Now for some English …

I hope you enjoyed a laugh or two. If you want to watch some more, there are plenty on Youtube.

Si pensabas que era fácil aprender inglés, toma nota de las siguientes palabras que, dependiendo del contexto, pueden tener significados que se contradicen entre si.

1. Bill – (a) billete, dinero en efectivo que tienes (b) una factura/nota, dinero que debes.

2. Against – (a) hacia, cerca de “against the wall”, “contra la pared” (b) que se opone “against the wind”, “contra el viento”.

3. Discursive – (a) pasando de tema en tema, sin orden (b) procediendo con mucha coherencia de un tema al que sigue.

4. Cleave – (a) separar “meat cleaver”, “cuchillo para partir carne” (b) mantenerse juntos, no separarse “to cleave to one another”, “no separarse”.

5. Before – (a) en el pasado “I did it before coming here”, “lo hice antes de venir aquí” (b) en el futuro “The future is before us”, “el futuro está ante nosotros”.

6. Blunt – (a) amellado, que no tiene filo (b) hablando de palabras, son palabras agudas que van directo al grano.

7. Either – (a) uno o el otro, “you can choose either of the options”, “puedes escojer uno de las dos opciones”. (b) ambos, los dos, “there are cars parked on either side of the street”, “hay coches estacionados en ambos lados de la calle”.

8. Fast – (a) rápido, algo que se mueve rápido (b) fijado, amarrado firmemente, que no se va a mover.

9. Buckle – (a) asegurar “to buckle your seatbelt”, “abrochar el cinturón de seguridad” (b) vencerse, caerse, desplomarse “the bridge buckled”, “el puente se desplomó”.

10. Oversight – (a) cuando le das atención a un asunto: supervisión, vigilancia (b) cuando no le das atención a un asunto: descuido, equivocación, inadvertencia

¿No te encanta este idioma donde your house can burn down while it’s burning up, your alarm clock comes on when it goes off, and when you fill out a form, you’re actually filling it in?

¿Conoces más palabras contradictorias en inglés o español?

Photo credit: Krawiec. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here are Merriam Webster’s top 10 words for 2007 (some new, some old):

1. w00t – expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”

2. facebook – to use facebook.com.

3. conundrum – a difficult problem, question or riddle that has a conjectural answer, or the answer involves a pun.

4. quixotic – foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals.

5. blamestorm – a meeting or gathering whose purpose is to pass or assign blame to someone.

6. sardoodledom – mechanically contrived plot structure and stereotyped or unrealistic characterization in drama.

7. apathetic – having or showing little or no interest, concern, emotion or feeling.

8. Pecksniffian – unctuously hypocritical.

9. hypocrite – acting in a contradictory fashion to your stated beliefs and feelings.

10. charlatan – someone who makes showy pretenses to knowledge or ability.

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a sentence which contains every letter of the English alphabet and is useful for testing printing equipment or fonts. These sentences are called pangrams. A couple of common pangrams in Spanish are: “El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi. La cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja.”, and “El pingüino Wenceslao hizo kilómetros bajo exhaustiva lluvia y frío, añoraba a su querido cachorro.”

The phrase “The 3 R’s”– which stands for “Reading, Writing and Arithmetic”– was created by Sir William Curtis, who was illiterate.

The most commonly sung song in the world– “Happy birthday to you”– is copyrighted until 2010.

Two of the greatest writers who ever lived, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes– of Don Quixote fame–, both died on April 23, 1616.

There are supposedly no words in English that rhyme with “month”, “orange”, “silver”, and “purple”. If you can think of any please let me know.

The word “Bookkeeper” is the only English word that has three consecutive double letters.

The expression “mad as a hatter” comes from a 19th century disorder called “hatter’s shakes” which afflicted hat makers and caused them to tremble, become easily excitable, act irrationally and mumble. The cause? The hatters were being poisoned by mercury. A mercury solution was used to treat the felt for making headgear, which in turn attacked the central nervous system.

España was called Hispania by the Romans, which was borrowed from the Phoenician’s term for the Iberian Peninsula– “The Land of Rabbits”.

Ever wonder about the origin of the Ñ? Originally it was used to save space when writing words that had a double N. So instead of writing “NN” the second N was written above the first one, which eventually evolved into a squiggle instead the the complete N. An example of this is the Latin anno, which is now written año in Spanish.

Corn has been cultivated in Mexico since the year 7000 B.C., more than 4,500 years before the Chinese had begun to develop a national cuisine. Many of the most popular Mexican dishes date from long before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1521, making Mexico the country with the longest tradition of a national cuisine.

The Canary Islands are not named after the little yellow bird as you would assume. They were named after dogs via the Latin root “can”. Think “can” in Spanish, or “canine” in English.

I’ve made a reasonable effort to ensure that the above-mentioned trivia is all accurate, but don’t use it in your doctoral dissertation without doing some more research.

• boar (wild pig)
• Boer (a South African of Dutch descent)
• boor (tasteless buffoon)
• bore (not interesting)

See Alan Cooper’s list of Homophones for more inspiration.

And that’s the number #1 reason why English is hard to learn.

Along with the recording of each speaker, there is a IPA transcription of their pronunciation as well as demographic information about the speaker.

To me it’s interesting to hear how English pronunciation varies from place to place, and depending on native language. For example, here’s some native Spanish speakers reading the sample text, or use the map to see how people from different areas speak.

From the about page:

Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person’s linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded.1 The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers.

So go check out this site, and if you’re feeling brave, you can even record and upload your own speech sample.

So in this prospect of learning a second language, we need to take care not to neglect our native language. Here’s four things we can do to better our mastery of our native language. (Note: English is my native language, so this article is written from that perspective, but it can apply to whatever language is your native language.)

Pay attention to spelling

Others certainly pay attention to our spelling. Poor spelling has a negative effect on other people’s perception of us. How can I improve my English spelling? I hear you asking. What I do is first pay attention to the spelling. Look at it long and hard. How can you expect yourself to “remember” the spelling if you never really payed attention to it in the first place. My other technique is to say the English word– either outloud or to myself– as if it were pronounced phonetically. To remember the spelling of Wednesday, I say to myself wed-nez-day instead of wenzday, the normal North American pronunciation.

Study English grammar

You may or may not have a liking for grammar, but I guarantee you if you can study up on English grammar, it’ll help you learn Spanish and understand the Spanish grammar you’re learning. Long ago when I began my Spanish studies, I bought English Grammar for Students of Spanish and for weeks I carried that little green book with me everywhere (the latest edition is red, oh well), and read it whenever I got a chance. It helped me immensely– I was actually able to understand the professor’s lectures about the finer points in Spanish grammar, because I understood enough about English grammar to have something to compare it too.

Study Greek and Latin roots

Being the language aficcionado that you are, you undoubtedly know that English has many words derived from Latin and Greek. A thourough study of these prefixes, suffixes and roots will not only better your command and comprehension of English, it will make learning many Spanish words as well. For example, if you come across the Spanish words lápida (gravestone/headstone) or lapidación (stoning to death), and you already knew the English words lapidation, lapidary or lapillus, it will make it easier for you to draw the connection and remember the Spanish words. Those three English words I mention are by no means common, but if you know that the root “lap” or “lapi” has something to do with stone/rock, that’s a headstart right there.

Ok, I won’t leave you hanging:
Lapidation: n. the act of stoning, sometimes to the point of death.
Lapidary: (1) n. a cutter, polisher, or engraver of precious stones usually other than diamonds; (2) n. the art of cutting gems; (3) adj. having the elegance and precision associated with inscriptions on monumental stone; (4) adj. of or relating to precious stones or the art of cutting them.
Lapillus: n. a small stony or glassy fragment of lava.

Learn to express yourself

This is something I’m still working on. And I’m not talking about using flowery, overdone language, just for the sake of trying to appear erudite. I’m talking about being more precise, more expressive with the language. There is a big difference in the mental image you create when reading these two fragments:

“she walked across the old sidewalk which crumbled under her feet”
“she picked her way across the sidewalk as the ancient concrete crumbled under her feet”

Expressing ourselves is something that we need to work at, something we need to put time into. As we learn to be more precise and expressive in our native language, that will spill over to your foreign language studies.

So put in your two hours a day with Spanish, but look up English words you come across and don’t know, and keep expanding your native language vocabulary, just as you expand your target language vocabulary. Pay attention to your English spelling and grammar, and learn word roots.

You’ll be happy you did.

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One thing she does, that I find fascinating, is how she uses two words– one in English and one in Spanish– to describe the same thing. If we’re about to leave the house, and her mother says vámonos, the baby’s reply is ámono, but then if I reply yeah, let’s go, she responds again, in kind, ss go or go go go. The mouths of babes are interesting places. Indeed that was going to be the title of this post and, although intriguing, I don’t know if it conveys the same meaning as the current title.

Here’s a small sampling of some of the words she uses in both languages. I need a refresher course in transcribing in IPA, so I can write out exactly how she pronounces things.

awa (agua) – wawa (water)
pato (zapato) – choo (shoe)
bujo (jugo) – dju (juice)
djio (adiós) – bye (bye)
ámono (vámonos) – ss go (let’s go)

It appears that right now she’s using the Spanish and English terms as synonyms. I don’t think she makes the distinction that they belong to two different languages at the moment. If I recall correctly, linguistic research supports the idea that a baby or child can learn multiple languages at the same time, and a bit down the road the child figures out that the words and grammatical structures belong to two or more separate languages, and separates them out in his or her mind.

I am waiting anxiously to see evidence supporting or refuting the idea that at the beginning of language acquisition there is just “one” language in the mind of the acquirer, which is later separated into the constituent languages.

Etymologically speaking is a long list of English words that have interesting or peculiar etymologies. It’s a entertaining read that can last over a few sittings, since the page is fairly long. There are some loanwords from Spanish, along with the etymological story behind them.

Here’s a couple of fruity snippets I found interesting.

Apple [The] Spanish term [manzana] comes from the Iberian pronunciation of matiana, a Gallo-Roman translation of the Latin word matianum, which was a scented, golden apple first raised by and named after Matius, a friend of Caesar’s who was also a cookbook author [...].

Apricot [The Spanish albaricoque] from the Arabic al barqouq or al birquq, for the Iberian Peninsula owed much to the Arab gardeners of Southern Spain (Andalusia). The Arabic word means “early-ripe,” and itself derives from the Latin praecox or praecoquum malum (in Greek, praecoxon), meaning “early-ripener” [...].

Another fruit also turns up, although I can’t vouch for the truthfullness of this claim, I don’t have any reason to doubt it either.

Avocado From “awa guatl,” a South American Indigenous word for testicle. The Spanish took this term and used to[sic] to refer to what we now call the avocado.

And a couple of citations that don’t have anything to do with fruit…

Cab (as in, Taxicab) Old Italian term for goat (cabra in Spanish). The first carriages “for public hire” bounced so much that they reminded people of goats romping on a hillside.

Casarse (to marry) From “casa,” meaning “house”; thus similar to the English expression, “to shack up.”

I could keep on copying and pasting all day long, so why don’t you go read the whole thing for yourself? Look down the list for cerveza, charlatan, chocolate, conejo, faro, guapo, hablar, lemon, ojalá, palaver, pineapple, potato, saffron, sherry, tomato, and usted- all of which have connections to Spanish.