Language Journal

Hello, welcome to my language journal. Due to the nature of Tumblr, entries go in order from newest to oldest, so I suggest you start at the beginning, which is located here. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and work your way up through the entries.

To navigate through pages, use these handy arrows at the bottom left side of every page:

Journal Entries

The font size on this layout is really tiny. So you don’t have to strain your poor eyes, I suggest zooming in on the screen by holding down Cmd and + (for Macs) or Ctrl and + (for Windows).

Sometimes the entry order on the page layout loads in the incorrect order. I apologize if this happens to you.

Underneath each entry, I've tagged the word count and the entry number. (This one is labeled 'entry 0.')

[A lot of times, content that is italicized does not count towards the word count, either. It is usually a quote or just snarky comments.]

[Okay, this doesn't count as a post, but I have been dying to throw doge on here somewhere. I love the doge meme so much, but some really fantastic linguistic analyses have already been done for it. So, uh, just ignore this post.]

My conversation partner, Emma, has shown herself to be very resourceful when it comes to finding the right words to say. She has trouble coming up with English words sometimes, but she is very good at getting around this problem. She manages to get her meaning across just fine.

We talk about cats a lot (about 99.9% of the time, possibly even more), and one word Emma can never seem to remember is 'kitten.' Instead, she often substitutes the word with 'little cat' or 'baby cat.' From the first time she did this, I still knew what she meant given the context.

Though I think this is an important skill for language learners to develop, it can also get in the way of expanding their vocabularies.

I'm guilty of doing this a lot in my German class. I am more interested in learning about German syntax than German vocabulary. I am more likely to say junges Kind (young child) instead of worrying about learning the German word for 'toddler.' This bad habit leaves serious gaps in my vocabulary of German words, and I rely heavily on my German dictionary as a result.

 "Where are you from?"

"Poland."

"Oh, wow! You don't have an accent at all!"

"...Poland, Ohio."

Conversations like this frequently plague my boyfriend. English is full of ambiguity--in metaphors, double meanings, sarcasm, poor wording, irony, and others. Sometimes ambiguity is taken advantage of for laughs, like with Who's On First? by Abbott and Costello and Mehoo with an Exactly Watt by Shel Silverstein.

What makes this type of humor so funny? First of all, I think it's because everyone's been in a situation where ambiguity has caused confusion, so everyone can relate to situations like these. The joke's audience usually already knows the context and is in on the intended meaning.

Sometimes, ambiguity preservers--in jokes and in real life. If my boyfriend had not clarified that he was talking about Poland, Ohio, for example, the conversation could have continued with ambiguity intact:

"So how is the weather in Poland?"

"Much like it is here. It's not really that far away."

"Yeah, I guess once you get used to the distance, the travel time passes by pretty quickly."

"Yeah, I guess so."

In this invented example above, the person continues to interpret the context to suit his/her incorrect interpretation of Poland. A psychoanalysis writes on TheAmericanScholar.org, "Our preferred method for integrating incongruous information is not to revisit a faulty premise, it seems, but to squeeze and stretch the existing premise in ever more convoluted ways to fit the new information."

Not only does the person continue to frame information to fit his/her incorrect interpretation, but my boyfriend also does the same from his perspective.

English is the foundation of computer coding. Almost every single computer language is written using English terminology and/or symbols. Using CSS to design a web page, for example, some of the property elements are font-size, text-align, color, background-image...

I cannot imagine how difficult it becomes for someone who does not speak English and wants to learn computer languages. Many coding keywords are pretty self-explanatory for English speakers and don't really need explaining. Non-English speakers would have to memorize all of the keywords and their functions completely. Additionally, if their languages do not use roman letters, they would have to familiarize themselves with those as well. And how would non-English speakers follow coding conventions for naming variables and such?

I think without learning some English, computer coders/programmers can't reach their full potentials. It's just too much of a barrier to overcome. Coding can be a challenge even for someone who has spoken English his/her entire life. 

I participate in fandom culture, and I've always been interested in observing how fandom slang develops, changes, and evolves. In the past few years, I've noticed fandom culture is gradually becoming more popular and recognized in certain circles. It's definitely a big deal on this website, Tumblr.

The fandom slang people use can determine what others think of them. If a person uses slang that is associated with other websites, such as FanFiction, Facebook, or Reddit, others may assume he/she is a netizens (lookie here, a portmanteau) of that site. If someone uses a non-typical ship name or an out-of-style slang term, people are likely to identify him/her as an outsider or newbie. And slang evolves quickly, so it's easy to fall behind.

On Tumblr (and elsewhere, but Tumblr is my specific area of focus), affixes are an important part of identity for fandoms.

A popular webcomic called Homestuck uses the suffix -stuck. A lot of AU (alternate universe) spin-off comics and stories are made by fans, such as marchingstuck, promstuck, and highschoolstuck. On Tumblr, anything with -stuck added to it is commonly understood to mean it involves Homestuck.

It gets really interesting when you consider crossovers, fandom spinoffs that encompass more than one fandom.

That's when you get words like Superwholockian, which is used to describe a person who is a fan of the television shows Supernatural (super-), Doctor Who (who-), and Sherlock (-lock; adding an additional affix, -ian, makes the word go through a functional shift).

In addition to affixing, fandoms tend to do a lot of blending and portmanteau creation. Even the word fandom is a portmanteau!

People in fandoms like to "ship" characters together, which is a slang term that means pairing characters together in relationships (often romantically, but also in other ways, including as friends, enemies, and rivals).

People who ship Harry/Draco from Harry Potter tend to call the ship Drarry (Dr- from Draco's name blended with -arry from Harry's name). People who ship Peter/Wendy from Once Upon a Time tend to call the ship darlingpan (a portmanteau combining the characters' last names). I'm not even going to get into fandom inside jokes and three-or-more-way pairings.

I usually underestimate the differences between British English and American English. And I'm not the only one!

In this video from a 2011 episode of the Late Night Show with David Letterman, Emma Watson was on the show being interviewed. Letterman asked her if she faced any language barrier issues after coming to school in America, and Watson answered that yes, she had. She admitted she initially didn't expect American English to be much different aside from different pronunciations.

What she didn't take into consideration are vocabulary differences. Watson talked about a time she asked a boy (rather loudly, she added) for a rubber in the middle of class, because she didn't realize it can mean 'condom' and not 'eraser' in the U.S.

At work last night, my coworkers came across a unique problem. Do you write, "I photoshopped something," or, "I Photoshopped something?"

Photoshop is a proper noun, but what happens when it goes through a functional shift and becomes a verb? According to the U.S. English standards, verbs are not capitalized.

There are plenty of other examples I can think of, too. Skyping, googling, internetting (interneting?), facebooking...I could go on and on.

Some companies work really hard to make sure their brands aren't commonly turned into verbs. They do this to avoid the same fate xerox and kleenex suffered--becoming recognized as generic terms. Adobe would probably outright refuse the use of Photoshop as a verb, although if they did begrudgingly accept it, I'm sure they'd prefer for it to remain capitalized.

Many corporations have entered the global market, and advertising has become globalized. Most large companies nowadays choose to use the same marketing strategies worldwide, so the same ads can be seen in New York and Tokyo. Most global advertising comes out of Europe and America, so they often must be translated from English into different languages.

Ads don't always translate well in other languages. Sometimes it's for cultural reasons, and sometimes, it's because of the translation job.

For example, when translating Got Milk? into Spanish, the campaign copy they ended up with was Are You Lactating? (Luckily, they caught this translation blunder in production.) In China, KFC's finger lickin' good was incorrectly translated as eat your fingers off (x).While that may be all well and good if you're Hannibal Lecter, I'm pretty sure it didn't bring customers running through KFC's doors. There are many examples of ad translation gone wrong.

I was watching a cartoon today where one of the characters fell into quicksand. And it kind of hit me out of nowhere--why is it called QUICKsand? I've seen enough Hollywood movie scenes to know it takes at least five dramatic minutes of attempting to rescue the person in vain before he or she finally succumbs.

So I looked up the origins of the word and found that it comes from the Middle English word 'guyk,' which comes from the Old English word 'cwicu.' (Or is it 'cwece'? I found two different spellings.) Apparently both terms mean 'living' (x)

Living sand. Huh. That certainly makes a lot more sense now.

"I don't like you like you, I just like you."

It's been years since I've seen this episode of Hey Arnold, but I'll never forgot this classic scene.

So I decided to google this phenomenon, which is apparently given a fancy-schmancy (see what I did there?) name: contrastive reduplication. It is done to be humorous, to clarify ambiguity, and to intensify or emphasize (x).

I wonder what other languages use reduplication, and how they use it?

On this page, one commenter complains about reduplication, particularly in the case of "cutesy wutesy childish speech." I remember learning in my Speech and Language Development class that there is evidence "cutesy wutesy" speech might actually help with first language acquisition.

Before I finish this entry, I can't resist mentioning my favorite example of reduplication--the moon moon meme. (I had a favorite example of reduplication before I knew what reduplication was.)

One linguist, d'Armond Speers, decided to make an experiment out of his son and speak to him during the first years of his life using nothing but the invented Star Trek language, Klingon. Speers' goal was to see if his son Alec would adopt Klingon as a first language alongside English. Everyone else--Alec's mother (who was 100% on board with it), other family members, people at the daycare center, etc.--spoke to Alec using English.

By the time he was a toddler, Alec did understand Klingon, but he barely spoke it, preferring to use English since everyone else besides his father spoke English (and because he knew his father could speak English, too). As an adult, Alec says he does not speak Klingon at all (x).

Speers claims raising Alec this way is just as beneficial as any other bilingual upbringing. Peoples' responses are varied; some accuse Speers of child abuse, and some think more experiments like this one should be conducted.

Personally, I would have been more accepting of the experiment if Speers hadn't been using a constructed language. I know that kind of eliminates the entire point of the project, but c'mon, if you're going to subject your child to an experiment where he is unable to say whether or not he wants to participate, at least get him to learn a language that could be more useful for him.

It's been around for a while now, but I haven't paid it much attention, because I can hardly believe it's a real campaign:

I am very much against banning words. It goes against freedom of speech, and it's kind of a ridiculous idea. You can ban a word from use, but that does not mean the concept behind the word will disappear. (I wrote an earlier journal entry about this idea, I believe.) Chances are, some other word would pop up to replace 'bossy' if it was actually banned.

The campaign won't succeed in banning the word 'bossy,' but it may succeed in stigmatizing the word.

One good thing about this campaign is that it brings attention and awareness to the larger issue (especially with Beyonce backing it). Despite this--I don't know, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

[I’m not counting this entry towards the 75-entry requirement, because basically all I'm saying is, "Sign language is cool!" Feel free to skip it.]

In my Speech and Language Development course, a student brought up sign language slang. I know next to nothing about sign language except how to sign a few alphabet letters I was taught in fifth grade. It never occurred to me sign language has slang and variation, so I took this as an opportunity to educate myself.

I stumbled across a "Sign Language Rap Battle" that opened my eyes a bit. The best part of the video, in my opinion, is around 3:12 when all three of the interpreters start signing at once next to each other, because you can really see the distinct differences in their styles.

Sign language can rhyme, too! Apparently rhymes occur when words have similar movements, shapes, or locations on the body (x).

Yesterday, one of my coworkers said she wants to marry Benedict Cumberbatch because British accents are sexy.

As I've been desperately trying to come up with new journal entry topics, I figuratively jumped for joy when this remark gave me a question to ponder: why do some people love/hate certain accents?

I don't think "accentphiles" favor certain accents because of how they sound, per se. It probably has more to do with cultural perceptions and associations of the accents.

When I think of most British accents, what immediately comes to mind is--okay, well, what immediately comes to mind is Lord of the Rings, but never mind that. The second thing that comes to mind is the idea of being prim and proper. Prestigious, in other words. It is an accent of power and wealth.

Opinions about accents swing the other way, too. According to one study, Americans prefer European Spanish accents over Latin American accents, presumably because of the negative association Latin America has with illegal immigration into the U.S. (x).

The Huffington Post sums up the concept well: "Preference for the sound of local language is established at birth according to what the fetus hears as its auditory nervous system is developing, but stereotypes based on accents, whether a regional English accent or a foreign accent, are learned in childhood."

Many accent stereotypes are deeply engrained in our society, and often, they are amplified by media. I think a lot of people judge others by their accents unconsciously, so in order to decrease accent stereotyping, more people should be made aware of the issue.

I experimented with vocal recordings and UTAU to come up with some suggestions for V4:

• Assimilation and co-articulation should improve, particularly for vowels.

•Stress needs to become easier to manipulate and control.

•Sounds that are cut short need to sound smoother. One hypothesis for achieving this is to create two voice samples for each sound--one at a normal length and one shorter. This could get tricky, however.

•Most importantly, voice banks need to be more extensive. Triphones obviously improve the quality of pronunciation, so V4 banks should have more of them. Ideally, V4 should experiment with the inclusion of whole morphemes and words in voice banks, moving slowly into a system of unit selection synthesis rather than diphone synthesis.

Getting computers to sound like humans sure is tough work. About 11 years after V1 came out, the third generation of vocaloids was released.

Now devoicing can be improved by making nearby consonants stronger (editing the sound's breathiness or dynamics), or by slicing a vowel sound and cutting it short (though this can sound choppy and unnatural). In additional to vowels, now glides, liquids, and nasals can be devoiced.

The smoothness of diphthongs and other sounds has been improved. With V3 came the ability to create a glottal stop. 

Triphones have been introduced, greatly improving pronunciation capabilities. Nowadays, most speech synthesis programs of this variety are using triphones, morphemes, and even entire words. Hopefully Vocaloid will get to that point eventually as well. Adding morphemes and words to the voice bank makes recording a colossal, time-consuming job, but it improves the quality of pronunciation a lot.

The original version of "Still Alive" is sung by a robot character, so it's meant to sound choppy and auto-tuned. It is rather appropriate, then, for a vocaloid to sing it. 

Avanna's singing is significantly less slurred than V1 and V2, but stops (especially 't') are often too strong or just sound awkward.