Aros am dywydd braf

Yr wythnos diwethaf, sylweddolais taswn i’n aros am dywydd braf cyn mynd allan i fforio’r ardal ‘ma, baswn i’n aros am amser hir. Felly er fod hi ddim yn braf bore Iau, es i i Feaumaris, tref fach ar de arfordir Ynys Môn. Mae’n bosib i weld Beaumaris o Fangor a ro’n i’n meddwl byddai hi’n dda mynd draw fan ‘na rhyw ddydd.

Mae’r lle yn dlws, mae’r golygfeydd oddi o fo yn godidog, ac yn ffodus, roedd y tywydd yn braf pan gyrhaeddais yno. Roedd torf mawr o bobl ar y pier yn pysgota am grancod – gweithgaredd poblogaidd iawn yn ar ardal ‘ma, dw i’n meddwl.

Y dydd canlynol, es i draw i Borthmadog. Ro’n i’n bwriadu mynd i Flaenau Ffestiniog ar y trên o fan ‘na, ond roedd y trên nesaf yn gadael ar ôl dwy awr, felly es i â bws i Fetws y Coed trwy rhan o Barc Cenedlaethol Eryri, ac yna yn ôl a fi i Fangor trwy Gonwy. Hyd yn oed yn y glaw, mae’r golygfeydd yn Eryri yn ffantastig, a doedd dim prinder o law pan ro’n i’n yno.
Waiting for fine weather

Last week I realised that if I waited around for fine weather before going out to explore this area, I’d have to wait a long time. So although it wasn’t fine on Thursday morning, I went to Beaumaris, a small town on the south coast of Anglesey. You can see Beaumaris from Bangor and I’d been thinking that it would be good to go over there one day.

The place is very attractive, the views from it are wonderful, and fortunately it was fine when I arrived. There was a big crowd of people on the pier fishing for crabs – a popular activity in this area, I think.

On the following day I went over to Porthmadog. I was planning to take the train from there to Blaenau Ffestiniog, but the next train didn’t leave for two hours, so I took the bus to Betws y Coed through part of Snowdonia, and then returned to Bangor via Conwy. EVen in the rain, the scenery in Snowdonia is fantasic, and there was no shortage of rain when I was there.

Voice Actors – Voice Coaches – Audio Reviewers

I received an email today about a number of vacancies at Rosetta Stone:

They are looking for Voice Actors, Voice Coaches and Audio Reviewers who are native speakers of, or have native-level fluency in Vietnamese, Turkish and Tagalog. They are also keen to find people who speak Latin well or who have a good knowledge of the language.

If you’re interested, please contact:
TagalogAudition@RosettaStone.com
TurkishAudition@RosettaStone.com
VietnameseAudition@RosettaStone.com
or LatinAudition@RosettaStone.com

Ideal Voice Talent and Audio Reviewer candidates have prior experience in audio reviewing, voice acting, voiceover, dubbing, broadcast, theatre, film or a closely related field.

Here’s a PDF with more details.

Baby talk

Our brains are wired to recognise repeated auditory and visual patterns, an ability that possibly evolved as a way to detect the non-random sounds made by predators, and which is also used in language acquisition.

According to a report on canada.com, researchers from Canada, Chile and Italy have done studies of newborn babies in Canada and Italy using brain scans to discover which parts of the babies brains are active when they hear words, and whether they react differently to different words. They found the part of babies’ brains that responds most to language is the same part, the temporal lobes, used for language processing in adults, and that babies react most to words with repeated syllables, such as mama, dada and banana.

One of the researchers, Judit Gervain of the University of British Columbia, believes that rudimentary language structures already in place from birth, and that it’s easy for a baby to attach meaning to the words like mama and dada.

I can hear you

A report I found today in Science News suggests that early hominids had hearing capabilities similar to modern humans, and paleoanthropologists at the American Natural History Museum in New York believe that this could indicate that they had some form of language.

Analysis and reconstruction of the auditory bones in skills of Homo heidelbergensis dating from 530,000 years ago have demonstrated that their hearing was probably similar to that of modern humans. They could hear best between 2 khz and 4 khz, the frequency range within which much of the sound of speech is transmitted, and researchers believe that such an ability must have been used, as maintaining such sensory systems is neurologically very expensive and they are unlikely to evolve and not be used. Whether they were connected with speech or something else is not known.

Mobile sign language

A team at the University of Washington has developed software that enables people to communicate in sign language via cell phones in the USA, according to ScienceDaily. The system transmits the face and hands in higher definition than other parts of the video, which reduces the bandwidth needed and will work on US cell phones and networks, which have lower data transmission rates than those in Europe and Asia. They are also working on a way to recognise when a person isn’t signing to reduce the processing power needed. So soon ASL users will be able to sign to each other over their phone, rather than having to rely on texting.

Such systems are already available in Japan and parts of Europe.

Do any of you use sign language on your mobile/cell phone, or do you know anyone who does?

Word of the day – macaronic

At the end-of-course ceilidh at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, one of the Irish guys read a story which was half in English and half in Irish. It was very funny, if you understood both languages; those who didn’t missed quite a lot. Even speakers of Scottish Gaelic found it quite difficult to understand all the Irish bits, which suggests to me that Irish and Scottish Gaelic aren’t as mutually comprehensible as some claim.

This type of story is called macaronic, a word coined in the 16th century by Teofilo Folengo, an Italian poet, to refer to a type of verse he invented in which he mixed Italian and Latin for comic effect. He based the name on macaroni, which he described in Latin as pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum (a savoury dish bound together with flour, cheese [and] butter, [a dish] which is fat, coarse, and rustic).

The word was first used in English the following century and was used to refer to any type of verse which mixes two or more languages together.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-wei1.htm.

Here are links to a few examples of Macaronic songs in English and Irish:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/w/williams/macaronic.htm

Cyngerdd

Neithiwr mi ganais gyda’r côr meibion mewn cyngerdd yn Newhaven. Y tro ‘ma mi gyrhaeddais mewn pryd – mi ges i lifft gydag un o’r aelodau eraill. Mi ganon ni mewn eglwys fach sy’n ddyddio o’r 12fed ganrif gydag acwsteg dda, ac roedd tua hanner cant o bobl yn y gynulleidfa. Roedd telynores yn canu’r telyn hefyd.

Ceolchoirm

Aréir chan mé i gceolchoirm le cór Breatnach i Newhaven. An uair seo tháinig mé in am – chuir mé síob le comhalta eile. Chan muid in eaglais bheag atá ag dátaigh ón dara haois déag le héisteacht mhaith, agus bhí thart fá leath chéad de lucht féachana ann. Sheinn cailín óg an cláirseach cúpla uair chomh maith.

Concert

Last night I sang in a concert with the Welsh Choir in Newhaven. This time I managed to arrive on time having got a lift with one of the other members of the choir. We sang in a small church dating from the 12th century with good acoustics, and there were about 50 people in the audience. One of our regular harpists played a couple of times as well.

The accent game

A website I found today has a game which shows you a series of short videos of people reading a few lines of a poem in English. Then they ask you to guess the where they’re from based on their accents. If you guess correctly, it also asks you to guess which city they’re from. Some of the people are native English speakers from various countries; the rest are non-native speakers from all over Europe. Visitors to the site can also submit their own videos.

I did better with the native speakers than the non-natives, but got quite a few of the former wrong as well. I’d probably do better if the videos were longer.

Do you know of any similar websites?