Lingua Latina - Latin!

Oh boy. This language is certainly my favorite. It ranks number three on this list, but tops the list as number one in sheer intricateness and elaborateness. This language is Latin. The third that I learned, Latin was certainly by far the most complex language I had ever decided to try to learn by that time. While it was a long and rather painstaking process, I'm happier than ever that I made this decision. This language is the one that unlocked my potential and made me realize what I was going to do with my life. I'm going to have to try quite hard not to talk too much in this post.

I. What is it?

Latin is an Italic language, meaning that it was born on the Italian peninsula. The earliest attested form of Latin is found approximately around 700 B.C. and remained the linguistic medium of the Roman Empire all the way until a little after its collapse before evolving into the modern Romance languages around 550 A.D. It remained the language of the educated and the clergy for quite some time (until about the early 1900s). That gives Latin an extended history of over two thousand years!

II. How does it work?

My favorite part. Latin utilizes an extensive case system for its nouns, of which there are six cases. There are three grammatical genders, as opposed to most of the Romance languages having only two: masculine, feminine and neutral. For verbs, there are not as many tenses that we as English speakers have not heard of, but a plethora of other features that we scarcely even know about today. That said, the English verb can approximate many with the help of a set of auxiliary verbs, but Latin does not use them. Due to this, the Latin verb conjugates quite meticulously and can change into a huge array of forms to convey many different meanings.

III. Anything peculiar about it?

Because of the extensive case system and excruciatingly precise verb conjugation, the word order is not nearly as strict as it is in English. For example:
"The evil teacher assigns us work daily and expects it on his desk the next morning!"
Doctor malus nobis opera quotidie assignat et in analogio suo mox mane exspectat!
Literal translation: "Teacher evil to us work daily assigns and on desk his next morning expects!"
However, it's perfectly acceptable to say instead:
Malus doctor opera nobis quotidie assignat et mox mane in suo analogio exspectat!
"Evil teacher work to us daily assigns and next morning on his desk expects!"
Or:
Assignat doctor malus quotidie nobis opera et exspectat in analogio suo mox mane!
"Assigns teacher evil daily to us work and expects on desk his next morning!"
Note that basically none of these literal translations make any sense in English. The case system and the precise verb conjugation give us all the information we need; word order is not grammatically necessary. Instead, moving words around changes the intonation, the emphasis of your expression.

IV. What do I like about it?

Latin is like a very intricate puzzle. Knowing all the cases and how each noun declines into them, knowing how to conjugate every verb in every possible way, knowing what gender nouns are to put them in appropriate places in tandem with the adjectives, it's all very complicated. In the end, that's essentially what makes me like the language so much. That, and there's a certain mysticism about the language that doesn't exist in English anymore.

V. Difficulty in learning it?

I'm not going to sugar coat this section. Yes, the language is a rather difficult one to learn. One of the hardest, actually. That does not mean, however, that it would be impossible. Just more difficult than many others.

• Things that make your life hard

1. The case system. There are several types of nouns that all decline differently, and then there are adjectives that have to be able to match any type of noun and therefore have many forms.
2. The large number of verb conjugations. What they look like, what they mean, where to use them. Several of these conjugations don't exist in English, so add that on too.
3. Latin is a highly fusional language. This means lots of paradigms to study.

• Things that make your life easy

1. There are many, many patterns to nouns, adjectives and verbs. All this stuff isn't just random. It's in finding and recognizing those patterns that simplify a lot of the memorization.
2. Quite a few words are borrowed from Latin. Knowing their meaning in English can sometimes help you identify the Latin meaning. Sometimes. Words ending in -ion are of Latin origin: Suppression (from supprimere, "to press down"), progression (from progredi, "to go forward"), vacation (from vacare, "to be empty"), inscription (from inscribere, "to write in"), the list goes on and on!

VI. Sample text

Sunt plus quam septem milia linguae in orbe terrarum; lingua qualibet loqui licet. Omnes linguae in orbe meo aequae sunt. Aliquando multas linguas loqui potero, ac semper lingua Latina exercebo ut perpetue vivat, per me.

"There are more than seven thousand languages in the world; you may speak whichever language you want. All languages are equal in my world. Someday I will speak many languages, yet I will always practice Latin so that it may live perpetually through me."

Links:
Latin Wikipedia article on the Rosetta Stone
Inter Mirifica - Decree of the Instrument of Social Communication

Le français - French!

French is the second language I undertook. It started in high school, and I began learning it begrudgingly; I was not terribly interested in the language. My high school education in the language was weak, to say the least, and after I graduated, there was a hiatus in which I didn't pick up the language again for a long time. My skills soon vanished. After I started to learn Latin, however, I reacquired what I had forgotten and learned lots of new stuff in the blink of an eye. French is often the language I put my electronic devices in. My computer's system language is in French; my phone would be in French, if it had the option. My tablet is in French. Even the language that this blog is presented to me with is in French!

I. What is it?

As previously hinted at, French is a Romance language. That means that the language descended from Latin. It shares roots with other Romance languages; Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Portuguese, Sicilian, etc. Historically spoken in France and Belgium, it expanded quickly and by this time there are many other emmigrant communities where French is the primary or recognized language, such as the Romandy region of Switzerland, Quebec, the Acadia region of Canada, Haiti, and many African countries. For a long time, French was the international norm; one could not be considered educated unless he or she spoke French. English has largely supplanted it in the modern day, but French still maintains its status as a working language of many international organizations.

II. How does it work?

As a Romance language, French retains some notable features that previously existed in Latin: There are two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. These grammatical genders determine how adjectives, articles and other grammatical features behave when tied to them. There are a significant number of verb inflections that do not exist and are used in ways that differ from English. The syntax has since lost Latin's complex case system; assignment of grammatical function is reduced to the same level as English, in that word order largely determines what a word is doing.

III. Anything peculiar about it?

The most obvious and prominent peculiarity about French is the sound of the language. Many English speakers notice that right away. Historically, the French accent has mostly elided the final syllable of many, many words and often times, vowels are elided when the sound conflicts. In that light, the language is meant to flow from your mouth. Some examples of this phenomenon:
Le arbre ("the tree") => L'arbre.
Ce était ("it/that/this was") => C'était.

Therein lies another peculiarity about French: the liason. A liason is when the elision that normally occurs at the end of a word is "attached" to the beginning of the next word. More examples of this phenomenon will be given first with IPA, and then approximated (very roughly) in standard English:

Elles en achèteront demain. ("They will buy some tomorrow.") /ɛl.z‿ɑ̃.n‿aʃtəʁɔ̃ dəmɛ/ (Ellz ahn ashtuh-roh duh-muh)
Normally "elles" is pronounced /ɛl/ with no pronunciation of the -s. Notice that -ont is not pronounced the way it looks, and the -n in demain is unpronounced.

Nous n'avons pas encore eu de jour ensoleillé ce mois-ci; seulement des nuages et de la pluie. ("We haven't had a single sunny day yet; only clouds and rain.")
/nu navɔ̃ pa.z‿ɑ̃kɔʁ ø də ʒuʁ ɑ̃sɔleje cə mwa-si; sœlmɑ̃ de nyaʒ e də la plɥi/ (Noo navoh pahz ehcore uh duh joor ensolayay suh mwah see; suhlmoh day noo-ahj ay duh lah ploo-ee.)
Complicated, huh? See the liason?

IV. What do I like about it?

It's a Latin based language. I love that I can recognize so many elements from Latin without a second glance. I also like the sound. Everyone likes the sound, of course, but in my head, French is like Latin with a very particular accent. It's great when I can nail that very interesting pronunciation and understand all the parts, especially since French feels like it's spoken very quickly. In fact, it's not; all the elision creates the illusion of speed in speech. Have you ever tried to read lyrics to a song in French while the singer sings it at the same time? Not easy!

V. Difficulty in learning it?

French is actually not as difficult as Japanese. While it is still different from English and still requires you to drop your English speaking mindset, it's not as different from English as Japanese is. There are still some things that will make your learning experience vary in difficulty.

• Things that make your life hard

1. The pronunciation. There are several sounds that simply do not exist in English.
2. The genders. English used to make one single grammatical gender distinction maybe 50 years ago (a male was "blond" but a female was "blonde"), but we don't do that anymore (everyone is blonde now).

• Things that make your life easy

1. Despite the pronunciation being very different from English, it's very regular (as opposed to English and its high inconsistency regarding pronunciation).
2. There are some vague similarities in the syntax that mirror English. It's a Subject-Verb-Object type of language, for example (as is English).
3. In our history, English speakers borrowed a huge percentage of our vocabulary from French. Therefore, there's a large number of words that appear very similar or identical to their English counterparts and even mean the same thing. Words that end in -nce (entrance, assistance, maintainance, importance) are of French origin, for example.

VI. Sample text

Les traductions grisées sont des traductions indirectes. En d'autres mots, ces sont des traductions des traductions et non des traductions de la phrase principale. Si une phrase islandaise a une traduction anglaise et la phrase anglaise a une traduction en swahili, alors, indirectement, ça phrase Swahili fournira une traduction pour la phrase islandaise.

"Grey translations are indirect translations. In other words, they are translations of translations and not translations of the principle phrase. If an Icelandic phrase has an English translation and the English phrase has a translation in Swahili, then, indirectly, that Swahili phrase will supply a translation for the Icelandic phrase."

Links:
French-English verb conjugation comparison
Serge Gainsbourg et Brigitte Bardot - Bonnie and Clyde (Song)

日本語 - Nihongo - Japanese!

Japanese was the very first foreign language I decided to study. It started in high school because anime and manga was popular at the time. While I was not very much into the media, I started to learn the language simply to have somewhere to fit in; I wanted to be the translator. After so long, I found that I really liked it, and it stuck.

I. What is it?

The classification of Japanese is under heated debate, but for the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to it here as a Japonic language. This describes the language family utilized by the people who live on the archipelago of Japan and its emmigrant communities. It has a long standing history and relationship with Chinese and other languages of the Pacific Islands. The earliest attested form of Japanese appears in the Nara period, between AD 710 - 794. That gives Japanese a life of a little over one thousand years. Pretty impressive!

II. How does it work?

Japanese is primarily a syllabic language. The writing system is comprised of characters foreign to the Latin alphabet (which is what we English speakers use); each character represents not a "letter," but a "syllable," distinguishing the writing system from an "alphabet."
The writing system is the focal point of Japanese and is what makes it such an exotic language to the western world. There are three forms of this writing system:

- Hiragana 「ひらがな」: This is the first syllabic system. These characters have only the phonetic value; no meaning is attached to them. It's the primary form of writing and will appear the most often. Notice that there are four characters. Each represents one syllable, as aforementioned: 「ひ」Hi「ら」 ra「が」 ga「な」na.

- Katakana 「カタカナ」: This is the second syllabic system. It's secondary to hiragana; its main uses are for foreign or borrowed words or names, or (if you notice how blocky it looks) is sometimes used as a form of emphasis, similar to italics in Latin alphabets. This system functions in exactly the same fashion as hiragana, but only looks different. Hiragana may be written in katakana and vice-versa.

- Kanji 「漢字」: These are the characters borrowed from Chinese. These characters, by appearance, do not belie their phonetic value, but instead have meaning in them. These characters are often used in combination with hiragana; the kanji will show the meaning while the hiragana will, in certain cases, show the pronunciation. There are two characters that illustrate the meaning: 「漢」, written as 「かん」('kan') in hiragana, and means "China." The other, 「字」is written as 「じ」('ji') in hiragana and means "character." Thus, the two characters together literally mean "Chinese character."

III. Anything peculiar about it?

The peculiar thing about Japanese is that, syntaxically, it's strikingly different from English. It stands as one of the more difficult languages to learn for English speakers solely for that reason. As many other East Asian languages, Japanese is primarily a "topic-comment" type of language, with your main verb coming at the end of the sentence. What? That's crazy talk! But that's how the language works and that's what makes it so tricky for us to learn it. Implication is heavy as well. The golden rule of Japanese: If you can imply it in context and it's obvious from that, do not say it.
Lastly, another striking difference between English and Japanese is that Japanese has the ability to illustrate a huge difference in levels of politeness in the way you word a sentence. The same thing can be expressed in several different ways and still retain its meaning, but changes its formality. A few quick examples:

明日は、受験。
("Ashita wa, juken.")
Colloquial translation: "Tomorrow, I have an exam." Or: "Tomorrow, there is an exam."
Literal translation: "Tomorrow, exam."
Notice the complete lack of pronouns and even no verb! This is why both colloquial translations are possible; it's the context that will determine which is more accurate.

一緒にお茶を飲みませんか。
("Issho ni ocha wo nomimasen ka.")
Colloquial translation: "Won't you have some tea with me?"
Literal translation: "Together tea not have?"
Notice again the lack of pronouns (you, me) in the literal translation, and also notice that it makes almost no sense in English.

待て！
("Mate!")
Literal and colloquial translation: "Wait!"
This is probably the most informal way to say this to someone. Say it like this only to your close friends! (Even then, it might be a bit rude, depending on the situation.)

待ってください。
("Matte kudasai.")
Literal/Colloquial translation: "Please wait."
Obviously a little nicer than the above.

お待ちなさい。
("Omachinasai.")
Lit./Coll. translation: "Wait."
While the translation looks the same as the first, it's actually a highly formalized way to say this. If you used this with your close friends, they'd probably raise an eyebrow or two at you.

IV. What do I like about it?

The heavy implication of the language, the way you go about wording things and the amount of control you have over how politely you may address someone are the biggest factors. Likewise, Japanese is capable of implying a lot of very little nuances that English cannot through little words and expressions, sometimes even through simply not saying something. Interesting indeed!

V. Difficulty in learning it?

In truth, Japanese is not all that difficult, despite the way I've been making it look previously. The best way to simplify Japanese is to learn how to drop your mindset as an English speaker; you cannot say the English things in your head with Japanese. Instead, you have to say things in Japanese with a Japanese mindset. There isn't a whole lot to it other than that!

• Things that make your life hard

1. The writing systems. There are three, though hiragana and katakana are not that troublesome. It's kanji that scare people away. There are about 2,000 characters that you have to know to be literate in Japanese. That's absurd! But it's not as hard as you might think! It will be discussed in the easy section.
2. Dropping your English-speaking mindset. That's not easy for everyone to do. It takes practice, and that's where immersion can help!

• Things that make your life easy

1. Kanji actually have patterns. There are "pieces" of each kanji, called "radicals." There are not so many radicals, and kanji are composed of them. If you learn the radicals, you can learn how to "spell" kanji, which helps learning them quite a bit.
2. Japanese is an agglutinative language, which means no noun cases! Particles instead show how each word functions in a sentence.
3. Verbs do not conjugate for number or person; only tense and voice, which makes learning conjugations a lot easier.
4. Verb forms are highly regular. There are only two irregular verbs in the language!

VI. Sample text:
基本的に翻訳は訓練してないから出来ないとは言うなら、正しい翻訳よりも例文として自然な表現を目指すという目標が掲げられると、これはなかなか病みつきになる体験かもしれない。

("Kihonteki ni honyaku wa kunren shite'nai kara dekinai to wa iu nara, tadashii honyaku yori mo reibun to shite shizen na hyougen wo mezusu to iu mokuhyou ga kakagerareru to, kore wa naka naka yamitsuki ni naru taiken ka mo shirenai.")

"Basically if you say you can't because you don't translate, when you set your sights on a sentence that is more natural but not as correct as the first, your personal experience may be that you are addicted to this."

Links:

NicoNico Douga - Japanese Youtube!
Yomiuri - International news site

All That Fancy-Shmancy Terminology

I understand that many of you reading this have absolutely no linguistic background at all. That said, I'll compose a list of the terms that I use throughout the blog. This will be updated every time I use new terminology. When you encounter a word for the first time throughout the blog that utilizes a word found here, just click it and it should direct you straight to the word on this list that you clicked on.

• Agglutinative Language - An agglutinative language is one that uses a large number of affixes to administer certain functions to certain words. In contrast with English, which is considered partially "analytic" and partially "fusional," we use the syntax and a few word inflections to assign the same functions to words. For example:
  花火は、昨夜に友達のカメラで写した。
  Hanabi-wa, sakuya-ni tomodachi-no kamera-de utsushita.
  "I filmed the fireworks with my friend's camera last night."
  Wa (topic), ni (locative relation), no (possessor) and de (instrument) are all the agglutinatives, while English relies on the word order, prepositions and inflections to relay the same information.
• Article - A small word or set of words that is used with a noun to limit or give definiteness to it. In English, articles exist as a, an and the. 
• Cases - Inflections of a noun, pronoun or adjective that are designed to illustrate a certain grammatical function in a sentence. In English, I, me and mine would be examples of the same word in varying cases. 
• Colloquial - Describes a casuality of an expression as opposed to a strict, encyclopedic or overly proper one. "I cannot go for a walk due to rain." (Not very colloquial.) "It's raining, so I can't go walk." (Much more colloquial.)
• Conjugation - A verb which has a subject assigned to it, altering it from its base form. "I am" would be a conjugated form of "to be" (the base form), complete with its subject (I) and the conjugated form (am). 
• Declension - The act of changing a noun's case from its base form. I (base form/subject case) =declined to=> me (object case); mine (possessive case). 
• Diacritics - The marks above or below a letter to indicate a certain pronunciation. The same diacritic's indication may vary between languages. 
• Elision - The omission of one or more sounds in a word.
• Fusional Language - As opposed to an agglutinative language, a fusional one assigns grammatical meaning to words by changing their form. English is, in part, a fusional language; our verbs change slightly to indicate person or tense. Purely fusional languages tend to have large numbers of word forms to learn.
• Indo-European Language - "Indo-European" is a linguistic phylum that contains a great number of languages which share a common ancestor, Proto Indo-European, and are found in the region between Europe and India. 
• IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) - An alphabetic system used to denote the value of sounds in a language in a method that would be internationally recognized.
  
  - IPA for French - You can click the letters or symbols and a sound file will be played to show pronunciation.

• Number - Simply singularity or plurality. 
• Paradigm - A framework that usually contains all the parts of a particular concept. In a linguistic sense, paradigms are usually charts that show how to conjugate verbs or decline nouns.
  
  - Sample verb paradigm for the English verb 'to be.'

• Participle - A verb form that has properties of both a verb and an adjective. E.g. written: I have written the agreement. (Verbal; the verb form is "have written.") That is a written agreement. (Adjectival; "written" is describing "agreement.")
• Particle - A particle is simply a small word. This term technically has no precise definition; it's actually a safety net of a term that is meant to encompass a huge group of words that have no congruency in their usage and have no exact lexical definition. English particles include ah, well, oh, to (infinitive verb marker), no, etc. 
• Person - Who the subject of the verb is. Some examples of this in English are First Person (I), Second Person (you), Third Person (he, she, it, John, one, etc.).
• Stem Augmentation (Greek) - When the stem of a Greek verb has a short e psilon prefixed to it. This usually happens in the past tenses. Ex: Λύω (Lýō), "I loosen." > ἔλυον (élyon) "I loosened." 
• Syntax - The rules that govern the way a sentence is constructed.
• Tense - A distinct verb form used to express variations in time or duration of the action or state that the verb describes. E.g. I am, I was, I have been, I will be, etc. 
• Voice - The distinction a verb makes that indicates the relation of the subject to the verb. In English, the distinction is whether or not the subject is asserting the action (active voice) or the subject is itself acted upon by the verb (passive voice). "He strikes the punching bag." (Active Voice); "He is struck by the punching bag as it swings back at him." (Passive Voice)
• Vowel Augmentation (Greek) - When the stem of a Greek verb begins with a vowel, this vowel is lengthened by the e psilon that is attached for augmentation in the past tense. Ex: Ἄγω (Ágō) "I bring." > ἐ + ἄγον (e + ágon) = ἦγον (êgon) "I brought."  

Links

Classics Reader

Not a Tool, huh?

What is a language? To you, a language is just something people from other countries speak. To me, a language is something much more than that.

A language is what breathes life into a culture. A language is the window into the soul of a people. A language is the link between the infinite space that is one's mind and reality. 

Each language in and of itself is more than a tool; oftentimes people take for granted the kind of expressive power that they wield. Each language is like a planet, each with its own geography, flora and fauna. They each have their own moons of jargon and even some bits of orbiting debris of slang. Exploring them and getting to know them is like getting to know a good friend. One of the most exciting endeavors of my lifetime. 

So what am I going to do with this? Perhaps in each post I'll dive into a particular language. I'll tell you what I like about it. I'll try to keep it simple! But no promises. 

Who knows; you may end up liking one or two.