Well, this is an interesting article.  This article post last January reported on a study done on Twitter.  They found that Twitter actually shows regional variation and dialect.

Now, first off I must say that I feel quite bad for the researchers who had to slog through thousands of Tweets, where they had to microanalyse each one.  I myself do not follow anything on Twitter because I can’t stand reading about the minutiae that makes up the average Twits life.  For researchers to do this…I must really give them kudos for their patience and perseverance.

That being said, it is an interesting find.  It also doesn’t surprise me in a way.  When people start Twittering/chatspeaking/texting, they tend to start using phonetic spellings of words, and of course, one of the major things that makes a dialect, well, a dialect is how it’s pronounced.  It definitely provides a lot of information about the writer, a bit more than might be found in traditional “Standard” English.  Because certain spellings and words are edited out of typical published writings, such as those for magazines, newspapers, and books, it is often difficult to tell where the author is from unless they use certain area specific words (like a British author using lift instead of elevator).

Whether I approve of Twitter or not, it’s a very neat article.

One of the next concerns I had in creating my new language was “How do I create roots and words?”.  It’s a very important question.  I can’t just throw out words willy-nilly.  For one, it’s too tedious.  Sitting and trying to come up with hundreds and hundreds of random words would tax even the most talented of conlangers.  For another, there would be no system of things.  I might have two words that are very similar and mean two totally different things.  But by having roots that have meaning, then it makes it easier, both on me and anyone that might learn this language, because then you can make connections.

All humans tend to make connections.  We categorize things automatically.  It is both a blessing and a curse in our species, because we can use it to learn language and science and stuff like that easier, and a curse because people put other people into categories, sometimes to their detriment.

In a conlang, it’s good to have common roots because it makes it easier to learn a language, especially if you’re trying to create an auxiliary language (or auxlang).  Auxlangs are created mostly to under the theme of an international language that many can learn, and  they tend to take common roots from many languages.  For example, in Esperanto the word for friend is “amiko”, which shares a common root of “ami” with French and Spanish, and likely this root is shared in several other languages.  This makes it easier for speakers of these languages to learn Esperanto.

Roots also make the language look and sound more natural.  In a natural language there are often roots that make many connections.  For example, one root in English is “biblio”.  You can find this root in words like Bible, bibliophile, bibliomaniac, biblioteca. In Japanese, it’s a little easier sometimes to see the root, because often the word will have the kanji that makes up one of the roots.  For example, 人（hito/kata, person） makes up several other words, like 人間 (ningen, human)、三人(sannin, three people)、人気(ninki, popular)、人々(hitobito, many people), etc.  Because of these categories, both native speakers and students of the language can learn the language more easily because then they have memory helpers to learn the many thousands of words that are in any given language.

Roots also allow for further evolution of language.  Scientists often use Latin roots to name new species and diseases.  Entrepreneurs use roots to make up new names for products and technology (I was amused to get my new laptop and discover a free e-book reading program on my computer named Blio.  It is very easy to see that the creators of the program shaved down the root biblio to get their name).  Slang is often invented by combining words and roots.

Because of all these reasons, you can see why coming up with roots are very important to the conlanger.

To get my roots, what I did was start by inventing words.  The first set of words I invented was a list of colors.  The very first word I invented was “neje” or black. Therefore the first root I had was “ne” for black or dark.  “Je” ended up being a root for color, and I ended all the other colors I invented in “je”, coming up with a list of colors like aje (blue), porije (green), and koje (red).

From there, I was actually able to expand the roots quite naturally.  The roots for porije meant “green, greening” and “color”-this led naturally to the word for grass, poro (all nouns end in -o, and thus making “green” into a noun also turns it into grass).

As I went through my new list, I would make up words that I thought were important, and then using the roots from these words, try to make up other words that could be connected with the roots.  “Tulo”, for eat or consume, thus became tuloku (eat) and tuloheo (meal), and so on and so forth.

An interesting note is this: if running low on ideas for new vocabulary, it helps to consult some basic vocabulary lists consisting of common words in any language.  Mark Rosenfelder includes a nice set of lists in the back of his book, The Language Construction kit, and you can find a good list in Ogden’s Basic English (a link is in Resources).

Also, make sure to create a list of all your roots as you go!  This is pretty important because it will keep you from repeating things, and makes a good reference for later.

Several weeks after arriving on campus, I had lunch with a member of the college staff.  My luncheon partner, a fifth generation Smith College graduate with a New England genealogy older than the state and a portfolio perhaps as wealthy, wanting to get to know me, asked me what it felt like to be black.

I was not offended by her query.  Her face was open; her eyes were friendly and engaged.  She simply believed that nothing from her own background and experience could help her understand me.  I knew better.  I had been assigned a race by America’s pervasive socialization process, and so had she.  I thus believed that if she drew upon her own experience of being “raced” she might then be able to see what had in common…I invented the Race Game and invited her to play it for a week.

This is from an interesting reading from my first week of classes.  It is from Thandeka’s Learning to Be White, an excerpt from the first chapter.

The rules of the Race Game are thus: for the next week, Thandeka challenged her colleague to use the word “white” when referring to her Euro-American acquaintances.  She would therefore be forced to introduce “my white friend Julie”.  Thandeka, in this new game, aims to bring awareness to people how pervasive racial speech is-and how much whiteness is left out of the racial references.

Looking over my own interactions with my peers, I realized that the Thandeka has a point.  I hear white people use words to describe race all the time-friends will refer to someone I’ve never met, prefacing their name with a racial indicator.  They’ll mention their black friend, their Asian roommate.  But the word white is often left out of the equation.  To these white peers, the others races are the ones deserving of labels because white is the default and doesn’t need the label.  Whiteness is the invisible but predominant race.

Thandeka’s book reminds me of  the “flesh-colored” crayon or band-aid.  It’s labeled flesh-colored, but put the pinkish beige band-aid on any black person and it sticks out like a sore thumb.  Are whites the only ones that are “flesh-colored”?  As a child, these band-aids and crayons didn’t strike me as odd at all-they matched my pale pink skin very closely.  But to a young African-American or Hispanic child, would these colors have stood out as being completely wrong?  What would these children be taught, that their skin was the secondary and less important color, that to white people their flesh was not flesh at all?

Let’s play a game all ya white folks out there.  For the next week play the Race Game.  Friend, family, neighbor-when referring to any of these or talking to any of these people, make sure to refer to the white people in your life as white.  Will you discover what it is like to be “raced”?

I’m one of those people that love to argue.  I worked for three years as a hair stylist, and to me the best customers were the ones that didn’t take it personally if I started arguing a “hot issue” with them.  On slow days, I would argue with a particularly feisty co-worker of mine.  It was fun because we were respectful to each other’s opinions, but we were completely different.  She was an older conservative woman with very traditional views, and I was very young, a “baby” in her eyes, and with very liberal views.  We had more differences than that, but no matter what we argued about we always had fun doing it, and more importantly we both knew how to argue.

Most people argue by stating their view and defending it with perhaps one good point.  If the other person comes up with a counter argument, or counters with more points to defend the opposing point of view, this person will cling to their original argument, stubbornly refusing to come up with more points to argue or admit that the other person has a valid point.  I love coming up with points for my arguments, supported by personal experience or empirical evidence.  However, it is very annoying when the person you are arguing against just repeats themselves over and over again like a broken recorder, offering little or no evidence besides their feelings.  Eventually I give up—not only will I not change their mind on the topic, but the other person won’t even argue properly for their side.

Also, a lot of people get offended when you try to argue with them, taking it as an attack on their beliefs.  As a young hair stylist, I had a hard time with this as I picked “fights” with people until I got the sort of sense that most hair stylists have, the one that tells them the sort of person they have in their chair and how to talk with them.  Some of the people in my chair enjoyed a robust argument, and others only enjoyed the argument if they “won” in the end, or if we were both arguing similar sides of the issue.  Others you could tell would not appreciate the argument at all.  Most likely the issue was more that most people seemed to think that a good argument or debate meant that one side had to be “wrong”. 

But there is no right or wrong in debates, especially those involving philosophy or religion.  If a Muslim and a Christian argue about whether Jesus was a deity, does one side become right or wrong?  Both are entitled to their beliefs, and each has evidence of some kind for why they believe the way they do.  But if you bring up why you do or don’t believe in God, or abortion, or gay marriage, or a myriad of other topics with someone who believes opposite of what you do, they often take it as a personal attack when it doesn’t have to be.

The beauty of arguing or debating with someone is that you try to change the other person’s mind about something, but you also accept the possibility that they will change your mind as well.  After all, perhaps they have evidence you never looked at before, or bring up a side of the issue that you now consider more relevant to the topic.  But most people don’t know about this possibility, or ignore it. 

America would benefit by offering required rhetoric classes in high schools across the country.  Perhaps if students read more Socrates and listened to more debates they would know more about the beauty of argument themselves.

Geoff Nunberg wrote a very cool blog about this issue–check it out.

Source: Klingon Language Institute

Source: wiki

A young Yorkshire boy needed to receive surgery for meningitis, and the emergency brain surgery apparently caused him to speak in a “posh” English accent, elongating his vowels, even though he had never done so before.  The other, a young Czech man, had an accident on a motorbike, and right after began speaking to the paramedics in perfect, un-accented English, despite knowing very little of it.  Though the Yorkshire boy’s accent seems more permanent, the young Czech’s English faded after a few days, leaving the young man unable to remember his miraculous change.

I think perhaps that the reason for these unusual occurences lie in the brain–in the subconscious.  In this age of multiculturalism and multimedia, the majority of people are exposed to many languages and dialects.  However, once past a certain age, the ability to pick up other languages declines rapidly.  But everyone remembers to a certain extent the words they hear.  I’ve taken two languages in school: Japanese and Spanish.  In America, we hear more Spanish, from characters who use Spanish words and phrases on TV, to the translations given under certain signs and products.  Therefore, for me, learning what Spanish I know was easier because I already knew a bit. 

Source: London Evening Standard

Source: London Evening Standard (Czech boy)

Source: US News

Then I moved to a University where only about 13% of students are Black.  In one of my classes where there are only 3 Black students out of 25 white students, I used the word “Black” when discussing works by two Black authors (who were writing about race and used the capitalized Negro).  The looks people gave me were rather ugly and shocked, very “What a racist white chick!  Doesn’t she know that Black isn’t at all P.C?” 

So after that class, I asked some Black students what they preferred, including my African-American girlfriend (she prefers the term African-American).  Some did say they preferred African-American, but also admitted that it’s really formal for regular, casual speech.  They personally would use Black (by that, I took to mean that it wasn’t okay for me, the white chick, to use).  Another classmate, who grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood, told me that she definitely didn’t prefer African-American.  “Why should I be called an African-American?” she asked me.  “My family is from Trinidad–it’s completely inaccurate for me, and I don’t like people pidgeonholing me because I’m Black.”

African-American, it seems, is a misnomer.  Most likely it came into use as a way for Black people to express pride in their roots, but it is not only people of color that come from Africa.  Many white people live there as well, a result of European colonization.  Therefore, an “African-American” can be a white person that has been naturalized to the United States.  Other terms, like Negro or Colored, definitely have a reek of antiquity about them. 

However, African-American is what many white people are forced to use, though most Black people have no preference between the terms.  But for a white person to use Black makes it seem like they are racist, even though pretty much no one refers to white people as their P.C. equal, Caucasian (and a good thing, too, as that term is also wildly inaccurate, as it comes from Caucasiod, which refered to Europeans, North Africans, and Middle Easterns).  One fifteen-year-old girl trying to start a “Caucasian Club” was lambasted by various Black organizations for racism, simply because of the name of the club, and despite the fact that there were many other students organizations for Blacks and other people of color.

But what can you do?  People will use whatever words they want, and for such a topic, it’s unlikely that it will change, since there are so many people who have differing opinions about this.

All of which makes me wonder-how do little kids get to know the difference between words and sentences?  I got the difference after a while through a growth of vocabulary, and knowing that Spanish verbs would end with -o, or -e, or -es, or -emos, or Japanese verbs end with -desu, -masu, -masho, etc.  Do little kids, learning their first language, just rely on vocabulary growth?

In The Language Instinct (yep, I’m still reading it), Pinker suggests that grammar is hardwired into your brain, and when the adult speaks to or around the child, switches are flicked in your brain that tell you things like the fact that your language is a SOV ordering language, or that you add -s to nouns to make plurals.  Which makes sense in a way…can animals make sense of plurals?  It makes me want to know if those gorillas that learned sign language can tell the difference between a few and many…