There have been several attempts to teach animals language in the past. What we’ve learned is that some animals may actually have the capacity for language… but none have the speech capabilities that humans have. In humans, the larynx descends around the age of 2. This doesn’t happen with other primates. In the 1950s a chimpanzee (Vicky) was taught to speak, but she could only speak 4 words (Mama, Papa, cup, up) and they all sounded pretty much the same. Researchers finally realized that maybe it wasn’t stupidity that prevented animals from speaking languages – it was a physical barrier (the high larynx).

Koko is a lowland gorilla raised by Penny Patterson. Patterson was a graduate student at Stanford when she met and began to work with Koko. Koko is one of the only non-human primates who can "speak" decent Ameslan (American Sign Language). She’s part of the Gorilla Language Project; the project is the longest running inter-species communication project ever conducted.

If you believe the results (I do), they give us some incredible information about the intelligence of non-human primates. Koko can use at least 500 signs, and understands at least 1,000 signs. She can understand about 2,000 words of spoken English. Some people say that Koko is just signing for treats; however, all evidence seems to suggest that she actually understands what she is signing.

There are a few key things to note about Koko’s language ability. She has the ability to do object naming. This means she could create phrases for objects if she didn’t know their names. A lighter was a "bottle match", and her pet kitten was "All Ball". All Ball was a present for Koko – unfortunately, All Ball was killed by a car just a few months after Koko got her. Koko was devastated, and understood when Patterson relayed what had happened. She cried when she was alone.

Koko can lie. She can also use displacement (speaking about the past or the future – what has happened, what might happen). These are both really important in determining whether a creature truly has the capacity for language.

Patterson brought in another gorilla, Michael, to be Koko’s mate. It didn’t work. Their relationship was that of siblings, not sweethearts. In fact, Koko’s nickname for Michael was "stinky devil" – certainly not an intimate nickname. Michael passed away in 2000 (Koko is still going strong; she was born in 1971).

Koko’s IQ has been estimated at anywhere between 70-95. Considering the fact that the average human IQ is 100, these results are quite shocking. One of the questions that Koko got wrong on the test was this: Where do you go when it rains? The correct answer was supposed to be house. Koko picked a tree… Now – is that really wrong? The fact that she can do so well on a very culturally biased IQ test (biased towards humans) is so surprising to me.

Have you heard of Koko? What do you think about non-human primates and language? Do you think they can really understand and use it? Or are they just faking to please their teachers?

Etymologies:

• Fall. (Noun. Synonym for autumn – fall is actually only used in the U.S.). This is from 1664, and it’s short for “fall of the leaf” (1545).
• Halloween. (Noun. October 31st.) From about 1745. The word is a Scottish shortening of Allhallow-even (Eve of All Saints, last night of October, from 1556). In the Celtic calendar it was the last night of the year. It’s actually an old pagan holiday.
• October. (Noun. The 10th month of the year.) The word is from about 1050AD. Octo- is from Latin (= eight). October used to be the eighth month in the Roman calendar, but it’s the tenth month in the Gregorian calendar (what we use now).

Vocabulary:

• Recondite: adjective. Little known, obscure. “Her lectures were filled with recondite information.”
• Redoubtable: adjective. Formidable (like an opponent; can be humorous). “He is a redoubtable opponent in Battlefied 1943.”
• Refulgent: adjective. Shining brightly. “That fat cat has such beautiful, refulgent eyes.”

Enjoy this beautiful fall weekend.

In the wild, animals can communicate with different sounds and movement. Honeybees even have a way to convey where the best flowers and pollen are. Dogs can learn their names, and so can some cats. I think my cats know their names (Couscous and Bo), but they like to annoy me so they pretend not to. They certainly listen and come when I tap on the food can.

What would a human life be like if we were limited to such basic communication? What if all of our correspondence was so simple that we could only express a few emotions and a few basic wants and needs (food, water, shelter)? This is probably how our language started out thousands (millions?) of years ago.

Today there are somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 different languages spoken in the world. There are many more that are now extinct. Every single language (ever!) has been based on a limited number of sounds that all humans are capable of making. Now, an interesting thing to note is that after a certain age (usually around 2 years), it’s harder for the brain to develop synapses that will recognize certain sounds. In other words, if you aren’t exposed to certain sounds regularly by the time you’re 2 years old, you might lose the ability (or just make it really really hard to learn) to make certain sounds or even distinguish between certain sounds (example – for native Japanese speakers, the distinction between <l> and <r> is really hard).

So linguistics is a subfield of anthropology. It’s a way of studying cultures and exploring how culture is learned and taught. Without language, we would have trouble communicating our culture and passing us on – this is part of what makes us human. Language, culture, communication… I find it fascinating to study what really sets humans apart from the animals that share most of our DNA.

I wrote a post here about how cooking has influenced humans & how it has helped to define and impact our evolution. If you liked this post you’d probably enjoy that, too!

Etymologies:

• Assassin. (Noun. A murderer of an important person, generally for political or religious reasons.) This word comes from the Arabic word hashishiyyin (hashish-users). A slightly nutty Ismaili Muslim sect back in the time of the Crusades (1095 – 1291) had a reputation for going out and murdering enemy leaders after they got high by eating hashish.
• Hazard. (Noun. A danger or risk.) The French game hasard was “a game of change played with dice”. It might have come from Spanish azar (“an unfortunate card or throw at dice”). So games of chance are hazardous.
• Whiskey/Whisky. This is from a Gaelic word that literally means “water of life”. Hehehe.

Vocabulary:

• Avarice: noun. Extreme greed for wealth or material gain. “The president’s avarice kept him motivated.”
• Fulminate: verb. Express vehement protest. “The students fulminated against the new curriculum.”
• Mendacity: noun. Untruthfulness. “The girl was embarrassed by her past mendacity.”

Have a great weekend.

The Browns have one child; the Smiths have two children. Ah, that one is weird. This is an example of an irregular plural form. These nouns are still called variable nouns, they are just irregular. There are only a few hundred nouns like this, but they are the most interesting.

There are some nouns that are more ambiguous. Take wheat versus oats, for example. Wheat seems singular, but you could talk about a wheat field – many wheat plants – and that seems to be plural, no? Or what about oats? Oats is a plural, but it seems to be used interchangeably with the word wheat.

Here are some irregular patterns (oxymoron!):

• Adding -en to the end of a noun to make it plural. Child, children; ox, oxen; brother, brethren (this can also be brothers). This is a remnant from Old English; <-n> used to be a case marker for plural. Chaucer used daughtren for daughters.
• Changing the vowel in the middle of the word. Man, men; woman, women; foot, feet; goose, geese; tooth, teeth; louse, lice; mouse, mice. This is called mutation or umlaut. More on this in a later post.
• Changing <f> to <v> and adding an -es or -s. Calf, calves; elf, elves; half, halves; hoof, hooves; knife, knives; leaf, leaves; life, lives; loaf, loaves; scarf, scarves; self, selves; shelf, shelves; wharf, wharves; wife, wives; wolf, wolves. Some of these are starting to become regular, though: scarfs, leafs, wharfs, etc… are becoming more and more popular. I’m not sure why this happens.
• Just plain weird.  Cow, kine (more commonly cows); die, dice.

And here is a fun spelling poem I found. I’m not sure who it’s by, but I wish I had written it!

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

I thought it was enjoyable.

Simba = lion in Swahili. Thank Disney for this one.

Uhuru = freedom. Remember that character in Star Trek? (I don’t.) The actress who played Commander Uhara actually chose her own name based on this word.

Safari = journey. This makes sense.

Kwanzaa (the holiday, which started in 1966) comes from the Swahili phrase “matunda ya kwanza“, which means “first fruits”. Kwanza = first. Kwanzaa celebrates unity.

Jambo = hello. Jumbo, the popular circus elephant, was probably named after this word. Now we call anything that’s very large jumbo.

Swahili is only spoken by maybe 5-10 million people as a first language, but it’s a common lingua franca in East Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A lingua franca (literally Frankish language) is a language that’s used to communicate when 2 people (or more) speak different languages. For example, if I speak English and Harry speaks French, but we both know Italian – we can use Italian to communicate, and Italian would be a lingua franca. English is commonly used as a lingua franca, and this is part of the reason why English has become so popular. I think Swahili will grow from its use as a lingua franca.

Wikipedia says that Swahili is a national/official language of four nations. It’s the only language of African origin among the official working languages of the African Union.

Swahili has been influenced by many other languages. Almost 35% of the language comes from Arabic (12 centuries of trading with Arabic speaking traders), and it also has English, French, German, and Portuguese influences.

The word for Swahili in the language is Kiswahili (we hear this word sometimes in English too). Ki- is a prefix for languages.

I really liked learning about Swahili (I should say Kiswahili), so I may decide to do another one sometime soon!

World War II boosted the English vocabulary. The thing about world wars is that the participants are forced to be in contact with civilizations around the globe, whether they agree with those people and their ideologies or not. WWII first brought us blitz (1940, from German Blitzkrieg) snafu (1941, military abbreviation, ’situation normal, all f*cked up’), honcho (1947, from Japanese Hancho), and pin-up (1941, first was Dorothy Lamour). The atomic bombs created some menacing vocab: countdown, fallout, fission, fusion, mushroom cloud, and test site.

Next came the Korean War. Also known as The Forgotten War or the Unknown War, this war had an ambiguous ending and it’s culturally disremembered in the US. Brainwashing is a term from this war. It’s a direct translation of the Chinese term xi nao (1950). Chopper, slang for helicopter, is military slang from the same period (1951). I’m guessing the term comes from the chopping action of the helicopter blades.

The Vietnam war created and introduced even more words: defoliate, domino theory, napalm. Some words took on new meanings: a situation escalates, pacification meant to wipe out resisters, and hawks and doves were pro- or anti-war. Nixon’s use of the phrase the silent majority caused a wide spread of the phrase after a presidential address.

I got the idea for this post from a book I’m reading: The Story Of English by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran.

Check out all my Words of the Day posts HERE.

Etymologies:

• Avocado: (noun. A pear-shaped fruit with a rough leathery skin, smooth oily flesh, and a large stone.) The Aztecs first called this fruit the ahucatl (testicle). It was called this either because of a physical resemblance, or because they thought it was an aphrodisiac. The Spanish misheard the word as avocado, and brought the fruit along with the incorrect name back to Europe.
• Big: (noun. Of considerable size.) This one is weird… it’s such a common word, but the origin is actually still unknown!
• Dog: (noun. The pet.) Like big, dog also has no clear origin. It appeared in Old English (OE) as docga, replacing OE hund. Most other Indo-European languages have words similar to hund (=> hound) or chien (French), but one can find how dog arrived. The Spanish word for dog (perro) also appeared without a clear origin.

Vocabulary:

• Anachronism: noun. Something located in a time when it couldn’t have existed or occurred. “Everything looked just as it would have in 1776… except for one anachronism, the bright red fire truck.”
• Diaphanous: adjective. Light, delicate, or translucent. “The girl drew the diaphanous veil over her face.”
• Polemical: adjective. Of or involving dispute or controversy. “The polemical essay caused quite a stir in the academic community.”

Have a great weekend!

This is a tricky topic. There are pundits who criticize speech as being riddled with “errors” and “incorrect grammar”. I’m often one of them. We say people are lazy or uneducated if they cannot speak “properly”. But who are we to decide what “proper” is? It used to be “proper” to have sentences with scads of commas, like so:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

I cringe. Comma splicing is just one of the many reasons that I cannot stand Dickens. This is just a personal defect – many people love this crazy comma-man; I am not one of them.

So we know that language changes (a lot) over time. Slang terms change, come into popularity, and drift away. Examples: airhead (80s), as if! (90s), far out (70s), groovy (60s), Nowheresville (50s), niftic (40s), the bee’s knees (20s). We might be familiar with these words, but we don’t really use them much anymore.

Let’s get more drastic. Try comparing Old English and Modern English (Beowolf, opening lines):

Hwaet! They are like two different languages. Some words are similar, but it’s kind of like comparing German and English:

• Der alte Mann hat mir heute das Buch gegeben. (The old man has given me the book today.)

Actually, sometimes German and English seem closer than Old English and Modern English do.

I think the most important thing to remember is this (in the words of one of my favorite linguists, John McWhorter):

Language change is not decay.

I had a lot more to say on this, but now I’m beginning to ramble, so I will stop now and continue later. I believe that language change is not always decay, but I do appreciate a good grasp of grammar and proper writing. There’s a difference between beautiful new language conventions and laziness. It’s a hard distinction to make, though. I love ending sentences with prepositions, and I love the Oxford comma (red, white, and blue instead of red, white and blue). (Confession: sometimes I add Oxford commas to books… even library books.)

What language quirks (new or old) do you love or hate?

Is it easy? No. English is one of the most complex languages to learn. It’s not a very logical language. Our spelling system is crazy and so is our (very irregular) grammar. It’s not considered the most beautiful language, either. If there is one thing to take away from this, it’s that languages do not thrive because they are “perfect” in any way – they thrive mostly due to cultural (political, economical, religious, etc…) reasons.

The Arts & Amusement.

• People read for fun. There have been many prolific and talented English writers. A lot of contemporary music is in English. Movies, games, advertising, computer programs, plays, and other forms of entertainment are often available first (or only) in English.

Politics & History.

• Some of the most imperialistic countries were English speaking: mainly, Britain and America. Britain colonized most of Africa and India, and with that colonization came the spread of the English language. When the government, schools, or religious bodies in a country speak a certain language (English), the language will permeate through all aspects of a society.

Academia.

• The majority of scientific and technical information is available in English. Did you know that 80% of the information stored in electronic retrieval systems is in English? [Source: Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.] In many parts of the world (where lesser-known languages are spoken), the only way to read famous pieces of literature is to read them in English (Shakespeare, the Bible, etc…).

Simplicity.

• This is a sort of chicken-egg situation. It seems like many people know English, so more and more people learn it to be able to communicate easily…

Communication.

• With so many languages to choose from to learn, people want to pick the one that will be most useful. English is used as a communicating language – meaning that two speakers of other languages (say Swahili and German) may use English as a common language to speak in.

Before English, the prevailing language was Latin. We know how that ended up! In the coming centuries we’ll see if English holds its ground.

What would you pick as your second language? I’ve studied Italian, French, and German… I’m best at Italian. I want to learn Japanese and Spanish.