The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages

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Capitalisation of all nouns, as in German, was abolished in 1948, leaving capitonyms such as venstre (left) and Venstre (the Left) as heterographs. Different sound, Same sign, Different meaning On Indian languages, a multilingual friend offers interesting examples in three categories, but maintains that ‘owing to the fixed pronunciation of every letter in all Indian languages’ it doesn’t seem possible to have:

For example, 连/ 連 (both pronounced lián) are simplified and traditional versions of the character meaning connect. Different sound, Same sign, Same meaningAs well as the three dimensions used here (sound/pronunciation, sign/spelling and meaning), there is a fourth dimension in the etymology of words. This becomes significant, for example, when identifying true homonyms such as ‘cleave,’ which are spelt and pronounced the same, but have different meanings arising from different etymologies. There are other possible dimensions of difference too: the precise articulation of the spoken word; the details of the handwriting, font or physical medium of the written word. None of these are explicitly included in this word game, though all may feature as an aspect of ‘form’ on the Loom which conflates all such qualities of words into the single dimension of ‘form,’ including pronunciation, spelling, and inflexion, as well as their etymology, and written or spoken style. Beyond the realm of language on the Loom, ‘form’ can also include the feel, taste and smell of a thing, and that close equivalent in a thing for the etymology of a word: its provenance. One subset which deserves mention is where one or two of the dimensions are similar, which is not a distinction generally made in this game which classifies only as the same or different. Examples include capitonyms where a capitalisation changes both pronunciation and meaning (reading/ Reading, polish/ Polish), and synophones (similar pronunciation, different sign, different meaning) including malapropisms such as the comedian Ronnie Barker’s ‘pismronunciation.’ (11) Words in this category include polysemes, whose meaning is extended by metonymy. In English, examples are: crane (noun, verb), book (noun, verb). (3) My source is a literate and multilingual speaker of Ju|hoansi, Afrikaans and English, who consulted with his fellows in the San Living Museum near the AiAiba Lodge in Namibia, and wrote the words down for me himself. Same sound, Same sign, Different meaning At one point, the author mentions that his only suggestion for learning Russian is to have been born in Russia and have grown up there. I laughed out loud when I read that.

Having said that this category is a mostly trivial case of words with differences in all three dimensions (10), it is significant in that it does comprise all words not sharing the same sound, sign or meaning – i.e. the rest of the language.So of the four categories requiring variation between spelling and pronunciation, two are empty as far as this speaker is concerned, one contains only homophonic capitonyms, and another requires omission of accentual marks from the written word (as is often the case in written Bisayan) to qualify strictly as heterophonic homographs. Same sound, Same sign, Different meaning My source’s mother tongue is known as Damara or Nama, formally also known as Khoekhoegowab, a member of the Khoe language group, an important non-Bantu language group in Southern Africa. She is a literate and multilingual speaker of both English and Damara.

As I said above, Part II is a treasure trove. Bodmer distills everything a student needs to know about sound correspondences, etc. to make connections across the outlined languages and accelerate learning. The only annoyance is that the huge tables in Part IV aren’t available online somewhere as spreadsheets (the book is almost a century old after all) so one could import them into a spaced repetition system like Anki for efficient learning. I typed these out as Google spreadsheets for my own use. I’ve made them available here: Romance Word List, Germanic Word List, and the Greek Roots List from the language museum. Importing into Anki or suchlike is pretty easy. Without going into etymology, and only being sensitive to semantic similarity, in this first category are some words of possibly related meaning – tubo (sugarcane, water pipe), dunggan (ears, heard) – and others not obviously so connected – pito (whistle, seven), paso (burnt, overlapping). Same sound, Different sign, Same meaning

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Up to the early 20th century, pronunciation of (certainly non-literary) Chinese was extremely varied. Even with the rigorous standardisation of pronunciation of Mandarin in the past century, there are still varieties of pronunciation within modern Standard Mandarin Chinese, even excluding dialects, which may not be distinguishable in pinyin spelling, but are clearly audible, and can be distinguished in the phonetic alphabet by linguists. Same sound, Same sign, Different meaning

It is divided into four parts. Part I is a "natural history" of language. Part II covers the "hybrid heritage" of English as a language which straddles the Germanic and Romance branches of the Indo-European language tree. Part III covers language problems and planning movements. Part IV is a "language museum" of comparative vocabulary tables. Saru (સારું, pronounced saa — ru (rhymes with Sue)) can be read as Saru or Haru and both mean ‘good’ (it is common to read the sound ‘sa’ as ‘ha’ without changing the meaning). Different sound, different sign, same meaning: Loan words, regional variations, and differences in vocabulary between scientific/formal and informal registers, give rise to different words referring to exactly the same referent (e.g. the plant Verbascum is also widely known as mullein, and many other folk names). (9)

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There are two alternative ways of counting numbers in Bisayan, one etymologically Austronesian, the other based on Spanish loanwords. This particular game is concerned with words. Instead of having two dimensions (form and meaning) like the Loom, each with three possible states (same, similar and different), this structure has three dimensions (sign/spelling, sound/pronunciation, and meaning), each with two possible states (same and different). The connections between this game and the Loom are explored further in the footnotes below. Why learn linguistics? We learn how older languages like Old English forked into German and English, and that there are a few common changes to know. e.g. in Wasser and “water”, W in Old English has not changed over time and remains the same in English. In German it sounds like V. The Old English word wæter had a hard T consonant that survived to English, but evolved to “ss” and softened in German. The point of learning this is that there are a handful of these changes you can learn and then you will automatically know hundreds of words without effort.