Category: Language

Croenlun

By Simon

They were talking about tattoos this morning on Radio Cymru and one of the presenters used the word croenlun, which I hadn’t heard before but could understand from the meaning of its component words – croen (skin) and llun (picture, image). This word doesn’t appear in any of my Welsh dictionaries so I suspect it isn’t very common – the usual Welsh word for tattoo is tatŵ.

Mysterious symbol tattoo

Other Welsh words containing croen include croendenau (skin thin) – touchy sensitive; croendew (skin thick) and croengaled (skin hard) – thick-skinned, callous; and croeniach (skin healthy) – unhurt, unharmed.

The English word tattoo comes from one of the Polynesian languages – perhaps the Tahitian and Samoan tatau or the Marquesan tatu, which mean “puncture, mark made on skin”.

The image on the right was sent in by a visitor to Omniglot who would like to know if anybody recognises the symbol.

It looks like a tattoo and the symbol does look vaguely familiar to me, though I’m not sure where I’ve seen it before.

Crimean Tatar

By Simon

Crimean Tatar (Qırımtatarca) is a Turkic language spoken in Crimea in Ukraine, and also Uzbekistan, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. At different times during the past century is has been written with the Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, and all three alphabets are still used by Crimean Tatars in different countries. At a recent seminar in Simferopol in Ukraine it was proposed that all Crimean Tatar adopt the Latin alphabet, according to this report.

The aim of the common Latin-based orthography is to standardise the written language and to unite Crimean Tatars wherever they live.

Postcard

By Simon

A visitor to Omniglot who would like to know what the Latin and Greek bits on this postcard mean, and whether anybody has any ideas about the identity of the writer.

Mystery postcard

The postcard that was sent to an address in the UK and has a UK stamp on so was probably it was posted in the UK, though the postmark is unreadable, apart from the date – 1904.

The quote about the “laughing woman and two bright eyes” comes from the last stanza of a poem called “The Temptations of St Anthony” which is in Bentley’s Miscellany of 1868 and is by a poet with the initials T.H.S. The full quote is “A laughing woman with two bright eyes is the worsest devil of all”.

Word of the day – wintle

By Simon

I came across the word wintle [‘winəl / ‘wintəl] in Louis de Bernières’ novel Notwithstanding, which I just finished reading. From the context – she walks carefully so as not to wintle on the rimy Bargate stones of the path – I guessed that it meant to slip or something similar.

According the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary it’s Scottish and means to stagger, reel or wriggle. It’s possibly comes from the Dutch word windtelen (to reel).

Dictionary.com defines it as 1. (noun) a rolling or staggering motion. 2. (verb) to roll or swing back and forth. 3. (verb) to tumble over; capsize.

Have you heard this word before?

The Audio Archive

By Simon

I came across the Audio Archive yesterday while searching for information about the pronunciation of English dialects.

The archive is part of an newsgroup about English and contains recordings by English speakers from around the world of a number of different texts.

Other collections of English dialect recordings including the British Library’s Sounds Familiar? and Archival Sound Recordings, the BBC Voices project, Sound Comparisons, the American English Dialect Recordings at the Library of Congress, and the International Dialects of English Archive.

A History of the World in 100 Objects

By Simon

Writing tablet from Mesopotamia (c 3100-2900 BC) found in Uruk III.

There’s an very interesting series of programmes on BBC Radio 4 at the moment called “A History of the World in 100 Objects“. The objects come from the British Museum and one of recent programmes discussed an ancient Mesopotamian writing tablet, like the one on the right, from about 3,000 BC.

They talk about the invention of writing, and how it was used almost exclusively for record keeping and accounting at first, and that written literature only developed later.

The tablet in question is a record of workers’ daily beer rations – workers were paid in beer as this was before the invention of money.

By the way I’m planing to add a page or two to Omniglot about the history and development of writing, and maybe a chronology as well.

Surprisingly spacious

By Simon

I’ve been thinking about buying a house for a while and this week I finally got round to looking at a few places. The estate agent’s descriptions and photos of the properties are designed make them sound and look attractive to potential buyers and need some interpreting as they don’t always quite match the reality.

For example, ‘surprisingly spacious’ seems to mean that a house is marginally larger on the inside than it appears from the outside; ‘mature’ might mean in a poor state of repair, as might ‘with great potential’; ‘small’ might mean absolutely tiny; and ‘popular location’ might mean that the area tends to get noisy at night; and/or there’s a lot of traffic.

Have you any other examples or interpretations?

‘Extreme’ language exchanges

By Simon

Language exchange trips have been popular for many years, but usually involve spending only a few weeks in a foreign country. For example, I took part in a language exchange with a French lad while at school which involved me spending three weeks with his family in France, and him spending three weeks in the UK with my family. I also spent two weeks with a family in Germany, and a month with a family in Austria.

According to The Independent, the latest trend is for children between 9 and 13 to spend six months in a foreign country, staying with a family and going to a local school. Even if they don’t know the local language at all at first, they’re usually fluent in it after six months.

The exchanges discussed in the article were arranged by En Famille International, a French company set up in 1978, and are available in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain and the UK. One perennial problem they have is a lack of English-speaking families willing to participate in the exchanges.