3: Nuggets of Language Nerdiness

Welcome to episode 3 of Nuggets of Language Nerdiness by The Sounds-Write Podcast! Do you know the difference between a language, a pidgin and a creole? What would a writing system look like if it could convey tone of voice and stress? What are false cognates? Join us as we explore these questions and more in this episode. Enjoy!

Some helpful links and sources:
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What is a language
What’s The Difference Between A Pidgin And A Creole?
Pidgin's etymology
History of Jamaican Patwa
Jamaican Patois and the Power of Language in Reggae Music
How Deaf Children in Nicaragua Created a New Language
Pidgins and Creoles
BBC News Pidgin
Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It by Mark Seidenberg
False cognates

Transcript

Hello and welcome to The Sounds-Write Podcast. I’m the host, Laura, and this is episode 3 of the series Nuggets of Language Nerdiness, where I share with you 3 lovely snippets that will help you understand the English language better. 

Sounds-Write is a speech to print approach to teaching phonics based on decades of research on the science of reading and learning. For twenty years, we’ve been delivering our quality teacher training programs. You can find a whole host of information and free resources on our website linked in the show notes. On with the episode!

Do you know the difference between a language, a pidgin and a creole?

Let's start with languages. I'm sure everyone listening knows what a language is. A language is a system of spoken, signed or written symbols that humans use to express themselves. Interestingly, when I was looking for definitions of what a language is, many stated that languages are used by members of the same culture or country to communicate with each other. It's just not that simple, though. We may often associate languages as being used between people from the same country, but in Uganda, for example, there are over 40 spoken languages throughout the country. And on the other hand, Spanish is the official language of 21 different countries, each, obviously, with their own unique cultures. 

But, semantics aside, what happens when two groups of people who don't speak the same language find themselves living in the same community? What can they do to communicate with each other? Where would you begin if you had to communicate with someone with whom you don't share even a single word of a common language? Well, you might try using gestures and then learning a few of each other's words for things. The bridge between the two or more languages that develops is called a pidgin. It is the result of two or more languages being blended together by native speakers trying to communicate with each other. The word 'pidgin' itself comes from a Chinese pronunciation of the word 'business'. 'Business English', the form of English used by Chinese people when doing business or trade with the British, became 'pidgin English'.

A creole comes a generation or two after a pidgin, as children learn the pidgin as their mother tongue, and the grammar and syntactic rules become solidified. Mother tongue speakers of pidgins force the pidgin into grammatical rules and make it consistent. This process is called creolisation and the languages that come out of the process are called creoles. Creoles are fully-fledged languages with a consistent grammar and syntax and wide vocabularies.

But, not all pidgins turn into creoles. If, for example, one of the languages spoken within the community becomes more popular, the pidgin may be wiped out before it has the chance to become a creole. Creoles form only under a very specific set of conditions.

Jamaican Patois, for example, is a language that developed from English, Spanish, Arawak and several West African languages. When Jamaica was colonised by the Spanish and then the English, slaves were brought to the island. The enslaved people often came from different places and didn't have a shared language with each other, let alone the plantation owners and the indigenous population. And so, a pidgin was born, combining words and sounds from these various languages. Over the centuries of colonial rule, the pidgin became a creole, the Jamaican Patois that is spoken today. And, in a full circle moment, there are a number of words in British English slang that come from Jamaican Patois. Words like 'mandem', 'wagwan' and 'ting' were all introduced by Jamaican and other Caribbean immigrants to the UK and are widely used in the UK today.

But pidgins and creoles don't just develop in spoken language. Another story of linguistic innovation comes from Nicaragua in the 1970s and 80s, when the first school for deaf students was established in Managua, the capital, and deaf Nicaraguans were able to socialise with each other in groups for the first time. Teachers at the schools primarily used lip reading and fingerspelling to communicate with students. Fingerspelling is where you spell out words using gestures that represent letters of the alphabet. However, as you can imagine, this was incredibly laborious and frustrating for the students. So, much like in other contexts where lots of people are brought together without a common language, students began developing a pidgin using signs they'd developed and used at home in order to communicate with each other. As this became more established across the schools, and older students began teaching younger students, it became a creole. This sign language is now known as the Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua. It's amazing to think that a group of students created a language in the playground.

There's a brilliant video on this topic that I've linked to in the show notes, that's worth watching if you're interested in learning more about pidgins and creoles.

A final note on this is that pidgin as a type of language is not to be confused with Nigerian Pidgin, which is actually a creole spoken in Nigeria. It is a language that has retained the name Pidgin, even though it's not actually a pidgin anymore. BBC World Service provides BBC News Pidgin, which is worth taking a look at if you're interested in seeing an English-based creole language in print. 

Stress in sentences

When we say that we teach from speech to print or that print is spoken language written down, we mean this with a few obvious caveats. Of course, the English we read and write is different in some ways to the English we speak and hear. In written English we try not to use fillers: words such as 'like', 'um' and 'you know?'. That's why listening to this podcast might sound a little different to hearing me talk freely. I have to admit that I'm reading from a script, which is why I'm managing to avoid saying 'um' all the time. Of course, fillers mainly just serve as a placeholder to allow us time to shape our thoughts before we speak them, but there are other, more useful, elements of spoken language that didn’t quite make their way into our writing system. 

Where we place the stress in sentences is very important for conveying meaning. In his book, Language at the Speed of Sight, Mark Seidenberg gives a brilliant example of how changing the stress in a sentence can drastically change its meaning. His example is ‘Fred didn’t take the test yesterday’. By changing the stressed word, it conjures up all sorts of different meanings when you hear it. 

Fred didn’t take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.) 

Fred didn’t take the test yesterday. (He took something else.) 

Fred didn’t take the test yesterday. (He took it some other day.)

Each of these gives you a different perception of Fred, one that could be more or less damning depending on where you place the stress. If you’re speaking to someone in person, one of these phrases might be paired with a raised eyebrow or a knowing look, that tells you even more about Fred and his test-taking. When we read this in print, we lose a lot of that contextual information like tone of voice, stress and body language that is key in spoken communication. We can underline the stressed word or put it in italics, but it’s just one example of how we lose some of the context. Writing conventions, says Seidenberg, can tell us some things about meaning, but not everything. But what would a writing system look like that was able to convey every bit of information that spoken language does? Like the ability to convey fear or amusement in a sentence, or the fact that a sentence is dripping with sarcasm. It might be useful to know those things. I can certainly think of a few examples on social media of sarcasm or humour not coming across in writing leading to arguments and Twitter feuds. 

However, Mark Seidenberg says that adding these extra elements into print comes with an added cost: the time to write, the time to read, the paper, the ink, the time needed to learn all the symbols for these elements. According to him, it wouldn’t be worth it and could, in fact, make reading even harder. Although our writing system isn’t perfect for recording exactly how something is said and the intent behind it, it’s good enough. Most of the time, we can deduce whether Fred hired someone to take a test for him or whether he took his test last week based on context.

False cognates

In this final section, I’m going to tell you about false cognates. A word is cognate with another word when the two share the same linguistic derivation. For example, the words essential and essence come from the same root word, ‘essentia’ in Latin. These are cognates. So, false cognates are words that seem like they should share the same linguistic derivation but, in fact, do not. Probably the most interesting example of this are the words isle and island. Contrary to what you might assume when hearing or reading the two words, they actually come from different roots. ‘Isle’ comes from the French word ‘ile’ and before that, the Latin word ‘insula’. While the word ‘island’ comes from Old English ‘iegland’ and before that the Proto-Germanic words for ‘thing on water’ and ‘land’. Amusingly, the spelling of ‘island’ was modified to include the ‘s’ because of its similarity to the word ‘isle’ in the 16th century. Other false cognates, or words that sound similar but don’t share the same linguistic derivation are ‘religious’ and ‘sacreligious’, ‘ingenious’ and ‘ingenuity’ and ‘fear’, ‘fright’ and ‘afraid’. Even though they sound like they should come from the same root word, they actually don’t! 

One example of a special case of false cognates that I’d always wondered about is why you hear words like ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ for parents in so many different languages. I’d always wondered if they were related. The answer is that they sort-of are, but not in the way you might think. If you’re a speechie, this might seem quite obvious to you, but it definitely surprised me. When babies begin babbling, they often begin by producing the easiest sounds. These are the open vowel /a/ and bilabial consonants, such as /m/, /p/ and /b/ (bilabial meaning bi-two and labial-relating to the lips, so sounds articulated using both lips). Combinations of these sounds are among the first that babies produce when they begin babbling, and parents associate these sounds with themselves. So, it’s not a coincidence that ‘mama’ means ‘mother’ in Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Swahili and many more. And those where it’s different are often combinations of those same bilabial consonants and /a/, such as ‘ama’ for mother in Nepali, ‘maa’ for mother in Bengali, and ‘ama’ for father in Tagalog. 

False cognates are slightly different to another term you might have heard, especially in foreign language lessons at school, which is ‘false friends’. ‘False friend’ is often used synonymously with ‘false cognate’, but they are completely separate phenomena. This is when a word sounds very similar in two languages, but actually has different meanings regardless of whether the two words share their etymology or not. This is separate to ‘false cognates’ in that a pair of words does not have the same etymology if it is a false cognate. The English word ‘pretend’ and the French word ‘pretendre’ are false friends, as they have different meanings. In French, it means to claim. However, the words do share the same linguistic derivation. They both come from the Latin word ‘praetendere’. So, they are false friends but not false cognates. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this third episode of Nuggets of Language Nerdiness by the Sounds-Write Podcast. Just a quick note before I sign off - if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, which most of you do, you might not be able to click the links in the show notes. Either you can go to the podcast on Spotify or go to our website, click on news and The Sounds-Write Podcast, you’ll be able to see the clickable show note links there. 

Thank you so much for listening and see you next time!