Category: Interesting facts

Antarctica famously has no permanent human population, and therefore no indigenous ethnicity or language, and yet linguistic researchers have figured out that it has its own dialect, or even several of them.

How could that be?

A 2019 study explored the language use of a team known as ‘the winterers’, scientific researchers spending six months in Antarctica, during which time they lived and worked closely together. While they came from various backgrounds, English was the language of communication. And while they all started out with different accents, over the course of the six months they spent together, their accents gradually became more similar to one another.

Instinctively, we all adjust our speech depending on who we’re talking to, and often adopt aspects of their pronunciation, to make ourselves easier to understand. This is what was happening here, and in a small community of just eleven people, it’s easy to see how they all started to sound more alike.

Another interesting linguistic feature of speech in Antarctica is its slang. The in-group of researchers refer to the cold continent as ‘the ice’ and have coined the term ‘ice shock’ to refer to the experience of having to adjust back to living in the wider world once their research term is over.

Even at the very limits of human existence, language is doing interesting things!

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Great Translators of the World – Sarah Austin

Sarah Austin was born Sarah Taylor in 1793. Her mother, Susannah, ensured that she was educated in Latin, French, German and Italian, among other things. Her husband, John Austin, was a legal scholar and the couple were well-known in London, where they mingled with some of the most noted intellectuals of their day.

Sarah Austin became renowned as a writer and translator, whose work provided much of her family’s income. In 1833, one of her finest works of translation, Characteristics of Goethe, was published, annotated with her notes and criticisms, and in 1840, Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes was similarly well-received.

In her later years, Austin argued for the importance of girls’ education, citing as challenges at the time the fact that many female village schoolteachers had not been taught how to deliver a rigorous academic education to girls, despite generally doing their best. Sarah Austin is remembered as the translator who introduced some of Germany’s greatest writings to English audiences. Her approach was strikingly modern; she started each project by communicating directly with the author, inviting them to be actively engaged with her translation work through to publication.

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Jean-François Champollion, born in 1790, was well-known from an early age for his extraordinary linguistic talents, mastering Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Ge’ez, Syriac, Chaldean, Classical Chinese, Persian and Arabic, as well as his native French.

The early 19th century was a period of deep interest in Egypt, following Napoleon’s campaign there, and the discovery of the legendary Rosetta Stone, which was written in three languages, and made it possible for scholars to start interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this cultural context, and with his extraordinary linguistic abilities, Champollion was excellently placed to start studying the topic.

In 1822, Champollion revealed that the Egyptian writing system combined phonetic and ideographic signs. By the late 1820s, Champollion was able to read Egyptian texts that had never been deciphered before.

Champollion died in 1838, aged just 41. His grammar of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously and would form the basis of many subsequent studies in the field. Various locations have been named in his honour, the more striking of which is the Champollion crater, a lunar crater on the far side of the Moon.

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Speakers of European languages often have fun with translations on Chinese menus that sound decidedly odd in the target language. But, of course, the translation hilarity goes both ways. Plenty of words in European languages are difficult to render accurately in Chinese, while some words, if rendered phonetically in Chinese, have meanings that might raise eyebrows.

Let’s stick with English names for now:

Nicholas sounds like ‘Ni kou si le’ in Mandarin and translates to ‘You are so stingy’

Isabella, pronounced ‘Yi sheng bei la,’ means, ‘The doctor got arrested.’

Martha sounds like ‘Ma hua,’ which is ‘Fried doughnut twist.’

Chinese people living abroad often adopt European names, as well as their own Chinese names, because they are easier for speakers of European languages to pronounce and avoid confusion. Do Europeans in China do the same thing? It sounds like some of them certainly should!

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Like many minority languages, Yuracaré – spoken in a remote region of Bolivia – is considered endangered. But new initiatives are offering hope.

Many of the Indigenous languages of Bolivia are no longer spoken. Yuracaré is one of the survivors, largely because its speakers lived in a remote area and refused to integrate with the colonial system. But inevitably, over the years, more and more Yuracaré people adopted Spanish as their primary language.

Today, the first ever definitive dictionary of Yuracaré has been published as the result of a collaboration of the remaining speakers, Gerónimo Ballivián Asencio Chávez, Alina Flores and Rufino Yabeta, with French anthropologist Vincent Hintzel and Dutch ethnolinguist Rik van Gijn. As well as capturing its linguistic richness of the language, the dictionary provides information about the traditional knowledge base of the people.

The Yuracaré culture is based in an area of extraordinary ecological diversity, and the language reflects this. Adult Yuracaré speakers typically know the names of 260 distinct bird species, for example, while the language also contains many explicit and implicit references to their shamanic belief system, which is deeply embedded in the local environment.

When a language is lost, a lot of cultural knowledge is lost too. The publication of the new Yuracaré dictionary offers hope for a brighter future.

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Certain languages, like Portuguese, Spanish and English – but also many others – are spoken in more than one place. And with the passage of time, the various versions of the language can become different.

In the case of English, most local and national variants are mutually intelligible, but there still are important differences, and sometimes even differences that seem quite subtle at first glance can matter a lot.

For example, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was criticised recently for using British spelling, rather than Canadian.

The difference between British and Canadian spelling is very small. Canadian English follows a middle ground between US and British English, with some of the spelling conventions from each. For example, it uses ‘z’ in words like ‘industrialize’ rather than ‘s’ as British spelling often does (but not always – we’ll be writing about the Oxford spelling conventions in another post). However, like the British, Canadians write about ‘colour’ rather than ‘color,’ as Americans do.

Experts in Canadian English have gone so far as to urge Carney to stick strictly to Canadian spelling and, where possible, terminology, to implicitly make the point that Canada is just as important as anywhere else. Especially important, in fact, to the Canadians.

As translators, we’re extremely aware of the importance of these differences, which can seem small to outsiders. Using spelling and terminology that are correct, but that belong to somewhere else, can make a text sound like it was written for others.

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Humanity’s taming of fire was a decisive step forward in terms of cultural and technological advancement. But did you know that it would also play an important role in communication and language development?

The earliest example of humans using fire dates to about 400,000 years ago. At a site in Suffolk, England, archaeologists uncovered evidence of people – almost certainly Neanderthals – using pyrite stones to create sparks that would light fire.

Domestic fires made it possible to cook, expanding the range of foods digestible to humans, and to live in colder areas than would otherwise have been possible. And in a world in which humans were still few in number, dispersed across large territories, the presence of fires in the landscape – visible from far away – communicated a very clear message to other human groups: we’re here.

But that’s not the only contribution that fire made to the development of language. Fires formed the centre of camps, of homes, and of villages. They became focal points around which groups gathered for warmth and to prepare and share meals. In these congenial settings, people engaged socially and exchanged knowledge. Researchers believe that, in this way, fireside settings became hotbeds of cultural and linguistic exchange, facilitating the development of language and of human culture as we know it today.

While modern homes increasingly lack fireplaces, our instinct as humans to gather around a fire remains strong. Fireside gatherings, and even candles burning brightly on our tables and mantles, are still places where people come together to talk and to share stories, and in this way to become part of a chain of linguistic exchange that dates back to remote antiquity.

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Anne Lister, born in 1791 into a wealthy Yorkshire family, grew up to manage the family estate of Shibden. She was also an extensive diarist, who wrote at length about her interests, including medicine, mathematics, and infrastructure such as railways and canals.

And her numerous love-affairs with other women.

Living at a time when same-sex relationships were seen as completely unacceptable, Anne used a code, which she referred to as ‘crypt hand’, to write about her love affairs. The code itself was quite simple, including the Greek alphabet, zodiacal and mathematical symbols, and punctuation; it was devised by a teenaged Anne and her then-girlfriend, Eliza, and Anne would continue to use it all her life to write about matters she wanted, or needed, to keep secret.

Forty years after Anne’s death in 1840, her heir discovered her diaries and managed to translate the code. Horrified, he hid all her diaries behind a panel in the wall of Shibden Hall. They would not be revisited until the 1980s, when historians Dorothy Thompson and Patricia Hughes translated them in full. They have subsequently been much explored by historians and researchers with an interest in lesbian history generally. They also beg the questions: are there things today some people might like to talk about, but can’t? How do we apply codes to our language now?

In 2011, Anne Lister’s diaries were added to the register of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme.

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