A website I found today compares how people from many different regions and countries pronounce English words. It also gives the pronunciation of equivalent words in related languages, and in older forms of English and other Germanic languages. The pronunciations are all given in the IPA, and there are recordings of many of the modern words as well.
I found an interesting article about Shetlandic (Shaetlan) today entitled Shaetlan is Daed - Lang live Dialect or Shetlandic is dead - Long live Dialect.. It’s available both in Shetlandic and English. It raises some interesting points about the current status of Shetlandic, about relationship between languages and dialects, and the difference between linguistics definitions and popular perceptions of dialects.
Shetlandic is a Germanic language/dialect spoken in Shetland, a group of islands to the northeast of Scotland and to the south of the Faroe Islands. It’s a variety of Scots with Norn influence. Norn was a language derived from Old Norse spoken on Shetland, Orkney and in parts of northern Scotland until the 19th century.
Here are a few extracts:
… when I was young we spoke Shaetlan - we needed the word ‘dialect’ only if we were speaking English, when we would usually call it ‘The Shetland Dialect.’ When we were speaking Shaetlan, the distinction between dialect and language didn’t arise - it was an artefact of translation, a distinction which appeared only when you were looking at Shetlandic from an English-language viewpoint. The word ‘dialect’ implies that one language is a left-over scrap of another language. It’s a purely relative term, which becomes relevant only when you are looking at a language from an external viewpoint.
Recently, however, I’ve noticed that an increasing number of people use the word ‘dialect’ to describe the Shetland tongue even when they’re speaking (or writing) Shetlandic.
He goes on to argue that creating a standard spelling system for Shetlandic would be a positive move and would help it to survive. He dismisses claims that such as system would kill off the forms of Shetlandic spoken in different islands; instead people would continue to pronounce words in their own way while writing them in a standard way. Moreover writers would not be forced to give up their idiosyncratic and creative spellings as they claim.
Further information, articles and texts about and/or in Shetlandic are available here.
Ecpod is a language learning site I found the other day that’s designed to teach you conversational English and Mandarin Chinese. It contains videos made by members, some of which feature everyday activities such as cooking, shopping or playing; others focus on particularly aspects of English or Chinese. There are also funny videos, cartoons, and a variety of others. The videos are vetted by language tutors commissioned by the site, who sometimes also add transcriptions.
It’s free, but you have to join to site to submit your own videos.
This sounds like a good idea. Do you know of similar sites for other languages?
Today’s word, snasail, is Scottish Gaelic for accurate, alright, brave, decent, elegant, lopped, neat or ornamented. When I stumbled upon it in my Gaelic dictionary, I thought at first that it said ’snailsail’, which conjured up an image of sailing snail.
A related words include:
snasmhor - neat, smart or elegant
snas-bhriathrach - eloquent, oratorical, rhetorical (briathrach = eloquent, loquacious, talkative)
snas-chainnt - philology, rhetoric (cainnt = language, speech)
snasachadh - analysis, carving, elegance, make-up, ornamenting, polishing
The root of these words is snas, which means aspect, colour, decency, elegance, gloss, perfectness, polish.
Finding time to study languages isn’t always easy what with all the other things you have to do. You can probably find moments during the day when you could study a bit, each of which might be only short. This doesn’t matter as long as you manage to accumulate a sufficient number of moments.
Some people advise you to fill every spare moment with language-related activity. This is all very well if you’re the kind of diligent person who carries around textbooks, dictionaries, flashcards and other language learning paraphernalia which you can whip out whenever the opportunity arises. If, like me, you don’t always have such things to hand, you can practice your language(s) by thinking of the words for the things you see around you, trying to describe the appearance and actions of any people and or animals you encounter, or just talking to yourself.
While I do try to use my spare moments to practise my languages, quite often I spend them just daydreaming or leting my mind wander instead. Sometimes my daydreams are in other languages though.
Last week GeoffB over on Confessions of a Language Addict wrote a good post about planning your studies - he suggests that when planning language study, it’s better to find times that fit into your routine and make them part of your routine, rather than thinking something like ‘I’ll study for an hour every evening’, then failing to do so.
He goes on to comment:
“Too often when we formulate our language learning plans, we are making them not for ourselves but for our idealized version of a dedicated language learner. Then we beat ourselves up for not being motivated enough to stick to it. In laying out your language learning plans, think about how you live your life and how you do things. Try to lay out some routines you can actually see yourself sticking to.”
Here’s a recording of part of song in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess what language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Moves are afoot in the Scottish Parliament to introduce lessons in Scots in Scotland’s schools, according to an article I found the other day.
The Minister for Schools and Skills, Maureen Watt, thinks that the language of Scots should be used in classrooms. This proposal is part of a new curriculum being published this week which will aim to ensure that “schoolchildren are exposed to Scotland’s literature and the languages of Scotland”. Presumably that would include Scottish Gaelic as well as Scots.
Quite a few of the comments on the article are written in Scots and most are supportive of the idea. There are also those who question whether Scots is a language, an old debate that will probably never be settled conclusively either way.
Another article discusses the role of Scots in schools and gives practical tips for teaching it, and this page is a transcription of a talk, partly in Scots, about Scots in schools. A recording of the talk is also available.
There are many sites that translate between different languages, but a site I found today called Sign Translate is the first one I’ve seen that translates between English and sign language.
The site is intended for health professionals working in Britain’s NHS (National Health Service) and provides translations from English to and from British Sign Language (BSL), and also between English and Arabic, Bengali, French, Gujarati, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Somali, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu. The BSL translations are displayed as videos, while translations in the others languages are available as text and audio.
The system does not in fact translate anything you say to it; instead it is programed with a set of typical questions and answers used in medical situations with versions of these in BSL and the other languages. Online BSL interpretation by real interpreters using webcams is also available.
This kind of system could be useful in other places such as hotels, police stations, banks, etc.
Have you come across any similar systems?
Here’s a recording of a number of phrases in a mystery language. Do you know of can you guess which language it is and where it’s spoken?
Languages Quick Fix is a very useful site I discovered today. It includes words, phrases, and idioms in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, and German, plus a basic introduction to each language. There are recordings of the words, phrases, and idioms in all the languages - in the case of Chinese, the recordings are in Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese. There are also links to news stories, dictionaries, and Chinese paintings (in the Learn Chinese - One At a Time section).
Another useful site I came across today is SmallMarble, a multilingual phrase book to which anyone can contribute. At the moment it has Spanish translations of most of the phrases, but few translations in other languages.
