2008 has been declared International Year of Languages by the United Nations. Part of their aim is redress the balance between English and the five other official languages used in the UN (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish), and they hope that the pursuit of multilingualism will act “as a means of promoting, protecting and preserving diversity of languages and cultures globally”.
Happy New Year, by the way.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was thinking of starting a new blog to practice my the languages. Well I’ve finally made up my mind and have created one - Rywsut-rywfodd. I plan to write everything in Welsh and Irish for now, and might write in other languages from time to time.
The title means “somehow or other”, as in “somehow or other I will become fluent in Welsh and Irish, and as many other languages as possible”. The subtitle - meddyliau hap yn y Gymraeg / smaointe fánacha as Gaeilge - means “random thoughts in Welsh / random thoughts in Irish”. I hope to write frequently - this probably won’t be every day though. I might even have a go at audioblogging as well.
When writing a recent post, it struck me how few words Welsh and Irish have in common. The only one that stands out in that particular post is blasus/blasta (tasty). Most of the others are borrowings from English.
I believe this is the world’s first bilingual Welsh/Irish blog. I might be mistaken of course - if there are others out there, I’m sure you’ll let me know. What’s the most unusual combination of languages you’ve come across on a blog or website?
I’ve been thinking for a while about starting a new blog to practise my languages. What I can’t decide is whether to have one new blog on which I post in various languages, or to have one for each language I want to practise. Another thing I can’t decide is what to call the blogs. Any ideas?
The course is going well, we’re speaking plenty of Welsh and we don’t have so much homework tonight.
I started this blog exactly a year ago, so today is its first anniversary. It currently contains 319 posts and 3,213 comments, and is visited by around 300 people a day. Unfortunately it also attracts a huge amount of spam posts - over 30,000 to date - fortunately the spam filters catch most of these.
When I took my first tentative steps into the blogsphere, I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to find enough things to write about, but so far I’ve managed to write posts almost every day, and enjoy writing them as well. While perhaps not every post is a perfectly honed gem, I do try my best to make them interesting and informative.
I decided to give the blog a new theme today - hope you like it.
According to a report I heard on the radio this morning, the British Museum is going to stage a major exhibition of the terracotta warriors who guard the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇), who unified China and was its first emperor from 221-210 BC. The exhibition will include not just some of the warriors, but also terracotta bureaucrats, acrobats and musicians. Apparently the emperor is attend in death by his army plus quite a few other members of his court.
The term ‘terracotta bureaucrat’ is not one you hear everyday and caught my ear.
The word bureaucracy combines bureau, meaning desk or office, with the Greek suffix -kratia, which denotes ‘power of’, and was coined by the French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-59). The word bureaucrat first appeared in writing in 1842. A bureau was originally a type of cloth used for covering desks and tables. It comes from the Latin Latin burra, wool, shaggy garment; via the Old French burel, coarse woolen cloth.
Terracotta comes from Italian and means ‘baked earth’.
A new series of BBC Radio 4’s fascinating programme about language, Word of Mouth, started this week. One of the things they discussed was Hinglish, a blend of English, Hindi, Punjabi and other South Asian languages spoken in India and by people of Indian origin in the UK, and elsewhere.
In the UK, British Indians pepper their English with Hindi and Punjabi words and expressions, such as yaar (a friend), javaani (youth), ganja (bald), chamcha (a spoon, a lackey, or a sycophant). While in India, many people mix English words and phrases with their native languages, for example time kya hua hai? (what time is it?).
A team of intrepid researchers from Icelandic and Turkey are planning a three-month journey through Central Asia to research the origins of Runic writing, according to the Zaman online newspaper. They believe that Runic writing was transmitted to Europe from Mongolia via the Silk Road.
The usually explanation of the origins of the Orkhon script of Mongolia is that it developed from the Sogdian script, and that resemblances between it and the Runic scripts of Europe are probably coincidental. Perhaps the Turkish and Icelandic researchers will be able to shed new light on these scripts.
If any of you have tried to email me at questions[at]omniglot[dot]com this week, your messages have probably bounced back. For reasons I don’t understand, this mailbox has been refusing to accept any emails at all. After trying a number of solutions, I’ve given up on the questions address and created a new one: feedback[at]omniglot[dot]com.
A number of you have suggested that I add a forum to Omniglot. I’ve been investigating this and it doesn’t appear to be too difficult to set up. What I’m not sure about is how long I’d need to spend administering and moderating it.
Do any of you act as forum adminstrators or moderators? How much time do you spend on this? Would you be willing to act in this role on an Omniglot forum? Also, do you have any suggestions for discussion categories?
In the meantime, there’s quite a good forum for language-related discussion over on How to Learn any language.
When writing posts on this blog I’m never sure whether anybody will comment and how many comments there will be. Yesterday’s unresearched, ill-thought-out little post has stirred up plenty of discussion, which, to some extent, was the idea. You could say I was playing devil’s advocate. Other posts that I spend hours crafting from nothing but the finest, most carefully-researched factoids might generate few if any comments.
It’s always interesting to hear your opinions and experiences. Each comment you leave reveals a little more about you, and I find these tidbits interesting.
Once upon a time, the only trace most people left was their name on a gravestone. Now you can leave snippets of information about yourself in many places, especially online. This should make it easier for our descendents to trace us, their ancestors, unless the future turns out to be something like it’s portrayed in such fine movies as Water World, The Day After Tomorrow or Terminator.
