SomethingAwful is a (generally not work-safe) comedy site that usually gets me laughing with every visit. Perhaps they’re most famous for “Photoshop Phridays“, but they have a variety of columnists and recurring features that are worth checking out for a quick laugh.

However, a recent edition of “Comedy Goldmine” is simply too magnificent not to feature here. The theme? Foreign Language Screw-Ups.

Although they’re all pretty funny, it seems like most of them can be broken down into a few different categories of speech error.

False Cognates

A foreign language word is considered to be a “cognate” if it’s similar in both sound and meaning to a word in one’s native language, and they both descended from the same source, either from a mother language or through borrowing. For instance, in Spanish, the word for ‘computer’ (computadora) is a cognate, as is the word for ‘volunteer’ (voluntario). These cognates happen frequently when two languages borrow heavily from the same language. In this case, English and Spanish both have many words with Latin roots.

However, it’s not uncommon for foreign language students to accidentally use a “false cognate”. These are, as you might suspect, words that sound very similar in two languages, but have different meanings. The textbook Spanish example is assistir (‘to attend’) and atender (‘to assist’). Sometimes, the mistakes can be innocent, but sometimes…

Frog writes…

Last year on a vacation to Cuba I rented a moped and managed to break it. When I returned it to the rental place I used my awesome high school Spanish to say I was ‘embarazado’ about what happened, meaning to say embarrassed. Turns out ‘embarazado’ means ‘pregnant’. I’m a guy.

Note, it’s not just English speakers who can make this mistake:

Dark Chicken writes…

This brother and sister I knew grew up in Mexico and were eating at a restaurant in the States. Well, the brother kept on bothering the sister, so she finally yelled, “Stop molesting me!” The restaurant went dead silent and everybody stared.

This comes from the false Spanish cognate, molestar, which means (completely innocently) ‘to annoy’ or ‘to bother’.

False cognates can make for some wonderful communication issues, but they’re not the only source of interlingual hilarity.

Secondary Meanings

In many languages, it’s common for words to have several meanings. Just like the English “cock” can either denote a male chicken or the male sexual organ, languages are littered with minefields of multiple meanings.

When a non-native speaker looks up a word in the dictionary, especially a small dictionary, it’s not uncommon to see several options listed. So, if a Spanish speaker wanted to tell a woman “You have a pretty cat” and looked the word up in a dictionary, there’s a decent chance that, quite innocently, he’ll use the word “pussy” instead and he’ll end up complimenting her genitalia. Here’s one wonderful example of a hilarious alternate meaning:

QueenOfMistakes writes…

The only thing I can think of was when I was in my German class and we’d been having a heatwave. I said “Ich bin heiss” (meaning “I am hot”), which made my teacher laugh.

Apparently, saying “Ich bin heiss” is one way of saying “I’m horny” in German.

This can also work the other way around. Sometimes, a language will have a word with two meanings, and in the other language, each meaning has a distinctive word.

Luebbi writes…

When I was in London with my class (German students), something hilarious happened at the airport. We where standing in a queue and some Brits came around and started to cut in line. A friend of mine yelled: “You can’t come here! There’s a snake here!”, which not only baffled the British couple, but made everyone else, including our teacher, laugh out loud.

The German word “Schlange” is used both for snake and queue, and he used the direct translation.

Grammatical Errors

Sometimes, you can have all the words right, but a little tiny grammatical error will get you.

Fhqwhgads writes…

Back in High School, while on a class trip to Italy, one of the guys was hitting on a local chick. He was doing well, until he used the word “bello” (instead of “bella”). She slapped him and walked away. Never call an Italian girl handsome.

Here, the writer failed to take into consideration the fact that in Italian (as well as in many other languages), adjectives are marked for gender. In English, we have separate words (a girl is “pretty” and a guy is “handsome”), but in Italian, that little tiny morpheme (unit of meaning) is able to completely derail even the most persuasive of pick-ups. The gender distinction can also change the meaning of words…

Mortanis writes…

Back in high school French, we had to pair off and interview your partner, then relate their day back to the class in French. A friend of mine interviewed a girl, and promptly reported to the class “She likes to play with her cat”.

But used the feminine for cat, which is slang for pussy. Was pretty enjoyable to watch our fairly attractive French teacher start snickering over something like that.

Misleading Mispronunciations

Nearly any foreign language one studies will have some sounds that are different from those in your native language. As a phonetics student, this brings me great joy, but when speaking another language, these differences can lead to some wonderful errors:

Ayreon writes…

“Cook” in Dutch is “kok” which is pronounced “cock”. A friend of mine once tried to “thank the cock for the nice meal” at a restaurant.

A co-worker of my dad’s name is Dick de Cock, which is a perfectly normal name in the Netherlands. However, when he got a promotion and suddenly had to travel all over the world, he got a lot of weird looks.

Here, I suspect that the Aspirated/Unaspirated distinction might be causing problems:

sewid writes…

Walking around crowded night markets in Taiwan after getting a taste of my first giant chicken schnitzel I asked my girlfriend how to say chicken schnitzel in Mandarin which she told me was “gi pai”

Much to her amusement when I misheard her, thinking she said it “gi bai” i loudly proclaimed in Mandarin to all around that I loved “gi bai”

Which I found out shortly sort of means I love vagina.

All it takes is a simple change in the voicing of a consonant to go from loving sausage to loving the polar opposite. Scary, huh?

Conclusion

There’s no shortage of ways to mess up in a foreign language. Between treacherous false-cognates, deceitful second meanings, grammatical gaffes and malicious mispronunciations, sometimes a second of speech may seem like an ocean of opportunity for offensive communication.

However, the beauty of it all is that generally, people laugh when such speech errors are made. If somebody knows you’re a foreigner, you often get the benefit of the doubt.

The moral of this story: Next time you’d like to compliment a girl’s pussy, you’d better have an accent, or else you’re going to be very, very pregnant.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Humor, Language Usage, Sociolinguistics, Speech and Grammar Errors, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 15 Comments


Prologue: This post is around 6 months in coming, so I apologize for the length. I do hope you’ll find it interesting nonetheless.

I came into Linguistics without a real direction, specialty or desire. Truthfully, it was more fate than anything that found me here. Today, I’d like to discuss a little bit of how I found Phonetics, why I love it, and why you might love it too.

Linguistics and Fate

When I started college, I was a Russian language major. I took a year worth of Russian language and culture classes, but I rapidly realized that their teaching style was going to kill me. A “Non-Grammatical Approach” to teaching grammar strikes me as about as effective as a “Non-Driving Approach” to Driver’s Ed, and the Russian department’s adherence to it was driving me crazy. As it worked out, I should probably be sending “Thank you” notes to the people whose terrible textbooks drove me from the department, as their failings brought me to my true passion.

The fall of my Sophomore year, I enrolled in Linguistics 2000, “Introduction to Linguistics”, just out of curiosity. I didn’t know what Linguistics was, but I decided to take it anyways, chalking it up to “College is a time for experimentation”. Well, it grabbed me. Hard.

By midterms, I had added Linguistics as a second major. By finals, I was feeling liberated. By the start of the next semester, I had dropped the Russian major (studying the language on my own instead), and l leaped off into the Linguistic Unknown. I’ve never made a better decision in my life.

Phinding Phonetics

In my intro to Linguistics classes, we touched on all the different fields of Linguistics, but only barely so. We spent a day or two looking at slides of the various IPA characters, briefly discussed the fact that English has around 10 more vowels than everybody thinks we do, and then moved on to the next field.

However, Phonetics really reached out and grabbed me. Phonetics, simply put, is the study of sounds in language, and can involve how we make sounds, how we hear them, and even how sound waves transmit information. I picked up a book, started studying the IPA, and used it in my other side projects (mostly in language creation). As soon as I could, I enrolled in the actual undergrad phonetics course, learning more and more about Phonetics, and at that point, I realized I could no longer deny my love for the sounds of language. I found myself making more and more clicks, glides, and trills, even in bed as I was going to sleep, and sometimes, I found the sounds of speech more interesting than what people were actually saying. Last year, I took the Master’s level Phonetics course offered by my school, and it sealed the deal: I love Phonetics.

I want to share the gospel of speech production; I want to show people that speech is more than just an everyday occurrence, and I want people to know that the alveolar tap in “later” can be just as graceful and precise as any figure skater’s finest trick. I’m passionate about Phonetics, and I think it’s genuinely important. Let me try and explain why.

What do speech sounds have to do with invisible aliens?

All linguists need some background in Phonetics, even if they don’t find it as interesting as I do. I remember that in my undergrad phonetics class, a lot of people really didn’t like it, and even though they wanted to be linguists, they didn’t understand why. Well, I’m going to try and explain why you need Phonetics. Let’s use a metaphor here:

We’ve likely all seen bad Sci-Fi action movies. More specifically, you’ve probably seen a movie where they have to deal with an invisible enemy. Sometimes it’s a guy in an invisibility suit, sometimes it’s a killer alien, sometimes it’s a stealth ship. No matter what, they always lose three or four expendable characters to some invisible menace before they wise up to what’s going on.

Now, imagine you’re writing a grammar of a language that’s never been described before, but you’ve never really had any phonetics training. You’re making good progress, analyzing the structures, translating words, and figuring out what the speaker is doing. Then suddenly, disaster strikes. You’re stuck with these two (made-up) sentences:

1. nalo bi (meaning “He saw the shrimp”)
2. nalo bi (meaning “He saw the necklace”)

You’ve checked and rechecked your data, but every time you ask the speaker to say those two sentences, he or she tells you the same thing. You’ve checked with other speakers to make sure it’s not a context thing, and when you repeat them back, you’re either “mispronouncing it”, or their translation varies. At this point, you’ve got the Linguistic equivalent of an invisible alien attacking your grammar.

In our bad Sci-Fi movie, what usually happens once they figure out that the invisible aliens are, forgiving the internet meme, in their base, eatin’ their doodz? Well, the nerdy guy in the basement workshop rigs up a set of (ultraviolet/thermal/spectral/force)-imaging goggles, which let you see the aliens clear as day. Then, they all go outside with their spiffy goggles, kill the aliens, get the parts for their ship, and get back to Earth. In bad movies, all you need to do to defeat an invisible alien is to learn how to detect it.

So, you’re still stuck staring at the “nalo bi” issue in your language. To you, these words sound almost exactly alike, but to the speakers, they’re obviously different. This is where Phonetics training comes in handy.

Phonetics: Invisible alien killer extraordinaire

You see, when we’re very, very young (less than a year), we can hear the differences between all of the different speech sounds in the world (a search for “Infant Phonetic Inventory” will put you on the right track to learn more). However, we’re all raised with a language, and after a while, we learn to subconsciously throw out the sounds that don’t matter in our language. In English, we rapidly stop caring whether our vocal folds are closed or open when we start a word (this is important in the Samoan language), and when people make an “n” further back in their mouths at the start of a word, our brain just turns it into a plain, alveolar “n”.

This is just fine for a monolingual English speaker, but when we get out into the field or study another language, it can cause us to stop seeing invisible aliens. People could be making two distinct sounds, but because they’re not present in our language, we won’t hear them.

You go get some Phonetics training. You learn about how different sounds are made. You listen to recordings and tapes of other languages to sensitize our ears. We study how sounds interact, and how to produce them. We get our ears, our mouths, and our brains to open up and hear the world not as English speakers, but as linguists.

Then, you go back to our invisible alien. They say the first phrase, you hear “nalo bi”, like before. They say the second one, and suddenly, you hear the difference. It’s not “nalo bi”, it’s “ŋalo bi”! The tongue is further back in the mouth, where our K is, and you’ve just been mishearing. You say it back, using your new skill at making the velar nasal (ŋ) at the start of a word, and they understand you. Through the magic of phonetics, you not only see the invisible alien, but you understand it, and can live in harmony with it.

See? Phonetics is phun!

Phonetics is really vital for anybody learning linguistics (or, to a lesser extent, learning languages of the world). We’re raised with one specific sound system, and it bends our mind. The study of phonetics can help free our mind, and let you see the complexity, beauty, and grace of the sounds of language that you’ve been conditioned to forget.

It’s a wonderful field not only because of the subject matter, but because it’s constantly applicable. A particle physicist can only do their work with million-dollar machines in labs. An engineer needs tools and computers to do their work. For a linguist or phonetician to work, all we need are ears, a brain, and language. We’ve always got our ears and our brain, and there’s nothing more omnipresent in human existence than language.

So, if you need a new hobby that lets you work from anywhere, enjoy the beauty in small things, and even catch invisible aliens, Phonetics is for you.

If you’d like resources in getting started, shoot me an email, or just go to your local linguistics department. A word of caution, though: mentioning invisible aliens probably won’t look too good on your application. We like creative people, but.. yeah…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Tirades | 5 Comments


I was just reading a post on LinguLangu which discusses the “Grammar-Translation” method of language teaching. It’s an interesting methodology, and not all bad (from what I’ve seen), but a particular tenet of the method described jumped up and bit me. (Keep in mind that this isn’t the feelings of the author of the original post, just a description of a mindset)

Literary language is superior to the spoken language. Student’s studies are limited with target language’s fine arts and literature.

Now, you must realize that saying “language X is better than language Y” is a truly heinous offense to me, and every time somebody says something like it, an angel’s lexicon loses a word.

No languages are better, “more complete”, “less complex”, or otherwise elevated above any other languages. Hold on, I’ll say that again. No languages are better, “more complete”, “less complex”, or otherwise elevated above any other languages.

Seriously. For a language to be used by a native speaker, it literally MUST be complete, in such a way that anything which needs to be expressed, can be expressed through some means. Even in the case of a pidgin (a newly-formed language created from elements of two or more other languages), when the first group of children are raised speaking only that language, they will fill in any holes in the grammar and make the language so it’s able to express anything one would need to. When a person is raised speaking a language, dialect, or sociolect, you can nearly guarantee that they’re speaking a fully functional language/dialect/sociolect.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t differences between the languages, and that some languages might not be easier in some areas. For instance, Russian has a nice, simple writing system, which is nearly phonetic (every letter represents the same sound, every time), but it has a very complex system of marking aspect (completion of an action). Similarly, Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) has a very nice way of ordering words and particles (morphemes) in a sentence, but the sound system is, to this English speaker, incredibly difficult and complex. Similarly, a language of South America might have more efficient words for describing rain, whereas another language might be more adept at snow description. However, different doesn’t mean anything is necessarily any better or worse.

So, this brings me to my final point: When people say nasty things about a language or dialect, they’re really saying nasty things about the people who use it. Mind you, I’m not talking about “language X has a complex sound system”, I’m talking about “language X is inferior to language Y”. No linguist worth his or her salt will ever tell you that a given language or dialect is “better” or “worse” than any other. That’s a social judgment, and it has nothing to do with the actual language or dialect. It really only shows the feelings of the speaker about the language’s users, and generally, it’s pseudo-intellectual snobbery.

Remember, any time you hear somebody disrespecting a language or dialect, it’s one of two things. Either the person talking really doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re knocking the language because they’re not willing to knock the people who speak it. Sometimes it’s both. Either way, at that point, it’s best to drop the Linguistics knowledge, put away the reference grammar, and grab yourself a raincoat, because although it might sound like actual intellectual discussion, they’re really just throwing mud on the playground.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Dialects and Idiolects, Language Acquisition, Language Usage, Sociolinguistics, Tirades | 7 Comments

Read older posts »

All content © Linguistic Mystic 2006-2012 unless otherwise indicated.
Please contact me for permission to reprint or repost.

Site Information

  • Categories

  • Latest Non-linguistic Posts

  • Archives

    • Site features