Chinese speakers use more of their brain than English speakers

If you speak Mandarin, your brain works differently. That’s according to a recent study published in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences. The report is the first to conclude that those who speak tonal languages like Mandarin exhibit a very different flow of information during speech comprehension, using both hemispheres of the brain rather than just the left, which has long been seen as the primary neurological region for processing language.

Reading Jane Austen in Chinese uses more parts of your brain.

After analyzing brain imaging data from Mandarin and English speakers listening their respective languages, researchers from Peking University and other universities found that native Mandarin speakers and native English speakers both showed evidence of activity in the brain’s left hemisphere. But Mandarin speakers also saw activation in the right hemisphere, specifically in a region important for processing music, via pitch and tone, that has long been seen as largely unrelated to language comprehension.

Since at least the 1950s, researchers in the field of neurolinguistics have been questioning how languages influence perception, and physiological behavior. This latest study supports one emerging theory, connectionism, that maintains that some languages require interactions across the entire brain. The findings are important for better protecting language-related regions during brain surgery as well as understanding the “constitution of knowledge of language, as well as how it is acquired,” according to the study.

“Pitch processing is crucial for music, but also crucial for tone processing of a tone language. Based on our current results, it is reasonable to hypothesize that all tone languages use both hemispheres,” Gang Peng, deputy director of the Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and one of the study’s co-authors, told Quartz. Other tonal languages include Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Thai.

Specifically, Chinese and English speakers both show activity in three regions in the left hemisphere: the inferior frontal gyrus, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, and the posterior middle gyrus, labeled F, A, and P, respectively (picture A in the image below). But Chinese speakers exhibit activity in an extra area in addition to those three: the superior temporal gyrus (figure R, picture B).

So what differences does it make? For one, according to Gang, there’s likely to be a higher prevalence of absolute, or perfect pitch among native tonal language speakers learning music, a theory that has been floated before.

And for those who are learning Mandarin—including Mark Zuckerberg and Prince William—they may notice that their brains are working just a little bit harder to crack the code of a notoriously difficult-to-learn language.

(Source: Quartz)

The world’s most musical languages

Why one syllable spoken at different pitches can have seven meanings

People don’t generally speak in a monotone. Even someone who couldn’t carry a tune if it had a handle on it uses a different melody to ask a question than to make a statement, and in a sentence like “It was the first time I had even been there,” says “been” on a higher pitch than the rest of the words.

Still, if someone speaks in a monotone in English, other English-speakers can easily understand. But in many languages, pitch is as important as consonants and vowels for distinguishing one word from another. In English, “pay” and “bay” are different because they have different starting sounds. But imagine if “pay” said on a high pitch meant “to give money,” while “pay” said on a low pitch meant “a broad inlet of the sea where the land curves inward.” That’s what it feels like to speak what linguists call a tonal language. At least a billion and a half people worldwide do it their entire lives and think nothing of it.

Mandarin Chinese, with its four tones, is a typical example. Take the word ma. If you say it the way an English-speaker would say it, just reading it sitting by itself on a page, then it means “scold.” Say ma as if you were looking for your mother—ma?—and it means “rough.” If you were just whining at her—“ma-a-a?!?”—with your voice swooping down a bit and then back up even higher, that would mean, believe it or not, “horse.” And if you say ma on a high pitch, as if you were singing the first syllable of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as ma instead of “oh” for some reason, that would actually mean mother. That’s the way almost every syllable works in Chinese.

An ethnic Hmong boy plays the lusheng to welcome the new year in Guizhou province, China.CHINA STRINGER NETWORK / REUTERS

As tone languages go, Mandarin is by no means the most complicated. The Hmong language, spoken in China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, can have seven or even eight tones. It’s dazzling, really. If you say paw like a statement, it means “female.” Say it like a question and it means “to throw.” Say it up high in an impatient way and you’re saying “ball.” Say it down low as if you ran into someone in a basement and didn’t want anyone upstairs to know you were down there, and it means “thorn.” Say it in a tone between the impatient high and the down-low and it means “pancreas.” If you say paw in a creaky way—kind of like the way one might imitate an elderly person’s voice—then it means “to see,” while if you say it in a breathy, amazed way as if you were seeing a horsey in the clouds, then it means “paternal grandmother.” (For what it’s worth, maternal grandmother is tai, said on the “basement” tone.)

Tone languages are spoken all over the world, but they tend to cluster in three places: East and Southeast Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; and among the indigenous communities of Mexico. Why there and not elsewhere? One thing these regions might have in common is heat, though it’s hard to imagine how that would make people speak more melodically. Yet environment may not be entirely unrelated to the phenomenon—according to one hypothesis, tone languages are less likely to develop in dry environments because dry air deprives the vocal cords of the suppleness required to produce subtle differences in tone.

The jury is still out on that one, but even if it turns out to be true, it only gets us so far. The theory proposes that where the climate isn’t dry, there’s no predicting whether a language will take on tones or not. As such, it’s easy to suppose—and fun to imagine—that people decide to “sing” language out of some kind of cultural impulse. The reality is less groovy, but just as interesting.

It’s ultimately a matter of one thing leading to another. Take the words “pay” and “bay.” It looks like the only difference between them is that they start with different letters, but there’s more to it up close. English-speakers tend to say the ay sound on a slightly lower pitch after a b than after a p, because of the different mechanics involved in saying those consonants. That is, one tends to say “pay” a little higher than one says “bay.” In daily life that’s so subtle as to be barely noticeable: What stands out is the good old difference between p and b. But p and b are very similar sounds, and sounds that are similar have a way of melting together—a Cockney English-speaker can say “bref” for breath and “fing” for thing because the f and th sounds are made close together at the front of the mouth. Suppose as time went by English-speakers started pronouncing b as p so that there was no more b sound at all?

Imagine: “Brother” is “prother,” “bat” is “pat,” “big” is “pig.” Things like that happen in languages all the time, and if it happened to English, then instead of “pay” and “bay” there would just be “pay” and “pay”—except there would still be that difference in the tone. “Pay” with a neutral tone would mean “pay,” while “pay” with a low tone would mean “bay.” The tone alone would convey the difference in meaning. This is exactly how a tone language happens, and in some places you can even see the steps in the process. For example, there is a language called Khmu spoken in parts of Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and China. In one dialect of Khmu, pok means “bite” and bok means “to cut down a tree.” In another dialect, though, b has become p, and all that’s left behind is the difference in the tone, as if the Cheshire Cat had left behind his smile. Thus in that dialect, pok on a high tone means “bite,” while pok on a low tone means “to cut down a tree.”

There are certain advantages to speaking tone languages. Speakers of some African languages can communicate across long distances playing the tones on drums, and Mazatec-speakers in Mexico use whistling for the same purpose. You know those people who can hear a stray note and instantly identify its pitch, for instance recognizing that a certain car horn is an A flat? They have “absolute pitch,” and there is evidence that speakers of tone languages are more likely to have it. In one experiment, for instance, Mandarin-speaking musicians were better at identifying musical pitches than English-speaking ones. The same has been found for speakers of Cantonese—which has six or even nine tones, depending on how you count—relative to English- and French-speakers.

Could a language rely completely on tones? As key as tones can be to conveying meaning, they aren’t fine-grained enough by themselves to communicate the full range of human expression—speaking only in tones would be akin to writing only in emojis. The tone-language counterpart to the new all-emoji translation of Moby-Dick, for example, would have been a language created by a Frenchman in the 1820s called Solresol, which was based solely on musical tones. Do-re-mi was “day,” do-re-fa was “week,” do-re-sol was “month,” and so on; mi-sol was “good,” and the reverse, sol-mi, was “bad.” Cute idea, but Solresol would have been no more able to equal the speed, nuance, and complexity of actual speech than Emoji-Dick can render the magnificence of Melville’s prose.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Why Mandarin doesn’t come from Chinese

The name of the world’s most spoken language has a surprising origin story.

Since the mandarin duck appeared in Central Park last fall, his unexpected presence has stirred up many questions: Where did he come from? Why is he so hot? Can such beauty survive in our garbage world? And, for the linguistics nerds out there, where do mandarin ducks get their name?

Yes, true, mandarin ducks are native to China, where Mandarin is the official language. But the word mandarin has a more roundabout origin. It does not come from Mandarin Chinese, which refers to itself as putonghua (or “common speech”) and China, the country, as zhongguo (or “Middle Kingdom”). It doesn’t come from any other variant of Chinese, either. Its origins are Portuguese.

This one word encapsulates an entire colonial history. In the 16th century, Portuguese explorers were among the first Europeans to reach China. Traders and missionaries followed, settling into Macau on land leased from China’s Ming dynasty rulers. The Portuguese called the Ming officials they met mandarim, which comes from menteri in Malay and, before that, mantrī in Sanskrit, both of which mean “minister” or “counselor.” It makes sense that Portuguese would borrow from Malay; they were simultaneously colonizing Malacca on the Malay peninsula.

For centuries, Europeans’ impressions of China filtered largely through the Portuguese. The 16th-century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, for instance, was Italian, but he arrived in China through Portuguese Macau. Following the twisty logic of colonialism, when he attempted to transpose Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet, he made use of both Italian and Portuguese, comparing the sounds of individual characters to the sounds of Portuguese and Italian words. Even today, “linguists go to town and try to figure [out] what Chinese would have sounded like at the time,” says David Moser, author of A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language. “They could use as a clue the way Matteo Ricci wrote the Portuguese.”

Mandarin duck showing off in Central ParkSETH WENIG / AP

Over time, the Portuguese coinage of “mandarin” took on other meanings. The Ming dynasty officials wore yellow robes, which may be why “mandarin” came to mean a type of citrus. “Mandarin” also lent its names to colorful animals native to Asia but new to Europeans, like wasps and snakes and, of course, ducks. And the language the Chinese officials spoke became “Mandarin,” which is how the English name for the language more than 1 billion people in China speak still comes from Portuguese.

But words have a way of collecting just-so origin stories, and Chinese speakers have sometimes retroactively given a Chinese origin to “mandarin,” says Moser. It sounds similar enough to mandaren, a phrase that could mean “important Manchurian.” The rulers of China’s last dynasty, the Qing, were from Manchuria, so it make sense if you squint at it. “But it’s not true,” says Moser. “Mandarin” has a distinctly non-Mandarin origin.

“Mandarin” is what linguists call an exonym, an external name for a place, people, or language. And exonyms often tell a history of how cultures met, fought, and interacted. Many English names for continental European cities derive not from the local language but from French—probably a legacy of the Norman conquest of England. For example, English and French both use Cologne for Köln, Florence for Firenze, Prague for Praha, and Belgrade for Beograd.

In other cases, says the lexicographer Grant Barrett, exonyms arise because two places have a relationship that pre-dates current national boundaries. For example, adds the linguist Anatoly Liberman, we use “Germany” from the Latin Germania. In French, the name is Allemagne from a group of tribes called the Alemanni; in Finnish, Saksa from the Saxons. Germany (Deutschland in German) only became a unified country in 1871, long after other Europeans had adopted their own names for the place, based on different peoples who once lived there.

From the vantage point of English speakers, many of the exonyms for non-European places and languages come filtered through the languages of former colonial powers. Bombay and Ceylon, for example, also come from the Portuguese, whose empire once sprawled through Asia. The names imposed by colonial powers can be controversial, of course; Bombay and Ceylon have since officially changed their names to Mumbai and Sri Lanka. The name “Mandarin” still endures, perhaps because its origin is more obscure or because China has enjoyed warmer relations with Portugal than with other European countries. As for the mandarin ducks, they also live in Portugal now.

(Source: The Atlantic)