Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
One of the things we discussed last night at the French conversation group was cheesecake – a member of the group has a weakness for this dessert and couldn’t resist when she saw it on the menu.
We concluded that the word cheesecake is also used in French and that there probably isn’t a French word for it. According to my French dictionary though, cheesecake is flan au fromage blanc, and another possible translation is gâteau au fromage.
In Germany cheesecake is Käsekuchen or Quarkkuchen, in Switzerland it’s Quarktorte, and in Austria it’s Topfenkuchen, according to Wikipedia.
What about in other languages?
Can anybody decipher the inscriptions below? The image was sent in by a visitor to Omniglot and comes from an old Turkish book. More images can be seen here.
When Richard Wagner first heard the saxophone he apparently said it sounds like the word “Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge”, a word he invented himself. (Source)
I used to play the sax and can’t say that it ever sounded like that!
Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge is also the name of a record label based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The other day I came across a useful site that helps you learn various alphabets and other writing systems – Henrik Theiling’s Script Teacher. It includes tests on CJK radicals, Hiragana, Katakana, Bopomofo, Hangul, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, a number of constructed scripts, and even a Blackletter (Gothic) typeface.
Other writing-related sites I found recently include the ambigram magazine, which includes a gallery of ambigrams, an ambigram generator and other ambigram-related information; and an ambigram generator.
An ambigram is “typographical creation that presents two or more separate words within the same physical space.” (source). Some ambigrams present the same word when read both ways up, or from left to right and right to left.
Here are some examples of ambigrams:
This says Thank you and comes from this site.
This is a biscriptal one:
It reads Sameh – سامح in the Latin and Arabic alphabets and comes from this site.
There are other examples of bilingual / biscriptal ambigrams on Chinese-English Ambigrams and on Inversions.
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Chaill mee m’ogheryn boayl ennagh ayns Bangor jea. Dy fortanagh va ogheryn vrash ec my vençhiarn thallooin as v’ee sthie tra hellvane mee urree. Cha nel m’ennym ny m’enmys er ny ogheryn, myr shen cha vee feysht ayn dy fow peiagh ennagh ad. Shoh yn chied traa ta shoh jeaynt aym, as ta treisht orrym bee eh y traa s’jerree neesht.
Chaill mé m’eochracha áit éigin i mBangor inné. Go hádhúil bhí mo bhean lóistín sa bhaile nuair a chuir mé scairt uirthi agus bhí eochracha breise aici. Ní raibh m’ainm nó mo seoladh ar na eochracha, agus dá bhrí sin ní bheidh fadhb ann dá mbeadh duine éigin tar orthu. Seo an chead uair go raibh mé ag déanamh seo, agus tá súil agam go mbeidh sé an uair deireanach chomh maith.
Mi golles i fy allweddi rhywle ym Mangor ddoe. Yn ffodus roedd allweddi sbâr gan fy argwylddes tir ac roedd hi’n adref pan ffonies i hi. Doedd fy enw neu gyfeiriad ar yr allweddi, felly na fydd broblem os mae rhywun yn ffeindio nhw. Dyma’r tro cyntaf imi colli fy allweddi, ac gobeithio y tro diwethaf hefyd.
They were talking about tattoos this morning on Radio Cymru and one of the presenters used the word croenlun, which I hadn’t heard before but could understand from the meaning of its component words – croen (skin) and llun (picture, image). This word doesn’t appear in any of my Welsh dictionaries so I suspect it isn’t very common – the usual Welsh word for tattoo is tatŵ.
Other Welsh words containing croen include croendenau (skin thin) – touchy sensitive; croendew (skin thick) and croengaled (skin hard) – thick-skinned, callous; and croeniach (skin healthy) – unhurt, unharmed.
The English word tattoo comes from one of the Polynesian languages – perhaps the Tahitian and Samoan tatau or the Marquesan tatu, which mean “puncture, mark made on skin”.
The image on the right was sent in by a visitor to Omniglot who would like to know if anybody recognises the symbol.
It looks like a tattoo and the symbol does look vaguely familiar to me, though I’m not sure where I’ve seen it before.
Crimean Tatar (Qırımtatarca) is a Turkic language spoken in Crimea in Ukraine, and also Uzbekistan, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. At different times during the past century is has been written with the Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, and all three alphabets are still used by Crimean Tatars in different countries. At a recent seminar in Simferopol in Ukraine it was proposed that all Crimean Tatar adopt the Latin alphabet, according to this report.
The aim of the common Latin-based orthography is to standardise the written language and to unite Crimean Tatars wherever they live.
A visitor to Omniglot who would like to know what the Latin and Greek bits on this postcard mean, and whether anybody has any ideas about the identity of the writer.
The postcard that was sent to an address in the UK and has a UK stamp on so was probably it was posted in the UK, though the postmark is unreadable, apart from the date – 1904.
The quote about the “laughing woman and two bright eyes” comes from the last stanza of a poem called “The Temptations of St Anthony” which is in Bentley’s Miscellany of 1868 and is by a poet with the initials T.H.S. The full quote is “A laughing woman with two bright eyes is the worsest devil of all”.