mothwing | Entries tagged with language

DGS is a lot of fun, not only because it's intuitive, but also because it's so quiet in that classroom. Of course we talk orally during the break, but it's signing all through class. Crocky and I did our third course today. They're intensive weekend courses, and right now we're on our way to level A2. Or at least that's what the themes we're covering would have me believe.

Sitting in language classes always reminds me of the fact that I'm a better language learner than language teacher (and god, I'm such a perfectionist little suck-up), but also how lost you can feel in a classroom in which people speak in a language in which you cannot communicate, or how much fun it is to try and make up sentences with the few words you know.

As always in this sort of course (at the VHS), there were a variety of other people of various ages and backgrounds. Many seem to be educators of various walks of life who want to work with hearing impaired or deaf children in future, but some were just there because they're interested. Others, like the other gay person in the course, have hearing impaired loved ones and relatives. People also sign at very different speeds. One person has a visual impairment which makes him slow, another person (whom I was partnered with this weekend) is fluent in ASL and is in the course to learn DGS. I was not able to keep up with him at all, but I like to believe that I didn't make too much of a fool of myself.

What is most difficult is remembering a language, correct syntax and vocabulary especially, without any form of meaningful notation system I can use. Due to my Alma Mater I'm vaguely familiar with the phonetic transcription system HamNoSys because I once attended a course on comparative phonology, but can't write it. Right now I'm using my own garbled version of the Stokoe notation and I doubt that I'll ever get behind SignWriting. I'll have to practice a lot before we're on to the fourth course in December, and it'll be long before I attempt to speak to anyone in this language. Other than Crocky.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: Germany, Bremen
Current Music: Vitamin String Quartet - Radioactive

« from: The Seafarer »

Uton we hycgan hwær we ham agen,
ond þonne geþencan hu we þider cumen;
ond we þonne eac tilien þæt we to moten.

- Anonymous.

(Let us consider where our true home is;
and then let us think how to come thither;
and then also strive that we indeed come there.
[translation: J. Glenn])

Current Mood: anxious

Before I post my resolutions (which I'll without a doubt break this year, too) I have to share what I spent most of my time procrastinating with today, the Old English poem Deor.

It's from the Exeter Book, and it's strangely encouraging to me. In it the singer describes the various misfortunes that have befallen various heroes and then, finally, himself, always closing, "þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg", which is usually translated as, "this may overcome, so may this be", though it's more ambiguous in the original (for annotations, see here, and a modern English translation as well).

Cut for length.

Triggers: mention of rape, too, which goes for the modern version, too.

Welund him be wurman wræces cunnade,
anhydig eorl earfoþa dreag,
hæfde him to gesiþþe sorge and longaþ,
wintercealde wræce, wean oft onfond
siþþan hine Niðhad on nede legde,
swoncre seonobende on syllan monn.
Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.

( Read more... )

( Reading of the translation on YT )

Current Mood: cold

The endless amounts of white, fluffy snow! now that I get to enjoy it from inside)! Reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales" aloud three times must have worked some kind of charm.
Going to Ikea with N. and coming home with stuff we don't really need. Like this mirror and these covers. I'm thinking about this lamp, too, but I don't like the way you can see the lighbulb and I think I'm going to get a candle instead. Or this one, which is also pretty.
Föhn mich nicht zulooks like fun - pretty much all of this year's trainees have purchased this book which is apparently a humerous memoir of a bad trainee's exploits.
Looking forward to baking cookies tomorrow
The Horrible Histories series which can be found on YouTube. Have some Charles II:
This aritcle:
«The cultural genome: Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages»
Abstract: We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. "Culturomics" extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities. Entertaining summary here.

Summary with brief overview here.

Current Mood: full

The following are the categories in the children's section of the nearest Hannover city library (and I quote):

- Fantasy
- Action
- Crime
- Reality
- Romance.

...

Yeah. I don't know. Fantasy and action, sure, but reality?? Really? (That's where they put the books on WWII, drugs, child pregnancy and life in the GDR. Reality is depressing in Germany. Romance is a redundant category, because every book I looked at in the other categories had a pretty prominent romance plot, yuck. Kissing books, man).

Am I happy about that because it means no one will have to go through the trouble of teaching the kids these words at school, or am I worried for the future of my mother tongue?

Current Mood: annoyed

As a hobby linguist I've been curious about Goddard's and Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage/semantic primes as an L2 teaching and learning tool for a while, and I've been trying to apply it to various concepts I've encountered so far with varying success.

The notion of cultural scripts I find particularly interesting, and I've been trying to apply those to some cultural scripts of our own.

( Here's some example of cultural scripts: )

Here's a table of semantic primes (Goddard, 2002):

So what does that give us for "slut shaming"?

I got something like this:

[people think like this:]

I want to say you are a bad person. Because of this I say you do things with your body and many other people's bodies.
It is good to do things with your and one other person's body, but not many people's - that makes you a bad person.
I want people to know that I know this is bad.
You are a person to whom I can say, "You are a bad person", and you cannot do bad things to me because of this.
People will think it is true if I say to you,
"You are a bad person, and you are doing bad things with your body"
I want you to think that you are a bad person.

...which leaves out the gendered double-standard, and its still pretty choppy. I wish we'd have had courses on this at uni, though they probably wouldn't have done me any good, given that I'm not a linguist.

Anyone have any ideas?

Current Mood: curious

I have a problem resisting old school books, especially for English and German classes - though I suppose ancient Biology books have the potential to be even more fascinating.

My most recent purchase is "The New Guide 1", which is from the early fifties and for Volksschulen, a school that covered years 1-8 for those students who were not likely to go on to tertiary education - until 1964 (West Germany), when they were replaced with a primary - secondary system and the secondary system got more differentiated as the Volksschule was replaced with the Grundschule for primary education, Haupt- and Realschule for secondary education.

The book frequently confuses me - I can see that the point of this is to teach students sounds, but the progression doesn't make sense to me - sentences like "My name is _____, what is your name?" that we covered in session two don't feature at all until Lesson 33, and the first things people learn are individual words and texts written to introduce the students to new sounds and what the book considers to be important spellings of the sound.

The book doesn't introduce characters the students can get used and attached to, and the stories in the book frequently touch upon poverty and hardship. Or they start out as cute and and then take a sudden turn, like this one:

( More weirdness - father is not rich and Enid does not like black people (chimney sweeps in this case) )

Current Mood: calm

One of the learners in my tutoring centre has the most interesting pronunciation. She was reading a text the other day and it took a while for me to figure out what she was talking about.

Oh. And "sought", forgot about that one. I think she was talking about a sword, about which she had thoughts. But I can't be certain.

Current Mood: calm

I took my first class in of the very short introductory course on German Sign Language that Crocky's uni's offering today, and it was awesome. Hard, though, because I missed the first class. It's only a very basic class for beginners and we won't get further than basic introductions and easy sentences, but it definitely leaves me wanting more. There are also a few really good resources online, too, like the German Sign Language dictionary, and I also very much like the look of Signing Savvy, which I wish were available in DGS.

Given our oralist past, it's not surprising that there is more material online, though. Most of my linguistics lecturer's deaf DGS teachers were forbidden to sign in class at their school back in the day. If they did sign, which the hearing teachers would interpret as being fidgety and not paying attention, they'd go so far as to tie their hands behind their backs.

Signing in general was frowned upon, the teachers couldn't speak DGS, as the central idea was to train them how to to lip-read instead, as DGS wasn't recognised as a language at all.

Until, oh, 2002 or so.

Go, Germany.

I have a student I tutor who is difficult, mostly because she is homesick and really demotivated.

Homesick because she's from Siberia and she gets tearful whenever she talks about her home. Last time she was rendered incapable of participating in class for twenty minutes because she saw a map of Europe and the East lying about before class and spent five minutes looking at her former home, then sat there, brooding, sullen. She was so bubbly when she came in, and this is not the first time she said she'd remembered something from home and went quiet.

Demotivated because they're analysing poetry, and she can't be bothered because she doesn't see the point both of poetry, what the particular pieces I bring in are about (they're supposed to work with Romantic poetry, and the Golden Age poets are a good match for obvious reasons), and why analysis is a good idea.

Now I'm thinking about bringing in a few poems in Russian which deal with similar subject matter as the German poems we're doing in class. I'm not sure it's such a good idea because I don't want her to feel bad, obviously. Still, it'd be an excuse to pick a native speaker's brain on Pushkin in the original, and possibly even Achmatova, because she's obsessed with Stalin's Russia, although if anything is likely to depress her, this'd probably be most likely to.

Current Mood: curious

I went shopping the other day and saw this:

Can anyone guess what I read? Instead of "Back Oblaten", that is? Does that happen to anyone else, or is it just me? I'm sometimes doubting my sanity. What I read doesn't have anything to do with didactics, but it does show my ongoing mental involvement with the memory of my previous exams, in this case, my translation exam.

Current Mood: amused

"Sky: from ON sky: "cloud," from PGmc *skeujam: "cloud, cloud cover", from PIE base *skeu-: "to cover, conceal". Meaning "upper regions of the air" is attested from c.1300; replaced native heofon in this sense. In ME, the word can still mean both "cloud" and "heaven," as still in the skies, originally "the clouds.""

Today, "sky" is the word for "cloud" in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. "Cloud" only became the word for "cloud" by the thirteenth century due to metaphoric extension - it used to mean "formation of rocks" (OE: clud).

The word for cloud used to be weolcan, which is the origin for the word "welkin",which is obviously very close to the modern German word: "Wolke".

On a related note - can anyone recommend Skeat's etymological dictionary? It seems to be fairly affordable (in contrast to Klein's and Partridge's) but I'd like something a little more up to date, yet inexpensive.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: List, Hannover

Hartmann writes slash, too:

"hie huop sich herzeminne
nâch starkem gewinne.
si minneten sunder bette:
diu minne stuont ze wette,
sweder nider gelæge,
dem wart der tôt wæge.
mit scheften si sich kusten
durch schilte zuo den brusten
mit solher minnekrefte
daz die eschînen schefte
kleine unz an die hant zekluben
und daz die spiltern ûfe stuben." (Erec, 9106-9117)

( Translation )

Now, I know, male bonding, minne was a general term for love at the time this was written, the modes of feeling displayed in medieval texts are sometimes strange to our sensibilities, and Erec is all about different kinds of minne. I know that. But still.

Passionate kisses? With lances? Really?

I probably need to get from the medieval texts and get some coffee, or some fresh air.

Current Mood: silly

The schuppin o' the Warl.

(translation by Henry Paterson Cameron, 1921)

I' the ingang God schuppit the hevin and the erd. And the erd wes wust and vide; and the mirk happit the face o' the depe: and the Gheist o' God steerit apo' the face o' the watirs.

And quo' God, Lat thar be licht: and licht wes. And God saw the licht, that it wes guid: and God sinder't the licht frae the mirk. And God ca'd the licht Day, and the mirk He ca'd Nicht. And thar wes e'enin and thar wis mornin, ae day.

And quo' God, Lat thar be a lift i' the mids o' the watirs, and lat it sinder the watirs frae the watirs. And God schuppit the lift, and sinder't the watirs whilk war aneath the lift frae the watirs whilk war abune the lift: and it wes sae. And God ca'd the lift Hevin. And thar wes e'enin and thar wes mornin, a saicond day.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: loving

I'll be doing an oral report on Scots in a seminar on the varieties of English after Christmas, and I am thinking about using this example to introduce what the video says is the Tayside accent:

There are a surprising number of eager Scots who have uploaded guides to their accent or lessons (such as Learn Scottish with The Hedrons, or John's Scots Language Primer), and there's also a group of people who are doing recordings in Scots - like the group of people who are uploading the Bible in Scots.

Here's Psalm 23:

I really miss this accent.

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Location: unfortunately, not Glasgow
Current Music: Interview with David Crystal

Ich was ein chint so wolgetan from the Carmina Burana (carmina amatoria, no. 185) is one of my favourite songs, even though it's basically about rape (the story is basically this: a young country girl, picking flowers, meets a man who lures her back to some linden trees and has sex with her against her will. The song is a mixture between Middle High German and Medieval Latin, and is clearly a comic song).

Crocky brought home a version from a music project and it's so awesome I fell in love with it, in spite of the text. It probably reflects the culture and the idea of humour from back in the day very well. I did not find the song from that project anywhere online, but an example of a similar idea of what the melody must have sounded like can be found on this CD, it's no.7.

( This is the text )

( English version by David Parlett )

( Modern German translation )

Below is an excerpt from the codex, featuring the writing and the notation. In the space above the text you can see the earliest forms of musical notation, neumes, which allow a very rough idea of what this song must have sounded like.
These are unheightened neumes, neumes without staff-lines, and therefore allow only a very rough idea - oddly enough, as notation with staff lines was technically known in the days when the Codex Burensis was supposedly composed, which is around 1230, although possibly not so much for secular music. The songs for which they do have melodies thus were all assembled through concordances with other manuscripts. From what I know, there is no explanation for why adiastemic neumes were used in the collection, especially as the collectors were clearly learned enough to know about the other notation systems. (While trawling the internets for more information on this, I came across this utterly awesome project devoted to digitalising neumes.)

The songs in the collection are attributed to the Goliards, German, English, Italian and French vagrant monks from the profane order of "St Golias", who were, in contrast to other monks, not averse to wine, woman, and song. They were clerical students who travelled from university to university or just generally travelled. The songs do offer a lot of evidence of their education - there are both paragraphs in Latin as well as quotes from philosophers and scholars. The Goliards were following the probably fictional "St. Golias" and were very critical of the political powers and the church, and wrote satirical poems and songs to express their discontent, but also bawdy songs and tales.
If this attribution is correct, that would make the codex an example of around 778 years old student culture, which is somehow awesome.

Page from the Codex Burensis with Ich was ein chint

I really should stop reading several books at the same time. It usually means I don't finish all of them.

25.

Dress Your Family in Cordoroy and Denim, David Sedaris.
I have to admit that after reading the enthused voices of various newspaper critics on the first page I would have expected something completely different, but I am by no means disappointed. I love the main character, Sedaris' style and the way he effortlessly combines autobiographic episodes with social commentary and humour.
Not as "Hilarious!!!" as the critics said, but I love it nontheless. Or maybe I misunderstand the meaning of "hilarious". I always thought that that meant something like "pant-wettingly funny", but that's not what this book is to me; it has a rather heart-warming, if sometimes slightly wry humour? Hmm.

( So complete was their power that I actually felt honoured when one of them hit me in the mouth with a rock. He'd gotten me after school, and upon returning home, I ran into my sister's bedroom, hugging my bloody Kleenex and crying, 'It was Thad!!!' )

24.

Who cares about English Usage?, David Crystal.
Oh, this is a book that several of our prescriptive grammarians need, need, need to read. It's both short and also a really funny read, and illustrates some of the things very nicely which grammar nazis on the intarwebz regularly throw fits about and which are just evidences of language changing, as it tends to. Good heavens.

("S.O.S., as everyone knows, stands for 'Save Our Syntax'. At various places in this book, I'll be discussing under this heading a grammatical point which regularly causes people to send up distress rockets, and demand linguistic lifejackets.")

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: RRZ Hamburg
Current Music: Scratch-scratch-scratch sound of the wheel of my neighbour's mouse, scrolling

23.

Drachen, by Joseph Nigg. (How to raise and keep a dragon)
This probably doesn't even count as a book, but it is so incredibly cute I wanted to include it.

22.

The English Language - a guided tour of the language, by David Crystal. For my semester, or at least the WS0203 IELS course, the Welsh professor probably is the godfather of Linguistics, as we were treated to a taped lecture he held in Hamburg a few semesters before by our teacher, Ada Whitaker.
("Accommodation has gotten me into the worst sort of trouble. I was talking to another arts enthusiast in Glasgow the other day, and we were agreeing about funding and exhibitions and all sorts of other topics, and after a while, Ah felt me voice go like thes. And then it happened. My partner in conversation was delighted and asked, 'Are ye from Glasgow?" Now, there's the problem - the Glaswegians are used to having their accent ridiculed, and react rather violently, so what was I supposed to say? 'No!' - he would think that I was making fun of him, and he would hit me. 'Yes!' - 'Which part of Glasgow?' - 'Uh, I don't know!' - and he would hit me again.")

21.

Eric, or Little by Little, by Frederic William Farrar.
A boarding school novel. A gripping tale of the snares of moral corruption that lurk behind every corner in the every-day life of a schoolboy in the nineteenth century (like cheating in exams, smoking the pipe, or using bad language that god does not delight in, oh my).
Most of the conflicts that arise between the students and the teachers seem absolutely ludicrous (one boy pinned a note that said "[teacher] is a surly devil" to the board and did not confess when he had the choice. As a punishment, he was "tried" in a mock trial by the entire student body. Their punishment for him was making him "walk the gauntlet", a beating from all of his fellow students. He was also subsequently caned in front of the entire school by the headmaster and expelled afterwards) from today's perspective - or at least my perspective, but it is still a charming window into a world that is comparatively whole and simple.

20.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot.
Mostly because I couldn't remember what happens towards the last third of the novel. I like it a lot, although there are parts that are incredibly tedious, and parts that are incredibly charming.

19.

Reading Lolita in Teheran, by Azar Nafisi. (Reading "Lolita" in Teheran - a memoir in books)
A fascinating read with many unbelievable insights into the daily life of an Iranian college professor. It made many of the things I already know about more real and thereby more horrifying.

18.

Mein Herz so weiß,by Xavier Marias. (A Heart so white)

17.

Homeland, by R. A. Salvatore.
Ever since duckygirlrocks wrote that entry in her LJ about the main character I wanted to read the series.
It is good so far, although I had to take the book back to the library before I finished reading it, though, so I still need to take it out again to find out how it actually ends. Needless to say, someone else has it in their clutches now and won't give it back.

Current Mood: recumbent

Segesta oppidum est pervetus in Sicilia, iudices, quod ab Aenea fugiente a Troia atque in haec loca veniente conditum esse demonstrant.

That he should have had the time to do that at all while he was fleeing is a miracle. I certainly would not have stuck around to found the odd village while I was on the run, especially considering he was carrying around Anchises.

I never realised how much I had forgotten, but at the same time, it's vaguely reassuring how to realise how many of the things I learnt back in 2002 are still there. Too bad that my motivation deteriorated towards the end and I don't have the sound basis of half remembered knowledge on the subjunctive and more complex constructions involving relative clauses that I have for most other things.

I've spent the day I should have used to write my various papers poring over the speech against Verres, and while I can absolutely sympathise with the Sicilians, I'm lost in the constructions more often than not. It would be fun, reading Cicero again (... even though, irrationally, after reading Harris's Imperium, my sympathy for Cicero has diminished greatly because he left Terentia, who was one of my favourite characters in the novel) if there wasn't ( this horrible exam at the end of it all. )

Other than renewing my acquaintance with Cicero's language and works I've spent the day fangirling Michael Praetorius and Giorgio Mainerio (especially the ( Schiarazula Marazula ). One of my favourite pieces ever, probably due to happy memories with

angie_21_237 and Angelo Branduardi's version and holiday tapes back in 1999.

Ok, back to Verres and his collection.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: Uelzen
Current Music: Johann Hermann Schein - Suite No 4 in D Major

Some good things do come of reading texts for education courses. I proudly present: the education buzzword bingo!

Create your own buzzword bingo cards here.

Also, feel free to add education buzzwords. I realise some of these are not really that inventive, but I found it hard to come up with 25 buzzwords, after all.

Current Mood: cynical
Current Location: Hamburg

I just heard it!!

Woman in the library: "... I dinnae ken if..."

*blinks* Wow! A Scots speaker!!!!

Current Mood: surprised

Reading all the texts on the various didactic theories makes me wonder how those of my fellow students are getting on with it whose native language is not German.
They are better off than us in some cases of course, since some of those texts seem to be written by an author who wanted to demonstrate that he is a balanced bilingual of German and Latin - the French students may have advantages there.

Especially the length of the sentences puts me in mind of what Mark Twain wrote in 1880 on the German language, in The Awful German Language:

( Parenthesis )

Die deutsche Verbklammer... terrible.

My sincerest condolences to all who endeavour to learn my mother tongue. If it wasn't mine, I wouldn't try, I fear. It's worse than French, and I completely failed at that.

Love and *hugs* to all!

And get well soon, Sad.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: "Illuminati" audio book

I love Scots. Especially Scots NOT talking as fast as I do.
This one, a landlord from Glasgow, did not. He was generally charming and helpful and I feet that my English can be sooo inadequate. Yes, of course, I can communicate, and I can also express complex ideas and whatnot, but for some subtleties it is just not subtle and quick enough. But all the same, I was able to express what I wanted and he described me the flats, sounds good so far, only that I am 'a bet errly to luik fa' a flat if ye want tae meeve in in September.'

Strangely, he apparently felt compelled to remark on how well he does get along with German students and that the last German tenant he had was a charming, nice and wonderful person he never had any troubles with and how he prefers students from abroad to English students and that if we are as nice as his tenant used to be he would be pleased to have us.

He was being kind, but it once more reminded me of the fact that I am going to be a foreigner from September on. Is it easy to be German abroad? I somehow do not think so, but then, the Scots are so charming that maybe it won't be bad at all.

Especially Scots spelling things out are cute.
"And the last part of the E-mail address is "prudential", that's p-r-u, d like dentist, e like... elephant, n like... nine, t like teeth, i like... icon, eh like eepple, l like... like."

I hope I have been polite enough - it is easy to make typically German mistakes even as an advanced learner which make the speaker sound totally impolite and even rude. And I am not sure I am trained enough to think of these little polite phrases quick enough when I speak, German and English structures battling in my head - I am never sure what I'll say until I've said it, and then, it is too late. Ah, well. All a matter of training.

Will stop now, I have to read 30 papers my Psychology class has written. The teacher has offered me to have a look at them because I have taught that class the two week before the test. I am curious what they have got to say on the topic, a few of them have been really good... and some more than only mildly disorganised.

Some of them wrote me letters to give me some feedback! They are so adorable. All in all they liked my classes and thought I am a good teacher because I talked to them a lot and let them talk among themselves about the things we were dealing with most of the time. Apparently, they liked that. Not that that is what people generally do in 11th year or anything... They also like the way I explain things, and that is what makes me really, really happy. Gave my ego a real boost, that did.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: The phone ringing

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Mothwing

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January 2022

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Roads to Safe Places

Uton we hycgan hwær we ham agen, ond þonne geþencan hu we þider cumen

Entries tagged with language

German Sign Language

from: The Seafarer

Deor

Good things

Reality check

"slut shaming" in NSM

Book habit

German EFL learner homophones

DGS

A Russian dilemma

Get out of my brain, please?

Completely useless discovery of the day: Sky.

Erec/Mabonagrin = OTP

Genesis 1

Scots

Ich was ein chint so wolgetan

Book

50 book challenge

Saturday with Cicero

Bingo!

blinks

The Awful German Language

Eh, like Epple.

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January 2022

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