Pidgins: Portuñol

A pidgin is created when two languages mix and simplify in order to facilitate communication between groups that do not have a shared language.

Not to be confused with creoles, which we'll leave for another day, pidgins are not native languages in their own right. They are very unlikely to have any native speakers since each group uses their own native language with other group members, so the pidgin is only used when communicating with another party. Pidgins are normally used in business and trade situations.

Pidgins were common before the coup.

Pidgins tend to be simplified and rarely feature any complicated sentence structures and often have tenses which are apparent by the use of a specific word. An example of this is the use of the word will in English to refer to an activity in the future.

They also use basic vowels and avoid complicated morphology and irregularities. Their purpose, after all, is to facilitate communication, often to sell things.

Some of the most well-known pidgins include Portuñol, points if you worked out that it's a pidgin of Portuguese (português) and Spanish (español). Obviously very clever people named it. Portuñol usually occurs along the Brazilian border where the neighbouring country speaks Spanish.

Green is Portuñol... almost inevitable, really.

Portuñol also refers to code-switching (the process of changing between one language and another) which can be common amongst speakers of Spanish and Portuguese due to the similarities between these two languages.
 

September 30 - International Translation Day

Today is International Translation Day, better known to some as the feast day of St. Jerome, at least among those fond of bread, wine, fish and carpentry.

A totally true and entirely factual history of St. Jerome:

St. Jerome was a Roman translator in the late 4th century. He is best known for having translated the Bible into Latin. As a young man, he enjoyed the typical university lifestyle and felt pretty bad about it. He decided to turn his life around by going to church and was inspired that his religion needed to be translated so he could harass people in shopping centres and airports.

"God! I'm so hungover, best translate the Bible..."

He decided to have a bit of an extended gap year and travel for a bit, going to Jerusalem and a monastery in Bethlehem, whilst funded by his Roman sugar momma, Paula.

Jerome (or J-Dog to his bros) was adamant that the languages he was translating from made for better Bibles than the most popular edition of the time and, as per usual, Christians were incredibly open-minded and didn't have any problems with Jerome's decision to go against the status quo.

Despite being the patron saint of translators, there is a lot of doubt surrounding Jerome's abilities in several of the languages he claimed to speak. It would be worrying to think that the Bible had been mistranslated and that it wasn't true...

You're not a real translator unless you have lions in your office.

Regardless of whether or not Jerome was a good translator, a bad translator, or simply a player with a fondness for travelling, he is the patron saint of translators and shares his day with that of all translators across the world. We know them as the awesome people who work out what stuff means in different languages and have been instrumental in linking cultures and bringing the world to our doorsteps.

Here's to you, you magnificent linguists!

Languages In South Africa

South Africa is perhaps one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. The African continent has a huge number of languages, actually...

South Africa has 11 official languages. The five most common languages feature in the national anthem (having a stanza each), likely making it one of the hardest anthems to learn. However, it was a welcome change to hear it at the Olympics instead of The Star Spangled Banner or March of the Volunteers, the anthems of the USA and China respectively.

If we steer clear of some of the cultural issues that have plagued South Africa over the years and concentrate solely on language we find ourselves in a true linguistic melting pot. In that respect, the country earns itself the title of the Rainbow Nation, which was coined by none other than The Lingua File's favourite South African Archbishop, Desmond Tutu.

South Africa's flag, adopted in 1994, is apparently symbolic of something.

The official languages of South Africa are Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. Afrikaans and English are Germanic languages, while the other nine are Bantu languages.

The "Rainbow Nation" in glorious linguistic technicolour.

The languages of South Africa have fairly distinct geographic areas in which they are used. From a European point of view it's not uncommon to expect this amount of linguistic diversity across such distances, but you have to consider that this is one country.

Ask A Stupid Question Day: Why Don't They Just Learn English?

Another obscure holiday is upon us today. It's Ask A Stupid Question Day! We've heard it all before from most Anglophones, usually those travelling.

We feel that if you ask a stupid question, then you should get a stupid answer.

Why don't they just learn English?

If you are an English speaker you should consider yourself very lucky that no matter where you go you'll probably be able to find someone who can help you in your language (Scotland excluded). It doesn't take much to learn a few phrases when visiting a foreign country. Even please and thank you can go a long way in somebody's mother tongue.

"Could you take our photo, por favor? Gracias!"

The expectation that everyone should learn to speak English is part of the reason most nations rate English speakers among the worst tourists... find a full list here.

You'll find Australia (16th), Ireland (14th), Canada (11th), the UK (10th) and the U.S. (1st) among the countries that are home to the world's worst tourists. Okay... so it's not all down to the language barrier and an expectation of the entire world to speak English. A good number of those countries are famous for having a drinking culture (we'll not name names) and generally getting quite rowdy abroad.

If you are from one of these countries you wouldn't be as annoying to the locals if you were slurring in their language rather than just shouting at them in English whilst you drink the bar dry.

Apothecary or bar? Sometimes booze is the best medicine!

You may think "I'm not like that", and perhaps you're right. You probably like languages like we do, and feel sorry for those that don't. A lot of people do speak English, but while many of them may speak it poorly, they probably speak English better than you speak their language.

On the other hand, they should learn English... so they can read this blog!

All Your Base: The Importance Of Good Localisation

Localisation, in the gaming industry, is the cultural adaptation and translation of products for sale and use in other markets. It can include translation for use in different countries where other languages are spoken, as well as in areas where the same language is spoken in a different dialect with different idioms (think US vs UK English).

One of the most prominent examples of a bad localisation process comes from the classic game Zero Wing. The game was decent, but it was made famous when rediscovered in 1999 and the English version of the intro spread like wildfire across cyberspace.

The terrible captioning that started it all.

Thus the "All Your Base" meme was born. Although amusing, the main problem was that when the game was made, the importance of high-quality translation and localisation was being overlooked. This resulted in some of the most horrific English you've ever seen.

Nowadays, the gaming industry is big money and games are created worldwide. However, without localisation it's difficult (perhaps impossible) to sell products globally.

Perhaps some of the best games... best localisation, perhaps not.

Once a game is localised, there's still another problem to tackle. Can you translate its cultural setting? Many games now feature detailed narratives. You can translate all the text properly, but can you really localise sentiments felt in one part of the world that may not be felt in another part? The Modern Warfare series probably isn't very popular in the Middle East. You can spend hours playing a Japanese game and still never really understand why any of the characters did what they did.

Although Mario still sells well in Italy...

September 26 - European Day of Languages

We like obscure holidays at The Lingua File, and there are few more important to us than the European Day of Languages. In an ideal world every day would be a day of languages... or a Saturday, but sadly, this is not the case.

The purpose of this holiday is to promote the linguistic diversity of Europe and to encourage people to recognize and learn new languages. We think that's a great idea. Politicians got something right!

Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe, the continent itself is home to only 3% of the world's languages. That definitely takes it out of the running to be the most multilingual continent. However, we can say that Europe does well in terms of cultural diversity. In comparison with North America, the cultural diversity of Europe is pretty astonishing.

This is the linguistic diversity of Europe. It's definitely better than that of Antarctica...

In North America, it's fairly uncommon to get on a train in one place and end up in a different country, let alone somewhere they speak a different language. However, in Europe you can hop on a train in Portugal in the morning, travel through Spain, and end your travels in France (assuming that the Spanish train system hasn't let you down) all in one very long day! Just in that one day, you would have had the opportunity to speak Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and French. If you continued your journey through Europe, this linguistic diversity would go on and on and on.

There's much more to European languages than just EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German and Spanish). Europe is home to a multitude of languages (over 200!), many of which you've probably never heard of. So enjoy your European Day of Languages, and take some time to investigate the linguistic diversity that Europe offers as a continent. Make sure you use it as an excuse to eat some good food and drink some fantastic booze too!

Cheers! Živjeli! Kippis! На здравје! Saúde! Iechyd da! 

That's just a small sample of European languages... English, Bosnian, Finnish, Macedonian, Portuguese and Welsh!

Technology Understanding Languages: Don't Be Siri!

So you've got a new smartphone and you'd rather tell it what to do whilst it's in your hand than touch the screen. You probably decide to use its speech recognition software. Then, you tell it to make an imaginary appointment in your calendar... and it does!

"I'm sorry, I can't do that Dave."

How does it understand language? Well... it doesn't. It simulates it pretty well, that's all. It deciphers which phonemes have been said and puts them together in the most probable order.

If you speak a language, understanding words is quite simple. Your brain should be many times more powerful than the average smartphone. IBM simulated an apparent 4.5% of the human brain with a supercomputer, requiring 147,456 processors. That's the equivalent of your brain after a night of vodka and that's still pretty impressive.

It's very difficult to separate individual sounds with just one input. Because of that, some horrific mind-numbing mathematics is involved. To put it simply, the software hears audio and then guesses at the most probable phoneme you may have said. It does this by ruling out impossible combinations or very rare occurrences.

First, the hardware on your smartphone converts the analogue information into digital information. Computers like 1s and 0s.

The software cleans up the digital data, then removes background noise and frequencies beyond our range of hearing. The information is divided into very small sections (hundredths of a second) and sampled by the software in order to process the phonemes.

Can you decipher this? Didn't think so...

The phonemes are processed by means of probability. The most likely phonemes are considered first, but if they're followed by unlikely phonemes or expressions, they are disregarded and replaced with the more likely alternative.

An example of a stumbling block for speech recognition would be the following:

"Real eyes realise real lies".

Its output could easily be realise repeated three times. So a speech recognition program would probably get this wrong. There are so many examples that could be wrong, so how does it occasionally get it right?

"Where are you?" could be "wear are you?" - we know it couldn't be, but a computer doesn't. The only way to stop this being mistaken is to have included likely and unlikely word combinations. The best method is to pick the most likely option, but that can be difficult if you don't know what any of the words mean.

The phone has as much chance of understanding you as any member of the opposite sex, but that doesn't mean you can do those sorts of things with it, even though it does vibrate.