About this blog
This blog contains my musings on language and languages, language learning and teaching, language-related technology, linguistics, interesting words and phrases, details of my adventures in foreign parts, and various other bit and bobs. While the main language is English, I slip into other languages on occasion just to see if you’re paying attention.
If you’d like to contribute to this blog as a guest blogger, or would like to make some other contribution to Omniglot, please contact me.
What’s an Omniglot?
Omniglot is a word I coined back in 1998 and means “all languages”. Omniglot is my website about the writing systems and languages of the world.
About me
My name is Simon Ager, I’m originally from Lancashire in the northwest of England, and currently live in Bangor in Wales. I earn my living mainly from Omniglot, and also do some freelance writing about languages and travel for other websites.
I’ve worked in various part of the UK, the Channel Islands, France and Taiwan in hotels, farms, schools and offices as a kitchen porter, waiter, barman, English teacher, proof reader, education counsellor, external liaison officer, interpreter, IT manager, web consultant, translator and web developer.
My mother tongue is English and I’ve been interested in accents and dialects of English and in other languages for as long as I can remember. I studied French and German at secondary school, did a BA in Chinese and Japanese, and recently completed an MA in Linguistics. I’ve studied a number of other languages mainly on my own and with varying degrees of success. My Mandarin, French Welsh and Irish are more or less fluent, I can get by in German, Spanish, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, I can read and understand quite a bit of Italian, Portuguese and Esperanto, and have a smattering of Czech, Taiwanese, Cantonese and British Sign Language (BSL).
More details of my language learning adventures.
I enjoy singing, playing and listening to music, reading, travelling, swimming, skating, cycling, unicycling and juggling.
You can find versions of this text in quite a few other languages on the About me page on Omniglot.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, my surname is pronounced /’eɪgə/ (/’eIg@/). It apparently comes from the Saxon name Eadgar – “ead” means “prosperity, fortune”, and “gar” means spear.
Some of my photos are on Omniglot and on Flickr.
I also write for the Language Trainers Blog and for Cactus Language Training.
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