Omniglot - the blog

Continuing yesterday’s sign language theme, I’ve been looking for information about British Sign Language (BSL) and have found a number online lessons and courses, as well as some information about the language. I’ve even learned a few signs.

BSL is used by over 70,000 deaf people, and also by some 100,000 hearing people. It was recognised as a language in it’s own right by the UK government on 18 March 2003, but it has no legal protection, so is not an official language of the UK.

According to Wikipedia, BSL is very similar to Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and New Zealand Sign Language, and also to Northern Ireland Sign Language (NISL), though differs significantly from Irish Sign Language (ISL), which, like American Sign Language (ASL), developed from French Sign Language (langue des signes française / LSF).

There are some BSL lessons here, here, here and here.

I find it fascinating to watch sign language being used and would like learn it one of these days.

What do you do if you want to discuss scientific matters such as photosynthesis or magnetism in sign language?

Well, most users of British Sign Language have to spell out the such words using finger spelling, which is quite cumbersome and time consuming. Recently however, the Scottish Sensory Centre at Edinburgh University’s School of Education started to develop a collection of new signs for mathematical and scientific terms which will not only be more convenient, but will also help students to understand the scientific concepts with gestures which make intuitive sense.

According to an article in The Herald, the new signs are being developed by a BSL expert from the School of Education with help from teachers and others who help deaf students, and also from deaf scientists at the University of Durham.

Where might you see a sign like the one on the right?

The answer, according to an article I found last week, is in Cheshire, England. The sign reads “DIVERSION A49 for Whitchurch and nearby places” and was erected by the Cheshire County Council, who claim that it is needed due to the large numbers of Polish people in the area.

The local police have received many complaints about Polish drivers getting lost and disrupting traffic, and the council believe the signs are a practical measure to improve road safety. Other people complain that the signs are a case of the council “pandering to political correctness”, and the local MP is quoted as saying that the signs are “It’s absolutely bonkers”.

Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Any ideas which language it is and in which countries it’s spoken?

Clue: This language is spoken mainly in Africa.

A luthier is someone who makes or repairs stringed instruments. The word comes from the French luth (lute). Luthiers are often divided into two categories: those who deal with plucked or strummed instruments, such as guitars, banjos, mandolins, etc, and those who devote themselves to bowed instruments, such as violin, violas and cellos. The latter are also known as archetiers, from the French arch (bow).

Do you know if there are special names for makers or repairers of others kinds of musical instruments?

A useful site I found this week is Radio Lingua, which offers podcasts to help you learn Spanish, French and German, or the basics of Polish, Irish, German and Russian in one minute chunks. The one minute podcasts are also available here.

Learning languages a little at a time like this seems to be quite a good way to get started. Most of the language courses I’ve tried tend to throw you straight into quite complex dialogues, which are often about subjects that are of little interest or relevance. However, one of my Irish courses, Irish On Your Own/Now You’re Talking, includes a lot of short dialogues and I found it much more useful.

Arbejdsglæde is a Danish word meaning literally “work gladness/joy”. There are apparently similar words in the other Scandinavian languages, and also in Dutch (arbeidsvreugde) and German (Arbeitszufriedenheit). The closest equivalent I can find in English is job satisfaction, though this doesn’t seem to have quite the same meaning as the Danish one.

I found this word on Alex Kjerulf’s blog, Chief Happiness Officer, in a post where he discusses some of the differences in work cultures between Scandinavia and Japan, where there’s a word meaning ‘death by overwork’ 過労死 (karōshi).

Do you know if there’s an equivalent to arbejdsglæde in other languages?

Here’s a recording of a mystery language.

Any ideas which language it is and where it’s spoken?

Namaste,

Simon agreed that I’ll occasionally post reviews about Asia, India and devanagari, typography and some font & linguistic software related matters as well.

I’m a young man, born in Riga and spreading the Sanskrit message around the world. Working as a Sanskrit Reader in Russia, teaching at the Russian State University and writing a PhD about Sanskrit verbal roots. I’m planning to publish several Sanskrit manuals and reprints of old books in the near future. I’m an editor as well of the Sanskrit section of the Open Directory and http://nagari.southindia.ru. So you can download some dictionaries there, etc.

It is strange that 200 years after the first Nagari typefaces where cast in iron in India, we’ve got no fine Devanagari fonts at our disposal. Ok, we have quite a few Hindi fonts. But, hey, there are many differences. No Devanagari fonts at the moment supports the four variants of “la” or the northern (Varanasi) and southern (Mumbai) variant of the letter “a”. Ok, some may say that who cares about Nagari font, but you do know and notice the difference, if you’re a teacher - students get stuck seeing a letter they’ve never seen before and have no reference chart to look upon.

None of the True Type Unicode fonts have a precoded ligature for “sthva” (which means the “va” should be under the “sth” and not beside it) as it was in the good old times when Harvard Oriental Series was printed (even they have lost the type in the latest editions, e.g. the 50th edition was printed in transliteration only). All the letters in Windows fonts are written without even the slightest break, though it is well known that in the manuscripts and books printed before 1914 in Europe, Devanagari letters are separated buy 1-1.5 mm. Maybe it is not very good from the point of view of grammarians, but, sure, it looks much better. Devanagari font differences like these can be continued.
That’s it for today, next post will be in a while. Is there anybody who’s interested to hear about Unicode Devanagari font matters?

Transliteration, from the Latin trans, across, and littera, letter, is the practice of transferring a text from one writing system to another. Transliteration can be used to give people who can’t read other alphabets an idea how to pronounce words and names, though without some knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of pronunciation of the original languages, their pronunciation will probably sound only vaguely like the original.

In phrase books you often find transliterations designed to show how to pronounce things based on the mother tongues of the readers. Such guides tend to be confusing as the ‘phonetics’ might not make much sense to you. A few phrase books and language course provide IPA pronunciation guides, which are great, if you’re familiar with the IPA.

In the phrases section on Omniglot, I try to provide transliterations for all languages written with non-Latin writing systems. Many languages have several different transliteration systems and I usually choose the most widely-used. The transliterations may not make sense to everyone, but there are recordings of quite a few of the phrases, so you can at least hear how to pronounce them. Ideally there would be sound files for all the phrases, plus maybe IPA transcriptions, and with your help, maybe that will be the case one day.

I chose this word today because someone suggested that some of the transliterations on my phrases pages are confusing, especially to Americans. The trouble is, if I made the transliterations American-friendly, people from other countries might not find them useful.