The Awesome Peculiarity of Language

 

Photo by JACQUELINE BRANDWAYN on Unsplash

“What does ‘display’ mean?” one of my 8th grade English learners asked. I answered, “To show.” He and his friend stared at me in disbelief. Wondering why it was so hard to understand, I asked them to show me the sentence they’d found it in. It read, “He displayed his new toy.” To befuddle matters even further, “displayed” came at the end of a line and didn’t quite fit, so it was hyphenated with “dis-” on one line and “-played” on the next. It had never before occurred to me to think that “display” could be perceived to have a negative prefix like “displace” or “discontinue.” These two boys were clearly perceiving that. Especially because the sentence was about a toy! It seemed a whole lot more likely to them that the character had stopped playing with it. 

There is nothing like working with language learners to help me appreciate the awesome peculiarity of language in general and English in particular. The wonder of communication, the disaster of Babel's fragmentation, the fascinating array of language systems that humans have developed, and the beautiful determination of people reaching across those divides to learn to think as strangers think and come to love them. Still, the struggle is real, and it surfaces at unexpected times. A class primed for curiosity and laughter is the best antidote to the frustration that always lurks. This happens daily in my EFL class. Let me share a couple of examples from this past week. 

Every time we read in our novel about the character or his uncle going to the workshop, one of the students would ask, “They have that at their house?” I would explain that it was a room with tools where they worked on the bicycle and other things. The next time we read “workshop,” the same student asked the same question. I finally realized that the confusion was being caused by the word “shop.” He was picturing a store. I guess we could call it a work space, or work place, but that could just as easily be an office, sewing area, or kitchen. When we finally clarified that “workshop” was not a store, he asked,“What do you call a shop that sells tools?” “A hardware store.” Which makes no sense in this computer age.   

In the workshop, the character was making bowls out of gourds. After a long discussion about what gourds were (Google Image is my immediate go-to resource), whether pumpkins were gourds, and which was the bigger category—squash or gourd (these students are scientists and never run out of questions!), one student finally asked why I was making such a small cup of my hands when I was talking about the bowls. I said that I was picturing rice bowls or soup bowls. He said, “We only call big ones bowls.” I said, “It could be a serving bowl.” He said, “Not a serving bowl. We don’t have serving bowls in Japan. The meal is brought out in small dishes. A big bowl for mixing.” While Americans may have many sizes and shapes of curved food containers designated “bowls,” Japanese has a special name for each from chawan (rice bowl) to misodonburi (soup bowl).

The previous week, a student asked for a “Hotchkiss” (Japanese: hoh-chee-kee-su)—a stapler. Hotchkiss was a company that produced staplers (like Kleenex for facial tissues in American English, or hoover for vacuum cleaner in British English). I wrote on the board: staple (noun/verb); stapler (noun). One of the students asked what the “staple” noun was. I clicked the stapler, caught the staple that came out in my hand, and held it out to him. He said, “So, like a paper clip?” Nope, only this little piece of metal that comes out of a stapler. He looked at me incredulously and said, “There isn’t any other meaning?” I hesitated and ventured, “Well, there is one other meaning, but it is totally different. Do you want to know it?” He shook his head. We’ll save “main food” for a different day.

Another day we read the sentence “I skid to a stop and turn the bike partway around.” First a student asked what “skid” means. I mimed squeezing handbrakes, coming to a sudden halt, and pointed to the place there are black tire marks on the ground. “Ah! ‘Drift,’” he said. I’m familiar with the concept of the movie Tokyo Drift, but I assure the class that while this IS English, it is a very specialized term, and if they tell an English speaker that their bike drifted, they will more likely communicate aimlessness and slowness than power and speed. I’m not sure they believed me. 

Next, we established the fact that while “bike” (baiku) in Japanese means “motor bike” or “motorcycle,” it is an exact simile for “bicycle” in English (jitensha in Japanese). Even these advanced students had trouble wrapping their brains around that. I told them how confused I was when I first came to Japan, such a law-abiding country, and saw everyone riding their bicycles on paths clearly marked “No bikes.”  

The curiosities of language are endless. Here are a few more that have actually come up in class in the last few weeks. While "I love to eat" and "I enjoy eating" mean the same thing, if you stop eating, you don’t eat; if you stop to eat, you do eat. Sometimes one form of a word is related, but others are not: emergency is similar to urgency, but emergent has nothing to do with urgent. Sometimes the presence or absence of a creates a different meaning: I have a few friends (yay!) vs. I have few friends (boo!).

Isn’t language amazing? Aren’t our students who tackle learning a new one amazing, too? 

What language curiosities have you been fascinated with recently?