Author: Simon

I am a linguist, web developer and musician. I live in Bangor in Wales and run Omniglot - the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, as well as making the Radio Omniglot Podcast.

Mizzle

By Simon

On Sunday I visited Bakewell, a small town in the Peak District, with a friend. It rained on and off all day and we were trying to decide whether the rain could be described as drizzle or mizzle, a word I hadn’t heard before. Apart from a few brief heavy showers, it rained lightly most of the time – something I would describe as drizzle.

According to Weather Online:

Mizzle is a term used in Devon and Cornwall for a combination of fine drenching drizzle or extremely fine rain and thick, heavy saturating mist or fog. While floating or falling the visible particles of coarse, watery vapor might approach the form of light rain.

Etymology: from the Frisian mizzelen (drizzle)

According to the Oxford Dictionary, mizzle is mainly a dialect word meaning ‘light rain or drizzle’; or ‘to rain lightly’, and it comes from late Middle English.

The Free Dictionary defines mizzle as:

– (verb) To rain in fine, mistlike droplets; drizzle.
– (noun) A mistlike rain; a drizzle.
– (verb, British slang) To make a sudden departure

Have you come across mizzle before?

Speaking in Tongues

By Simon

The other day I heard about an interesting-sounding film called Speaking in Tongues, which tackles issues surrounding bilingual education in the USA, and follows four American children who are being educated in immersion programs in San Francisco. Two of children are in immersion programs to retain their native languages while learning English, and the other two are learning other languages through the programs. It demonstrates the practical benefits of being bilingual and dispels some of the myths. In part it is a reaction to the ‘English only’ movements that have sprung up in many parts of the USA.

There’s also a blog which discusses the film and the issues it addresses.

Have any of you seen it?

Audio books

By Simon

At the moment I’m reading the novel Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier, and have been wondering how to pronounce Meaulnes, which is the name of one of the characters. I guessed it was something like /meyln/ or /meylnə/, and have now discovered that it’s pronounced more like /mœln/. I’ve also found a free audio book version of the story on the Internet Archive.

When reading texts in foreign languages I usually read them aloud to practise speaking those languages. Listening to recordings of texts as I’m reading, and repeating what I’m hearing, helps me improve my pronunciation and intonation, as well as my listening comprehension. I find this a useful way to improve my knowledge of languages, and also to enjoy stories and learn new things from factual texts.

The Audio Archive or that site contains thousands of audio books, podcasts and other recordings. Most are in English, but there quite a few in other languages, including Arabic, French, German and Spanish. A related resource is Audiocite.net, which contains numerous audio books and other recordings in French.

Macaronic radio

By Simon

I listened to some Cantonese on RTHK this morning, and while I didn’t understand everything, I could get the gist of the news stories. Then I saw that RTHK has a Mandarin channel as well, so I listened to that for a while and noticed that when they had outside reports and interviews, many of the reporters and interviewees spoke in Cantonese, which wasn’t translated into Mandarin. I assume they don’t bother with translation because the majority of their listeners can speak both Cantonese and Mandarin.

Other radio stations do the same sort of thing – Radio Cymru doesn’t translate bits in English into Welsh, and source], and it comes from the New Latin macaronicus, from Italian dialect maccarone (dumpling, macaroni) [source]. As it is usually used for humorously or satirically , it might not be the best term to describe this type of language use on the radio.

Are there other radio or TV stations that assume their listeners are bilingual or multilingual and that leave segments in other languages untranslated? Do any such stations do so for more than two languages?

Grok

By Simon

Grok [ˈɡɹɒk] / [ɡɹ̩kʰ] is a word I came across today in an email, and though I’ve encountered it before, I wasn’t sure what it meant. I thought it had something to do with programming as I’d only seen and heard it used in that context.

According to the Oxford Dictionaries online, grok is a verb meaning:

  1. to understand (something) intuitively or by empathy
  2. to establish a rapport

The Wiktionary definition of grok is as follows:

to grok (verb, transitive, slang)

  1. To have an intuitive understanding of; to know (something) without having to think (such as knowing the number of objects in a collection without needing to count them)
  2. To fully and completely understand something in all its details and intricacies.

The American author Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the word grok and used it in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, in which it was a Martian word with a variety of meanings such as “water”, “to drink”, “life”, or “to live”, and also had a figurative meaning that is hard for Earth people to grasp [source].

When learning languages I aim to absorb them, to know as much about them as possible, and to speak them without having to think too much, or in other words to grok them. I’m not a big fan of this word, but it fits what I’m trying to do with languages.

Are there words with similar meanings in other languages?

Puzzle

By Simon

A visitor to Omniglot would like your help deciphering the writing below. It comes from an old silk painting which appears Chinese, or maybe Japanese.

Writing from old painting

The bit on the left appears to be a signature which I think is 三抆向 (San Wenxiang) and perhaps the name of a town 圓山？ (Yuanshan ?) – a small town in Taiwan.

The other bit of writing might be a poem, though I can’t make out all of the characters (reading vertically from right to left): 昚中斑 (shèn zhōng​ bān) 一面二有​ (yī​ miàn èr yǒu​). The characters in the third row from the right might be Chinese hanzi: 力夕？石 (lì xī​ ? shí), or Japanese katakana: カタノ石 (ka ta no shiki), and in the next line 二而？ (èr ér ?). I’m not sure about the characters in the last line.

Mice, muscles and mussels

By Simon

Larry, the official mouser at 10 Downing Street

Today I came across the German word Mäusefänger (mouse catcher) in an article, sent to me by a friend, about the cat that recently took up the position of chief mouse catcher at 10 Downing Street, the official residence of British Prime Minister David Cameron. Number 10 apparently has a bit of a problem with mice, and there’s a long tradition of keeping cats at the prime minister’s residence and the treasury.

Mäusefänger is made up of two words: mäuse, the plural of maus (mouse), and fänger (catcher, fielder, interceptor, trap). Maus, which is of course related to the English word mouse, comes from the Proto-Germanic. *mus (a small rodent), from PIE *muHs- (mouse) [source]. The word muscle comes from the same root, via the Latin musculus (muscle, lit. “little mouse”), as does mussel, via the Old English muscle/musscel, and the Late Latin muscula [source].

While looking up some of the words in the article, I came across a useful German dictionary, canoonet, which not only gives information about German words (in German), and links to dictionaries for other languages, but also has grammatical information, such as noun and verb conjugations. There is also a Morphologie-Browser, which shows the words derived from a particular word – here’s an example with the word sehen (to see).