I literally love language!

Image from stock.xchng

I was interested to read the following CNN post recently, saying how dictionaries are defining the word literally with its most current meaning rather than its traditional meaning. Thus literally is now used as an intensifier, meaning very or really, rather than meaning, well, literally. That means that you can now say, There were literally hundreds of choices on the menu, when in fact there were about forty choices. All you are doing is implying that there was a lot of choice. Usage changes, and dictionaries reflect current usage, though larger dictionaries always include original uses too. Of course, dictionaries always try to show the latest uses of words, though purists often object.

Many words are not used literally, though. I loved the CNN comment that "next thing they'll be telling us that there's no ham in hamburger, no egg in eggplant, a boxing ring isn't round and tennis shoes aren't just for tennis". This reminds me of Ogden Nash's poem on the hamburger (also known as a beefburger, particularly in the UK):

In mortal combat I am joined
With monstrous words wherever coined.
"Beefburger" is a term worth hating,
Both fraudulent and infuriating,
Contrived to foster the belief
That only beefburgers are made of beef,
Implying with shoddy flim and flam
That hamburgers are made of ham.

We have so many words in English that are not literally what they claim to be, or which have changed from their original spelling. Did you know that a newt, for example, used to be an ewte, but assimilated the n from the indefinite article? The same is true of an apron, which was originally a napron, and an umpire, which used to be a numpire. This process is called ‘metanalysis’, and you can read more about it in Stephen Ullmann’s fascinating book Semantics: An introduction to the science of meaning.

Other words may be ambiguous, depending on the variety of English you are using. For example, the verb to flog is used colloquially to mean to sell in the UK, but both to sell and to steal in Australia. Likewise, to barrack a team in the UK means to shout abuse, while in Australia to barrack for means to shout encouragement. As with ‘literally’, the word has come to change its meaning. There is obviously potential for confusion there!

When you think you are using a word to say one thing, but you are actually saying something else, that word is called a ‘false friend’. This was brought home to me when I lived in Portugal, where the word marmelada refers to a kind of quince jam. For me, as an English person, marmalade was always made from citrus fruit, and often had a bitter taste. Our local supermarket didn’t know this, though, and they ordered several boxes of what turned out to be English orange marmalade. No one bought it except for my family, so the price went down and down and we ate marmalade for months. Paddington would have been happy!

www.paddingtonbear.com

All this goes to show that language develops constantly, from one country to another, from one variety to another, and from one year to another. Online dictionaries try to reflect these changes and are a great place for learners of a language to check current usage. However, there are always new things that we can watch out for, and it's fascinating to see how words change their meaning. 

That’s why I literally love language!

Sing to read

Is the prerequisite of singing reading? Adults normally read the lyrics first before they upgrade the words into a song by adding melodious intonation. Or if the opposite is true, one would then claim that one sings first before checking out the lyrics. Normally, we listen to songs before deciding if we would like to be part of the fandom as a (singing) listener.

For Jia Yi, a three-year old, she sings first. The songs she sings contain 30 to 40 Chinese words. She does not understand the lyrics but she likes Chinese New Year songs very much, as the songs are sung by her peers in colorful costumes. Jia Yi sings and dances along for hours while watching her peers singing joyously. Below is a sample of Jia Yi having fun while watching a video in her parents’ bedroom:

Jia Yi singing to her favourite tune in her parents' bedroom

  

In case you think Jia Yi is a monolingual Chinese girl, she is also a true blue fan of Hi-5 and she watches Disney Junior Channel, which is part of a paid telebroadcast delivered by ASTRO, a company offering a private telebroacast service. Disney Junior shows English cartoons and musical programmes especially tailored for children below 12.

Arguably, singing has a captivating effect on young and adult minds. In Jia Yi’s case, the CD-Rom of Chinese New Year songs is a launch pad to pronounce Mandarin words in a melodious manner. We may regard the singing as an enhancement of linguistic and rhythmic intelligences in Jia Yi’s cognitive development.

                                                      The CD cover of Jia Yi's favourite Chinese New Year songs

The magical effect of singing on reading seems to garner a steady following. In an alumni sharing session, it was mentioned that Thai songs were used to teach secondary school students Thai before their actual volunteer work in Thailand. My Thai teacher Achaan Sudha included a lot of songs in her Thai lessons as part of our learning extension. My Thai learning became quite a memorable experience with the use of songs.

Beyond reading development via rhythmic intelligence, cultural strengthening is another plus point when Chinese New Year songs are used in early childhood. The songs in Jia Yi's CD-Rom are concerned with the celebration of spring in the lunar calendar. There are plenty of Mandarin references to red packets, good wishes, auspicious terms, as well as communal semiotics such as the color red, mandarin oranges, gold coins, the God of Fortune, peach blossoms and willow tree.

 

Jia Yi requesting a snap shot

The time spent listening to the songs is a blessing in disguise, not least because it is a positive distraction that prevents Jia Yi from playing digital games too often, like Scarecrow and Candy Crush, which are readily available on the family's iPad. That means Jia Yi's digital exposure to terms such as divine, life, saga and sugar is lessened. The risk of developing a distorted or engineered English comprehension by means of gaming lexicon also decreases. While Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings make some interesting alternatives in her collection of CDs, it is appropriate for Jia Yi to sing about some of the cultural references that are closely associated with her cultural heritage before her next trip to LEGOLAND.


Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
National University of Singapore

Reading at three in a multilingual society

Jia Yi Chee is a three year-old girl born in January, 2010. She is the youngest growing up with three elder brothers. Literally speaking, she comes from a working class as both her parents are working full time, although her mother drives Jia Yi to school before work every morning. After the domestic helper left the family, Sheena, Jia Yi’s mother chose to put her daughter on a full day child care system. Currently, Jia Yi attends a multilingual childcare facility six days per week in the multilingual Pekan Nenas, a town in the state of Johor, south of the Peninsular Malaysia.

                                                                 Jia Yi (posing for iPhone)

Among other things, Jia Yi has received books and a few sets of mono-word card after six months attending the childcare facility. In between dinner and breakfast, Jia Yi watches a lot of English and Mandarin cartoons on television. Television, once-called the idiot-box, is a surrogate baby-sitter.  Despite her ritual television viewing, Jia Yi enjoys reading. Her reading stimulations are the word cards, which display words in English, Malay and Mandarin that are arranged in random order. The following are her progressive reading outcomes based on selected word cards as her mental stimulants:

Reading stimulants	Jia Yi’s reading output
Bantal	bantal (pillow in Malay)
学 Xué	*tóng > xué (learn in Mandarin)
Scissors	scissor [sic]
love	love
女Nǚ	nǚ (female in Mandarin)
Skirt	skirt
Luka	luka (scar in Malay)
You	you
eye	eyes [sic]
Play	play
Towel	*mouth > I don’t know (in Mandarin) > towel (upon correction)
I	saya, wo, I (upon correction)
Pagi	pagi
Seluar (pants)	*selamat > *beautiful (with a smile) > seluar (upon correction)
Kasut	kasut (shoes in Malay)
Morning	morning
Kawan (friend)	*friend, *pen yu > kawan (upon correction)
Baju	baju (shirt in Malay)
Toothbrush	toothbrush
Girl	girl
Milk	milk
爸bà    (father)	ba ba (wrong tone in Standard Mandarin; correct colloquially)
Feel	*Fail > *fail (with a smile) > feel (upon correction)
开kāi	kai (open in Mandarin)
心Xīn	xin (heart in Mandarin)
Perempuan	Perempuan (women in Malay)
Mouth	mouth
Saya	saya (I in Malay)

Table 1: A three year-old’s reading output in a multilingual society

                                                Jia Yi's favourite reading area (in front of the TV)

Initially, prior to the outcomes in Table 1, Jia Yi used to read in phrases: “I love you” for the word love, “good morning” for the word morning, má má for the mono-syllable word mother 妈 in Mandarin. Jia Yi has eventually corrected her reading output by tailoring it to a word-by-word reading pattern. This seems more like a reading detour if we believe that language development is not a word-based transformation.  Depending on one’s preference, one may look at formulaic language as part of psycholinguistic development (Alison Wray), emergentism (William O'Grady), nonlineal parallel processing as a state of mind (cf. Naomi Goldblum, among others), form-function construction as the cognitive process for language (Adele Goldberg), or core syntactic properties shared by human languages (Noam Chomsky) as our reference point(s).

The reading outputs contained in Table 1 were observed and recorded by the blogger who held the word card to Jia Yi’s face. The blogger said yes/good if Jia Yi has read correctly, nope if she has read wrongly, and offered the ‘accurate’ pronunciation if she has read the word on the card wrong for twice.

                                               Jia Yi before watching a movie on a Friday evening

What is interesting is that Jia Yi has recurrent difficulties with verb-to-be such as /are/ in a different observation and personal pronoun /I/ compared to nouns such as /scissors/. She uses any of the three languages as a basis of her reading knowledge and attempts to correct herself in two other languages. Jia Yi mimics the pronunciation of a word in a third language when she receives a correction in a third language.

Based on the simple reading interaction with Jia Yi, there are four questions that this blog post would like to raise as its concluding remarks. Firstly, is word-for-word the right way to adopt in teaching reading to preschools? Secondly, do the children growing up reading in a multilingual setting require different sets of learning materials compared to the children growing up reading and learning in monolingual setting? Thirdly, should language learning begin with one language per each contact time in a multilingual setting, if not across all the learning settings? Lastly, do the language educators and policy planners understand the difference between children coordinating multilingual stimulations and children receiving monolingual stimulations well enough when they manage language acquisition in general and plan reading practice in particular?

 

Jyh Wee Sew

Centre for Language Studies

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

National University of Singapore

I used to be so passive

The passive voice is one that causes many problems for speakers of English as an Additional Language (EAL). This may be because it does not exist in their language, or because it is used differently. The passive voice, however, is frequently used in academic writing, especially in reports or in other situations where the action or outcome of an action are more important than the person who performed the action.

For example, it might be important to highlight people’s names in some cases, because you want the reader to focus on that information:

            Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium and polonium.

In other cases, however, you might not want to highlight the names, but you still want to include them:

            Radium and polonium were discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie.

Alternatively, you could omit the names completely and concentrate on an action and the outcome of that action:

            Radium and polonium were discovered in a shed.

(That’s true – you can read about it on the Nobel Prize website.)

Here are two more sentences:

            The shed was falling down, so we had it repaired.

            The shed leaked, so we got the roof replaced.

You might have noticed something unusual about these last two sentences. Most passive voice constructions use the verb “to be” followed by a past participle. However, it is possible to have a passive-type construction using “get” or “have”, as in the examples above (had it repaired and got the roof replaced). In these cases, “have” and “get” are followed by a past participle. They are called “causative verbs” and often mean that someone does something for you at your request.

            We asked someone to repair the shed.          – active

            The shed was repaired.                                – passive

            We had the shed repaired.                            – causative “have”

There is also another construction which many learners of English are not aware of. It comes midway between the active and the passive, and is sometimes called the “middle voice”. This occurs with verbs such as “break” and “open”:

            Tim broke the window.                                  – active

            The window was broken (by Tim).                  – passive

            The window broke.                                       – middle

            Kate opened the window.                              – active

            The window was opened (by Kate).                – passive

            The window opened.                                     – middle

With the active voice, we know who did the action. With the passive, we know that someone did an action, but we do not need to include their name if we don’t want to. With the middle voice, it seems as though the action happened spontaneously; there is no need to include a person at all.

There are several hundred of these “ergative verbs” which can be used in the middle voice in English, and using them in this way makes a writer’s English sound more like that of a native speaker.

You can find a list of ergative verbs at the English for Uni website, together with exercises and a new video story. This story is called “Stolen on the Ghan”, and is set on the train from Adelaide, in South Australia, to Darwin, in Australia’s north. In addition to grammar detective Ms Parrot, the video features the singer Bobby Dylan and the film star Dizzy Delite, both of whom suspect that their necklaces have been stolen.

It is Bobby Dylan who sings the video’s opening song, with a mixture of active, passive and middle voice:

I used to be so passive;

Every door was closed to me.

I used to be so passive;

No door was opened to me.

Then the door opened;

It opened ergatively. 

   [I made up that adverb to remind you that "open" is an ergative verb!]

So I pushed it open;

I opened it actively.

Now I’m no longer passive;

I open every door that I see.

No, I’m no longer passive –

The doors open wide for me!

I encourage you to explore the passive voice and the middle voice, and learn more about ergative verbs. You might find the doors opening wide for you too!