Languages of the world: 8. Mandarin Chinese

Languages of the world:

Mandarin is a group of related dialects or varieties spoken the Northern and Southwestern of China. It has more native speakers than any other language in the world (nearly one billion speakers). The term “Mandarin” is borrowed from Portuguese (“mandarim”), this word means counselor or minister.

In the early 20^th century the “Standard Chinese” was adopted as the national language. It was based on the Beijing (phonology) and other Mandarin dialects (vocabulary), thus this “Standard Chinese” is also known as Mandarin (Pǔtōnghuà).It is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore.

The phonology of Mandarin Chinese consists of two dozen consonants and about half a dozen vowels, some of which form diphthongs and four tones.

The writing system for almost all the varieties of Chinese is based on a set of written logograms that has been passed down with little change for more than two thousand years. While it is possible to invent new characters, Chinese usually borrows old ones that have fallen into disuse. Chinese characters were traditionally read from top to bottom, right to left but in modern usage it is more common to read from left to right.

Although Standard Chinese is the lingua franca of China, it differs from dialects, even in the Mandarin group, to the point of being to some extent unintelligible. The linguistic diversity is so large that neighboring city dwellers may have difficulties communicating with each other without a lingua franca.

Chinese facts:

• Chinese grammar is surprisingly straightforward, with none of the tenses, plurals, cases or genders that can make learning European languages difficult.
• The hard part about Chinese is mastering the tones. Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, which means the pitch or intonation in which a sound is spoken affects the meaning.
• For reading Chinese without using Latin alphabet it is necessary to memorize a large quantity of Chinese characters. If you want to read a newspaper you will have to learn around 2.000 Chinese Characters.
• Intonation is very important in Chinese. For example wǒ xiǎng wèn nǐ, means I want to ask you. But if you say it with a different intonation you may end up saying I want to kiss you.
• Chinese people place great emphasis on titles. If the name of your teacher is for example Mrs Wang, you should call her Wang Lǎoshī, meaning Teacher Wang. For doctors it is used Yīshēng. Xiānsheng for Mr. and  Nǚshì for Ms.
• Keep in mind that in China there are different dialects, and they are hardly understood among them, so you could end up listening to two Chinese people talking in English because their dialects are completely different from one to another and they find it easier to talk in English language if they both know it.
• Knowing how to read and write Chinese characters will help you pick up Writtern Japanese quicker, because Japanese langue uses a large amount of characters with exactly the same meaning than in Chinese but pronunciation and grammar is completely different between these two languages.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Chinese courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

 

再见 (Zàijiàn) and visit us on Facebook !!

Languages of the world: 7. Arabic

Languages of the world:

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD.  It includes the literary language and the spoken Arabic varieties.

The literary language is called Modern Standard Arabic. It is the only official form of Arabic.The spoken Arabic varieties are spoken in a wide territory stretching across the Middle East and North Africa.Arabic languages are Central Semitic languages, most closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic and Phoenician.

It is official in 26 states and it is also the liturgical language of Islam. Despite of its different dialects, the modern standard Arabic is widely taught in schools, universities, and used to varying degrees in workplaces, government and the media.

This language is the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group. It is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right to left, although some spoken varieties use Latin alphabet.

Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the Islamic world, like Persian, Turkish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malay and Hausa. We can appreciate Arabic influence in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Sicilian. Arabic language has also borrowed words from languages, for example Hebrew, Greek, Persian, Syriac, Turkish and English and French in recent times.

The major dialects groups are:

Egyptian (Spoken by 80 million people), Maghrebi (75 million people speak this dialect), Mesopotamian (Spoken by 36 million), Levantine (35 million speakers), Sudanese (30 million people), Yemeni (25 million speakers) and Najdi (10 million people).

The Arabic alphabet can be divided into two groups order.

• The original ’abjadī order (أَبْجَدِي):

غ

ظ

ض

ذ

خ

ث

ت

ش

ر

ق

ص

ف

ع

س

ن

م

ل

ك

ي

ط

ح

ز

و

ه

د

ج

ب

أ

gh

ẓ

ḍ

dh

kh

th

t

sh

r

q

ṣ

f

‘

s

n

m

l

k

y

ṭ

ḥ

z

w

h

d

j

b

’

• the newer hijā’ī order (with letters partially grouped together by similarity of shape, used where lists of names and words are sorted):

ي

و

ه

ن

م

ل

ك

ق

ف

غ

ع

ظ

ط

ض

ص

ش

س

ز

ر

ذ

د

خ

ح

ج

ث

ت

ب

أ

y

w

h

n

m

l

k

q

f

gh

‘

ẓ

ṭ

ḍ

ṣ

sh

s

z

r

dh

d

kh

ḥ

zh

th

t

b

’

Arabic is a language which lies far from English but still you may find some false friends such as:

• If you hear the word “when”(وين) in Arabic they are talking about where something is.
• If your name is Anna, you would be saying in Arabic “I” (أنا).

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Arabic courses in our “Centro de Lenguas”

مع السلامة. (Ma’a salama) and do not forget to like us on Facebook !!!

Languages of the world: 6. Russian

Languages of the world:

Russian is a Slavic language spoken primarily in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It is not an official language in Moldova, Latvia, Estonia but is widely spoken in these countries.

Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian.

The standard well-known form of Russian is generally called the “Modern Russian Literary Language”. It arose in the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state by Peter the Great.

In the 20th century, Russian was widely taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. In particular, these countries include Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, former East Germany and Cuba.

The language possesses five vowels, which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to 4 consecutive sounds.

Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic (кириллица) alphabet. It consists of 33 letters:

А /a/	Б /b/	В /v/	Г /ɡ/	Д /d/	Е /je/	Ё /jo/	Ж /ʐ/	З /z/	И /i/	Й /j/
К /k/	Л /l/	М /m/	Н /n/	О /o/	П /p/	Р /r/	С /s/	Т /t/	У /u/	Ф /f/
Х /x/	Ц /ts/	Ч /tɕ/	Ш /ʂ/	Щ /ɕɕ/	Ъ /-/	Ы /ɨ/	Ь /ʲ/	Э /e/	Ю /ju/	Я /ja/

Russian Facts:

• It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages.
• There are around 155 million native speakers in the world, being the 8^th most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers.
• There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral
• There is no article.
• Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without.
• TheNovgorod Codex is considered to be the most ancient Russian book which dates back to the beginning of the 11th century.
• Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 780 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency.

False Friends:

• In Russian language, the word магазин (magazin) does refer to a shop and not to a magazine, which is said журнал(zhurnal).
• If you overhear the word  kабинет (kabinet) you need to know that they are referring to an office.
• There are more words similar to English like лук(Luk) that sounds similar to the name Luke, but the meaning is actually onion.
• Декорация, sounds like decoration but it is a setting, while to say decoration you need to use the word украшение.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Russian courses in our “Centro de Lenguas”

do vstrechi and visit us on Facebook !!!

5. Languages of the world: Polish

Languages of the world:

Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries.

The Polish alphabet consists of the basic latin scripts and certain letters with diacritics (ć, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż, ą, ę, ł) and the letters q, v and x, which are used only in foreign words, are not considered part of the Polish alphabet.

Apart from Poland, other countries with important Polish communities are The United States, Germany, UK, Brazil, Argentina, Belarus, Canada Lithuania and Russia.

The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country and population transfers that followed World War II.

Polish grammar is similar in most respects to that of Russian, and those who have studied Russian will find its grammar much easier to grasp. Polish is a highly inflected language, with relatively free word order. There are no articles, and subject pronouns are often dropped. Nouns may belong to three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Adjectives agree with nouns in terms of gender, case and number.

It is said that Polish is one of the more difficult languages to learn because of its tongue-bending pronunciation, complex gender system, seven cases, aspect as a grammatical category of the verb and a tendency to avoid internationalism for “real” Polish words. At least consonants sound almost like they do in English and the stress of a word is always in the penultimate syllable.

If you learn Polish, you are half way closer to learn other languages such as Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian. Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Russian, Slovene, Serbianand Ukrainian would be also easier to learn.

Facts:

• There are around 600.000 Native Polish speakers in The USA.
• Polish is made up of a few dialects including Little Polish & Silesian.
• Polish is the 29th most spoken language in the world, and is one of the most widely spoken Slavic languages.
• In 1475, the first Polish language book to be printed in Poland was issued in Wroclaw.

Some false friends in Polish are:

• Komunikacja could sound like Communication, but it means public transport in Polish.
• Aktualny refers to something valid or topical, while actual is said faktyczny.
• A knot in Polish is a kid or wick. If you actually want to say knot you shoud use the word węzeł.
• The English word complement is said uzupełnienie in Polish and komplement means compliment.
• Lot can mean in Polish either dużo (many) or parcela (piece of land). If you actually say lot, then you are referring to a flight.
• Something eventual in Polish is ostateczny and ewentualny is possible or potential.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Polish courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

Do zobaczenia and visit us on Facebook !!

Languages of the world: 4. Italian

Languages of the world:

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe (Italy, Switzerland and San Marino) and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia. It derives from Latin and it is part of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. Italian is related most closely to the other two Italo-Dalmatian languages, Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian.

Italian has got around 80 million speakers, mainly in Italy with 65 million native speakers, but also in Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, some regions of Slovenia and Croatia and large Communities in Argentina and Brazil.

The Italian language adopted by the state after the unification of Italy is based on the Tuscan (a language spoken mainly by the upper class of Florentine society.  Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city, since the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states.

Throughout the world, Italian is the fifth most taught foreign language, after English, French, German, and Spanish.

Facts:

• Florentine dialect evolved into the so-called “Standard Italian” that is recognized today as the national language.
• Italian vocabulary has contributed many words to the English some of them are: gondola, regatta, fresco, vendetta, broccoli, pizza, spaghetti, cappuccino, fiasco, orchestra, piano, solo, a cappella, volcano, basilica, stucco, terracotta, and inferno.
• All words end in a vowel in Italian, with the exception of a few articles, prepositions, and foreign words.
• Italian language is completely phonetic, every letter corresponds to a specific pronounced sound, so we can say that it is read as it is written.
• Learning Italian will help with the grammar of other Romance languages, such as French, Spanish or Portuguese.
• There are different ways of saying “you”, these are: “tu” for people you know well and friends and the word “Lei” in other cases. The plural is, respectively, “voi” and “Loro”.

Some false friends in Italian are:

• The word camera in Italian means room whilst camera is macchina fotografica.
• Morbido is used in Italian to say that something is soft.
• Don’t look surprised if you receive coated almonds when asking for confetti.
• If you like something the correct word to use is mi piace (I like) and if you say mi piaci you are saying “I like you”.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Italian courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

Arrivederci and don’t forget to like us on Facebook !!!!!

Languages of the world: 3. German

Languages of the world:

German is a West Germanic language related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 100 million native speakers, German is one of the world’s major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union.

Some of it its words come from Latin and Greek and fewer from English and French.

As Germany was divided into many different states in the 8^th century AD, the only force working for a unification or standardization of German for several hundred years was the general wish of writers to be understood by as many readers as possible.

The 2nd Orthographical Conference ended in 1901 with a complete standardisation of the German language in its written form and three years earlier the Deutsche Bühnensprache had established rules for German.

If we have a look in Europe, German is natively spoken in Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, but its use is shared with other different languages in Switzerland and Luxembourg. In the rest of the world, German is spoken by communities having the largest ones in The USA, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Australia and South Africa.

Facts:

• The first printed book in the world was in German. Johannes Gutenberg invented book printing and printed the first book in the world – a 42-page bible – in 1455.
• The oldest existing book written in the German language is probably Abrogans, an 8th century manuscript dictionary of translations from Latin into Old High German
• German belongs to the three most learned languages in the world and is the tenth most widely spoken language in the world and fifth on the Internet.
• German is among the top five most widely used languages on the Internet. German has 3 genders, ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ and also ‘neuter’.

der – masculine
die – feminine
das – neuter

• The German language is exceptionally famous for forming long words. Some examples are:

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
A 63-letter long word meaning: Beef labeling regulation & delegation of supervision law.

Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft for Association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services.

Some words which come from German and you may already know are:

• You perhaps went to a Kindergarten as a child.
• Zeitgeist, meaning ‘the spirit of the times’.

Here are some false friends:

• The German word Gift means poison.
• Mist is the translation of “bird droppings”.
• An advice in German is a Rat. The animal rat is written Ratte.
• Gymnasium in German is not a gymnasium in English. It actually means Grammar School.
• Sympathisch means nice in English and if you want to say sympathetic the correct word is mitfuehlend.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find German courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

bis bald !

Languages of the World: 2.French

Today we are going to learn a little bit more about the French language.

French is a descendant of the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire, as are languages such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, Sicilian and Sardinian. It is spoken officially in 29 countries by more than 115 million people and around 275 million speak it as a second language. It is an official language of United Nations, European Union and a large number of international organizations.

French speakers will number approximately 500 million people in 2025 and 650 million people, or approximately seven percent of the world’s population by 2050.

It is the second most common language in Canada, after English, and both are official languages at the federal level.

A majority of the world’s French-speaking population lives in Africa. It is estimated that 115 million African people spread across 31 Francophone African countries can speak French as either a first or a second language. The total French-speaking population is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050.

French was the most important language of diplomacy and international relations from the 17th century to approximately the middle of the 20th century. English has taken over that role since then.

Facts:

• The French counting system is partially vigesimal: twenty (vingt) is used as a base number in the names of numbers from 60 to 99. The French word for 80 is quatre-vingts, literally “four twenties”, and the word for 75 is soixante-quinze, literally “sixty-fifteen”

• French is second only to English for the number of countries where it has official status.

• The number of French speakers has tripled since 1945 largely because most of the former French and Belgian colonies kept French as their language of government, education and science after decolonization.

• The Agence universitaire de la Francophonie networks 630 French language universities and more than 350 French faculties worldwide, for a total of 120,000 professors and researchers.

• About a third to a half of basic English words come from French, including pedigree, surf, view, strive, challenge, pride, staunch and war.

• At the time of the French Revolution, 75% of French citizens did not speak French as a mother tongue. Until the 19th century, French was spoken more widely in Holland and Germany than in some parts of France.

• The letter ‘w’ appears only in foreign words within the French language.

• French spelling generally reflects the language as it was spoken four or five centuries ago and is therefore, a poor guide to modern pronunciation.

• French is the second most commonly-taught second language in the world (after English).

• One of the longest sentences in literature comes from Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables”: 823 words without a period.

• If you learn French, you’ll have a head start in learning other languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Catalan

False friends (Faux amis) in French:

• Sensible means sensitive
• A deception is a disappointment
• Journal is a newspaper
• Actuellement: Sounds like ‘actually’… but it means ‘at the current time’. Actually would be ‘en fait’.
• Caution in French means a deposit, guarantee or bail, in financial terms.
• Forcément is equal to necessarily.
• Réalisation is to complete or accomplish something.
• La chair is the skin, not something where you can sit down.
• Le four is not a number, it refers to the oven.
• Laid is someone ugly.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find French courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

Á bientôt !

Languages of the World: 1.Spanish

Languages of the world:

In this section we are going to talk about clichés, topics and other interesting information related to languages throughout the world.

We are starting this trip with the Spanish language.

Spanish (also called Castilian) is a Romance language that originated in Spain. It is estimated that there are more than 420 million people all around the world with Spanish as mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken language in terms of native speakers (after Chinese). Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations and is used as an official language by the European Union and Mercosur.

It is spoken officially in 21 countries:

Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, SADR, Spain and Venezuela. Being “de facto” in: Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua and Uruguay.

Spanish is also a very important language in the United States, where more than 50 million people use it every day.

Facts:

• From year 1252 to 1284, King Alfonso X standardized the official language in Castile and Leon.  He was known also as Alfonso the Wise, or Learned, because of his ardent study of Roman philosophy of law and social mores.

• The Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española) is the accepted authority of correct, standard Spanish. Beginning in the 18th century.

• Spanish is one of the world’s most phonetic languages. If you know how a word is spelled, you can almost always know how it is pronounced.

• The first Spanish grammar was created by Elio Antonio de Nebrija and published in 1492, the same year Columbus discovered America.

• Spanish is expected to be the first language of 50% of the population of the United States within 50 years.

• If you learn Spanish, you will have a head start in learning other languages such as French, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan or Romanian

• The demand for Spanish courses has doubled worldwide in ten years.

• The most difficult words for foreigners are probably the rolled r (-rr) sound such as in jarra, ferrocarril, carretera or zorro and the dr sound which we can find in the words dromedario or cocodrilo.

• Some false friends that we can find in Spanish are as follows:

• Asistir meansto attend; to say assist, the word ayuda is used.
• Carpeta is not acarpet, it is a folder.
• Constiparse is tocatch a cold.
• decepciónis a disappointment, not a deception (engaño).
• Embarazada is apregnant woman, if someone is embarrassed, he or she is avergonzado/a.
• Éxito is asuccess, not an exit.
• Recordar means to rememberor to remind.
• Sensible is the Spanish word for sensitive and not sensible (sensato)
• Tuna is a college musical club, if you want to order the fish tuna you had better ask for atún.

Here, at the University of Almería, you can find Spanish courses in our “centro de lenguas”.

¡ Hasta la próxima !