A related word is crore (करोड़ in Hindi), which means 100 lakh, or 10 million, is often abbreviated to cr, and appears in the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Who will be a ten-millionaire?).

The Gujarati equivalents of lakh and crore are લાખ (lākh) and કરોડ (karoḍ).

The new dictionary looks really useful, by the way, with monolingual (Gujarati-Gujarati), and bilingual (Gujarati<>English) options, as well as a thesaurus (બંધિયાર સ્થળો), phrases (તાળો), idioms (ચુડેલનો વાંસો), proverbs (સુખનું મૂળ સંતોષ), a spellchecker and other tools and information.

Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?

The type of language used and the information discussed was university level, and while I didn’t understand every word, and got a bit lost when he was explaining some of the technicalities of how the city was built, I was able to understand most of the lecture.

One thing he mentioned was the many different terms there are in Venice for streets, lanes, alleyways, etc, including via (street), calle (a walkway between two buildings), calleta (a narrower calle), salizada (a broader calle), ruga (a calle with lots of shops -from French, rue), rio (small canal), rio terrà / terà (filled-in canal), fondamenta (a walkway that runs along a rio or the lagoon), and sotoportego (a covered walkway through a building).

There are also quite a few terms used in street names in English – street, road, lane, alley, passage, close, drive, place, green, croft, way, grove, gardens, end, crescent, bank, and so on.

Is the same true in other languages?

Yesterday I met a Manx-speaking friend on the boat coming over and we talked Manx throughout the crossing. Well actually she did most of the talking and I contributed to the conversation whenever I could. It was the longest conversation I’ve ever had in Manx and I was pleased to find that I could understand almost everything, and even got the jokes.

My Manx tends to get mixed up with Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and even Welsh sometimes, but my friend is fluent in Irish, and speaks some Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, so this didn’t matter so much. We did try to stick to Manx most of the time though.

One of the things we were discussing was false friends between the Gaelic languages. For example, daoine means people in Irish, while in Manx dooiney means men, and the word for people is sleih, mooinjer or pobble. In Scottish Gaelic people is poball or sluagh, and men is daoine.

We also tried to translate Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody into Manx, though couldn’t remember all the words in English and weren’t sure of the Manx equivalents of some of the words we could remember.

More details

Sounds like a good idea.

Do you know of any similar initiatives?

Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?

Related words include moliannus, praiseworthy; molianrwydd / moliant / molud, praise.

The words for ‘to praise’ and ‘praise’ in Irish and Scottish Gaelic are simliar to the Welsh: moladh, and mol, in Manx they’re moylley and moyll, and in Breton they are meuliñ and meuleudi.

Another meaning of moli is ‘to gather scurf in the eyes’. Scurf, or môl, is a word I haven’t come across before and means the stuff that appears in the corners of your eyes during sleep. There’s probably another name for it – does anybody know?

The Tele Scouter is a small gadget that fixes onto glasses which incorporates a retinal display, a camera and a microphone. The microphone picks up the language and transmits it to a small computer worn around the waist, which sends it to a server for translation. The translation is then displayed on the retina. The device cannot currently keep up with language spoken at normal speed, and is a bit bulky, but it’s an interesting development.

If the size can be reduced and the speed and reliability increase, this device could be really useful. If it could also translate and/or transliterate written language, if would be even more useful, especially in for languages written with different writing systems.