Category: Interesting facts

You may have come across yodelling in the song ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ from the musical The Sound of Music, but did you know that yodelling originally developed as an important mode of communication in the high and often isolated mountain communities of the European Alps? Or that forms of yodelling are found in many cultures all over the world?

Yodelling is a type of singing that involves rapid and repeated changes of pitch. The form with which most people are familiar was developed in the Alps by herders calling to their flocks, and communicating with one another across considerable distances, not unlike the Turkish ‘bird language’ of which we wrote some time ago. 

Yodelling also features widely in folk music from this region and crossed the Atlantic with European migrants to become an integral part of many different types of folk music in the Americas too. By the 1830s, Alpine yodelling – performed by both white and Black entertainers – was an established form of music-hall entertainment, popularised further after the birth of the film industry in the early twentieth century. 

The world record for yodelling is still held by Canadian Donn Reynolds, who yodelled for seven hours and twenty-nine minutes in 1976 in a feat that would surely have impressed the lonely goatherds of yore. 

Photo Source: https://www.meetsalzburg.com/en/plan-your-event/social-side-programmes/yodeling-lesson/

Many people around the world live with hearing absence or loss, and clearly they have a very different relationship with language than those who can hear. 

A question that hearing people often ask about those who are born without hearing is ‘What language do they think in?’

We all think using a combination of images, words and feelings, but those of us who’ve grown up hearing use language as an integral part of our thought process. People born without hearing, who have never heard spoken speech, generally think in a predominately visual way, with images and, often, word signs or moving lips.

The thought processes of people with acquired deafness are different again. Depending on what age they were when they stopped hearing, they may still think using spoken language, but will tend to use a larger number of visuals the longer they have spent in silence.

Maybe magic isn’t real, but that hasn’t stopped people from cultures all over the world from doing their very best to cast magical spells.

The specialised use of language in the form of incantations is at the heart of most magical practice. An incantation is typically a specific arrangement of words that might be chanted, spoken or sung, often in the context of highly ritualised behaviours.

Specific ‘magical’ words are thought to have special powers; often these are words that would sound nonsensical in another context – think ‘abracadabra’ or ‘shazam’. In cultural contexts in which magic and incantations are taken seriously, these special words may be kept secret from the general population, passed down along formal or family lines to the practitioners of magic.

Photo Source: https://tinyurl.com/3vf4pwf2

In India, social class and particularly the caste system have had a profound impact on how people talk. Sanskrit was the language of the Brahmins, the highest caste, representing purity and religious authority. Consequently, to retain privilege, access to Sanskrit education was restricted. Lower castes instead spoke vernacular languages and dialects that were viewed as less prestigious. When the British colonised India, English became a new elite language, as it has remained to the present. In India, a good knowledge of English is required for upward social mobility, and families that are ambitious for their children often prioritise access to English-language education to help them have bright futures.

Photo Source: https://www.ikan.com/indian-people-friendly-and-acceptable-of-foreigners 

The Mormon faith has a special place in the history of the United States, and a significant missionary presence around the world. But did you know about the Mormon alphabet? Between 1847 and 1854, George D Watt, under the leadership of Brigham Young – the second president of the Church of Latter-day Saints – developed a new script, known as the Deseret alphabet, in response to the religiously-informed view that all aspects of life needed reform. The alphabet was intended to be a more phonetically accurate replacement for the Latin alphabet in English, and a stepping stone towards returning to the ‘pure language’ the Mormons believed to have been spoken prior to the construction of the Tower of Babel.  Despite considerable effort and expense, the Deseret alphabet was never widely adopted, although in recent years its character set has been encoded in the Unicode standard.

Photo Source: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/deseret.htm

In arid climates, oases are vital sources of water, and major hubs of biodiversity. All sorts of bird, animal and plant life find water and nourishment there, and many oases are home to unique ecosystems and localised species. But did you know that they are very important hubs of cultural and linguistic diversity too? Languages, dialects and unique cultural traditions tend to cluster around the oases where human beings also make their homes. In Algeria, for example, oases harbour at least 552 plant and 98 mammal species, and are also home to twelve distinctive ethnic populations, each of which has its own language.

Photo Source:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Ghardaia

Until 1956, when American Andrew Foster introduced American Sign Language (ASL) to Africa, the only deaf schools in Africa were in Egypt and South Africa. Foster worked for three decades, until his death in 1986, to promulgate the use of sign language across the continent. Local variations emerged, including Ghanaian Sign Language and Nigerian Sign Language, both dialects of ASL. This still-developing field is sure to throw up many more fascinating dialectal differences, as the education of the deaf continues to improve in Africa. 

Photo Source: 

https://www.zikoko.com/life/sign-language-is-important-and-heres-why-you-should-learn-it/

Recent work on DNA has revealed that early humans and Neanderthals not only met but had children together, begging the question as to whether they even recognised one another as separate species. Despite being very similar, there were significant differences in their facial and skeletal structures that would have made them look different. Modern humans’ facial development ceases earlier in the process of growing up, leaving us with features that would probably have looked juvenile to Neanderthals, whose facial features tended to be larger. The changes in skeletal structure may also have meant that the Neanderthal people had somewhat different ranges of sound, implying that their languages would have been quite different too. Perhaps some early translators helped the two groups to communicate, and stone-age love to blossom.

Photo Source : 

https://sites.dartmouth.edu/dujs/2021/03/07/were-we-smarter-than-neanderthals/

The road to linguistic hell is often paved with good intentions.

In an effort to create a more gender-neutral language, the term ‘Latinx’ was coined, in US English, to refer to people of both sexes from Latin America.

While some adopted the term, it outraged many native Spanish-speakers, who pointed out that ‘Latinx’ is often difficult for them to pronounce, while some of them were using their own gender-neutral ‘Latine’ anyway. Others further pointed out that they see the very term ‘Latino/a/e/x’ as tricky in general, as it lumps together people of Spanish, Indigenous, and mixed descent, treating them as a single cultural and linguistic entity.

Image Source: 

https://www.dictionary.com/e/latine-vs-latinx/