Shetlandic and Up Helly Aa

Up Helly Aa fire festival
Up Helly Aa Senior Jarl Squad in their galley

There were plenty of people speaking Shetlandic, or at least using some Shetlandic words at the various events I went to yesterday. At a concert in the afternoon the host and the performers were all locals and spoke with Shetlandic accents and used local words for some things. One of them also sang a song in Shetlandic.

Up Helly Aa fire festival
circling the galley

There seems to be a continuum which runs from Scottish English or Scots with a Shetland accent and maybe a few Shetlandic words to broad Shetlandic. The Shetlandic word I’ve heard most often is peerie, which means small.

Up Helly Aa fire festival
circling the galley

In the evening there was a procession involving hundreds of people holding flaming torches. Some were dressed as Vikings and pulled a replica Viking galley through the streets. At end of the procession they parked the galley in the middle of a field and the torch bearers circled round it. Once they were all there, they sang a few songs then threw their torches onto the galley, which burned brightly.

Up Helly Aa fire festival - the burning of the galley
burning of the galley

A bit later there were parties at various places, known as halls, around Lerwick (I was in the hall at the Isleburgh Community Centre). Each of the 47 squads who had taken part in the procession travelled around the halls performing their party pieces. Most of these involved dancing and/or music, plus some comic sketches, mainly in fancy dress, with a lot of men dressed as women. The parties went on until 8am this morning, so I was up for 24 hours – rather longer than normal for me – after which I was rather tired and slept until this afternoon. Others had breakfast and carried on partying today, which is a public holiday here.

Up Helly Aa fire festival
Up Helly Aa Junior Jarl Squad

Many of the squads had Shetlandic names, such as Da Rumbling Stanes, and some did songs in Shetlandic. Here’s an example (to be sung to the tune of Status Quo’s Rockin’ All Over The World):

Guizing Aa ower Da Toon
Up Helly Aa, Up Helly Aa here we go.
Wir haeing a party. Pittin on a show.
Here we go-o.
Guizing aa ower da Toon.

Stevie Grant, Stevie Grant. It’s your day.
Cheer dee up da ranks. Set dee on dee way.
Here we go-o.
Guizing aa ower da Toon.

Fir wir filsket, wir filsket, wir filsket, wir filsket.
Up Helly Aa filskit. Wir aa filsket.
Here we go-o.
Guizing aa ower da Toon.

Some cry fir weemin Jarls. We say no.
Wir gean tae stick wi e da Status Quo.
Here we go-o.
Guizing aa ower da Toon.

Notes
Stevie Grant is the Guizer Jarl (chief viking) this year, so I suppose that guizing is what he does in that role.

Filsket = high-spirited

I took some of the photos using the night scene mode on my Samsung Galaxy web tablet, which is really difficult to hold still, so many of them turned out blurred.

Up Helly Aa

Up Helly Aa, Shetland

This week I will mainly be in Shetland for the Lerwick Up Helly Aa fire festival, which starts tomorrow. I haven’t seen any Vikings yet, but there’ll be plenty around tomorrow night.

I have heard quite a few people speaking with Shetland accents, which sounds to me a bit like Scots with some Scandinavian prosody. I haven’t heard anybody speaking broad Shetlandic yet, apart from recordings in the museum, but am listening out for it.

The combed giraffe sings like a saucepan

I came across a number of interesting French idioms today in this article in The Guardian, including peigner la giraffe (combing the giraffe), which means to waste time on a pointless task, and chanter comme une casserole (to sing like a saucepan) or to sing terribly. It also mentions a Dutch idiom, broodje aap verhaal (monkey sandwich story), which refers to persistent rumours or urban legends.

English equivalents of peigner la giraffe include idling, dossing (about), doing nothing (much), killing time, and so on. Do you have any others?

How about English or other language equivalents of chanter comme une casserole or broodje aap verhaal?

Breton

This week I reached the half-way point in my Breton Assimil course (lesson 50) and have entered the ‘active phase’. So for every new lesson I also go back to an earlier lessons and translate the French versions of the dialogues and exercises into Breton. I also translate them into Welsh, just for fun. So far I’m finding the translations easy, but have to check some of the spellings.

My impression of the Assimil course so far is that it is a good way to learn a new language. Each lesson provides some new words and grammar, but doesn’t overwhelm you with new stuff. In Colloquial Breton the lessons cover far more material, which can be a bit intimidating at first. For example, when a new verb is introduced in Colloquial Breton all forms for a particular tense are given, while in the Assimil course the different forms are usually introduced over several lessons. I think I prefer the gentle, gradual approach of Assimil, but will go back to the Colloquial course once I’ve finished the Assimil one. If I need to know all the different forms of a verb or other conjugated word, I can look in the grammar section at the back of Assimil, or in my Breton grammar book,

As well as studying a bit every day, I listen to Breton radio regularly, and am beginning to get the gist of some of the things I hear, or at least can recognise some of the words. I haven’t heard any Breton songs that I really want to learn yet, but I hope there’ll be a few. I have also bought a Breton version of the first Harry Potter book and plan to read it soon, perhaps in parallel with the Welsh and/or English versions.

Have you used Assimil courses to learn any languages? What are you impressions of them?

Fantastic octopus wiring!

The title of this post is an example of the English sentence that appear on tweets by a certain Mr Nakayama, who aims to introduce Japanese people to “Non-essential English Vocabulary: Words that will never come up in tests”. He makes up these useless but memorable phrases as an alternative to all the books and websites that help people prepare for tests, and they are proving popular with English learners in Japan. Nakayama san has also published a books of these phrases.

More examples include, “My brother has been observing the slugs since he got divorced.” and “What nice barbed wire. Thank you, I knitted it myself”, “The mayor got a lot of shampoo hats by dishonest means.”

The writer of the article where I found this suggests that this might be a good way to learn vocabulary in any language as the bizarreness of the sentences makes them relatively easy to remember. Quite a few of them feature somewhat crude language, though that probably makes them memorable as well.

Les mots de la semaine

– la caisse (enregistreuse), le tiroir caisse = till / cash register = cofrestr arian = kefierez
– la caisse automatique = self-service till / self checkout = cofrestr arian awtomatig = kefierez emgefre
– casissier = checkout assistant = gweithiwr cofrestr arian
– vendeur (-euse) = shop assistant = gweithiwr siop = gwerzher
– l’hydromel (m) = mead = medd = chouchenn, dour-mel
– affolé = panic-stricken = llawn braw, rhuslyd, gwyllt
– affolant = disturbing = cynhyrfus, annifyr, cythryblus = da bennfollañ, braouac’hus
– affoler = to terrify = dychryn, brawychu, arswydo
– s’affoler = to (get into a) panic = cynhurfu, rhusio, dychryn = pennfollañ
– ne t’affole pas! = don’t panic = paid â chynhyrfu!

The person on the till

Last night at the French conversation group one of the things we talked about was shopping, particularly in supermarkets, and one of the words we weren’t sure of was till / cash register. I now know this is la caisse (enregistreuse) or le tiroir caisse and that someone who works on a till is possibly un caissier or une caissière.

This got me thinking what you call such a person in English. You might call them a shop assistant or maybe a cashier, but neither of these seems to fit the job very well.

What would you call such a person? Would the term you use depend on the kind of shop?

Learning a language, are we really too old?

Today we have a guest post by Jade Henriques, a young language learner who is planning to pursue a degree in linguistics. Here is her website languageninjas.com. You can also keep up with Facebook.

From the first time I started learning languages, I see this question pop up from time to time. I too considered if I was just too old to learn another language. The thing is that people believe that you have to be at a certain age to learn a language, once you pass this age learning a language is next to impossible.

On the contrary scientist may disagree; I’ve actually stumbled across many researches that say; not learning a language because of your age is a myth. When it comes to learning a language, adults actually have the capability of learning faster than little children. One perspective I have is that as adults we already learned the basics of communication and the meaning of objects around us. For example, a seven year old may learn that a tree is a plant, a tree has leaves, and a tree grows from the soil. As adults we know this already, in our second language all we need to know is what a tree is in that language, we don’t need to go into details of what it is or a description of it.

It’s still, however, an ongoing battle of whether children learn better or adults do.

Our Brains can actually do it
The human brain is still a mystery to many scholars and scientists out there. The complexity of it is baffling. Something I see so very often is that if we see a word 160 times over, it is permanently lodged into our permanent memory. That doesn’t mean you should sit and say a word 160 times over. It means that if over a period of time, on different occasions, if you see a word at least 160 times, it’s going to be hard to forget that word. This research was carried out by a group of Cambridge neuroscientists. This is why reading is so important when learning a language. The first time you see a word and you don’t understand it, don’t beat yourself up. If you were to see this word again, and again and again, our brains will begin to make sense of it and remember it for us.

It’s about inputting
There is no way on God’s earth you can speak a language with very little input. It is in the same essence if you see a word for the first time and you don’t understand it right of the back, then that simple means you hardly see this word or you’ve never seen this word before. So, before you open your mouth, start inputting data into your brain.

I’ve find that it is actually easier to remember words when we are not fighting ourselves to remember them. For instance, making vocabulary list and spending your day studying this list is not the way to go.

But naturally just reading and listening (to things you actually enjoy) will help you to remember words faster and pain free.

Long term, Medium term and short term memory
Long term memory is words that we will never forget. Long term memory is very hard to destroy and it would take a brain disorder such as Alzheimer’s to do so. This is what the above study suggests that if a word is seen 160 times, then it’s a part of your long term memory. With words in your medium term memory, it suggests that you have seen these words numerous times but not enough. If you neglect these words over a period of time, chances are you will forget them. Words in your short term memory are the easiest to forget, maybe you just seen these words a handful of times, overtime, try to make words in your short term memory apart of your long term memory.

In conclusion, you are not too old to learn a language; it’s just a matter of practice and a passion for the language.