Confessions of a language addict's Blog

A little bit ago, I was looking for information on Greek when I came across a title, Teach Yourself Doric. Much to my surprise, however, it referred not to the Greek, but to a dialect of Scots. In the last couple months, I’ve revisited my Alsatian, reviewed a bit of German, dipped my toes into Dutch and, of course, learned a bit of Doric, which started the whole adventure into Germanic and into the question, What makes a language?

To visit forums and look at references, there seems to be some contention as to whether Scots is a language in its own right, or just a dialect of English. I would say that if it is a dialect of English, it is a dialect of Middle English, going back to the same base as modern English. At any rate, it’s not quite the same animal as modern English. I don’t think you can use different words for things as elementary as the verbs to do, to have and to go, the particle not and the numbers and claim that you’re speaking the same tongue. To be sure, with a common ancestor in Middle English, Scots and English have a lot in common. But there are differences, including in places where Scots is more conservative than modern English (like the word aabody, everybody, much closer to Old English than the modern English). And if it’s your life’s dream to understand Burns, ESL classes are not the place to go.

It should note that there is an English spoken in Scotland. It’s called Standard Scots English and it’s pretty much like British English with a different accent and local features. But there’s still a sizable population that not only considers itself Scots but communicates in a way that may be no easier to understand that Dutch or Frisian for a native English speaker. So for the moment, at least, it looks to me like they have their own language. You can find out more in Teach Yourself Doric, Doric for Swots and the Doric dictionary, as well as in Luath’s textbook for Sctos.

In the past, I’ve written about using your MP3 player for listening to lots of content and shuffling it around. But the longer I use my Nook, the more convinced that there’s something new and even more incredible out there. I’m not referring to the apps that you can get, either. Rather, it’s that an eReader provides an especially nice way of shuffling written content.

I’ve long advocated using multiple texts or study tools in learning a language. But in the old days, this meant a stack of books with bookmarks and a notebook to the side. With the eReader/tablet, though, your reader will remember where you left off with regular books while PDF apps like ezPDF will remember where you were in your PDF file, which you can read through just like a book.

There’s one other nifty thing out there these days: PrintToPDF. I use Firefox, and so have installed the PrintToPDF plugin, though comparable options exist for most browsers. The neat thing about this is that it allows you to go to a set of web lessons, print them to PDF and dump them on your eReader, thus providing that content when you’re not on wifi and remembering where you were reading the next time you pull it up.

If you’re looking for you next investment for language learning, I’d suggest the Nook Tablet or the Kindle Fire. This will enable you to carry around several books for your study and keep track of how far you’ve gotten with them for little effort beyond the occasional printing and syncing of files.

I wrote earlier about the problems of deciphering Akkadian, going from transliteration to normalization to translation. And you run into similar problems with Sumerian. Of course, if you want to capture the sound of Mandarin, you are left with pin yin, which fails to distinguish homophones that are clearly marked in the hanzi. Finally, there’s the perennial problem of bough, cough and enough. But even in a language with regular phonetic spelling like Spanish, problems arise. And with good reason. How we make language and how we interpret it differs.

In his Manual of Sumerian, Hayes talks about the difference between phonetic and morphological transcription. That is, when turning the Sumerian characters into a Latinized notation for the sake of organizing your thoughts on what represents what, is it better to capture the morphemes – the units of meaning – or the phonemes – the units of sound? Is a compromise possible? And if so, what?

To turn the question into English, let’s take a phrase:

I am going to go to the zoo tomorrow.

I’m gonna go to the zoo tomorrow.

Aym guhnuh gohtuhthuh zoo t’morrah.

The first of these is a morphological transcription: It captures the elements of meaning. The last is a phonetic transcription of what was said. The middle is a compromise: It clearly breaks out most of the morphemes and the one place where it runs things together is sort of an official misspelling. Which is best? Unless you like to read aloud, the first or second is far more convenient. It means that you can see what units are being put together and it assures that people with different accents will write the same thing. This makes writing a trusty way of communicating meaning, but not a trusty way of communicating speech.

There is something useful to be gleaned here: What makes the Cuneiform languages so hard to decipher is that there’s not a good balance between their representation of morphemes and phonemes. But though they are an extreme, they point to a problem even with a language like Spanish: To truly understand the spoken tongue and produce it requires a sort of normalization where sounds run together in order to figure out where one word ends and the next begins and just what the endings and beginnings of those words are. Getting at home with your language, then, is going to require going beyond text and trying to get a sense of how your language sounds in your head and coming off your tongue if you truly want a feel for the language you’re learning.

As I mentioned some time ago, the ability to update to my home site from blogger went away. Since then, I’d been updating by hand. But the updates have fallen by the wayside since I don’t often find the patience to post there. So this is where new Confessions posts will be found.