Applied Languages

Cambodia’s “jungle woman”, whose story gripped the country after she apparently spent 18 years living in a forest, has begun speaking normally instead of making animal-type noises, her father said.

Rochom P’ngieng, now 28, went missing as a little girl in 1989 while herding water buffalo in Ratanakkiri province around 600 kilometres (400 miles) northeast of the capital Phnom Penh.

In early 2007 the woman was brought from the jungle, naked and dirty, after being caught trying to steal food from a farmer. She was hunched over like a monkey, scavenging on the ground for pieces of dried rice.

She could not utter a word of any intelligible language, instead making what Sal Lou, the man who says he is her father, calls “animal noises.”

Cambodians described her as “jungle woman” and “half-animal girl” and since rejoining society Rochom P’ngieng has battled bouts of illness and was hospitalised in October after refusing food.

But Sal Lou said late Wednesday that this month his daughter had started to understand Cambodia’s Khmer language and could even speak the language of his ethnic Phnong tribe.

“She is becoming a normal human being like others. She has been starting to speak out now — she speaks the language of Phnong,” Sal Lou told AFP by telephone. “She can ask for food, water and so on when she feels hungry,” he said.

The apparent breakthrough happened after Rochom P’ngieng’s hospitalization, when doctors gave her injections to treat a nervous illness for a few days, Sal Lou said. “She is very gentle and I am very happy with her progress,” he said adding that her condition appears to be improving from day to day.

Sal Lou said his daughter had stopped trying to flee into the jungle as she had in the past. “Even though we tried to take her into jungle, she wanted to stay at home,” he said, adding that she is able to eat food now.

The jungles of Ratanakkiri — some of the most isolated and wild in Cambodia — are known to have held hidden groups of hill tribes in the recent past. In November 2004, 34 people from four hill tribe families emerged from the dense forest where they had fled in 1979 after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which they supported.

Read more: AFP

A linguist has revealed he talked only in Klingon to his son for the first three years of his life to find out if he could learn to speak the ‘language’.

Dr d’Armond Speers spent days translating phrases to communicate to his son Alec speaking like the creatures featured in space-based fantasy programme Star Trek.

The Minnesota native hoped the child’s first word would be ‘vav’ instead of ‘dad’. However, the language was problematic at this age because it lacked equivalent words for ‘bottle’ and ‘diaper’.

Despite his passion for Klingon, Speers denied he is a Star Trek fan, saying: ‘I don’t go to conventions or wear fake foreheads. I’m a linguist.

‘I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language.

‘He was definitely starting to learn it,’ he added. ‘When Alec spoke back to me in Klingon his pronunciation was excellent.’ Now 13, Speers’ son does not speak Klingon at all.

The language was developed after Spock actor Leonard Nimoy decided the creatures should have their own language. Developed by an expert, Klingon has 21 consonants, five vowels and is the most spoken fictional language in the world.

Read more: Daily Mail

Researchers have used a rare surgical procedure to map the part of the human brain associated with processing language, including grammar and speech. Three patients who were getting brain surgery to treat epilepsy agreed to have the electrical activity in their brains measured while they were asked questions about language.

The patients all had a network of electrodes placed into their brains to determine which regions were healthy and which were causing the patients’ seizures. Surgeons use the technique to pinpoint which areas of the brain to remove to stop the seizures.

The researchers asked the patients questions after the electrodes were inserted and before the surgery was scheduled to begin. The patients, while awake and responsive, were asked to repeat a given word, then to give derived forms of the word, such as plurals for nouns or past tense forms for verbs. The patients were also asked to mouth the words without speaking.

The researchers used a procedure called intra-cranial electrophysiology to measure brain activity while the patients were being quizzed on grammar. The technique gave the scientists information on changes in activity accurate down to the millimetre and the millisecond.

Because opening a person’s skull and inserting electrodes into his brain is something surgeons would only do when medically necessary, the study gave researchers a rare look into human brain function. Researchers in other fields of neurology can use animals to study brain activity, but complex language is unique to humans.

Neurologists studying language do use MRI scans of the brain to map where language is processed, but the resolution of such scans is much lower than the intra-cranial technique. The research focused on a portion of the brain called Broca’s area, known to be important in language and speech.

French doctor Pierre Paul Broca found in 1865 that two of his patients who were unable to produce more than a few words had lesions on their brains in the same spot. “In the 150 years since this discovery, progress in the understanding what precisely Broca’s area contributes to language has been disappointing,” said Eric Halgren of the University of California at San Diego.

The research found that the different language processes the scientists tested were in separate but partly overlapping locations within Broca’s area. They found that the brain’s computation of vocabulary, grammar and articulation took place very quickly: roughly 200, 320 and 450 milliseconds, respectively.

“We showed that distinct linguistic processes are computed within small regions of Broca’s area, separated in time and partially overlapping in space,” said Ned Sahin of UCSD, first author on the study, which appeared this week in the journal Science.

Sahin said the research dispels some notions that are still taught in medical textbooks, such as the idea that Broca’s area is only involved in speaking, while reading and hearing are handled in a different part of the brain. “Our task involved both reading and speaking, and we found that aspects of word identity, grammar and pronunciation are all computed within Broca’s area,” he said.

Read more: CBC News

Poetry written in regional dialect helps preserve local language and way of life in a globalized world. But a group of German and Scottish poets who have translated it found out just how similar Europeans are.

From landlocked farms in the Franconia region of Bavaria to fishing villages on the coast of Scotland or the Shetland Islands, regional dialects throughout consolidated and globalized Europe are something of an endangered cultural resource.

The task of preserving them goes in part to dialect poets, including two Germans and two Scots who have been involved in a project to translate regional verse.

Last year they held a workshop in Fife, Scotland, where they communicated through oral translators and were provided with literal “gloss” translations in both languages of each other’s poems. Today, they say the experience has had a lasting effect on how they view their poetry.

The sentiments of dialect poems are often expressed through rustic and geographically-bound language. While Franconian poets often work with imagery and idiomatic expressions based on a life of farming, the Scots poets do so with a life of fishing in mind. In some instances, this makes literal translation impossible and forces the poets to search for comparable literary devices.

Isabel Cole organized the workshop and edits a Berlin-based journal of German literature in English translation called “no man’s land.” She said dialect is less accepted in Germany as a form of literary expression than it is in Scotland.

“I think if people are open-minded about literature, dialects or non-standard literature, it is a real enrichment,” said Cole. “That’s something I actually miss in standard German literature. One thing I like about Germany is how many dialects there are, and how people cultivate their dialects. They have really different ways of expressing themselves.”

Alexander Hutchison, who lives in Glasgow, is not optimistic about current attempts to cultivate dialect in Scotland’s schools, he said that in poetry the Scots dialect is every bit as viable a form of self-expression as standard English.

“If people don’t understand the dialect, they can’t connect,” he said. “But if they do understand it, then there’s an immediacy – a personal element – that you cannot get in the parent language. There’s just as much possibility of a lack in the parent language as there is in the dialect. They operate in different dimensions to me.”

Although Hutchison expressed similar sentiments while speaking about his desire to preserve Scots and see it flourish, he compared the dialect to a “threatened habitat,” endangered by time and changing patterns of human behavior. Having lived for years in North America, Hutchison said he understands the pressures modern existence exerts on local cultures.

“I’m always wary of standardization, of people trying to impose things. As a poet, I never want to make rules for other poets.”

Read more: Deutsche Welle

In a recent translation of War and Peace, Platon Karataev, Tolstoy’s kindly peasant, addresses his interlocutor as “little falcon”. It just doesn’t sound right, reminding of someone from Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Remember Montigomo Hawk’s Claw?

Actually, “little falcon” is a literal translation of the Russian word sokolik, an intimacy or endearment that is still used by older people.

The Russian language is full of such words: First, the Russian national character is expressive and emotional, and one aspect of it is that it has so many diminutive adjectives and nouns (hence attempts to render them in English by the word “little”); second, the language itself offers a variety of ways to be expressive and emotional. One of them is suffixes. Russian is sometimes called the language of suffixes.

Russian suffixes express an extremely wide range of emotions and attitudes. They can produce words that are caressing, diminutive, familiar, vulgar or contemptuous.

Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka studied the way Russian suffixes work with Russian personal names. She says the meanings expressed by names with suffixes are so rich and complex they cannot be represented by simple labels such as “affectionate” or “scornful”. Some are ambivalent.

The suffix ka (as in Mashka) may express familiarity or “anti-respect” but it becomes diminutive and even caressing in Mashenka.

Ik (the suffix used in Karataev’s sokolik) is diminutive when used with masculine names. People use it when they talk to small boys, who begin to resent it in their early teenage years.

In English, suffixes are rarer, and they are less expressive. Most commonly, standard short forms such as Tom or Bill are used with regard to people one knows well. Sometimes, such short forms are preferred by the person and are used officially as in Jimmy Carter rather than James Earl Carter, as Leonid Brezhnev’s letter of congratulations was addressed to the then president-elect.

Translators of fiction face enormous problems rendering the expressive range conveyed by Russian suffixes. Simple shortening has become widespread, at least in male names. Increasingly, people prefer to be called Vlad or Stas. We’ll see how that plays out.

Read more: Telegraph