Category: Language stuff

My friend Yenabo and I look at a lot of picture books together.  She talks about them in mmmBELLYmay while I look at the pictures.  Having the pictures makes what she’s saying understandable, even if it’s stuff I’ve never heard before.  That, in geek-speak, is a novel utterance.

I was tickled by the novel utterance that came out of this book:  “The fox is wearing clothes.” 

It must be wearing clothes, because foxes are red, not yellow.  We had a good laugh, which is always nice when you’re stretching your brain as far as it will go.

Next week I’m going to go to a village that I haven’t been to before, and start spending one night a week there.  I just might bring a picture book with me and see what other novel utterances we come up with.  Never a dull day in mmmBELLYmay land!

PS  This is an old post that seems to never have posted.  Can anyone tell me how to make Windows Live Writer work right?  But, I did indeed bring this book to the village, and many novel utterances were uttered.  Now I’m in the States, but this post isn’t too outdated, since I brought my recordings of the chats Yenabo and I had about this book home to practice with.

Besides, my nieces are always coming up with lovely novel utterances, as exceptional nieces do.

This morning I was teaching French by giving commands for my students to follow.

Me:  "Sentez l'orange !"  (Smell the orange!)

Students:  Pause, puzzled.  Finally, one starts swaying a little bit and kind of chanting "L'orange, l'orange, l'orange."  The others join in.

Me:  Very confused.

Then I realized what was going on.  mmmBELLYmay doesn't make a difference between "s" and "sh" in words, they just alternate freely.

So, my students heard "Chantez l'orange !"  And so they did.  They sang "the orange" very nicely actually.  Relevance Theory at work, my friends, powerfully at work. 

This has come up before when we've told stories about Jesus chasing demons out of people.  "Chasser" becomes "sachet", and I guess we have Jesus putting demons in plastic bags.  Hmmm.

So, my dear francophone friends, I need your help.  I'm going to tackle s/sh confusion, and to do that I need sets of words in French that differ only in those two sounds.  (Like sin/shin in English, in case any non Francophone/nonlinguist cares.)  Minimal or near minimal pairs as it were, O fellow linguists, preferably nice concrete nouns or verbs we can act out.

Last night I went to a Tex-Mex restaurant.  They had tortilla chips on the menu, which was even in English.  So we ordered them.  This is what we got. 

A fried tortilla with fries on top. 

Fries=chips in British English.

So, tortilla chips. 

Word for word translation can lead to serious miscommunication.

The fries were good, so this was not a serious miscommunication, just a good laugh.

This is ridiculous, but fantastic.   Two weeks ago, you had me, an American, teaching a course on how to learn language to Africans who all speak at least four languages.  Yeah, because I'm so good at it and they're not.  Right. 

But, they wanted someone from my organization to come and teach them some techniques, so I did, and they were gracious and gave me a lovely dress (which I've washed but not ironed yet) as a thank you.  It was actually a great week, and all the participants said that what they learned would help them.  But still, who should be teaching who?  Whom? Huh?

I put a photo album of the week called 'language learning' on here, it's on the left hand side of the blog, if you're interested.

Further ridiculousness is an American teaching Africans how to tell stories.  That was last week.  Of course, I was helping them learn to craft memorable and accurate stories from the Bible, not improving on their storytelling skills, so it's a little less absurd, but still.  I'm just saying.

Humbling to have the world's best language learners and storytellers want you to share the little bit you know with them…

This week, I’m teaching West Africans the language learning techniques that I’ve been using.  Great stuff.  It takes some modification, though.

One concept is that language is like an iceberg.  What you can actually say is like the tip of the iceberg.  There’s lots more that you can passively understand that can’t be seen but is floating under the water.  Our task as language learners is to move the words from the bottom of the iceberg up to the top, where we can use them as well as understand them.

Lovely analogy.  Let’s see how it would work here.

Ok, you know ice cubes?  Well, there are places in the world where there are very big ice cubes floating in the sea.  Huge ones, bigger than trucks.  So big, actually, that if a huge passenger ship hit one it would sink, and a band would play while it was sinking and a movie would be made about it, and a Canadian woman would sing about it…

So, I’m not going to use that in the workshop.  My first idea was to talk about a yam instead.  They’re big on the bottom, underground.  But, the leaves that are on top are not edible.  Not perfect.   Then someone suggested I use a hippo-you can only see the eyes when they’re floating in the river, and they’re big underneath.  I’m not sure everyone at the workshop will have seen a hippo, though, so I decided to use a cayman.  I think those are pretty common, I’ve seen them from the north to the south.  The one in the picture is in a cement tank in someone’s yard in the capital city.  Where I live, there was so much rain a few years ago that the road flooded.  People waded across it.  One person had their dog with them, though, and as the dog was swimming across-gulp!  Dinner for the cayman.

So.  Language learners have a cayman of language in their brain.  We’ll see how that flies.  Any suggestions for next time?  They don’t have to be serious!

Want to try your hand at a little language learning and analysis?  The data below is from my language learning notes. See if you can figure out how to make the plural of the mmm-BELLY-may word for "fish".  Post it in the comments to see if you're right, don't worry about the exact characters, I'll know if you got it or not.

 

English	mmm-BELLY-may singular	mmm-BELLY-may plural
goat	kÿÞ buÎoÎkÿ	siî buÎoÎsi
cat	kÿÞ nýÎnÎtikÿ	siî nýÎnÎtiîsi
fish	kÿÞ paÎakÿ	????

 

Notes:  The backwards “c” – ý-  is pronounced like the vowel in “ cot.”  The backwards “3” -ÿ- is pronounced like the vowel in “bed.”  The lines above the vowels mark tone.  Ask me about tone after I’ve had a few more months to study it back in Benin!