Thursday, May 04, 2006
An Embarrassed Yuckysaurus!
It’s now official. The English language has chalked up one billion words. That is billion, not million. Now some of these words are actually phrases. That total was announced by the Oxford English Corpus, which has been tallying words since 2000 in a database to aid in the publication of new dictionaries. The database accumulates words from wherever English is spoken around the world. Now don’t rush out and try to buy a new dictionary the size of your house. All this is computerized. And to be sure it does include some words which might be labeled suspect. For instance, I was reading a book about dinosaurs to my grandson, when I suddenly and impulsively inserted a new word for a new species of dinosaur—yuckysaurus. My grandson immediately fell in love with the yuckysaurus. Too much in love. In a few days he had started telling his daycare friends about the “yucky!” And then one day his teacher asked if anyone could name a dinosaur other than a T-Rex. That was a cardinal mistake. Never ask a four-year-old such a question. Of course, he volunteered a “yuckysaurus.” The teacher was more than a bit taken aback. She informed him that there was no such animal. He insisted that there was so. His grandfather had said so. No one can argue against a grandfather. Not even the Oxford English Corpus!
With one billion words, no wonder it is so hard to learn the English language. However, other languages can be equally daunting. I know one young lady who was visiting Spain, staying with a host family. She was proud of her new proficiency in Spanish and wanted to demonstrate it, when she made a minor mistake in etiquette. She wanted to say, “I’m embarrassed.” What she actually said was “I’m pregnant!” Her host asked “How long have you been ‘embarrassed?’ ” “Just a couple of minutes,” she replied. Everyone laughed.
Language problems are not unique to humans. If you have seen March of the Penguins, you can empathize with the parents. In a colony of 10,000 Emperor Penguins, 5000 abandon their newborns to their spouses and then trot off to feed for a few weeks. Before they depart they must teach the new chicks a unique song that no other chick can recognize. Imagine about 5000 different songs, only one of which is of interest to you. When the mother returns, the chick sorts through the songs and finds its mother for a joyful reunion.
Researchers think that they have found the ivory-billed woodpecker alive and possibly well in Arkansas. The videos have been inconclusive. But the audio recordings are pretty convincing. Well maybe! Some experts are still arguing about the patterns of sounds. Some say it could be the pileated woodpecker. Others say that it could be a blue jay proud of a new song that he learned from his parents, who had learned it in turn from their parents and so on. But the bottom line is that no one actually knows what the ivory-bill actually sounds like. It seems that there are no actually recordings of the real mccoy. There are only handwritten notes of an Audubon member. Audubon people are, after all, notoriously inaccurate when compared to grandfathers.
Starlings are the latest species to be subjected to language testing. A group of researchers at the University of California at San Diego decided to teach an artificial bird language to a group of starlings. First, they created a unique blend of warbles and rattles. If they recognized the correct pattern they got food otherwise they turned out the lights and left them in the dark. Nine out of ten starlings mastered the new language. Good, but not good enough. The chicken at the old IQ Zoo, in Hot Springs, AR, got fed when she beat a human at tic-tac-toe. She never lost. Not even grandfather could beat her.
It’s now official. The English language has chalked up one billion words. That is billion, not million. Now some of these words are actually phrases. That total was announced by the Oxford English Corpus, which has been tallying words since 2000 in a database to aid in the publication of new dictionaries. The database accumulates words from wherever English is spoken around the world. Now don’t rush out and try to buy a new dictionary the size of your house. All this is computerized. And to be sure it does include some words which might be labeled suspect. For instance, I was reading a book about dinosaurs to my grandson, when I suddenly and impulsively inserted a new word for a new species of dinosaur—yuckysaurus. My grandson immediately fell in love with the yuckysaurus. Too much in love. In a few days he had started telling his daycare friends about the “yucky!” And then one day his teacher asked if anyone could name a dinosaur other than a T-Rex. That was a cardinal mistake. Never ask a four-year-old such a question. Of course, he volunteered a “yuckysaurus.” The teacher was more than a bit taken aback. She informed him that there was no such animal. He insisted that there was so. His grandfather had said so. No one can argue against a grandfather. Not even the Oxford English Corpus!
With one billion words, no wonder it is so hard to learn the English language. However, other languages can be equally daunting. I know one young lady who was visiting Spain, staying with a host family. She was proud of her new proficiency in Spanish and wanted to demonstrate it, when she made a minor mistake in etiquette. She wanted to say, “I’m embarrassed.” What she actually said was “I’m pregnant!” Her host asked “How long have you been ‘embarrassed?’ ” “Just a couple of minutes,” she replied. Everyone laughed.
Language problems are not unique to humans. If you have seen March of the Penguins, you can empathize with the parents. In a colony of 10,000 Emperor Penguins, 5000 abandon their newborns to their spouses and then trot off to feed for a few weeks. Before they depart they must teach the new chicks a unique song that no other chick can recognize. Imagine about 5000 different songs, only one of which is of interest to you. When the mother returns, the chick sorts through the songs and finds its mother for a joyful reunion.
Researchers think that they have found the ivory-billed woodpecker alive and possibly well in Arkansas. The videos have been inconclusive. But the audio recordings are pretty convincing. Well maybe! Some experts are still arguing about the patterns of sounds. Some say it could be the pileated woodpecker. Others say that it could be a blue jay proud of a new song that he learned from his parents, who had learned it in turn from their parents and so on. But the bottom line is that no one actually knows what the ivory-bill actually sounds like. It seems that there are no actually recordings of the real mccoy. There are only handwritten notes of an Audubon member. Audubon people are, after all, notoriously inaccurate when compared to grandfathers.
Starlings are the latest species to be subjected to language testing. A group of researchers at the University of California at San Diego decided to teach an artificial bird language to a group of starlings. First, they created a unique blend of warbles and rattles. If they recognized the correct pattern they got food otherwise they turned out the lights and left them in the dark. Nine out of ten starlings mastered the new language. Good, but not good enough. The chicken at the old IQ Zoo, in Hot Springs, AR, got fed when she beat a human at tic-tac-toe. She never lost. Not even grandfather could beat her.
