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.

Scandinavian Mutual Intelligibility

By Simon

Scandinavian languages

The other day I meet a Faroe Islander, and one of the things we talked about was mutual intelligibility between Scandinavian languages.

I was under the impression that Faroese and Icelandic were closely related, and assumed that there would be quite a bit of mutually intelligibility between them.

She told me that this is true to some extent – if you know Faroese, you can understand written Icelandic quite well, but spoken Icelandic is more difficult to follow.

I also thought that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are more or less mutually intelligible. I’ve been learning Swedish for a while now, and can make some sense of written Danish and Norwegian, and understand the spoken languages to a limited extent.

Everyone in the Faroe Islands learns Danish, which is very close to Norwegian, so they can understand both languages. According to my Faroese informant though, Swedish differs more from the other Scandinavian languages and is more difficult to understand.

If you speak one or more of the Scandinavian languages, how much can you understand the others?

If I had my druthers

By Simon

In an email I received today, I saw the phrase “If I really had my druthers”, which puzzled me. I hadn’t come across the word druthers before, and had to look it up.

According to Wikitionary, druthers [ˈdrʌðəz] means “wishes, preferences, or ways” and is used informally in the USA. It comes from the the expression “I’d rather” (meaning “I would prefer to”), which is often pronounced “I druther” in some dialects.

According to Dictionary.com, druthers first appeared in the 1870s.

Here are some examples of use:

  • I’d druther stay home today.
  • We druther go swimming than go to school.
  • If I’ve got my druthers, I(‘d) druther not.
  • If I had my druthers, I would prefer to be a writer

Have you heard / seen druther(s) used before?

Do you use it yourself?

Fox paths

By Simon

Language quiz image

The other day I saw post on the Omniglot fan club on Facebook about fox-related idioms. The discussion started with a fox-related Swedish idiom: Ha en räv bakom örat (“to have a fox behind one’s ear”) = to be cunning like a fox.

I found a few of interesting fox-related expressions in Welsh:

  • Cysgu llywnog [kəsgɨ ɬʊɨnɔg] (“fox’s sleep”) = simulated sleep to deceive the onlooker
  • Llwybr llwynog [ɬʊɨbr ɬʊɨnɔg] (“fox’s path”) = a secret path used by quarrymen when late for work to avoid being seen by the steward
  • Tywydd llwynog [təʊɨð ɬʊɨnɔg] (“fox weather”) = unsettled weather

I particularly like the second one.

In English you might someone is a sly fox, or as sly/cunning as a fox if they’re particularly cunning and/or clever. This association is an old one mentioned in folk tales such as Aesop’s Fables, and also in Shakespeare’s plays [source]. You can also outfox someone when you outwit them, especially if you’re a wily old fox.

Do you know any other interesting fox-related idioms?

Achoo!

By Simon

When someboday sneezes, do you usually say anything? If so, what?

In the UK it’s common to say ‘Bless you!’ after a sneeze.

In French they say à tes souhaits or à vos souhaits – souhait = wish, so these mean something like ‘to your wishes’.

In German they say “Gesundheit!” (Health). I’ve heard this used by English speakers as well.

The Welsh equivalents of ‘Bless you’ are:

– Rhad arnat ti! = Bless you! (to one person you know)
– Rhad arnoch chi! = Bless you! (to several people or a stranger)
– Bendith y Tad! = Blessing of the Father!

However I’ve never heard these used in Welsh.

How do you represent the sound of a sneeze writing?

Here are a few ways: achoo, atchoo, ahchoo, ah-choo, a-choo, atishoo, atchoum (French).

Here’s an infographic showing how people respond to a sneeze around the world:

How the world responds to sneezing

How the world responds to sneezing, courtesy of Expedia.ca

Hit us up on Twitter

By Simon

On a podcast I listen to – A Way with Words, when asking people to get in touch to ask language-related questions, they often say “Hit us up on Twitter”.

To my ears this sounds strange. I might say something like, “Contact us on Twitter”, or even “Drop us a tweet”.

Does it sound strange to you?

How would you ask people to tweet?

How is Twitter referred to in other languages?

When asking people to phone you, would you say any of the following?

– Drop us a line
– Call us
– Give us a call
– Give us a bell
– Give us a buzz

Or something else?

The Road Runs

By Simon

Today I learnt that one way to say goodbye or farewell in Romanian is drum bun. This came up in a Duolingo lesson, and I translated it as “good road”, which is what it means literally. However that’s not how it’s used.

Drum (road) comes from the Greek δρόμος (drómos – road, track), from the Ancient Greek δρόμος (drómos – roadway, road, street, way; journey), from the Proto-Indo-European *drem- (to run) + -ος (-os).

*Drem- is also the root of the English drome, as in hippodrome, aerodrome, velodrome, anadrome, syndrome and palindrome.

In case you’re wondering, an anadrome is a word which forms a different word when spelled backwards, such as desserts and stressed. They are also known as volvograms, reversgrams, heteropalindromes, backwords, semordnilap or emordnilaps, or semordnilaps [source].

Other anadromes in English include spar / raps, star / rats, bus / sub, nip / pin, and so on.

Can you think of others in English or other languages?

Creating fonts

By Simon

I have tried various apps for creating fonts, such as FontStruct and Fonty with mixed results. Some work better than others. FontStruct works well, though I find it tricky to make letters with lots of curves. Fonty works well, though when I tried to use the fonts on my computer, the letters do not display at all.

Yesterday I found Glyphr Studio, a free, web-based font design tool that works well and produces usable fonts. I worked out how to import graphics, which is easier than making all the letters from scratch, though a little convoluted, as you have to save each letter as a separate image, convert the images to SVG files, then import them and tweak them. Strangely they are inverted when they appear in Glyphr.

Anyway, I make a rough font for Laala, which requires more tweaking, but looks okay.

One language is never enough (Zo alu laala nuuna teete) in Laala

If you make fonts, what software, apps or websites do you use?