Isegoria

If you’re like most English-speakers, you’re an English-reader, and you think that English has five, sometimes six, vowels — a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y — because the English alphabet has five, sometimes six, vowels.

But if you look at how dictionaries “respell” English words for pronunciation, you quickly realize that English — even if we look only at a single dialect, like General American English — has many, many vowels — including not just monophthongs, or pure vowels, but diphthongs and triphthongs composed of multiple vowel sounds.

Looking at all those crazy IPA spellings is enough to make you feel like a ghoti out of water.

Why do pilots say “roger” on the radio?:

Pilots and other military types say “roger” to acknowledge receipt of a message or instructions. “Roger” at one time was the phonetic designation for the letter R, which in turn stood for “received.” Why not just say “received”? From a safety perspective, it makes sense to use standardized language, particularly when dealing with international operations. An American pilot may not understand German, but they both understand aviation terminology. The International Civil Aviation Organization oversees this standardization and disseminates it accordingly.

The use of “roger” isn’t all that old. In the military’s phonetic alphabet, “roger” didn’t become the designation for R until 1927. (Previously the designation had been “rush.”) The first citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary for “roger” in the sense of “received” dates from 1941, coinciding with U.S. entry into WWII. The term made the big time in 1943, when the Army Signal Corps incorporated it into one of its procedural manuals.

In 1957 “roger” was replaced by “romeo,” the current designation, but by then “roger” = “received” was so entrenched that the brass knew better than to try and change it.

Manchán Magan asks, Cá Bhfuil Na Gaeilg eoirí? — Where are all the Gaelic speakers?:

There is something absurd and rather tragic about setting out on a journey around a country, knowing that if you speak the language of that country you will not be understood. It is even more absurd when the country is your native one and you are speaking its native language.

Irish (Gaelic) is the first official language of Ireland. We have been speaking it for 2,500 years, right up until the British decided it would be easier to govern us if we spoke their language (and then outlawed the use of Gaelic in schools) in the 19th century. We, in turn, soon realised that our only hope of advancement was through English, and we — or at least the half of the population that survived the Famine — jettisoned Irish in a matter of decades. Had it not been for the Celtic Revival that accompanied Ireland’s fi ght for independence in the early 20th century, the language would have probably died out by now. Today, a quarter of the population claim they speak it regularly. I have always suspected this figure and to test its accuracy I decided to travel around the country speaking only Irish to see how I would get on.

His first mistake was trying to find Irish-speakers in Dublin:

I chose Dublin as a starting point, confident in the knowledge that in a city of 1.2 million people I was bound to find at least a few Irish speakers. I went first to the Ordnance Survey Office to get a map of the country. (As a semi-state organisation it has a duty to provide certain services in Irish.) “Would you speak English maybe?” the sales assistant said to me. I replied in Irish. “Would you speak English?!” he repeated impatiently. I tried explaining once again what I was looking for. “Do you speak English?” he asked in a cold, threatening tone. “Sea,” I said, nodding meekly. “Well, can you speak English to me now?” I told him as simply as I could that I was trying to get by with Irish.

“I’m not talking to you any more,” he said. “Go away.”

Dublin is perhaps the least Irish and most English location within Ireland:

Language experts claim that the figure of fluent Irish speakers is closer to 3% than the aspirational 25% who tick the language box on the census, and most of these are concentrated on the western seaboard, in remote, inaccessible areas where one would not naturally find oneself.

Fewer characters being used in written Chinese:

The Chinese media is using fewer characters and to understand 90 percent of the content in publications you need only to know about 900 of the thousands of pictographs that make up the script, state media said on Tuesday.

The findings of a survey conducted by the education ministry and language commission were based on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files chosen from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television, the Xinhua news agency said.
[...]
Written Chinese is made up of around 50,000 individual characters, whose main function is to represent meaning, not pronunciation.

The average university graduate, however, may know only about 6,000, as many characters are archaic and some found only once in the whole history of the written language, often describing the names of people, places or mythical beasts.

Traditional, or “complex” characters are still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and many overseas Chinese communities, though simplification is gradually creeping in as mainland China’s economic clout grows and more Chinese travel abroad.

Lost in translation looks at the differences between English and German humor:

Our attitude to the Germans and their supposed lack of a sense of humour is best understood through the example of the joke known to comedy professionals such as myself as The German Child. It goes like this. An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child’s mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, “Mother. This soup is a little tepid.” The German child’s mother is astonished. “All these years,” she exclaims, “we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?” “Because, mother,” answers the German child, “up until now, everything has been satisfactory.”

The basis for most English-speaking humor is the ambiguity of the English language:

At a rough estimate, half of what we find amusing involves using little linguistic tricks to conceal the subject of our sentences until the last possible moment, so that it appears we are talking about something else. For example, it is possible to imagine any number of British stand-ups concluding a bit with something structurally similar to the following, “I was sitting there, minding my own business, naked, smeared with salad dressing and lowing like an ox … and then I got off the bus.” We laugh, hopefully, because the behaviour described would be inappropriate on a bus, but we had assumed it was taking place either in private or perhaps at some kind of sex club, because the word “bus” was withheld from us. Other suitable punchlines for this set-up would be, “And that was just the teachers”, “I was 28-years-old” and “That’s the last time I attempt to find work as a research chemist in Paraguay.”

There is even a technical term used by those who direct comedy on camera to describe this one-size-fits-all mechanism. Eddie Large is gasping for air as a hot dog falls into the end of his snorkel. The shot widens to reveal Sid Little, whose sausages are flying into the air out of his hot-dog buns because he is using too much ketchup. Pull back and reveal. But German will not always allow you to shunt the key word to the end of the sentence to achieve this failsafe laugh. After spending weeks struggling with the rigours of the German language’s far less flexible sentence structures to achieve the endless succession of “pull back and reveals” that constitute much English language humour, the idea of our comedic superiority soon begins to fade. It is a mansion built on sand.

Some German humor:

On my first night in Hannover I had gone out drinking with some young German actors. “You will notice there are no old buildings in Hannover,” one of them said. “That is because you bombed them all.” At the time I found this shocking and embarrassing. Now it seems like the funniest thing you could possibly say to a nervous English visitor.

According to The Straight Dope “the origin of OK was conclusively established 30 years ago”:

The etymology of OK was masterfully explained by the distinguished Columbia University professor Allen Walker Read in a series of articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964.

The letters, not to keep you guessing, stand for ‘oll korrect.’ They’re the result of a fad for comical abbreviations that flourished in the late 1830s and 1840s.

Read buttressed his arguments with hundreds of citations from newspapers and other documents of the period. As far as I know his work has never been successfully challenged.

The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 and spread to New York and New Orleans in 1839. The Boston newspapers began referring satirically to the local swells as OFM, ‘our first men,’ and used expressions like NG, ‘no go,’ GT, ‘gone to Texas,’ and SP, ‘small potatoes.’

Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, ‘oll wright,’ and there was also KY, ‘know yuse,’ KG, ‘know go,’ and NS, ’nuff said.’

Most of these acronyms enjoyed only a brief popularity. But OK was an exception, no doubt because it came in so handy. It first found its way into print in Boston in March of 1839 and soon became widespread among the hipper element.

It didn’t really enter the language at large, however, until 1840. That’s when Democratic supporters of Martin Van Buren adopted it as the name of their political club, giving OK a double meaning. (‘Old Kinderhook’ was a native of Kinderhook, New York.)

OK became the warcry of Tammany hooligans in New York while beating up their opponents. It was mentioned in newspaper stories around the country.

Van Buren’s opponents tried to turn the phrase against him, saying that it had originated with Van Buren’s allegedly illiterate predecessor, Andrew Jackson, a story that has survived to this day. They also devoted considerable energy to coming up with unflattering interpretations, e.g., ‘Out of Kash, Out of Kredit, and Out of Klothes.’

Newspaper editors and publicists around the country delighted in coming up with even sillier interpretations– Oll Killed, Orfully Konfused, Often Kontradicts, etc.–so that by the time the campaign was over the expression had taken firm root nationwide.

As time went on, though, people forgot about the abbreviation fad and Old Kinderhook and began manufacturing their own etymologies.

Daniel Engber explains “How they type in the PRC” in What Does a Chinese Keyboard Look Like?:

How do you type Chinese characters on a keyboard?

You use a piece of software called an input method editor, which allows conventional-looking keyboards to produce the thousands of characters used in written Chinese. There’s no standard system, though, so two Chinese keyboards may not look exactly the same and they may not function in the same way.

In the Peoples’ Republic of China, most computer users type out their Chinese in transliteration, using the standard Roman alphabet keys on a QWERTY keyboard. To generate a character, you type out its sound according to the same spelling system — called Pinyin — that represents the name of China’s capital with the word ‘Beijing.’ The computer automatically converts the Pinyin spelling to the correct Chinese characters on the screen.