Good news – the Omniglot forum is back.

I’m not sure how I managed it, but somehow I got it back.

As you might have noticed, the Omniglot forum is not working at the moment. I’m not sure what’s wrong with it – nothing has changed, as far as I can tell, and all the files are still there, but it’s just not appearing.

I’m trying to find a way to get it back, and if you have any suggestions how to do this, please let me know.

When you look at someone to try and work out what they’re feeling, do you focus on their mainly eyes, or on their whole face?

If you come from East Asia you might focus mainly on the eyes and express your emotions mainly through your eyes, whereas Westerners tend to focus on and use their whole face, at least according to an article on Science Daily.

The researchers found that facial expressions they believed to be universally recognisable were often misinterpreted by people from East Asia, who tend to focus most on the eyes when trying to decipher such expressions. They also noted the emoticons reflect this difference as well, in that Western ones use the mouth the convey emotions, e.g. :) (happy) and :( (sad), while East Asian ones use the eyes: ^.^ (happy) and ;_; (sad).

I handed in my last essay today, so that’s pretty much the end of the taught part of my course and I can now concentrate on my dissertation. It’s a great relief to get all the assignments out of the way after spending what seems like ages on them. Fortunately I don’t have any exams this semester. The course seems to have gone really quickly and I’ve learned a lot of interesting and useful things. The areas I’ve found most interesting have been phonetics, bilingualism and speech and language disorders.

I plan to spend the last two weeks of June on the Isle of Man gathering information for my dissertation, learning some more Manx, and having a bit of a holiday. The last time I was on the island was about 30 years ago when I went there on a day trip from primary school, and I’m looking forward to going back. I’ve started making contact with a number of Manx speakers and hope to meet as many of them as possible when I’m on the island.

Are there any Manx speakers or learners who read this blog?

Vel Gaelgeyryn erbee lhaih yn blog shoh?

This blog seems to be working again now and I’ve managed to restore the data up to last November. Unfortunately that was the last time I made a backup of the blog, and due to the problems with my old server, it is not possible to recover the data since then. Oh well, lesson learned. I will try to make regular backups from now on.

The forum is also up again, though I haven’t managed to restore any of the old data, so we’ll just have to start anew. Sorry!

In other news, one of the university assignments I’ve been working on is a presentation on bimodal bilinguals – that is people with normal hearing who have deaf parents and grow up fluent in sign language and a spoken language such as English. Unlike other bilinguals who switch between their languages (code switch), bimodal bilinguals can speak and sign at the same time (code blend). Normally the signs and words mean the same thing, though occasionally one adds to the meaning of the other. When speaking, for example, some of the words may be accompanied by signs, and vice versa. It is also possible to use both languages simultaneously, a difficult undertaking known as SimCom (Simultaneous Communication) which is used in educational settings.

I find this topic fascinating as I’m learning British Sign Language as the moment. So when I give my presentation on this, I’ll be able to demonstrate a bit of code-blending.

I’m still trying to get this blog up and running again.

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.

2008 has been declared International Year of Languages by the United Nations. Part of their aim is redress the balance between English and the five other official languages used in the UN (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish), and they hope that the pursuit of multilingualism will act “as a means of promoting, protecting and preserving diversity of languages and cultures globally”.

Happy New Year, by the way.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was thinking of starting a new blog to practice my the languages. Well I’ve finally made up my mind and have created one – Rywsut-rywfodd. I plan to write everything in Welsh and Irish for now, and might write in other languages from time to time.

The title means “somehow or other”, as in “somehow or other I will become fluent in Welsh and Irish, and as many other languages as possible”. The subtitle – meddyliau hap yn y Gymraeg / smaointe fánacha as Gaeilge – means “random thoughts in Welsh / random thoughts in Irish”. I hope to write frequently – this probably won’t be every day though. I might even have a go at audioblogging as well.

When writing a recent post, it struck me how few words Welsh and Irish have in common. The only one that stands out in that particular post is blasus/blasta (tasty). Most of the others are borrowings from English.

I believe this is the world’s first bilingual Welsh/Irish blog. I might be mistaken of course – if there are others out there, I’m sure you’ll let me know. What’s the most unusual combination of languages you’ve come across on a blog or website?

I’ve been thinking for a while about starting a new blog to practise my languages. What I can’t decide is whether to have one new blog on which I post in various languages, or to have one for each language I want to practise. Another thing I can’t decide is what to call the blogs. Any ideas?

The course is going well, we’re speaking plenty of Welsh and we don’t have so much homework tonight.