The Economist article seems to have been prompted by the author’s observation that over five million people are exposed every week to the artificial languages of Dothraki and Valyrian found in the television series “Game of Thrones”. I’ve never seen the programme in question (I understand it’s quite popular), but evidently it’s quite a big deal. Feel free to post comments along the lines of “What, have you been living in a cave for the past (…)”, etc.

Presumably this whole game of inventing languages primarily for entertainment purposes (as opposed to the more prosaic goal of facilitating communication between societies separated by mutual incomprehension) started with Star Trek. A university friend of mine is both a linguistics expert and a keen Trekkie, and has consequently always taken an interest in Klingon. Given that the language is supposed to be of particular use when discussing issues related to spacecraft or warfare, I have to assume/hope he isn’t getting much practical mileage out of it on a day-to-day basis… or, for that matter using it as a means of mentally torturing his children like this bloke did. Sigh.

So we have languages invented to communicate with others, languages invented for entertainment purposes… but what about language as a method of exclusion? To wit: languages that only a select group of people can understand, allowing members of that group to communicate in front of others without being widely understood. I suppose Cockney rhyming slang, Pig Latin , Polari and the French verlan fall into this category, but for me it stirs memories of a brief school craze for pronouncing words backwards, mainly to flummox the teachers in class. To my dear old Latin teacher, Mr Nilbog Ecaf (pronounce: ‘essaf’), if you ever happen to read this: I’m very sorry.

Could the difference then only be due to a difference in accent? Americans often have trouble understanding us ‘Brits’ when we speak the Queen’s. Similarly for us, it can be a wee bit challenging to follow a Scottish conversation if the speakers have a particularly strong accent, which is why Scottish interviews are sometimes subtitled. Going back to the Scandinavian languages, take a look at this sentence:

Danish: Det var en fugtig, grå sommerdag i slutningen af jun
Norwegian: Det var en fuktig, grå sommerdag i slutten av juni
Swedish: Det var en fuktig, grå sommardag i slutet av juni
English: It was a moist, grey summer day in late June

The sentences appear almost identical and – although this cannot stand as a representative for the languages as a whole – it would seem that the pronunciation is the key.

But just how well do the Scandinavians understand each other? Apparently news programmes and interviews are also shown directly in the neighbouring countries [so Ed claims, but I haven't been able to find any hard evidence for this - Ed(itor)], and here at Robertson Languages, we have occasionally been asked by clients to translate English texts “into Scandinavian” (although whether these requests reflect specific local knowledge or just an unfamiliarity with the issues in question hasn’t always been clear). It is also claimed that due to regional dialects, people sometimes have more trouble understanding their fellow countrymen than their friends across the border. Take a look at this study on mutual intelligibility that was undertaken across the three Scandinavian countries. It marks the level of understanding people had of the other languages, the highest score possible being 10.

If there are any Scandinavians out there who can enlighten us more on this subject, we would be more than happy to hear from you! We’d particularly welcome comments about what happened to Finnish and Icelandic, and why these two don’t seem to form part of this Scandinavian family.

[written by Ed]

My latest project is to create a board game. With a bit of luck I may complete it before my draft notes end up gathering dust in the back of a cupboard or up in the loft. As I am a linguist, I think it is important that my game should be accessible to anyone, regardless of language, culture or background.

By now you may be wondering what my game is about and here my culture-free ambitions hit the first snag. I want to make a board game about … cricket.
It is, therefore, likely to be of little interest to anyone outside the former British Empire and not much interest to many of those within. Furthermore, as cricket is little known within the nations whose languages I have studied, translation of key terms, such as “no-ball” and “over”, could be problematic.

There are several approaches to internationalising board games:

• Translate all materials for each market in which the game is to be played. Some games even go so far as to alter content depending on where the game is sold; there are versions of Monopoly, for example, based in different cities with different street names.
• Keep the in-game materials untranslated and explain them in the translation of the rules. As the in-game materials are generally more complex to produce than rule sets, it makes more economic sense to do this but it can be more awkward for the players unless the volume of in-game text is kept quite low.
• Provide bilingual or multilingual in-game materials; a game I have recently discovered called Bang! has cards in Italian and English, and I remember playing a game called Vive la Différence which used cards with text in about 6 or 7 languages. This approach can, however, cause difficulties if trying to fit a large amount of text into a small space. Even a simple monolingual translation of the materials may cause spacing issues as text will often tend to expand in translation.
• Use no in-game text and simply translate the rules; ‘abstract’ games, such as Chess, Go and Uno are classic examples in this vein. In more thematic games, symbols can be used to represent in-game concepts.

In my game I think I will be trying to go with minimal in-game text, using symbols to represent shot types, ability types (batting, bowling, fielding) and specialisation (fast bowler, spin bowler, close-in fielder, wicket-keeper).

I intend my game to work in a similar way to role-playing-games or wargames in that there will be an element of chance through dice rolling but player ability should play a role as well. Player’s teams should be customisable, within limits, to have their own strengths and weaknesses. I have a certain fear that my rules will end up being hideously complex, but I don’t imagine I’ll reach the extent of the monstrous 100-plus page rulebook of a game called Magic Realm (which, whatever it says about my sanity, I am, however, still interested in playing).

As Spring seems finally to have arrived, with the Summer approaching close behind (hopefully), I may find myself being drawn outdoors to playing cricket or other sports for real and so leaving my indoor interests behind.

If, however, I make significant progress with my board game, I will endeavour to keep you posted.

It’s clear that Esperanto has a tight-knit community and that by sharing a common language it allows a mix of nationalities to come together, communicate and share their own cultures. I am, however, wondering whether this fraternity has been created precisely by the fact that Esperanto isn’t widely spoken.

I don’t think that being able to communicate with people around the globe necessarily makes a language universal and therefore, in Esperanto’s case, a ‘success’. For example, there are Catalan speakers dotted around the globe – yet I doubt anybody would consider it a universal language. The difference is that Catalan might not have the same international community as Esperanto and they most likely do not actively seek each other out whilst abroad.

I must retract what I said about Esperanto being a waste of time, as the replies to my previous blog have shown me that Esperanto has created a tight-knit community which allows friendships to blossom. I do, however, still believe that Esperanto is trying, in vain, to assume the role that English currently holds. People in hostels, bars, hotels or taxis around the world always revert to English as the universal form of communication and I still find it hard to see how or why Esperanto would ever change this.

It is also interesting to note that in 24 years, our company has not once had a request for Esperanto translation or language training, suggesting that companies are also reluctant to spend marketing budgets on this minority language.

(Written by Ed)

I was given the idea to write this blog by my co-worker Antonio, who over my time at RLI has given me a crash course in Italian gestures, meaning that verbal conversation has almost become futile in the workplace. Using simple movements he can express most feelings, and ask me if I am hungry, thirsty, angry or even crazy. It seems that the Italians use these hand movements as we in the UK might punctuate a sentence. They may even be more important than grammar, as I remember my GCSE Italian teacher tried teaching us the basic Italian hand gestures before we could even conjugate our first verb. The gestures can add emphasis to a statement, drive home an argument and often be rather comical, but I have been told that the gestures may vary across Italy and may cause offence if used in the wrong context or region, so watch out.

Studies have shown that as much as 65 percent of social meaning is conveyed through nonverbal means. Other research has shown that these gestures, which are likely to be subconscious and therefore indicative of true feelings, are often trusted over verbal communication. So although Italians’ gestures are conscious, does this perhaps mean that they are better communicators? Or that they just like to flail their arms around more?

(Written by Ed).

Esperanto was developed in the late 1800’s by Dr Ludwig Zamenhof with the aim of uniting the world through language. Zamenhof grew up in Bialystok – a melting pot of Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews – and felt the lack of a common language caused hostility between these social groups.

Unofficial stats estimate the number of Esperanto speakers at between 10,000 to 2 million, a broad estimate to say the least. It is also estimated that approximately 10 million have studied the universal tongue to some extent during their lifetime. Esperanto is, however, rarely taught in the UK as it is not seen to meet the requirements of the curriculum. There are meant to be 1000 Denaskuloj (native Esperanto) in the world, the majority of which will be found in Europe, but Esperanto is effectively a homeless language, adopted by no particular country or culture. Native Esperantophones are commonly born into a family where the mother and father communicate in Esperanto. Apart from by pure chance, Esperantophones are most likely to meet one another over the internet or at the annual congress, which has been held nearly every year since 1905.

Esperanto’s vocabulary is based on a mixture of Romance and Germanic languages and its phonology is Slavic. As for its phonetics, surely there is no such thing as a pure Esperanto accent, as there is no established country or area in which Esperanto has had time to grow. Therefore speakers must just adapt the accent of their native tongue to that of Esperanto, which must cause some miscomprehension and confusion. As you may notice, Esperanto has predominately European roots, yet surely a universal language should attempt to make itself more global. Lojban, for example – another invented language – integrates Mandarin, Hindi, English, Spanish, Russian and Arabic, making it decidedly more cosmopolitan.

As a linguist myself I am supportive of all language learning, but I get true pleasure from visiting or living in foreign countries, soaking up the culture, learning about their past and seeing how that affects their society and language today. Yet none of this is possible with Esperanto as it has no country, capital, culture or history; so I wouldn’t recommend Esperanto to any budding linguist, even if it is meant to be one of the easiest languages to learn.

(Written by Ed)

The debate over the use of language has inevitably always affected more marginalized groups such as immigrants, women and certain racial or religious groups, and – as human history testifies – is not a phenomenon restricted to playground bullies. However, rather than delve into the murky waters of man’s efforts to subjugate others, the opportunity to campaign for change in long-standing word meanings leads this post to a brief thought on the flexibility of language.

As language is ‘living’ or actively used, it retains a fluidity or a malleability which means it is influenced and shaped by its context. Some terms such as ‘neger’ reveal the ‘accepted’ term during a certain time period for describing someone of darker skin and give us an idea of the historical context; although you can argue that preserving this word or other words with now discriminatory or pejorative meanings in books as a memento is not necessary in children’s literature.

How do we keep abreast of these changes? Apart from being an historically abusive and offensive term, the use of ‘neger’ was causing direct personal harm to Mr Mesghena’s daughter – but can we police language? How can we measure whether a once-acceptable term is no longer fit for purpose? Well, you’ve got to be in it to win it, as the old proverb goes. If you’re a language learner, whether that’s a foreign language or not, you need to keep your language knowledge up to date by any means you can, i.e. reading the papers or watching the news or just meeting up with friends from that country to talk in their language. An example in English is the shifting meaning of the word ‘gay’ in the last few decades to mean homosexual rather than happy. Whilst working in Bangkok in the late 90s, my dad came across a Thai colleague who had graduated from British university several decades before and who had not heard about the changed meaning of this word. After years of using it, he was taken aback to discover what this word now meant.

Cultural sensitivity is also useful in countries where we speak the same language. Well, more or less the same language. We’re not just talking about the omission of the ‘u’ in words such as ‘colour, favour, honour etc.’ or the lack of adverbs – he spoke ‘real quick’, rather than he spoke ‘really quickly’ that characterise US English. I also mean more serious faux-pas, for instance, the word fag (UK slang for cigarette) and fag (US derogatory term for a gay person) which obviously requires speakers to be sensitive to their hearers.

Yet, there is a use of words which is simply wrong, not in a moral sense or a racially discriminative way but one which is merely non-sensical. A few years ago, a university tutor of mine recounted a lesson with a visiting student he was teaching; in response to the question (made by the tutor), ‘Shall we move rooms? It’s rather hot in here, isn’t it? The American student replied ‘Cool’, to which the tutor replied,’No, actually it isn’t!’

2 million people are said to have already marched past his body, which has been on public display at a military academy; such sweeping grief brings to mind the force and potency behind mourning public figures. Given the office he held, it is not unexpected that President Chavez should have a state funeral; it is more the scale of the ceremony which is impressive. It seems almost to have the same power to draw people together as a national sporting triumph – think of the many times South American countries such as Argentina and Brazil have taken home the World Cup trophy and the boost this has given these nations, or even our own national pride last summer in hosting and winning many medals at the Olympic Games.

Official mourning is not unheard of, but interestingly has always appeared more intense in its fervour in certain parts of the world. Is it simply a case of the Latin temperament expressing grief or political maneuvering?

The powerful nature of public mourning is one which some have suggested can bring national unity to a country in way that politicians or public figures couldn’t always achieve whilst alive and is therefore an opportunistic political act. Whilst mourning may reflect a person’s popularity or the love of their people, on another level it is also a shrewd political move not to be missed, one which can promote national identity among fellow countrymen in the throes of strong emotion and a fatalistic sense of change and uncertainty. This may be particularly true for countries whose leaders have held a more autocratic grip on their citizens; for example, the command given for the official public mourning of Kim Jong-Il which took place a couple of years ago. The display of vehement emotion received some criticism from foreign press as a show of grief which appeared too exaggerated to be true.

However, it has not just been those with official roles such as President Chavez, North Korean leaders or Sir Winston Churchill who have had official mourning. In fact, more informally-organised mourning has overshadowed the formal proceedings in more recent years.

In 2005, the late and popular Pope John Paul II was greatly mourned in the Vatican as well as by millions of people from all over the world (not just Catholics), many of whom queued from St. Peter’s Square all along the Tiber waiting to catch a glimpse of his body lying in state. Closer to home, Princess Diana’s unexpected death 16 years ago led many to take to the streets or tune in across the globe to pay homage to the people’s princess. Princess Di was a prime focus for media attention during her life and we can see how this same focus affects our reaction to others in the public sphere such as the late Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson – neither of whom had an official day set aside for mourning and yet had millions of people mourning around the world for them without the prompting of a state official. This perhaps shows another side to the potential for heavy influence through the media, as the widespread sharing of personal details through the press and the rise of the ‘celebrity’ cult makes people feel like they ‘know’ someone famous; as a consequence, they are truly sad at the death of a person who they may not actually know personally but who they nonetheless feel has been a large part of their life.

Grief can be engineered to fit the circumstances and generate an outward show of support, but there is no reason to doubt that there is genuine sorrow for the passing of a man who has led the people of Venezuela for 14 years. There is hope that through this time of loss there will be a sense of unity, even if it is used for political ends on the world stage.

If you’re a film buff, one of the wonderful perks of learning a foreign language is the way that it opens up a whole new sphere of cinematic experiences to you, letting you really get inside a country’s culture at a deep level. Don’t get me wrong; the professionals out there who provide dubbing and subtitling services to the film industry are dedicated and highly-skilled individuals who do a great job of making some fantastic works of art available to the non-linguist (and I should know; I used to work in that area myself). Yet despite their fine work, there’s nothing quite like understanding the nuances of the original dialogue itself… and then, of course, there are the obvious benefits of being able to turn off all that distraction at the bottom of the screen and immerse yourself fully in another world without having your eyes flicking constantly up and down.

However, whether you like your subtitles on or off (or, heaven help you, perhaps you prefer your films dubbed), there’s plenty of gold out there in world cinema, and we at Robertson Languages occasionally find ourselves discussing the relative merits of various international fillums over our morning coffee – as you may already have suspected if you’ve read Mary-Anne’s recent post. Seeing as we each have our list of favourites, I thought we’d start an intermittent series of blogs to promote a few staff picks. And today – drum roll – I’ll kick things off with a brief intro to the 1991 French classic, Delicatessen.

If you’ve ever seen Amélie (or, to give it its proper French title, Le Destin fabuleux d’Amélie Poulain), you’ll have at least half an idea what to expect from Delicatessen, for both emerged from the endlessly creative brain of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who also directed the Hollywood blockbuster Alien Resurrection, and later turned down a shot at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). However, whereas Amélie is essentially a light-hearted (albeit quirky), feel-good romance, Delicatessen (Jeunet’s first feature film) is more your average, everyday comedy tale of true love winning out against cannibalism, played out against a backdrop of schizophrenia, clowns, snails, spectacular DIY stunts, grandma-baiting, indoor water cascades, conjuring tricks, Heath Robinson suicide attempts, weird plumbing, slapstick, unlikely musical duets and a subterranean resistance movement with a rubber fetish in the suburbs of an apparently post-apocalyptic French city. (Stop me if you’ve heard it all before.)

Visually, the film is a stunner. Although based entirely in and around a single location (a dilapidated apartment block) and shot on just one sound stage (Jeunet actually came up with the idea for the film’s “sequel”, The City of Lost Children, first, but didn’t at the time have the industry kudos to command the sort of budget required for that film’s far more ambitious backdrops), the retro-looking set design is a sight to behold, and the frequent use of wide-angle lenses brings out the weirdest in a cast who must surely have already been selected for their unusual appearances. Also of note are the intriguing co-ordinated colour schemes throughout, and in particular the extremely sparing use of blue in the entire film… each time it does appear (most notably at the very end), could it be a metaphor for hope?

Which brings us, in a sense, to the storyline. What exactly has happened in the outside world? Is the story set in the future or the past? Who are the Resistance fighting against? Is the film trying to make a point, or even make complete sense? (If you’re interested, the answers to the above questions are three “who knows?”, and a pair of “probably not”s, in that order). Yes, the film does have a consistent – and ultimately simple – plot at its heart, which I won’t spoil; but really, most of the joy along the way is found in the quirky uniqueness of the microcosm Jeunet has created, and the wealth of additional detail you feel he couldn’t resist throwing in, just for the heck of it.

From the desperate escape attempt that forms the film’s claustrophobic opening scene, right through to the creative destruction of most of the apartment building at the climax – and taking in any number of breathtakingly off-the-wall happenings along the way – Delicatessen is stuffed full of “what-on-earth?” moments. Some fit into the story in an obvious way; many others are simply beautiful, voyeuristic digression as we are briefly allowed to eavesdrop on the lives of the building’s various inhabitants. For example, the glorious synchronised “bedspring symphony” set piece (which was used on its own as the cinematic trailer for the movie’s US release) adds not one jot to the advancement of the plot, but it’s still arguably the finest few minutes of the entire film. If you want to discover just how brilliant a movie stitched roughly together out of a series of inspired, twisted vignettes can be, Delicatessen is one you need to add to your “must-see” list.

But hey, enough of my yakkin’. At the time of writing, you can pick up a second-hand copy of this little beauty for three or four quid delivered. And a final clincher: believe it or not, this is a French film which doesn’t feature Gérard Depardieu. Go on, what’s stopping you? And how about coming back here afterwards and letting us know what you made of it?

This claim is thanks to a new phonetic alphabet called SaypU which some suggest could hold the seeds to a possible germination of peace across the globe by providing a universal code, which could make pronunciation easier and help promote international relations.

Can we really reverse the curse at Babel? Does language really hold the key to calming conflict and achieving amnesty of barbed comments and contentious remarks? As anyone who has experienced the difficulties of attempting to make yourself understood abroad, I wonder if, physically, universally recognised phonemes can really help control disobedient mouth muscles?

These are all big questions which would take more than a blog post to discuss, but let’s consider a few of the previous attempts to universalise language in this way.

Firstly, how about Esperanto? It was promoted as a truly international language, created in the late nineteenth century to be a neutral second language, again with the hope of uniting people. However, in spite of the good intentions behind it, it has never become widely accepted or spoken.  This may be because language has always been a useful tool for political leverage or other ends; in the last century alone we can think of the dominance of Russian in former Soviet countries as well as the Azeri language, which has three different alphabets which have come about as different political parties have come into power. In more recent times, the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement has sought to standardize different Lusophone spellings, with Portuguese speaking governments adopting this spelling reform with the aim of promoting greater literacy and unifying the language. Whatever your opinion of the new ‘simplified’ form of Chinese which came into play after Mao’s rise to power, it has enabled what was a largely illiterate population access to a written form of a common language.

Yet, even if we can make a step towards solving the problem ‘on paper’, how do we get our tongues around unpalatable sounds when our oral reflexes just won’t give? I have memories of schooldays with teachers attempting, with various degrees of success, to get us to produce the French nasal [] or even the common [e] sound. Inability to produce more unfamiliar sounds at first sometimes made me wonder if my head, ears and mouth were even connected, so different was the cacophony that we, unitedly, produced. In more recent years, I have encountered Italians bewailing the English habit of ‘eating their words’ or of not opening their mouths to speak – and who can blame them, when this is so opposed to the strong vowels and the emphasis on pronouncing every sound clearly in their native tongue? And, dare I ask, how do we involve languages with more interesting sounds to us like the ‘clicks’ in Xhosa?

I can sympathise with this desire for a common phonetic alphabet. English is notoriously difficult to pronounce because of the lack coherence between spelling and pronunciation, and introducing a phonetic alphabet would greatly help non-native speakers to accurately produce the correct sounds without learning words one by one. Indeed, the phonetic system is encouraged in English schools now to enable children to learn to read more quickly and is widely used in speech therapy.

Another argument in play is the important distinction – and charm – of various accents which would impoverish the richness of language if all sounds were standardized; we would still need to differentiate between US English, Aussie English and British English and also consider regional accents which are already on the wane.

For some, hopes are high, if a little unrealistic, but the idea that we can foster international understanding through language seems to be a noble pursuit and contains an element of truth.

The truth is that taking the more traditional approach and learning a new language does help you appreciate another people, culture and their customs. If we can’t yet unite on a global scale through a common phonetic alphabet, you could make your contribution to social transformation by personal change and take on the mantle of language learning yourself and work on your own ability to communicate in a foreign language of your choice the next time you’re abroad. If we all made an effort to understand each other better, maybe this would achieve more peaceful relationships.

So, drop us a line and get learning today. Who knows, like Gracie, you may find that a different life experience, such as being able to communicate in someone else’s language, may leave you not merely becoming more empathetic towards your fellow man but also wanting ‘world peace’ …