"The River Avon, running through Shakespeare’s hometown Stratford-Upon-Avon, is another example. 'Avon' in an ancient Celtic language means 'river' – so the River Avon is more properly the River River. The La Brea Tar Pits manage to be redundant in two ways: La Brea is Spanish for 'the tar' – so the La Brea Tar Pits effectively mean 'the the tar tar pits.'"
Wiki has a handy list of them.
A long, in-depth, and very interesting article on how the U.S. military approaches language training, especially for elite troops who might go into areas where a base-level of language and cultural skills are a must:
"A Green Beret trained in Modern Standard Arabic and deployed to Iraq isn’t going to have many fluent conversations with his counterparts who speak an Iraqi dialect. But he can exchange simple pleasantries, ask about his counterpart’s family, and understand basic military terminology — all while getting a laugh out his new Iraqi friends who might describe his school-taught Modern Standard dialect as 'fancy Arabic.'
Once it’s accepted that in most cases the purpose of language training isn’t to achieve fluency, it allows standards to be set that are more realistic for the missions expected from today’s Green Berets. The Interagency Language Roundtable scoring scale notes that at a 1+ rating, speakers '[c]an initiate and maintain predictable face-to-face conversations and satisfy limited social demands.' Meanwhile, listeners demonstrate '[s]ufficient comprehension to understand short conversations about all survival needs and limited social demands.' This level of speaking and listening is more than enough for Green Berets to converse with a partner force that speaks the same language, get across basic ideas, and potentially work around a situation where an interpreter or English-speaking member of the partner force isn’t available."
There's a lot more going on in the article that's worth looking at.
I also appreciate an educational model where perfection isn't the goal, but basic communication is. Maybe it's the military's version of "ELF," or "English as Lingua Franca."
"So I began to teach them English, just some phrases and short sentences, such as 'Hands up!,' 'Drop your weapon, we spare you!,' 'We don't kill prisoners,' 'Don't move!,' 'Surrender, you are safe!,' 'Don't die for American imperialism!'
There was no paper to write on, so I used a stick to inscribe on the ground the written characters representing the English sounds so that the literate ones among them could have some phonetic guidance. I couldn't possibly make them pronounce the words accurately, since half of them didn't even speak Mandarin well. But they were eager to learn, even if they did complain about the pain inflicted by the English pronunciation on their tongues and jaws. A few claimed they had sore throats. I was amazed that in just a few days they could rap out to one another what they had learned. Most of them were smart men who would have gone far in their lives had they had the opportunity and the education. I wondered why they would concentrate so much on learning a few foreign words that they might never use at all. Heaven knew what would happen to us tomorrow; we might get captured or killed anytime. The enemy was just two miles to the north.
I suspected that to them the act of learning must represent some kind of hope. At least this meant there was still a future, on which they could fix their minds. Their limited awareness of the larger world and their inert response to the menace of death endowed them with the strength needed for survival. I was moved by the tenacity of life shown in their desire to learn."
-- Ha Jin, War Trash
My life is way too up in the air right now to do something as life-changing as buying a new video game console, but this is kind of cool -- the Hangul-ized logo for Cyberpunk 2077. (I realize the release has been a shit-show.)
So roughly, we've got "SA-EEE-BUH-PUNG-KU."
Not easy to do, but very cool.
Covid Squirrel says -- "Mask on! Talking off!"
As seen on the classroom doors of my college, where some-but-not-all students have returned for classes.
"A broad regional accent might hold you in good stead in some jobs, but can be a drawback in more upwardly mobile careers. 'There may be some kind of expectation that, if you’ve secured a good degree and aced teacher training, then why didn’t you modify your accent as a linguistic means to signal that you are moving up in the world,' says Dr Alex Baratta, a lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education.
'Accents tell you as much about what we project on to people as anything to do with the actual people,' says Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. How you perceive accents can be dependent on your proximity to the location of the accent, she says. She grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, where the Liverpudlian accent was considered 'metropolitan'. This contrasts with the animus that some Mancunians have towards a scouse accent, and the romanticism some Americans hear in its cadences.
Since I have been in London, I have become conscious of what my accent signals – northerners are often depicted as being louts or simpletons in the southern-centric media. During the first few ice-breakers at university, I was told by a well-spoken southerner that I sounded like Karl Pilkington, of An Idiot Abroad fame.My adult students explained to me that a Daegu accent doesn't map as "stupid" or "poor" so much as "antagonistic" towards Seoul folks.
