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Los cognados falsos son palabras en ingles o español que suenan como otra palabra en la otra lengua. Pero hay muchísimos cognados correctos en ingles y español también, como "decide/decidir" y "incredible/increíble". Algunos cognados falsos que en realidad tienen definiciones muy diferentes incluyen:
1. nudo. Muchas personas piensan que es la palabra español para "nude" pero en realidad se significa "knot".
2. apología. Muchas personas piensan que es la palabra español para "apology" pero en realidad se significa "warning/advice".
3. cuestión. Muchas veces personas piensan que significa "question", pero en realidad se significa "matter / issue".

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Check out some of the most common false cognates in Spanish.

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Este página web es un colección de palabras chistosos en "spanglish", una mezcla de español y ingles. Algunos demuestran la regla que aprendemos en clase: cuando crea un verbo nuevo, siempre tiene el término "-ear". Por ejemplo, los números 5 y 6 son "parquear" y "chequear". No son palabras españoles, pero sin embargo siguen este regla; en realidad, si hay reglas o patrones en el "spanglish". Otros ejemplos en este página que me gustan mucho son: "clickeando"; "el shopping", y "Bibaporú".

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24 Everyday Words You Didn't Know Were Spanglish

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Me

Eva (born in Austin, TX; grew up in San Antonio) - English dominant, bilingual (Spanish)

Parents

Brian (Born & raised in Mt. Hope, KS) - English dominant, bilingual (German)

Cynthia (Born & raised in Columbia, MO) - English dominant, bilingual (German)
Siblings
Talia (Born in New Orleans, LA; grew up in San Antonio) - English dominant, bilingual (Spanish)

Paternal Grandparents

Jerry (Kansas) - English monolingual

Janet (Kansas) - English monolingual

Maternal Grandparents

Lyman (Missouri) - English dominant, bilingual (German)

Annie (Missouri) - English monolingual
Talat (step-grandmother, born in Pakistan, US immigrant) - Urdu dominant multilingual (English and German)

Notes:

1. Brian & Cynthia: After marrying in 1987, my parents moved to Basel, Switzerland, for my dad to do his post-doc. My mom majored in German in college, so she already knew the language; my dad, though, knew none and learned German while living there for three years. Nowadays, they only speak it to each other when they don't want my sister and me to know what they're talking about.

2.  Talia & Eva: Both my sister and I were put in a Spanish Immersion program beginning in elementary school. From 1st-5th grade, all of our classroom instruction was in Spanish. We continued taking classes through high school, and both of us are majoring in Spanish in college.

3.  Lyman & Talat: I don't know how they learned German, but both are fluent and live in Germany during summers.

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Este página web habla sobre las palabras españoles que también usan en ingles. Lingüistas estiman que ingles ha prestado alrededor de 10,000 palabras españoles. Muchas son términos de la comida, como "taco, burrito, cilantro, oregano, y enchilada". Otras palabras ingleses relacionados a la comida son un poco diferente, pero vienen de español, como "tuna", que viene de "atún." Nombres de animales que vienen de español incluye "puma, jaguar, and iguana"; estas palabras  fueron originalmente de origen indígena (Puma de quecha; jaguar era "yaguar" con los Guarani en Paraguay; y iguana era "iwana" con los Arawak y Carib en los Indias Occidentales).

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Este sitio web ofrece la transcripción de una entrevista entre el periodista Jim Lehrer y el autor de un nuevo libro, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, llamado Ilan Stavans. Stavans nos explica que "spanglish" es un unión entre español y ingles, como un matrimonio. También incluye el encuentro entre las culturas anglo sajones y hispanos. Realmente ocurre como un metodo de comunicación: la conversación empieza en ingles o español pero los hablantes cambian al otro muchas veces, a veces creando nuevas palabras o mezclando palabras de los dos lenguajes. Pero Stavans acentua que "spanglish" no es un lenguaje por su mismo, y es mas como un dialecto. Además, hay diferentes dialectos de "spanglish" en los diferentes países y regiones; el "spanglish" en Puerto Rico será diferente que el "spanglish" en la frontera del EEUU y Mexico.

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Do You Speak American . Sea to Shining Sea . American Varieties . Spanglish . Book | PBS

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I think that being able to appreciate Spanglish enables us tore see the process of language formation. It is like an astronomer discovering a new galaxy. It is not only an opportunity to see how galaxies are created, but to see how our own galaxy was formed.

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A Language, Not Quite Spanish, With African Echoes

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A Language, Not Quite Spanish, With African Echoes

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Este artículo del "New York Times" habla sobre el pueblo de San Basilio de Palenque en Colombia. Este pueblo fue fundido por esclavos fugutivos. Allí, hablan palenquero, una lengua que confusa lingüistas. Hay teorías sobre como palenquero originó, pero no hay hechos ciertos menos de que este pueblo es el solo lugar donde hablan lo. Palenquero es comparado a papiamento muchas veces, pero palenquero es único; la gramática es muy diferente de lo de español, así que no es efectivo compararlo a español. Los lingüistas piensan que era influenciado por el kikongo, el lenguaje de Congo y Angola, y también portugués. Palabras kikongos, como "ngombe" (ganado) y "ngubá" (cacahuate), son usado en día de hoy en el palenque también. Un ejemplo de una oración palenque es esto: “Palenge a senda tielan ngombe ri nduse i betuaya,” que significa que Palenque es la tierra del ganado, dulces, y alimentos básicos.

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Palenquero is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language in Latin America. But its grammar is so different that Spanish speakers can understand almost nothing of it. Its closest relative may be Papiamento, spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which draws largely from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, linguists say. It is spoken only in this village and a handful of neighborhoods in cities where workers have migrated.

The survival of Palenquero points to the extraordinary resilience of San Basilio de Palenque, part of whose very name - Palenque - is the Spanish word for a fortified village of runaway slaves. Different from dozens of other palenques that were vanquished, this community has successfully fended off threats to its existence to this day.

Colonial references to its origins are scarce, but historians say that San Basilio de Palenque was probably settled sometime after revolts led by Benkos Biohó, a 17th-century African resistance leader who organized guerrilla attacks on the nearby port of Cartagena with fighters armed with stolen blunderbusses.

And while English-, French- and Dutch-based Creole languages are found in the Caribbean, the survival of one in the interior of Colombia has led some scholars to theorize that Palenquero may be the last remnant of a Spanish-based lingua franca once used widely by slaves throughout Latin America.

Palenquero was strongly influenced by the Kikongo language of Congo and Angola, and by Portuguese, the language of traders who brought African slaves to Cartagena in the 17th century. Kikongo-derived words like ngombe (cattle) and ngubá (peanut) remain in use here today.

Advocates for keeping Palenquero alive face an uphill struggle. The isolation that once shielded the language from the outside world has come to an end. Once three days by mule to the coast, the journey to Cartagena now takes two hours by bus on a bumpy dirt road.

Electricity arrived in the 1970s as a government gift in recognition of Antonio Cervantes, better known as Kid Pambelé, a Colombian world boxing titleholder who was born here. With electricity came radio and television. The schoolhouse, named in honor of Biohó, has an Internet connection now.

But Palenqueros, as the community's residents call themselves, say the biggest threat to their language's survival comes from direct contact with outsiders. Many here have had to venture to nearby banana plantations or cities for work, and then found themselves ostracized because of the way they spoke.

"We were subject to scorn because of our tongue," said Concepción Hernández Navarro, 72, who survives by farming yams, peanuts and corn.

Only two of Ms. Hernández's eight children live here; five are in Cartagena and one moved as far away as Caracas, drawn by Venezuela's oil boom. "We have always been poor here," she said in an interview in front of her modest house, "but our poverty has grown worse."

If there is one blessing to this impoverishment, it may be that Colombia's long internal war has largely been fought over spoils in other places, allowing teachers here to toil uninterrupted at reviving Palenquero since classes were introduced in the late 1980s.

Undaunted by the prospect of Palenquero's disappearing after centuries of use, Rutsely Simarra Obeso, a linguist who was born here and lives in Cartagena, is compiling a lexicon. Others are assembling a dictionary of Palenquero to be used in the school.

The defenders of Palenquero view their struggle as a continuation of other battles. "Our ancestors survived capture in Africa, the passage by ship to Cartagena and were strong enough to escape and live on their own for centuries," said Mr. Salgado, the schoolteacher.

"We are the strongest of the strongest," he continued. "No matter what happens, our language will live on within us."

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A Language, Not Quite Spanish, With African Echoes

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Palenquero is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language in Latin America. But its grammar is so different that Spanish speakers can understand almost nothing of it. Its closest relative may be Papiamento, spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which draws largely from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, linguists say.

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A Quick Explanation of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)

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A Quick Explanation of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)

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Este página del web habla sobre de ladino (judeo-español) que era la lengua de los judeos de origen español. A través de tiempo, se han hablado el ladino en África del Norte, Egipto, Grecia, Turquía, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Francia, Israel y un poco en el Estados Unidos también. Ladino desarrollaba después de cuando los judeos fueron expulsado de España y Portugal en 1492. Empezo como español castellano, pero cuando los judeos fueron de españa, ladino desarrolló. Fueron diferencias entre los dialectos de ladino dependiente en donde los judeos se establecieron. El lenguaje de ladino incluyó vocabulario de español medieval que no usamos en español moderna.

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ladino ladino spanish judeo judeo-spanish judeo-espagnol judezmo spaniol dzhudezmo sefardic sephardic language

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Ladino, the Sephardic Language - Judeo-Spanish Judeo-Espagnol

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A Quick Explanation of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)

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Regional Variations in Spanish Words Translated from English

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Regional Variations in Spanish Words Translated from English

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Este página del web incluye un gran lista de palabras de ingles traslados a español; demuestra como hay variaciones de vocabulario en las países que principalmente hablan español. Las diferencias me fascinan. Por ejemplo, la mayoría de países usan "bebe" para los infantes. Pero en
Argentina y Uruguay usan beba (para niña) y bebe (para niño), y en Chile, usan guagua. Además, en Cuba, el Republico Dominicana y Puerto Rico, usan guagua para autobús. Para supermercado, hay muchísima variación:
"Colombia: mercado
Costa Rica: compras
Cuba: bodega
Dominican Republic: víveres
El Salvador: pulpería
Guatemala: tienda
Mexico: super, tienda de abarrotes
Panama: abarrotería
Puerto Rico: colmado
Spain: supermercado
Uruguay: almacén
Venezuela: abastos"
Quiero saber más de como estas variaciones originaron.

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Regional Variations in Spanish Words Translated from English

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List of Spanish words that have different meanings in different Spanish speaking regions around the world, highlighting the importance of expert translators, compiled by the Rennert Translation Group.

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En este blog, el autor habla sobre las diferencias entre acentos españoles en varias países. La diferencia más obvio y conocido es como en español castellano--del norte de España--pronuncian "ci’ y ‘ce' con el sonido θ. En Perú, el español es influenciado por el quechua y aymara, lenguas indigenas. En Argentina, pronuncian el doble l como "zh"; y, en Buenos Aires, usan "vos" en lugar de tú.

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Capítulo 7: Variación lingüistica en español

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Capítulo 7: Variación lingüistica en español

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Esta columna habla sobre las homónimas y como en la escritura, la gente las confusa muchísimo, especialmente en ingles. En ingles, hay miles de homónimas. El autor dice que las homónimas con tres significados son generalmente los mas confusos. Cuando lee la columna, aprendí sobre algunas palabras y homónimas en ingles que yo había diciendo incorrectamente, como “hoard” para describir un grupo de personas (la palabra correcta es “horde”).

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Most writers can distinguish between principal and principle, complement and compliment, and flee and flea. But many of these words, known as homophones, trip up even the most experienced wordsmith. They are nasty words that cause misunderstanding and sometimes hilarity for the reader. The English language boasts several thousand homophones that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings.

When writing my first travel book about Ireland 25 years ago, I stumbled over these words. One homophone related to a story about the Italian state electricity board wanting to buy 30 tons of sand for research purposes from the beach at Dog's Bay near Roundstone in Galway. A county councillor said if the Italians wanted the sand, in exchange they would have to give the stones from the Colosseum to help rebuild a local pier damaged in storms.

I misspelt it as Coliseum, the name of the theatre in London, now home to English National Opera. Fortunately a gimlet-eyed editor saved my blushes.

She also corrected another homophone that referred to the hoard of tourists visiting the Aran Islands, which should have been spelt as "horde". (The former refers to the hoard of antiques in your attic; whored - behaving like a harlot - is another more colourful variant.)

One that slipped through the net and appeared in the published book was vocal chords, when I meant vocal cords.

The most frequently misused homophone is one with three meanings, such as palate, palette or pallet. The first is the roof of the mouth, the second an artist's board for mixing colours, the third a wooden platform. I now tread carefully on the platforms on which I write, on guard against these occupational hazards.

Be warned: your computer spellcheck is no help, since the words are spelled correctly but used in the wrong context. An old- fashioned dictionary, or the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors is still the surest way to check.

After a creative writing weekend workshop I tutored some years ago, a participant wrote to thank me. She said the workshop had helped overcome her fear of the blank page and "conker" her fear of writing; obviously, it did not help conquer her fear of homophones.

Apart from these loathsome words, the other embarrassment I suffered in print is a typo that crept into a song title. Late at night in a dark and noisy bar in Carlow, I wrote down the name of the song Shoe the Donkey, which acquired an extra letter "t", transforming it in the printed book into Shoot the Donkey. I asked the editors to correct it for the reprint, but they felt it was so good that it should be left as it was. It has been corrected for the book's 10th anniversary edition, although I had feared it would end up as Shoo the Donkey.

But back to homophones. Recent examples I have come across for my ever-growing collection include elicit for illicit, peddling for pedalling (pedaling in the US), birthed for berthed (in reference to a cruise ship) and a story about a waiter who did not understand the diners' order since he spoke only "pigeon" English, leading to the surreal impression that he was cooing at them.

Many writers clearly found the word business a tough slog. In a letter to his first serious girlfriend, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dylan Thomas wrote about being tormented by words: "There is torture in words, torture in their linking & spelling, in the snail of their course . . . "

Paul Clements's Wandering Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way: From Banba's Crown to World's End is published by The Collins Press. Two of his earlier travel books, The Height of Nonsense: The Ultimate Irish Road Trip and Irish Shores: A Journey Round the Rim of Ireland, have recently been reprinted

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Most writers can distinguish between principal and principle, complement and compliment, and flee and flea. But many of these words, known as homophones, trip up even the most experienced wordsmith. They are nasty words that cause misunderstanding and sometimes hilarity for the reader.

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"Look at All These Ducks There Are at Least Ten." Why Is This Funny?

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"Look at All These Ducks There Are at Least Ten." Why Is This Funny?

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En este articulo, el autor habla sobre las máximas de H. Paul Grice, que son principios de cooperación relacionado a la lengua. Cuando hablo con otra persona, hay reglas no escritas que yo y la otra persona sigue; es un cooperación entre personas para intercambiar información correcto. El articulo específicamente explica porque es chistoso que un clip de video de muchísimas (cientos, probablemente) patos con el subtitulo “Look at all those ducks there are at least ten” . Es chistoso gracias a las máximas de Grice.

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The animated GIF above-along with the caption "Look at all those ducks there are at least ten"-is currently floating around the Internet. The thousands of people who have liked and shared it on various sites, including Tumblr, Reddit, and Imgur, presumably think it's entertaining, but why?

At the risk of spoiling the joke by overanalyzing it, a linguist named Paul Grice has an answer.

What's curious, at first glance, is the contrast between "at least ten ducks" and the vast swarm of ducks in the actual picture. The incongruity of the caption leads to humor, right? But this too is strange. After all, the statement is technically true, as pointed out by the almost-as-popular follow-up comment: "Well, you're not wrong." And sure enough, if we were sorting a series of images into piles of those containing at least ten ducks and those containing nine ducks or fewer, this throng of ducks would no doubt fall into the first group. Why, then, does it sound funny to make-albeit out of the blue-what is undeniably a true assertion? Is it simple understatement, or is there something more at work?

Here's where Paul Grice comes in. Grice was the first to describe some of the implicit assumptions that everyone makes in conversation, known as Gricean Maxims in his honor. In particular, he noted that everything that someone says is interpreted as if it were relevant to the circumstances and what had been said before. It sounds simple, but it's something that computers, compared to humans at least, are surprisingly bad at.

Take the following exchange, for example:

Speaker 1: "Would you like some coffee?"
Speaker 2: "Coffee would keep me awake."

Speaker 1 could reasonably interpret that answer as a yes or a no depending on the context. If it's morning and there's work to be done, being kept awake is likely desirable, but if it's late evening, well, probably not. It all hinges on what is the most relevant interpretation: The yes or no isn't inherent to the answer itself, but you figure it out, without much thought, based on your common-sense knowledge of the world, referred to in linguistics as your pragmatic competence.

Grice and his successors break this idea down further. In general, we assume that people are truthful, that they are giving as much detail as is pertinent and no more, and that they're being as clear as possible. When someone seems to be violating one of these assumptions, it's logical to deduce that they're doing so for a particular reason, such as biting sarcasm or, in the case of our ducks, for laughs.

Which of the following statements conveys more complete information?

1. "I ate some of the cookies"
2. "I ate all of the cookies"

Obviously, the latter provides you with a more definitive picture of the current state of the cookie jar. You would expect me to have pretty reliable knowledge of my own eating behavior, so if I said that I ate some of the cookies, I must be implying that I did not, in fact, eat them all. Otherwise I would have said so.

The technical name for this type of reasoning is scalar implicature, and it's precisely what's going on with the ducks. Since we expect that the caption will give as much information as is relevant, we might assume that ten is a reasonably close estimate of the actual number of ducks in the picture. But it's abundantly evident that there are more than ten. So a statement that there are at least ten ducks in the picture is out of whack with what we see: On the one hand, the writer of the caption couldn't possibly believe that there are maybe ten, maybe a few more, ducks in this picture, but on the other, the Gricean Maxim related to quantity that normally works so well suggests that this is in fact precisely what the writer believes. And yet the caption remains incontrovertibly true in the most literal sense. Just as with a classical paradox or an optical illusion, puzzling over why we can get multiple interpretations from this caption in this context can cause surprise and entertainment. Similarly, I could play with your expectations by saying:

"I ate some of the cookies ... [pause] ... actually, I ate all of them."

Providing incomplete information up front-being temporarily misleading, in effect-turns a matter-of-fact statement about eating all of the cookies or seeing some number of ducks into a punchline.

Of course, as with any type of humor, implicatures can be overplayed, so one of the fun things about Gricean Maxims is that they explain why certain people are really annoying. We've all encountered that guy who, when asked "Do you know what time it is?" will reply "Yes." He's responding to the literal meaning of the question and not to its larger, pragmatic implications.

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look at all these ducks there are at least ten

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"Look at All These Ducks There Are at Least Ten." What??

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The animated GIF above-along with the caption "Look at all those ducks there are at least ten"-is currently floating around the Internet. The thousands of people who have liked and shared it on various sites, including Tumblr, Reddit, and Imgur, presumably think it's entertaining, but why?

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Stanford Professor Analyzes Everyday Influence of Linguistics

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Stanford Professor Analyzes Everyday Influence of Linguistics

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Este articulo cubre una conferencia sobre la lingüística y, específicamente, las polisemias y homónimas. El profesor, Dr. Daniel Jurafsky, explica como la polisemia y homonimia afecta todo, como los menús de los restaurantes, y interacciones con la policía. Por ejemplo, Dr. Jurafsky describe sus investigaciones en restaurantes; en los menús de restaurantes mas baratos, usaban adjetivos imprecisos para describir su comida, como “delicioso, sabroso, y terrífico.” En restaurantes mas caras, usaban adjetivos sensoriales, como “picante, rico, crujiente, y cremoso.”

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Jason Ben Nathan / Sun Staff Photographer

Prof. Daniel Jurafsky, linguistics and computer science, Stanford University, described the unexpected role linguistics play in the construction of restaurant menus and police-civilian interactions at a lecture Thursday.

Jurafsky first discussed the evolution of words, saying that a word's evolution depends on its polysemy and homonymy - the number of meanings, its frequency and its sentiment. Words with high polysemy, low frequency and negative sentiment are the most likely to change, according to Jurafsky.

Jurafsky then described a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon researchers that revealed that a restaurant menu's language correlates with the restaurant's price.

Cheaper restaurants tend to use vague adjectives like "delicious, flavorful, terrific," whereas middle-priced restaurants tend to use sensory adjectives like "zesty, rich, crispy, creamy," Jurafsky said.

Jurafsky added that expensive restaurants have shorter, more succinct menu descriptions, which is due to the fact that people expect high quality food at expensive restaurants, eliminating the need to reassure customers by explicitly saying so on the menu.

Jurafsky also examined people's everyday interactions with police officers, tackling the question of whether officers treat white community members with a greater degree of respect than they treat black community members.

Using transcripts from body cameras and computer science models to collect data, researchers asked random participants to judge the respectfulness, politeness, friendliness, formality and impartiality of their interactions with police officers, according to Jurafsky.

"Officers are more polite to white people, more impartial to white people, more friendly to white people ... and more respectful to white people," he said.

Jurafsky concluded that race is a "significant factor in whether someone is treated respectfully," saying the goal of his research is "not just to show that there are differences, but to improve the situation."

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Stanford Professor Analyzes Everyday Influence of Linguistics

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Jason Ben Nathan / Sun Staff Photographer Prof. Daniel Jurafsky, linguistics and computer science, Stanford University, described the unexpected role linguistics play in the construction of restaurant menus and police-civilian interactions at a lecture Thursday. Jurafsky first discussed the evolution of words, saying that a word's evolution depends on its polysemy and homonymy - the number of meanings, its frequency and its sentiment.

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Esta página web tiene un selección de texto de un nuevo libro por John McWhorter sobre la lingüística y como cambia a través del tiempo. Este extracto habla sobre la semántica y pragmática. El pragmática es un tema de la lingüística que implica que nos sienten de lo que estamos hablando. Por ejemplo, cuando digo, “Bien, te veo mañana” diciendo “bien” al principio significa que hay un actitud subjetivo allí. Además, hay tan subjetividad involucrado que el significado original de la palabra desaparece.

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In his new book, 'Words on the Move,' John McWhorter delights in the fluidity of language, how it never stands still but flows and morphs like the living thing it is.

There's a reason that it often requires an art history class to get a handle on medieval painting. It may be pretty in a general sense, but it's hard not to notice that the people tend to exhibit only the broadest of emotions, if any-in much of medieval painting, the faces seem almost frozen blank.

This increasing focus on the individual is a theme in much of Western history. We can practically hear and smell Anna Karenina, Holden Caulfield, and Oscar Wao in a way that we never can any of the characters in The Iliad. To Plato and Aristotle, steeped in unquestioningly hierarchical ideologies, a political system guaranteeing all individuals "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" would have sounded like science fiction. Even the notion of a popular song "cover" is a sign of the times. To Cole Porter, it would have seemed alien to write a song for only one artist to sing, with anyone else required to wait about ten years to take a crack at it, and even then, have their effort classified as a salutary "version" of the first one. Today, a pop song is about one person expressing their one self.

Language, however, has always been ahead of the curve on individualism. Long before Rembrandt, Thomas Jefferson, or Adele, human language has always and forever been getting personal. Not in the sense of people having arguments, although of course that has been happening, too. Rather, one of the things that has always happened to a great many words is that they start out showing what we mean, but end up being used to show how we feel. This trajectory is as common as words getting shorter ( I'd-a done it from I would have done it), cuter ( horsey, brewsky), or nastier ( hussy started as housewife). Just as often, a word nestles into a place in English that grammar mavens and quite a few others consider unsuitably vague, random, redundant, or as having no "real" meaning-the use of so at the start of a sentence is an example-when to a linguist the word in question is fulfilling a function as normal as marking past tense or making something plural.

This chapter will introduce you to something very old about language that, through no fault of our own, always seems new.
Well, What?
It's a whole wing of language that one hears too little about, with our natural intuition that a word is something with a meaning corresponding to some easily specified thing, concept, action, or quality. Ah, there is so much more to what it is to communicate as a human being. There are certainly the vanilla sentences. Horses run fast: if a toddler asks us what that means, we could easily go word by word and nail the matter. But then, how about another perfectly plausible sentence: Well, horses run fast. Okay: horses, run, and fast are easy. But what about well? What does well mean, Mommy? Note, this is not the well that refers to excellence: you didn't mean Expertly, horses run fast. This is that other little well, that you don't even think about.

And when it's that hard to specify or master what a particular word "means," it's a good sign that we're in a different realm of language, where the tidy idea of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions you learned in school doesn't do much for you, and a Schoolhouse Rock! jingle would be frustratingly diagonal. "Conjunction Junction" and "A Noun Is a Person, Place, or Thing!" were delightfully instructive tunes, but it's hard to imagine setting a melody to " Well implies discrepancy between a previous statement and what you wish to utter!" or at least one that would exactly catch on.

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Any language is always dragging some words from the chipper, gingham-dress, schoolroom straightforwardness of semantics (Horses live on farms!) into the MPM maw: layered, loaded, smoking Dunhills in the courtyard. MPMs are evidence of a word that started as an ordinary one, but then got personal.
The Personal Pull
MPMs are an extreme manifestation of a general process. Throughout any language, words of all kinds are always going personal to a certain extent: the subjective exerts a gravity-style pull on words' meanings. Example: must started out in the objective command sense: You must stand still. Later came an alternate meaning of must, as in (doorbell rings) That must be the Indian food. In saying that, we don't mean "I demand that that be the Indian food," but a more personal, subjective sense of mustness. You mean that within your mind and your sense of what is likely, logic requires that you must suppose that it's the Indian food, rather than the mail or a neighbor. First was the command meaning, objective and focused outward. But over time words often turn inward and become more about you. "That" (in my mind) "must be the Indian food": here is psychology. Must got personal. Other times, things get so personal that the original meaning vanishes entirely. Here's some Tennyson (sorry): Lancelot's admirer Elaine is asleep "Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought." Rathe? Angry, as in "wrathed," maybe? No, actually: the word meant "quick" or, in this passage, "early." Elaine is up early with things on her mind. Rathe meant "early," so rather, in Old and into Middle English, meant "earlier." But a meaning like that was ripe for going personal, as must did. It happens via what we could call meaning creep, by analogy with the term mission creep -bit by bit, new shades creep into what we consider the meaning of something to be, until one day the meaning has moved so far from the original one that it seems almost astounding.

MPMs are what happens when this personal pull on words' meanings goes so far that a word no longer has what we can easily process as a meaning at all ( Well,... ), or has a meaning so divorced from the original that some mistake seems to have been made (the "teenager" usage of like).

In these cases, the word's very essence has become an expression of personal feeling, rather than being the name of a person, place, thing, action, or trait. We need not think of MPMs as smokers, actually, but I think it's safe to say they drink wine. They make the difference between the receptionist and the friend, between Siri and you. They bring language alive. Nor are MPMs usually as tough to specify as little well. They simply require us to expand our conception of what it is to "mean" something, especially since the fact that no one tells us about this side of language so often leads to misunderstandings about how people talk.

In putting a face on language, MPMs even lend themselves to a handy acronym, FACE, that allows us to explore how deeply this "secret" realm of language permeates our very beings. More specifically, the FACE schema gives us a sense of the perfectly ordinary place words have gone when, superficially, they seem to have gone off the rails because it's hard to nail down what they "mean." In English, MPMs can be classified according to four principal functions that they cluster around:

This likely seems a random set of distinctions. In fact, it constitutes quite a bit of what it is to actually talk-not speak or recite, but talk.
Factuality: For Real
What makes really seem out of place in a headline is that it is fundamentally emotional: it's too personal. We can sprinkle really all over a sentence to lend notes of personally backed insistence with an in-the-moment feel: Really, I didn't even see the point of going outside when it was that hot; He wants to pay it in installments, but really, what's point of dragging it out?; I'm just tired of the whole mess, really. Note that in all these cases, in reality would not convey the particular meaning that really does. The reason I'm just tired of the whole mess, in reality seems off is that really and in reality do not mean the same thing.

Really, then, is a paradigm example of the F in FACE, the Factuality flavor of modal marker. The story of really has two parts, like a movie and its sequel. In the first installment, really was one of many English words meaning "truth" that came to mean very-such as very itself, which came from the French word for true, vrai ( verrai in the late thirteenth century). Very is the well-worn version of verily just as "rilly" is what happens to really with heavy use. Truly was another example, of course, with true having undergone the same transformation as verrai a couple of centuries earlier. Even farther back there had been others. In the poem "The Owl and the Nightingale" of around 1200, the Middle English trips you up just as you think you're in good hands: Ich was in one sumere dale ..." ("I was in a summer dale") in one suthe digele hale. What? Digel was an original English word for "secret"; hale is "hall," or, in a poetic sense, "space," "place." But suthe: the key to that one is perhaps clearer in the way it would later be spelled, sooth: it meant "truth," captured today only in soothsayer.* But sooth had an extended meaning as-you guessed it-"truly," or "very." In one suthe digele hale meant "in a very secluded place."

Very, true, and sooth show that when a word means "true" and it's used a lot, you can almost predict that, over time, it will glide from meaning "truth" into meaning "very." But the process can also go further than that, and that's where really comes in. Very settled into serving as an objective word, of the kind learners get in textbooks early on. But the personal pull got a hold of really, such that it morphed beyond the very stage into a more personal (i.e., modal) place. When someone says it's really cold, we think of them shivering under their coat, not a weather report. To say, Okay, really, what are we going to do? is to indicate one's emotional commitment to getting down to cases. You show your FACE.

Literally, then, is easy. It was originally one more variation on indicating truth-specifically exactness, as in "by the letter": He took the advice literally; He meant it literally. But that can have been only a snapshot along a time line; there was never any question that literally was going to morph into other meanings. The only question was what kind. For one, literally quite predictably went beyond its original meaning into one where "by the letter" no longer makes sense except as a metaphor: We were literally the only ones there; We were literally on the brink of a depression. There are no letters involved in these statements, but literally means that the statement is true in a specific way-as in what we sometimes even refer to as "by the letter."

But ultimately, in view of the fact that language inherently goes rather than sits, literally is that kid in sixth grade who became the one to make fun of for some random reason when, with another roll of the dice, many of his tormentors would have been equally ripe for torment and what everybody really deserved was to be left alone. More to the point, literally is that kid subjected to a bizarre accusation that he is remiss in refusing to talk and dress like his grandfather.

Of course, some could object that just because people were doing it a long time ago doesn't mean they were any more correct than we are. But a second clue about literally is a certain inconsistency in objections to its figurative usage. Fowler suggested practically as a substitute, but in its usage as "approximately," practically has drifted into a near opposite to practical's original meanings of "actual," "realistic," and "suitable," has it not? Also, it's easy to forget how far even the meanings of very and truly are from where they began. It all made my daughter very happy-try paraphrasing that with "in actuality," the original meaning of verrai and truly. "It all made my daughter happy in actuality"? What-in comparison to her alternate happinesses in the fifth dimension? Or, where are the pedants opining that very's original, and therefore "real," meaning is verily, and that therefore to call something very small implies that something else could be un verily small?

Who among us can say that the figurative use of literally occasions confusion of this kind? It never does-perfect, idiomatic comprehension thrives because context always makes clear which meaning is intended. Language is not self-standing orations howled into the ether; it is a vehicle for talking about life and emotions directly experienced, recalled, or predicted from moment to moment. Too often we are taught to think about language as if it were written sentences out of a Language Arts workbook. Walter Ong, in his magnificent book on the difference between oral and written uses of language, magnificently got across why this is a mistake:
Written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words.
Few would have any argument with Ong here, and most might even see him as belaboring the obvious. However, if so, then equally obvious is that even contronyms create no cognitive dissonance. The richness of context keeps miscomprehension from even having a chance to begin.

Literally, then, is just one more factuality marker amid the FACEs of English. Words move; there are new factual markers aborning as I write. One of them is almost perfect: straight up, as in I straight up told her she had to move out. It has the personal, "I'm telling you" function of really and of the figurative literally, and given that factuality markers come from words referring to truth, it's no surprise that this is exactly what straight up's original meaning is: one can also mean it to say, essentially, I agree. Wouldn't you know, true and tree developed from the same ancient word: Millennia ago, English speakers saw trustworthiness in the straight-up quality of trees. The rest was history, which has that famous way of repeating itself: today people are feeling the same trustworthiness in the expression straight up itself.
Acknowledgment: I Hear You
Thus speaking is about more than making tidy little observations about things and concepts, what they do, and what they're like. Notice that the only humans who talk this way are toddlers, from whom it sounds cute-as in, less than mature. Running alongside the "blackboard" realm of language is another one, through which we communicate our feelings about what we're saying not just with facial expressions and gestures, but with speech. With the factuality wing of the FACE apparatus, we prophylactically attest to sincerity. Something else we do as humans, rather than robots, is routinely acknowledge others' state of mind. It is, fundamentally, a kind of politeness, although less overt than deliberately taught formulas such as saying "Please" and "Thank you." And just as with factual markers like really and literally, a "parts of speech" view of language misses the true function of our Acknowledgment tools. These tools lurk in places you'd never suspect, of a kind that many con-sider suspicious indeed. Yet English wouldn't be a human language without them.

An example is, of all things, the word totally, as used by young (and, increasingly, "younger") people. He's totally going to call you means neither "He is going to call you in a total fashion" nor even "He is actually going to call you."

Acknowledgment also takes forms beyond what we typically think of as words. In language, it helps to think of word as an approximate notion. Quite often, a phrase of two or more words does what one word could easily do. Never mind!, for example, is two words technically, but the never is not meant literally. You aren't warning someone to "never" think about something over time, but to not think about it right now, and mind, in the meaning of "attend to," is actually close to archaic beyond a few expressions. We barely stop to think what the words in Never mind! actually mean-rather, Never mind! is in essence a single "word" in itself, such that we are not surprised to know that for the same concept, Russians use the one word nothing. Other examples include Forget about it (not accidentally spelled as the single word Fuhgeddaboudit in New Yorkese) and Long story short for "To make a long story short."

Or, and stuff. Here is a shaggy bit of speech we associate with imprecision, but it can be seen another way. Again, it's no novelty-English speakers turn up using it even in formal documents as far back as the 1620s, as in someone investigating a rather grisly prison and finding "six several Priests prisoners in several Chambers, and Altar, with all Furniture thereto belonging, with Church-Books and Stuff."

Part of the joy of the novel Middlemarch is how you can almost smell the characters from nearly two centuries' remove, and one of my favorite facets of that is that George Eliot has Dorothea Brooke's dilettante uncle speak with an and that kind of thing tic: "Life isn't cast in a mould-not cut out by rule and line and that sort of thing," "You are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners, that kind of thing," "I lunched there and saw Casaubon's library, and that kind of thing." This shows that there were people who used that expression in that way, so familiar to us now, even in the mid-nineteenth century, when Eliot wrote.

You know is handy in showing that classifying all these words and expressions as acknowledgment markers is not some kind of special pleading for linguistic sloth. You know goes way back-if it's lazy to say you know, then English speakers have been lazy since, say, Chaucer's time, when he has his Canterbury Tales characters popping off with you knows and similar things, like thow woost, where woost is the old know verb, which otherwise spawned the wit in mother wit and use your wits. Emily in "The Knight's Tale" says, I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye a mayde, and love huntynge and venerye, with thow woost as you know for the fourteenth century.

And it had been ever thus: Beowulf, that masterpiece in Old English, is a little weird in its very first word-since when does an epic poem begin with "What!"? Yet generations of scholars have internalized that first line Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon ... "What! We have heard of the fame of the spear-Danes' people-kings ..." Really, though? Did Old English speakers kick off a good tale by bleating "Whaat!" to quiet everybody down? Actually, no. Many translators have gotten by the awkwardness by using Lo! but even that doesn't get across what that What actually meant. The original manuscripts have no punctuation; that was added later, by editors. In manuscript, the passage is simply HWÆT WE GARDENA IN GEARDAGUM. There is no indication that hwæt was an interjection kicking off the show, and from how hwæt is used throughout Old English documents in general, we can see that it actually translates best as roughly "So ..." In the Beowulf opening, for example, it brought the listener or reader in, with an implication that the fame of the spear-Danes' kings was familiar, reinforcing that it was something of which "we have heard." Imagine: "So we've heard of the spear-Danes' people-kings' fame." Hwæt, then, went into the audience's mind: in Old English, what could be used as an acknowledgment marker.

Why, for example, do younger people seem to be asking questions when they're making statements? So it was Day light Savings Time? And I forgot to set my clocks back? And so I got to school late and Anderson gave me extra homework? Those observations could seem more gracefully couched as declarations. Why are these people so unsure? To the extent that women have been documented to be more likely to use what has been called uptalk, we might read this as evidence that they lack conviction, and perhaps that uptalk is a linguistic response to sexist dismissal.

Uptalk is another example of the question form used to convey declaration. If the uptalker is actually questioning anything, it is not the validity of her statement but whether the person listening understands or shares the same basis of knowledge and evaluations. However, in performing that question so often, she is not spastically seeking endless answers and validation despite already holding the privilege of being the one holding the conversational floor. In its use in uptalk, the questioning intonation has morphed into a passing gesture: it doesn't mean; it does -namely, it ongoingly establishes that you and the other person are on the same page.

That's a natural evolution from questioning, just as y'know is a natural evolution from the verb "to know." In uptalk, questioning has become even more personal than it already is. In uptalking, you are acknowledging (Acknowledging) the interlocutor's state of mind. In that, to uptalk is actually quite nice, in the grand scheme of things. Or, as certain people would put it, "Uptalk is nice?" Those comfortably dismissive of potshots against youthspeak might even put it as "Uptalk is totally nice."
Counterexpectation: Much to My Surprise
To glean articulateness in sentences like those may feel a tad queer, but the sense of dislocation is worth it. To understand FACE is to see a great deal of language in a different, and less depressing, way. Just as geneticists are learning that ever more of what has been dismissed as "junk" DNA has purpose, a great deal of what feels like the trash in English is part of how the language gets basic work done.

When we use little even to indicate disapproval or surprise, for example, it becomes part of the Counterexpectational component of FACE. He didn't even bring a present -i.e., despite that one expected he would. Counterexpectation isn't something we learn in school as central to grammar: we learn about the future tense and predicates and objects. But languages quite eagerly corral words (and more) into conveying counterexpectation as well. It's part of being human to sort out what's everyday and what's new, and a big part of communication is, after all, to remark upon what's new.

But you never know how a language is going to convey the counterexpectation part of the FACE apparatus. There are any number of ways a language gets across the "Hey!" sentiment beyond its mere word for Hey. In English, profanity plays its role here, too, this time with the word ass. There is a big pot and there is a big-ass pot, there is a lame excuse and a lame-ass excuse. An initial temptation is to think this is simply a matter of profanity. However, that implies that leaving aside the fact that one of them is rude, big pot and big-ass pot have the same meaning. They don't.

"Where I come from, squirrels are black, but when I got here, I looked out the window and saw a gray-ass squirrel!" Gray-ass doesn't mean simply "gray as uttered by a potty-mouth," but "counterexpectationally gray." This is why another possible intuition actually doesn't go through, that big-ass means "really big" compared to just big, such that there might be a profane parallel grammar:

POLITE NAUGHTY

big big bigger big-ass biggest biggest

Words change, and ass was assigned a mission. A good guess is that it started with big-ass, because in language as in so much else, things tend to start with the literal and drift into the abstract, and human beings can literally have large behinds: Then a big-ass fellow jumped in and settled it once and for all. However, yes, it would have been fellow rather than guy, dude, or bro, because the counterexpectational ass floated beyond anatomical plausibility as far back as 1919, when someone was documented as getting angry when a "silly ass barber shaved my neck." All manner of - ass usages pop up well before 1950: an accent criticized as having "lousy broad-ass As," and familiar-sounding locutions such as green-ass (corporals), poor-ass (southerners), and broke-ass (a waiter). In all these cases, the point is that the quality in question draws attention.*

In narrating, we are creating a little movie. We need to focus the camera or the lights on what we deem worthy of note. We don't want to only show a waiter, but to remark that he was broke, since it isn't considered the norm for someone who works to be broke. A real camera could zero in on his frayed cuffs or show him hitching a ride home: in a grand old film noir, the character would not be written as actually stating, "I lack funds." Talking, we might designate the waiter as broke-ass: "He was working and all, but actually he didn't have any money."
Easing: No Worries
The final component of FACE is Easing. Much of what we do when speaking is devoted to ensuring a basic comfort level, which is unsurprising given that many scholars have seen exactly this as a primary component of what it is to be polite.

The sheer amount of laughter in typical conversation, including not just guffaws but chuckles and little passing jokes, is counterintuitive under a view of speech as just "communication." Human speech is a laughy-ass business: we prefer communication within an ongoing reassurance that there is no impending social threat, that everyone is on the same page. A person who never laughs or chuckles lacks charm; you're never quite comfortable with such a person, and you suspect they don't like you. Anthropologists even have a name for this decorative kind of laughter that you miss only when it isn't there: Duchenne laughter. It follows that shared sense of humor is so often the spark and sustenance for a romantic relationship, the most intimate and therefore most potentially dangerous kind. "Why Paul and not Andrew? I don't know... he made me laugh." The core essence of laughter is as a jolly manifestation of amusement, but because the state of mutual laughter is inherently relaxing and bonding, in conversation laughter is less at something than for something. It has become a quiet but potent tool.

This easing function percolates into language itself, upon which the nature of texting's abbreviation LOL ends up making perfect sense. Originally it meant "laughing out loud," and was used to indicate that one was genuinely and directly amused by a comment. However, quickly LOL came to be sprinkled throughout text exchanges with a frequency far beyond anything that would make sense as amusement. A popular article floats the idea that LOL has no real meaning at all by exemplifying its usage in a wide range of sentences.

However, when people have a hard time assigning a "meaning" to something they nevertheless produce day in and day out, it's a clue that we're on to something in the pragmatic wing of language, where we have to get used to a different sense of what something means-namely, it's where words do rather than "mean." A goodly sampling of the sentences from the LOL article:

I like you. Im pretty sure everyone else figured that out before you lol

I dunno, just assuming? I wasn't sure if you did lol but I guess I shouldn't assume

They charged me again so it wont cancel for a while lol

Oh lol yea they charged me again but only for a month

No way lol it was just a question

That is different and now you know I actually like you and not just sex like lol

I feel like you think that's a bad thing lol

Ahh ok-lol. I wanted to ask you if you would drive me to the airport : )

Nope, not for the next couple of weeks. Why, ya miss me??? lol

lol rude. Lol... not even... you miss me? (Sleepy?) Lol a lil bit Do u think its possible To fall in love at first Skype?! Lol Maybe lol

The LOLs in those passages are certainly prolific, but not devoid of function. All LOLs take the edge off. They buffer the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of, for example, burgeoning romance, as we sense from the content. The lol s are typeset chuckles, of exactly the kind you can hear in vocal conversation.

More obviously, expressions such as I know, right?, which can sound like tics, are serving the same easing function, this time in terms of indicating agreement. To simply state that you agree over and over again would ease no one, suggesting perhaps an impending and unwelcome embrace. "I agree. I agree. I agree." There needs to be a more easing way to communicate such a thing, and recurrent I know, right? serves the function, in that those words indicate agreement readably, but more obliquely.

As always, English is just being a language: easing markers are not traceable to something about being a modern American. When I was learning German, I recall a friend offering me a bite of an apple with Magst mal abbissen? Now, just Magst abbissen?-literally "Want to bite?"-would have been the textbook sentence, but there was that little word mal. I had learned it as meaning basically "time" or "one time," but had never heard it used the way my friend did; it sounded like she was specifying that I was restricted to biting it only once, which seemed incommensurate with the gleam in her eye. But walking away, from the context I sensed that the mal was a way of minimizing, creating a comfort zone: Magst mal abbissen? means "Want to bite a little?" or, more idiomatically, "Wanna little bite?" It isn't hard to imagine how "one time" came to mean "a little" or "just," as in Just try it on. One learns mal in learning to speak the language as opposed to reading it. It's a classic modal marker, in this case a softener; it eases. A word that means something as neutral as "time" ends up being a little personal tool to create an aura of coziness. Germans often use it where in English we might talk in a higher voice: you offer someone an apple without meaning to seem too pushy-quite possibly you will say Wanna bite? And if you are a person of a particular sort of sonic expressiveness, even just kind of squeak the melody of that sentence on a little grunty buzz: nn nhh? And when people say such things, note also the raised eyebrows.

Then we perform the easing function in ways beyond mere words, which predictably occasions considerable confusion. For example, for those whose speech repertoire includes an informal variety considerably different from the formal one, the very act of switching into that informal variety with a fellow speaker of it is a gesture of easing. To speak the vernacular, the "dialect," the "just talking" kind of language, brings forward a shared identity as people who have the ability to speak in that way, and therefore creates a feeling of intimacy. The conversation becomes more comfortable just as it does with punctuations of laughter; it puts people at their ease.

In America, this is how Black English fits in, especially for more educated speakers. Black English began as a transformation of English by African slaves. They transformed English for two reasons. One: they learned the language working alongside indentured Irish, Scots-Irish, and lower-class British servants who spoke regional dialects of English rather than the standard. Two: adults don't learn languages as completely as children, and so naturally these slaves shaved off some of the quirks of English here and there. Today, a great many black Americans have full access to Standard English, and speak it with ease. However, Black English survives for them nevertheless. What was the only reality for their distant ancestors has now become a way to express facets of their personhood: Black English is a way of getting personal.

Thus often today Black English is a vehicle of modal expression. More specifically, it is an easing-the way that one signals warm connection, group membership. Black English for such speakers is not something they would ever speak continuously the way a less-educated Bavarian might spend most of his life speaking Bavarian rather than High German. Scholars of Black English seek and prize recordings of anyone speaking full-blown Black English for minutes on end the way some cherish bootleg tapes of Springsteen or Dylan.

For most black Americans when talking to one another, in addition to the battery of pragmatic strategies all English speakers have at their disposal, switching into Black English is ever available as a supplement. The very act of the switch is, in itself, an expression of empathy analogous to LOL. Hence the common sentiment that in many of its renditions, Black English is more honest, warmer, realer-there is feeling in it. "There Isn't Any Mountain High Enough" would never have made the charts; "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" is the necessary title for a song intended to convey heartfelt affection. Feeling could be considered the very essence of what Black English is for, to most modern black Americans who use it. It is part of the FACE component of speech.

Yet it is because Black English is often today a matter of the pragmatic realm of speaking that the black American fluent in Black English, apprised that she "speaks a dialect," is typically somewhat perplexed or even, due to the stigma attached to the dialect in some quarters, offended. Scholars see that stigma itself as responsible for the perplexity and ignorance. There is truth there, but the person who feels something off in the idea that they speak a "thing" called Black English is nevertheless onto something. The idea of a Rosetta Stone set for Ebonics seems silly for a reason: Black English does not feel like a discrete dialect of English in the way that Sicilian is a dialect of Italian (or, as analyzed by many, not even properly "Italian" at all). To most speakers, Black English feels like a repertoire one takes advantage of, a tool kit-"something you can dip into," as it is often put. They're right, and although they have no reason to put it this way, it's because, for them, Black English is a pragmatic strategy.

For that reason, a great many of the grammatical traits documented as part of Black English are more FACE components (pragmatic) than vanilla semantic items familiar to all English speakers such as using - er to mark the comparative and - s to make something plural. We have seen the straight up factuality marker. The yo used before or after a sentence, as in Dat's my jam, yo! (where jam refers to a popular song, not something to spread on bread), is an acknowledgment marker. Distinct from the Yo! used to call someone, this yo is uttered in a parenthetical way, and summons common feeling: Dat's my jam, yo! translates roughly as "That is my favorite song, comrades!" with an assumption that it's a lot of your friends' favorite song, too-you wouldn't say it if you happened to be into Scriabin, or some odd little song you knew was just a quirky personal favorite of yours. Or, when a black person says, She done growed up, he doesn't simply mean "She grew up." That done is used only when the observation is counterexpectational. She done growed up! conveys that you find it counterintuitive that the little girl you seem to have encountered just a couple of years ago is now driving a car.

And then, easing is the very use of the dialect at all. There are those who criticize Barack Obama for using elements of Black English when he addresses black audiences. They see the switch as fake, from someone they usually hear speaking Standard English. To understand Black English as a modal gesture clarifies the matter: Obama's Black English is the texter's LOL.
The FACE of Humanity
The FACE part of English, then, is what allows us to talk rather than speak. Its components are each expressions of a fundamental aspect of being human. The philosopher of language Paul Grice outlined a Cooperative Principle of conversation, long accepted as canonical, under which we subconsciously follow certain maxims in an exchange. One is a commitment to truth: "Do not say what you believe to be false." Hence the reflex of underlining that one is sincere with factuality markers, driven also by another maxim that encourages one to be maximally informative-we want our interlocutors to know we're giving them the real deal. Then, to be human is to have a theory of mind, understanding the states of mind of people other than ourselves. Hence the acknowledgment impulse, which in the larger sense grows out of the fact that conversation is fundamentally a co-operation, not two people taking turns expressing themselves individually. It is, as the language evolution theorist Michael Tomasello has noted, not a matter of me talking to you and you talking to me but us communicating with each other.

Finally, easing is central to classic descriptions of how politeness works. To a large extent, politeness is a matter of making people comfortable, and key to that is taking things down a notch. The psychologist Roger Brown and the English literature scholar Albert Gilman classically described the transformation in accepted manners in Europe, where politeness came to allow ever more use of informal pronouns like the French tu rather than referring to single persons in the plural with words like vous, as if they were kings calling themselves "we." The comfort of solidarity triumphed over the chilliness of hierarchy. Or despite a sense one might have that politeness is about formal practices such as standing up straight, saying "please," and wearing proper attire, the linguist Robin Lakoff nailed that seeking degrees of informality is also a basic element in what it is to be polite.

Let's FACE It: Emoticons and the Fate of the Language

FACE makes sense of things, then. One last one: to understand that language has a modal component answers common questions as to whether emoticons are "taking over" written English, or whether it could be possible to write only in emoticons. Those questions are based on an assumption that emoticons are mere decorations upon a writing system that was complete without them. However, it wasn't. Emoticons are not taking over, but filling a hole. They provide something that was missing from texting language at first: the pragmatic part.

Texting, in that it is casual, rapid, and vernacular, is executed via the physical process of writing, but is actually better described as a written kind of speech. As we have seen, speech differs from formal language in its being couched in personal feelings, eternally demonstrated alongside the more concrete communication of content. It was inevitable, then, that once texting became the staff of life for a generation, its users would quickly start developing ways of injecting texts with the warmth of humanity in a way that, for example, the formality of telexing or faxing did not encourage.

But of course, emoticons could no more constitute a language by themselves than we could speak exclusively modally with no actual content. Writing all in emoticons would largely be the equivalent of saying, Well, anyway I mean, totally, you know. To the extent that this sentence is at all plausible, it could be so only after previous sentences that had established actual content to refer to. Otherwise, it is clothes without a body, just as emoticons alone would be. Neither decorations, detritus, nor destructors, emoticons are-you knew this was coming-the faces of texting.

That's what FACE is about. No language qualifies as a real one without it. Much of what occasions questions as to "What's that all about?" in how people come to use words is ultimately a mere matter of language maintaining that which it could never do without. A language without FACE would be as discomfitingly incomplete as a human without a face-just as we would expect, given that languages express humanity.

From Words on the Move: Why English Won't-and Can't-Sit Still (Like Literally) by John McWhorter. Copyright © 2016 by John McWhorter. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved.

John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and is the author of more than fifteen books, including The Language Hoax, The Power of Babel, and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. He writes for TIME, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and his articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Daily Beast.

There's a reason that it often requires an art history class to get a handle on medieval painting. It may be pretty in a general sense, but it's hard not to notice that the people tend to exhibit only the broadest of emotions, if any-in much of medieval painting, the faces seem almost frozen blank.

This increasing focus on the individual is a theme in much of Western history. We can practically hear and smell Anna Karenina, Holden Caulfield, and Oscar Wao in a way that we never can any of the characters in The Iliad. To Plato and Aristotle, steeped in unquestioningly hierarchical ideologies, a political system guaranteeing all individuals "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" would have sounded like science fiction. Even the notion of a popular song "cover" is a sign of the times. To Cole Porter, it would have seemed alien to write a song for only one artist to sing, with anyone else required to wait about ten years to take a crack at it, and even then, have their effort classified as a salutary "version" of the first one. Today, a pop song is about one person expressing their one self.

Language, however, has always been ahead of the curve on individualism. Long before Rembrandt, Thomas Jefferson, or Adele, human language has always and forever been getting personal. Not in the sense of people having arguments, although of course that has been happening, too. Rather, one of the things that has always happened to a great many words is that they start out showing what we mean, but end up being used to show how we feel. This trajectory is as common as words getting shorter ( I'd-a done it from I would have done it), cuter ( horsey, brewsky), or nastier ( hussy started as housewife). Just as often, a word nestles into a place in English that grammar mavens and quite a few others consider unsuitably vague, random, redundant, or as having no "real" meaning-the use of so at the start of a sentence is an example-when to a linguist the word in question is fulfilling a function as normal as marking past tense or making something plural.

This chapter will introduce you to something very old about language that, through no fault of our own, always seems new.
Well, What?
It's a whole wing of language that one hears too little about, with our natural intuition that a word is something with a meaning corresponding to some easily specified thing, concept, action, or quality. Ah, there is so much more to what it is to communicate as a human being. There are certainly the vanilla sentences. Horses run fast: if a toddler asks us what that means, we could easily go word by word and nail the matter. But then, how about another perfectly plausible sentence: Well, horses run fast. Okay: horses, run, and fast are easy. But what about well? What does well mean, Mommy? Note, this is not the well that refers to excellence: you didn't mean Expertly, horses run fast. This is that other little well, that you don't even think about.

And when it's that hard to specify or master what a particular word "means," it's a good sign that we're in a different realm of language, where the tidy idea of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions you learned in school doesn't do much for you, and a Schoolhouse Rock! jingle would be frustratingly diagonal. "Conjunction Junction" and "A Noun Is a Person, Place, or Thing!" were delightfully instructive tunes, but it's hard to imagine setting a melody to " Well implies discrepancy between a previous statement and what you wish to utter!" or at least one that would exactly catch on.

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Any language is always dragging some words from the chipper, gingham-dress, schoolroom straightforwardness of semantics (Horses live on farms!) into the MPM maw: layered, loaded, smoking Dunhills in the courtyard. MPMs are evidence of a word that started as an ordinary one, but then got personal.
The Personal Pull
MPMs are an extreme manifestation of a general process. Throughout any language, words of all kinds are always going personal to a certain extent: the subjective exerts a gravity-style pull on words' meanings. Example: must started out in the objective command sense: You must stand still. Later came an alternate meaning of must, as in (doorbell rings) That must be the Indian food. In saying that, we don't mean "I demand that that be the Indian food," but a more personal, subjective sense of mustness. You mean that within your mind and your sense of what is likely, logic requires that you must suppose that it's the Indian food, rather than the mail or a neighbor. First was the command meaning, objective and focused outward. But over time words often turn inward and become more about you. "That" (in my mind) "must be the Indian food": here is psychology. Must got personal. Other times, things get so personal that the original meaning vanishes entirely. Here's some Tennyson (sorry): Lancelot's admirer Elaine is asleep "Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought." Rathe? Angry, as in "wrathed," maybe? No, actually: the word meant "quick" or, in this passage, "early." Elaine is up early with things on her mind. Rathe meant "early," so rather, in Old and into Middle English, meant "earlier." But a meaning like that was ripe for going personal, as must did. It happens via what we could call meaning creep, by analogy with the term mission creep -bit by bit, new shades creep into what we consider the meaning of something to be, until one day the meaning has moved so far from the original one that it seems almost astounding.

MPMs are what happens when this personal pull on words' meanings goes so far that a word no longer has what we can easily process as a meaning at all ( Well,... ), or has a meaning so divorced from the original that some mistake seems to have been made (the "teenager" usage of like).

In these cases, the word's very essence has become an expression of personal feeling, rather than being the name of a person, place, thing, action, or trait. We need not think of MPMs as smokers, actually, but I think it's safe to say they drink wine. They make the difference between the receptionist and the friend, between Siri and you. They bring language alive. Nor are MPMs usually as tough to specify as little well. They simply require us to expand our conception of what it is to "mean" something, especially since the fact that no one tells us about this side of language so often leads to misunderstandings about how people talk.

In putting a face on language, MPMs even lend themselves to a handy acronym, FACE, that allows us to explore how deeply this "secret" realm of language permeates our very beings. More specifically, the FACE schema gives us a sense of the perfectly ordinary place words have gone when, superficially, they seem to have gone off the rails because it's hard to nail down what they "mean." In English, MPMs can be classified according to four principal functions that they cluster around:

This likely seems a random set of distinctions. In fact, it constitutes quite a bit of what it is to actually talk-not speak or recite, but talk.
Factuality: For Real
What makes really seem out of place in a headline is that it is fundamentally emotional: it's too personal. We can sprinkle really all over a sentence to lend notes of personally backed insistence with an in-the-moment feel: Really, I didn't even see the point of going outside when it was that hot; He wants to pay it in installments, but really, what's point of dragging it out?; I'm just tired of the whole mess, really. Note that in all these cases, in reality would not convey the particular meaning that really does. The reason I'm just tired of the whole mess, in reality seems off is that really and in reality do not mean the same thing.

Really, then, is a paradigm example of the F in FACE, the Factuality flavor of modal marker. The story of really has two parts, like a movie and its sequel. In the first installment, really was one of many English words meaning "truth" that came to mean very-such as very itself, which came from the French word for true, vrai ( verrai in the late thirteenth century). Very is the well-worn version of verily just as "rilly" is what happens to really with heavy use. Truly was another example, of course, with true having undergone the same transformation as verrai a couple of centuries earlier. Even farther back there had been others. In the poem "The Owl and the Nightingale" of around 1200, the Middle English trips you up just as you think you're in good hands: Ich was in one sumere dale ..." ("I was in a summer dale") in one suthe digele hale. What? Digel was an original English word for "secret"; hale is "hall," or, in a poetic sense, "space," "place." But suthe: the key to that one is perhaps clearer in the way it would later be spelled, sooth: it meant "truth," captured today only in soothsayer.* But sooth had an extended meaning as-you guessed it-"truly," or "very." In one suthe digele hale meant "in a very secluded place."

Very, true, and sooth show that when a word means "true" and it's used a lot, you can almost predict that, over time, it will glide from meaning "truth" into meaning "very." But the process can also go further than that, and that's where really comes in. Very settled into serving as an objective word, of the kind learners get in textbooks early on. But the personal pull got a hold of really, such that it morphed beyond the very stage into a more personal (i.e., modal) place. When someone says it's really cold, we think of them shivering under their coat, not a weather report. To say, Okay, really, what are we going to do? is to indicate one's emotional commitment to getting down to cases. You show your FACE.

Literally, then, is easy. It was originally one more variation on indicating truth-specifically exactness, as in "by the letter": He took the advice literally; He meant it literally. But that can have been only a snapshot along a time line; there was never any question that literally was going to morph into other meanings. The only question was what kind. For one, literally quite predictably went beyond its original meaning into one where "by the letter" no longer makes sense except as a metaphor: We were literally the only ones there; We were literally on the brink of a depression. There are no letters involved in these statements, but literally means that the statement is true in a specific way-as in what we sometimes even refer to as "by the letter."

But ultimately, in view of the fact that language inherently goes rather than sits, literally is that kid in sixth grade who became the one to make fun of for some random reason when, with another roll of the dice, many of his tormentors would have been equally ripe for torment and what everybody really deserved was to be left alone. More to the point, literally is that kid subjected to a bizarre accusation that he is remiss in refusing to talk and dress like his grandfather.

Of course, some could object that just because people were doing it a long time ago doesn't mean they were any more correct than we are. But a second clue about literally is a certain inconsistency in objections to its figurative usage. Fowler suggested practically as a substitute, but in its usage as "approximately," practically has drifted into a near opposite to practical's original meanings of "actual," "realistic," and "suitable," has it not? Also, it's easy to forget how far even the meanings of very and truly are from where they began. It all made my daughter very happy-try paraphrasing that with "in actuality," the original meaning of verrai and truly. "It all made my daughter happy in actuality"? What-in comparison to her alternate happinesses in the fifth dimension? Or, where are the pedants opining that very's original, and therefore "real," meaning is verily, and that therefore to call something very small implies that something else could be un verily small?

Who among us can say that the figurative use of literally occasions confusion of this kind? It never does-perfect, idiomatic comprehension thrives because context always makes clear which meaning is intended. Language is not self-standing orations howled into the ether; it is a vehicle for talking about life and emotions directly experienced, recalled, or predicted from moment to moment. Too often we are taught to think about language as if it were written sentences out of a Language Arts workbook. Walter Ong, in his magnificent book on the difference between oral and written uses of language, magnificently got across why this is a mistake:
Written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words.
Few would have any argument with Ong here, and most might even see him as belaboring the obvious. However, if so, then equally obvious is that even contronyms create no cognitive dissonance. The richness of context keeps miscomprehension from even having a chance to begin.

Literally, then, is just one more factuality marker amid the FACEs of English. Words move; there are new factual markers aborning as I write. One of them is almost perfect: straight up, as in I straight up told her she had to move out. It has the personal, "I'm telling you" function of really and of the figurative literally, and given that factuality markers come from words referring to truth, it's no surprise that this is exactly what straight up's original meaning is: one can also mean it to say, essentially, I agree. Wouldn't you know, true and tree developed from the same ancient word: Millennia ago, English speakers saw trustworthiness in the straight-up quality of trees. The rest was history, which has that famous way of repeating itself: today people are feeling the same trustworthiness in the expression straight up itself.
Acknowledgment: I Hear You
Thus speaking is about more than making tidy little observations about things and concepts, what they do, and what they're like. Notice that the only humans who talk this way are toddlers, from whom it sounds cute-as in, less than mature. Running alongside the "blackboard" realm of language is another one, through which we communicate our feelings about what we're saying not just with facial expressions and gestures, but with speech. With the factuality wing of the FACE apparatus, we prophylactically attest to sincerity. Something else we do as humans, rather than robots, is routinely acknowledge others' state of mind. It is, fundamentally, a kind of politeness, although less overt than deliberately taught formulas such as saying "Please" and "Thank you." And just as with factual markers like really and literally, a "parts of speech" view of language misses the true function of our Acknowledgment tools. These tools lurk in places you'd never suspect, of a kind that many con-sider suspicious indeed. Yet English wouldn't be a human language without them.

An example is, of all things, the word totally, as used by young (and, increasingly, "younger") people. He's totally going to call you means neither "He is going to call you in a total fashion" nor even "He is actually going to call you."

Acknowledgment also takes forms beyond what we typically think of as words. In language, it helps to think of word as an approximate notion. Quite often, a phrase of two or more words does what one word could easily do. Never mind!, for example, is two words technically, but the never is not meant literally. You aren't warning someone to "never" think about something over time, but to not think about it right now, and mind, in the meaning of "attend to," is actually close to archaic beyond a few expressions. We barely stop to think what the words in Never mind! actually mean-rather, Never mind! is in essence a single "word" in itself, such that we are not surprised to know that for the same concept, Russians use the one word nothing. Other examples include Forget about it (not accidentally spelled as the single word Fuhgeddaboudit in New Yorkese) and Long story short for "To make a long story short."

Or, and stuff. Here is a shaggy bit of speech we associate with imprecision, but it can be seen another way. Again, it's no novelty-English speakers turn up using it even in formal documents as far back as the 1620s, as in someone investigating a rather grisly prison and finding "six several Priests prisoners in several Chambers, and Altar, with all Furniture thereto belonging, with Church-Books and Stuff."

Part of the joy of the novel Middlemarch is how you can almost smell the characters from nearly two centuries' remove, and one of my favorite facets of that is that George Eliot has Dorothea Brooke's dilettante uncle speak with an and that kind of thing tic: "Life isn't cast in a mould-not cut out by rule and line and that sort of thing," "You are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners, that kind of thing," "I lunched there and saw Casaubon's library, and that kind of thing." This shows that there were people who used that expression in that way, so familiar to us now, even in the mid-nineteenth century, when Eliot wrote.

You know is handy in showing that classifying all these words and expressions as acknowledgment markers is not some kind of special pleading for linguistic sloth. You know goes way back-if it's lazy to say you know, then English speakers have been lazy since, say, Chaucer's time, when he has his Canterbury Tales characters popping off with you knows and similar things, like thow woost, where woost is the old know verb, which otherwise spawned the wit in mother wit and use your wits. Emily in "The Knight's Tale" says, I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye a mayde, and love huntynge and venerye, with thow woost as you know for the fourteenth century.

And it had been ever thus: Beowulf, that masterpiece in Old English, is a little weird in its very first word-since when does an epic poem begin with "What!"? Yet generations of scholars have internalized that first line Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon ... "What! We have heard of the fame of the spear-Danes' people-kings ..." Really, though? Did Old English speakers kick off a good tale by bleating "Whaat!" to quiet everybody down? Actually, no. Many translators have gotten by the awkwardness by using Lo! but even that doesn't get across what that What actually meant. The original manuscripts have no punctuation; that was added later, by editors. In manuscript, the passage is simply HWÆT WE GARDENA IN GEARDAGUM. There is no indication that hwæt was an interjection kicking off the show, and from how hwæt is used throughout Old English documents in general, we can see that it actually translates best as roughly "So ..." In the Beowulf opening, for example, it brought the listener or reader in, with an implication that the fame of the spear-Danes' kings was familiar, reinforcing that it was something of which "we have heard." Imagine: "So we've heard of the spear-Danes' people-kings' fame." Hwæt, then, went into the audience's mind: in Old English, what could be used as an acknowledgment marker.

Why, for example, do younger people seem to be asking questions when they're making statements? So it was Day light Savings Time? And I forgot to set my clocks back? And so I got to school late and Anderson gave me extra homework? Those observations could seem more gracefully couched as declarations. Why are these people so unsure? To the extent that women have been documented to be more likely to use what has been called uptalk, we might read this as evidence that they lack conviction, and perhaps that uptalk is a linguistic response to sexist dismissal.

Uptalk is another example of the question form used to convey declaration. If the uptalker is actually questioning anything, it is not the validity of her statement but whether the person listening understands or shares the same basis of knowledge and evaluations. However, in performing that question so often, she is not spastically seeking endless answers and validation despite already holding the privilege of being the one holding the conversational floor. In its use in uptalk, the questioning intonation has morphed into a passing gesture: it doesn't mean; it does -namely, it ongoingly establishes that you and the other person are on the same page.

That's a natural evolution from questioning, just as y'know is a natural evolution from the verb "to know." In uptalk, questioning has become even more personal than it already is. In uptalking, you are acknowledging (Acknowledging) the interlocutor's state of mind. In that, to uptalk is actually quite nice, in the grand scheme of things. Or, as certain people would put it, "Uptalk is nice?" Those comfortably dismissive of potshots against youthspeak might even put it as "Uptalk is totally nice."
Counterexpectation: Much to My Surprise
To glean articulateness in sentences like those may feel a tad queer, but the sense of dislocation is worth it. To understand FACE is to see a great deal of language in a different, and less depressing, way. Just as geneticists are learning that ever more of what has been dismissed as "junk" DNA has purpose, a great deal of what feels like the trash in English is part of how the language gets basic work done.

When we use little even to indicate disapproval or surprise, for example, it becomes part of the Counterexpectational component of FACE. He didn't even bring a present -i.e., despite that one expected he would. Counterexpectation isn't something we learn in school as central to grammar: we learn about the future tense and predicates and objects. But languages quite eagerly corral words (and more) into conveying counterexpectation as well. It's part of being human to sort out what's everyday and what's new, and a big part of communication is, after all, to remark upon what's new.

But you never know how a language is going to convey the counterexpectation part of the FACE apparatus. There are any number of ways a language gets across the "Hey!" sentiment beyond its mere word for Hey. In English, profanity plays its role here, too, this time with the word ass. There is a big pot and there is a big-ass pot, there is a lame excuse and a lame-ass excuse. An initial temptation is to think this is simply a matter of profanity. However, that implies that leaving aside the fact that one of them is rude, big pot and big-ass pot have the same meaning. They don't.

"Where I come from, squirrels are black, but when I got here, I looked out the window and saw a gray-ass squirrel!" Gray-ass doesn't mean simply "gray as uttered by a potty-mouth," but "counterexpectationally gray." This is why another possible intuition actually doesn't go through, that big-ass means "really big" compared to just big, such that there might be a profane parallel grammar:

POLITE NAUGHTY

big big bigger big-ass biggest biggest

Words change, and ass was assigned a mission. A good guess is that it started with big-ass, because in language as in so much else, things tend to start with the literal and drift into the abstract, and human beings can literally have large behinds: Then a big-ass fellow jumped in and settled it once and for all. However, yes, it would have been fellow rather than guy, dude, or bro, because the counterexpectational ass floated beyond anatomical plausibility as far back as 1919, when someone was documented as getting angry when a "silly ass barber shaved my neck." All manner of - ass usages pop up well before 1950: an accent criticized as having "lousy broad-ass As," and familiar-sounding locutions such as green-ass (corporals), poor-ass (southerners), and broke-ass (a waiter). In all these cases, the point is that the quality in question draws attention.*

In narrating, we are creating a little movie. We need to focus the camera or the lights on what we deem worthy of note. We don't want to only show a waiter, but to remark that he was broke, since it isn't considered the norm for someone who works to be broke. A real camera could zero in on his frayed cuffs or show him hitching a ride home: in a grand old film noir, the character would not be written as actually stating, "I lack funds." Talking, we might designate the waiter as broke-ass: "He was working and all, but actually he didn't have any money."
Easing: No Worries
The final component of FACE is Easing. Much of what we do when speaking is devoted to ensuring a basic comfort level, which is unsurprising given that many scholars have seen exactly this as a primary component of what it is to be polite.

The sheer amount of laughter in typical conversation, including not just guffaws but chuckles and little passing jokes, is counterintuitive under a view of speech as just "communication." Human speech is a laughy-ass business: we prefer communication within an ongoing reassurance that there is no impending social threat, that everyone is on the same page. A person who never laughs or chuckles lacks charm; you're never quite comfortable with such a person, and you suspect they don't like you. Anthropologists even have a name for this decorative kind of laughter that you miss only when it isn't there: Duchenne laughter. It follows that shared sense of humor is so often the spark and sustenance for a romantic relationship, the most intimate and therefore most potentially dangerous kind. "Why Paul and not Andrew? I don't know... he made me laugh." The core essence of laughter is as a jolly manifestation of amusement, but because the state of mutual laughter is inherently relaxing and bonding, in conversation laughter is less at something than for something. It has become a quiet but potent tool.

This easing function percolates into language itself, upon which the nature of texting's abbreviation LOL ends up making perfect sense. Originally it meant "laughing out loud," and was used to indicate that one was genuinely and directly amused by a comment. However, quickly LOL came to be sprinkled throughout text exchanges with a frequency far beyond anything that would make sense as amusement. A popular article floats the idea that LOL has no real meaning at all by exemplifying its usage in a wide range of sentences.

However, when people have a hard time assigning a "meaning" to something they nevertheless produce day in and day out, it's a clue that we're on to something in the pragmatic wing of language, where we have to get used to a different sense of what something means-namely, it's where words do rather than "mean." A goodly sampling of the sentences from the LOL article:

I like you. Im pretty sure everyone else figured that out before you lol

I dunno, just assuming? I wasn't sure if you did lol but I guess I shouldn't assume

They charged me again so it wont cancel for a while lol

Oh lol yea they charged me again but only for a month

No way lol it was just a question

That is different and now you know I actually like you and not just sex like lol

I feel like you think that's a bad thing lol

Ahh ok-lol. I wanted to ask you if you would drive me to the airport : )

Nope, not for the next couple of weeks. Why, ya miss me??? lol

lol rude. Lol... not even... you miss me? (Sleepy?) Lol a lil bit Do u think its possible To fall in love at first Skype?! Lol Maybe lol

The LOLs in those passages are certainly prolific, but not devoid of function. All LOLs take the edge off. They buffer the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of, for example, burgeoning romance, as we sense from the content. The lol s are typeset chuckles, of exactly the kind you can hear in vocal conversation.

More obviously, expressions such as I know, right?, which can sound like tics, are serving the same easing function, this time in terms of indicating agreement. To simply state that you agree over and over again would ease no one, suggesting perhaps an impending and unwelcome embrace. "I agree. I agree. I agree." There needs to be a more easing way to communicate such a thing, and recurrent I know, right? serves the function, in that those words indicate agreement readably, but more obliquely.

As always, English is just being a language: easing markers are not traceable to something about being a modern American. When I was learning German, I recall a friend offering me a bite of an apple with Magst mal abbissen? Now, just Magst abbissen?-literally "Want to bite?"-would have been the textbook sentence, but there was that little word mal. I had learned it as meaning basically "time" or "one time," but had never heard it used the way my friend did; it sounded like she was specifying that I was restricted to biting it only once, which seemed incommensurate with the gleam in her eye. But walking away, from the context I sensed that the mal was a way of minimizing, creating a comfort zone: Magst mal abbissen? means "Want to bite a little?" or, more idiomatically, "Wanna little bite?" It isn't hard to imagine how "one time" came to mean "a little" or "just," as in Just try it on. One learns mal in learning to speak the language as opposed to reading it. It's a classic modal marker, in this case a softener; it eases. A word that means something as neutral as "time" ends up being a little personal tool to create an aura of coziness. Germans often use it where in English we might talk in a higher voice: you offer someone an apple without meaning to seem too pushy-quite possibly you will say Wanna bite? And if you are a person of a particular sort of sonic expressiveness, even just kind of squeak the melody of that sentence on a little grunty buzz: nn nhh? And when people say such things, note also the raised eyebrows.

Then we perform the easing function in ways beyond mere words, which predictably occasions considerable confusion. For example, for those whose speech repertoire includes an informal variety considerably different from the formal one, the very act of switching into that informal variety with a fellow speaker of it is a gesture of easing. To speak the vernacular, the "dialect," the "just talking" kind of language, brings forward a shared identity as people who have the ability to speak in that way, and therefore creates a feeling of intimacy. The conversation becomes more comfortable just as it does with punctuations of laughter; it puts people at their ease.

In America, this is how Black English fits in, especially for more educated speakers. Black English began as a transformation of English by African slaves. They transformed English for two reasons. One: they learned the language working alongside indentured Irish, Scots-Irish, and lower-class British servants who spoke regional dialects of English rather than the standard. Two: adults don't learn languages as completely as children, and so naturally these slaves shaved off some of the quirks of English here and there. Today, a great many black Americans have full access to Standard English, and speak it with ease. However, Black English survives for them nevertheless. What was the only reality for their distant ancestors has now become a way to express facets of their personhood: Black English is a way of getting personal.

Thus often today Black English is a vehicle of modal expression. More specifically, it is an easing-the way that one signals warm connection, group membership. Black English for such speakers is not something they would ever speak continuously the way a less-educated Bavarian might spend most of his life speaking Bavarian rather than High German. Scholars of Black English seek and prize recordings of anyone speaking full-blown Black English for minutes on end the way some cherish bootleg tapes of Springsteen or Dylan.

For most black Americans when talking to one another, in addition to the battery of pragmatic strategies all English speakers have at their disposal, switching into Black English is ever available as a supplement. The very act of the switch is, in itself, an expression of empathy analogous to LOL. Hence the common sentiment that in many of its renditions, Black English is more honest, warmer, realer-there is feeling in it. "There Isn't Any Mountain High Enough" would never have made the charts; "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" is the necessary title for a song intended to convey heartfelt affection. Feeling could be considered the very essence of what Black English is for, to most modern black Americans who use it. It is part of the FACE component of speech.

Yet it is because Black English is often today a matter of the pragmatic realm of speaking that the black American fluent in Black English, apprised that she "speaks a dialect," is typically somewhat perplexed or even, due to the stigma attached to the dialect in some quarters, offended. Scholars see that stigma itself as responsible for the perplexity and ignorance. There is truth there, but the person who feels something off in the idea that they speak a "thing" called Black English is nevertheless onto something. The idea of a Rosetta Stone set for Ebonics seems silly for a reason: Black English does not feel like a discrete dialect of English in the way that Sicilian is a dialect of Italian (or, as analyzed by many, not even properly "Italian" at all). To most speakers, Black English feels like a repertoire one takes advantage of, a tool kit-"something you can dip into," as it is often put. They're right, and although they have no reason to put it this way, it's because, for them, Black English is a pragmatic strategy.

For that reason, a great many of the grammatical traits documented as part of Black English are more FACE components (pragmatic) than vanilla semantic items familiar to all English speakers such as using - er to mark the comparative and - s to make something plural. We have seen the straight up factuality marker. The yo used before or after a sentence, as in Dat's my jam, yo! (where jam refers to a popular song, not something to spread on bread), is an acknowledgment marker. Distinct from the Yo! used to call someone, this yo is uttered in a parenthetical way, and summons common feeling: Dat's my jam, yo! translates roughly as "That is my favorite song, comrades!" with an assumption that it's a lot of your friends' favorite song, too-you wouldn't say it if you happened to be into Scriabin, or some odd little song you knew was just a quirky personal favorite of yours. Or, when a black person says, She done growed up, he doesn't simply mean "She grew up." That done is used only when the observation is counterexpectational. She done growed up! conveys that you find it counterintuitive that the little girl you seem to have encountered just a couple of years ago is now driving a car.

And then, easing is the very use of the dialect at all. There are those who criticize Barack Obama for using elements of Black English when he addresses black audiences. They see the switch as fake, from someone they usually hear speaking Standard English. To understand Black English as a modal gesture clarifies the matter: Obama's Black English is the texter's LOL.
The FACE of Humanity
The FACE part of English, then, is what allows us to talk rather than speak. Its components are each expressions of a fundamental aspect of being human. The philosopher of language Paul Grice outlined a Cooperative Principle of conversation, long accepted as canonical, under which we subconsciously follow certain maxims in an exchange. One is a commitment to truth: "Do not say what you believe to be false." Hence the reflex of underlining that one is sincere with factuality markers, driven also by another maxim that encourages one to be maximally informative-we want our interlocutors to know we're giving them the real deal. Then, to be human is to have a theory of mind, understanding the states of mind of people other than ourselves. Hence the acknowledgment impulse, which in the larger sense grows out of the fact that conversation is fundamentally a co-operation, not two people taking turns expressing themselves individually. It is, as the language evolution theorist Michael Tomasello has noted, not a matter of me talking to you and you talking to me but us communicating with each other.

Finally, easing is central to classic descriptions of how politeness works. To a large extent, politeness is a matter of making people comfortable, and key to that is taking things down a notch. The psychologist Roger Brown and the English literature scholar Albert Gilman classically described the transformation in accepted manners in Europe, where politeness came to allow ever more use of informal pronouns like the French tu rather than referring to single persons in the plural with words like vous, as if they were kings calling themselves "we." The comfort of solidarity triumphed over the chilliness of hierarchy. Or despite a sense one might have that politeness is about formal practices such as standing up straight, saying "please," and wearing proper attire, the linguist Robin Lakoff nailed that seeking degrees of informality is also a basic element in what it is to be polite.

Let's FACE It: Emoticons and the Fate of the Language

FACE makes sense of things, then. One last one: to understand that language has a modal component answers common questions as to whether emoticons are "taking over" written English, or whether it could be possible to write only in emoticons. Those questions are based on an assumption that emoticons are mere decorations upon a writing system that was complete without them. However, it wasn't. Emoticons are not taking over, but filling a hole. They provide something that was missing from texting language at first: the pragmatic part.

Texting, in that it is casual, rapid, and vernacular, is executed via the physical process of writing, but is actually better described as a written kind of speech. As we have seen, speech differs from formal language in its being couched in personal feelings, eternally demonstrated alongside the more concrete communication of content. It was inevitable, then, that once texting became the staff of life for a generation, its users would quickly start developing ways of injecting texts with the warmth of humanity in a way that, for example, the formality of telexing or faxing did not encourage.

But of course, emoticons could no more constitute a language by themselves than we could speak exclusively modally with no actual content. Writing all in emoticons would largely be the equivalent of saying, Well, anyway I mean, totally, you know. To the extent that this sentence is at all plausible, it could be so only after previous sentences that had established actual content to refer to. Otherwise, it is clothes without a body, just as emoticons alone would be. Neither decorations, detritus, nor destructors, emoticons are-you knew this was coming-the faces of texting.

That's what FACE is about. No language qualifies as a real one without it. Much of what occasions questions as to "What's that all about?" in how people come to use words is ultimately a mere matter of language maintaining that which it could never do without. A language without FACE would be as discomfitingly incomplete as a human without a face-just as we would expect, given that languages express humanity.

From Words on the Move: Why English Won't-and Can't-Sit Still (Like Literally) by John McWhorter. Copyright © 2016 by John McWhorter. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved.

John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and is the author of more than fifteen books, including The Language Hoax, The Power of Babel, and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. He writes for TIME, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and his articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Daily Beast.

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There's a reason that it often requires an art history class to get a handle on medieval painting. It may be pretty in a general sense, but it's hard not to notice that the people tend to exhibit only the broadest of emotions, if any-in much of medieval painting, the faces seem almost frozen blank.

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En el capítulo 5 de nuestro libro, habla sobre lenguas amerindias. El quecha es el lenguaje del imperio inca. Este página de web explica que hoy en día todavía hay 8 millones de hablantes del quecha en Perú y otros países latinoamericanos. En Perú, un cuarto del población habla quecha. En quecha, no hay genero para los sustantivos. Además, los adjetivos vienen antes de los sustantivos. Los verbos generalmente van en el fin de una oración. Algo que me parece muy interesante de este lengua es que todos los verbos son regulares. Solo hay tres vocales: a, i, u—pero hay varias pronunciaciones para cada vocal.

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Peruvian Spanish, of course, has literally hundreds of Quechua words, from names of animals and plants ( papa 'potato', viscacha 'type of rodent', cuy 'guinea pig'-- yum, a delicacy in Peru), to cooking terms ( choclo 'corncob', pachamanca 'earth oven', tocos 'horrid dish of fermented potatoes'), to items of clothing ( chompa 'sweater', chullu 'knitted cap', cushma 'shirt') to terms from everyday life ( china 'young woman'; calato 'naked', cachaco 'cop', chacra 'farm', caucho 'rubber', quena 'flute').

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Iberia’s children: A short history of why Portuguese and Spanish are different

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Iberia’s children: A short history of why Portuguese and Spanish are different

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Este artículo describe como español y portugués son un poco similar, pero hay muchas personas que piensan que son como dialectos del mismo lenguaje, y el autor dice que las personas que piensan como así son pensando incorrectamente. Ya que español y portugués fueron dos dialectos de un lenguaje (el latín) hace miles de años, hoy en día tienen vocabularios, sonidos, y léxicos únicos e independientes. El autor dice también que los dos lenguajes son diferentes gracias al periodo después del conquista musulmán de iberia y el Reconquista. Portugal era consolidada como un área estable antes de España. Por eso, portugués era estandarizada antes de español; además, el lenguaje de portugués tiene más características del latín vulgar.

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"They look similar!" I can already hear you saying. "Look, just change this, and constituci ón becomes constituição. Todo is tudu and bien is bem. Lengua is lingua, and is idioma. They're just dialects of the same language."

Yes and no.

Now, no. Portuguese and Spanish are currently quite different. You can't learn one and expect to function effortlessly in the other. Portuguese sounds are quite different from Spanish ones, as are the two languages' vocabularies. And which variety of present-day Portuguese and Spanish are we talking about, specifically? There's Argentine Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, for starters, and Canary Islands Spanish and Guinean Portuguese, not to mention the regional differences between Portuguese and Spanish dialects within Portugal and Spain themselves.

But once upon a time, yes. Portuguese and Spanish were, basically, dialects of the same language. That language was Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, from which all Romance languages spring.

Hundreds of years later, how have Portuguese and Spanish grown apart, and why? And will they always be different?

Iberian siblings

Spain and Portugal presently occupy almost the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula, the spit of land that sticks out of Western Europe just below France. (Almost, but not quite: the tiny Principality of Andorra sits snug along the border of Spain and France, ensconced in the embrace of the Eastern Pyrenees.) The Iberian Peninsula is where Portuguese and Spanish were 'born' (if languages can be born) and it is also the main reason why Portuguese and Spanish are much closer to each other than to the other major Romance languages: it has allowed them to develop in relative isolation. Indeed, this is plain to see on a map: the oceans surround the western, southern and eastern edges of the Peninsula, while to the north, the Pyrenees form a natural border with France. It is for this reason also that Portuguese and Spanish are usually known as the Iberian or Iberoamerican languages.

But Portuguese and Spanish were not the first languages on the Peninsula, nor are they those first languages' descendants. They come from a very different place.

All roads lead from Rome

The story of Portuguese and Spanish, as with all Romance languages, actually begins in Italy. Or, more specifically, with the Roman Empire, which spoke Latin and spread the language across the lands that it conquered and governed.

At their height, the Romans controlled almost all the areas immediately surrounding the Mediterranean, including modern-day Italy, Croatia, the Levant (the area around modern-day Israel, Lebanon and Syria), the Maghreb (modern-day Morocco), and the Iberian peninsula (which the Romans called 'Hispania'). Latin, as the language of the Roman Empire, was thus brought into all these places, and it gradually began to supersede the use of many other languages on the Peninsula.

Aquitanian, Tartessian, Lusitanian, Celtiberian: these are some of the languages believed to have existed on the peninsula before the arrival of the Romans in 218 BCE. All have now been lost to history (except perhaps Aquitanian, which may have survived in its possible daughter language, Basque, and which you can read about here) because Latin superseded them all in the new Roman province of Hispania. At this time, there was no Spain or Portugal to speak of; there was only Hispania, initially divided into two sections, Hispania Ulterior and Citerior, which became three from 27 BCE: Lusitania (the south-west), Baetica (the south), and Tarraconensis (the rest); and then five from 284 CE, with swathes of Tarraconensis becoming the new provinces of Galicia (the north-west) and Cartaginense (the south-east).

Thus, for the next 600 years, Latin continued to reign supreme on the Iberian Peninsula, as it did in most of the other areas of the Roman Empire.

Latin, however, was itself changing. Just as there are formal and informal versions of Arabic and Tamil today, spoken in different contexts, so too were there different varieties of Latin emerging in the Empire. There was a standardised, 'higher' version of Latin, which we call Classical Latin, spoken in more formal contexts like matters of administration and, later, in churches; and then there was the more informal Latin that everyday people spoke, which gradually came to be called colloquial or Vulgar Latin.

Vulgar Latin developed differently in different parts of the Empire. Not all the reasons for the differences are known, but one main factor could be that different parts of the Empire had different indigenous languages that came into contact with Latin, and thus different parts of the Empire had different loanwords (and eventually vocabularies) in their versions of Vulgar Latin. For example, the Vulgar Latin spoken in Spain and Portugal might have included loanwords from Celtiberian, whereas the Vulgar Latin spoken in France might have loanwords from other indigenous languages instead such as Gaulish.

Of course, Vulgar Latin was frowned upon by authorities and those from the higher echelons of society, and Classical Latin remained their language of choice; they maintained it as a unifying language that was used for administration in all parts of the Roman Empire. Thus, as long as the Empire stayed intact, so too did Latin.

Gothic and Arabic

Like all great empires, however, the Roman Empire was destined to fall. As its influence and control over the territories on its periphery began to weaken significantly, territories like Hispania began in the 5 th century CE to experience several waves of invasions by Germanic peoples like the Vandals, the Alans, and the Visigoths. Eventually, Hispania came under control of this last group, the Visigoths, who were invited to rule the province for Rome by Emperor Honorius in 415 CE, and who gradually took complete control of it, especially after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE.

The new kings were native speakers of Gothic, a distant but now extinct relative of today's German and English. Gothic never really caught on in Hispania, and remained the language of the upper classes, while the majority of the population continued to use Vulgar Latin for everyday communication and interaction. However, with Classical Latin no longer readily available for 'reference' as the standard to aspire to, Vulgar Latin in Hispania likely began to change further, incorporating several new features from Gothic.

Then, beginning in 711 CE, Visigothic Hispania was almost entirely conquered by the Moors of the Umayyad Caliphate, becoming the new Muslim kingdom of Al-Andalus. In a series of swift, lightning-fast conquests, the Umayyads took almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, and replaced Gothic with Arabic as the language of the elite.

However, the Vulgar Latin dialects continued to survive in large part because most of the population remained Christian despite now being subject to heavy Arabic influence. For this reason, the Vulgar Latin of this time is known as Mozarabic. As had been the case under the Visigoth kings, Mozarabic was spoken by a large majority of the population, while Arabic was only used by the upper echelons of society.

Whence Portuguese and Spanish, then? At last, with the Muslim conquest of Spain, they were beginning to appear.

Beloved Homeland

In the northwest corner of Spain, the tiny kingdom of Asturias successfully resisted the Moors, and was able to recover and grow in strength throughout the 9 th and 10 th centuries CE. This one remaining Christian bulwark on the peninsula thus served as the nucleus of the movement known as the Reconquista or the Christian reconquering of Spain, and also as the nucleus from which Portuguese and Spanish as we know them today were eventually born.

At its inception, Asturias was composed of the modern-day regions of Asturias and Galicia, which were never fully under the control of the Moors. Indeed, Galicia especially had remained fiercely distinctive since the 4 th century. In 409 CE, slightly earlier than the rest of the peninsula, it had become a separate Roman vassal state under the Suebi, a separate Germanic race from the Visigoths, and remained an independent Suebi kingdom until 585 CE, when Visigoth King Leovigild absorbed it into the rest of Visigoth Hispania. Galician dialects of Vulgar Latin were thus already rather more divergent compared to Vulgar Latin and Mozarabic dialects on the rest of the peninsula, and even compared to their Asturian brethren.

Enter a Galician nobleman named Vimara Peres, who at the end of the 9 th century CE, led an Asturian force to conquer a sizeable chunk of Andalusian territory between the Minho and Douro rivers. Asturian King Alfonso III awarded the entire region to Peres as a County, and Peres resettled the area with Galician colonists. He also named it after the largest port city in the region, Portus Cale -taken today as the origin of the name Portugal. From this point on, Portugal began to develop its own regional identity, and indeed, its own distinct Vulgar Latin dialects, separate from the Asturian ones.

Portuguese and Spanish

Eventually, Asturias splintered into several successor states as various kings and heirs fought for control over the area. Two of these successor states were the Kingdom of Leon, and the County of Portugal, the latter of which declared its independence as a separate Kingdom from Leon in 1143 under King Afonso Henrique, and by which time had expanded to fill out most of the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Portuguese was also by this time a markedly different dialect from the other Vulgar Latin daughter dialects, and Portugal's separation from Leon ensured that this would continue to be so.

Meanwhile, Leon, later the Kingdom of Leon and Castile, gradually began to assert itself as the dominant force in the central area of the Peninsula. It eventually defeated the Moorish kingdoms, and expanded to control the territory of modern-day Spain by the end of the 15 th century CE. The Vulgar Latin daughter dialect that eventually became the language that we know today as Spanish was the Castilian dialect that originated with Leon and Castile, and which became standardised in written form in the 13 th century around the city of Toledo through the work of the Toledo School of Translators. Under the official patronage of King Alfonso X, this group worked to translate a large body of various Arabic and Hebrew texts into Latin and, for the first time, Castilian, giving Castilian a sizeable body of "official" written language, and in doing so laying the foundations for Castilian's eventual dominance over the other daughter dialects of Vulgar Latin.

Differences today

Today, both Standard Castilian Spanish and Standard Continental Portuguese reflect this rich tapestry of linguistic and cultural history, with a sizeable number of loanwords from Arabic, Gothic and (in the case of Spanish) Basque. Both languages retain similar grammatical features and syntax, and also share many cognates, or root word forms, as a result of their common descent from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the peninsula.

However, Portuguese and Spanish differ mainly because of their different origins during the period following the Muslim conquest of Iberia and the advent of the Reconquista. Modern-day Portugal was conquered and consolidated as a stable kingdom much earlier than Spain, and thus the process of the standardisation of Portuguese began earlier than that of Spanish, resulting in Portuguese retaining more recognisable features of Vulgar Latin than Spanish, whose original core dialects evolved and became standardised much later. Geography, both natural and political, has also played a part-had Portugal not remained an independent kingdom and state, it is conceivable that Portuguese might have deteriorated, much as the other Vulgar Latin dialects have today. (The reverse with Castilian Spanish is possible too, though much more unlikely, due to the relative size of the two polities).

Other Vulgar Latin dialects?

What happened to those, I hear you ask? After all, there were other successor states to Asturias, like Aragon, and Navarre. Surely they had their own unique dialects. And what happened to Leonese and Galician?

The answer is that with the process of standardisation, other dialects that have not been chosen as the standard often become marginalised and are left to simply fade away. In many cases, this is exactly what happened with the other dialects up until recent times: Aragonese, Leonese, and Navarrese are all still spoken, but by relatively few people, as Castilian Spanish became the sole language of use in almost all domains of public life after the 15 th century. Nonetheless, Galicia has managed to maintain its strong distinctive regional identity, and Galician has survived quite well into the present day as a strong marker of that identity. Galician and Portuguese continue to be rather more mutually intelligible than Portuguese and Spanish as a result of Portuguese's evolution from the Galician Vulgar Latin dialects; indeed, most linguists agree that Galician and Portuguese form a sort of continuum of intelligibility. Two other languages that have experienced a resurgence on the peninsula are Catalan, which after almost near-extinction has reemerged as one of the primary drivers of the Catalan independence movement, and Basque, very probably the last survivor of the languages originally spoken on the peninsula before the coming of the Romans.

The New World

Now that you know how Portuguese and Spanish came to be, the question is, where are they going?

In the 14 th and 15 th centuries, Portuguese and Spanish explorers were an integral part of the European Age of Exploration, which saw the colonisation and domination of Africa, the Americas, and much of Asia by European colonists. Portuguese and Spanish came to override indigenous languages in much the same way Latin did, and with almost identical end results: Spanish is now the dominant language in most of Central and South America at the expense of many native languages, while Brazilian Portuguese has far outstripped Continental Portuguese in terms of number of speakers and influence. Both languages have also left their mark on daughter languages as far flung as Tagalog in the Philippines, Kristang in Malaysia, and Guinean Creole in Guinea-Bissau.

With the collapse of the Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, all these varieties and offshoots of Portuguese and Spanish have been largely left to develop on their own, much as the various dialects of Vulgar Latin were left to their own devices after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And already we are seeing marked differences: Brazilian Portuguese speakers, for example, often pronounce initial 'd' sounds with a sound rather like the English 'j', an innovation unknown to Continental Portuguese, while Argentinian Spanish speakers are famous for their almost lyrical intonation patterns, a feature not found in Castilian Spanish. Chilean Spanish is full of loans from Quechua, while informal Angolan Portuguese is filled with loans from Kimbundu.

It seems possible that both languages might go the way of their once dominant Roman parent. Already we sometimes speak not of Portuguese and Spanish, but Portugueses and Spanishes; in a hundred years, perhaps we might even speak of an Iberian language family. As the Spanish saying goes, no hay dos sin tres -never two without three.

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Iberia's children: A short history of why Portuguese and Spanish are different | Unravel Magazine

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Once upon a time, Portuguese and Spanish were, basically, dialects of the same language: Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Hundreds of years later, how have Portuguese and Spanish grown apart, and why? And will they always be different?

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Crossroads of Medieval Spanish Literature and Modern Critique

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Crossroads of Medieval Spanish Literature and Modern Critique

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En el periodo medieval, el península ibérico era dinámico y diverso. En el siglo 13, los cristianos vivieron en el norte, los musulmanes vivieron en el sur, y los comunidades judíos vivieron por todas partes. El área cristiano tuvo estabilidad política, y por esa razón el arte y la escritura florecía. Un tipo de escritura de este tiempo fue el mester de clerecía, el primer tipo de poesía española. El mester de clerecía era en forma de romántica, épico, y muchas mas. El mester de clerecía era muy influyente en los siglos que seguía.

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Creative Studios at The University of Texas at El Paso

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The Cleric's Craft Conference 2015: Crossroads of Medieval Spanish Literature and Modern Critique

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The thirteenth century was a dynamic time in the Iberian Peninsula, as political and cultural changes were occurring throughout the realms that occupied what is now Spain and Portugal. Much of the literature of this period was learned in nature and composed by clerics, and although the works were read and studied individually from the time of composition, they did not see collective examination until the nineteenth century.

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The Romance Languages and What Makes Them Amazing

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The Romance Languages and What Makes Them Amazing

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Este video habla sobre los lenguajes románicas, que incluye el español, el portugués, el catalán, el francés, y varios otros. Describe la historia de este tipo de lengua y también hechos interesantes. Hay muchísimas personas quienes idiomas primeros son un lenguaje románica. Todos los lenguajes románicas fueron desarrollados del latín, el lenguaje de los romanos. Fueron dos tipos del latín: formal y vulgar. El formal era usado por las personas de la clase alta, y vulgar era usado por los plebeyos en varios regiones del imperio Romano. Cuando el imperio Romano disolvió, el latín vulgar de los varios regiones empezó a desarrollar en lenguas nuevas. En día de hoy, español tiene el numero de hablantes nativos más alto de los lenguajes románicas. Algo interesante de los lenguajes románicas es que hablantes de lenguajes románicas mas o menos puede comunicar con hablantes de un lenguajes románicas diferentes porque hay muchas palabras con similitudes. Por ejemplo, “Buenas tardes” en español significa lo mismo que “Boa tarde” que es portugués.

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The Romance Languages and What Makes Them Amazing

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Capítulo 5: Historia de la lengua española

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Capítulo 5: Historia de la lengua española

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How to Put German Sentences in the Right Order

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How to Put German Sentences in the Right Order

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Este página informativo explica la sintaxis del alemán. Hay algunas similitudes entre la sintaxis alemán y ingles. Por ejemplo, oraciones cortos y declarativos tienen el mismo orden de palabras en alemán y ingles, que es sujeto à verbo à otra. Algo interesante sobre la sintaxis alemán es que el verbo siempre es el elemento segundo en una oración. El autor dice que este es la regla más importante para recorder cuando aprendes el alemán. Por ejemplo, en alemán, “Te veo” será “Iche (sujeto) sehe (verbo) dich (objeto)”.

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While there are cases in which German and English word order are identical, German word order (die Wortstellung) is generally more variable and flexible than English. A "normal" word order places the subject first, the verb second, and any other elements third, for example: "Ich sehe dich." ("I see you.") or "Er arbeitet zu Hause." ("He works at home.").

Sentence Structure

Simple, declarative sentences are identical in German and English: Subject, verb, other.

The verb is always the second element in a German sentence.

With compound verbs, the second part of the verb goes last, but the conjugated part is still second.

German sentences are usually "time, manner, place."

After a subordinate clause / conjunction, the verb goes last.

Throughout this article, note that verb refers to the conjugated or finite verb, i.e., the verb that has an ending that agrees with the subject (er geht, wir geh en, du gehst, etc.). Also, "in second position" or "second place," means the second element, not necessarily the second word. For example, in the following sentence, the subject (Der alte Mann) consists of three words and the verb (kommt) comes second, but it is the fourth word:

"Der alte Mann kommt heute nach Hause."

Compound Verbs

With compound verbs, the second part of the verb phrase ( past participle, separable prefix, infinitive) goes last, but the conjugated element is still second:

"Der alte Mann kommt heute an."

"Der alte Mann ist gestern angekommen."

"Der alte Mann will heute nach Hause kommen."

However, German often prefers to begin a sentence with something other than the subject, usually for emphasis or for stylistic reasons. Only one element can precede the verb, but it may consist of more than one word (e.g., "vor zwei Tagen" below).

In such cases, the verb remains second and the subject must immediately follow the verb:

"Heute kommt der alte Mann nach Hause."

"Vor zwei Tagen habe ich mit ihm gesprochen."

The Verb Is Always the Second Element

No matter which element begins a German declarative sentence (a statement), the verb is always the second element. If you remember nothing else about German word order, remember this: the subject will either come first or immediately after the verb if the subject is not the first element. This is a simple, hard and fast rule. In a statement (not a question) the verb always comes second.

This rule applies to sentences and phrases that are independent clauses. The only verb-second exception is for dependent or subordinate clauses. In subordinate clauses, the verb always comes last. (Although in today's spoken German, this rule is often ignored.)

One other exception to this rule: interjections, exclamations, names, certain adverbial phrases are usually set off by a comma. Here are some examples:

"Nein, der alte Mann kommt nicht nach Hause."

"Maria, ich kann heute nicht kommen."

"Wie gesagt, das kann ich nicht machen."

In the sentences above, the initial word or phrase (set off by a comma) comes first but does not alter the verb-second rule.

Time, Manner, and Place

Another area where German syntax may vary from that of English is the position of expressions of time (wann?), manner (wie?) and place (wo?). In English, we would say, "Erik is coming home on the train today." English word order in such cases is place, manner, time... the exact opposite of German. In English it would sound odd to say, "Erik is coming today on the train home," but that is precisely how German wants it said: time, manner, place. "Erik kommt heute mit der Bahn nach Hause."

The only exception would be if you want to start the sentence with one of these elements for emphasis. Zum Beispiel: "Heute kommt Erik mit der Bahn nach Hause." (Emphasis on "today.") But even in this case, the elements are still in the prescribed order: time ("heute"), manner ("mit der Bahn"), place ("nach Hause").

If we start with a different element, the elements that follow remain in their usual order, as in: "Mit der Bahn kommt Erik heute nach Hause." (Emphasis on "by train" - not by car or plane.)

German Subordinate (or Dependent) Clauses

Subordinate clauses, those parts of a sentence that cannot stand alone and are dependent on another part of the sentence, introduce more complicated word order rules. A subordinate clause is introduced by a subordinating conjunction ( dass, ob, weil, wenn ) or in the case of relative clauses, a relative pronoun ( den, der, die, welche). The conjugated verb is placed at the end of a subordinate clause ("post position").

Here are some examples of subordinate clauses in German and English. Notice that each German subordinate clause (in bold type) is set off by a comma. Also, notice that the German word order is different from that of the English and that a subordinate clause may come first or last in a sentence.

„Ich weiß nicht, wann er heute ankommt." | "I don't know when he arrives today."

„Als sie hinausging, bemerkte sie sofort die glühende Hitze." | "When she went out, she immediately noticed the intense heat."

„Es gibt eine Umleitung, weil die Straße repariert wird." | "There's a detour because the road is being repaired."

„Das ist die Dame, die wir gestern sahen." | "That's the lady (that/whom) we saw yesterday."

Some German-speakers these days ignore the verb-last rule, particularly with weil (because) and dass (that) clauses. You may hear something like "...weil ich bin müde" (because I'm tired), but it's not grammatically correct German.

One theory blames this trend on English-language influences!

Conjunction First, Verb Last

As you can see above, a German subordinate clause always starts with a subordinating conjunction and ends with the conjugated verb. It is always set off from the main clause by a comma, whether it comes before or after the main clause. The other sentence elements, such as time, manner, place, fall into the normal order. The one thing you must remember is that when a sentence starts with a subordinate clause, as in the second example above, the very first word after the comma (before the main clause) must be the verb. In the example above, the verb bemerkte was that first word (note the differences between the English and German word order in that same example).

Another type of subordinate clause is the relative clause, which is introduced by a relative pronoun (as in the previous English sentence). Both relative clauses and subordinate clauses with a conjunction have the same word order. The last example in the sentence pairs above is actually a relative clause. A relative clause explains or further identifies a person or thing in the main clause.

Subordinating Conjunctions

One important aspect of learning to deal with subordinate clauses is to be familiar with the subordinating conjunctions that introduce them.

All of the subordinating conjunctions listed in this chart require the conjugated verb to go at the end of the clause they introduce. Another technique for learning them is to learn the ones that are NOT subordinating, since there are fewer of those.

The coordinating conjunctions (with normal word order) are: aber, denn, entweder/oder (either/or),weder/noch (neither/nor), and und.

Some of the subordinating conjunctions can be confused with their second identity as prepositions ( bis, seit, während), but this is usually not a big problem. The word als is also used in comparisons ( größer als, bigger than), in which case it is not a subordinating conjunction. As always, you have to look at the context in which a word appears in a sentence.

Note: All of the interrogative words ( wann, wer, wie, wo) can also be used as subordinating conjunctions.

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How to Put German Sentences in the Right Order

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While there are cases in which German and English word order are identical, German word order (die Wortstellung) is generally more variable and flexible than English. A "normal" word order places the subject first, the verb second, and any other elements third, for example: "Ich sehe dich."

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En el ingles antiguo, no usaban el orden de las palabras para indicar relaciones. En vez, adjuntaban terminaciones diferentes a las palabras para indicar cosas como el objeto directo, sujeto, genitivo, objeto indirecto, y objeto de preposición. Por esa razón, el orden de palabras no era tan importante al ingles antiguo como es al ingles de hoy. Este me parece muy interesante porque hoy en día el orden de palabras es totalmente esencial a la sintaxis de ingles, y el lenguaje de que se originó es súper diferente.

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Now that you have made yourself familiar with the parts of speech and the way different types of words function in a sentence to make meaning, we are ready to move on to Old English itself.

Modern English is what is called an analytic language. For the most part, it uses the order of words in a sentence to indicate grammatical and logical relationships.

means something very different from

Both sentences are made up of the same words, but they mean totally different things. Why? Because we have used the arrangement of words in the sentence to specify which word is the subject and which is the direct object.

In the first example, we know that "dog" is the subject of the sentence because it comes before the verb. Likewise, we know that "cat" is the object of the sentence (it receives the action) because it comes after the verb ("ate").

Things didn't work exactly this way in Old English.

Old English (like Latin, Greek, Russian and many other languages) is an inflected language. Instead of relying on word order to indicate relationships, Old English attaches endings to each word to indicate relationships.

Different endings mark words as subjects (the thing performing an action), direct objects (things directly receiving the action), indirect objects (things indirectly receiving the action and objects of prepositions), objects of prepositions , and genitives (things possessed by other things).

(If you aren't sure you completely understand these different word functions, go back to the previous chapter of Grammar Review and look over the explanations. If you haven't already, you can do some practice exercises).

Because word endings indicate grammatical relationships, word order is not nearly as important in Old English as it is in Modern English. Therefore words in a sentence can be arranged in various ways without changing the meaning of a sentence (there are of course some limits in this flexibility. The study of these rules and regularities is the field of Old English syntax. In general, syntax in poetry is more flexible than syntax in prose).

Thus, in Old English

Dog+(subject ending) ate cat+(object ending).

means exactly the same thing as:

and also the same thing as:

and also the same as:

On the other hand,

Dog+(object ending) ate cat+(subject ending)

means something entirely different.

You need not panic at this point: we do in fact use endings in Modern English to indicate grammatical function (think of "-ing", "-tion", "-ly", "-y" and others).

To understand Old English, you do not need to learn (very much) about word order. You do, however, need to learn your endings and their grammatical functions.

Endings for nouns, pronouns and adjectives in Old English are divided into five categories of grammatical function called cases. A list and brief description is given below. Click on each case for further information.

Nominative: The naming case; used for subjects.

The possession case; used to indicate ownership.

The direct object case; used to indicate direct receivers of an action .

The indirect object and prepositional case; used to indicate indirect receivers of action and objects of prepositions. Also used to indicate things that are being used ("instruments").

A list of all the possible endings for a word is called a declension. In Old English, nouns, pronouns and adjectives are all declined; that is, they change their endings based upon their grammatical function (or the grammatical function of the words they modify) in the sentence.

(words in the Nominative are marked in navy blue)

The Nominative is the naming case, used for the subject of the sentence.

Nominative nouns can be singular:

"Alfred" is the subject of the sentence, so "Alfred" would be in the nominative.

"Brothers" is the subject of the sentence, so "brothers" would be in the nominative case.

In Old English, nouns, pronouns and adjectives can all take the nominative case.

If the main noun is in the nominative, the pronouns and adjectives grammatically related to that noun will also be in the nominative. (This principle is called "Case Agreement" among nouns, demonstratives and adjectives. We will discuss it in more detail below.)

That great king ruled the kingdom.

Having "that" and "great" in the nominative as well as "king" is an example of case agreement among adjectives, pronouns and nouns.

Important Note: When you look up a word in the dictionary it will be in the nominative case.

(words that would be in the genitive case in Old English are marked in green)

The Genitive is the possession case, used to indicate that one thing is owned by, controlled by, or connected to another.

In Modern English we indicate genitives by using apostrophe-s ('s) or the preposition "of".

Alfred's kingdom was famous.

This sentence can also be phrased:

The kingdom is the subject of the sentence and is in the nominative case.

Because the kingdom belongs to Alfred, "Alfred" is in the genitive case.

Genitives can be singular (as above) or plural:

This sentence can also be phrased:

In Old English, adjectives and pronouns can also take the genitive case:

The power of that large kingdom was great.

"Sword" and "power" are the subjects of the sentences, so they are in the nominative case.

"His" is a genitive pronoun referring to the sword.

"Of his large kingdom" is a a phrase composed of a demonstrative pronoun ("that") an adjective ("large") and a noun in the genitive ("kingdom") all of which refer to the word "power".

Case Agreement

In Old English, adjectives and demonstrative pronouns must be the same case as the nouns they modify.

In the sentence "Alfred was the king of that large kingdom," "that," "large," and "kingdom" would all be in the same case (which, for this sentence, is the genitve case).

Having "that" and "large" in the genitive as well as "kingdom" is an example of case agreeement among adjectives, pronouns and nouns.

The Accusative Case

(words in the accusative are marked in red)

The Accusative is the direct object case, used to indicate the receiver of an action.

The accusative can be singular (as above) or plural:

Alfred is the subject of the sentences because he is performing the action.

"Wulfstan" and "the warriors" are the direct objects of the sentences because they are receiving the action.

In Old English, adjectives and pronouns can also take the accusative case:

Alfred is the subject of the sentence because he is performing the action.

The warriors are the direct object of the sentence because they are receiving the action (the reward).

"Those" is a demonstrative pronoun the refers to the warriors, so it is in the accusative case.

"Brave" is an adjective that, because it refers to the warriors (who are receiving the action) is also in the accusative case.

Having "those" and "brave" in the accusative as well as "warriors" is an example of case agreement among adjectives, pronouns and nouns.

The accusative case can also be used to indicate "motion towards" something.

The Viking ships are moving towards the harbor, so "into the harbor" is in the accusative case.

Note: If the ships were staying in the harbor, the phrase "in the harbor" would be in the dative case (see below).

(words in the dative and instrumental are marked in purple)

The Dative Case

The dative case can be used for both Indirect Objects and Objects of Prepositions.

Dative for Indirect Objects

The Dative is the indirect object case, used to indicate the secondary receiver of an action.

The dative can be singular (as above) or plural:

Alfred is the subject of the sentences because he is performing the action.

"Wulfstan" is the direct object of the sentence because he is receiving the action.

"Edward" and "the warriors" are the indirect objects because they secondarily receive the action.

In Old English, adjectives, and pronouns can also take the dative case:

Alfred is the subject of the sentence because he is performing the action.

"Wulfstan" is the direct object of the sentence because he is receiving the action.

"Wulfstan"would be in the accusative case.

"Warriors" are the indirect objects because they secondarily receive the action.

"Those warriors" would be in the dative case.

"Those" is a demonstrative pronoun that refers to the warriors, so it is also in the dative case.

"Brave" is an adjective that, because it refers to the warriors (who are secondarily receiving the action), is also in the dative case.

Having "those" and "brave" in the dative as well as "warriors" is an example of case agreement among adjectives, pronouns and nouns.

Dative with Prepositions

In Old English the objects of most prepositions ("of", which takes the genitive, and "to", which can take the accusative, are the more common exceptions) take the Dative Case.

"Alfred" is the subject of each sentence because he is performing the actions.

"Illness," "Æthelny," and "victory" are the objects of the prepositions "with", "by", and "for", so they are in the dative case.

In old English, adjectives and pronouns also can take the dative case if they are linked to the object of a preposition.

Alfred is the subject of the sentence because he is performing the action.

"Illness"is the object of the preposition "with," so it is in the dative case.

"That" is a demonstrative pronoun that refers to "illness," so it is in dative case.

"Horrible" is an adjective that refers to "illness,&quot so it is in the dative case.

Having "that" and "horrible" in the dative case as well as "illness" is an example of case agreement among adjectives, nouns, and pronouns.

Even though many books of Old English grammar separate the dative and instrumental cases, it is easier to think of the instrumental as just another use of the dative (the endings are the same for nouns; there are some pronouns that have different instrumental forms).

An instrumental noun is one that is used to accomplish something (as the instrument of the action).

In Old English instrumentals can be recognized as nouns in the dative case that are not indirect objects and are not preceeded by a preposition.

"Sword" is in the instrumental case because it is the instrument Alfred used to kill the Viking.

However, it is just as easy to think of "sword" being the object of "with," and thus in the dative.

Old English gives a writer the option of leaving out "with" and simply saying

Alfred killed a Viking sword(+dative ending) . (<== note that "sword" is in the dative / instrumental case)

You could translate this sentence as: Alfred killed a Viking by means of a sword.

In Old English, adjectives and pronouns also can take the Instrumental Case if they are linked to an instrumental noun (or, if they are stand-alone pronouns, if they are being used as an instrument).

Alfred killed the Viking with that trusty sword

"Alfred" is the subject of the sentence because he is performing the action.

"Sword" is the means by which the action was accomplished, so it is in the instrumental case.

"that" is a demonstrative pronoun the refers to the sword, so it is in the instrumental case.

"Trusty" is an adjective that, because it refers to the sword (which is the means by which the action is accomplished) is also in the instrumental case.

Having "that" and "trusty" in the instrumental case as well as "sword" is an example of case agreement among adjectives, pronouns and nouns.

the endings on a word indicate which case it belongs to. In turn, the case indicates what function the word is performing in the sentence, whether it is the subject (nominative), the direct object (accusative), the indirect object or object of a preposition (dative), or if it is a possessive (genitive) form.

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Now that you have made yourself familiar with the parts of speech and the way different types of words function in a sentence to make meaning, we are ready to move on to Old English itself. Modern English is what is called an analytic language.

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Este “blog” habla sobre como el sintaxis es un elemento esencial para la poesía y enfoca en el lado artístico del sintaxis, no solo reglas gramáticas. Explica como el sintaxis puede transformar un texto de prosa a una poema. El autor dice que, en contrasto con la escritura formal, es preferible usar sintaxis extraña en la poesía. También, ya que la sintaxis no es tradicionalmente algo creativo, en la poesía, la sintaxis puede alterar el tono, humor, y ritmo. Pero el autor pone énfasis en que el escritor necesita obtener un equilibrio con la sintaxis: algunas veces, escritura con sintaxis convencional es única y notable, y algunas veces escritura con sintaxis raro no es algo especial y en lugar es como un truco.

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One evening, the bell rang
Softly around the port.

Is that poetry? If it is (highly debatable!), it has little poetic quality. It reads like prose cut up into lines. Somehow, it has a prose rhythm, and there's little attention to sound. If it's prose-with-line-breaks, it's not even especially good prose. But see what happens if we mess around with the syntax and compress things a little:

Very gently struck
The quay night bell.

Rather better! No one reading those lines with a working ear could possibly fail to recognise these lines as poetry, even if they couldn't see the line-breaks. They are the opening two lines of W.S. Graham's great poem, 'The Nightfishing' (1955), from his New Collected Poems (Faber 2004), which marked a dramatic change in Graham's style. He went from being merely a highly gifted representative of the 'new apocalyptic' poetry typical of his generation to a singular poet with an entirely distinct voice. The lines are poetic (in a positive sense) for many reasons, but it's the odd syntax that allows the prevailing tone and mood and rhythm of the poem to assert itself. Even a more conventional but similar rendering, such as "The quay night bell/ Was very gently struck" doesn't cut it. In Graham's original, you hear a strike with each stress of "quay night bell" which "very gently struck" has prepared you for.

Poets have been skewing conventional syntax for many decades now, some in quite extreme ways beyond the scope of this article. I'm interested here simply in how manipulating syntax can help make a free verse poem distinctive, not in how 'experimental' or otherwise it might be. Just as in Graham's poem, imaginative use of syntax can affect the tone, mood and rhythm of a poem.

Another intriguing example can be found in a new poem by Frances Leviston, Midsummer Loop. You can read (well worth doing!) but it's the first eight lines I want to highlight:

now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that,
hours of silence in which the angel of conversation deserts us
to beat her wings above another gathering,
another long room, magnificent table and solemn pronouncement
made to the detriment of everybody else
and the glorification of the subject,
now we are abandoned to our own resources...

When a poem begins with the word "now", the first question I'd ask is "now....what?" It takes another seven lines to find out. Leviston interjects a description of an event happening elsewhere and stretches this out so much that she has to repeat the word "now" to remind readers she is indeed continuing from her opening phrase. This stretched syntax contributes decisively to the poem's tone and form. The poem is a loop, ending where it began. It's also a single sentence - a sentence which takes 52 lines (or a 'year') of poetry to enact if you include the repeated lines at the end, but there's so much variation and so much of interest that I didn't notice it was a single sentence the first time I read it. There's a certain tension created by the long, sprawling sentence. As a reader, I'm always feeling that something is awaiting resolution and quite a bit does happen, but a loop poem can never be fully resolved. The tension is held for another loop and then another etc. Much of this poem's success comes down not only to great phrases and an interesting mind at work, but to skilful use of syntax.

Sometimes poems with entirely conventional syntax stand out from the crowd for many other reasons and sometimes poems with convoluted syntax stand out for all the wrong reasons. But breaking ordinary syntactical rules isn't a cheap gimmick when done well. Les Murray shows not only how it can create something distinctive and exciting but also how syntax can mirror a poem's content:

When I ran to snatch the wires off our roof
hands bloomed teeth shouted I was almost seized
held back from this life

That's the beginning of Murray's poem, The Powerline Incarnation, which you can find in his New Selected Poems (Carcanet 2012) or online here, alongside a fine commentary by Kate Middleton (the Australian poet, not the other one...). The conventional opening line is a masterstroke. Immediately after contact is made with the live wires, the poem becomes like an electric shock. That's partly to do with the vigorous diction ("teeth shouted") and the ecstatic religious overtones of "seized" and "held back from this life", but the lack of punctuation that comes to dominate the poem possesses its own frenetic charge. The poem isn't just describing an extraordinary event, but enacts it within its own form. If you punctuated this poem conventionally, it would make a kind of syntactical sense, but what you'd lose would be huge. The absence of punctuation and the consequent syntactical ambiguities are simultaneously disruptive and energising - the way collision and confusion often are. The control Murray sustains alongside the illusion of chaos is the mark of a brilliant writer.

Some poems are best written in conventional syntax, but I do think it's often worth experimenting with syntactical variations when beginning a poem until a distinctive, captivating tone emerges. I imagine many people immediately switch off when, on rare occasions, syntax is mentioned. It might seem like a dry topic but, for poets and poetry readers, I don't think it is. Graham, Leviston and Murray are three good reasons why syntax can become suddenly fascinating. What do you think?

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One evening, the bell rang Softly around the port. Is that poetry? If it is (highly debatable!), it has little poetic quality. It reads like prose cut up into lines. Somehow, it has a prose rhythm, and there's little attention to sound. If it's prose-with-line-breaks, it's not even especially good prose.

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Este página web explica algunas reglas básicas sobre el sintaxis en italiano. Hay algunos similitudes del sintaxis de español y italiano. Por ejemplo, en español, el conjugación de un verbo indica quien hace el acción y es un pensamiento completo. Es el mismo en italiano; si dice solo “parlo,” es un pensamiento completo también porque el sujeto está incluido en el verbo. “Parlo” significa “yo hablo”.

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From the study of the musicality of languages ( phonology) to the rules which govern the internal structure of words ( morphology) we move to that branch of linguistics which focuses on the rules that govern words in larger structures (phrases and sentences, for example). This study is known as syntax. According to the definition provided by Giorgio Graffi in his book Sintassi, syntax is the study of combinations of words and why some combinations are permissible in a particular language, while others are not.

When speaking about morphology, I demonstrated that English is a morphologically poor language. The phrase "talk" is incomplete; there is no way of knowing who is talking because the subject has been omitted. On the other hand, the Italian "parlo" is a complete thought because the subject is embedded within the verb itself. Due to the fact that English verbs do not contain as much information about who is completing the action, English must rely heavily on word order in order for its meaning to remain clear.

Here is an example taken from the introduction to Italian linguistics: "Dog bites man." No native of English would blink twice at a sentence such as this one. Although the word "bites" does not itself contain information about who is biting whom, the word order takes care of this clarification. In such a small sentence, word order is strict and inflexible. Note what happens when we make any changes: "Man bites dog" has a completely different meaning while another arrangement-"Bites dog man"-has no meaning at all and is not grammatically acceptable.

However, in Latin, these three sentences would not have differed greatly despite their word order. The reason for this is that Latin used case endings ( morphemes which indicate the role of a word within a sentence). As long as the correct ending was used, placement in the sentence would not have been as important.

While the grammatical rules of Italian are not quite as flexible as they were in Latin, there is still more room to maneuver than in English. Such a simple sentence of three words-"dog," "bites," and "man"-does not leave enough room to maneuver, so to demonstrate word order flexibility in Italian, we will look at a slightly longer one.

Let us examine the sentence, "The man, who the dogs bit, is tall." The part of this sentence on which we will be concentrating, is the phrase "who the dogs bit." In Italian the sentence would read "L'uomo che i cani hanno morso è alto." However, in Italian it is also grammatically correct to say: "L'uomo, il cui braccio hanno morso i cani, è alto." On the other hand, to change the word order in English would result in "The man, who bit the dogs, is tall" and would change the meaning completely.

While Italian allows some flexibility within word order, other formations-such as noun-adjective phrases -are stricter. For example, the phrase "the old suit" is always translated as "l'abito vecchio" and never as "il vecchio abito." This is not an absolute rule, however in cases where the noun and adjective may change position, the meaning changes, even if only subtly.

Changing the phrase "la pizza grande" to "la grande pizza" alters the meaning from "the large pizza" to "the grand pizza." It is for this reason that translation is so incredibly difficult and is very rarely an exact science. Those who try to translate phrases such as "keep it real" or "just do it" into Italian for a tattoo will acknowledge frustration at the loss or change of meaning.

The beauty of languages lies not in their similarities, but in their differences. Growing accustomed to the new structures of foreign languages will broaden your means of expressing yourself, not only in Italian, but in English as well. Furthermore, while most phrases lose some meaning in their translation, the further you take your studies, the more unique phrases you will discover in Italian that defy translation to English.

About the Author: Britten Milliman is a native of Rockland County, New York, whose interest in foreign languages began at age three, when her cousin introduced her to Spanish. Her interest in linguistics and languages from around the globe runs deep but Italian and the people who speak it hold a special place in her heart.

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Italian Syntax - Word Order and Translation

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Syntax is the branch of linguistics which focuses on the rules of word order in phrases and sentences. Growing accustomed to the new structure of Italian will broaden your means of expressing yourself, not only in Italian, but in English as well.

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Things English Speakers Do Without Noticing

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Things English Speakers Do Without Noticing

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Este artículo habla sobre el complejidad del idioma ingles y como la mayoría de los hablantes nativos no han realizado todas las reglas que ingles tiene. Por cierta yo no sé todas las reglas de ingles–es posible que yo sé más reglas de español de reglas de ingles porque he aprendido las reglas prescriptivas de español en escuela. El autor explica como hay 20 tiempos diferentes en ingles y que usamos todos casi todos los días sin realizarlo.

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Aidan Simonds, Contributing Writer
Opinion. Size. Age. Shape. Color. Origin. Material. Purpose. Noun. When describing something, this is the order the adjectives must be placed in. It's one of the basic rules of the English language, and one that everyone follows everyday. But until recently, most people didn't even know this rule existed.

In early September, BBC culture editor Matthew Anderson tweeted out a passage from the book The Elements of Eloquence laying out this exact rule. The tweet soon went viral, garnering 40,000 retweets and 70,000 likes. Following this, Mark Forsyth, the author of The Elements of Eloquence wrote an article for BBC explaining this rule in more detail, and even offered some exceptions to the rule, while at the same time revealing another previously unknown rule.

In the article, Forsyth uses classic fairy tale characters as examples. Little Red Riding Hood follows these rules, yet Big Bad Wolf doesn't; and if we try to follow the rules by saying Bad Big Wolf, it just sounds wrong to our ears. This is another example of a previously unknown rule of the English language. To help explain the rule, Forsyth brings up the concept of reduplication, which is when you repeat a word, but either change a consonant or vowel. Some examples given by Forsyth are lovey-dovey, nitty-gritty, and ding-dong. When using reduplication with a change in vowels, there is a certain order that the vowels go in. If there are three words, the order is I, A, O. If there are two words, I always goes first, and is then followed by either A or O.

Forsyth talks about how the English language is very complex, though for those who have been speaking it their entire life, we don't think about the complexities of it.

There are about 20 different tenses in the language, many of which native speakers are not even aware of. Forsyth brings up the pluperfect progressive passive tense, which is a tense used for, in Forsyth's words, "an extended state of action that happened to you prior to another action in the past." Forsyth himself calls it "rather daunting." However, when we say things like, "I realized I'd been watched," we are using this tense without even realizing it.

Another complexity of the English language that may seem strange to non-English speakers is the fact that English speakers often use present-tense when talking about actions that are not presently occurring, like saying "I brush my teeth," not to say you're currently brushing your teeth, just saying that you brush your teeth regularly.

The English language seems very complex and daunting for someone who doesn't speak it natively, as there are tons of unwritten rules like the ones mentioned previously. One of the most commonly used ones is the verb "to think," which is often used as an auxiliary. We say "I think you're right," while someone who is still learning English will say "I am thinking you're right." That person is grammatically correct, but the fact that we've had years to learn the small complexities of this language makes it seem fairly comical when someone talks like that.

English is a language made up of small complexities that are not discussed, but that everyone knows about anyway. This is what makes it so hard to learn. Unless you've been speaking it your whole life, you tend to miss out on all the unwritten rules and tenses that are so common in our everyday speak. The English language is much more fascinating than you would think, but most people don't even realize it.

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Things English Speakers Do Without Noticing

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Aidan Simonds, Contributing Writer Opinion. Size. Age. Shape. Color. Origin. Material. Purpose. Noun. When describing something, this is the order the adjectives must be placed in. It's one of the basic rules of the English language, and one that everyone follows everyday. But until recently, most people didn't even know this rule existed.

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Book explores how our voices shape the rules of grammar

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Book explores how our voices shape the rules of grammar

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Este articulo enfoca en un lingüista llamado Norvan Richards, un profesor en MIT. Richards publicó un libro sobre el morfología y fonología en el principio de septiembre. Richards empieza el entrevista con el autor del articulo con una pregunta sobre el morfología de ingles–¿por que los hablantes de ingles añaden “it” al principio de un oración que empieza con un verbo? Puede ver este fenómeno en este oración: “It seems like Spanish class will be hard.” Richards razona que añaden el “it” porque el sonido ha influenciada el lengua. Además, Richards dice que cuando estudiamos la sintaxis, la mayoría de lingüistas no han investigado el morfología y fonología.

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Book explores how our voices shape the rules of grammar

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In English, declarative sentences do not usually begin with a verb. Let us suppose you are struggling in a language class, and complain about it to a friend.

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Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters)

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Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters)

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Este artículo me parece muy pertinente e interesante porque desde cuando primer empecé a aprender español a ahora, no completamente comprendo porque español tiene géneros para sustantivos y ingles no. Este articulo explica como el ruso, francés, español, árabe tienen géneros para sustantivos, y como el uso de género para cosas que inherente no son masculino o femenino, como el coche o la cama, puede afectar el cognición. Por ejemplo, cuando hablantes de ruso fueron preguntado de asignar nombres a los días de la semana, casi todos dieron nombres de mujer a días que son sustantivos femeninas y nombres de hombre a días que son sustantivos masculinos.

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If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns -even inanimate objects- have grammatical gender. Russian, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all examples of such languages. In French, wine and chocolate are masculine. In Arabic, soup and the calendar year are feminine. Speakers of these languages must take care to mark gender with definite articles and pronouns. They also must alter adjectives and even verbs for gender agreement.

As it turns out, a language's grammatical gender can have significant and surprising effects on cognition. In one study, for example, Russian speakers were asked to personify the days of the week. They consistently personified the grammatically masculine days (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) as males and the grammatically feminine days (Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) as females. When asked why they did this, they were unable to explain themselves.

So linguistic gender can spill over into other mental processes, leading us to judge and categorize inanimate and abstract nouns as truly having a gender, even though we logically know better. But the Russians in this study were tested in their native language. Can grammatical gender influence speakers' cognitive processes when they're speaking another language entirely?

In 2002, researchers set out to answer that question. They created a list of 24 objects that have opposite genders in Spanish and German; in each language, half of the objects were masculine and half were feminine. Speaking English and using materials written in English, the researchers asked a group of native Spanish speakers and a group of native German speakers -all of whom were proficient in English- to generate three adjectives for each item on the list.

Across the board, object gender influenced the participants' judgments. For example, the word "key" is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers in the study tended to describe keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, used words such as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and tiny when describing keys. The word "bridge" is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering.

In the same study, German and Spanish speakers looked at picture pairs. Each pair included a picture of a person and a picture of an object. The participants rated how similar the two pictures were. There were no written labels, and participants did not speak during the task. Both Spanish and German speakers judged pairs to be more similar when the grammatical gender of the object matched the biological sex of the person in the picture. A pair consisting of a bridge and a man, for example, seemed quite similar to a Spanish speaker but not similar at all to a German speaker.

As these studies show, grammatical gender can influence people's thinking, even when they're speaking a language with no grammatical gender to speak of -and even when they're not speaking any language at all!

Many of us like to believe we live in a post-sexism world, with the worst of gender prejudice behind us. But if gendered conventions of language can influence our thoughts -making a key seem prettier or a bridge seem sturdier- then it seems we are not yet free of gender stereotypes. Small, unnoticed features of language can influence our thoughts, sometimes in big ways. Knowing that, imagine how else language, culture, and society might affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Mind-boggling, isn't it?
Sources Cited:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition, ed. D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow, pp. 61- 80. Cambridge University Press.

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Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters)

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If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns -even inanimate objects- have grammatical gender. Russian, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all examples of such languages. In French, wine and chocolate are masculine. In Arabic, soup and the calendar year are feminine.

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En este artículo, el autor enfoca en un hombre, David Peterson, quien inventa varias lenguajes. Él no haga esto para divertirse–es su trabajo. Peterson habla 8 lenguajes su mismo, y ha creado 40 lenguas para programas de la televisión, como Game of Thrones’s “High Valyrian.” Peterson es un lingüista, y todos sus lenguas tienen morfología, fonología, y gramática. Creo que es muy interesante que este persona constantemente crea nuevas lenguas porque, para mi, aprender el español ha sido difícil porque siempre estoy olvidando una regla, o cual género es una palabra. Algo interesante que Peterson mencionó es que el primer lenguaje que el trató de crear fracasó porque en vez de crear un lengua con su proprio léxico, casi el lengua entero fue un translación directo de ingles, y lenguajes reales no son como eso; cada lenguaje es único y tiene sus propias reglas y palabras.

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The Man Who Invented High Valyrian and Dothraki

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How one linguist creates obsessively detailed-and fully functional-languages for Game of Thrones and other shows

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Capítulo 3: La estructura de las palabras: morfología

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Capítulo 3: La estructura de las palabras: morfología

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Algo que me parece muy interesante de capítulo dos es como personas que hablan lenguajes diferentes hacen diferentes sonidos fonéticos con sus bocas. Además, algo que no he realizado antes de capítulo dos es como el lenguaje de español solo tiene 5 sonidos de vocales y que ingles tiene muchísimas más. Aprendí que adultos Americanos quienes aprenden español como segundo lenguaje tienen dificultad de pronunciar las vocales correctamente porque Americanos tienen mucha variedad de sonidos vocales. Este página del web explica varias aspectos del lenguaje japonés. Japonés tiene algunos semejanzas con español; por ejemplo, hay solo cinco sonidos vocales en japonés, como en español. Algo que diferencia japonés de ingles es que en japonés, generalmente todos los sílabos en una palabra son hablado con la misma fuerza y duración.

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Ryo Furue (Email: my family name AT hawaii PERIOD edu)

I no longer maintain this page, but I leave it here because it seems some people occasionally find it useful.

Recently, I was informed of a brilliant website which shows the standard Japanese pronunciation of any piece of Japanese text you input: Japanese Phonetic Converter - kanji to romaji or furigana

Introduction

Children learn their mother tongues without learning theories. Why not adults? Why bother to learn theories? You might ask. Unfortunately, we adults can't learn languages as children do. You could try, but that would be inefficient. What we usually do is first to learn some theories and then to judge your performance against the theories when you practice. If you are rich, you could hire a "coach" who knows those theories and whose job is to observe your performance and advise you on how to improve, just as professional baseball players hire their private coaches. If you don't hire a coach, you need to be your own coach. So, you want to learn the theories.

Here I offer some informal and unauthoritative theories on the pronunciation of the Japanese language. My target audience are American English speakers, but speakers of other languages will also find this guide helpful. I should really cite references; I owe a lot to books I read. It's simply because of my laziness that I don't try to determine which book says what. As such, I can't guarantee the correctness of the information given here.

0. The five vowels

Here is minimum knowledge about Japanese vowels. I postpone more detailed description since there are much more important things than accurate knowledge of each Japanese sound.

The Japanese language has only five vowels. Each vowel is transliterated to each of the five vowel letters of the Roman alphabet. In Japanese written in Roman alphabet,

The letter "a" always represents a sound not unlike the American "a" in "father". (The closest English sound is the British "u" in "cup", I think.)

The letter "e" always represents a sound quite like the "e" in "pet".

The letter "i" almost always represents a sound quite like the American "ee" in "feet", not "i" in "fit". I said "almost". There is one minor exception, which will be explained later.

The letter "o" always represents a sound quite like the initial portion of the American "o" in "so". In English, the vowel of "so" is transient: While you pronounce it, your jaw, lips, and tongue move. That means this vowel is a "slide" from one type of vowel toward another. The Japanese "o" corresponds to the initial position of the American "o" in "so".

The letter "u" in Japanese almost always represents a sound not unlike the "oo" in "fool", not "u" in "full". Again there's one minor exception.

The most important thing to note is that each letter almost always represents one single vowel sound. (There's one minor exception for "i" and another for "u".) In English, the "i" in "sit" and the "i" in "site" represent quite different vowels. This type of wild variation never occurs in Japanese.

1. Each syllable has the same length and strength.

This rule is the simplest but by far the most important. Of course, even in Japanese, important syllables are pronounced more strongly and they can be slightly longer than the unimportant ones. But, the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables is much smaller than in English. So much so, it's better to think of Japanese syllables having equal lengths and strengths. You can learn subtle variations after you become proficient in Japanese.

A precise definition of a "syllable" will be given shortly. For the moment, let's pretend that we already know what a syllable is in Japanese.

An effective method of practicing this rule is to clap your hands while you pronounce Japanese words. For example, say "yokozuna" (a sumo champion). This word consists of four syllables: yo-ko-zu-na. So, clap your hands four times: clap-clap-clap-clap, keeping the same interval between the claps. Do it again and say yo-ko-zu-na at the same time so that each clap coincides with one syllable. Also, try to say all the syllables evenly with equal strength.

2. There are no diphthongs in Japanese.

A diphthong is a slide from one vowel to another as in the English word "rain". The vowel in this word is written as [ei] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This [ei] is considered a single vowel, a slide from an e-vowel to an i-vowel. Therefore "rain" has only one syllable although it has two vowel letters. The Japanese language doesn't have any diphthongs. Two consecutive vowel letters simply indicate two separate vowels and hence two separate syllables. For example, the word "Inoue" (a common family name) is pronounced as four syllables: i-no-u-e, with four hand claps: clap-clap-clap-clap (See rule 1). Consequently, long sequences of vowels aren't uncommon in Japanese words, such as "Aioi" (a-i-o-i, a placename) and "aoi ie" (a-o-i-i-e, a blue house).

By the way, the astute reader (yes, that's you) may ask this question: How can you tell that "Inoue" should be divided as i-no-u-e? Why not in-o-u-e? A good question. That's the theme of the next three sections.

3. All Japanese syllables are open.

An open syllable is one which ends with a vowel. A syllable ending with a consonant is---, that's right, a closed syllable. For example, "get", "an", "cast", and "sports" are closed, and "sky", "knee", "we", and "a" are open.

The Japanese language has only open syllables, with two exceptions, which will be explained in the next two sections. Since all syllables are open, you can unambiguously divide Japanese words written in Roman alphabet into syllables in many cases. For example, "yokozuna" should be yo-ko-zu-na; other divisions would contain one or more closed syllables: yok-o-zu-na, yo-koz-un-a, etc.

4. The special syllable "N"

One of the two exceptions to the preceding rule is the N-syllable. In Japanese, the sound of "n" in certain circumstances forms a syllable by itself. For example, "kanji" (a Chinese character) has three syllables: ka-N-ji. (As in this example, I'll indicate this syllable with a capital "N" in what follows.)

The word "kanji" is unambiguously divided into syllables because of rule 3 ("kan" cannot be a single syllable because it is closed). On the other hand, there are words which cannot be uniquely divided into syllables from their Roman transliterations alone. For example, "Inoue" could be i-N-o-u-e instead of i-no-u-e. This is one of the shortcomings of Roman transliteration. If the word is written in the Japanese characters, there is no such ambiguity.

There are two schemes to avoid this ambiguity. One is to use an apostrophe as in "Shin'ichi" (a common given name), which is unambiguously divided into syllables as shi-N-i-chi: the apostrophe is there to prevent the division shi-ni-chi. The other scheme is to use a hyphen: "Shin-ichi". Unfortunately, these conventions aren't always followed. So that you need to be aware that a spelling like "kanan" can be ka-N-an-N or ka-na-N. (The fact is that both are possible. Ka-N-an-N means "to take into account" and Ka-na-N is the Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese district.)

An important question is, what N-sound should we use? I'll answer this question in an appendix. For the moment, let's use the English n-sound.

5. A double consonant is a syllable.

The other exception to rule 3 is the syllables consisting of double consonants. What's a double consonant? Read aloud (a nonsensical) "seat top". Compare it with "sea top". What's the difference? The time spent to pronounce the "tt" in "seat top" is approximately twice as long as that of the "t" in "sea top".

To understand this phenomenon, we first need to examine how a single [t] sound is produced. Open your mouth and release air from your lungs; The air freely flows through your mouth and exits. Next, block your airway using your tongue and upper teeth. That's the initial position of your speech organs before the articulation of a [t] sound. Gently apply pressure from your lungs. Because your airway is blocked, the air can go nowhere and so pressure builds up behind your tongue in your mouth. Then, release the blockage at the tip of your tongue. Because of the pressure, air rushes through the narrow gap between the tip of your tongue and your upper front teeth. The noise so created is the sound of [t]. The most important thing to note here is that there are two stages in the articulation of [t]: (1) the building-up of pressure and (2) its release. Such a sound is called a "plosive" in phonetics. (This is an imprecise definition, sorry. If I find the time, I'll give more precise definition later. In this discussion, however, this imprecise one will do.) There are several plosives in English and Japanese. For [p], you block your airway by your lips, but otherwise it's the same as [t]. For [k], you block your airway using the back of your tongue and the upper part (ceiling) of your mouth.

Note that phase 1 of a plosive can be indefinitely prolonged. Block your airway, apply pressure, and freeze. You can stay in that state at least for a few seconds. (If you are a good swimmer, you can do that even for a minute.)

Now let's examine what's going on for the "tt" in "seat top". We recognize that the first "t" of "tt" has only phase 1 of [t]. The release of pressure occurs only at the end of the second "t". In other words, instead of making two separate real t's, we actually make a single "t" but indicate the existence of two t's by lengthening phase 1. That's why the "tt" of "seat top" is about twice as long as the "t" in "sea top" although only one [t] is produced in fact.

Perhaps you have by now guessed why I'm explaining all this. The Japanese language treats the double plosive "tt", "kk", "pp", etc. as a syllable. For example, "kakko" (parenthesis) has three syllables: ka-k-ko, clap-clap-clap. The second syllable consists entirely of phase 1 of the [k] sound, which is silence. In contrast, "kako" (the past) consists of two syllables: ka-ko. Although the second syllable of "kakko" is silent (no sound produced), we discern the presence of the syllable thanks to rule 1. The absence of sound for a fixed interval of time unambiguously indicates the presence of the syllable. The word "kakko" can be distinguished from "kako" solely by this presence of the silent second syllable! I think you've now understood how important rule 1 is for the Japanese language.

6. A long vowel comprises two syllables.

This rule is quite simple. Each of the five Japanese vowels has a long and short versions. The long version comprises two syllables, and so, in accordance with rule 1, the long version is precisely twice as long as the short one.

Perhaps, we can regard this rule as a corollary to rule 2. In fact, the long vowel can be viewed as a sequence of two vowels of the same kind. For example, "Iida" (a common family name) consists of three syllables: i-i-da. The "ii" of "Iida" can be viewed as the long version of "i" or as two consecutive short i's. These two views are equivalent: "ii" comprises two syllables (clap-clap) and is pronounced without any break between the two i's. The word "Iida" can be distinguished from "Ida" (another common family name) thanks to rule 1.

Here's a list of how the long version of each vowel is represented in Roman transliteration:

long [a]: "ah", "a" (same spelling as the short version), "aa"

long [e]: "ei"

long [i]: "ii"

long [o]: "oh", "o", "oo", "ou"

long [u]: "u", "uu"

In section 0, I said that each vowel letter represents exactly one vowel with a minor exception for the letter "i" and another for "u". As the list above shows that "ei" is pronounced e-e, not e-i. This is the only instance where the letter "i" doesn't represent the [i] vowel. Also, the combination "ou" is pronounced o-o, not o-u. This is the only exception for the letter "u". But, these exceptions are minor because if you really pronounce "ei" as e-i, that's passable; your interlocutor may not even notice. Likewise for "ou". As you can see from the list above, there's no universally accepted method of indicating long vowels except for "ei" and "ii". I'll give more details on this matter in an appendix.
The most important things have been told. This section explains each Japanese sound in more details.

(t,d), (k,g), (s,z), (p,b)

A good news is that most Japanese consonants are the same as English ones. In particular, these eight sounds are almost identical or very similar between the two languages.

A bad news is that spellings are sometimes somewhat confusing. [TO BE WRITTEN.]

The letter "y" following another consonant letter

English doesn't use the letter "y" in the way Japanese does, although English does have the same "phenomenon". Say "you" aloud and then "oo" (as in "fool"). What's the difference? The difference is obvious: the existence and absence of the initial y-sound, of course. In the International Phonetic Alphabets, this y-sound is written as [j], so the pronunciations of these two words are written as [ju:] and [u:], respectively. Next, say "few" and "foo" aloud. We have the same difference: [fju:] and [fu:].

The Japanese language has similar pairs; Spellings for them are more systematic. For example, "Tokyo" is pronounced [to:kjo:] (to-o-kyo-o, four syllables) and "toko" (to submit a manuscript) is pronounced [to:ko:] (to-o-ko-o, four syllables).

This kind of y-sound following another consonant can be difficult for English speakers. For example, there's no such combination as "ry" in English. To practice this combination, first say "yo" (as in "yoke") and "o" (as in "oh") alternately. And then, say "ryo" and "ro" alternately.

A1. The pronunciation of the syllabic "N"

A1.1. Before a vowel

English-speaking people have a great difficulty in pronouncing a syllabic N followed by a vowel. For example, "Shin'ichi" should be pronounced shi-N-i-chi, not shi-N-ni-chi. That is, there shouldn't be an [n] sound at the top of the third syllable. How is that possible?

One solution is to briefly stop your voice just after the N syllable, as Germans do before the vowel starting a word. ("Guten Abend" would sound like "Gute Nabend" if pronounced by an English speaker.) This strategy will do in Japanese, although it's not common at all.

The usual pronunciation of the syllabic N before a vowel is a nasal vowel. To understand what a nasal vowel is, we first need to understand what ordinary vowels are and what nasal consonants are.

Air from the lungs has two potential exits: the mouth and the nose. When we pronounce a normal vowel, we close the "door" (uvula) to the nasal cavity, so that the air flows only through the mouth. On the other hand, when we pronounce the English [n] and [m], we block the airway by the tongue and upper teeth (for [n]) or by lips (for [m]). At the same time, we open the door to the nasal cavity. So that the air exits solely from the nose. Now, what if we open the "door" (uvula) and the mouth at the same time? That's the nasal vowel. The air exits both from the mouth and nose. The "vowel" so produced obtains a color or hint of an [n].

The N in shi-N-i-chi is actually the nasal version of [i] because it follows a real vowel [i]. If you produce the real [n] by blocking the mouth airway by the tongue and upper teeth, then the next syllable will inevitably become ni, instead of the plain i.

A1.2. Before "k" or "g"

This pronunciation of the syllabic N is easy for English speakers because it is exactly what they are doing in speaking English. Consider the English word "ankle". How is the "n" in it pronounced? Pronounce "Anne" (the female name) and "ankle" alternately and observe the difference in the positions of your tongue when you pronounce the "n" parts of the words. [TO BE CONTINUED]

A2. How to spell long vowels?

The biggest shortcoming of Roman transliteration of Japanese is that there's no universally accepted method of indicating long vowels except for "ii". The Ministry of Education of Japan once endorsed the use of overbar (Place a short horizontal bar on the vowel letter), but it never saw wide use.

For the vowels [a] and [o], there are three common schemes.

One of the most frequently used methods is just to give up indicating the length! For example, "Ryo" (my first name) could be ryo-o (two syllables with a long "o") or ryo (one syllable with a short "o"). From the spelling alone, you can't tell which. It's in fact a long "o", but I've given up indicating it. "Tokyo" is the same: both o's are in fact long (which makes this word consist of four syllables: to-o-kyo-o). "Kyoto", on the other hand, is Kyo-o-to.

Another widely used scheme is to add an "h" after "a" and "o" as in "rahmen" for ra-a-me-N (a Japanized Chinese noodle) and "Endoh" for e-N-do-o (a common family name). This scheme works in many cases, but can result in ambiguity as in "Ohita" (a place name): Is it o-o-i-ta (with a long "o") or o-hi-ta (with a short "o" plus a syllable "hi")?

Another scheme uses two vowel letters as in "raamen" and "Endoo". "Raamen" is OK, but "Endoo" would be pronounced wrongly by English speakers.

For the long [o], there's yet another scheme: "ou". This is the exception for the letter "u" mentioned in section 0. The combination "ou" is pronounced o-o (long o), not o-u. But I said the exception is a minor one, because even if you pronounce o-u instead of o-o, you'll sound OK.

For the vowel [e], the long version is most often written as "ei". For example, "sensei" (teacher, doctor, or professor) is pronounced se-N-se-e with a long "e", not se-N-se-i. This is the exception for the letter "i" I mentioned in section 0. But, remember I said this exception is a minor one. It is minor because even if you really say se-N-se-i instead of se-N-se-e, you will sound OK. Your Japanese interlocutor may not even notice that your pronunciation isn't quite right. I would say that the spelling "ei" should be pronounced e-e not e-i, which is substandard, but that the latter isn't odd, either.

For the long [u], we usually give up indicating that it's long and simply write "u". So, "Kyushu" (a place name) is kyu-u-shu-u.

You see, a lot of confusions are due to Roman alphabets used to write Japanese.

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Ryo Furue (Email: my family name AT hawaii PERIOD edu) I no longer maintain this page, but I leave it here because it seems some people occasionally find it useful. Recently, I was informed of a brilliant website which shows the standard Japanese pronunciation of any piece of Japanese text you input: Japanese Phonetic Converter - kanji to romaji or furigana Children learn their mother tongues without learning theories.

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En este video encontré un perspectivo nuevo a la lengua y fonética. Antes de ver el video, no he pensado sobre como la fonética se afecta los personas sordos. Es increíble que personas sordos todavía pueden aprender hablar varias lenguajes sin oír los sonidos de la fonética y que aprenden a hacer las diferentes sonidos numerosos con sus lenguas, labias, dientes, etc. También el video me provoca el pregunta de como los personas sordos aprenden una segunda o tercer lengua y como este proceso ocurre.

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Watch: What It’s Like to Read Lips | Short Film Showcase

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How WSJ Used an Algorithm to Analyze ‘Hamilton’ the Musical

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How WSJ Used an Algorithm to Analyze ‘Hamilton’ the Musical

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Este artículo explica un investigación sobre el musical Hamilton. Los investigadores estudiaron la fonética y las rimas en canciones. Ellos crearon un algoritmo para analizar las liricas en detalle. Los investigadores transcribieron las liricas a sonidos fonéticas, pero no utilizaron el IPA. Por ejemplo, solo escribieron los sonidos como “S-P-AA-T” para “spot” y “B-IY” para “buy.” Analizaron los sonidos de vocales, estrés, y sufijos. El algoritmo producía una calificación para cada rima en los canciones. El autor dice que las rimas que Lin-Manuel Miranda usó en sus canciones son parte del razón de porque Hamilton era (y todavía es) tan popular.

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"Hamilton" is the massively successful Broadway musical about American's founding father Alexander Hamilton. By combining hip-hop and musical theatre, its writer, creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda devised a juggernaut that found wide appeal among audiences.

But what exactly makes his lyrical construction special, and how did Mr. Miranda weave four decades of hip-hop history with three centuries of the American story? To answer part of this question, we looked to the rhyme patterns in "Hamilton," trying to classify the specific ways Mr. Miranda references foundational rappers such as Big Pun, Rakim, and Lauryn Hill into his verses about the Revolutionary War and constitutional congress.

See the full project: We Wrote an Algorithm to Unravel the Rhymes of Hit Musical 'Hamilton' "

Syllables vs. words

The prospect of training a computer to recognize ryhmes becomes daunting when considering the complexity of rhyme structures (like the difference between perfect and oblique rhymes). Early in our process, we decided to consider rhyme solely at the syllabic level, rather than only focusing on entire words. Rap lyrics will often combine rhyming sounds together, making it impossible to fully capture the breadth of rhyme construction by asking only: "Do these words rhyme?"

For example, everyone would agree that when Nas writes these words, he's rhyming the word "mon key" with "fun ky":

The ends of "mu si cian" and "com po si tion" rhyme, but "com-" also rhymes with the "mon-" and "fun-" sounds. If we limited rhyme to only full words, we would lose these syllabic rhyme patterns that are integral to the complex compositions of modern rappers.

Phonetics

Our general approach to extracting rhyme patterns begins with breaking each word into syllables and translating them into a regular phonetic language. We do this with the assistance of the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary with syllable annotations added by Susan Bartlett, Grzegorz Kondrak and Colin Cherry.

This translates each word into a series of syllables, each of which is a series of phonemes, written in a code called the "Arpabet." For example, in the final translation, the word "Hamilton" would be broken into:

Vowel sounds

To determine if two syllables can be rhymed, they first must share a similar vowel sound. The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary assigns each syllable one of 15 different vowel sounds. Any two syllables that have the same vowel sound (the same Arpabet character) are potential rhymes. Any two words with vowels that sound similar are weaker potential rhymes.

But how do you measure vowel sound similarity? Generally, vowels with similar resonant frequencies (often produced in similar parts of the mouth) are similar enough that a rapper can bend their sounds to produce syllables that rhyme. For instance, when Lin-Manuel Miranda has Aaron Burr rhyme "Scots man" with "dropped in," he is able to do so because the "ə" vowel of "man" has very similar formant frequencies to the "ɪ" vowel of "in."

Stress

Next, we look at syllable stress and assign a score. Generally, rhyme is heard most strongly between two stressed or emphasized syllables. As such, the highest score goes to two stressed syllables. Pairs with a single stressed syllable receive a lower score, and the lowest score is given to two unstressed syllables.

Suffix

Finally, we look at the consonant sounds that come after the vowel in a given syllable to determine if two syllables rhyme. If two syllables share a similar vowel sound and the same suffix phonemes, we immediately classify them as a rhyme. Here is the table of rhyme scores for the line "For gott en spot in the Car ibbe an."

The higher the score, the more likely the syllables rhyme. We've highlighted the matching scores, which indicate possible rhymes: between "spot" and "got," "en" and "an," "en," and "for" and "Car."

As we did with vowel sounds, we score syllable pairs based on how similar their suffixes sound. Identical suffixes receive the highest score; similar sounding suffixes, such as "m" and "n", would recieve a lower score. Our primary measure of suffix similarity is based on how frequently listeners mistake one consonant sound for another (PDF).

Algorithm overview

The first step in determining rhyme patterns in a verse of lyrics is to measure every syllable against every other syllable and assign them a rhyme score based on a product of: vowel similarity; stress and syllable similarity; and stress. After this process, we filter out what we consider bad rhymes: rhymes between very commonly occurring English words ("then" and "an," for instance), rhymes that occur very far apart without similar rhymes between them, rhymes that are simply the repetition of two words, occurring outside of any larger rhyme patterns, and low-scoring rhymes that don't appear to be in patterns with other rhymes.

Clustering and ordering

This produces a graph, with syllables represented as squares, colored into rhyme families. We sort the families for clean visual display by running a simulated annealing pass against their order, scoring against how indexically near to each other successive syllables' rhyme families are. (For computer sciency folks: this problem is similar, though not identical to, a traveling salesman problem). For instance, you would want to order the rhyme pattern "CABACABAC" as "ABCBABCBA", for maximally pleasurable display.

Rhyme pattern "CABACABAC" visualized

Rhyme pattern "ABCBABCBA" visualized

Bibliography

The main text we used to explore differing ideas of rhyme and rap compositional styles was Paul Edwards' " How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-hop MC." Another background text we read to contextualize different schools and evolutionary moments in rap was " The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed," by Shea Serrano, Arturo Torres, and Ice-T. The paper " Acoustic Characteristics of the Vowel Systems of Six Regional Varieties of American English, " by Cynthia G. Clopper, David B. Pisoni, and Kenneth De Jong, from the Sept. 7, 2005 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, was used to explore differing varieties of vowel similarity to account for differing dialects of rappers.

Ultimately, we went with a much simpler model of vowel similarity. Our main text used in the creation and tuning of our syllable suffix similarity score was " Consonant Identification in Consonant-vowel-consonant Syllables in Speech-spectrum Noise," by David L. Woods, E. William Yund, Timothy J. Herron, and Matthew A. I. Ua Cruadhlaoich, which was published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 127.3 (2010). We were partially inspired by the B-Rhymes Blog, and while we used a different model we incorporated their idea of a generic rhyme score. We also initially consulted " Algorithm That Counts Rap Rhymes and Scouts Mad Lines, " but decided that a different approach would be more useful for our purposes.

Finally, while we independently developed our approach to programatically detect rhymes, we are not the first to tackle this problem. Hussein Hirjee and Daniel G. Brown developed a different method of scoring rhymes in their paper " Using Automated Rhyme Detection to Characterize Rhyming Style in Rap Music. "

See the full project: We Wrote an Algorithm to Unravel the Rhymes of Hit Musical 'Hamilton' "

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How WSJ Used an Algorithm to Analyze 'Hamilton' the Musical

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"Hamilton" is the massively successful Broadway musical about American's founding father Alexander Hamilton. By combining hip-hop and musical theatre, its writer, creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda devised a juggernaut that found wide appeal among audiences. But what exactly makes his lyrical construction special, and how did Mr. Miranda weave four decades of hip-hop history with three centuries of the American story?

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Este artículo describe como Benajmin Franklin fue muy interesado en la fonética, la ortografía, y el alfabeto. Él creyó su propio alfabeto que podría ser usado por la población general en vez del alfabeto ingles. Como el alfabeto internacional de fonética, Franklin descartó letras que fueron confusos; por ejemplo, ya que en ingles con la letra “c” puedes hacer un sonido como la “c” en la palabra “Celebrate” o como se pronuncia la “c” en la palabra “Confuse,” Franklin descartó la letra “c” a favor de usar solo “k” o “s”.

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One of the founding father's more quixotic quests was to create a new alphabet. No Q included

smithsonian.com

Benjamin Franklin was many things. Politician, scientist, inventor, printer author, he was a visionary whose ideas helped shape America. But he also had some notions that, while founded on sound logic and pragmatism, seem quite bizarre in retrospect. For instance, there's his suggestion that the turkey was a more appropriate national symbol than the eagle, which he saw as "a bird of bad moral character." Franklin's vision for American didn't stop with independence and iconography. He also proposed a redesigned alphabet - a new language for a new nation.

Franklin developed his phonetic alphabet in 1768 but it wasn't published until 1789, when Noah Webster, intrigued by Franklin's proposal, included its description in his book Dissertations on the English Language. However, because, Webster lacked the type blocks to illustrate Franklin's changes, the alphabet wouldn't be seen until Franklin had new blocks cast to print the alphabet for his 1779 collection of writings, Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces. It was the ultimate test of Franklin's scholarship and polymathy, a phonetic alphabet designed to have a "more natural Order," than the existing system. His proposal, "A Reformed Mode of Spelling," opens with an analysis of spoken English in the form of a table prioritizing the alphabet by sound and vocal effort. Franklin gave preference to "Sounds formed by the Breath, with none or very little help of Tongue, Teeth, and Lips; and produced chiefly in the Windpipe."

Franklin's analysis resulted in removing six letters from the alphabet - C, J, Q, W, X, AND Y- that were, in his view, redundant or confusing. The "hard" and "soft" sounds of a C, for example, can easily be replaced by a K and S. Franklin also limited the remaining letters to one sound, "as every letter ought to be," including vowels. In the phonetic alphabet, "long" vowel pronunciations are achieved using double vowels. The changes weren't all reductive. Franklin's alphabet includes six letters of his own devise: a letter that makes a "soft O" sound as in "folly" or "ball"; one that replaces all "sh" sounds as in "ship" or "function"; an "ng" sound; two "th" substitutes; and a letter that replaces both "um" and "un" letter combinations. Franklin first used his new alphabet at length in a 1768 letter to Polly Stevenson, the conclusion of which provides an excellent, and mostly legible example, of his proposed revisions:

Sources:
Franklin was confident that his new alphabet would easier to learn and, once learned, would drastically reduce bad spelling. He believed any difficulty in implementing a new alphabet would ultimately be overcome by its logic and simplicity. However, biographer Walter Isaacson has written that the alphabet "took his passion for social improvement to radical extremes." But in the heady days after the Revolution, a national language seemed like a natural development for a new country. Franklin's proposal found little support, even with those to whom he was closest. He did, however, manage to convert Webster, the pioneer of spelling reform. Webster supported standardizing American spelling but, until meeting Franklin, had advocated against its simplification. After reading Franklin's "A Reformed Mode of Spelling," however, Webster was inspired to draft a more conservative proposal for reforming the alphabet, which didn't depend on creating new characters. The two men supported one another's pursuits but found little interest from others. Franklin eventually abandoned his plan, while Webster persisted, even publishing books using his new orthography. His efforts were met with resistance and ridiculed by critics as an unsightly corruption of language - critiques that were likely also applied to Franklin's abandoned scheme.

There can be no doubt that language has influence over a country and its populace. It's an integral part of one's national identity. Franklin just took this to the extreme. Perhaps he viewed the alphabet in the same way he saw the turkey, as a something "courageous" and "original" to America. The phonetic alphabet would be an American original too, and a reflection of the men and women living in the new country - pragmatic, efficient, egalitarian.

Benjamin Franklin, Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces (1779); Nicola Twiley and Geoff Manaugh, "Six New Letters for a Renovated Alphabet" (St. Bride Foundation, 2005); Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2007); Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2004); "Benjamin Franklin's Phonetic Alphabet," Omniglot; Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2007)

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About Jimmy Stamp

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smithsonian.com Benjamin Franklin was many things. Politician, scientist, inventor, printer author, he was a visionary whose ideas helped shape America. But he also had some notions that, while founded on sound logic and pragmatism, seem quite bizarre in retrospect.

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Capítulo 2: Los sonidos de la lengua: fonética y fonología

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Capítulo 2: Los sonidos de la lengua: fonética y fonología

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Emotional and Physical Pain Activate Similar Brain Regions

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Emotional and Physical Pain Activate Similar Brain Regions

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En capítulo uno, aprendemos sobre los áreas de cerebro de Broca y Wernicke, que nos ayudan a comprender la lengua y decir cosas lógicas. Ese artículo habla de cómo su cerebro procesa y interpreta lenguaje grosero en comparación de cómo el cerebro procesa dolor físico. El investigación mencionado concluye que cuando tenemos experiencias emocionales dolorosos, el área del cerebro que enciende es el mismo área que enciende cuando tenemos experiencias de dolor física. Este articulo me recuerdo de cómo cuando hablamos, el área del cerebro que enciende es lo de Broca, y cuando procesamos la lengua lógicamente, el área de Wernicke se alumbra. Pienso que es muy interesante como áreas diferentes de nuestros cerebros literalmente iluminar cuando hacemos cosas diferentes y que pueden ver la actividad con un "Positron Emission Tomography".

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When people feel emotional pain, the same areas of the brain get activated as when people feel physical pain: the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. In one study, these regions were activated when people experienced an experimental social rejection from peers. In another more real-life study, the same regions were activated when people who had recently broken up with romantic partners viewed pictures of the former partner.

So, if physical and emotional pain have similar neural signatures, why not take Tylenol (acetaminophen) for grief, loss, or despair? People who had experienced a recent social rejection were randomly assigned to take acetaminophen vs. a placebo daily for three weeks. The people in the acetaminophen condition reported fewer hurt feelings during that period. When their brains were scanned at the end of the treatment period, the acetaminophen takers had less activation in the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex.

This study was not done in order to promote acetaminophen and other analgesics as psychoactive drugs. Rather, the idea was to emphasize that over the course of evolution, our bodies decided to take the economy route and use a single neural system to detect and feel pain, regardless of whether it is emotional or physical. While it may be a good idea to take a pain reliever in the acute phase of feeling physical and emotional pain, no one is proposing this a long-term cure for dealing with hurt feelings and grief.

Pain, of course, is always both a physical and an emotional experience. If I stub my toe, in addition to the physical pain, I am likely to be also angry or disappointed with myself or with someone else who is convenient to blame (Why did you leave that box in the hallway where I couldn't see it until I hurt myself? Now look what you've done!!).

Speaking of blaming, I begin to feel annoyed when people who do these studies and also those that apply them clinically don't go far enough into the body: emotional pain doesn't just hurt psychologically; it hurts in MY body. These days, it seems, the discovery of a link between a brain region and a psychological experience gives the experience an aura of authenticity: now we know it's real. People sometimes say, upon reading or hearing that depression, anxiety, and many other psychological ailments have specific neural signatures, "It's not just in my head." Well, I agree, but the brain happens to be located in the head (maybe saying it's not just my imagination is more accurate?). Showing only brain activation for a particular experience - without acknowledging a corresponding activation in the peripheral nervous system and a corresponding felt sense in the body -- doesn't do much to convince me that the experience is somewhere else than in my head.

Here's the part that most psychologizing tends to leave out: the brain is massively interconnected with the rest of the body. There are direct neural connections via the brain stem and spinal cord. The circulatory and lymphatic systems also carry neurotransmitters ( hormones and immune cells) that find receptor sites in the brain which feedback and modulate the links between brain and body. In this way, every cell in the body - every cell -- is linked into the nervous system and as such, can be sensed and felt, whether or not we allow ourselves to be aware of this psychobiological fact (I feel better now, having said this in writing).

With a physical pain, there is an obvious link between the psychological experience of pain and an awareness of a physical location in the body. The pain seems to come from an elbow, or a toe, or a hip. Weirdly, we can feel the physical pain in that location even though most, but not all, of the processing is going on in the brain. The neural, blood, and immune pathways between brain and body are tagged with body location information, beginning in the spinal cord and with successively more specific tagging up through the brain stem and thalamus, each adding another layer of redundancy and complexity, until the experience becomes conscious and further identified as "mine" in the insula, parietal, and motor cortices. The marvel of the nervous system is that even though body sense awareness is largely a creation of cortical complexity, we feel in 3-D: the pain is "in" my knee, that object is "out there" in space, etc. No one actually knows exactly how acetaminophen increases the pain threshold: it may act specifically in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate, or throughout this whole body network.

So, with this kind of logic, we can come back to the neural similarities between emotional and physical pain. If the similarity is not just in the brain but in the body, it's perfectly reasonable to ask: Where does an emotional pain hurt? If there really is an economy of pain networks that includes both physical and emotional pain, and if physical pain has a body location, then this simple syllogism leads to the conclusion that emotional pain must have a physical location in the body.

In what way might emotions be embodied? All emotions have a motor component. Even if we try to hide our feelings, there will be micro-momentary muscular activation. The anterior cingulate is located right next to the premotor area, which begins the process of forming an emotional expression in the body. The premotor area connects to the motor cortex above it, and then back to the specific muscles of expression.

Emotional pain may be located in the body in those places where an expression was meant to happen but failed to materialize. If I felt like screaming at the person who left the object in the hall, the object that stubbed my toe, but I didn't actually scream, and in fact, I didn't take my anger out on the person, I might still have residual muscle tension in my neck, throat, and jaw (holding back my angry scream). That neglectful person, for me, is experienced as a pain in the neck or a pain in the butt (the suppressed urge to kick?) or that I'm fed up (a feeling in my chest and gut that I'm going to burst?). Deeper insults go deeper into the body. Rage and hatred are the ultimate gut feelings, down in the bowels (I'm so mad I could puke; You make me sick to my stomach).

The studies cited at the beginning of this post were about social rejection. Where is that felt in the body? A broken heart? Downhearted? Is love and its loss more than metaphorically connected to the heart and chest? Yes, says research from behavioral medicine and health psychology. The sense of safety that comes from being in the company of loved ones is partly created by vagal-parasympathetic activation which promotes an easy and relaxed integration of breathing and heart rate, both of which are located in the chest.

Feelings of insecurity get the heart and the breath out of synch and activate the sympathetic nervous system as if we were dealing with a threat (elevated heart rate and blood pressure), and can create a sense of unease in the chest, and even pain. People who have been hurt by others often have retracted chests and downcast postures, which are muscular ways of protecting the heart and closing off the self from fully engaging with others for fear of being hurt again. And people in insecure relationships are more likely to have cardiovascular (and other health) problems than those who are more secure.

With physical pain, we'd be in big trouble if we could not locate it in our body via the direct inner experience of feeling it. How would we (our brain) know how to deal with the pain (how to move, how to sit, or how to lie down without further injury) in the absence of a location and a direct body sense? Sometimes pain relievers make the important work of the body -- to find and heal the injury -- more bearable but we need to allow body sense to play a role in feeling into what our body needs.

For emotional pain, an analgesic will help us temporarily but it won't take away the unresolved feelings that never got seen or expressed or really felt. In order to get over grief, resolve anger, and even embrace happiness, we have to really feel those things in the body. We are quick to access the body locations of pleasurable feelings (food, drink, sex, warmth, touch) so why not also let ourselves go to the places of emotional pain? Yes, it hurts for a while, but then - miraculously - there can be relief and the emergence of a new perspective on ourselves and others.

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Emotional and Physical Pain Activate Similar Brain Regions

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When people feel emotional pain, the same areas of the brain get activated as when people feel physical pain: the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. In one study, these regions were activated when people experienced an experimental social rejection from peers.

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What communicating only in emoji taught me about language in the digital age

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What communicating only in emoji taught me about language in the digital age

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Algo que me pareció muy interesante de capítulo uno fueron las lenguas pidgin, que son lenguas que personas usan para comunicar en situaciones de intercambio o comercia cuando no hablan el mismo lenguaje . En ese columna, el autor examina el uso de “emojis” de tele como lengua pidgin. Para un día, solo comunicó con “emojis” en vez de mensajes de texto. Un profesor de lingüística con quien el autor habló confirmó que los “emojis” son un tipo de lengua pidgin; muchas veces los lenguas pidgin constan solo de verbos y sustantivos, y los “emojis” son imágenes de varios acciones y sustantivos, como un hombre corriendo o un plato de pasta.

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To inform my mother that I had spaghetti for dinner last night, I texted her:

"You had noodles and a croissant :-)?" was her reply.

My experiment of communicating only in emojis for 24 hours seemed to be getting off to bit of a rocky start.

Created in the late 1990s by a Japanese communications company, emojis have since exploded onto our digital-cultural landscape. The world's approximately two billion smartphone users send out six billion of the symbols each day, according to oft-cited data from digital communications startup Swyft Media. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries even named the "face with tears of joy" icon its Word of the Year.

The venerable dictionary's decision split the world into two factions: those who bemoaned the impending death of language, and those who embraced the emoji as a reflection of our evolving digital universe.

"We're in a new phase of language development," said Susan Herring, professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University. "More and more graphical representations, such as emojis, gifs, stickers, and memes are being incorporated into language used online."

Texting without words turns out to be a lot like eating soup without a spoon: It's possible, but not pleasant. To immerse myself into this brave new pictorial world, I decided to try communicating solely in symbols for a whole day. I'm not the first person to try this. In 2014, one intrepid couple talked purely in emoji for a month. But I felt like spending a day in emoji-only mode might provide me with some insight into the potential-and limitations-of visual communication. (As an aside, since emojis are a purely visual medium, I limited the experiment to online interactions only, i.e. Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage, and emails. Shoving a cab driver an iPhone Note denoting "car, arrow, house with tree" didn't seem like a bright idea.)

By the end of the day, I'd learned a lot-and tested the strength of a few friendships in the process. Texting without words turns out to be a lot like eating soup without a spoon: It's possible, but not pleasant.

The thing I perhaps missed most was grammar. As it turns out, the majority of emojis are, frustratingly, "content signifiers." The "pig snout," the "woman in red," the "setting sun:" these represent nouns and verbs, but I lacked a basic structure to tie them all together.

Prepositions are important (in English, anyway). So are articles, pronouns, tense markers and signifiers of time. Without them, I was helpless.

To inform my parents I was heading to class, I typed: 🚃🚃🏫 📚🙋🔜 🕒

"Maybe it's best we don't take part in this experiment," my mother suggested gently.

Emojis, according to linguistics professor Herring, represent a sort of pictorial pidgin language-the primitive tongue that emerges out of necessity between two populations with no common language. Emojis represent a sort of pictorial pidgin language-the primitive tongue that emerges out of necessity. Designed to be functional without being fancy, many pidgin languages were created as way for Europeans and non-Europeans to communicate, i.e. between slaves and slave traders in the 18th century, or between Chinese indentured laborers, native Malays and the British in colonial Singapore.

"Pidgin basically comprises nouns and verbs strung together," Herring said. "That's what happens when you use emoji." The rudimentary language typically lacks plural markers and functions exclusively in the present tense. Without conceptual words like "very," ideas are intensified by repetition: "extremely quick" becomes "quickquick."

To convey I was meeting with friends, for example, I tapped on a bunch of little people: ➕👪

To emphasize how hard I was working on this story from dawn till dusk, I added multiples of the "arrow to smartphone" character: ✏️ 📲 📲 📲 ➡️ 🌄

But just like in sonnet writing, these restrictions were also portals into dimensions of creativity. I was forced to parse semantics-the relation of words to their meaning-in order to express abstractions.

"Language is usually expressed serially, one word after the other," explained Herring. "But emojis don't map the same way onto a language." So instead of using emojis as discrete symbols, I grouped several together to signify concepts.

Here's "fracking:" 💦

And "the Socratic method:"
1️⃣2️⃣ ❓ ❓ 🙇 ❓ 🙇 😓 😓 😓
3️⃣ ❓❓❓🙇

4️⃣ 🙇 💡 💡 💡 ➡️

Visual metaphors proved particularly handy. The phallic nature of the eggplant emoji ended up in more than one raunchy conversation. So did the peach's smooth, rounded curves. (Incidentally, Americans lead the world in use of the eggplant icon, according to Swyft Media.)

And after I got over the disconcerting lack of grammar involved, I started to have fun with the medium.

By the end of the day, I'd learned a lot-and tested the strength of a few friendships in the process. I think it's ultimately this potential for humor and creativity that has embedded the emoji so deeply into popular culture. They now pop up in spheres as diverse as marketing and politics, art and literature. Finland is branding itself with them. Australia's foreign affairs minister took part in the world's first all-emoji political interview. PornHub allows its viewers to order porn with emojis. There's now an emoji-only Bible.

Matthew Haughey, an editor at the messaging app Slack, became something of an internet celebrity last year after publishing an emoji summary of "The Big Lebowski" online.

Haughey, like me, ran into his share of translation speed bumps. Without an icon for a rug (which is afforded outsized significance in the movie's plot), he had to invoke the parchment symbol. In fact, he told me that his summary would have been incomprehensible if not for accompanying text words.
Follow Samantha on Twitter at @samwrites1. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
"Emojis are terrible as a language," he concluded.

Inevitably, I ran into misunderstandings myself.

"Look right?" asked my friend, confused.

Referring a study I'd recently read, I tapped out "equine therapy for military veterans with PTSD" as:

"Police who win awards for shootings are more likely to suffer trauma while on horses," was the attempted translation from a very patient friend..

Nope.

Emojis are great-but they shouldn't be forced to carry rhetorical weight all by themselves. And here we come to the second big problem (after syntax) with emoji-speak: the subjectivity of perception.

"Emojis are not universal," explains Neil Cohn, a linguist who specializes in visual language research. Different people ascribe different meanings to images. This gulf, it should be noted, widens across cultures.

For example, over the course of his research, Cohn has found that Asians tend to use to say "please" or "thank you," while Western cultures generally take the same icon to mean "prayer" or "praying."

The symbols themselves skew Japanese. There's onigiri and narutomaki-two well-known Japanese food items-but no salad or steak. Many of the smileys have origins in manga morphology, added Cohn, pointing to the "screaming face," the "face with sweat drop," the "flushed face."

By the end of the day, I was definitely all three of those faces. Living in my digital Babel was exhausting. But at the very least, given the diversity of emoji facial expressions available, I could articulate with remarkable precision how exhausted I felt.

Scrolling through hundreds of symbols to search for the "woman in red" character is a pain in the peach emoji. "When people interact, 60-70% of meaning is derived from non-verbal cues-gestures and facial expressions," said Vyvyan Evans, a professor of linguistics at Bangor University. (This is also why, by the way, that ending correspondence without a smiley can seem curt.)

In other words, emojis are great-but they shouldn't be forced to carry rhetorical weight all by themselves. Indeed, when attempting to simulate real speech, digital communication is greatly enhanced by emojis. But my experiment also proved that as descriptive as emojis might be, they're simply not going to replace words anytime soon.

"Text is never going away," said Herring, hammering the final nail in the emoji coffin, especially since users cannot guide the process of its evolution. In English, words wax and wane organically, reflecting the culture and fashion of the times. But adding new emojis to the canon involves a turbid petition process overseen by the Unicode Consortium, the organization that oversees software internationalization standards. Shakespeare and e.e. Cummings can rest easy.

Ultimately, emoji are themselves likely a fad. In the same way the "face with tears of joy" emoji has replaced "lol" in internet-speak, stickers-the custom images in instant messaging apps like Facebook and Line-are starting to surpass emoji-use in Japan. Despite emojis' current ubiquity, there's a good chance they will one day be viewed with as much nostalgia as Coogi sweaters or cassette tapes.

And I think I'm fine with that. Scrolling through hundreds of symbols to search for the "woman in red" character is a pain in the peach emoji, if you know what I mean.

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What communicating only in emoji taught me about language in the digital age

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To inform my mother that I had spaghetti for dinner last night, I texted her: 🍴🌙🍝 "You had noodles and a croissant :-)?" was her reply. My experiment of communicating only in emojis for 24 hours seemed to be getting off to bit of a rocky start.

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Este video discute la lengua de niños pequeños, alrededor de edades uno a dos. El video se relate mucho a la sección de capítulo uno que explica la hipótesis del periodo crítico, que propone que hay un periodo durante la infancia que es muy importante para aprender reglas, vocabulario, y sonidos de la lengua. En el video, el hombre habla sobre nuevas investigaciones que encontraron que los niños de edad alrededor de uno o dos tienen comprensión avanzado de reglas gramático y usan los cuando hablan. Para estos chicos, chirridos y soplos de aire son como sus propios palabras. También pueden poner los sonidos en lugares correctas de la estructura de la oración.

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Baby talk seems like it's gibberish, but it's actually far more advanced than we thought. Trace looks at what all that noise might really mean. Read More: From the Mouths of Babes: Toddlers' Speech Is Far More Advanced Than Previously Thought http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130614082516.htm "The sound of small children chattering away as they learn to talk has always been considered cute -- but not particularly sophisticated."

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Capítulo 1: La lingüistica como ciencia cognitiva

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Capítulo 1: La lingüistica como ciencia cognitiva

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Column: He, she, they? Why it’s time to leave this grammar rule behind

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Column: He, she, they? Why it’s time to leave this grammar rule behind

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En capítulo uno, una de las temas nos preguntamos si hay una sola “manera correcta” de hablar una lengua y una sola forma de gramática correcta. En este columna, el autor, un maestro de Ingles, discute las reglas de usar los pronombres “el, ella, y ellos” y si es aceptable usar “ellos” para pronombre singular. Tradicionalmente, las lingüistas de Ingles que siguen al método prescriptiva dicen que es necesario usar un pronombre singular tradicional: el o ella. Una lingüista moderna que sigue reglas descriptivas probablemente dice que es aceptable usar el pronombre “ellos” para pronombre singular.

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Editor's Note: Ask a teacher what he or she did this summer and he or she (or should I say they) will tell you that a good deal of time is spent prepping for the next school year. Educators will also tell you that they spent the summer analyzing their prior year's performance, what went well and what didn't.
Steve Gardiner, who's been teaching high school English in Montana for the past 38 years, says when it comes to grading English essays he's ready to make a change that will lessen the workload on his red pen - and yes, it involves grammar.
As a high school English teacher, I have been crossing out the singular use of the word 'they' for many years. I have burned up hundreds of red pens, and hours of time, correcting this grammatical usage based on a traditional gender binary of he and she. It's time to move on.

Although there is historical precedent, writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer and many others who used a singular "they," most language experts throughout the 20th century saw this usage as an error. Language evolves over time and often social changes bring about modifications in word use. The issue of the missing singular gender-neutral pronoun is one of those situations.

That's why I cheered when the American Dialect Society met in Washington, D.C., recently and voted to make the word 'they' acceptable and correct when used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. The change comes during a time of unprecedented discussion about gender identity issues.

For example, "Every student should do the best they can."

That statement, while true, is incorrect, at least in sense of recent grammatical usage. It should bother us when we hear it, but it doesn't. That's because it has become so commonplace that related sentences featuring the daily usage, even for media commentators and many other educated speakers.

As a high school English teacher, I have been crossing out the singular use of the word "they" for many years.

In the example above, the correct version would read, "Every student should do the best he can," or "Every student should do the best she can." The subject student is singular and the pronoun they is plural, so we need to use either he or she to achieve noun-pronoun agreement.

Three or four decades ago, it wasn't much of a problem. We used the pronoun 'he' because the masculine form was dominant. Then we lived the years of seeking political correctness and gender equity, and the 'he' became more often 'he or she' or 'he/she' until we realized that reading paragraph after paragraph of he/slash/she quickly became tedious.
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If we wanted to remain gender-neutral, we needed to avoid 'he' or 'she' and the option most readily available to us was 'they,' which a is a gender-neutral pronoun, but plural. Yes, it would be possible to change the subject to plural and create the sentence, "All students should do the best they can," and that would be correct, but it does not always say exactly what we are wanting to express.

The problem, then, has been that the English language is missing a gender-neutral, singular pronoun.

OK, we do have 'it,' which is a gender-neutral, singular pronoun. But 'it' is generally not considered correct for use in describing a human being. We reserve 'it' for things or animals, so 'it' does not quite fill the opening, either. Most of us would not care to say, "Every student should do the best it can." I doubt that sentence sounds correct to very many people.

We, as a society, made progress on the gender equity issue, we created a consciousness, an awareness, but we never assigned a word to let us take care of the problem grammatically.

To create a singular gender-neutral pronoun, we could create a new word. Several have been suggested over the years, but none have made it into mainstream language usage.

Another option is to say that since most people don't hear the singular-plural agreement problem now, perhaps the application of the usage rule has changed and the word 'they' is now both singular and plural, in which case the original sentence earlier in this article is now correct.

Having fought this battle with students for more than three decades, I am ready to admit defeat. Every student is going to write what they want. Every broadcaster is going to say what they want. There, I even wrote it myself, and most readers probably did not notice.

The use of the singular 'they' simply does not seem like a mistake anymore. Now that the American Dialect Society has voted that it is not an error, I can save red ink and time, if only I can refrain myself from marking it. I am willing to try.

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Column: He, she, they? Why it's time to leave this grammar rule behind

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Editor's Note: Ask a teacher what he or she did this summer and he or she (or should I say they) will tell you that a good deal of time is spent prepping for the next school year. Educators will also tell you that they spent the summer analyzing their prior year's performance, what went well and what didn't.