Globalizing the Korean alphabet

A group of linguists in Korea are looking into giving people with no written form of their language ways to write using the Korean alphabet (hangŭl), according to this article.

A number of communities they visited in Indonesia were keen on using hangŭl to write their languages and plan to send representatives to Korean to learn the alphabet, who will then to teach it to their communities.

The Korean alphabet is currently used only to write Korean, so it will be interesting to see how well it will work for other languages.

Linguistics experiment

This is a little experiment I’ll be doing for my bilingualism class next week which I thought I’d try out on you first.

Imagine you’re making a cartoon featuring the things listed below as characters. Which ones would you assign a male voice to, and which ones would you assign a female voice to?

1. A rock 2. A tree 3. A river 4. A bear 5. A salmon 6. A boat

Could you also tell us your native language, and whether you speak any other languages fluently? If you do speak other languages, when did you acquire them, do you use them regularly, and would you consider yourself bilingual or multilingual?

Wythnos o ganeuon

Mae’r wythnos hon wedi bod yn brysur iawn – Ddydd Sul diwethaf, canais efo’r côr cymunedol yn y Ŵyl Heddwch ym Mangor -gwahoddynt i ni ganu wrth iddyn nhw bwyta ein cinio. Nos Fawrth canais efo cór y gymdeithas gerdd yn y prifysgol, Nos Fercher canais efo’r côr cymunedol, a Nos Iau es i i gyngerdd wych gan Northern Harmony, côr ifanc o’r UDA. Yna treuliais Dydd Sadwrn yn canu mewn gweithdy canu efo Northern Harmony – roedd yn ardderchog a dysgon ni ganeuon o America, Corsica, Siorsia, De Affrica ac Ukraine. Nos Sadwrn es i gyngerdd wych gan Trio Naatyashwora, grŵp o gerddorion o Nepal.

Mae cynhadledd ryngwladol ar ddwyieithrwydd i’w chynnal ym Mangor y penwythnos hwn hefyd, ac es i ryw areithiau ddoe ac echddoe.

Seachtain na hamhráin

Bhí an seachtain seo an ghnóthach – Dé Domhnaigh seo cáite, chan mé leis an cór pobail ag an Féile Síochána i mBangor -thug iad cuireadh dúinn ag canadh agus iad ag ith ar lón. Oíche Mhairt chan mé le cór na cumann ceoil san ollscoil, Oíche Chéadaoin chan mé leis an cór pobail, Oíche Aoine chuaigh mé chuig ceolchoirm le Northern Harmony, cór óg as Meiriceá. Ansin chaith mé Dé Sathairn ag canadh i gceardlann chanta le Northern Harmony – bhí sí go hiontach agus d’fhoghlaim muid amhráin as Meiriceá, an Chorsaic, an tSeoirsia, an Afraic Theas agus an Úcráin. Oíche Shathairn chuaigh mé chuig ceolchoirm le Trio Naatyashwora, grúpa ceoltóirí as Neipeal.

comhdháil idirnáisiúnta ar an dátheangachas ar siúil an deireadh seachtaine seo freisin, agus chuaigh mé chuig cúpla óráidí inné agus arú inné.

A week of songs

This week has been a busy one – last Sunday I sang with the community choir in the Peace Festival in Bangor – they invited us to sing to them while they were having lunch. On Tuesday evening I sang with the community choir again, on Wednesday evening I sang with the university music society choir, and on Thursday evening I went to an excellent concert by Northern Harmony, a young choir from the USA. Then I spent most of Saturday at a singing workshop with Northern Harmony, which was fantastic and we learnt songs from America, Corsica, Georgia, South Africa and Ukraine. On Saturday night I went to a great concert by Trio Naatyashwora, a group of musicans from Nepal.

An international conference on bilingualism is being held in Bangor this weekend as well, and I went to a few talks yesterday and on Friday.

Word of the day – optionulsory

The term optionulsory was coined by one of my classmates the other day to refer to things that are somewhere between optional and compulsory – in this case the Linguistics Circle Research Seminars. Linguistics postgrads are expected and encouraged to attend these seminars, but are not absolutely obliged to do so.

I went to one of the seminars on Wednesday – quite an interesting talk on Spanish verbs which focused particularly on the preterite tense.

David Crystal

We met David Crystal today and had a very interesting question and answer session with him. He’s an Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, but has so many other commitments that take him all over the world, he rarely has time to visit.

Among the topics we discussed whether it’s possible for major world languages such as English and Spanish, to live in ‘harmony’ with minority languages. David believes that this is possible, if the minority languages are supported politically and economically, and if their speakers are determined to continue using them. He gave the example of Catalonia, where major investment in the economy has been a major factor in the strength and growth of Catalan. In other regions where investment has been mainly in language teaching and language preservation organisations, the minority languages are not doing nearly as well.

We also talking about the future of English as a global language – David believes the current dominance of English is likely to continue, that the centre of English is shifting towards those who speak it as a second or foreign language, and that a new form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) could emerge. ELF is likely to be a simpler, formal style of English stripped of region and country-specific idioms and expressions. This is already happening to some extent. He also mentioned that English as a global language only started to be seriously discussed by linguistics about ten years ago.

Multilingual clock

I plan to make a tool that will show how to tell the time in many different languages. It will function something like the one here, and will probably use Flash.

I’ve started gathering translations, as you can see in this spreadsheet. Can you help by adding other languages, and by making recordings?

The recordings don’t need to be of every phrase in the spreadsheet, but of enough parts of phrases so that I’ll be able to splice them together. If you can help, please send your contributions to feedback[at]omniglot[dot]com.

Multilingual resources

I found some useful sites with information in multiple languages today:

The multilingual bird search engine contains the names of birds in eighteen languages, including Catalan, Danish, Esperanto, English, French, German and Swedish, as well as their scientific names.

The Multilingual dictionary of musical terms is a musical glossary in English, French, German and Serbian.

Multilingual Animal Glossary of Unveiled Synonyms (MAGUS) is a dictionary of the common names of wild and domestic mammals and birds in more than 50 languages of Europe.

Middle English Grammar Project

A project is underway at the University of Stavanger in Norway to analyse the grammar of Middle English, according to this article. Philologists at the university have already digitised 1,000 Middle English texts from the 1300s-1500s from all over Britain, and made them available on their website. The corpus includes texts on legal, religious, medical and astrological matters, as well as cookery books and literary texts. Most are being digitised for the first time.

The texts can be used to study dialects, as at the time they were written, people wrote more or less as they spoke and there was no standardised spelling system. They can also be used as a way to learn more about the grammatical development of English.