Why English Can Feel Like a Lawless Language

While we love all languages, English tends to get more of the spotlight at The Lingua File than other languages since it's our mother tongue. As our mother tongue, we didn't learn it in the same way as we did our second languages, so we have a vastly different understanding of it.

The first major difference we tend to find between English and our other languages is that, despite using English more fluently and with greater ease, we tend to understand significantly less about why we say certain things the way we do, having never studied them in the same depth as the rules we had to learn during foreign language tuition.

An American cowboy in Dakota Territory in the 1880s.

This means that when we speak English with non-native speakers, we are often asked questions about the language that we have never really considered or thought about. Proper grammar is drilled into us at a young age, so the weird nuances of English just become second nature to us.

Take time prepositions for example. We say in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening. However, we say at night. Sure, in the night exists, but we would rarely say it. We just know that "night" is used differently. I'm sure these exceptions are incredibly frustrating for those who are learning the language.

When you consider prepositions in general, the same type of exceptions that irk learners concerning time prepositions also occur with other prepositions, and can result in a lot of frustration when learners have to tackle them.

And what about pronunciation? For users of languages with a phonemic orthography (a language whose written symbols correspond directly to a given sound), English must be incredibly annoying. Why does the "u" sound different in unite and untie? They look almost identical to one another...

Don't forget phrasal verbs, too! They are so annoying for those learning English as a second language that we even dedicated an entire post to it!

Why You Should Make Mistakes in a Foreign Language

Learning a foreign language is rarely a simple thing. You have to learn tonnes of new vocabulary and words that may hardly resemble anything you've ever seen before. Then there are false friends, the words that look or sound exactly like words in your own language, but have a completely different meaning.

Even then, when you learn a few words, the syntax may be completely different to the syntax in your own language. In this case, you have to train your brain to recognise this in order to make yourself understood and to understand what you read and hear.

Then there's the grammar. Some people can learn grammar with little effort. Then there are people like me, who even struggle with grammar of their mother tongue.

In addition to almost completely changing the way you think, you also have to learn how to pronounce all the phonemes in a language. Learning to use an authentic accent in a foreign language can be difficult if your mother tongue doesn't share many of its phonemes with those of your new language.

It's unlikely that you will gain all this knowledge and all of these skills overnight. Just like learning a musical instrument, there are going to be a few wrong notes here and there. That's not a problem.

Making mistakes and learning from them can be one of the most useful tools in your language learning arsenal. The worst thing you can do is not talk or practice your new language just because you're scared of making a mistake.

Sometimes mistakes can be embarrassing, but in my experience, most people that I've met have always been very understanding to those learning a language. In fact, some of the errors I've made in the past have been amusing, such as telling an older lady that I was horny when I meant to say that I was warm, and telling a friend that I had diarrhoea when I wanted to say a cold. I've never made either of these mistakes since.

So if you're learning a language, don't worry! Make mistakes and learn from them. The improvements you'll make will far outweigh any embarrassment you may suffer from making mistakes.

What's the worst mistake you've made in a foreign language? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below.

Putting Up With Phrasal Verbs

Many native English speakers have probably never considered or even heard of the term phrasal verb, much like the many other nuances of languages that native speakers don't give a second thought. However, it's these nuances that learners of a language can struggle with, and in my experience, phrasal verbs are a pain in the proverbial arse of many people trying to learn English. So what exactly are they?

As you should know, verbs make things happen. However, they're quite awkward for language learners since you often need to learn a whole host of things just to use them correctly. In order to use a verb in English, you first need to learn the grammatical person, which usually dictates who is the active participant of the verb.

Once you know who the verb's about, you need to know when it took place and its grammatical tense. Sometimes the tense doesn't indicate time exactly, but we won't get bogged down in that just now.

This nebula is only slightly more complex than phrasal verbs.

So you think you've got verbs all mastered? Not quite! In English, phrasal verbs can change the entire meaning of a verb just by adding a word or two. For example, looking is not the same as looking for or looking after. The first indicates viewing or watching, while the second indicates searching, and the third indicates being responsible for something.

It's sort of crazy that sitting down and sitting up are different things in English (with the first referring to taking a seat and the second to adjusting your posture). How can putting be completely different if you put up with rather than put out (and take care with the latter!).

The thing about phrasal verbs is that the words they're composed of cannot work in isolation: you need the verb and either a preposition (words that usually indicate a place or time) or a particle (a word that requires the other word to have any meaning).

Despite phrasal verbs being useless in isolation, they also are incredibly versatile when used. The order of the words that make up phrasal verbs is not entirely fixed, meaning that they might not always appear in the order that you learned them. In fact, the phrasal verb "to put up with" is famous for being used awkwardly in order to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. While the quote isn't really from Winston Churchill, I still enjoy this syntactic monstrosity:

"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."

- Not Winston Churchill

This flexibility is the kind of awkwardness that non-native speakers find horrendously difficult to wrap their heads around, and who could blame them? It's absolutely ridiculous!

Are you learning English as a foreign language? What do you think of phrasal verbs? What is your favourite phrasal verb? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below.

5 Things Languages Could Do Without

If you hadn't already guessed, I love languages. However, languages are far from perfect. If you've ever had a misunderstanding, you know what I mean. While imperfections and subtleties are part of what makes languages amazing, here are a few things that I think would make languages easier for everyone if they were removed:

Gender

This is something the English language doesn't feature, which I'm so glad about. However, many other languages do have gendered nouns. Take the beautiful French language, for example. Nouns are either masculine or feminine and singular or plural. Thanks to the concept of objects being arbitrarily designated as one gender or another, you have to remember two different words for "the", le and la, and then when something is plural, you have to use les. This also means that adjectives "agree" with nouns, forcing everyone to have to learn different adjectives depending on the noun.

Pronouns or Conjugations

These two have to go hand in hand as you can't really get rid of them both. Pronouns help you identify who's doing what in a sentence. They're quite useful when verb conjugations are similar or identical. In English, a lot of verbs have the same conjugation regardless of the pronoun used. Try conjugating the verb "to speak" in the present tense:

I speak

You speak

He/She/It speaks

We speak

You speak

They speak

Without the pronoun, you'd probably have no idea who was doing the speaking. However, Spanish doesn't have the same problem with the verb hablar.

(Yo) hablo

(Tú) hablas

(Él/Ella/Usted) habla

(Nosotros) hablamos

(Vosotros) hablaís

(Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes) hablan

The reason the pronouns are in parentheses is due to the fact that in Spanish they're not necessary and can often be omitted. Of course, if there are two other people with you and one is a guy and the other is a girl, you can clarify who you mean with the use of either él (he) or ella (she). It would seem given the latter example, that you could either have one conjugation per tense, using pronouns for clarification, or a conjugation for each pronoun, meaning you don't need to use any pronouns.

Tense

Having a whole host of different conjugations to learn just because things happen in different tenses is crazy. Especially in languages where you have several new conjugations to learn every time you learn a new tense. British Sign Language deals with tense in an interesting way, marking when events take place by the position of the sign.

Of course, this can't be done in the written form of languages, but it could be done with temporal markers that indicate when events take place. We already have words for "future" and "past", so why not just say those along with one individual tense?

Case or Syntax

Since I've been using Romance languages for examples, I'm going to use Latin as my example here. Case is interesting as I can see how useful it can be, but absolutely hate having to learn it! Case, for those who don't know, is when a word changes to match its grammatical function in a sentence. This means words have various alterations depending on their function. There are 8 cases that can be found throughout a number of Indo-European languages.

English only uses a few of these because you can generally figure out a word's function from where it appears in a sentence. So why have both? Either have an unwavering syntax that allows users of a language to know exactly what a word does without any need for several cases, or a completely free syntax in which words appear in any order but make use of an obvious case, but never both!

Silent Letters, Diphthongs, and Irregular Spellings

What the hell are these even for? How about we just have a letter for each sound and leave it at that? We would probably have to accommodate a 40-letter alphabet to do it, though...

What do you reckon? What do you think languages could do without? Is there something in a foreign language that you think your mother tongue should have? Tell us in the comments below!

How Eugene Goostman Passed the Turing Test

As the headlines have been dominated by the World Cup recently, one of the news stories that fell by the wayside last week was the story of chatbot Eugene Goostman passing the Turing Test. If you aren't familiar with it, the Turing Test is a method for testing artificial intelligence posited by Alan Turing.

Alan Turing was a British mathematician who helped crack the Enigma code during World War II, in addition to being considered one of the most important pioneers of artificial intelligence. To simplify his test, Turing suggested that if a human participant could not tell whether simulated behaviour was that of an AI or a human, the AI will have passed the test.

While there are various ways to adjudicate the Turing Test, it is generally agreed that there are two main rules to follow when conducting the Turing Test:

1. The participant has five minutes to interact with the AI.

2. At least 30% of respondents must be fooled by the AI into thinking it is a real human.

The reason this news particularly interests us is because of how the test is conducted. Language is used as the primary indicator for participants as to whether or not they are speaking to an AI. In the most recent test, participants had a conversation with Eugene Goostman via typed chat. However, they were told that Eugene Goostman was a 13 year-old Ukrainian boy. As we said in our earlier post on the Turing Test, a human who does not speak English as their first language may be considered to be an AI by respondents.

The reverse can also be true. If participants are told that they are speaking to a 13 year-old Ukranian boy, they are likely to be more lenient when it comes to judging the responses of the AI, assuming that misunderstandings, odd answers, and incorrect grammar are all failings of the boy's age and mother tongue rather than that of the AI.

While we have no doubt that Eugene Goostman is an impressive piece of programming, we can't help but think that these results are exaggerated. Had people thought that they were talking to a native English speaker, would he have passed the Turing Test?

What do you think? Genuine AI or skewed results? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Why Can't We Talk To Animals?

Hamsters are not known for their linguistic abilities.

As humans, we enjoy the dizzying heights and supremacy of being the so-called superior beings of our planet. Some of the things that separate us from animals are our sentience, our culture, and our languages. That said, it certainly does not stop us from attempting to communicate with our furry friends.

When was the last time you found yourself talking to a dog, not just giving vocal orders but actually greeting them, asking how they are, or even just having a full conversation? Those with the restraint to not have full discussions with their pets will think of us as weird, but it's perfectly natural to humanise animals. Talking to plants apparently encourages them to grow. It's actually the vibrations that cause them to flourish rather than the quality of conversation that will make your prize-worthy turnips real contenders at the County Fair.

It's pretty clear that most animals can't understand the intricacies of our advanced communication, but it is certainly not black and white when it comes to whether or not animals can talk. Dogs don't really understand language, they understand tone. Much like when speaking with your girlfriend, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. They respond to tone and volume rather than distinguishing between phonemes, syntax and lexicon.

Cats have been shown to be able to learn commands and understand them, but since they are perhaps the most self-centred creatures on the planet, they often refuse to acknowledge anyone other than themselves.

Dolphins are also great in a military capacity.

Dolphins are said to communicate via a series of clicks and squawks, but deciphering their "language" has become difficult as they spend a lot of time underwater and are therefore hard to study.

Bees, much like art students, communicate solely through dance. They perform a series of motions in certain directions in order to define the location of pollen.

One scientist has spent years studying and decoding the noises of prairie dogs and the messages encoded in their chirps. Aside from being incredibly cute, it seems the little critters are more than capable of encoding information about potential threats, complete with descriptions and instructions on how to escape. It's hardly Shakespeare, but we may not be so highly elevated above these adorable little creatures.

It may not be a case of animals not having language, but rather us not speaking their language.

Rise of the Machines: Computational Linguistics

We've said before that Google Translate isn't very good, and it isn't. The main problem is that when we compare it to human translators, it's proven to be horrendous. However, the science behind it, known as computational linguistics, is very impressive.

If you've ever tried programming you know it's not the easiest subject. Programming languages follow a strict syntax that can rarely be broken. With natural languages you can make a mistake and be understood, whereas computers refuse to allow the user such liberties.

When you combine programming with the field of linguistics you end up with what we call computational linguistics. Its function is to model human, or natural, languages, often with the use of crazy mathematics and programming.

Computational linguistics, like most technology, came about due to political paranoia during the 1950s. When the United States became aware that it had made some foreign enemies, it decided that messages needed to be translated into English, rather than learn another language. How times have changed...

Even this is more advanced than the
machine they tried to translate with.

The initial research was done using text, as speech recognition poses its own problems. Unsurprisingly, what really interested the Americans was the Russians. They needed scientific journals translated from Russian to English, and en masse.

As you can imagine given the state of current machine translation, sixty years ago the technology was even less advanced. So much so that the scientists were required to reassess the whole field. Word for word translation would barely make any sense, and once they knew that grammar, syntax, lexicon, and morphology were essential to producing high-quality and accurate translations, they had ultimately given themselves significantly more work.

What started as research into using machines to monitor the Russians has since developed into the study of what makes languages work and how to synthesize them. Though  machine translation can be easily criticised, you cannot take away some of the phenomenal work that goes on in computational linguistics departments across the world as they endeavour to map, model and analyse our favourite thing in the world, languages.

Collocation: How Words Go Together

In linguistics, collocation refers to words that appear together more frequently than expected. It's how words go together, though not like "rama lama lama" as Grease would have us believe. Though rama and lama probably do exhibit collocation to a certain extent.

For native speakers of a language, the collocations are almost second nature. Most English speakers know that you make a decision rather than do a decision. The fact that "make" occurs more frequently with the word "decision" is a syntactic relation. Many speakers of languages that do not have a distinction between the words "do" and "make", such as French and Spanish, will often find themselves making this mistake, causing the English speakers with them to wince slightly at the inelegance of the phrasing.

It can also be used to make funky lines...

Collocation can be measured by brainy mathematicians using all sorts of crazy functions that we don't even want to fathom. Certain methods include using the log-likelihood, (it's not something you consider on your first visit to the toilet after a curry), as well as other statistical analysis methods.

You know when you're witnessing collocation, especially within the speech of a foreign speaker. It's the feeling every native speaker will get when they can't explain why a sentence is wrong but know that it just sounds wrong.

Even with all the mathematics behind finding collocation, all it takes is a sentence that feels awkward.

The Turing Test And Synthesizing Language

We were playing on Cleverbot the other day and it got us thinking about how complex language really is. We've already mentioned that recognising speech is near impossible and translating it with a machine or programme is nigh on impossible.

If you try out the website for yourself, you'll probably quickly realise that it's a machine (including the disclaimer that says so) and that it can't really communicate. It definitely tries...

So why is it so difficult? The Turing Test is a method used to gauge how authentically a machine or AI can replicate the behaviours of a human and Cleverbot is trying to pass this test. If the user cannot distinguish it from the natural behaviour of a human it can be said to have passed the test.

One of the permutations of the Turing Test.

If you type a message into a terminal you should be able to tell if the invisible person on the other end of your conversation is a man or a machine. If you cannot, then the AI has done its job in pretending to be human.

Of course, this method also depends on the human gauging whether or not the answers are coming from a machine. If you showed someone Siri in the early ages of the telephone they would have been more inclined to think it was an operator sending the information since they wouldn't have been familiar with search engines or speech recognition software. In the modern era we expect these things, so the Turing Test has become significantly more difficult.

Even simple commands that can be recognised such as "call person x" or the rendering of speech into text would baffle the Victorians. We wouldn't advise showing a caveman your smartphone immediately after he's been thawed from the ice, either.

A flaw with the test is that when it comes to man versus machine, a non-native speaker of a language could be misdiagnosed with displaying all the hallmarks of a machine due to their irregular usage of vocabulary on unnatural sentence structures.

Language is a complex structure and, just like your favourite song, even if you know all the words it doesn't guarantee that you'll be any good at it. It becomes even more complicated when the communication is bilateral. You have to take in information, process it, find the correct information, find the correct words, put them in the correct order and execute this all in either the written or spoken form. Even when technology seems to be able to do it all, it can often fall short of being comparable to the real thing.