Omniglot - the blog

I came across the word clustfeinio yesterday while reading a novel in Welsh. At first I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, apart from having something to do with ears, clustiau. From the context though I was able to guess its meaning:

Wy’n clustfeinio am bob gwich a sgrech.
I’m [verbing] to every squeak and shriek.

From its position in the sentence, you can tell that clustfeinio is a verb. Can you guess what it means? The character who says this sentence is lying in bed trying to get to sleep.

Related words include:

clust - ear
clustdlws - ear-ring (lit. “ear brooch/jewel”)
clusten - (ear) lobe
clustew / clustrwm - hard of hearing (lit. “fat ear” / “heavy ear”)
clustfyddar - deaf
clustiog - eared
clustog - pillow, cushion
clustowlad - buffer-state (lit. “pillow state”)

According to an article I came across today, increasing numbers of Mongolians are enrolling in Korean language classes in the hope that they will get jobs in Korea and save enough money to buy a house when they return to Mongolia. This is the so-called ‘Korean dream’. Such classes are available at all levels of education from primary schools to universities.

Already a quite a large number of Mongolians - around 33,000 - live and work in South Korea, and it seems many of the compatriots would like to follow in their footsteps. Many Mongolians also go to study in Korea, attracted in part by the relatively low study costs.

I wonder if the Mongolian find it easier to learn Korean, a language which has a similar structure to Mongolian, than other languages such as English, Russian or Chinese. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that Japanese people find Turkish easier to learn than English because of its similar structure.

Lingosmile is a new wiki-style site I heard about recently which aims to provide a free and easy way to produce translations collaboratively. The idea is that anybody can join in and translate material into their language, edit existing translations and/or add recordings. Translations on the site are divided in sections such as language learning, sciences, art & culture, fiction, song lyrics and so on, and anyone can start a new project within these sections.

The site is still in beta and I don’t think it’s been officially launched yet, but it looks like it has potential to become a useful language learning resource.

Is it possible to achieve spoken fluency in a second language without being able to read it?

This question was sent in by Ian McGilloway and comes, in part, from a discussion he had on holiday where the local staff at a diving company in a small fishing village on an island spoke pretty good English with English accents but could barely read and write. He wondered how far they could take their range of language and if they would plateau out without the extra input from reading.

He thinks it possible to speak a second/foreign language fluently without being literate in it, but it would be considerably easier if you could read it. Largely because the range of vocabulary you’d be exposed to would be far greater. In particular, with languages which have different registers that depend on the social status of people in the group and so on.

In some cases language learners might learn to read a language only in transliteration if it’s written with a different alphabet or other writing system. This is especially true for Chinese and Japanese. They can achieve spoken fluency in such languages, I think, but might miss out on some literary aspects.

Have you learnt to speak any languages without learning to read them?

Or conversely have you learnt to read any languages without learning to speak them?

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

According to Reuters, plans are afoot to establish a language museum in London, which is apparently the most multilingual city in the world with over 350 languages spoken. The idea is the get the museum up and running to coincide with the 2012 London Olympics.

The museum would aim to get people more interested in languages - both their own and foreign ones - using serious scholarship and high-tech gadgets such as a machine that shows you what happens in your brain while you’re speaking.

A similar museum - the National Museum of Language is due to open in College Park, Maryland in the USA later this year. Another - Linguamón - Casa de les Llengües (House of Languages) - is planned for Barcelona.

成語 [成语] (chéngyǔ) are Chinese idioms usually consisting of four characters. They tend to pack a lot of meaning into those four characters and many have a story, myth or moral behind them from Classical Chinese literature, in which they were used extensively. If you’re not familiar with the stories, it will be very difficult or impossible to work out what the idioms mean. They’re still quite commonly used in modern written and spoken Chinese, and there are between 5,000 and 20,000 of them.

Here are a few examples:

一日千秋 (yírìqiānqiū) = “one day, a thousand autumns” - implies rapid changes; one day equals a thousand years

一日千里 (yírìqiānlǐ) = “one day, a thousand miles.”- implies rapid progress; travelling a thousand miles in a day

一日三秋 (yírìsānqiū) = “one day, three autumns.” - when you’re missing someone very much, one day can feel as long as three years.

From Wikipedia

A good place to find out more about chengyu is this site, which explains a number of them in Chinese and English. Another useful chengyu site is this one, which contains a dictionary of 13,000 of them with explanations in Chinese.

These idioms are also used in Japanese and are called 四字熟語 (yojijukugo) - four character idioms. They come mainly from Classical Chinese and have the same or similar meanings to the Chinese ones. A dictionary of Japanese four characters idioms, with explanations in Japanese, can be found here, while this site explains some of them in English.

For a while I’ve been considering rearranging Omniglot’s homepage and have come up with the following alternative. I’m trying to make it to easier for visitors to understand what the site’s about and to be able to find the contents they’re looking for.

What do you think? Is the new version better than the old one?

Here’s a recording of part of a song in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess the language?

An interesting site I came across today called the Chinese Pear Stories features material in seven Chinese languages - Mandarin (普通话), Cantonese (广东话), Hakka (客家话), Shanghai Wu (吳), Xiamen Min Nan (閩南话), Xiang 湘 and Gan 贛. The material consists of recordings and transcriptions of stories told by speakers of each of these languages. This is the first time I’ve heard the latter two and to me they sound a lot like Mandarin.

A researcher from the University of California made a short film, which can be seen on the site, called ‘Pear Stories’ about some children stealing fruit.The film has no dialogue and is designed to elicit samples of various languages, including the Chinese ones already mentioned and also English, German, Greek, Japanese, and one of the Mayan languages. People watched the film, then were asked to say what they’d seen in their language. The idea was to compare how speakers of different languages describe the same events.

One finding that emerged was that the structure of the stories was very similar across all the languages - there appears to be a common ’story grammar’. There were however some minor differences in the vocabulary used, and some people added moral comments about stealing.