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Monthly Archives: July 2007
Reviving Sanskrit
Recently the number of people studying Sanskrit, the best known of India’s classical languages, has been increasing, according to an article I found today. The piece mentions that there’s a lot of interest in Sanskrit both in India, and among India ex-pats in the USA and other countries. Reasons for this include the booming Indian […]
Blog newydd / nua
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. […]
Do women really talk more than men?
According to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, the commonly-held believe that women talk a lot more than men is a myth. An article I came across today gives details of the research, which discovered that both men and women use around 16,000 words per day on average. Between 1998 and 2004, the […]
How old is English?
The other day I came across an interesting site about the history of the English language. It argues that English has been spoken in Britain for a lot longer than is conventionally assumed, and that there wasn’t sufficient time for the native population to adopt English after the Anglo-Saxons starting settling in the 5th century. […]
Name the language
Here’s a recording of a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which one it is and where it’s spoken?
Where in the world?
Here’s a photo of a mystery place sent in by David. Do you know or can you guess where it is? Which languages are spoken there?
Alphabets and email
One of the things I do in my job is to prepare html emails in many different languages, which are sent out by our web marketing bods. We’ve discovered that the text of emails in non-Latin writing systems often gets mangled in transmission, so to make sure the recipients can read the text, we send […]
Idiom of the day
In English when you give up on something or admit that you’re defeated, you might say that you’re throwing in the towel or the sponge, a phrase that comes from boxing. In Welsh you put the fiddle on the roof: rhoi’r ffidil ar y tô. I like the image this conjures up. Other Welsh idioms […]
Where were the Etruscans from?
The origins of the Etruscans, whose civilisation flourished 3,000 years ago – c.1200 BC to c.100 BC – in Etruria (modern Tuscany), have long been subject to debate among archaeologists, linguists and historians. There are three main theories: Herodotus, the Greek historian, believed that they came from Anatolia (southern Turkey); others believe they came from […]
Balingua
Recently I was offered a free trial of a new online language course called Balingua, the author of which promises that you can learn a language quickly and well using the techniques he has developed. Apparently you can acquire basic oral proficiency in a new language in 30 hours, and the course “relies on the […]