English: the world's second language

The link below is to a TED talk by Jay Scott Walker about people’s enthusiasm when it comes to learning English.

Jay Scott Walker is an American inventor and entrepreneur. He is the chairman of Walker Digital, a developmental business systems laboratory.  The company specialises in creating applications for mobile phones and the internet. In 1992 Walker co-founded New Sub Services which is today called Synapse Group, a company that processed magazine subscriptions. He won the “Direct Marketer of the Year” award in 1999 as a result of helping the company to make approximately $300 million. In 2004 and 2005 Synapse came in the top 25 of a poll of the best places to work in America.

Jay Walker is also a board member of many societies that look for solutions to the world’s problems, including The Atlantic Council, The Preventative Medicine Research Institute, World Information Transfer, Inc. and TED.  At his home in Connecticut there is an enormous library split over various levels with very strange architecture. It has over 50,000 books and he calls it “The Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination”.  Unfortunately, it’s not open to the public.

Follow this link to watch Jay Scott Walker’s TED video: The World’s English Mania

Interesting words from the youtube video:

Hysterical – crazy; acting irrationally.

Pandemonium - A state of total disorder.

Deafening – very loud; so loud that it causes people to lose their hearing

Rapture – In Christianity this refers to the return of Jesus Christ.

Gruelling – An adjective used to describe a very difficult task.

English is international

False friends... they can make you look very silly!

A few years ago, when my Spanish language learning skills weren’t quite as strong as they are now, I was in a bar in Valencia trying my hardest to chat up a pretty Spanish girl. I was trying to explain to her that I felt embarrassed about the fact that I couldn’t express myself as well as I wanted to, and that in English I was much funnier! But I got caught in a false friend trap. It wasn’t that she was trying to be a false friend, it was a linguistic false friend. Instead of telling her that I was embarrassed, I told her that I was pregnant! It was only later on when I went home and did some vocab revision that I realised why she had looked so disturbed by what I had said.

Note to self: “embarazado” does not mean “embarrassed”, it means “pregnant man” and is a definite, and somewhat confusing, turn-off for pretty single ladies.

Has anybody else ever fallen into a false friend trap?

Place names and pronunciation... What should we do?

Having read a thread on languagehat about the pronunciation of “in re” and other Latin words that are used in English, I began to think about the way foreign accents are used in English. There are numerous foreign words that have been adopted into English. Words borrowed (stolen?) from French and Latin often provoke varied opinions regarding their pronunciation. People tend to question whether they would sound pretentious or risk being misunderstood if they pronounced a word with French origins in a French accent while speaking English, or whether they might sound pretentious simply for using the foreign term in the first place. Sometimes it’s not even a question of whether the person speaking thinks they might sound pretentious. It’s possible that the pronunciation of a certain part of an adopted foreign word is unfamiliar to an anglophone, like the rolled “RR” in Spanish or the guttural French “R”.

It seems that most people tend to think that it’s best not to apply a foreign accent when using adopted words in English, but it’s a bit of a minefield. When I’m speaking to my friends I get a bit annoyed if they pronounce Paris with a French accent (Pari with the guttural “r”), or if they say “Barthelona” with a Spanish accent, but at the same time I think I would get slightly irritated if they pronounced Mont Blanc with a totally English accent as if it were “Mont Blank”. I think it’s with place names that some interesting ideas arise as well as some good points for discussion. If you are not certain how people living in the area would pronounce the town, city or country then perhaps it’s just best to say it with an English accent, that is, of course unless you’re talking about the Thai island of Phuket!

To read the thread on languagehat about the pronunciation of “in re” click here.

Most of us could use our mobile phones with our eyes shut and our hands tied behind our backs, so why not change the language on your phone to the language you are trying to learn. You probably know where the messages are, and how to find different apps regardless of the language, so it’s a great way to have an extra bit of language immersion in your life without feeling like you’re studying. It’s almost cheating! But, before you know it you’ll have acquired a new collection of technology vocab just by getting your phone out of your pocket! Just make sure you remember how to change the language back to the original language in case you get stuck, or have a dictionary at home in case of mobile emergencies! Linguistic immersion is the most effective way to improve your language learning.

Most of us take language for granted.  It’s just something we learn when we are growing up. How often do you think about what it might be like to communicate without language? How often do you contemplate what it might be like to try and understand your surroundings and even yourself without language?

If you want to learn a foreign language or you speak more than one language, then you are in a privileged position. You have more opportunities in job sectors, you can travel more confidently and learn about different cultures by speaking to local people, and you can also consider how words work and change between different languages.

Walter Bejamin was a philosopher and intellectual who lived from 1892 to 1940 and he had some really amazing ideas about different languages and cultures.  In his essay of 1923, “The Task of the Translator” he discussed how translations of literature often underline aspects that are not so obvious in the original, and that some parts of the original just don’t translate into the target language.  This is one of the things a person learning a new language will discover; there are lots of phrases that don’t have an exact equivalent in another language.

You may be asking, ‘how does this make us philosophers like Walter Benjamin was?’

Well, when you find a phrase that doesn’t really translate word for word into another language you might think about why it doesn’t.  This could lead to a better understanding of what it is we are trying to express with words. Walter Benjamin believed that the difference between languages was the key to philosophical truth. Do you think learning another language can bring you closer to understanding the way your own language works within a specific culture?