As part of our Signs of Life series, we bring you some of the finest interpretations of language in sign form from across the world. This one, close to home, was spotted in East London.
The Spag Bowl
Mar 25, 2014
Mar 20, 2014
American Association for Applied Linguistics 2014 Conference
We are getting ready for the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in Portland Oregon. We are bringing many new textbooks including new editions of best-selling titles Forensic Linguistics, Developing Materials for Language Teaching and Quantitative Research in Linguistics: An Introduction. Stop by to receive a 35% discount on all displayed titles and a tote bag with each purchase. Check out our program ad below.
Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Sign Language
For the 7th week of the Five Fun Facts about Languages series, we’re doing something a bit different and looking at a global language, or rather languages, which are completely different from any of the others we’ve looked at so far. Abandoning the world of spoken language, this week we present our Five Fun Facts about Sign Language!
1) Sign language shares many similarities with spoken language, and both are considered to be ‘natural languages’ by linguists. However, instead of using sound patterns, sign language conveys meaning through manual communication and body language, such as hand shapes, hand, arm or body movements and facial expressions.
2) The fact that sign languages have developed naturally, instead of being artificially created, means that hundreds of different sign languages are used around the world. Just as an English speaker would not be able to understand somebody speaking to them in Japanese, a user of English sign language cannot understand a user of Japanese sign language. In fact, even ‘English’ sign languages are very different, with American Sign Language being closer to the French version than the British.
Different sign languages use different words. This is the word for 'maths' in American and Japanese sign languages.
3) Sign languages have been used by groups of deaf people throughout history. We have evidence for the use of sign language from as early as the fifth century BCE, in Plato’s Cratylus. In it, Socrates observes “If we hadn't a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn't we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?" Juan Pablo Bonet’s 1620 publication, Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudo, is the first modern treatise of sign language phonetics, setting out a method of oral education for deaf people and a manual alphabet.
4) Sign languages are not mime and do not have to have a visual relationship to the things that the words express. They have complex grammars and, like spoken languages, organise meaningless phonemes (or cheremes) into meaningful semantic units.
In Czech sign language this means "Life is beautiful, be happy and love each other."
5) Just as with spoken languages, children who are exposed to sign language from birth will naturally acquire the ability to communicate using it.
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Hindi!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Mar 13, 2014
Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Swahili
Jambo! It’s week 6 in Bloomsbury Linguistics’ quest to find five fun facts about various languages from around the world. This week, we’re moving to a new continent - Africa. Please do get in touch with us @BloomsburyLing, #5funfacts, and let us know what you think about our Five Fun Facts about Swahili!
1) Swahili is a Bantu language, part of the wider Niger-Congo family. Swahili has only 5 million or so native speakers, but, as it serves as a lingua franca in much of Southeast Africa, the total number of Swahili speakers is over 140 million and it is one of the official languages of the African Union.
2) Beginning as a costal language before spreading along the eastern ‘Swahili Coast’, modern Swahili has been influenced by a number of languages over the years. Some Arabic has penetrated the vocabulary due to contact with Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the coast, and Swahili was for a long time written in an Arabic script. German, Portuguese, French, Hindi and English words have also been incorporated into the language. For example:
hoteli - hotel
picha - picture
muziki - music
redio - radio
3) Letters written in 1711 in the region of Kilwa, in eastern Tanzania, are believed to be the first ever documents to be written in Swahili. These letters were sent to the Portuguese people of Mozambique, as well as to local allies, and are preserved in the Historical Archive of Goa in India.
4) Swahili is one of the easiest African languages for English speakers to learn as, like English, it has no lexical tone, which is not the case in many sub-Saharan African languages. However, one of the main differences between English and Swahili is that Swahili uses particles at the beginning of the word to indicate verb tense (present, past, future) and person (I, you, we, they, etc).
5) Most people would probably assume that they know no Swahili whatsoever but if you’ve ever watched Disney’s The Lion King, you may actually know more than you thought! For example:
- Simba - lion
- Nala - gift
- Rafiki - friend
- Pumbaa - stupid or slow witted
- Shenzi (one of the Hyenas) - Uncivilized or savage
- Asante sana (in Rafiki’s song, beginning “Asante sana, squash banana”) - thank you very much
And, of course, Hakuna Matata really does mean no worries!
So, asante sana and remember to come back next week for something a little bit different - our five fun facts about Sign Language!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Mar 06, 2014
Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Hebrew
Welcome to week 5 of the Bloomsbury Five Fun Facts about Languages series. Today we're looking at a West Semitic language that fell out of everyday use for almost 2,000 years; here are Five Fun Facts about Hebrew! Share your thoughts with us @BloomsburyLing, #5funfacts.
1) Hebrew is historically regarded to be the language of the Hebrews or Israelites and their ancestors. Around 200 CE, Hebrew ceased to be an everyday spoken language, surviving through the medieval age only as the language of Jewish liturgy and rabbinic literature.
2) Dating to the 10th Century BCE, the Gezer calendar may be one of the oldest surviving examples of written Hebrew. Currently classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, scholars are divided as to whether the Semitic script is paleo-Hebrew or Phoenician. Written without any vowels, the calender does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it.
3) Hebrew was revived as a literary and spoken language in the 19th century. Initially the two aspects revived separately - literary Hebrew in Europe’s cities and spoken Hebrew mainly in Palestine, before beginning to merge at the start of the 1900's. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (אליעזר בן יהודה) (1858-1922), is often regarded as the "reviver of the Hebrew language.”
4) The results of Hebrew’s revival are unique. It is now the language of 9 million people across the globe, 7 million of whom live in Israel. There is no other example of a natural language without any native speakers going on to gain so many, nor of a sacred language becoming the national language of millions.
5) Hebrew sentences do not have to include verbs, as the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense is omitted. For example, the sentence "I am here" (אני פה) has only two words; one for ‘I’ (אני) and one for ‘here’ (פה).
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Swahili!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
- See more at: http://bloomsburylinguistics.typepad.com/continuum-linguistics/2014/02/bloomsbury-linguistics-five-fun-facts-about-hittite.html#sthash.gMyyRuIe.dpuf
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Hebrew!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Happy World Book Day!
Thursday 6th March 2014. A special day for books, for reading, for learning: all around the globe children are dressing up, reading aloud, receiving book tokens, celebrating their favourite stories. Well we couldn’t let them have all the fun! We’d like to know what your favourite Bloomsbury academic book is – what’s top of your World Book Day wish list?
Tell us here and not only will ten of the entries be featured in a special academic wish list blog, but ten lucky (randomly selected) entrants will win a paperback of their choice!
How are you celebrating World Book Day?
Feb 27, 2014
Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Hittite
We're turning back the clock for the fourth installment of our Five Fun Facts about Languages series to look at a very ancient language that is nevertheless linked to many in today's modern world. Not ancient Greek or Latin - that would be too obvious! No, today we're giving you our Five Fun Facts about Hittite! If you have any intresting facts of your own about this fascinating language, let us know @BloomsburyLing #5funfacts.
1) The Hittite civilisation flourished in Anatolia during the 2nd Millennium BCE. The language in which the Hittites spoke and kept written records is the earliest attested Indo-European language yet known, a language family that now includes Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Punjabi and Russian, among others.
2) Hittite preserves some very archaic features lost in other Indo-European languages, such as its retention of two of three laryngeals. The existence of these sounds had been hypothesized by Ferdinand de Saussure on the basis of vowel quality in Indo-European languages, but were unattested as separate sounds until the discovery of Hittite.
3) Hittite was written in a cuneiform script, adapted from the lingua franca of the ancient Near East, Akkadian cuneiform. Cuneiform means ‘wedge-shaped’, so named for the wedge shaped letters used to write the script, originally pressed into clay tablets using a blunt reed for a stylus.
4) Although neither Hittite nor any other ancient Anatolian language has survived into the modern era, its linguistic influence is still with us. The Hittite word for 'water', watar, and other Hittite linguistic artefacts are still recognizable if one scratches the surface.
5) In 1902, the Norwegian linguist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon became the first person to make a link between Hittite and other Indo-European languages. However, it was not until 1915 that Knudtzon’s hypothesis was proved to be correct. Working from a large quantity of tablets discovered at the site of the Hittite capital, Hattusa, Czech linguist Bedrich Hrozný used his background in Semitic languages to realise that the (transliterated) phrase:
nu ninda en e-iz-za-te-ni
wa-a-tar-ma e-ku-ut-te-ni
Meant:
Now you will eat bread and drink water.
After this, deciphering the rest of the language was (comparatively) a piece of cake.
- If this post has inspired you to expand your knowledge of the Hittite language, why not check out the Bloomsbury Companion to Historical Linguistics? Covering aspects of a number of ancient languages, including Hittite, this is a complete resource for anybody studying or researching historical linguistics. Buy your copy here!
- To find out more about Saussure's linguistic theories, try Roy Harris's authoritative translation of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (and use Saussure: A Guide for the Perplexed to help you make sense of it all!).
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Hebrew!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Feb 20, 2014
Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Spanish
For the third week of Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Languages, we've moved things up a gear and broadened our horizons to look at one of the biggest languages in the world. Here are our Five Fun Facts about Spanish! Let us know what you think @BloomsburyLing #5funfacts.
1) Around 406 million people speak Spanish as a native language across the globe. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers, at almost 117 million and the United States is second with 52 million. Spain itself has only the fourth largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, at around 46 and a half million. It is predicated that the USA will have taken the top spot by 2050.
2) After Mandarin and English, Spanish is the third most spoken language in the world by total number of speakers, and the official language of 22 countries. This is reflected in the 2007 statistics for internet usage, which shows Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the internet.
3) A manuscript dating to around 964 AD from the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla contains, between the lines and in the margins of the Latin text, glosses written in Romance. These las Glosas Emilianenses (Glosses of Saint Emilianus) are believed to be the first written examples of both Spanish and Basque. 4) It is commonly believed that Castilian Spanish is spoken with a lisp due to ‘prestige borrowing’ of this pronunciation from a 14th century Spanish king who spoke with one. This is just an urban legend. While it is true that the sound /θ/ is prevalent in Castilian Spanish, there is a systematic distinction from the sound /s/, which could not have occurred if the lisp story was true. Also, the /θ/ sound only began to develop in the 16th century, two centuries after the lifetime of the king with the lisp, Pedro (the Cruel) of Castile.
5) There are 355 words in the Spanish language, including murciélago, comunidades, ecuación and auténtico, which use all 5 vowels. A woman from Medellín, Amparo Atehortua, complied the list of these words after reading the positively scintillating Larousse dictionary cover to cover.
Make sure to come back next Thursday when we'll be attempting to present five fun facts about the earilest attested Indo-European language - ancient Hittite!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Feb 13, 2014
Bloomsbury Linguistics' Five Fun Facts about Jafaican English
It's week two of our Fun Facts about Languages series, and today we're back with five titbits of information about an emerging dialect of the English language in the UK - Jafaican. Give it a read and let us know what you think by tweeting us @BloomsburyLing.
1) Jafaican (from a blend of ‘Jamaican’ and ‘fake’) is a term used to describe an emerging dialect of English which combines Cockney, Jamaican, and other Caribbean, West African and Indian varieties of English. Linguists, however, prefer the term ‘Multicultural London English’, or ‘MLE’.
2) Made famous by figures such as Ali G, who used his own comic variant, experts believe that Jafaican will have replaced more traditional dialects such as Cockney by 2030. Variants are also spreading outside of London, to such exotic places as Milton Keynes, Reading and Ashford.
^ Cockney is being replaced by Jafaican ^
3)The increasing use of Jafaican by kids (and some adults) from pretty much all ethnic and social backgrounds is commonly blamed on a cultural infatuation with ‘the ghetto’. Researchers at Lancaster University believe it is actually a natural result of young people growing up in close proximity to a greater variety of Englishes, and not due to simple imitation.
4) There has been a strong backlash in some quarters against this spread of Jafaican. Some people see it as an undignified distortion of English. However, linguistics have long recognised that languages are always in a state of flux and that ‘standard’ English is just another dialect. Jafaican, linguistically, is just as good and grammatical as 'standard' English, so we should all ‘allow it’.
5) At first, some Jafaican phrases can seem baffling and impenetrable. To help out, here are some Jafaican terms commonly heard around London:
• Allow it/him: Leave it/him alone, don’t worry. “Wot you sayin’?” “Nah, it’s bare funny, allow it!”
• Bare: Very, a lot. "Dat was bare jokes", “Dat exam was bare hard.”
Remember: it's bare, not bear...
• Blad/blud/blood: Friend; a Jamaican term coming from the meaning of brother. ''Wat u sayin blad?''; ''Blaaaad this boy gettin me vex!''
• Chat: Talk. “Don’t chat to me.”, “What you chattin bout?”
• Creps: Trainers. ‘Dem creps are sick.’
Creps are trainers Crepes are French pancakes
• Safe/easy: Greeting or to indicate that something is good. ‘Yea, he’s safe bruv.’
• Sick: Good. "Dat Nando’s was sick, man."
• Yard: Home or area you live, probably deriving from ‘back yard’. ''Do you want to go out tonight?'' ''Nah im relaxin at my yard.''
Yard, sweet yard...
Make sure to come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Spanish!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Feb 07, 2014
Friday Crossword
It's Friday! To celebrate, Bloomsbury Linguistics has put together an 18 question crossword about all things linguistics. Click on the crossword below for a bigger (more readable!) copy. Print it out, give it a go and let us know how you get on @BloomsburyLing!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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