Language's Biggest Challenge: How Do You Define Left and Right?

I was watching an old episode of QI (a fascinating show for those who haven't seen it) when the question of defining left and right to an alien species came up. The general consensus is that you cannot define left and right due to the relative nature of the concepts. Surely, that can't be right. Right?

The reason these concepts are so difficult to define is because they are relative. Put simply, you can't really have left or right without having some reference point.

If you search the definition of "left" on Google, you'll be met with:

"on, towards, or relating to the side of a human body or of a thing which is to the west when the person or thing is facing north."

Google defines right as:

"on, towards, or relating to the side of a human body or of a thing which is to the east when the person or thing is facing north."

A compass provides a fine example of cardinal directions.

How would you define left and right without a compass? These concepts only really exist on a planet with a magnetic field where a system of cardinal directions can be defined...

While left and right are seemingly simple for most of us to understand, around 15% of people seem to struggle with left and right, suffering from a condition known as "Left-Right Confusion".

Can you really blame those who can't tell the difference? The terms are so useless in practice that "my right" is only "your right" when we're facing the same direction. This makes left and right egocentric directions, as their definition is based on the self.

While both up and down are also egocentric, thanks to gravity, their definitions are often universally understood. This is thanks to everyday life, where gravity is almost always found to be pulling us back to our home planet, Earth.

The relative nature of these terms means that in geometry and physics, left and right aren't even bothered with. The Cartesian coordinate system puts matters into numbers, which is often preferred by the hard sciences, rather than the subjectivity preferred by human languages.

However, there are a number of languages and communication systems that don't use the concept of relative direction like left and right. The Guugu Yimithirr Language, which is natively spoken by around 100 aboriginal Australians, seemingly has no time for egocentric directions, preferring a system of cardinal directions to describe the location of objects.

While I feel like I know more about directions, both egocentric and cardinal, I certainly wouldn't feel confident giving directions to aliens. How would you describe left and right? Tell us in the comments below.

Remembering September 11: How One Day Changed the Way We Speak

As anyone with a calendar will know, yesterday was September 11. Thirteen years have passed since the terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and for many, the memories are still fresh in their minds.

Like most catastrophic events, September 11th led to a huge number of cultural changes in the United States and across the world. There were obvious changes, like how air travel security measures changed drastically seemingly overnight. It wasn't just air travel that changed however, as governments kept busy introducing new legislation to reduce the chances of a similar attack happening in the future. One cultural change that isn't as obvious has been the changes to the English language since 2001, which have been quite astounding.

Many new terms were added to the language just after the attacks, though their origins aren't as obvious now due to the passage of time. Over the years, the American Dialect Society has monitored the use of the English language in North America. It is a useful resource to learn more about how the vast majority of Americans use their mother tongue. We've put together a few of the important and lasting terms we feel were rarely uttered before those tragic events.

One World Trade Center, a new skyscraper
located near where the Twin Towers fell.

9/11

It was noted that just a year after the event, "9/11" (said as "nine-eleven") was considered the expression most likely to last. It's fairly safe to say that over a decade later, 9/11 is one of the most enduring expressions since the event. In fact, while the constituent elements of the term preexisted, these two numbers refer to a specific set of events that occurred on September 11, 2001 in most contexts and almost never signify anything else.

Pre- and Post-9/11

The events of 9/11 were considered so important in English-speaking circles that the date now acts as a divider between two eras, at least in the minds of many people.

Al-Qaeda

While not a neologism, al-Qaeda, the name of the organisation who was eventually revealed to be responsible for the attacks, was a popular topic of conversation at the time and is now known to most people. 

Sadly, a number of people took the Arabic origins of the word "القاعدة" as an indication that Arabic speakers and Muslims were either terrorists or hated the United States, despite the fact that there are plenty of terrorists who aren't Arabic-speaking Muslims, as well as people who hate the United States and are neither terrorists, Muslim, nor speakers of Arabic.

DHS

The United States Department for Homeland Security (DHS) was formed in 2002 following the events of 9/11 as a response to them.

Ground Zero

Although the term "ground zero" existed "pre-9/11" (See what we did there?), when the term is capitalised and rendered as "Ground Zero", it almost always is in reference to the World Trade Center site where the Twin Towers were attacked.

IED

While not necessarily a term from 9/11, IED, short for Improvised Explosive Device, is a term used by the US Army in Afghanistan and Iraq to refer to a type of bomb.

TSA

The Transportation Safety Administration, known by the acronym TSA, was a federal agency formed post-9/11 that was one of the key changes to airport security. Their visibility to anyone travelling by plane in the United States means the term has quickly entered the lexicon of American English.

The Linguistic Legacy

While some of the terms that were used after 9/11 have fallen out of favour and have even been forgotten, we should never forget those who needlessly lost their lives on that day, in subsequent conflicts, and in conflicts every day throughout the world.

Country Profile: The Languages of China

Exactly two years ago, we started a regular series of language profiles. Now we're replacing it with a new series in a very similar vein, country profiles. While the language profiles covered one particular language, the new country profiles will be a look at the linguistic makeup of one country in particular.

When we did language profiles, we worked our way through a list, starting with the language with the most native speakers. As we certainly missed a few of the world's many languages, we'll still occasionally do language profiles, just not weekly as we have been doing.

This week marks the first of our country profiles. We're starting with the languages spoken in the world's most populous country, China. After that, we'll work our way around the world, making sure to skip the places we've already covered during their national holidays.

The flag of the People's Republic of China

The Languages of China

Almost one fifth of the world's population lives in China, and Mandarin Chinese is spoken by around 840,000,000 people as a native language. Mandarin has de facto status as the national language.

However, with around 1.3 billion people in a single country, there are certainly more languages than just Chinese. In fact, China has 8 official languages: Standard Chinese, Cantonese, English, Portuguese, Uyghur, Tibetan, Zhuang, and Mongolian.

Sino-Tibetan Languages

Since the Sino-Tibetan languages are indigenous to most of what makes up modern-day China, you can expect plenty of these languages to be spoken in the country. Aside from Mandarin, Cantonese is also another Sino-Tibetan language with official status.

Cantonese is natively spoken by around 62,000,000 people in the world. In China, Cantonese is an official language in Hong Kong and Macau and used by the local governments in these places.

Unsurprisingly, Tibetan is spoken in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The language is spoken by over one million people and is written using a Brahmic script, a type of abugida.

Indo-European Languages

You may have spotted a couple of Indo-European languages in the list of official languages in China. These are the lasting heritage of European colonialism in China.

The English language has official language status in Hong Kong, which was a British colony for 156 years until it was handed back to China in 1997. Likewise, the Portuguese language is spoken as an official language in Macau, which was a Portuguese colony between 1557 and 1999, making it both the first and last European colony in China.

Turkic Languages

The Uyghur language is spoken around the world by up to 11 million people. Within China, it is principally spoken in Xinjiang, where it has official status.

Mongolian Languages

The Mongolian language is natively spoken by nearly 6 million people in the world. In addition to being the official language of Mongolia, it is also an official language of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China.

Tai-Kadai Languages

The Zhuang languages are the last of China's 8 official languages. In total, around 16 million people speak one of the Zhuang languages in the south of China. However, the languages are not mutually intelligible to one another and in some cases are more related to another language from the Tai language family than each other. Perhaps they should be reclassified.

Other Languages

"Surely there are more than 8 languages spoken in China?", we hear you ask. You are right. In fact, there are apparently nearly 300 languages spoken in China, far too many for one post.

Code Talkers: How Speaking a Minority Language Helped Win the Great War

On Wednesday, we were looking at the Navajo language and it got us thinking about the Navajo code talkers used during the Second World War. While the Navajo code talkers are probably the most famous, there were plenty of other code talkers who spoke other languages.

A code talker, for those who don't know, is someone who uses their language to transmit secret messages during wars. If you're trying to transmit information during a war, especially by radio, you do not want your enemy to know what you're saying. In order to ensure your message is only understood by those you want to understand it, you will probably use a code.

Encoded information is certainly one way to ensure that only the intended recipient understands your message, since a code is essentially a language that is only understood by a particular group of people. During the First and Second World Wars, the United States realised that there was a group of people who spoke languages that only they understood, the Native Americans.

Native American Code Talkers

Sequoyah may have invented the Cherokee
syllabary, but it was the spoken language that
was most useful.

The first code talkers spoke Cherokee, the Iroquoian language spoken by the Cherokee people. In fact, the Cherokee code talkers were present at the Second Battle of the Somme, helping to transmit encoded messages. 

The discovery of Native American languages as a means to transmit encoded messages was more of an accident than a genius military plan. It was noticed by the US Army during WWI that the enemy couldn't understand the Cherokee troops.

While the Cherokee code talkers were the first, they were certainly not the only Native American code talkers. The Choctaw Indians from Oklahoma used their language to transmit messages during the Great War.

Since code talkers were so successful during the First World War, Hitler sent a group of around thirty anthropologists to the United States in order to learn Native American languages before WWII had even started. However, not everything turned out as he planned. We'll be back on Monday with the full story. Join us then.

Read The Fascinating Story of the Navajo Code Talkers

Learn a Language with the Ikea Catalogue

Last week an Ikea catalogue made its way into the pile of unsolicited post that enters through our letterbox every day. As we went through the seemingly endless pages of utilitarian minimalist furniture, we started pondering what the product names meant, if anything.

I imagined that if the names of the products were in any language, it would be Swedish due to the company's origin. However, it should be noted that Ikea's headquarters are located in Leiden, Netherlands. Since my knowledge of Swedish is fairly limited, simply reading that catalogue was never going to give me the answer to my question.

A typical Ikea kitchen layout.

While it is rare that anyone would ever find the answer to anything in a catalogue, I remembered that I live in a wonderful era where almost everything is at my fingertips and a quick bit of delving into the internet would answer my question. This may seem very foolish to anyone in Sweden or anyone who speaks Swedish, but to me it was the culmination of years of infrequent pondering and terrible Swedish impressions every time I bought flat-pack furniture.

My efforts, though as minimalist as the furniture itself, yielded results. It turned out that all of Ikea's products are indeed real words, rather than foreign-sounding pseudo-language, such as Häagen-Dazs, which is supposed to sound Danish.

In addition to being actual words, all of Ikea's products follow a nomenclature, or naming convention, that is designed to ensure that products belonging to certain groups are all named after certain types of words.

Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish place names are each allocated to three different groups of product types while the names of Scandinavian lakes, rivers, and bays are used for another group with garden furniture being named after Sweden's islands.

"That's all well and good, but I don't want a geography lesson, I want to learn Swedish!"

Don't worry! Ikea's ranges of bookcases are all the Swedish words for various occupations and the kitchen ranges are often grammatical terms, ideal if you are a prescriptivist. Chairs and desks and fabrics and curtains are men's and women's names respectively, and lighting products are all named after a wide range of terminology from music to the sciences as well as the months of the year and the seasons.

You can learn the names of precious stones and minerals from the bedding and cushions and even mathematics in Swedish from curtain accessories. While we're certainly not saying you'll become fluent in Swedish by walking around their one-way stores and eating meatballs, you should remember next time you find yourself replacing a bookcase that you can expand your Swedish vocabulary while arguing with your other half in Ikea.

Afghan Independence Day: The Languages of Afghanistan

Yesterday, 19 August, marked Afghan Independence Day. In honour of this day, today we'll be looking at the history leading up to the event and the languages spoken in this Asian country. Although the holiday celebrates the signing of the Anglo-Afghan Treaty, the treaty was not actually signed on 19 August nor did it grant Afghanistan independence.

Band-e Amir National Park, Afghanistan

The Anglo-Afghan Treaty marked the end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War and was an armistice between the UK and Afghanistan despite Afghanistan never being part of the British Empire. It was signed on 8 August and agreed that Afghanistan was to be recognised by the UK as independent, despite already being so. The treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rawalpandi, also agreed that British India, which was part of the British Empire, would go no further than the Khyber Pass.

Afghanistan has since celebrated its "independence" each 19 August, but who are we to tell them to celebrate it on a different day? Instead, we thought we'd celebrate the country's linguistic diversity.

Afghanistan grants two languages official status, Pashto and Dari. Pashto, also known as Afghani, belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is natively spoken by around 60% of the population of Afghanistan and its official status is constitutionally equal to that of Dari. There are somewhere between 40 and 60 million speakers of Pashto worldwide, with just under 9 million native speakers in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's second official language, Dari, is widely considered to be a dialect of Persian. Dari is only spoken by a fifth of the country's population, though it is also thought to be the native language of just under 10 million people around the world.

The flag of Afghanistan

While we've said that Afghanistan only has two official languages, the third and fourth most common languages and the other languages spoken in the country are considered the third official language in certain circumstances. In fact, the constitution of Afghanistan states that the Turkic languages and a number of other languages spoken in the country are to be considered official languages in areas where they are spoken by the majority.

This constitutional peculiarity means that the third official language of Afghanistan (in certain areas) is Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashayi, Nuristani and Pamiri. The Uzbek language is natively spoken by 14% of the population, whilst Turkmen is spoken by closer to 2.5% of those in Afghanistan.

Finally, it should be noted that Afghanistan has a high degree of multilingualism with a large percentage of the population speaking more than one of the country's official languages, something that we certainly find worth celebrating!

The Worst Uses of English in Songs

While I am very much in favour of multilingualism and believe that everyone should at least learn a second language, I do feel there is a time and place for multilingualism. Quite some time ago, we put together a list of the songs in English that almost ruined other languages for us, before adding a few more to that list.

It may surprise you that it is not just English speakers who are making these linguistic faux-pas. Today we've created a list of artists that should have either stuck to their mother tongues or spent a little longer studying both grammar and pronunciation when it comes to English. While I could easily mention any of the Eurovision entries from this year, I've instead decided to throw together 5 songs that I actually like but certainly should have never had any English in them.

Robert Ramirez - Sick of Love

I first heard this song in Spain a few years ago, and while it was often played in clubs, it fortunately never seemed to make its way to English-speaking audiences (at least not the UK or the US). I can only imagine that its lack of popularity in English-speaking countries is due to its horrendous butchering of the English language. While I'm certainly not saying this is the only song to have nonsensical lyrics, it tops off its lyrical nonsense by mispronouncing a large number of English words including "sugar" and "evil".

Discobitch - C'est Beau La Bourgoisie

I have a love-hate relationship with this one. While Discobitch's franglais electro track was the anthem of my Erasmus year, it always hurt my ears to hear the incorrect conjugation of "grow" in the line "and all the piles of money that grows next to you". You could argue that it is conjugated with "money" but that would make even less sense. Also, repeating "I'm a bitch", while somewhat funny the first time, becomes very crude and childish come the fiftieth time.

Nozomi Sasaki featuring Astro - Kamu To Funyan

This song is everything you would expect from J-Pop and more. While throwing seemingly random English words into songs is common practice in Japan, I can't bring myself to enjoy the sugar-crack-coffee-infused mayhem without cringing at "lucky let's working" with "working" being pronounced like "walking". In addition, there's also the needless addition of "everyday", "all day", "happy end", and "peace of life", to name a few pointless English words that are as welcome as dog in a cat shelter.

Psy - Gangnam Style

Don't think that I'm only singling out J-Pop for its obsession with random English words. K-Pop is just as guilty, including the worldwide YouTube sensation "Gangnam Style", which has English right there in the title. "Hey, sexy lady" is certainly the main offender for this song that could have simply been entirely in Korean. However, I'm not sure it would have been anywhere near as popular if it was only in Korean as the random English is part of its appeal for English listeners.

Sak Noel - Loca People

It's the complete lack of necessity of the English in this one that really irritates me. Admittedly, when I first heard it, I knew it had to be a foreign artist and due to being very, very drunk at the time, still thought it was the greatest piece of music ever written. I'm not a stickler for profanity either, so it doesn't bother me that the word "fuck" is used almost non-stop for the hook. It's the awful pronunciation of the dialogue that's annoying. However, as there is pretty much a 50-50 split between the English and the Spanish in this one, you could argue that it's a candidate for the both the worst use of English and a foreign language in a song.

While I certainly promote learning a language and disparage mocking those who are, I think it's completely different when an artist adds the English language to a song, often not for artistic reasons, but rather in order to increase its potential global popularity. It would be nice just to live in a world where music could be globally popular without any English in it.

Are there any foreign language songs that you think should never have included English lyrics? What do you think of the songs on our list? Do you agree or disagree? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!