I found some alphabet and language games today on PurposeGames, including one which involves matching writing systems to their names (which come from Omniglot), a multilingual one, an Arabic alphabet one, a Phoenician alphabet one, and many more. You can also create your own games on this site.
Do you know of any other sites with similar games?
Do you know of any other sites with similar games?
I’d like to add these kinds of games to Omniglot eventually.
In his essay, England your England, George Orwell wrote of the English working class:
Even when they are obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.
I’ve encountered attitudes like this among many English tourists who rate foreign places partly by the ability of the locals to speak English, and even if they know a few words of the local languages, they usually pronounce them with an English accent.
An article I found on this subject – Brits don’t border with local lingo – says that more than half of the British tourists surveyed cannot recognise even basic phrases in the language of their destination, that more than 80% of monolingual British tourists refuse to take a phrase book or dictionary abroad with them, and that a third rely on the locals speaking English. If the locals don’t speak English, then the Brits speak more loudly and slowly in English, use mime, and/or speak English with a foreign accent. Even those who know phrases in foreign languages often get them mixed up and pronounce them incorrectly.
Amusing examples of mispronunciation and misuse of foreign phrases can be found in the British television comedy Only Fools and Horses, in which the character of Del Boy uses “au revoir” to mean “hello”, “bonjour” for “goodbye”, and “bon appetit” for “I hope you choke on the potatoes” – there are more examples here. He pronounces all with a strong Cockney accent.
Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in?
I heard recently that there is now an online version of Dwelly’s Gaelic Dictionary, the most comprehensive Gaelic dictionary currently available. You can search for words via Scottish Gaelic or English, a significant improvement on printed version. You can also search for whole words, parts of words, exact spellings or similar sounding words. Another advantage of the online version of the dictionary is that you can read the text clearly and change the size if necessary – in the printed version the text is quite small and not always easy to read.
Edward Dwelly (1864-1939) was an English man with no Scottish connections who became fascinated by Scotland and learned to speak Gaelic like a native, and to play the bagpipes to a virtuoso level. He was also an active member of Comunn Gàidhealach an Lunainn (the Gaelic Society of London). He started work on his Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary in 1891, and it was published between 1902 and 1911. He not only compiled the dictionary, but also edited, illustrated, proof-read and printed it.
While the dictionary is somewhat out of date, the guys who digitised it are planning to add new words, recordings and images to it to bring it up-to-date.
Here’s a recording of part of story in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in?
A correspondent has asked about email etiquette and would be interested to know about formal and informal email openings and sign offs. Do you, for example, always start with a greeting of some kind and finish with a farewell? Or do you sometimes omit one or other of these? What kind of greetings and sign offs do you use, and do they depend on the context?
In my previous job some of the emails I sent were simple one word or one sentence ones without greetings or sign offs which said things like “Done”, “Sorted”, “I’ve done that now”, etc., but I only wrote in this way when replying to colleagues I knew well. Normally I almost always include greetings, such as Hi or Hello, and farewells, such as Regards or Best wishes, in my emails, except in some replies.
Today we have a guest post from Sol Klein:
While not paying in Latin class recently, I started thinking about a phrase I used to hear a lot of back in elementary school, when half of my educational day was conducted in Hebrew and half in English. The phrase is:
“כי פתח דלת. לא פתח תשובה”, which translates word-for-word to ” ‘because’ opens door. Does not open answer,” and more loosely translated means “the word ‘because’ opens a door. It does not open an answer.”
Which is of course nonsense when translated literally. The phrase, however, is a pun, and works on the assumption that the audience speaks both English and Hebrew. The word for “because” in Hebrew is the first word in the sentence, “כי,” pronounced /ki/, homophonically identical to English “key.” Taking this pun into account, the phrase can be translated in two different ways: “A key opens a door. It does not open an answer,” or “the word ‘because’ opens a door. It does not open an answer.”
This phrase was used to scold us for not answering “why” questions in complete sentences. For example, if we were asked “למה האיש שמח,” “why is the man happy,” we would be expected to reply with “האיש שמח כי הוא אוכל גלידה,” “the man is happy because he is eating ice cream,” rather than simply “כי הוא אוכל גלידה,” “because he is eating ice cream.” If we answer in the lazy latter fashion, we begin our answer with “כי,” /ki/, “because,” making our answer not a complete sentence. Thus our teacher would say to us “(’כי,’ /ki/, or ‘key’) opens a door, not an answer,” and we would groan and rephrase our answer in a complete sentence.
Anyway, I hope I’ve explained this at least somewhat clearly. I realize it would make infinitely more sense to a Hebrew speaker. My question is if you or any of your readers know of any other similar “cross-lingual” puns, where the funny bit depends on an audience’s knowledge of two separate languages, particularly two languages as distinct as English and Hebrew.
An article I came across today talks about the Ainu language in which the author, a Russian linguist, talks of his quest to find Ainu speakers in Hokkaido. He met plenty of Ainu but found only two people able to speak the language.
He does find quite a few people who know a few words or Ainu and can recite poems and sing songs, even though they don’t understand them, but as he defines ’speak’ as the ability “to produce spontaneous utterances”, he doesn’t classify these people as speakers. Everywhere he goes, he hears the Ainu speaking Japanese, even in an Ainu language class.
He tentatively concludes that the number of Ainu speakers might be as many as 600, or 2% of the 30,000 people who identify themselves as Ainu. This figure is a lot higher than that reported in Ethnologue (15), or by Murasaki Kyoko, a Japanese anthropologist who said there were 5 or 6 speakers in 2003.
A correspondent has asked me whether I know of any resources (in English) for learning Ainu. Can you suggest any?
Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in?
Reforms to the spelling of Portuguese were officially adopted in Brazil yesterday and will be adopted by Portugal and Cape Verde and the other lusophone countries eventually, according to this report. The reforms have not been welcomed by all in Portugal as many of them are existing Brazilian spellings and thousands of people have signed petitions against them. There are more details of the opposition to the reforms here.
The reforms include the removal of silent letters, such as p in optimo (great) and of unnecessary diacritics. The letters k, w and y, which are already used, are being officially added to the Portuguese alphabet The idea is the make written Portuguese uniform globally, which will make things like internet searches easier.