http://www.omniglot.com/blog language-related musings - one language is never enough / Знать один язык недостаточно Thu, 15 May 2008 16:11:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en On a website I came across today, there's some useful and interesting advice about studying languages. The author of the site, Alexander Arguelles, is a professor of linguistics and has studied many many languages - you can find out which ones on the how to learn any language forum. There's also ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/15/foreign-language-expertise/ Today's word, priodol, means appropriate, proper or suitable in Welsh. I came across it while reading a web page about self-employment and had to look it up as I wasn't sure what it meant in the context. I knew that the root priod had something to do with marriage, but ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/14/priodol/ A number of police officers in Lancashire have been learning sign language (BSL) in order to communicate more effectively with deaf people, according to an article in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph. The BSL-trained officers use their skills to help people who have been arrested and to gather statements from victims, witnesses ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/13/police-signing/ Here's a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which language it is? http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/10/language-quiz-63/ If you would like to turn your constructed alphabets into fonts, there are a number of ways to do so: you could buy one of the professional font creation tools available from Fontlab, you could use a free font editor such as FontForge or Softy, or use the font creation ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/09/creating-fonts/ Irreversible binomial is a linguistic term I came across today on this blog post. It was coined by Yakov Malkiel in a 1959 article in the linguistics journal, Lingua, and refers to pairs of words on either side of a conjunction such as and that are always used in a ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/08/irreversible-binomials/ Image you're at a party to celebrate a friend's birthday. It's a Saturday or Sunday, the party's been going on for quite a while and you're starting to feel somewhat fatigued. In English and most other languages it would take a whole sentence to explain this situation. In Estonian however, ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/07/party-fatigue/ Today I came across an online collection of recorded exercises from W. Smalley's Manual of Articulatory Phonetics. The exercises are design to help distinguish different types of sounds based on their point of articulation, articulators, manner of articulation, or point and manner of articulation. This looks useful if you have ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/06/articulatory_phonetics/ According to an blog post I found today, teaching a baby sign language can help him or her to learn to read at an very early age. The post is about a 17 month old girl who can read, as she demonstrates on the video embedded in the post. Her parents, ... http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/05/reading-baby/ Here's a recording of a poem in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is? http://www.omniglot.com/blog/2008/05/03/name-the-language-33/