Croker Island, an island off the coast of the Northern Territory. With only 150 speakers of the language, it is one of Australia’s most endangered Aboriginal languages.

With the help of a government grant, locals are working with researchers from Minjilang Endangered Languages Project to log a dictionary and list of phrases to be utilised on the app, which is due to be launched in May. It is hoped that younger Indigenous generations will use the app to aid learning of the language, and to converse with current Iwaidja speakers.

I guess I never really thought that there would still be typewriters manufactured in this age of computing, but then again, I have seen some printers recently that were definitely more low-tech than the electronic typewriters I used when I was at school. Sadly, there was just one typewriter company left in the world, and it has had to close its doors because of low demand (although there still was some demand!). Godrej and Boyce, a company in Mumbai, India, once sold 50,000 typewriters a year, but lately were down to fewer than 800 orders, mostly for Arabic script.

There’s something about the typewriter that brings to mind a lone writer in a shack somewhere, with no company but a stack of paper that wants to be something great. No matter how convenient computers and word processors are, typewriters make me think of a different kind of dedication to work (of course, I couldn’t blog from a typewriter, no matter how romantic it might seem). I remember using a manual typewriter, too, with uneven spacing, tangled ribbon, and white-out sheets for correcting my mistakes.

It’s the end of an era that allowed people to create their own printing without a press. It’s sad, but it’s exciting to think about what might be the next step.

For a fuller article and some great pictures of typewriters through the ages, visit The Atlantic.

Vaguely related to my last post about Anglish, a modified version of English with mostly Anglo-Saxon roots, here is a new term for you: inkhorn. Not to be confused with eggcorn, inkhorn was a word used to describe what was thought to be an unnecessarily pretentious word borrowed into English from a foreign language, usually Latin or Greek. Its origin dates back to the period between Middle English and Modern English, when there was a lot of controversy about the proper use of the language. Some English speakers were quite keen to adopt new words from other places, and some were very strict about keeping their language pure (I would possibly have been in the latter camp).

An inkhorn was simply an inkwell made out of horn, and many people could not understand why this new term was necessary. A lot of inkhorn words did have a purpose, and no direct translation in English, but the problematic ones were the ones that already had a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon version.

In the end, many of the borrowed words, like celebrate, encyclopaedia, and ingenious, ended up replacing the now-archaic German-based words. Some were used for a short time, and then faded into obscurity (although words like expede still exist in other forms, like expedient). To combat the influx of foreign words, some purists tried to resurrect old Anglo-Saxon forms, and even went as far as creating their own new words. These words (such as gleeman for musician and foresayer for prophet) invariably didn’t make it through to modern times.

I wonder which terms from the present will be in use in 500 years. Will people still be saying for the win? I hope not.

Even though almost all Maori speakers have a fluent (if not very good) level of English, some researchers have proposed that there are still a lot of communication problems between Maori and Pakeha (non-Maori New Zealanders, but predominantly used to describe New Zealanders of European descent) when speaking English.  Most of the problems seem to arise from differences in non-verbal communication, such as eyebrow movement, hand gestures, and posture.

Even though miscommunication between Maori and Pakeha has a long history (dating back to before the (in)famous Treaty of Waitangi signing), the research proposal has been controversial in itself.  Some people support the idea of lessening misunderstandings, but some, including ex-MP John Tamihere, think the study is unnecessary and a ‘bloody waste of money’.

I think that the research could provide some valuable sociological insights into some differences between these two enmeshed cultures, but I’m really not sure how it will be used to improve interactions in the future.  Will people go to ‘how to understand your fellow kiwis’ seminars?

Do you think the research should be carried out?

Full story via NZ Herald, link via Language Museum, image via SMH.

Welcome to the brand-spanking-new Language Trainers Australia and New Zealand blog*!

Aussies and kiwis have a bit of a reputation internationally for not being awfully keen on foreign language learning, but I hope the fact that you are reading this means you aren’t described by the stereotype.  Our geographical isolation from the rest of the world has meant that historically there was no real need to learn new languages for communication.  Hopefully now that international travel and communication are both so easy, more and more people will start learning new languages.

This blog is intended to be a place where you can keep up with what is happening with Language Trainers, get some tips about language learning, and find out about language news, oddities, and interesting language topics from all over the world.  I hope you will drop by often!

As for me, I am a kiwi who has travelled extensively, speaks bits and bobs of quite a few languages, and is currently trying to learn Mandarin Chinese (as difficult as it is sometimes!).  I have a deep interest in language and communication, and hope that I can share some of that enthusiasm with you.

If you have an opinion on any of the posts here, or if you know of any interesting language sites or articles, please leave me a comment on the site, or send me an email.  I would love to hear from you.

Good luck in your language-learning endeavours, and I hope to see you here again soon!

*It’s a long name, but hopefully I won’t have to refer to it by its full name very often.
Image: spleeney via Flickr Creative Commons.