With the popularity of the film, Avatar, linguists around the world have a new invented language to expose their geekiness: Na’vi.

Poised to join the ranks of other invented languages like Esperanto, Quenya (aka High-Elvish), and Klingon, Na’vi is sure to amass a following of nerds and linguists at future nerd conventions like Comic-con.

But philosophically, it calls into a greater question. What makes a language a language? Vocabulary? Native speakers? A grammar filled with syntax, phonology, phonetics, morphology, and semantics?

Having tried to create my own fictional language, I can tell you it is a lot more sophisticated than just making up words.

Anyway, score another one for the linguistic nerds out there!

I came across this article.

Hooray for more paranoia induced ignorant racism!

I suppose this means the next time I visit an tropical island-themed hotel, I should ask Larry to change his name to something more tropical. I mean, it is part of the experience, right?

Two weeks ago, I read an article in the New York Times about nomenclature. The author argues that there is something inherent about the way we name things, particularly animals, that lets us separate them into categories. Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of Georgia conducted a study asking students to listen to a pair of 50 names read aloud. Each pair contained the name of a fish and the name of a bird. To combat bias, he chose names from the Huambisa language, spoken by people of the same name in Peru.

Students were able to correctly identify the bird and the fish 58% of the time, suggesting that they subconsiously picked up on linguistic cues. Somehow, the names gave a sense of “bird-ness” or “fish-ness”.

Statistically speaking, random guessing would give a result hovering around 50%. A scaled-down version of the quiz can be found here. Interestingly, I took the quiz and was able to correctly identify the bird in 9 of the 10 questions, despite not having any exposure to the language. Maybe there is something to this idea.

This got me thinking, what about non-Latinate languages? I’ve written a mini quiz for Chinese with 10 pairs of names. Each pair contains a flower and a bird. (I couldn’t find a list of fish names with audio pronunciations. However, the study suggests that this pairing could also work, in that the two categories are distinguishable with distinct characteristics. Whereas, distinguishing the name of a tree and a bush is more difficult since the defining characteristics between the two aren’t as distinct.) Can you pick out the bird? To remove visual clues from radicals, I will only give the Pinyin and an audio pronunciation. Click on the links for audio.

1. a) wu1 dong1 1a, b) shui3 xian1 1b
2. a) chu2 ju2 2a, b) he4 2b
3. a) ge1 3a, b) mu4 jin4 3b
4. a) ying1 4a, b) shu3 kui2 4b
5. a) shao2 yao4 5a, b) fei3 5b
6. a) kong3 que4 6a, b) ying1 su4 6b
7. a) bai2 tou2 ying1 7a, b) yu3 jin4 xiang1 7b
8. a) ge1 zi3 8a, b) gong1 ren2 cao3 8b
9. a) xiang4 ri4 kui2 9a, b) guan4 9b
10. a) pu2 gong1 ying1 10a, b) jin1 si1 que4 10b

So? How’d you do? Which ones are the birds?

Answers: (highlight below to reveal answers)
The birds: 1. a; 2. b; 3. a; 4. a; 5. b; 6. a; 7. a; 8. a; 9. b; 10. b