Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 January 5

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January 5

Good Korean Language Textbook/Website

I know a very small amount of korean and am interested in learning more. Are there any people here who know of a good method to learn/any good books or websites? NativeForeigner ^Talk/_Contribs 01:31, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

How much Korean do you know right now? There are many different textbooks available at the beginning level, though I would recommend choosing one from a University series that you could continue if you wanted to move up to more advanced Korean later. Probably one of the best series (and easiest to get) is the University of Hawaii's "Integrated Korean" set. There are at least a dozen books in it covering all levels that do a really good job of making things clear and using pretty modern Korean. Seoul National University has a very good series of books for colloquial Korean, and Yonsei Uni has a great one for grammar/more literary Korean, though I don't know how easy these would be to obtain at Amazon or other American book sites.

Books not to get: Anything from a publisher that makes guides to many different languages, like "Teach yourself Korean", "Korean for Dummies", "Teach me Korean" (unfortunately many of the books you'd find if you went to a physical Barnes & Nobles store). Korean is unique enough that you are best off with textbooks that were designed specifically for Korean and not as an offshoot of a more generic language learning curriculum. Oh, also, don't touch the "Korean in Plain English" books.

Some websites for learning online: http://korean.sogang.ac.kr/ (Beginning to Intermediate level), http://www.language.berkeley.edu/Korean/10/index.htm (Intermediate level). I've lost my bookmarks to some of the beginning-level sites, but I'll see if I can find some more.

Hope this helps~

--24.196.81.86 (talk) 02:48, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, mostly just words/conversation stuff. Time to get some verbs etc. NativeForeigner ^Talk/_Contribs 01:24, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Email Etiquette - replying to an individual AND a group

For formal business emails in which only one person is to be in the TO- field and multiple people are to be in the CC- field, how should one address the message?

Dear John, (ignoring the other secondary recipients)

Dear John and All, (awkward, but acknowledges their presence)

Something else entirely? 218.25.32.210 (talk) 06:16, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

The first one, since it's only John you're actually writing to. The others are included for information only. Sometimes it's necessary to refer to one of those people in the text of the email, in which case I put "...Jane (copied in this email for information)" just to acknowledge their presence. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 06:23, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I have rarely put a salutation in an email. --ColinFine (talk) 08:36, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Then I would say you're in the minority. If it's a formal work-related email then you definitely need some form of salutation, although saying "John" works just as well as "Dear John". --Richardrj ^{talk email} 09:06, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Pet peeve here: if you do decide to reply to all the people in the circulation, please don't just put "All," as the salutation. I find this very rude. Is that just me? --TammyMoet (talk) 09:26, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

No, I agree – that's bad. "Dear all" is fine, though (I would drop the capital A). --Richardrj ^{talk email} 09:37, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree too - "All" on its own as a salutation annoys me, as does "Best" as a sign-off. If the email also includes the phrase "going forward" at least once then my cup runneth over, but not in a good way. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 15:00, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Come on, Andrew, be proactive! Think outside the box and embrace the paradigm shift! -- 128.104.49.12 (talk) 16:47, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Linguistic flags

I'm searching for some linguistic/ethnic flags. The ones I'm trying to find are: Ancient Greek, Cimbrian, Gothic, Istroromanian, Low German, Megleno-Romanian, Norse, Yiddish. I know that it may sound bizarre, but many other minority languages have their own flag, for example:

• Ladin => [1]
• Livonian => [2]
• Rumantsch => [3]
• Ruthenian => [4]
• Sami => [5]
• Sorbian => [6]
• Walser German => [7]

--151.51.19.249 (talk) 13:37, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Those groups are self-conscious linguistic minorities within a modern nation-state; the ancient Greeks weren't (and their era predates the existence of national flags in the modern sense). AnonMoos (talk) 13:48, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

In case it wasn't obvious, AnonMoos's prescription for the Ancient Greeks -- they existed before national-type consciousnesses (see Nationalism) and the concept of national-type flags (Timeline of national flags may be of some interest) -- applies equally to all the other groups you list except for Yiddish, which originated in the 10th-century Germanic-Jewish Ashkenazi culture and is still a living language, though in decline. It seems not completely unlikely that at some time in the last few centuries a Yiddish/Ashkenazi flag has been conceived, but if so it will never have been widely recognised or used. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 14:43, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

You can ask one or more of the members at Wikipedia:WikiProject Heraldry and vexillology. -- Wavelength (talk) 15:45, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I strongly doubt whether they could come up with any substantial concrete information there beyond what has already been said here. The whole concept of "flags of languages" is somewhat problematic in any case -- languages do not generally divide neatly along national boundaries, and many of the flags linked by the original questioner above are flags of ethnic identities as much as (or more than) they are strictly flags of languages as such. If you look at commons:Category:Flags of languages and its subcategories, the only accepted flags which are strictly linguistic in nature there are the emblems of artificial languages (Esperanto, Ido, Novial, Lojban, "High Icelandic"). The other images in the category are ad-hoc combinations of different national or quasi-national flags, ad-hoc animated GIFs which flash sequences of flags, flags of ethnic or regional identities -- or are without wide usage and official status. If people can't even agree on a standardized icon to click on to access the English-language version of a website, then it's not necessarily too realistic to expect there to be an established flag of the ancient Greek language (though I guess you could cheat and use the wreath emblem of some versions of Hellenic neopaganism)... AnonMoos (talk) 22:38, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

For some languages, I've seen other sites use the modern flag of the area where the language was spoken or the primary modern descendent of the ethnic group. It's not always possible, though. For Yiddish, you might be able to use the Israeli flag, but it's not correct, and some might take offence. 130.56.65.24 (talk) 03:30, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Some might consider that to be slightly perverse, since Yiddish is distinctly a minority language in Israel today, and some prominent Yishuv leaders of the 1920's and 1930's were actively anti-Yiddish... AnonMoos (talk) 04:17, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Chump

What is the etymology of "chump"?174.3.123.13 (talk) 17:08, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=chump&searchmode=none rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:12, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I went to that link, and am not convinced. In usage, it appears to be similar to churl. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 06:52, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Failure cognate

Failure is to fail as ______ is to ail (as in a dental implant that's not doing so well, but is not at the stage of irreversible failure). We can speak of "implant failure," but can we say "implant ailure"? DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:21, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

They are not comparable. Fail is a verb that takes a complement (either a noun phrase, as in "I failed the test", or an embedded clause, as in "I failed to get the scholarship"). Ail also can take a complement ("what ails you?"), but in this case the verb and its complement are in a different relationship than they are in fail. As far as I know, there is no noun that means "the act of 'ailing' something"; the only noun derived from ail is ailment, which is different. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:40, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

As mentioned, "ailure" isn't a word ("ailment" is the nearest noun). Also, the verb "ail" is generally applied to living things, rather than dental fittings (in contrast, fail in the sense of "to fall apart"/"disintegrate"/"cease to be of use" normally applies to inanimate objects and would not be used of human beings). If a living thing ails it probably has an ailment (or illness). However, "ail" sounds old-fashioned and would not be used by many English speakers, and "ailment" also seems a little old-fashioned. "damage", "impairment", "wear and tear", or "malfunction" probably have the sense you are looking for.

If you have a specific sentence you want people to comment upon or suggest a word, post it here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.172.19.20 (talk) 17:53, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Anonymous famous writers like Salinger and Pynchon

If they really wanted to be anonymous, why didn't they use a pseudonym? --Quest09 (talk) 17:55, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

This is not really a language question. Try asking at the Humanities reference desk. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:59, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

OK. Question moved to the Humanities RD.--Quest09 (talk) 18:03, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

The silent majority

Is there a single word or two that encapsulate the point (which comes up surprisingly often) that the silent majority are often overshadowed by the vocal minority (9 words)? Feel free to fire words at me :) - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 19:25, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

The squeaky wheel gets the oil. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:45, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

(ec)Demagogy comes to mind, but that's more to do with a vocal _individual_. "Squeaky wheel", similarly - and that's just an abbreviated proverb. There's a Chinese proverb "Three men make a tiger" - but that's four words in both languages. Tevildo (talk) 19:46, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure the tiger proverb applies in full, but demagogy is pretty close, and at least useful in such debates. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 21:00, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I just checked every word in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that ends with "ocracy" and couldn't find one that means "rule by the vocal majority". (But I did find some other bizarre words, like strumpetocracy - government by strumpets.) Mitch Ames (talk) 09:29, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

The rate of Language change

Has there been any research on the respective rates that different languages change? I'm not, of course, referring to how fast the writing system or a dead language may change -- these often don't change at all, and don't reflect the natural course of language change. But are there any cases of two different natural languages, maybe spoken ones, that change at different rates? I've only heard of this once, on some Internet website, that Japanese has changed at a slower rate than Western languages like English, for Japanese children can still understand old, thousand-year-old Japanese literature while modern English speakers can't understand thousand-year-old English. But I'm hesitant to believe this until I hear more. For all I know, Japanese children are taught old Japanese from infancy... is it concievable that the languages of societies which are more traditional and elder-based change slower than those of Western, independence-based societies? Or maybe it has to do with the amount of borrowing between different languages. Jonathan ^talk 22:23, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Have a look at glottochronology; but its basic assumptions - which are really what you are asking about - are somewhat controversial. It's often assumed that Icelandic has changed relatively little over the last thousand years because Iceland was so isolated, but I'm not sure if this idea has been tested. --ColinFine (talk) 22:28, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Really? I've never heard that claim before, but I'm not surprised--it does sound rather ridiculous. A lot of people (first one that pops into my mind is John McWhorter) that languages change just as much, if not more, when isolated and left to themselves. Claiming that "language X changed little because it's isolated" tacitly assumes that the only source of language change is borrowings and language contact, which is certainly not true. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:52, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

It's important not to be misled by highly conservative orthographies. If Japanese children can understand 1000-year-old texts, it's because the kanji haven't changed since then, but whether or not they could understand spoken Japanese from 1000 years ago is an entirely different question. The same is true of Icelandic: the orthography hasn't changed much, but the pronunciation of modern Icelandic is wildly different from that of 11th-century Old Norse, so even if modern Icelanders can read the Eddas with little difficulty, they'd probably have a much harder time understanding it spoken. Indeed, conservative orthography is what makes Chaucer as understandable to modern English-speakers as he is; if English orthography had changed along with the pronunciation during the Great Vowel Shift and other changes, Chaucer would be much more difficult to read than he is. +Angr 22:42, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Angr about orthography--in particular in the case of Japanese. When laypeople say "you can still understand thousand-year-old Japanese", they are often just saying that the same set of kanji is used...but not only has the pronunciation changed (as Angr pointed out above), but the grammar has changed as well. This same issue comes up with Classical Chinese, which uses almost the exact same characters as Modern Chinese, but is for all intents and purposes a foreign language. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:52, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Regarding Japanese, I heard it's very difficult to understand Kabuki. Even the actors have difficulty understanding their own lines. --Kjoonlee 23:31, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

It is fairly implausible that Japanese children can understand 1000-year old texts. Kanji were little used for writing Japanese 1000 years ago. For formal purposes, men would write in what they thought was Chinese, using Chinese characters, but often with a very strange approach to Chinese grammar; while for less elevated purposes they would write Japanese in kana. The two great works by women, the Genji Monogatari and the Pillow Book were both written in kana. So an ancient text in Kanji will most often be written in a mixture of Japanese and Chinese grammar (and Japanese inflections are always written in kana today anyway). A text in kana might actually be easier - kana spelling is quite conservative; but the grammar has changed significantly over the years --ColinFine (talk) 00:26, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

You've already worked out that languages change at different rates. There are a bunch of factors that come into play here. Literacy and language standardisation are two (see Dennis Ager's Motivation and Policy in Language Planning). Language contact is another - not just which languages are in contact, but their respective typologies, the status given to each by the speakers, what domains each language is used in etc. This can affect languages at different levels - lexical diffusion (i.e. borrowing), syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics. Sometimes it happens in odd ways - see mixed language, Michif language, Monguor language, Media Lengua. Languages tend to go through periods of slow change, and sometimes go through areas of strong language change (such as the change between Old and Middle English over about 200 years, or the change from Vulgar Latin into the older versions of modern Romance languages). Steewi (talk) 03:41, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

While language change isn't removed with isolation, borrowing is certainly reduced. That, along with conservative orthography, may factor in the ease of reading old texts; with more limited borrowing in a language's more recent history, a greater number of cognates could create easier comprehension. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 06:56, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Regarding Japanese: Classical Japanese is taught in junior and high school. Kanji have very little to do with it. The grammar and vocabulary is significantly different that serious study is required to make any sense of the texts. On the other hand, 17-18th century texts are fairly readable to a native Japanese speaker with minimal difficulties. Of course the same is true for native English speakers as well. Elementary students read Shakespeare (early modern English) with only minimal aids and never needing to learn special grammar or much new vocabulary. 124.214.131.55 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:28, 6 January 2010 (UTC).

Very true -- a language engaged in language contact will change faster than an isolated one, I'm sure. And I guess you're right that some languages have undergone periods of intense change (I know that for the Old English to Middle English change that happened between 1100 and 1300 AD, it was fueled by the social upheaval caused by the Norman invasion.) Here's something I'm really interested in: is there a difference in the rate of language change between a conversative culture and a modern culture? If the culture tends to pay more attention to the old people than to young people, do new words have a harder time being created? Or, if we lived in a hypothetical communistic society with no class structure where there was no such thing as formal and informal speech, would new words come faster or slower? I'm starting to think not. I'm starting to think that a conservative culture will change a language just as much as a modern culture, and you can't really stop the language without stopping the life of the culture. Jonathan ^talk 15:17, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

As far as Icelandic being isolated, I think we can disagree with that. Iceland has been in constant contact with Denmark for much of its history and the Icelandic language didn't change as much as the language of the Faroe Islands, which was in constant contact with Norway (and Denmark). I cannot give another reason for its apparent conservativeness, but I would disagree that it was isolation, or, at least isolation on its own, that caused it. --KageTora - (影虎) (Talk?) 15:43, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Jonathan, re: your question and conservatism - here in Slovenia there is lately a strong populist approach to the Slovene language (by some linguists, but mostly politicians), namely that our vulnerable, tiny languagette is on the brink of extinction, being pushed out of existance by the major languages and that them youngsters are actively participating in bringing about the downfall of the language by mixing English words into their spoken language (they do this when they are not loitering on peoples' lawns, I suppose). It's all a load of bullshit, IMO, but hey, this position is pretty strongly represented in the media and politico-speak. So, the atmosphere could be called pretty conservative, at moments even hostile to foreign language influences, but the Slovene language itself will have none of it and rolls on, changing along the way nonetheless. What I find amusing about this "ZOMG the language is being backstabbed by our young'uns" movement is that the proponents of it seem to have conveniently forgotten that when they were young themselves, they used borrowed words from English, German, French or Serbian as well, and not a lot of their slangisms held on, and the ones that did are now unblemished parts of the language. I see no reason why the youngsters of today should have more "language-destroying power" than the youngsters of, say, ten or twenty years ago.

What I find more disturbing, though, is that this same movement is also working hard to expulge all words of Croatian/Serbian origin (trying hard to erase from the collective memory that we were once brethren with those nations, I suppose), and in their purifying zealotry tend to even brandish as undesirable words that only sound like they might be Croatian/Serbian in origin but are really leftovers from the common ancestor, Old Church Slavonic, i.e. completely legit, old-school Slovene words. As far as I'm concerned, that borders on lingustic crime. TomorrowTime (talk) 18:01, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Also in response to Jonathan, I don't think it's true that one can make generalizations about language change like that. There are a few languages that we can think of t hat didn't change very much while isolated and there are a few languages that we can think of that did change a lot while isolated. The reasons and manners of change perhaps differ. Language change has too many variables for one or two things to be considered the main instigators of it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:08, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

This is completely OR, but I've thought about this a fair bit, and I think that the rate of language change correlates strongly with the rate of social and/or political change. The way that this happens is that, in a given social order, the language of the prestige group is seen as the standard, of which other variants of the language are seen as nonstandard "dialects". When an existing prestige group loses power to another group, the new group's variant becomes the standard. Indeed, the new group may accentuate features of its speech that are distinctive so as to increase the distance of the new standard from the previous standard. For example, I can't prove this, but I suspect that the loss of rhoticity in England was a matter of the speech of the well-to-do middle classes of the towns of East Anglia and the East Midlands (which evidence suggests was already non-rhotic, perhaps through contact with Dutch or Low German) replacing the more conservative rhotic speech of the cavaliers as the prestige dialect of England during the 17th century. Marco polo (talk) 21:50, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

I guess one test ground for this hypothesis would be nations that had Communist revolutions in the 20th century, and land reform and other stuff that caused class upheaval--did these revolutions coincide with major linguistic changes? (The only one I know much about is China, and in the case of China there are confounds anyway because in the mid-1950s, right around when they were doing land reform and other Communist-y stuff, they were also implementing some large-scale language standardization stuff.) rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 00:15, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Marco Polo's hypothesis (which sounds plausable to me, BTW) would to an extent explain what I mentioned in my post earlier - the drive by Slovene linguists to purge words seen as being of Croatian/Serbian origin from the Slovene language. Granted, Communism in Yugoslavia wasn't the monstrous oppresive regime it had been in many other countries - it was seen by the people as a sort of humane Communism, and there is still a lot of Yugonostalgia around, so it's hard to say that the above mentioned drive for language change by expulsion of perceived Croatian/Serbian words is solely because of an intended distancing from anything Communist-y. It has more to do, IMO, with the perceived financial injustice commited to the Slovenes by the centralised Serbian government - Slovenes in Yugoslavia felt like they were working their (culturally essentily middle European/German) asses off to support the less-developed (culturally essentialy Ottoman) regions of Yugoslavia. A popular saying was that the Slovene worker is flushing their money down the Danube (i.e. in the direction of Belgrade).

Well, to be fair, I myself was only a wee un (early teens) when Yugoslavia fell apart, so all of this is second hand knowledge, and may be fundamentaly flawed.

Another Yugoslav example would be something I already mentioned before on this board - Croatia instituted traditional, pagan names for months, to distance its language from the Serbian language which uses the standard denominations (Januar, Februar, Mart, etc). These new (well, old, actually) denominations didn't stick with the general public, and nowadays regular Croats (i.e., anyone who isn't an anouncer for the national TV) refer to months as "first month", "second month", etc. TomorrowTime (talk) 10:30, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

What about Russian? I haven't heard of any major changes that occured in Russian this last century despite three major wars and a game-changing revolution. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:18, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

The communist revolutionists in Russia and in my native Bulgaria have tended to make the orthography somewhat less etymological and more close to real-life pronunciation; but the standard languages themselves didn't change much. All in all, communist examples aren't a good way to test Marco Polo's theory of social-cum-linguistic change; they usually take place in modern times, in countries that already have a very well established standard language before the revolution, so the communists' "mission" is not to elevate some popular dialect to a new standard but rather to teach the illiterate, dialect-speaking population the already existing national standard. I think the social => linguistic theory is more suited to situations in pre-modern times where a state and an elite structure and culture totally break down or at least decline very sharply, leading to a drastic gap in continuity: something like what happened to the Old English literary norm after the Norman conquest. Something similar can be said about the transition from synthetic Old Bulgarian to analytic New Bulgarian (via first Byzantine and then Ottoman rule), from Old to New Swedish (via Low German influence and Danish rule), perhaps from Latin to Romance (via the fall of the Empire and barbarian rule; Latin as a language of the elite became at some point too remote to exert a conserving influence on the population's vernacular) etc..

As for non-rhoticity in English, it may be connected to a social shift, but I think it's too small and undramatic a development to need or warrant such an explanation. Such stuff happens all the time everywhere. And the events of the English revolution were hardly enough to trigger even such a change in accent, especially considering the fact that a Restoration occurred rather soon afterwards and should have led to a mass re-adoption of the "cavalier accent" if there ever was such a thing. Consistent non-rhoticity as we know it is considered to have emerged only in the 18th century, AFAIK.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 23:00, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

I gathered from TV documentary, that when Hirohito made his first radio broadcast to announce the surrender of Japan in 1945, that most ordinary Japanese could barely understand the archaic language spoken at Court. True? Alansplodge (talk) 14:20, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

The article: Humanity Declaration. While the text excerpt looks daunting it's actualy fairly understandable and not too heavy on archaics. TomorrowTime (talk) 14:31, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Nevermind my previos answer. I looked into the whole text of the declaration, and it is indeed written in a fairly rigid Japanese with quite some archaicisms. I can imagine that the average Japanese person would indeed have had some trouble understanding the text in entirety (even if they undestood what was basicaly said), at least without having it in written form. Meh, let's have one of the natives on this RefDesk confirm or deny this. TomorrowTime (talk) 14:41, 8 January 2010 (UTC)