Applied Languages

As the old Chinese saying goes, one word is worth a thousand pieces of gold, but moves to update 44 characters in China’s historic lexicon could cost the nation a whole lot more.

Scholars from home and abroad have reportedly worked for eight long years on revising the way some of the language’s 8,300 standardised characters are written. The proposal to tinker with 44 characters was made public by the Ministry of Education and State Language Commission on 12th August 2009.

Those behind the proposed moves say they have received waves of support for the changes, while those in the publishing industry as well as netizens have overwhelmingly shot down the plan, with many citing the financial implications and potential impact. Suggested revisions include changes to the angles and length of the writing strokes of the 44 characters, which include commonly used words such as cha (tea), chun (lip), sha (kill) and qin (intimate).

So far, there have been no clear reasons given by the ministry or experts who suggested the changes. “According to our studies, 67 percent of respondents favour the proposed revisions of the 44 Chinese characters, while those opposed to the proposals account for only 6 percent,” said Wang Ning, a professor at Beijing Normal University who worked on revising the vocabulary.

She did not reveal how many people had been involved in the study but officials at the Ministry of Education, who invited the public to air their opinions about the proposals via email, letter or fax before next Monday, said the statistic was from the near 1,500 respondents. “We proposed the revision according to the principle of Chinese traditional calligraphy practice,” said Wang, who explained the new standard 44 characters would conform to the typeface for printing during the Song Dynasty (960-1276). “The revision of 44 characters accounts for less than six per every 1,000 characters in the glossary.”

Small changes can have a huge economic impact on the publishing industry, however. “Revising 44 Chinese characters would immediately lead to a total overhaul of dictionaries, textbooks and all other books across the country,” said a spokesman for the State-run Xinhua Bookstore, one of the publishing companies in China responsible for a combined output of around 330 billion yuan ($48.32 billion).

The company has printed, on average, 8 million volumes of the Xinhua Dictionary annually for the past 50 years, he said. If the proposals get the green light from the State Council, all the dictionaries already produced would need to be recalled, retyped, reprinted and rebound. “Imagine how mammoth the costs would be,” he added and estimated that, with one Xinhua Dictionary costing around 10 yuan ($1.4), the impact could run into billions of yuan.

And the effects will not just be confined to the publishing industry. Citizens would have to change their bank accounts and identity cards, which cost 20 yuan for every new application, and companies would have to change their name and signage.

Read more: China Daily

If you thought that English is the language of the 21st century, think again. In Europe, the future could be Latin. “It’s not practical if you have to translate the name of an EU programme into 23 languages, so if you have a Latin word which can be pronounced in all 23 and means something at the same time, it’s practical,” European Commission translator and classical linguist Wolfgang Jenniges said.

In the EU, languages are big political business. Each member state fights fiercely for its national tongue, with EU texts routinely translated into all 23 of the bloc’s official languages. As long as the EU has enough computer memory and printer paper to handle 23 versions of every text, it is a perfect political solution.

But trouble starts when there is only room to use one word from one language – such as when creating an internet domain name. English, the EU’s most widespread language, might seem to have the advantage in such questions. But other member states fear that too much English use would cement it as the EU’s unofficial working tongue, a politically impossible position. “English has become the lingua franca, but we are not allowed to say so,” one EU linguist commented.

The EU’s solution has been to find a politically neutral language in the only place it could realistically look: European history. “The fact that Latin doesn’t belong to any one nation makes things easier,” Jenniges said.

With Latin at the root of many of the technical, scientific, religious and legal terms in Europe, Virgil’s language is perfectly placed to become the EU’s virtual language. “There is a dose of Latin in all 23 EU languages: the dosage varies, but it’s always there,” the linguist pointed out.

In a striking blend of ancient and modern, the EU has therefore adopted Latin titles for some of its top internet addresses. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg has the domain name “curia” – Latin for “court.” The council of EU member states uses the domain name “consilium,” Latin for “council.” Both those names are sub-addresses of the EU’s web domain, “europa” – the Latin name for Europe.

EU projects are also being given Latin names. A recent translation contest was called “juvenes translatores” (“young translators”), while the EU has a “Tempus” (“time”) project for upgrading universities outside the bloc.

Classical names are even coming back into fashion for EU military missions. In recent years, the bloc has run operations named Althea, Artemis, Themis and Concordia – the goddesses of healing, hunting, justice and reconciliation.

The tradition was reinforced in December, when the EU sent a fleet of warships to fight Somali pirates under the codename “Atalanta” – in Greek myth, the only woman to sail on the quest of the Golden Fleece. Those names “transcend modern cultural and historical references of a national nature, as well as linguistic considerations,” an EU official said.

Admittedly, EU-watchers are not likely to have to reach for their Latin dictionaries any time soon. Any decision to extend the use of Latin on a larger scale would be “eminently political,” and would have to be preceded by “the renewal of Latin teaching in schools and universities almost from scratch,” Jenniges pointed out.

But with political sensitivities showing no sign of fading, the EU may well find that the simplest way of avoiding fights between living languages is to look for more and more names in a dead one.

Read more: EarthTimes

If you have ever wondered about the origins of many of the words and phrases Americans use every day, Mahmoud El-Kati has an answer. His new book, “The Hiptionary,” examines the influence of African-American linguistic usage on U.S. culture as a whole. El-Kati taught history at Macalester College in St Paul for many years. As a result, he is well aware of the power of language.

“The Hiptionary” is a collection of essays and definitions El-Kati uses to explain the origins of different words. He said many of us use terms essentially unchanged since they were brought over from West Africa in the times of slavery. “Okra, banjo — people use those words every day,” he said. “Gumbo, OK. Booba has been corrupted to mean ‘bubba,’ but it is a corrupted Yoruba word.”

Then El-Kati gets on to neologisms, those words which have been given new meanings through adaptation and augmentation in the way they are used. ”Cool has been reinvented not to mean cool. It’s an attitude, not ice,” he said. “Joint — I don’t know how many times ‘joint’ has changed. Juke joint, joint can be the jailhouse. Joint can be smoking marijuana. Now joint is a song, people like this joint as opposed to that joint.” The list is goes on and on — bag, chill, rap, cook, and of course, hip.

Mahmoud El-Kati said he wants to inform people about linguistic roots. And he also wants to start a larger discussion. He said it’s time to acknowledge there are different types of American English.

El-Kati has long argued that people are the product of their culture more than anything else. He says language is an expression of culture, and that American linguistic usage is, as he puts it, Africanized.

“African-Americans have been central to the development of what we call American culture,” he said. “That is undeniable. We need to stop playing games around this idea of race, that this belongs over here because it’s white and this is black. Everybody in this country uses some black English.”

El-Kati points back to the way spirituals became a part of the larger musical culture during slavery. It’s a pattern of cultural influence and adoption which continues. Other examples include the blues, jazz, rock and roll and now hip-hop, which El-Katie describes as the largest ecumenical movement in the world.

He argues, though, that by and large, African Americans aren’t credited for their influence. He dedicates his book to the first black Rhodes Scholar, Alain Locke, and quotes his writing. “It almost passes human understanding how a people can be so despised and yet artistically esteemed. So ostracized and yet culturally influential. So degraded and yet a dominant editorial force in American life,” Locke wrote.

“That pretty much says it for me, the peculiar relationship that African people have to the American Republic,” he said. El-Kati said he doesn’t expect everyone to agree with him. Indeed he hopes his book will generate discussion.

Read more: MPR News

From August this year, civil servants under the age of 50 in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, have been told to attend training in five foreign languages, as well as common spoken Chinese and computer skills. The foreign language courses were the most noticeable part of the training program. The aim is that by the end of 2010, all civil servants in the city will have to grasp at least 300 daily expressions in English and 100 daily expressions respectively in Lao, Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese, which are used in countries bordering Yunnan. The civil servants’ proficiency in these five foreign languages will influence their future promotion prospects.

Kunming is a famous tourism destination, which borders several Southeast Asian countries. Recent years have seen a sharp increase in foreign trade there, resulting in a huge lack of professionals with foreign language skills. Kunming trains at most 200 professionals in uncommon foreign languages. This does not match Kunming’s status as China’s “bridge” connecting countries in Southeast and South Asia. Therefore, the Kunming Municipal Government decided that local civil servants should take foreign language training.

What the public is most interested in is whether it’s necessary for so many civil servants to take foreign language training almost at the same time. Besides, is it possible for the civil servants to improve their foreign language proficiency within this limited time? They are worried that this will become just another vanity project.

Some supporters of this training program also point out that to learn 100 daily expressions of a certain language does not necessarily mean that someone has mastered the language, but that the expressions will be helpful in daily communication with foreigners. Civil servants capable of these expressions could be able to avoid many misunderstandings in communication with foreigners.

Read more: Alibaba

Bilingual people are unable to completely switch off their second language, even when reading in their native language, new research suggests. The study, which was published in the August issue of Psychological Science, found that overlaps between the two forms of communication may speed comprehension.

Researchers from Ghent University in Belgium had 45 college students who spoke Dutch as their native language and English as a second language read several sentences written in Dutch.

The sentences contained cognates, which are words that originate from the same ancient language and have retained a similar meaning and form across languages. The English word “cold” and the German word “kalt” — both derived from Middle English — are cognates.

While reading the sentences, the researchers recorded at what points the students’ eye movements paused. This is called a “fixation location,” the study authors explained in a news release from the Association for Psychological Science.

The study found the bilingual students spent less time looking at the cognates compared to the ordinary Dutch words, suggesting that there are overlaps in the brain’s processing of the two languages that speed up cognate comprehension.

For example, the researchers found that in the sentence “Ben heeft een oude oven/lade gevonden tussen de rommel op zolder” (“Ben found an old oven/drawer among the rubbish in the attic”), the bilingual students read “oven” more quickly than “lade.”

Even though participants did not need to tap into their second language to read their native language, the study suggests the second language is always active, and that being bilingual impacts processing of the native tongue, too.

Read more: US News