Omniglot - the blog

I’ll be leaving Brighton tomorrow and moving to Bangor. I’ve spent the past few days packing, and getting rid of things I no longer need, and still have far too much stuff, especially books.

The plan is to set off tomorrow morning at around 7am, and to stop at an IKEA on the way to buy some furniture for the new house. So I should arrive in Bangor sometime tomorrow afternoon (it’s just over 300 miles from Brighton).

Unfortunately my broadband connection probably won’t be working for a week or three - not sure why it takes so long to set up - and I’ll have to rely on dial-up until then. So posts on this blog may become somewhat sporadic for a while.

A useful site I heard about recently is Practicing Spanish, which focuses on medical Spanish for healthcare providers. It includes daily dialogues, with audio, useful phrases for different medical situations, anatomical terminology, basic vocabulary, notes on culture and information about Spanish-speaking countries, as well as a number of folk songs. The author of the site is a Spanish teacher in the USA with training in medical interpreting.

A similar site I found today contains a glossary of medical terms in nine European languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).

There’s another mutilingual medical dictionary at: http://www.super55.com.

Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?

Clue: this is an indigenous language of Central America.

The other day I heard about an interesting video on YouTube that shows the ancient forms of 36 Chinese characters via an animated cartoon in which the characters come to life. The commentary is all in Mandarin, but there are some English explanations in the information about the video.

A regular visitor to Omniglot has asked me to request your help with a project on Librivox. The aim of the project is to collect recordings of the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 30 different languages. A similar project last year resulted in recordings of the UDHR in 21 languages from Arabic to Walloon.

If you can help, there are details of the project on the Librivox website.