I remember in the movie “The usual suspects” there was some guy who was part of or worked for the police department, who seemed to be an expert in just recognizing a whole bunch of languages, but not necessarily being fluent enough to translate them. Basically, if some person was speaking a language no one recognized, they called in this specialist, he identified the language, then they found the translator who could actually translate for them.
I hope I’m remembering the movie correctly, but even if not, are there really positions like this? Are there people who are specialized in recognizing hundreds of possible languages, but not necessarily knowing enough to be able to translate?
How does one become good at recognizing tons of different languages, if this is a real thing?
If the position is not a real one, or not a very common one at least, then how do police departments and other government organizations deal with someone who cannot answer the question, “what language are you speaking?” Obviously I doubt this happens very much in real life, but still, might be interesting to know what happens.
You wouldn’t need to recognize hundreds, probably less than twenty would cover 99.9% of such situations. For for that .1% you could probably get a good guess as to further investigation.
I mean hell I can almost always guess correctly WHAT language is being spoken, don’t most people?
What you are asking about are called linguistic shibboleths. It is basically how we recognise accents. I imagine someone really good at it might also know a few languages. It wouldn’t be a prerequisite however.
Thanks for reminding me of something though. In the reference of Peter Colletts “Book of Tells”, there was mention of a book dealing with language “tells”. I’m going to try find that.
By the way, Book of Tells is excellent. An easy and informative book, it is about body language. It was republished under a new title, more aimed at sensational readers, but the contents were the same, near as I can tell. It was not a book about “how to get laid.” It isnt about tricking people.
Meanwhile, google shibboleth perhaps.You shouldn’t need to add linguistic, as they are normally factors of speech.
As far as identifying an unknown language, I think the police would look for physical traits if at all possible. An experienced eye(especially with a reference book) knows the difference between a Chinese man and a Korean one for instance. For people of Africa, the Sudanese look a lot different from people of South Africa.
Even among whites there is often a great deal of difference.
Many 9-1-1 centers deal with this by using a language line translating service. If we are absolutely unable to determine which language we transfer it over to the language line and let them figure it out. Must be harder without visual clues.
But generally we have a good idea about which languages are more common in our community. We have plenty of Spanish and Tagalog speakers but I once got tripped up by someone who was speaking Polish. The Polish guy at least managed to give me an address; the police went and saw his passport and then we figured out who to call to translate.
There are all sorts of clues that you can use. Is it a tonal language (like Chinese or Vietnamese)? Does it have lots of hard consonants (like the Slavic languages or Arabic)? Then you might look for particular words that are frequent in one language, but rare or impossible in others – e.g., if a person repeatedly says “the”, then it’s 99.99% sure that they are speaking English (it’s a very common word in English, and impossible to say in most other languages). A person exposed to multiple languages can learn such clues fairly easily without being able to speak fluently in any of them.
I’ve always loved the etymological story of “shibboleth.” It’s about a linguistic shibboleth right there–so the linguistics term is basically redundant!
ETA: I take that back. The spy who is challenged for the password, if he gives “sibboleth,” could still be speaking Hebrew, we’re “sibboleth” a Hebrew word; it’s a graphic challenge (as well as a simple challenge, so it’s a second layer), that he might have intercepted the code word. I have no idea.
For that matter “shibboleth’” might have been a nonce word too. It would make sense for a code bunch-of-phonemes.
I’m running out of time to search for the cite in the Bible for this episode…
[Hijack]There was a sort of civil war going on, basically Judah against Ephraim (foreshadowing the Judea/Israel divide after Solomon). Supposedly, the Ephraimites were incapable of enunciating “Sh”, therefore a Judean would, “properly,” say “shibboleth” while an Ephraimite would say “sibboleth” and would thus be caught – which is the reason this particular word was selected as the code (or possibly they were simply challenged to pronounce it; I don’t remember at the moment).[/Hijack]
Yes, it’s a challenge of phonemes–hence its topicality to the OP. I happen to be particularly interested in handling of graphical information in oral and written speech communities (specifically, in music).
That’s why I mentioned the episodes’s “back-up” encoding of the password:
in theory, the challenged soldier could have learned the correct (to the challenger’s hearing) pronounciation of the code word, were he to have intercepted it in a written message.
But since the “sh” and the “s” sounds have–in normal adult Hebrew text–the same grapheme, the challenger still would not know which word to imitate.
You’re not, actually. They figure out the Hungarian is speaking Hungarian because they’ve already identified the bodies of the dead gangmembers as Hungarians.
I can more or less recognize a Slavic language by ear, but I couldn’t tell you if it’s Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech or Serbian if my life depended on it. Could you ?
I’d assume that, for example, a linguist who speaks at least one of them and is aware of the way all the other Slavic languages differ specifically from the known one (be it grammar, spelling, pronunciation of phonemes, recognizing a few words…) would be able to tell “yup, that’s Polish all right. But I don’t speak Polish, get a 'terp.”
I wrote a long post that was eaten by gremlins so here’s the short of it.
You can get the guy to ID anything (hold a up map to get his origin, count to get him counting, show colours, etc) then use google to nail down an exact language. No expert is really needed for this part.
