Omniglot - the blog

A group of linguists in Korea are looking into giving people with no written form of their language ways to write using the Korean alphabet (hangŭl), according to this article.

A number of communities they visited in Indonesia were keen on using hangŭl to write their languages and plan to send representatives to Korean to learn the alphabet, who will then to teach it to their communities.

The Korean alphabet is currently used only to write Korean, so it will be interesting to see how well it will work for other languages.

This is a little experiment I’ll be doing for my bilingualism class next week which I thought I’d try out on you first.

Imagine you’re making a cartoon featuring the things listed below as characters. Which ones would you assign a male voice to, and which ones would you assign a female voice to?

1. A rock 2. A tree 3. A river 4. A bear 5. A salmon 6. A boat

Could you also tell us your native language, and whether you speak any other languages fluently? If you do speak other languages, when did you acquire them, do you use them regularly, and would you consider yourself bilingual or multilingual?

Here’s a recording of part of a news report. Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in?

The term optionulsory was coined by one of my classmates the other day to refer to things that are somewhere between optional and compulsory - in this case the Linguistics Circle Research Seminars. Linguistics postgrads are expected and encouraged to attend these seminars, but are not absolutely obliged to do so.

I went to one of the seminars on Wednesday - quite an interesting talk on Spanish verbs which focused particularly on the preterite tense.

We met David Crystal today and had a very interesting question and answer session with him. He’s an Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, but has so many other commitments that take him all over the world, he rarely has time to visit.

Among the topics we discussed whether it’s possible for major world languages such as English and Spanish, to live in ‘harmony’ with minority languages. David believes that this is possible, if the minority languages are supported politically and economically, and if their speakers are determined to continue using them. He gave the example of Catalonia, where major investment in the economy has been a major factor in the strength and growth of Catalan. In other regions where investment has been mainly in language teaching and language preservation organisations, the minority languages are not doing nearly as well.

We also talking about the future of English as a global language - David believes the current dominance of English is likely to continue, that the centre of English is shifting towards those who speak it as a second or foreign language, and that a new form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) could emerge. ELF is likely to be a simpler, formal style of English stripped of region and country-specific idioms and expressions. This is already happening to some extent. He also mentioned that English as a global language only started to be seriously discussed by linguistics about ten years ago.

I plan to make a tool that will show how to tell the time in many different languages. It will function something like the one here, and will probably use Flash.

I’ve started gathering translations, as you can see in this spreadsheet. Can you help by adding other languages, and by making recordings?

The recordings don’t need to be of every phrase in the spreadsheet, but of enough parts of phrases so that I’ll be able to splice them together. If you can help, please send your contributions to feedback[at]omniglot[dot]com.

Here’s a recording of part of a radio interview. Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in?

I found some useful sites with information in multiple languages today:

The multilingual bird search engine contains the names of birds in eighteen languages, including Catalan, Danish, Esperanto, English, French, German and Swedish, as well as their scientific names.

The Multilingual dictionary of musical terms is a musical glossary in English, French, German and Serbian.

Multilingual Animal Glossary of Unveiled Synonyms (MAGUS) is a dictionary of the common names of wild and domestic mammals and birds in more than 50 languages of Europe.

A project is underway at the University of Stavanger in Norway to analyse the grammar of Middle English, according to this article. Philologists at the university have already digitised 1,000 Middle English texts from the 1300s-1500s from all over Britain, and made them available on their website. The corpus includes texts on legal, religious, medical and astrological matters, as well as cookery books and literary texts. Most are being digitised for the first time.

The texts can be used to study dialects, as at the time they were written, people wrote more or less as they spoke and there was no standardised spelling system. They can also be used as a way to learn more about the grammatical development of English.

Scottish Gaelic is making something of a comeback in Glasgow, according to an article I found today in The Herald. This is largely thanks to the Sgoil Ghàidhlig Ghlaschu / the Glasgow Gaelic School, which provides education from nursery to secondary level through the medium of Gaelic.

Gaelic medium education has been available in Glasgow at primary level since 1986, when half the children who took this option had connections with the Gaelic-speaking highlands and islands. The Glasgow Gaelic School was opened in 2006 and currently has about 700 pupils, 80% of whom have no Gaelic connections, and some are from other countries. Demand for places outstrips supply and there are plans to expand the school over the next few years.

A new generation of young Gaelic speakers is emerging in Glasgow, and some of their parents are learning Gaelic as well. Similar things are happening in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. There is also an increased interest in Gaelic culture and music, and a thriving Gaelic pub scene.

In 1901 approximately 18,500 people in Glasgow spoke Gaelic according the census, though the actual number was probably higher. In 2001 the census revealed over 10,000 Gaelic speakers, and those speakers are spread across all age groups, whereas elsewhere in Scotland it’s mainly the older generations who speak Gaelic.