“Jihad Sheilas”

Interesting video originally appeared on Australian TV under the name Jihad Sheilas. It profiles two female Australian converts to Wahhabi Islam who got deep into the Al Qaeda like Islamist scene. Both women appear to have links to radical Islam and probably Al Qaeda and related groups.

The movie is also interesting for the accents. The announcer speaks something called General Australian which is something like Received Pronunciation or RP in the UK. The two women both speak a much broader accent that is more common among the general population, especially in the rural areas. I understood everything of what the narrator said, but I sometimes struggled to understand both of the women. The broad Australian English accent is pretty hard to understand!

How Moving Word Stress Changes Meaning in English Sentences

Tulio writes about how stress changes meaning in English sentences. I reprint it below, with some additions by me.

What I think must be even tougher for English learners is the way we use stresses to completely change the meanings of words and entire sentences. They say Mandarin is hard because of the tones changing the meaning of very similar sounds, but English stresses much be just as confusing.

Convict, present and export are completely different words depending on which syllable is stressed,and if the stress is on the latter, it turns it into a verb. That’s got to be confusing for someone learning.

What will really throw English learners for a loops is when the stresses are used on entire sentences to change the meaning, such as:

*I* didn’t take the test yesterday. (There was a test given yesterday, but other(s) took, and I didn’t.
I *didn’t* take the test yesterday. (You thought I took the test yesterday, but actually I didn’t.)
I didn’t *take* the test yesterday. (I did something else with it, for instance, instead of taking the test, I reviewed what it would be about or studied for it instead.)
I didn’t take *the* test yesterday. (I took a test, but not the one you were thinking of. Instead I took a different one.)
I didn’t take the *test* yesterday. (I took something else, not the test you were thinking of. Maybe I took a little quiz instead.)
I didn’t take the test *yesterday* . (I took the test, but not yesterday. Instead, I took it on some other day.)

Really crazy how we take this for granted that stresses on one word changes the meaning of the sentence even though the word order is unchanged. Sometimes I imagine what I would do if I was an ESL teacher trying to explain this to people. Yikes!

Linguistics is fascinating.

Articles in the English Language

Foreign language learners probably have more problems with articles than with most other aspects of English. This is because the rules of English articles are obscure, if they even exist at all, and because many L2 learners of English come from languages which use no articles at all.

English really has a three way distinction in articles:

Zero article

a, an (indefinite article)

the (definite article)

It is easy to see how a three way distinction like this could be useful for a primitive people. Suppose we are talking about a tiger. Let us observe the noun tiger with all three English articles.

A tiger (What this means really is, “Any old tiger,” “no specific tiger,” just a tiger in the general sense.)

The tiger (This is a lot more specific. In English, when we say, “the tiger” we are usually referring to some certain specific tiger, as in, “that tiger right over there that’s about ready to charge us.”)

Tiger [zero article] (In English, this would have to be capitalized, because when we say, “Tiger” we are referring to something that has the name “Tiger,”  as in a pet cat named Tiger, a man nicknamed Tiger.

Many languages do without articles altogether and seem to do just fine, but one can see where a 3-way distinction like this might just come in handy.

How Far Back in History Does the European Race Go?

Etype shares a great many myths about “Aryans,” by which means I am not sure what.

The greatest number of linguistic precursor markers for the Aryan language that is shared throughout the globe and the greatest concentrated number of speakers of that language is German.

However this is not to be discussed, as Nazi anthropology and Germans are to be repudiated as thoroughly as possible…even if this means twisting common sense…which is easy enough these days…witness the small-pox blanket myth, something so simple anyone should have been able to refute it…yet for some reason it ran around loose like a dog no one dared collar…even if the entire idea was completely, spuriously insane.

Anthropology like most science, is filled with many of these myths that are demonstrably insane.

The idea that science is a warehouse of verities and not something the state would notice might be good to bolster various spurious arguments for collective mind control is itself deluded.

If there is any truth to the original findings, and need I remind you it was in Germany where the science of modern anthropology and anthropological linguistics originated and developed… later post-war jury rigged for British propaganda purposes. Then possibly the Aryans originated around the Baltic during a thermocline some 10.000 to 30.000 years ago.

Recently excavations found Lithuanian settlements that contained bronze tools and evidence of textile clothing that were carbon dated to 40,000 years old. However this totally uproots many favorite common theories, so you don’t hear much of it.

But it is more certain than any opposing theory, despite the latter’s currency, that Europeans are older than 10,000 years old, has more consistent evidence than any prevailing idea, whatever sanction our betters lay on it.

On that topic, the evidence for the out-of-Africa theory is actually paper thin, the fossil record to support it could fit on a garden table…and does not account for the fact glaciers swept Europe and N Asia in this time period, and this may be why the oldest fossils are found in Africa to date….

The African genesis theory is mostly supported mostly by group think and the fact that opposing theories sound a lot like Europeans who prefer logic to what the established state says is good for them to think.

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to think that the Aryans were not much the same as today’s European, other than what seems the knee jerk need to conform to common fallacy – such as Europeans evolved in isolation the last 10000 years.

The “Aryan” language is most closely related to Persian or Sanskrit and the other Indian languages, not German.

As far as “Aryans’ originating 10-30,000 YBP in the Baltic region, I do not know what he means by Aryans. He means White people? White people originated around Finland 9-11,000 YBP.

I know nothing of 40,000 YBP Lithuanians, but 35,000 year old Europeans look nothing like Europeans. There’s nothing remotely European about them. They may look a bit like African Hottentots.

The traditional European phenotype only dates back 10,000 years. Before that, Europeans looked very different.

In fact, the African genesis theory is pretty uncontroversial in anthropology today. It is only rejected by nonscientists, mostly White nationalists and White racists with an axe to grind against Black people.

The “Aryans” only date back to 5,000 YBP. That’s it. If you are talking White people, well, White skin and blue eyes go back 9-11,000 YBP. Before that, European skulls and genes look more Arab than anything else. Going back ~20,000 YBP, European skulls look most like the skulls of the Indian tribes of NW America such as the Makah of Washington state. Going back 35,000 YBP, the oldest Europeans do not look like any known race. They may look more like a Bushman than anything else.

Observation of an Age Effect in English Language Learning Among Filipinos

I talk to quite a few Filipinos on the Net, mostly women. I have noticed an age effect for English language skills among those that I talk to.

Over 50: I didn’t talk to any, but other people told that this group has in general poor English skills, with many of them speaking little to no English at all.

40-50: Worst English skills of all. All had high school degree and no college.

30-40: English skills in this group were much better but were still quite variable. Some in this group had some college. A few had even graduated from college. College did not seem to have much effect on English skills.

21-30: English skills in this group were generally better than in the 30-40 group, and some with some college had excellent English skills. One with a couple years of college had near perfect English.

20-under: This group uniformly had excellent English skills, the best of all of the groups so far. Some had some university education.

There could be a couple of explanations for better skills amongst the younger.

It’s possible that it could be an effect of how recently they left school. Education in the Philippines is heavily in English, but Tagalog and other languages are also used. The group that has most recently left school or is still in school would be expected to have the best English.

The longer they are out of school, the more their English skills would be expected to deteriorate, as most Filipinos use Tagalog and or another Filipino language much of the time. The 40+ group with no college had been out of school for 25-30 years.

On the other hand, it’s possible that English language instruction or teaching in English in the Philippines and has improved markedly in the past 25-30 years. The reasons how this has occurred would be worth examining. Why is easy. In the past 25-30 years, Filipino society has put an increasing premium on English skills.

However, even now there are problems with English medium instruction in the Philippines. Filipinos tell me that quite a few teachers have English skills that are poor at best, so kids are not getting proper input.

Recent articles in the Filipino press have lamented the poor English skills of the average Filipino, odd considering that the Philippines is a country where English is one of the official languages.

What Languages Are You Studying?

Please feel free to update us on your current language learning endeavors, if they exist.

As for me:

English: Native speaker, no need to study anything. In fact, it’s unusual that I run across a word that I don’t know. The most recent one was analphabetism. I bet you don’t know what that means.

Spanish: I have been studying Spanish on and off since I was 6 years old. Studying Spanish is more or less of an ongoing thing with me. We have a lot of bilingual signs and prinouts in our area. I often read them with the English translations to bone up on my Spanish.

I could do better. There is a bilingual newspaper that is issued around here for free, but I never bother to pick it up.

Part of the problem is that when you are as good at Spanish as I am, learning more Spanish (such as reading Spanish papers) is really a serious drag. Spanish as written down especially in papers does not translate literally. Not only are there a ton of not commonly used words, but there are also a lot of figures of speech. In addition, there are lots of phrases, that, when looking at the Spanish and then at the English, one wonders how they managed to go from one to the other. The Spanish-English translation is not transparent at all.

As you learn Portuguese, French and Italian, it only helps you with your Spanish, though the assistance is not obvious. After a while, all Romance just starts running together. You might as well just study Latin and get it over with.

I speak Spanish to Spanish speakers around here on a regular basis. It’s a lot of fun, and they really appreciate if you can speak three words of their language, unlike the French.

The Spanish-speakers who are actually born in Mexico appreciate it a lot more than the ones who are born in the US. I am not sure why that is, but in so many ways, Hispanics who were born in Latin America are much better people than Hispanics who were born on the US. It’s popular to dog on Latin America, but Latin American Hispanic culture is much superior to US Hispanic culture.

There are deep elements of respect, pride, kindness, brotherhood, politeness and dignity present in Latin American Hispanic culture that are almost neutered in US Hispanic culture. US Hispanics are pretty much just typical asshole Americans, except that they happen to be Hispanics. And in many ways, such as the lumpenization of their culture, US Hispanics are actually worse than the rest of Americans.

I’m not sure what it is with US Hispanics, but something has gone terribly wrong. They’ve lost most of what’s grand about Latin American culture, and they’ve replaced it with what’s worst about US culture, in addition to concocting up various cultural poisons of their own. It’s cultural mongrelization of the worst sort, all of the bad, none of the good and a bunch of new innovations, almost all bad.

Portuguese: Past. I studied it a bit in the past when I was hanging around with this Brazilian woman. Now I’ve given it up. I am already studying Spanish and French, and after a while, you are just studying too many Romance languages. The words are so similar that you start getting them all tangled up in your head. You go to say a Spanish word and you say the Portuguese, Italian or French word instead. If you have some Spanish (especially), French and Italian, you get lots of help with Portuguese.

Italian: I study this language a little bit, but not too much. I am not very good at it, but it’s interesting. If you know some French, Spanish and Portuguese, you can go a long way with Italian.

French: My latest fetish is French. I am not very good at it, so I am at the point where learning the language is fun because you’re always learning new stuff. I have blown off verbs and just concentrate on vocabulary. Verbal conjugations in Romance languages suck anyway. Even in Spanish, they can be quite complex.

German: Past. Mostly I just picked up some basic vocabulary. Attempts to run beyond that, I am afraid, run into Hell. I understand that they still have case, and that the nouns are pretty crazy. There are supposedly other difficult aspects of this language, but I am not sure what they are. Learning basic vocabulary is pretty fun though.

That’s about it. For the most part, as a language learner, I concentrate on the Romance languages. They are difficult enough, believe me! Going beyond Romance seems like a gigantic PITA to me. You’re pretty much traveling to whole new planets. Why bother when Romance is hard enough as it is?

Check Out Moselle Franconian

This is one Hell of a bizarre sounding language. I guess it sounds more like French than anything else, but it doesn’t sound much like French either! It doesn’t sound like much of anything!

Truth is, they are actually speaking and singing German in this video, as bizarre as that sounds. Yes, this is actually German. German with a very heavy French influence, but German nevertheless. It’s Moselle Franconian, a middle Franconian language in this case spoken in France in Sarreguemines right on the German border. It’s probably intelligible with other Moselle Franconian languages spoken over the border. I have heard that Germans visiting the city of Trier say that the Moselle Franconian spoken there might as well be Chinese!

These are Middle German languages that developed off the same tree – Franconian – that went to Dutch. The Low Franconian languages went to various forms of Dutch, and the Middle Franconian languages went to German. The Luxembourgish spoken in Luxembourg sounds something like this.

Neoslavonic Website

Here.

Neoslavonic is a new constructed language, or conlang. These languages have a history of not being very successful for some odd reason, but they are definitely a good idea. For instance, in Esperanto it takes about 1 year to get to a fluency level that it takes one 8 years to get to in English.

Neoslavonic was created from mixing together the major Slavic languages, presumably Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. These languages are fairly similar anyway and there is a fair amount of intelligibility between them. The notion of a Pan-Slavic language is a good idea.

The website is very well done and there seems to be some time and money behind it. Seems to be run out Czechoslovakia.

The Northern Germanic Languages

A friend of mine has a post up at his site referring to an earlier post of mine, Scientific Studies of Intelligibility in Scandinavian Languages.

North Germanic has been traditionally divided by East Norse (Swedish, Scanian, Danish, etc.) and West Norse (Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic). There are much greater differences between dialects of Swedish and dialects of Norwegian than between Swedish and Norwegian themselves. Nobody can understand the Danes because their pronunciation is so different.

Icelandic, German, Dutch and Swedish are much more inflected than English is.Even Danish is quite a bit more inflected than English. English has clearly lost most of its inflection.

For a modern Swede, Dane or Norwegian, trying to read Icelandic is like if we English-speakers tried to read the Old English of Beowulf. Icelandic is the odd man out of the North Germanic languages.

Afrikaans and English Redux

A friend of mine who runs a site on Germanic culture and linguistics links to an old article of mine, Is Afrikaans Close to English?. He adds at the end a several paragraph explanation of the question and possible answers to it, delving into Germanic linguistic history, Old English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Faroese, Old Swedish, Swedish and Danish. One thing he makes clear is that Afrikaans is presently one of the least inflected of the Germanic languages – it has lost most of its inflection and is almost turning into an analytic language.