Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which language it is?
Month: May 2008
Creating fonts
If you would like to turn your constructed alphabets into fonts, there are a number of ways to do so: you could buy one of the professional font creation tools available from Fontlab, you could use a free font editor such as FontForge or Softy, or use the font creation service Fontifier.
Today I found out about another font tool, FontStruct, a free online font editor which looks good and fairly easy to use. The site also has a gallery where you view fonts created by other people and add your own creations. When I can find a spare moment or two, I’ll have a go at converting some of my ideas for con-scripts into fonts.
Irreversible binomials
Irreversible binomial is a linguistic term I came across today on this blog post. It was coined by Yakov Malkiel in a 1959 article in the linguistics journal, Lingua, and refers to pairs of words on either side of a conjunction such as and that are always used in a particular order. For example, bread and butter, salt and vinegar, fish and chips, meat and potatoes, gin and tonic, time and tide, cloak and dagger, ladies and gentlemen, knife and fork, and head over heels.
Some such pairs are reversible in parts of the English speaking word – is it cheese and bacon or bacon and cheese, for example? Both versions are used in the UK at least. To some extent is depends on the ratio of cheese to bacon – if you have more cheese than bacon in your sandwich, then you might call it a cheese and bacon sandwich.
Can you think of any other irreversible binomials in other languages?
In Welsh there’s bara menyn (bread (&) butter).
Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus
Image you’re at a party to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It’s a Saturday or Sunday, the party’s been going on for quite a while and you’re starting to feel somewhat fatigued. In English and most other languages it would take a whole sentence to explain this situation.
In Estonian however, there’s a word that covers just such an eventuality – Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus, which according to Corcaighist, means “The tiredness one feels on the afternoon of the weekend birthday party”. Or if you break it down into parts “birth.day.week.end.party.after.lunch.tiredness”.
Articulatory Phonetics
Today I came across an online collection of recorded exercises from W. Smalley’s Manual of Articulatory Phonetics. The exercises are design to help distinguish different types of sounds based on their point of articulation, articulators, manner of articulation, or point and manner of articulation. This looks useful if you have the book, and quite useful if you don’t.
Articulatory phonetics is a sub-field of phonetics which involves documenting how humans produce speech sounds. Specifically how our articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc), interact to create the specific sounds.
Reading baby
According to an blog post I found today, teaching a baby sign language can help him or her to learn to read at an very early age.
The post is about a 17 month old girl who can read, as she demonstrates on the video embedded in the post. Her parents, who are both Speech Pathologists, have taught her American Sign Language as well as English and have encouraged the development of her language skills, though they haven’t drilled her in reading. Learning sign language can also help children develop their spatial and visual abilities apparently.
Have you heard of any other similar cases?
Name the language
Here’s a recording of a poem in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?
How good are you?
Today we have another guest post from James in Santiago, Chile.
There comes a stage in every language when you start asking yourself how good you are. Yes, it’s fun to play around learning the Basque verb system or to be able to speak enough to get by as a tourist in 10 different languages, but when you have to use a language day in and day out the question whether people can actually *really* understand what you are saying and just how “foreign” you sound does become more pressing: there is a big difference between ordering a skinny latte and teaching Kantian epistemology. People are normally very generous with foreigners who are trying to learn their language: “hablas perfecto”, “you speak amazing English” (mentally we add “for someone who has just been learning for a year and has never left Latvia”)
The truth is we rarely are able to assess ourselves correctly and tend routinely to over or underestimate how good we are. I’m an underestimator because I teach humanities at tertiary level and have a perfectionist streak, so I tend to put myself a level below what my teacher thinks. About a year ago (May or June 2007) I did a self assessment on the CEFR and thought that I was a middling C1. I got my teacher at the time (a Chilean who had been working with me for over 6 months) to assess me using the CEFR criteria and she said that she would describe me as a C2. I went to Guatemala in February 2008 to study more and placed myself at a 4 on the ILR scale. My Guatemalan teacher, who has 20 years experience and is one of the best I’ve had in my 20 years of language learning, put that I was a 5 on my language certificate (a 5.1 to be exact which is the lowest level in the highest category). I still don’t agree with him, which is irrational: he is the native speaker language professional and we had over 80 hours of 1-2-1 contact when I was feeling ill from altitude sickness (i.e. he saw me at my worst for a prolonged period) so he should know. But, without a trace of false modesty, I still think I’m an ILR 4.
Of course, at one level scales and numbers mean nothing: we all have a level at which we are happy with and what it’s called is irrelevant, for some it’s “higher”, for others not: artificial levels don’t actually tell us anything or make us feel any better. Some people couldn’t care less if the grammar or pronunciation is right as long as people get the point, others care so much that they barely open their mouths.
So do you care how “good” you are?