Welcome to Wes’s Language and Linguistics Page
Hi
there Netcruisers, and welcome to the personal language page of Wes Ulm. Learning foreign languages has been a
near-obsession of mine for almost 15 years, and on these pages I’ve distilled over
a decade’s worth of nifty learning tricks and insufferably goofy mnemonics to
help you master the foreign tongue of your choice. Over the years I’ve learned a dozen foreign
tongues for one odd reason or another, and my purpose in this section is primarily
to impart valuable skills to assist you in organizing and making sense out of
the language of your choice, enabling you to acquire fluency as efficiently and
painlessly as possible. Learning a
foreign tongue is one of the most challenging endeavors a person can undertake,
but it’s much less unnerving if you train yourself to master a language’s
internal logic and learn to recognize the connections that link language’s together—using your own native tongue as a cue to
learn another. My system here might be
termed “practical linguistics”—I delve into some of the esoterica of languages’
origin, evolution, and structure, but I do so in a manner that yields valuable
information and background for you in the practical challenge of mastering a
foreign tongue. There are also a few
articles in here that tackle linguistic history, etymology, and policy, but for
the most part I’m providing a “user’s guide,” a manual to help you acquire
rapid proficiency in a foreign language and speak, hear, read, and write it with
facility. I’ve written these articles
with a particular audience in mind, namely native English (esp. USA) speakers
who are learning a foreign tongue in school, but these essays also double as a
resource for linguists, philologists, and curious folk in general who like to
delve into the ways in which distinct languages relate to each other and build
themselves from the ground up.
More on practical linguistics, my own foreign language background, and
the central challenge of retention in
mastering a language over the long term.
The
Three Habits of Highly Successful Foreign Language Learners
Another introductory article which provides some general unifying
principles for you in organizing and guiding your foreign language study. Check this article out first, since it
furnishes the nuts-and-bolts tips which will facilitate your language-learning
effort in general.
Which
Languages Should I Sink My Teeth Into? Here’s
Wes’s Short List
This,
by popular demand, is a short list of languages that I feel are most valuable
for a native English-speaking American to dive into these days. There are a few surprises here, and as I
emphasize I’m not trying to advocate a peremptory set of languages to learn at
the exclusion of others; we need people capable of speaking in many different
tongues! However, based on current
economic circumstances, political situations, and trade relationships, there
are some languages that are especially useful to acquire. Spanish is obviously on here and I give that
language special attention, but there are many others which you might not
expect at first. Check it out.
The
Master List: Essential Vocabulary in Any
Language
One
of the most vexing challenges in tackling any language is the sheer drudgery of
imbibing thousands of new words, phrases, and idioms to express what you
intend. There’s no terribly simple or
straightforward way around this.
Nevertheless, there are some steps you can take to make the process more logical and
efficient. You can use etymological
relationships between the vocabulary of the new language and English (or
another that you happen to know), or trace the internal logic of the language
and its metaphorical style to divine how new words are created from simpler
components. However, the most valuable
step at the outset is simply knowing which words to
focus your attention on. There is a
subset of vocabulary that we encounter on a daily or weekly basis in any
language, the backbone of regular speech in which even minor gaps can pose
frustration in basic conversations. To
address this issue, I’ve compiled an alphabetized list here containing “must-know”
vocabulary arranged in easy-to-discern categories that enable you to logically
the words together. Study this list
systematically and learn the words one-by-one, reviewing them in conversation
and dialogues. From this foundation you
can then begin absorbing more complicated phrases, idioms, and formal
vocabulary. You have to walk before you
can run, though, and this list should put the spring in your step.
Before I dive into the
individual language sections on this site, here’s an appetizer on an especially
popular linguistic topic these days:
Taming
the Linguistic Tiger: Using the Chinese
Character System to Maximal Advantage
This
is a brief article on the Chinese character system as utilized in the writing
schemes of the Chinese and Japanese languages.
It’s an effort to make the sometimes-intimidating Chinese script both
comprehensible and useful for you. I
dispel some myths here but my primary objective is to demonstrate how the
Chinese script, far from being a painful labor of mental exertion for a
language-learner, can actually be a powerful, efficient, even elegant tool to
aid you in concisely conveying ideas and learning new vocabulary. I’ve also supplied two tables which
illustrate the linguistic liaisons between Chinese and Japanese as borne in the
character compounds that form many of their words, and the phonetic similarity
of much Japanese vocabulary relative to Chinese, as a result of borrowing that
stretches back centuries. By the time
you finish this essay, the Chinese script should seem less like an abstruse,
enigmatic amalgam of symbols to you and more like an intelligible, remarkably
adroit system to express your ideas, thoughts and emotions.
Going Native with your Native Tongue
Most
of us don’t spend too much time delving into the history and intricacies of our
native tongue. We acquired our first
language as young children, before our memories of people, events, and places
had begun to congeal, and thus in our mind’s eye our native tongue feels as if
it were “always there.” Nevertheless,
this innate, deeply imbued perception we have of our native tongue doesn’t work
with a foreign language, where we have to devote conscious attention to the
details of grammar and vocabulary. As I
emphasize throughout these pages here, it’s a myth that children somehow have a
special faculty for language which is lost in adults. In fact, studies have demonstrated that
adults tend to learn new languages much more rapidly (since they do not need to
learn both concepts and the symbols and sounds that represent them, as children
do); children seem to learn more efficiently merely because language
acquisition is a full-time job for them.
As an adult, you simply need to take a different approach to language
learning. The first
step in doing this for a foreign tongue is to better grasp the construction of
your own. For English, this
yields many further practical dividends in part because English has drawn from
numerous sources, which you can in turn use to expedite your mastery of a
related language.
Sources
of the English Language: An Introduction
A
brief article on the Germanic, Romance, and Greco-Latin source streams that
furnish the backbone of the English tongue (no anatomical pun intended). As I emphasize here and elsewhere, English is
a fundamentally Germanic language in
its basic grammar and vocabulary, which must be appreciated when using it as a
springboard to latch onto foreign tongues of interest.
The Germanic Basis of the English Language
This
section’s articles detail the Germanic source streams of the English
language.
Historical
Overview and the Anglo-Saxon Backbone
English
originated as a series of “Low German” dialects spoken by German tribes in
northern Europe fronting on the North Sea, prior to the fall of the Roman
Empire, and was carried to the British Isles by tribes like the Jutes, Saxons,
and Angles (from the region of Angeln
in modern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, from which English acquires its
name). This Germanic “proto-language,”
the grouping of northern Germanic dialects, is referred to as “Anglo-Saxon,”
and it supplies the framework—the basic grammatical and syntactical matrix as
well as the phonological system and basic vocabulary—of the English tongue. Many articles remark on the changes that the
English language has experienced since Anglo-Saxon times and the relatively
small remnant (about 5%) of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary still present in modern
English. However, this emphasis vastly
overstates matters. Almost all modern
languages differ markedly from their Roman-era (or before) predecessors; the
world, after all, has changed substantially since the 4th century
A.D., and much of the original vocabulary has lapsed into desuetude. Moreover, although Anglo-Saxon’s percentage
of the word total in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary may be slight, but it
constitutes the most fundamental stratum of English vocabulary, the essential
constituent of speech that is uttered on a daily basis. As such, over 80% of the words that we will
use in a given day are of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and the essential structure
of the language still owes its lion’s share to this ancient source.
Echoes
of the Viking Raiders: The Old Norse
Imprint on English
The
ferociously energetic, militarily adept Scandinavian raiders of the Middle
Ages—known to modern ears as Vikings,
Normans, or Norsemen—left their
mark on civilizations across Europe, from Norse settlement-states in England
and France (the Danelaw and Normandy, respectively), to the very name and
foundational cities (Kiev and Novgorod) of Russia, to the beginnings of Dublin
in Ireland, to mastery of trade routes linking the ancient Byzantine Empire
with the icy waters of the North. They
also influenced Europe’s languages, particularly English. Although the Anglo-Saxons were bitter foes of
the invading Vikings and suffered from their invasions more than any other
nation, the Scandinavians fundamentally influenced British society in its
institutions, language, even in the blood of its people following an extensive
period of intermarriage.
Perhaps
the most surprising contributor of Germanic vocabulary to English is
French—yes, French. Although French is a
Romance language like Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Romanian, it is
perhaps the most Germanic of the group, owing to dense settlements of Germanic
language-speaking Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, and even Vikings (the
Normans) in the five centuries following Rome’s collapse. In the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of
1066 and the many other major periods of French infusion into English (owing to
the prestige status that French historically enjoyed, facilitating its
contributions to many European tongues), most of the novel infusion of
vocabulary into Middle English consisted of Latin-derived vocabulary (which in
some cases was also of Greek derivation, since the Romans had borrowed
extensively from ancient Greek).
However, a perhaps surprising contingent of the French-derived
vocabulary is Germanic in origin, and in fact this “Franco-German” source is a
major contributor to English’s Germanic lexicon. This source stream is detailed here.
Crosstalk
with Cousins: Modern Dutch, Low German,
and High German Additions to the English Language
The
most recent Germanic additions to English stem from infusions of Low German
(including Dutch and Flemish) and modern German (i.e., High German)
vocabulary. English merchants prospered
in the wool trade from the Middle Ages onward and
swapped their wares for goods on the Continent, in the process enjoying
frequent contact with Dutch-speaking merchants of the Netherlands and Flanders
and the closely-related Low German-speaking traders of the Hanseatic League in
northern Germany. From the 17th
century onward, speakers of High German (the current official language of
Germany, Austria, and other lands) began to make their mark in music, the
sciences, invention, food, architecture, and many other fields. Although these languages had progressed to
relative to maturity, they still had much to learn from each other and
exchanged vocabulary, and English absorbed a new cohort of Germanic words from
its Germanic language cousins on the European Continent.
The Greco-Latin Contribution to English
Schoolchildren
are inculcated with the results of 1066 and all that, the transformation of Old
English to Middle English largely by the introduction of a significant stream
of Latin-based vocabulary to English via Norman French. However, the infusion of Latin into Germanic
English is ancient and predates the Norman Conquest by many centuries. Even before the Anglo-Saxons departed the
forests of northern
The
best-known purveyor of the ancient Romans’ tongue to English, Norman French
actually had begun to change English even before the Norman Conquest. Following 1066, contrary to popular
perceptions, English was not immediately affected much by French, and the
period of the heaviest importation of French vocabulary was in the late 14th
century—ironically over 150 years after the
Conspicuous
Coincidences: Close Ties Among the Romance Languages—and You
A
bit of a detour but an essay I decided to post up out of popular demand. If you’ve been learning Spanish in school,
you can rapidly notch another two or three languages under your belt by using
the patent similarities between Spanish and its Romance language cousins: French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian,
Catalan, and many others. Since all of
these evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken in the
From
here on, I’ve classified my articles on my Languages page based on the language
classification (Germanic, Romance, Semitic, East Asian) for the foreign tongue
for which I’m giving hints and suggestions.
This
family will sound familiar to you because it’s the home of the English
language, along with Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic,
Scots, Frisian, Low German, and several others.
Outside of Icelandic, the languages in this family have been heavily
influenced by French, Latin, and Greek over the past millennium, but they also
share similar ancestral roots in a “proto-Germanic” progenitor language. You can exploit these linguistic
relationships to make better sense out of the languages and learn—and retain—your foreign tongue at a much
faster pace.
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