You can identify the language in the following audio clip?
This language is part of a language family that spans several continents.
Month: November 2006
Name the language
Here’s a short sound clip in a mystery language. Can you work out what language it is?
This language is spoken mainly in one country and has no close relatives.
Climbing mountains
My studies of Czech are progressing slowly. So far I’ve only really got to grips with the first lesson of Colloquial Czech, and am working on lesson 2. Yesterday I had a quick look at the later lessons and wondered whether I’ll ever get that far. I know I shouldn’t let this put me off, but it a bit disheartening to see how far I have to go.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this comparison, but learning languages has quite a lot in common with climbing mountains. You start off in the foothills where the going is relatively easy, as long as you are physically fit / your language learning skills are up to scratch, otherwise you might find even this stage a struggle. Past the foothills there will be some difficult climbs and some long, hard slogs up slopes of varying steepness.
You might come up against some seemingly unscaleable obstacles, though with time and effort you probably find a way over or round them, perhaps with the assistance of a guide/teacher. When you think you’re not making much upward progress, or are even going downhill, it might help to turn round to admire the view and to see how far you’ve come.
Even when you reach the summit, you’ll probably see further summits to scale. You might also look over at neighbouring moutains (related languages) or distant ones (unrelated languages) and think that it would be interesting to climb/learn them.
As you’re climbing, you might look up at the mountain every now and then and think it looks steep and difficult to climb. This might inspire you to try harder, or to stop and enjoy the view / put what you’ve learnt to good use. If you decide to give up and do something else, then come back to your climbing/learning, you’ll probably find the going easier the second time, as you’ve already been that way before.
With Czech I’m pootling around in the foothills at the moment. When I look up towards the summit, I wonder whether this is a mountain I really want to climb, or whether I should stick to more familiar mountains.
Whistle This!
Today I came across a website for (tin/penny/Irish) whistle players called Whistle This! which is based on an interesting idea: every two weeks a new tune is posted on the site with the sheet music, whistle notation and a recording. Visitors are invited to learn the tunes, record themselves playing them, and to send in their recordings, which others can then listen to and comment on. There is also a forum for whistle and music-related discussion. I plan to start learning the tunes and sending my recordings in, perhaps starting when the next tune is posted.
This concept could possibly be adapted for language learning. Instead of tunes you could have dialogues, extracts from literature, poems or short stories for people to learn, recite and record. Ideally you’d have native or fluent speakers providing the initial recordings. Maybe someone has already thought of this and a site or sites like this already exist, though I haven’t found any yet.
Comments
When writing posts on this blog I’m never sure whether anybody will comment and how many comments there will be. Yesterday’s unresearched, ill-thought-out little post has stirred up plenty of discussion, which, to some extent, was the idea. You could say I was playing devil’s advocate. Other posts that I spend hours crafting from nothing but the finest, most carefully-researched factoids might generate few if any comments.
It’s always interesting to hear your opinions and experiences. Each comment you leave reveals a little more about you, and I find these tidbits interesting.
Once upon a time, the only trace most people left was their name on a gravestone. Now you can leave snippets of information about yourself in many places, especially online. This should make it easier for our descendents to trace us, their ancestors, unless the future turns out to be something like it’s portrayed in such fine movies as Water World, The Day After Tomorrow or Terminator.
Polyglots
It struck me today that many polyglots and hyperpolyglots are male. I wonder if this has something to do with the instinct to collect things and the tendency to get a bit carried away with particular subjects, traits that seem more common in males than females. Perhaps it might also be a result of the male inclination to show off. The ability to learn many languages is quite a good indicator of intelligence, after all.
Any thoughts on this?
Addition
I suspected this might be a controversial observation. Maybe I should expand my point a bit: I’m certainly not implying that there are no female polyglots, or that men are better at languages than women. What I mean by polyglots here is people who learn a large number of languages, i.e. ten or more. If you look at the list of polyglots on Wikipedia, you notice that most of those who know 10+ languages are men.
Books books books
If, like me, you have a large collection of books, trying to put them in some sort of order is can become quite a time-consuming task. In fact, just trying to fit them all on your shelves can be a real challenge.
Every so often I go through my books and try to decide which ones to sell or give away. Then I usually put them on one side and promptly fail to do anything about them. Although when I left Taiwan, I did actually manage to sell most of the books I had there, but also sent about a hundred or so home.
Until recently I was buying and reading two or more books a week. I still read two books a week on average, but I usually borrow them from my local library rather than buying them. Thus my shelves and bookcases have been largely spared any further overcrowding.
I arrange my books by genre and author, more or less, and to some extent by size and language. I don’t bother putting them in alphabetical order, though do put some of them in chronological order, especially trilogies and other series.
Brighton library used to arrange fiction books alphabetically by genre, but recently they stopped grouping them by genre. This makes it easier to find books, if you know the name of the author, and sometimes you come across interesting-looking books from genres you might not normally read.
How do you arrange your books?
Mystery symbols
Mystery language
Can you identify the language of this recording?
This language is a member of a widely-scattered language family, most of the members of which are spoken by relatively few people.
Postilions and lightning
There’s an urban legend that sometime during the 19th century a phrasebook was published that including the extemely useful phrase “My postilion has been struck by lightning”. There seems to be various theories about the origins of this phrase, and a number versions of the phrase, including “Our postillion has been struck by lightning!”, or “Stop, the postilion has been struck by lightning!”.
According to Nigel Rees on the Quote Unquote website, both postilions and lightning are mentioned in Karl Baedeker’s The Traveller’s Manual of Conversation in Four Languages (1836), in which the phrase: “Postilion, stop; we wish to get down; a spoke of one of the wheels is broken.” appears. In an 1886 edition of this book, there appears the phrase: “Are the postilions insolent?; the lightning has struck; the coachman is drunk.”
Other useful phrases including the the Baedeker book include “Can we get a pony or a donkey for Madame, to mount up that hill?”, “Clean that looking-glass a little, it is quite dull.”, and “Come, make haste. Plait my hair, and make the curls; for I want to go out.”
Do any of you have a copy of Baedeker’s book, or something similar? I’d like to find out how he translated these phrases. Which of the phrases that appear in current phrasebooks do you think people will be laughing about in 100 year’s time?
A postilion or postillion, in case you’re wondering, is one who rides as a guide on the near horse of one of the pairs attached to a coach or post chaise especially without a coachman.