I winced when I read the headline “Drinks on Who?” written in one-inch bold letters in the October 7, 2009 sports section of the Washington Post.  This is the equivalent of saying “Drinks on she?” or “Drinks on I?” instead of the correct “Drinks on her?” or “Drinks on me?”.  It reminded me of the primitive savage expressions like “Me Tarzan, you Jane” of black-and-white TV days, or Tonto saying to the Lone Ranger: “Him say man ride over ridge on horse.”

The nominative and objective case of pronouns is one of the last vestiges of the Germanic origins of English, and it is slowly but surely disappearing.  Soon, the pronouns “who” and “whom” will combine into a caseless “who” in sympathy with “you”.  There is also great confusion about “you and I” vs. “you and me”.  The words of popular songs like “You and me against the world” by Helen Reddy become imprinted in our mind until they finally don’t sound wrong.

In order to use the pronoun cases correctly, it is necessary to understand the structure of the sentences.  As a general rule, pronouns in the subject are in the nominative case, pronouns in the predicate are in the objective case.  Thus, we say “I saw him” or “He saw me”.  We would never think of saying “Me saw he” or “him saw I”, which is the wrong use of both pronouns.  The nominative personal pronouns are: I, you, he, she, we, they.  The corresponding objective forms are: me, you, him, her, us, them.  Notice that “you” is the same in both cases, so we say “I saw you” and “you saw me”.  The pronouns “thou” (nominative) and “thee” (objective) which were a familiar or personal form of the formal “you” have disappeared from modern English, but they are still found in biblical passages and in Shakespearean plays.

Learn English Grammar

The British complain that Americans haven’t spoken English for years, and of course, Americans even spell the language differently. Americans spell theatre as theater and colour as color. How horrible! Americans got rid of senseless transpositions and unpronounced extra letters; they also changed the “ise” verb endings to “ize”.   Not content with improving the English language, Americans are now trying to change Spanish by using nouns as verbs in TV commercials.

Hispanics now comprise approximately 15% of the population of the United States. The demographics of the United States have changed since its founding through acquisition of territories and immigration. In the past, the U.S. has been a great melting pot where eventually everyone has ended up speaking English and blended with the rest of the population. It has been different with Spanish speakers.

The major part of the southern United States was Spanish territory at one time. With the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, the U.S. took control of Florida which had been a province of the Captaincy General of Cuba under Spanish rule. The oldest city in the U.S. is St. Augustine, Florida which was established by the Spaniards in 1565. The U.S. acquired approximately 80,000 Spanish speakers from Mexico when it took over the territory that included California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming under the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. In 1917, the United States gave U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans. About 31,000 Puerto Ricans moved to New York from 1946 to 1950. The 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story portrayed some of the friction between the Spanish and Anglo cultures of the time. From 1947 until 1964, the U.S. had the Bracero Program which allowed the importation of temporary contract laborers from Mexico to the United States. In 1959, a large Cuban exodus started when Fidel Castro won control of Cuba. From 1960 to 1979, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left Cuba to start a new life in the United States, mainly in Florida. Many Americans traveled to Mexico during the 1968 Summer Olympics and discovered Mexican food. Soon afterward, Mexican restaurants started appearing throughout the U.S. and many of the waiters and cooks were of Hispanic origin. Another wave of 125,000 Spanish speakers came in the early 1980s from Central America to the U.S. to escape natural disasters or to seek political asylum. The U.S. also has over 11 million illegal residents who, for the most part, are Spanish speakers from Mexico.

For two centuries, there has been a steady stream of Hispanic people who brought their culture, traditions, and the Spanish language to the U.S. The U.S. is home to more than 45 million Hispanics, making it the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking community after Mexico. Large enclaves of Spanish speakers and radio and national television channels that broadcast in Spanish such as Univision and Telemundo have made it possible for immigrants and their U.S.-born children to retain their language skills and have prevented the melting pot effect.

In a recent visit to New York, I noticed that the Metro cards for the New York Subway were written completely in Spanish.  This is an adaptation to the reality that Hispanics comprise a large segment of our society and contribute substantially to the U.S.  economy.  Advertisements for cellular telephones that can send text messages have introduced new verbs on Spanish television such as “textear” or “mensajear” instead of using the traditional Spanish grammatical constructions “enviar mensajes de texto” or “enviar mensajes”. Children who grow up listening to these neologisms will eventually adopt a new American version of Spanish. So how will these new verbs be conjugated?

Textear:
yo texteo, tú texteas, él textea, nosotros texteamos, vosotros texteáis, ellos textean. Estoy texteando.

Mensjear:
yo mensajeo, tú mensajeas, él mensajea, nosotros mensajeamos, vosotros mensajeáis, ellos mensajean. Estoy mensajeando.

Learn English Grammar

There is a revolution in the way people communicate with each other.  Newspapers are getting thinner or going out of business.  Television programs keep saying “go to our website for more details”.  Almost everybody has a cell phone, and cell phones have evolved into multi-function devices that, besides carrying voice messages, take pictures or act like Global Positioning System (GPS) devices that show maps and provide directions.  The cell phones also can store and play your favorite music.  Many of these advances are due to the way that the Internet is developing.

Google has become the major search engine in the world and neither Yahoo nor MSN (now Bing) comes close to the breadth and depth of coverage that Google offers.  The greatest handicap for finding information has been the multiplicity of languages in the world.  Google is making great strides in its statistical translation approach.  A user can search in other languages and have the results translated into his native language.  It is now possible to search information in Arabic or Russian even if you don’t know these languages.  The translations are somewhat rudimentary, but they are understandable.  I can imagine that in twenty years many language barriers will disappear.

One of the latest trends in the Internet is the use of gadgets which perform functions such as displaying the weather, news, or other useful information.  Gadgets are XML containers with HTML and JavaScript that may be easily manipulated within web pages.  To get familiar with the technology, I developed the Lucky Numbers Gadget illustrated above.  It is amazing what you can do with less than 90 lines of code.  Anybody can now develop customized web pages by selecting the gadgets that they find most useful.

You can add the Lucky Numbers gadget to your iGoogle web page by pressing the button:

Example of a Declarative Sentence

This web site has a formal description of an English Grammar that I have used for many years for my computational linguistics work.  The problem with formal descriptions is that they are very terse, and it takes a lot of study to understand how the constituents interact with each other.

I have developed an Interactive Syntax Worksheet that displays the interaction of the grammatical components, and gives the user an intuitive feeling for the process involved in constructing English sentences.  I hope that this is useful to students learning English as a second language, and to native speakers interested in English syntax.  The program is written in JavaScript and it operates entirely within the web browser, so there is nothing to download.  The only requirement is that the browser should be running with JavaScript enabled.

Emperor Napoleon using an Imperative Sentence

Rwanda, a small landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa, has decided to change instruction in schools from French to English.  The French language was brought to Rwanda by Belgian colonizers.  On July 1, 1962, Rwanda was granted full independence from Belgium.

Rwanda has been in the news in recent years because of the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda’s Tutsis by Hutu militia.  Now that the country is gaining some stability, there is a new focus on agricultural development and international trade.  Most Rwandans speak the local Kinyarwanda language or French, but fewer than five percent speak English.

The emphasis on trade has made Rwandans aware that French is only spoken in France, and small parts of Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. Whereas English is spoken worldwide even in countries like China.  Rwandan Senator Aloisea Inyumba said:

“Introducing English is just being realistic.  English is the language of business“

All Rwandan government employees are now required to learn English.

The hyoid bone is the only bone in the body that is not directly connected to another bone.  The hyoid is supported by the muscles of the neck and it, in turn, supports the base of the tongue.  Scientists agree that the hyoid bone and its position in the throat is what makes human speech possible.

Some time ago, it was discovered that Neanderthals had hyoid bones.  This made it possible to deduce that Neanderthals living throughout Europe 230,000 years ago were able to speak.  A new discovery of two hyoid bones from the middle Pleistocene site of the Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain) indicates that the predecessor of the Neanderthal, Homo Heidelbergensis, was also capable of speech.  The researchers conclude that “Modern hyoid morphology was present by at least 530 kya [thousands of years ago] and appears to represent a shared derived feature of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages inherited from their last common ancestor.”[1]

Once language got started, pre-humans could coordinate their activities and argue about religion and politics, just like we do today.

[1] Martí­nez I, Arsuaga JL, Quam R, Carretero JM, Gracia A, Rodrí­guez L, Human hyoid bones from the middle Pleistocene site of the Sima de los Huesos (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain), Journal of Human Evolution, 2008, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 118-124. PMID: 17804038

English is the most common language in international trade, but there are many people in the world who do not understand English. Over 313 billion web pages have been published on the World Wide Web, and approximately 70% of them are written in English. Here are some global internet statistics of web content by language:

Language	Percent of web content
English	68.4%
Japanese	5.9%
German	5.8%
Chinese	3.9%
French	3.0%
Spanish	2.4%
Russian	1.9%

It is important to consider that the native language of people using the internet is not always English. About 30% of the web surfers are English speakers, but 15% speak Chinese, and 9% speak Spanish. Here are some statistics of the percent of users who surf the internet.

Language	Percent users	Number of users
English	30.1%	379M
Chinese	14.7%	185M
Spanish	9.0%	113M
Japanese	6.9%	88M
French	5.1%	64M
German	4.9%	62M
Portuguese	4.0%	51M

From these statistics, it is evident that Chinese and Spanish readers are being underserved. Web sites seeking to expand their global audience should consider translating some of their pages to make them accessible to speakers of other languages.

ScientificPsychic.com uses the following national flags to indicate the availability of web pages in other languages:

	English
	Spanish
	French
	German
	Russian

To see an example of an internationalized web page see:

English Verb Conjugation and Inflectional Morphology

Bonobo – the gentle ape

I recently watched a re-run of a PBS NOVA special about bonobos.[1] For some time, scientists have known that chimpanzees and bonobos share about 98% of their DNA with humans. Current research has shown that bonobos can use and understand language.[2] Analysis of the behavior of the two apes indicates that chimpanzees are bullies, fighters, and murderers who dominate by force, whereas bonobos are peace-loving, social, and sometimes join peacefully with non-related groups of bonobos. Researchers think that unity between the high-ranking bonobo females and year-round social sexual encounters between all members of the bonobo group help to reduce conflicts.

Humans have aggressive traits as well as social traits. The NOVA program tried to imply that the personality of humans may be closer to bonobos than to chimpanzees because we aggregate into social groups, we are very sexual, and we have some altruistic traits. However, as a background to the story, the program mentioned the regional war that spread through the Congo which is the native habitat of bonobos. The researchers studying the bonobo were detained as spies and were lucky to survive the ordeal. The war brought great misery to the area when food became scarce and thousands of people lost their lives through aggression, starvation, or disease.

There is great irony in trying to find good qualities in mankind when there are so many conflicts around us. The lessons of the great world wars have been largely forgotten. Words like Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Gaza, Sudan, and Abu Ghraib evoke images of chaos, destruction, famine, and new forms of torture like “waterboarding”. We may be closer to chimpanzees than we would like to admit.

[1] Nova Special on the Bonobo

[2] Linguistic Capabilities of the Bonobo

To be or not to be …

The verb BE is the most frequent and most misused verb in English. It is also the most irregular. BE may be used as an auxiliary verb or as a linking verb. Here is the conjugation of the verb “to be”:

Contractions of the verb “to be” are very peculiar because some forms can be confused with possessive nouns and must be disambiguated using context. Finally, there is the forbidden word “ain’t” which is used indiscriminately for “is not” and “are not” disregarding person agreement.

Learn about the usage of the verb “to BE”

In Spanish, the written language is a fairly accurate phonetic representation of the words. This is why “baseball” is spelled “beisbol”. In English, the spelling of words is more the result of tradition, rather than phonetics. Every person who has ever tried to write English knows that the spelling of English words has to be memorized. The English language resulted from a mishmash of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon heritage modified by the influence of the Roman and Norman conquests.

What is the function of the silent “E”? The silent “E” is responsible for the difference between the pronunciation of “HAT” and “HATE” or between “CAP” and “CAPE” or between “HOP” and “HOPE”. Although the final “E” is not pronounced, it indicates how the vowel preceding the consonant should be pronounced. The “A” in “HAT” is called a short vowel, whereas the “A” in “HATE” is called a long vowel. Long vowels are usually diphthongs, i.e., two adjacent vowels with a smooth transition from one vowel to another.

Learn how short and long vowels affect the patterns of conjugation of regular verbs in English.