Author: 101translations

Surnames have all sorts of origins. Often they are associated with a particular place, or with a particular trade. For example, an English-speaker whose surname is ‘Cooper’ can reasonably assume that one of their ancestors worked in the barrel-making business.

In Italy, some of the most intriguing, and saddest, origin stories for surnames are associated with that country’s long history of caring for abandoned newborn infants. Italian civil records contain many examples of children for whom little background information is available because they were abandoned at or shortly after birth. Many were born out of wedlock to young, poor, unmarried mothers, who chose to leave them at a ruota dei proietti or ‘foundling wheel’ that allowed them to discreetly deposit an infant at a suitable establishment. 

Having no knowledge of who the babies’ families were, the authorities often gave them surnames such as ‘Esposito’, which means ‘exposed’ or ‘abandoned,’ ‘Innocenti’, which means ‘innocent one’ or ‘Trovato,’ which means ‘found’. Many of these surnames are still relatively common today, and anyone bearing one is likely to have an ancestor whose life started out in a foundling hospital.

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One of the team-members of 101translations recently witnessed a crime taking place and had to give a police statement. Trying to be as helpful and specific as possible, she described the assailant as having mauve trousers and a cerise top. The male police officer looked baffled, so his female colleague leaned in to explain: ‘That’s purple and red, Bob.’

Since the first research on the topic was carried out in the 1970s, investigations consistently show that women, statistically speaking, tend to have much larger vocabularies for colour than men, and that this trend hasn’t changed much despite the dramatic social shifts that have taken place in many societies since then. 

So what’s the reason for the difference?

Women in many cultures and linguistic contexts still get to choose clothes from a much wider colour palette than men so that’s probably one of the reasons, if not the main one. But research suggests that some men are also reluctant to learn more words for colours, or to use them if they know them, because of ongoing negative stereotyping of men who are seen as being interested in ‘women’s topics.’ Research also suggests that women tend to be better at discerning assorted colours and shades, although it’s not clear whether this is an innate tendency, or a learned behaviour from simply being exposed to more colour choices in their daily lives. 

The topic of sex differences in language use is a fascinating one – and a tricky area to explore, as it is often next to impossible to figure out the driving factors for the differences, which can also shift as cultural mores do.

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Hip hop first emerged as a distinct musical genre in New York in the 1970s, when local Black artists started to perform the distinctive rhythmic music with its spoken lyrics and syncopation. It has gone on to have a profound effect not just on popular music in general, but also on how people speak across the English-speaking world, and to some extent even beyond. 

Black Americans often speak with accents, dialects and vocabularies that are different to those of white people living in the same areas. Differences can be especially marked when it comes to spoken informal language. The predominantly Black artists working in hip hop dipped into the rich lexicon of Black American vernacular. In the process, they introduced words into the general English vocabulary. Without realising it, you’ve almost certainly used some of these words yourself. 

For example, the term to ‘ghost’ someone, meaning to disappear from their life suddenly, without warning, comes from the Black American vernacular, and was first heard in a forum more accessible to the mainstream on a 1991 collaboration between two hip-hop duos, 3rd Bass and Nice & Smooth. 

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Folklore is everywhere, and linguistics is no exception. 

You might have heard the old story about how the Spanish ‘lisp’ – whereby the letter z, the sibilant c and the letter s are pronounced as ‘th’ as in English – originated because King Ferdinand of Spain (1479-1516) spoke with a lisp, and ordinary people adopted this way of talking out of deference to him. This tale is sometimes cited as the reason why Latin Americans don’t pronounce Spanish the same way. 

In fact, the Spanish ‘lisp’, known as ‘ceceo’ in Spain, was originally a local pronunciation from specific parts of Spain. Most of the original Spanish conquerors and settlers of what we now know as Latin America were from a different area – and in any case, accents and pronunciations have changed over the centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. 

With its varied pronunciations and distinctive local accents and vocabularies, Spanish is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world. The diverse types of Spanish are generally mutually intelligible, but there can be considerable variation in vocabulary, with differences due to contact with a wide variety of Indigenous peoples and languages, and to the vicissitudes of history.

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The Swedish Chef is one of the most beloved characters of The Muppet Show, known for his interesting approach to cooking, for communicating in mock Swedish, and for his trademark phrase, ‘Bork, bork, bork!’

Perhaps predictably, the Swedish Chef’s performance is less beloved in Sweden than elsewhere. Most Swedes feel that his language sounds much more like Norwegian and that there’s nothing very Swedish about his behaviour at all. And in Germany, the Swedish Chef becomes the Danish Chef, because the way Danes speak German reminded the voice-over actor of the melodic gibberish of the original character.

Photo Source: https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/7-kitchen-and-life-lessons-that-the-swedish-chef-taught-us

In 1973, with the American civil rights movement increasingly impacting on academia, the term Ebonics was coined, a portmanteau word combining “ebony” with “phonics”, to refer to how Black Americans speak English, with influences from West African languages, and dialectal forms that emerged within Black communities. 

The term escaped academia in the 1990s and entered mainstream discussions about how Black students should be taught in school, and how their distinctive dialects should be treated. Did they need to be ‘corrected’ to standard American English, or should their modes of speaking be recognised as formal variants in their own right, and accepted or even taught in school?

The term ‘ebonics’ remains controversial among African American linguists, some of whom see it as trivialising an essential debate.

Photo Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-civil-rights-to-black-lives-matter1/

Poets are often pretty casual with the rules of language for the sake of their art, but possibly none has pushed the boundaries more than Lewis Carroll, the 19th century author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, whose poems are filled with invented words that consistently pose a challenge to translators seeking to render them in another language. 

Consider the first verse of his famous poem, Jabberwocky: 

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Despite the obvious challenges involved, somehow Jabberwocky has been translated into sixty-five languages, with translators using equivalent nonsense terms of their own invention.

Photo Source: https://classic-literature.co.uk/lewis-carroll-jabberwocky-poem/#google_vignette

Throughout the cold war, the USA and the USSR engaged in space exploration as a proxy for hostilities. In 1993, amid improving relations, American Vice-President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced plans for a new space station, which eventually became the International Space Station, which would enable cooperative research and observation, and potentially transportation, maintenance, and a staging base for possible future missions to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. 

Astronauts on the International Space Station – who come from various different backgrounds, not just the USA and Russia – are all expected to know both English and Russian, but as many are not proficient in both, over the years the ISS crews have developed their very own pidgin language that combines words, sounds, phrases, and expressions from both Russian and English, which they refer to as ‘Rushglish’.

Photo Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cold-war-politics-shaped-international-space-station-180975743/

Throughout the medieval period in Europe, large numbers of people traversed the many pilgrimage routes to sacred sites. These multiple journeys had a vast impact on language, as they exposed travellers and their hosts to many vernacular tongues that they would never otherwise have encountered. 

Very educated pilgrims could communicate with one another in Latin, then the language of scholarship and the Church, but the need for everyday communication led to the development of glossaries and guides that pilgrims could use on their religious journeys, thus contributing to the standardisation of many languages.

Photo Source: https://historymedieval.com/medieval-pilgrimage-routes-beyond-the-horizon/

In 1999, acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney published a new translation of the Old English epic, Beowulf. While his translation won awards and was greeted with great acclaim by many, others criticised him for the liberal use of terminology from the English as spoken in Northern Ireland – the linguistic tradition in which Heaney grew up, which has profoundly marked his writing.

Heaney himself commented that he had used Northern Irish dialectal terms he knew from listening to his aunts and other relatives, and that he had seen similarities between the original Old English and some of the words he was familiar with as a child.

Heaney’s most vociferous critics took to referring to his translation as “Heaneywulf” to signal their disapproval of his treatment of the text.

Photo Source: https://susannahfullerton.com.au/13-april-1939-seamus-heaney-is-born/