IdiomSite

I stumbled across a webpage with idioms, and it made me start to question how I would define some common English idioms. The webpage is IdiomSite.com, which features a banner across the top that defines idioms as 'a natural manner of speaking to a native speaker of a language.' My first issue with the page is with that definition--I feel the definition provides some kernel of truth, but there is a lot missing from how idioms are separated from other natural manners of speaking; also, notice the definition only includes a one-way relationship (in the definition, the listener is specified as a native speaker, but not necessarily the speaker of the idiom).

After scrolling down through the page, there are several idioms defined that I would argue with. The following three are examples of these potentially arguable definitions:

• 'as high as a kite': anything that is high up in the sky.
• 'barking up the wrong tree': a mistake made in something you are trying to achieve.
• 'chip on his shoulder': angry today about something that occured [sic] in the past.

My own uses of these idioms don't quite match up with the above definitions; however, I don't want to bias my audience. Do you agree with these definitions? If not, how would you change them to make them more accurate?

Atlas of True Names

Thanks to a student who shared this website with the other Dr. Sams, I think I know what I want for Christmas this year--a map from Atlas of True Names.

The atlas literally translates place names on maps, based on the name's etymology, making looking at a map even more intriguing than it already is. I'm sure some of the names are a bit liberal in their translations, but the appeal is that the different names makes it like looking at a map of a fantasy world, when it's really just a map of our world.

For instance, you can head over to the Great Land of the Tattooed (England) to visit Unfordable River Town (London) and leave from there for Westland (Ireland) to visit Darkpool (Dublin); of course, on the way, you'll have to pass through Land of Strangers (Wales). You can then travel across the Sea of Weeds (the Atlantic Ocean) to visit any one of the coastal cities of the United States of the Home Ruler, including New Yew Tree Village (New York), Sibling Love (Philadelphia), or Marsh Farm (Washington, D.C.).

Even if you don't go on that epic journey, you should take a moment to appreciate how cool the Atlas of True Names is.

Visuwords: Graphical dictionary

I've seen visual thesauri and dictionaries floating around the web, but I think the best one I've seen (or at least the one I've had the most fun with) is Visuwords, an online graphical dictionary. When you go to the page, you see the following space:

Visuwords screenshot

There is a search box at the top, where you can enter a word you want to explore, or you could choose to hit the "random" button to the left of the search box, which will give you exactly that--a random word.

Running down the left of the blank white area (where your word will be mapped) is a key to understand what you're about to see:

Visuwords key

Using Visuwords can help identify parts of speech and semantic relationships, both helpful in a linguistics classroom.

I chose to search for the word 'linguistics', which resulted in this graphic display:

Visuwords search for 'linguistics'

You can zoom in on the area to pay more attention to some of the detail going on:

Zoomed in section of 'linguistics'

Using the key down the side of the page, I can see that linguistics is a kind of humanistic discipline, that lexicology is a kind of linguistics, and that 'linguistic' and 'lingual' are derivations of the word 'linguistics'. If you hold your mouse over any of the the visual definition, you can get more information:

Mouse over information

In this image, you can see a yellow box of more information about the 'humanistic discipline, humanities, liberal arts, arts' entry.

All in all, I think this is a pretty cool tool to visualize relationships among words and concepts and is something I will introduce in my linguistics courses when we discuss semantics.

Great Vowel Shift: Dinosaur Comics

In History of the English Language, we were covering the Great Vowel Shift. My students asked why it occurred, and I had the pleasure of telling them, "No one knows." One of the students spoke up and asked if I had ever seen the Dinosaur Comics about the Great Vowel Shift; when I said I hadn't, she pulled it up on her phone to show me. I laughed so hard when I saw it that I snort laughed in the middle of class. Now that it's nearing the end of the semester and we all need a laugh, I'm sharing the comic with you, too. Enjoy!

Taken from Dinosaur Comics.

The Joy of Phonetics: Getting help with IPA

One area many students struggle with in linguistics is phonetics. Understanding IPA, the IPA charts, transcriptions, and the application of IPA to phonology can be quite frustrating for beginners. Luckily, there are several helpful websites that just might help those frustrated students. (Some of these are mentioned in a past post, but they are worth mentioning again.)

1. UCLA's Interactive IPA Chart (from Ladefoged's "A Course in Phonetics")

Screenshot of UCLA's IPA Interactive Chart

The IPA chart that can be seen in the screenshot is interactive in that it allows you to click on any area to zoom in; once you're zoomed in on an area, it allows you to click on an individual symbol, and a sound file will play so that you can hear the sound that particular symbol represents, which is incredibly helpful for those world sounds that may not be in your native language. The only downside is that the sound files take you to a different screen instead of playing while you're still looking at the chart.

2. York University's Interactive IPA Chart

Screenshot of York's IPA Chart

This IPA chart is similar to the UCLA chart above but was created by Eric Armstrong and has a few extra features that students may find helpful. Just like the UCLA website, you first have to click on a section of sounds to zoom in before you can play with the individual features. Once you're zoomed in, you can click on an individual symbol to hear what sound it represents; one advantage to this website is that the sound file plays without taking you to a different screen.

Another advantage is that if you mouse over any words/symbols on the chart, you can find out more information. For instance, if you mouse over a manner or place label on the consonant chart, a definition box will pop up, like this:

Definition box

If you mouse over a symbol in the chart, the IPA descriptors of the symbol and the "common" name will appear in the box over the top of the chart:

Symbol information

Students often get frustrated by words like 'engma' being thrown around when learning the IPA; this website can help those students learn those names while still learning the IPA descriptions associated with them.

3. Iowa's Interactive Sounds of Spoken Language

Screenshot of Iowa's Phonetics Website

If you aren't learning the IPA charts for world languages but are focusing on either American English, Spanish, or German, then you will most likely find this website helpful. From the home page (which you see in the screenshot above), you can click on your language of choice. Clicking on the American English option will take you to a new screen that looks like this:

The Sounds of American English

From this view, you can decide whether you want to look at consonants or vowels and which category you want to explore. For instance, you might click on the "fricative" button and then click on the "/z/" to get to this screen:

Focus on the /z/

Every aspect of this website is interactive. You can play the animation to watch what happens in the sagittal section when the sound in focus is made. You can choose a play-by-play, in which case each stage of the sound is fully described. Or you can listen to sound files on the right-hand side while watching what the outside of the mouth looks like during sound production. This tool is especially helpful for anyone working in the speech pathology field.


4. Interactive Sagittal Section

Screenshot of Interactive Sagittal Section website

Created by Daniel Currie Hall, this website allows you to choose the features of the sound you're working with (e.g., voicing, placement, manner), and the sagittal section on the screen changes to match the requirements, which can help internalize the difference between all those columns and rows in the IPA chart (and, in the end, help with understanding natural classes). After seeing Iowa's website before this one, you may wonder if it really is all that helpful. The answer is yes. This website isn't constrained to sounds in particular languages (but is constrained by types of sounds). Also, the sagittal sections more closely resemble what some students see on exams/homework assignments and might be more helpful.

There are other online interactive IPA tools, such as the University of Victoria's IPA chart and another IPA chart that is simply housed at www.ipachart.com. The goal is for you to find one that you can work with and that helps you understand the material better. Phonetics shouldn't be frightening--it should be fun to explore the sounds of language.

If you have know any other phonetics websites that you feel should be mentioned, leave the website (and the reason you like) in the comments below.

De-stressing fun with Google Translate

Floating around Facebook is a photo (as far as I can tell, Adam Port is the beginning of the sharing thread and so should be credited for this) that instructs you to copy and paste the following text into Google Translate:

pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk

Once you paste it into the box, you need to click on "German" as the source language and then hit the symbol for listening to the text on the German side (not the side that translates it into English). You should see this screen:

The purple circles mark the areas you need to pay attention to--make sure the source language is German and click on the circled symbol to listen to the text read aloud.

It just might put a smile on your face as you're swamped in finals week...

Written Language and Brain Processing

A colleague shared the following article that appeared on Science Daily with me: "Brain's Involvement in Processing Depends on Language's Graphic Symbols."

In the article, researchers claim that Arabic takes longer to process because it cannot be processed unilaterally in the brain; that is, it requires both the left and right hemispheres to communicate in order to process language. What's interesting is that the study compared English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Both Hebrew and Arabic are written from right-to-left and both omit vowels (which are represented as diacritics in the orthography) for native writing. It doesn't surprise me that perhaps English is processed differently, but it does surprise me that Hebrew and Arabic are processed differently. That leaves me to wonder if it is the actual shapes of the letters in the orthographical system that lead to different processing.

The article ends with this thought:

Thus, the question is again raised as to whether in the modern world those who speak certain languages have an advantage over those who speak other languages...

I'd think the next step is to test native Arabic speakers who are fluent (or extremely proficient) in English or Hebrew to see if they still use both halves of the brain to process a language that native speakers can process unilaterally. (And vice versa--study how native English or Hebrew speakers process Arabic.) After that, naturally, it'd be interesting to see how other orthographical systems are processed.