Language
Monday 18th January
Isn’t language complicated?
I was thinking of teaching Japanese some time in the next couple of years. My ideas are good, but my knowledge is still a little behind where I could consider myself an ‘authority’ on the language. I could currently manage a 30 minute talk for the ‘getting old disgracefully’ club or cub-scouts.
I am, however, taking GCSE Japanese in the summer and downloaded the teachers’ lesson plan list from Edexcel with the theory that if I create a complete GCSE Japanese course, then by the end I will have covered everything I need for the exam. And I’ll have a complete GCSE Japanese course saved on my computer should I wish to use it. (My current Japanese teacher has gone very unstructured which is a pretty bad thing since we only have 38 hours of teaching left before the exam, and some people came in with zero knowledge).
But anyway that started me thinking… what about English. How much knowledge do you need to have of English to be considered an authority? That led on, by some strange mental wranglings to the word “shopping”. The subtleties therein are amazing. We all use English, and know how to use it, but could we explain it? Probably not in some cases.
Shopping
There are two activities we can talk about:
“shoppping” is an activity where you go to shops and buy things.
“the shopping” is an activity where you go to shops and buy things.
However, you “go shopping”, while you “do the shopping”. And what of the implications?
“shopping” is a fun activity done for leisure.
“the shopping” is a chore done for survival.
Of course, “the shopping” is also the word for the bags of stuff you brought into the house which needs to be put into cupboards.
My Japanese is just coming to the stage where these sort of nuances are starting to matter. It’s a whole new can of worms world.
Anyway, enough of that… just thought I’d throw in a fun word seen today:
常電導磁気浮上式鉄道 or joudendoujikifujoushikitetsudou which is a non-superconducting maglev train. Who’d'a thought it?
One of the most fascinating things about ideographic languages is that there’s such a huge difference between literal and common translations. For example, “Non-superconducting maglev train” has parts of about six English words in it, but I count at least 10 characters in the line you posted. (The spacing looks close so the characters kind of run together on my screen.)
I once asked a high school friend, David Tang, why his parents’ Chinese restaurant had four characters in its name when the English name only had three words. He explained that in his language, there was no one word meaning “restaurant,” so it was a combination of the word for “meal” and the word for “house.” I imagine that Japanese is similar.
ScottJ
18 Jan 10 at 18:19
Cripes. Is German like that, where they put lots of words together to form a bigger one eg Fernsehenapparat. I would imagine many languages reduce the options, like english, Swahili, or some creoles, to make the word and usage as simple (and more difficult for forreners) as possible. Like Shopping
lordhutton
18 Jan 10 at 21:08
“Shopping” – blowing the whistle on. “Blowing the whistle” – oh, to hell with this. I love it, though!
Lois
19 Jan 10 at 08:55
Yes, language is very complicated, you must be doing well if you’re starting to notice little nuances like that in Japanese!
The vast majority of people learning a second language in adulthood never reach a native-like competence of those kinds of things… especially one that’s as different from English as Japanese. It’s as if people who grew up with a language have certain “instincts” about it that are very difficult (near-impossible!) for a foreign learner to acquire.
Jess
19 Jan 10 at 15:55
You ‘go shopping’ because in that context the word ’shopping’ is acting as a participle of the verb ‘to shop’. Just in the same way that you ‘go walking’ or ‘go climbing’.
When you ‘do the shopping’, ’shopping’ is an abstract noun representing the act of buying provisions.
When you ‘put the shopping away’, ’shopping’ is a concrete noun representing the physical bundle of stuff that you bought.
All good old-fashioned grammar!
Sam
20 Jan 10 at 13:57
lol @ grammar boy. There ya go, Stu! Fixed!
sweavo
20 Jan 10 at 17:50
Yeah! Good. Easy!
Stu
20 Jan 10 at 17:51