Five Wordy Stories to Satisfy Your Inner Linguist

[Music] my name is Jani Chicano MA from Greece and I speak 32 languages Russian Portuguese I honest is what we call a hyper polyglot it means he can speak a lot of languages by the time I was 20 I had already learned some 15 languages and when I moved to Brussels and started my career or the EU institutions I added more official EU languages see the thing is I honest he's a quick learner I Spencer no ideas for not mm mama I see Tyler mckernon see how why call you yes this doesn't happen by just sitting at home in the studying no no clarity no I K viajar is very potato con la gente netted Lamia procrastinate pres nian no it rears occur to any metal Jonnie Jonnie till redneck : mark a post so you desire veramente to the Questor lingua con in economy ecology only Giorno the world is a big place with different cultures and yes different languages a clifton Levanon letter inspiration in italian and meter marine dental I speak to my husband in polish Polish polish I dream in all kinds of languages targeted Solanki share please difficult calm did not reverse the move wailing before we go if anyone knows it's you what is the most complicated language to learn Mandarin mystery solved [Music] hello normally when you think of words they fit into a language but there's a relatively new class of words that don't quite follow the rules and it's called wasa a go John Kelly is a language writer I spend a lot of my time writing about word origins he's a linguistics expert and he knows just about everything about the phenomenon called wasa a go why say a go literally means Japan made English it is a language process that takes foreign words usually English words and transmogrifies them into something wholly new and novel for Japanese purposes we see this with a word like karaoke everybody knows and everybody loves karaoke but it joins the Japanese kata which means empty and okay which is a Japanese rendering of orchestra so a karaoke is an empty orchestra the most popular example is the word Pokemon the creator of Pokemon took two English words pocket and monster he smashed them together and got Pokemon or take cosplay a word that describes people dressing up as fictional characters cosplay joins costume in play and there's anime anime is a fairly straightforward rendering of the English animation Wasi ego is important because language is always changing and reinventing itself what new words will pop up in the future only time will tell [Music] pardon me professor maybe you can help me out here is this word pronounced cash or cash a cash appreciate it doc you see when jock Bailey pronounces a word he pronounces it right he could pronounce this thing it's my Ragan he can pronounce this thing Sharron shmitah he even pronounces words that don't make a lick of sense albumen and when you're that damn good with words sooner or later someone's gonna pay you to say him hi dr. Bailey this is jock Bailey the official pronounced er of the National Spelling Bee Luxembourg L you XE [Music] Gayla sherbet Giro GIF before jocks days is the world's foremost pronounce our persnickety words he began a spelling career on the other side of the microphone jock was a competitive speller and in 1980 he found himself in the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee his word aloo cube rate so he said elu CU b ra t and it means to burn the midnight oil to study all night and with those 10 letters jock became a champion 23 years later jacket aloo ki braided all the way to the Big Show propio phenom Roquefort pyroclastic the definition but sometimes even Chuck's meticulous pronunciations don't tell the whole story English words are not always felt as they sound one thing that makes English words really hard to spell is the schwa the schwa is that uh like in butter or unutterable the y and syringe the a in balloon the Olin freedom they all sound the same spoken out loud a spellers nightmare the longer and weirder a word is the easier it is to spell take take the state fish of Hawaii the homo homo no ko well the humuhumunukunukuapua'a that's an easy word to spell it's just long it's a weird word and weird things stand out and are easier to remember oh and oh and a si a pair in Amasia correct for a man with perhaps the most legitimate claim is the authority on pronunciation Jacques takes a rather agnostic approach to the right and wrong ways to say things a lot of people are kind of amazed that I know how to pronounce all these words but I don't I read them from the dictionary well how does the dictionary know how to pronounce a word because they go out there and listen to native speakers if there are a whole bunch of people who pronounce a word a certain way that makes it a correct pronunciation people who have very strong opinions that there's an incorrect way to pronounce a word but it's like saying that dog barked wrong that's not a bark well the dog gets to decide thanks John I reckon you got more wisdom that all the books in the library in many parts of the world Scrabble is viewed as a pastime as a game where maybe old people play after retirement and all that but Scrabble in danger is actually very big it is seen as a spot there is an actual nature and Scrabble Federation under the Ministry of sports they have a lot of young people hoping to aim an actual living from playing Scrabble my name is Wellington g-gary and I'm the word Scrabble champion I start playing Scrabble in 1996 when my immediate Arabella taught me the game it was it until six years after that I was playing with some of my neighborhood friends and they were like ah you are quite good why not play in tournaments and I was like wow you mediate ladies in tournaments and the rest is history else to say having an African mean the word Scrabble championship is bigger than I can actually comprehend you needed to have been in the hole to see the jubilation of our other African brothers it was something that everyone in Africa that play Scrabble has actually looked forward to Nigeria is a very very diverse nation we have well over 500 developed languages but the major means of communication all over Nigeria is English and since Scrabble is based upon the English vocabulary is going to be a way of helping each and every one improve their command of the English language relating with if I hadn't played Scrabble might have been involved in some other not so legitimate activities and I think playing Scrabble it keeps you on the right track we are not blind to the facts that's the level of unemployment to the country is very very immense so I came up with the Wellington foundation for scramble and mine development in Africa there's a lot of similarities between how life actually goes and how Scrabble goes you get to understand that is not all the time that you get in your way you really have to make the best out of the little that you are given you know each country is known for a particular sport Brazil for example is known for football we are hoping to make Scrabble in Nigerian sports about if you mention Scrabble in any part of the world danger should come to mind [Music] to be or not to be that is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and I was a very just fortunate bounce again to see if troubles are by opposing end them to die to sleep to sleep perchance to dream mother you get micromachine man he presenting a genuine original class of almost video things micro machines a lot of people know me as the micro machine man or the FedEx guy are terrible Testaverde from Saved by the Bell or just that guy who talks fast in fact I was in the Guinness Book as the world's fastest talker and so for the last 40 years if you needed a fast talker I was your go-to guy is that ok did you get everything you need I mean I can repeat it again if you want you sure you don't want to do together when I was 12 years old I wanted to get into the Guinness Book of World Records so I figured the only thing I could really do since I wasn't gonna eat a car or swallow lead-pipe was to lock myself in a room and teach myself fast-talking and I did that with the hamlet soliloquy years later I'm at this party fancy California Beverly Hills party and a friend of mine is trying to pick up this valley girl he's from New York and talking pretty quickly and she looks at him and says Nick oh my gosh are you like the world's fastest talker and he says no as a matter of fact this person is they called me overnight did one of my little party routines because I come up sipping a cup of tea but if I pick difficult the Pacific Club and a guy walked over he says that's incredible I'm a producer and I'm gonna put you on a show I went on the show and I did the fast-talking thinking that would be it and all of a sudden the phone starts ringing and I'm booked all over the place and I managed to make a living out of it I can speak as fast as eleven words a second now I never do eleven words a second for TV well let me do Peter Piper at eleven words a second pick up I come up to pick up cup up to feed about fifty difficult to pick up a cup to feed a puppet then you kind of hear me going pop pop up but that's really are you kind of getting but when you do TV there's visual reinforcement people see you and do whatever so I do about seven to eight words a second that would sound something like now on radio I have to do it even a little slower because you have no visual reinforcement you're not seeing me so that I do about five to six words a second so it sounds something like and that's kind of the secret to my success because if you can't understand what I'm saying they're not gonna pay me the big bucks now the very first commercial I did was the Federal Express commercial it is to this day the most award-winning commercial in the history of advertising the final scene I'm sitting behind the desk and I'm going you know Dave what's the deal with the deal are we dealing David's deal with Don if it's a deal with dr. feelgood I'm putting you down to deal with so I did the thing like 29 times without making a mistake and the director said to me what are you like a machine you never make a mistake I said you want a mistake I'll give you a mistake the next time so I said David's a dork with dick down and duck and that's the take II ended up putting in the commercial to deal with Dave the first time I saw it I called this John it's our little secret although I'm known as the world's fastest talker I do not choose to live my entire life in the fast lane sometimes I just like to take it all a little slower but sometimes it's really really good to be test you [Music]

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 141,039

Rating: 4.9270239 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, language, words, scrabble, pokemon, nigeria

Id: __Ryi1XNAW0

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 08 2018