Omniglot - the blog

Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is, and where it’s spoken?

Today we have two questions from visitors to Omniglot.

The first question comes from someone who cares for a women in the end stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She doesn’t communicate much, but when she does she usually sings a song that seems to be in Ukrainian or possibly Slovak (she is an American woman who speaks English). Below is a phonetic rendering of what she sings:

Hietsa kietsa kulo pietsa
Talo mene pabolo
Mama mene swala wala
Him no mene pabolo

Do any of you recognise this song or the language?

The second question comes from someone in Canada who remembers her Scottish grandparents singing a goodbye song. Below is her phonetic rendering of the first line of the song, which is all she remembers, is “A daw a wha-a-tay bide ee wha-a-a”. Is this familiar to anyone?

Over the past six years the number of children in primary schools learning foreign languages has doubled, according to a report in The Times. So it appears that the UK government might just achieve its aim that all primary school pupils are learning a language by 2010.

The most popular language by far is French, which is taught by 89% of primary schools. German is taught by just 9% of schools, and Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Urdu are by fewer than 3%. Over 4,000 primary school teachers with a language specialism have been trained, and thousands more will be trained by 2010, at least that’s what the government hopes.

A review of languages in schools carried out last year by Lord Dearing recommended that languages be made compulsory at primary level. This hasn’t been implemented yet.

Do you think the study of foreign languages should be compulsory in schools? Is it compulsory in your country? If not, do plenty of people study languages anyway?

Today’s word, crychydd (’krəx.ɨð) is one of the Welsh words for heron. Other words for heron include crëyr, crehyr and crŷr, which appear to be immitations of the sounds herons make. The Irish word for heron is similar - corr.

Whenever I go for a walk by the sea here in Bangor, I often see a heron or two, as well as various other kinds of birds. They are usually grey herons (crëyr glas), but I did see a white one the other day, or it might have been a white egret. I’d like to learn a bit about these birds and their names in Welsh (and English, if I don’t already know them). I’ll see if the Welsh language bookshop in town has a book on local birds the next time I’m there.

One of my Welsh dictionaries, Y Geiriadur Mawr, has a section on birds with their names in Welsh and English. Many of the names are translations of their English equivalents, e.g. aderyn du - blackbird, asgell goch - redwing, and gwylan benddu - black-headed gull. Other names are based on the sounds the birds make, their appearance, or their habits or habitats, e.g. wid-wid - rock pipit, gwidihŵ - owl, bronfraith (speckled breast) - song thrush, Harri-gwylch-dy-big (Harry wash your beak) - little grebe, aderyn yr eira (snow bird) - starling.

A useful site I heard about recently is Practicing Spanish, which focuses on medical Spanish for healthcare providers. It includes daily dialogues, with audio, useful phrases for different medical situations, anatomical terminology, basic vocabulary, notes on culture and information about Spanish-speaking countries, as well as a number of folk songs. The author of the site is a Spanish teacher in the USA with training in medical interpreting.

A similar site I found today contains a glossary of medical terms in nine European languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).

There’s another mutilingual medical dictionary at: http://www.super55.com.

Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?

Clue: this is an indigenous language of Central America.

The other day I heard about an interesting video on YouTube that shows the ancient forms of 36 Chinese characters via an animated cartoon in which the characters come to life. The commentary is all in Mandarin, but there are some English explanations in the information about the video.

A regular visitor to Omniglot has asked me to request your help with a project on Librivox. The aim of the project is to collect recordings of the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 30 different languages. A similar project last year resulted in recordings of the UDHR in 21 languages from Arabic to Walloon.

If you can help, there are details of the project on the Librivox website.

eduFire, a language learning site I heard about recently. It’s designed to bring together language learners and tutors via the web using what they call ‘live video language learning’. Tutors can set their own fees, a small proportion of which is retained by the eduFire people as service charge, and students can try sample video lessons and talk to other students before deciding on a tutor. The most popular languages are Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

eduFire are giving away free one-hour tutoring sessions for readers of this blog. The first ten people to email freetutoring@edufire.com will receive a coupon code that allows their session to be complimentary.

Don’t forget the My favourite kanji competition, by the way. I said that the closing date for entries is today, but as I’ve only received two entries so far, I’ll extend that to the end of July.

Apologies for the lack of language quiz yesterday. This was due to server problems. As I know you enjoy these quizzes … here’s a recording in a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which language it is?

Yesterday I was talking to a former colleague who grew up in the UK speaking Cantonese and English and whose family comes from Hong Kong. He told me that when he meets Mandarin-speaking Chinese people, they tend to assume from his appearance he will understand them when they speak to him in Mandarin. He doesn’t. Sometimes Japanese people assume he’s Japanese as well.

I’ve seen similar situations in Taiwan and China involving Overseas Chinese who don’t speak Mandarin, or only speak it a little bit, being talked at in Mandarin by people who find it hard to accept that people who look Chinese don’t understand or speak Mandarin. At the same time, it can sometimes be difficult for Chinese people to accept that a Westerner such as myself can speak Mandarin.

Have you had experiences like this with Mandarin or other languages?