After a short, original light-verse poem, hear about Christmas and Japanese New Year’s and learn some Japanese words related to New Year’s.

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

You can also get a word a day by following darewords on Twitter. I have.

This Friday, November 23, 2007, America’s PBS public broadcasters will air a two-hour marathon of their new children’s vocabulary TV show Word Girl (check your local listings).

I’ve never seen the animated show, but the bits on the Web site are very entertaining and probably educational for elementary school children. The creators show that language is fun. The television series also offers the introduction and reinforcement of four vocabulary words per episode.

I put this post in the Humor category as well as Language because some of the animated shorts on the site made me laugh, as when the narrator explains that Word Girl arrived on Earth when her monkey crashed their space ship. The narrator then goes into great detail about how monkey piloting is a very bad idea until Word Girl, breaking the fourth wall, makes him stop (in the first Huggy’s House of Fun Freeze Frame).

If your kids are in America and are no longer drowsy from Thanksgiving turkey by Friday, have them take a look.

Show’s dictionary for parents and teachers

Now Oxford University Press has come out with a book:

Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher (UK publisher site, US publisher site).

Words now used by the mainstream sometimes come from science fiction. Did anyone use the word cyberspace before author William Gibson in 1982? The OED wants to know.

The Pirate Primer: Mastering the Language of Swashbucklers and Rogues
by George Choundas
ISBN: 978-1-58297-489-7
$19.99, hardcover, 484p

This book is not only a dictionary but a grammar as well with examples from historical and fictional writings about pirates. From publisher Writer’s Digest Books (wdeditors.com/wordpress/spring-2007-titles/the-pirate-primer) [EDIT (6/4/10): dead link]:

This is the authoritative work on the subject, containing and explicating every distinctive term, phrase, usage, and speech structure uttered by or attributed to pirates in film, television, literature, and historical accounts over the last threee [sic] centuries. Every entry in the Primer is accompanied by an illustrative historical example of pirate speech or dialogue. Thus, the user sees the contents of the Primer deployed in actual context by actual pirates. This use of excerpts mobilizes the same instructional benefits of the immersion method considered so effective in foreign-language training. However, it also serves to remind the user that the pirate language is, and always and most importantly, a way to tell stories about pirates and ourselves.

This book sounds like fun for people who like depth (all the way down to Davy Jones’s locker!) and illustrative examples. However, I have to take issue with this claim:

This use of excerpts mobilizes the same instructional benefits of the immersion method considered so effective in foreign-language training.

No, it doesn’t.

1. Some examples are from the book Treasure Island and other fictional pirate speech. You aren’t necessarily learning a language variety that anyone ever spoke.
2. To get a beneficial language immersion, you would have to go live somewhere that has actual old-fashioned British pirates conversing a lot and to desire to interact with them. Reading examples (some of them fictional) in a book that doesn’t even have sound files can help you learn some phrases and grammatical structures, but you won’t be immersed in a linguistic-cultural community.
3. Language learners aren’t all the same. Some people are very analytical and learn languages better through study than through immersion. (However, through immersion very young children can naturally acquire a new language like a native speaker, including accent.)

Also, if this is a primer, by definition it contains first principles; it wouldn’t be a “comprehensive book on pirate language,” as is claimed above the long quote I included.

With all that said, however, The Pirate Primer looks to be the most thorough guide you could have.

Abbreviated Table of Contents:

FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION

PART I: WHAT TO SAY

CHAPTER 1 GREETINGS & PARTINGS
CHAPTER 2 CALLS
CHAPTER 3 FLOURISHES
CHAPTER 4 COMMANDS
CHAPTER 5 THREATS
CHAPTER 6 OATHS
CHAPTER 7 CURSES

CHAPTER 8 INSULTS
CHAPTER 9 EPITHETS
CHAPTER 10 RESPECTFUL ADDRESS
CHAPTER 11 RETORTS
CHAPTER 12 QUESTIONS & REPLIES
CHAPTER 13 TOASTS AND DECLAMATIONS
CHAPTER 14 CONTRACTIONS
CHAPTER 15 ARRGH

CHAPTER 16 CULTURAL TERMS

PART II: HOW TO SAY IT

CHAPTER 17 PRONUNCIATION
CHAPTER 18 WRONG TALK
CHAPTER 19 CONVERSIONS
CHAPTER 20 STRUCTURAL FORMS
CHAPTER 21 FUNCTIONAL FORMS
CHAPTER 22 PARTS OF SPEECH

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX A OPENERS, MIDDLERS & CLOSERS
APPENDIX B SOUND LIST
APPENDIX C PIRATE COMPANY ARTICLES

See also my post:
Arrr! Talk Like a Pirate Day 2006 [September 19th]
and:

Talk Like a Pirate Day Official Site

paperback (978-0-520-22976-1): 29.95, £18.95

hardcover (978-0-520-22975-4): $65.00, £41.95

E-book without DVD (1601295251): $15.95

Amazon.com with the table of contents, index, and first six pages of the introduction

ASL storytelling is fun to watch, probably even if you don’t know the language. The signs can get exaggerated, and there’s a lot of non-sign gesturing/mime thrown in.

ASL poetry can be quite beautiful. Sometimes the poems “rhyme” by using signs with the same handshape or signs with the same movement. Also, a lot of signs are normally made with only one hand (right for right-handers), but poets might alternate series of signs between the left and right hands to create a visual balance and flow.

ASL drama is like spoken-language drama except that the signing is bigger not louder (and only the vocal interpreters need microphones) and the stage “blocking” of actors’ movements always involves the audience being able to see their signing. The actors can’t utter lines of dialog with their backs to the audience unless they move their arms unnaturally far out to the sides.

Here’s something that may blow your mind:

With sign languages, the medium is the message, sort of (to hedge on a line from Marshall McLuhan). Actually, the articulation is the signal.

With spoken languages, you decode the message from the signal—sounds produced by air moving past or blocked during speakers’ articulation of their mostly hidden speech organs (tongue, vocal folds, etc.). With signing, you also decode the message from the signal, but the signal IS the signers’ articulation of hands and face that you are seeing. It’s as if a speaker used no air and you just watched the tongue move around to receive a message (not recommended, especially with strangers).

That’s also why Deaf babies of Deaf parents sign earlier than Hearing babies of Hearing parents speak, and why Hearing babies of Deaf parents sign earlier than they speak. Their hands are visible to them and easier to coordinate than the hidden, intricate speech organs. However, signing isn’t so easy when you learn it later. Just as with spoken languages, your signing can have an accent if you learn it later in life. It’s hard to get the smooth movements of native signers. Plus, the grammar can be very different from English, such as verbs like GIVE that move from abstract third-person subject to abstract third-person object.

Celebrities are also used in rhyming slang and the new book Shame about the Boat Race: Guide to Rhyming Slang from Collins (ISBN 0007241135) gives examples of modern celebrities finding their way into the lingo. The title refers to “Nice legs shame about the face” (metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=23975&in_page_id=34) [EDIT (5/30/10): dead link] turned into rhyming slang.

Assuming the expressions are common enough to be shortened, some people might drink too many Britneys (Britney Spears rhymes with beer) and then Wallace (Wallace and Gromit rhymes with vomit).

We’ll have to see if any of these become ordinary words like giving someone a “raspberry” (making a derisive breaking-wind noise with your mouth on your hand, also called a Bronx cheer). Raspberry tart rhymes with fart.

See also: Web’s Greatest Dick’n’arry of Cockney Rhyming Slang

The book is The Queen’s Hinglish by B. K. Mahal (ISBN 0007241127).

It’s mini-quiz time. Match the Hinglish terms with their Standard English equivalents:

1. airdash

2. badmash

3. chuddies

4. glassy

5. timepass

a. hooligan

b. thirsty

c. traveling by air

d. underpants

e. uninteresting diversion

Answers in BBC article and after the jump.

Answers

1-c airdash – traveling by air
2-a badmash – hooligan
3-d chuddies – underpants
4-b glassy – thirsty
5-e timepass – uninteresting diversion

Those words don’t seem to fill any gaps in Standard English, but Hinglish’s prepone would be a welcome addition. We already have postpone, so why not?

That contest is for real words. However, with Barbara Wallraff’s Atlantic Monthly column “Word Fugitives,” you can make requests for made-up but useful words (like Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff and Rich Hall’s Sniglets from the 1980s). If you subscribe to the online content or have access to the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly, you can see reader requests for such words and submit your suggestions at the Fugitives link above (if it hasn’t run off).

Submitters of outstanding requests and suggestions will receive free books signed by the Atlantic Monthly authors. “Word Fugitives” and its companion “Word Court” usage column (in alternating issues) both have book compilations by Wallraff: Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words and Word Court: Wherein Verbal Virtue is Rewarded, Crimes Against the Language are Punished, and Poetic Justice is Done.

Now the author has put 50 of the words and definitions into the virtual reality (wdeditors.com/wordpress/talk-the-talk-has-a-second-life/340/) [EDIT (5/29/10): dead link] realm of Second Life (site).

It’s a brave new world of reading and of the marketing of books. Perhaps before books can be replaced by E-books, they will be replaced by “V-books” (or audio V-books) experienced via the “avatar” representations of us.

See also: Author’s site