Category: Interesting facts

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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Inuktun is a language spoken by Inuit people from northwestern Greenland. The people – and by extension the language – suffered considerably in earlier years. In the late nineteenth century, American arctic explorer Robert Peary brought a group of six Inuit people, including two children, to New York at the request of American anthropologist Franz Boas, who hoped that studying them would prove some of his theories about cultural evolution.

In New York, this small group was housed in a museum as a public exhibit. Four of the six died within a year, of neglect and disease, after which their skeletons were put on display in the American Museum of Natural Science.

Unsurprisingly, Indigenous Greenlanders have tended to remain wary of researchers. However, texts by scholar Alfred Kroeber, who studied the Inuktun language in the late nineteenth century, give some insights into how the entirely oral language was spoken then, and how it has changed in the years since. Some researchers believe that the Inuktun people initially settled in Greenland as late as the 18th century. Contemporary linguist Andrew Garrett has found that Inuktun was then much more like North Canadian Inuit languages than it is today, suggesting the existence of complex cultural, communication, and migratory connections between the two regions.

Today, modern Inuktun is spoken by about 1000 inhabitants of Northwest Greenland, with most speakers also speaking standard Greenlandic, and many also Danish.

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You might think that a good knowledge of engineering and locomotives is essential to work successfully with trains – and you’d be right – but did you know how important it is for train drivers to have good language skills too?

Think about it: often, trains travel across borders from one country to another, or sometimes even across various different borders. And if the driver and other staff members don’t change, that often also means they’re also passing from one linguistic environment into another. Now they need to be able to not just hear, but also understand, the essential safety and other messaging they receive from ground and station staff.

When train drivers don’t understand the language of the country they’re travelling through, that’s a serious safety issue – and it is one that periodically raises concerns. For example, train crews from Mexico are allowed, under certain circumstances, to travel about 10 km across the border into the United States, but only if they can demonstrate that they speak English well enough to understand any instructions they receive about safety.

Of course, one also hopes that similar essential rules apply to any American operatives working south of the border!

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Great Translators of the World – Kumārajīva

Kumārajīva was born in Kashmir in about 344 CE. He grew up to be a Buddhist monk, studying under various scholars before settling on the Mahayanan school of Buddhism, becoming a renowned scholar and orator.

By 401 CE, after having mastered the Chinese language, he led a team of translators who worked together to translate many Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese. The Xiaoyao Gardens, where the translators worked, became a centre for Buddhist scholarship, and their translations, noteworthy for their distinctive easy-to-read style, are still central to Chinese Buddhism to this day. In fact, in many cases more recent translations have been rejected in favour of the ‘Kumārajīva versions’ that many still see as key texts.

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You probably know the phrase ‘hocus pocus’ for its association – often tongue in cheek – with magic and mystery. But did you know that the phrase has quite a long history?

As a term associated with conjuring and tricks, ‘hocus pocus’ dates to at least the early 1600s, when it first appears in writing, with reference to street performers.

However, one likely explanation to its origin dates earlier, to the Reformation in Europe, and the devastating religious wars that followed. Whereas the Protestants held their religious services in the actual languages of the various communities (e.g. English, German or Swedish), the Catholic Church still used Latin for Mass until after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

The term ‘Hoc est corpus meum,’ which means ‘this is my body,’ is used in Catholic Mass. Some historical linguists believe that ‘hocus pocus,’ referring to trickery and deception, derives from a mocking, deliberate mispronunciation of these Latin words.

These particular words would have resonated especially strongly during the Reformation when “transubstantiation” (the Catholic belief that the Communion bread and wine become the literal body and blood of Christ) was a matter of active theological debate, with the newly formed Protestant churches rejecting this doctrine.

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Gagauzia is an autonomous territorial region of Moldova, home to the Gagauz people, who speak a Turkic language. Turkic languages are a family of over 35 related languages spoken by approximately 200 million people across Eurasia, including regions from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and parts of East Asia. The most widely spoken Turkic language is Turkish, followed by Uzbek and Azerbaijani.

The history and political background of Gagauzia is complex, and beyond the scope of a blog post, but as language professionals, we’re very interested in their linguistic situation.

The official language of Moldova is Romanian, also referred to in some contexts as Moldovan. However, as an autonomous territorial region, the Gagauzians have the right to carry out their affairs in their own language. Anyone aspiring to be the governor of Gagauzia must be fluent in its language. That’s a good thing: linguistic diversity and the rights of speakers of minority languages are very important.

However, as in many other areas with similar situations vis a vis language, not being able to speak the majority language well also poses problems. It can limit access to good jobs, inhibit development, and even contribute to political and ethnic tensions. At the time of writing, a substantial number of children growing up in Gagauzia don’t speak Romanian, even when their parents do.

Balancing the rights of people to cherish, speak, and live through their native language has to be balanced with their need, and right, to also fluently speak the languages they need to engage with the wider world, and realise their full potential.

Fortunately, the human mind is more than capable of containing two or more languages; we have previously spoken of the many benefits of bilingualism. Hopefully, the peoples of Moldova and Gagauzia will find a way forward that respects the minority language while also facilitating access to the language of the majority, along with all the benefits it accrues.

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As we have discussed in various blog posts, all living things communicate in one way or another, and many animals use forms of communication that are relatively sophisticated, sometimes even among members of different species.

But only human beings have language. And while language is at the heart of everything we do as a species, there are still lots of big questions about how it evolved, and why. The one thing we do know is that language started long before anyone recorded it.

Some biological factors appear to be essential to the development of spoken language. The brain needs to have a certain capacity for abstract thought, which depends partly on its size. So, it’s reasonable to infer from the skull size of fossil remains that language may have been possible in hominids of a certain brain size. The position of the larynx also provides some clues because the larynx is essential to utter specific sounds (as opposed to, for instance, more generic growling or barking).

Language also relies on grammar, which is a general set of rules that everyone within the language group must use to understand one another. Some linguistic researchers believe that the capacity for language, and therefore grammar, is innate; that babies are born with this ability already programmed into their brains.

One thing, however, is certain: language is a defining feature of our species. It makes us who we are and has given us the gift of communication that is far more complex, and much richer, than that of even our closest relatives.

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William Tyndale, who was born in England in about 1494, is chiefly remembered for his theological and political contributions to the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth century, but his contributions to the art of translation are no less important. In fact, translation was an essential element of the Reformation, as one of the major changes the Protestant churches sought was for liturgical and scriptural materials to be translated into, and used in, the local vernacular languages.

Among his chief works, Tyndale translated much of the Bible into English, drawing directly on texts in Hebrew and Greek; he was fluent in French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as his native English. His translations were the first to be reproduced using the printing press, then still quite a new invention, and would drive Reformation thinking across the English-speaking world.

Ultimately, Tyndale was executed as a heretic – first strangled and then burnt at the stake. However, this was on grounds of his opposition to the English King Henry 8th’s plans to annul his marriage and had nothing to do with the quality of Tyndale’s translations, which were excellent.

The King James Bible, which remains the standard text for British Anglicanism – and which has often been praised for the quality of the translation – was heavily based on Tyndale’s original work. Its impact on the English language, and on the twists and turns of history, is immeasurable.

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