Omniglot - the blog

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

I received an email today about a number of vacancies at Rosetta Stone:

They are looking for Voice Actors, Voice Coaches and Audio Reviewers who are native speakers of, or have native-level fluency in Vietnamese, Turkish and Tagalog. They are also keen to find people who speak Latin well or who have a good knowledge of the language.

If you’re interested, please contact:
TagalogAudition@RosettaStone.com
TurkishAudition@RosettaStone.com
VietnameseAudition@RosettaStone.com
or LatinAudition@RosettaStone.com

Ideal Voice Talent and Audio Reviewer candidates have prior experience in audio reviewing, voice acting, voiceover, dubbing, broadcast, theatre, film or a closely related field.

Here’s a PDF with more details.

Our brains are wired to recognise repeated auditory and visual patterns, an ability that possibly evolved as a way to detect the non-random sounds made by predators, and which is also used in language acquisition.

According to a report on canada.com, researchers from Canada, Chile and Italy have done studies of newborn babies in Canada and Italy using brain scans to discover which parts of the babies brains are active when they hear words, and whether they react differently to different words. They found the part of babies’ brains that responds most to language is the same part, the temporal lobes, used for language processing in adults, and that babies react most to words with repeated syllables, such as mama, dada and banana.

One of the researchers, Judit Gervain of the University of British Columbia, believes that rudimentary language structures already in place from birth, and that it’s easy for a baby to attach meaning to the words like mama and dada.

A report I found today in Science News suggests that early hominids had hearing capabilities similar to modern humans, and paleoanthropologists at the American Natural History Museum in New York believe that this could indicate that they had some form of language.

Analysis and reconstruction of the auditory bones in skills of Homo heidelbergensis dating from 530,000 years ago have demonstrated that their hearing was probably similar to that of modern humans. They could hear best between 2 khz and 4 khz, the frequency range within which much of the sound of speech is transmitted, and researchers believe that such an ability must have been used, as maintaining such sensory systems is neurologically very expensive and they are unlikely to evolve and not be used. Whether they were connected with speech or something else is not known.

Here’s a recording in a mystery dialect. Do you know or you guess which dialect this is?

A team at the University of Washington has developed software that enables people to communicate in sign language via cell phones in the USA, according to ScienceDaily. The system transmits the face and hands in higher definition than other parts of the video, which reduces the bandwidth needed and will work on US cell phones and networks, which have lower data transmission rates than those in Europe and Asia. They are also working on a way to recognise when a person isn’t signing to reduce the processing power needed. So soon ASL users will be able to sign to each other over their phone, rather than having to rely on texting.

Such systems are already available in Japan and parts of Europe.

Do any of you use sign language on your mobile/cell phone, or do you know anyone who does?

At the end-of-course ceilidh at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, one of the Irish guys read a story which was half in English and half in Irish. It was very funny, if you understood both languages; those who didn’t missed quite a lot. Even speakers of Scottish Gaelic found it quite difficult to understand all the Irish bits, which suggests to me that Irish and Scottish Gaelic aren’t as mutually comprehensible as some claim.

This type of story is called macaronic, a word coined in the 16th century by Teofilo Folengo, an Italian poet, to refer to a type of verse he invented in which he mixed Italian and Latin for comic effect. He based the name on macaroni, which he described in Latin as pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum (a savoury dish bound together with flour, cheese [and] butter, [a dish] which is fat, coarse, and rustic).

The word was first used in English the following century and was used to refer to any type of verse which mixes two or more languages together.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-wei1.htm.

Here are links to a few examples of Macaronic songs in English and Irish:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/w/williams/macaronic.htm

A website I found today has a game which shows you a series of short videos of people reading a few lines of a poem in English. Then they ask you to guess the where they’re from based on their accents. If you guess correctly, it also asks you to guess which city they’re from. Some of the people are native English speakers from various countries; the rest are non-native speakers from all over Europe. Visitors to the site can also submit their own videos.

I did better with the native speakers than the non-natives, but got quite a few of the former wrong as well. I’d probably do better if the videos were longer.

Do you know of any similar websites?

Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Can you guess of do you know which language this is, and which story this passage comes from?

According to the most recent census, the number of people in Scotland who speak Scottish Gaelic is 58,650. However some of people I talked to last week who are involved in teaching or researching Gaelic believe that the actual number is higher. They suggested that some fluent Gaelic speakers who don’t read and write the language very well, if at all, don’t admit that they speak it on the census to avoid receiving forms and other official literature in Gaelic. They estimate that that real number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland is at least twice the census figure, and that there are several thousand more in other parts of the world, especially in England, Canada, Australia and the USA.

I’ve heard similar stories about Welsh speakers who don’t tick the box on the census saying that they speak Welsh for fear of receiving incomprehensible documents in Welsh.

Some Gaelic speakers apparently don’t believe that their Gaelic is good enough for jobs that require it, even though they speak it fluently. However such insecurity doesn’t seem to effect younger people so much, or Gaelic learners from other countries. There were certainly quite a few people from other countries with fluent Gaelic working at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.

Does this sort of thing happen with other minority languages?