Category: Language

Language barrier

By Simon

According to an article in The Guardian, a man who planned to walk 9,000 miles to Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace in India without money found the language barrier insurmountable when he arrived in France.

His aim was to show that a world without money is possible, and he thought he could obtain food and shelter in return for helping people, a philosophy he promotes via his website, the freeconomy community. The walk went well until he arrived in France, when he realised that the little French he could remember wasn’t sufficient to explain his mission and his dietary requirements – he’s a vegan – and people thought he was a refugee or a beggar.

He now plans to travel around the UK offering his help to people and brushing up his language skills with members of the Freeconomy network, and would like to try the walk to India again eventually.

Have you ever had trouble explaining your mission and/or dietary requirements in a foreign language?

I don’t drink alcohol and sometimes find it hard to explain this in other languages, especially when asked why. I discovered recently that you can apparently avoid drinking in Japan if you cover your glass and say kyōkai (church) – no one will mind as long as you keep their glasses topped up. Does anyone know if this works?

Happy New Year!

Word of the day – flollop

By Simon

Today’s word, flollop, is used in Douglas Adam’s book, Life, the Universe, and Everything, to describe the movement of a mattress:

The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in more common usage.

In the book it is argued that in an infinite universe everything must grow somewhere, including mattresses. Well sponges grow on our world, so why not mattresses somewhere else!

Mattresses also globber when “deeply moved by a story of personal tragedy”, vollue, willom, flurble, gup and flodge, though the latter actions are not clearly defined.

If you have read the story in language other than English, do you know how these words are translated?

Christmas / Navidad / Weihnachten / Natal

By Simon

A multilingual Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

Glædelig jul og godt nytår
Καλά Χριστούγεννα και Ευτυχισμένο το Νέο Ετος
Bonan Kristnaskon kaj feliĉan novan jaron
Танд кристмас ба шинэ жилийн мэнд хүргэе
Chúc Giáng Sinh Vui Vẻ và Chúc Năm Mới Tốt Lành
(A freylikhe nitl un a guter nayer yor) אַ פֿרײליכע ניטל און אַ גוטער נײַער יאָר
Nollaig shona agus Athbhliain faoi mhaise duit
聖誕節和新年快樂 (shèngdànjié hé xīnnián kuàilè)
Nadolig llawen a blwyddyn newydd dda
Среќен Божик и среќна Нова година
Sinifesela uKhisimusi oMuhle noNyaka oMusha oNempumelelo
메리 크리스마스 잘 지내고 새해 복 많이 받으세요 / 즐거운 성탄절 보내세요 및 새해 복 많이 받으세요
Kilisimasi fiefia mo ha ta’u fo’ou monū’ia
ᏓᏂᏍᏔᏲᎯᎲ & ᎠᎵᎮᎵᏍᏗ ᎢᏤ ᎤᏕᏘᏴᎠᏌᏗᏒ (Danistayohihv & Aliheli’sdi Itse Udetiyvasadisv)
Veselé vánoce a šťastný nový rok

Can you name the languages above (without looking at the Christmas page first)?

By the way, if you spot any mistakes on the Christmas page, or can provide versions of the phrases in other languages, please let me know.

Language of the month

By Simon

On a recent edition of Word of Mouth, the BBC Radio 4 programme about language, they talked about an interesting scheme at a primary school in London where over 40 different languages are spoken by the pupils. Each month one language is chosen as the language of the month, and a pupil who speaks that language teaches the other children and the teachers some words and phrases in their mother tongue both in person and via video and audio recordings. The pupils also tell people about their culture. The recordings are also made available to other schools via the web.

The school sees the multitude of languages spoken by the children as an opportunity and asset rather than a problem. The children can share their own languages and cultures, and learn about the languages and cultures of others, and they become familiar with the sounds of the different languages.

Maybe we could do something similar here. Would any of you like to share some of your native language(s) with the rest of us? This could involve audio and/or video recordings of useful words and phrases, information about your language and culture, and anything else you think would be interesting.

Colours / Lliwiau

By Simon

This week I’ve been gathering data for a project comparing the colour vocabulary of Welsh/English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers. The aims of the project are to find out which colour words people know, which order they name them in, and whether the bilinguals name different colours in Welsh and English. All I have to do now is write a 5,000 word report on this data. Unfortunately the colours data collected online is not useable for this project, but I’m very grateful to those of you who completed the questionnaire.

It came as no surprise that there are more words for colours in English than in Welsh – I already suspected that. Most of the bilingual participants listed only basic colour words in Welsh, but one did come up with one I hadn’t heard before – gwinau, which means bay, auburn, brown or sepia and is usually used to describe the colour of horses. The same participant mentioned that there are a number of other words used to describe the colour of horses but couldn’t think of them. I found melynell (bay), llwyd-ddu (dun), brith / brithlwyd (piebald) and broc / brych (roan).

The basic colour words in Welsh are:

black – du
white – gwyn
red –coch
yellow – melyn
blue – glas
green – gwyrdd / glas
brown – brown / gwinau / cochddu (red/black) / dugoch (black/red)
purple – porffor / cochlas (red/blue) / glasgoch (blue/red)
pink – pinc / gwyngoch (white/red)
orange –oren / melyngoch (yellow/red)
grey – llwyd

The colour glas can mean blue (sky), green (grass), grey (sea), silver (coins) or transparent (saliva) depending on the context. The same word is found in all the other Celtic languages and has a similar meaning. Llwyd is also used to refer to brown paper.

Participants also mentioned arian (silver), aur (gold), piws (puce/purple), fioled (violet) and indigo. Another word for the latter two is dulas (black/blue).

The compounds are not commonly used, as far as I can tell, and none of the participants in this survey mentioned them.

I managed to find a number of other Welsh words for colours:

amber – melyn-goch / ambr
auburn – gwinau / coch / melynwyn / llwydwyn
azure – asur / glas
beige – beis
bronze – efydd
cream – hufen
crimson – coch / rhuddgoch / rhudd / purgoch / fflamgoch
cyan – gwyrddlas
fawn – llwyd olau
magenta – magenta / majenta
maroon – cochddu / marŵn
mauve – piwswyn / porffor gwelw / porffor golau
puce – piws / glasgoch
russet – lwytgoch
scarlet – ysgarlad / coch golau
sepia – gwinau / cochddu
tan – melyngoch
tawny – melynddu

I plan to add a new section on colours to Omniglot and have start collecting colour words in various languages. So could you send me all the colour words you can think of in the language(s) you know?

Safeguarding German

By Simon

Plans are afoot in Germany to add mention of the German language to the German constitution, according to this report. At their recent party conference, the ruling Christian Democrats voted to add the words, “The language of the Federal Republic of Germany is German” to Article 22 of the constitution. They hope this will help to safeguard the language in the future, and are also reacting against negative attitudes to German in other countries, especially in the English-speaking world.

The article doesn’t mention whether the German mention whether ‘regional’ varieties of German and other languages spoken in Germany will enjoy any constitutional recognition or protection. If this plan does come to fruition, the situation might be similar to that in France where ‘regional’ varieties of French and other languages spoken within France have only just gained limited recognition by the French government.

Do you have any strong negative or positive views on the German language?

Lang-8

By Simon

A useful-looking website I heard about today is Lang-8, which describes itself as a a social networking service site for language exchange and international communication. Users can write journal entries in a language they’re learning, and get them corrected by native speakers of that language. There are also groups for particular language combinations, e.g. Japanese / English or Chinese / English, and discussion forums.

Mysterious medallion inscription

By Simon

This medallion belonged to Kevin Silver’s father and was believed to be his grandfather’s originally. Kevin has been told is “probably” a protection device that his grandfather wore to protect himself from harm and evil spirits. His grandfather was an Orthodox Jew from Russia who was very religious.

Kevin has tried to match the letter to the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Ancient Greek, Russian, & Ancient Russian alphabets without success. Can you help?

Medallion with mysterious inscription

I’ve decided to put puzzles on this blog to make it possible for you leave comments rather than having to send them to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

Solution from Aharon Shmuel

The language is Hebrew written in the Paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet (abjad). The script is taken from the style used on coins minted during the Jewish revolts against Rome; indeed, this seems to be a replica of a coin from that period.

The text reads שנת אחת לגאלת ישראל; SHNAT ACHAT LEGE’ULAT YISRAEL; year one of Israel’s redemption. This phrase was used on coins minted during the revolts. In fact, Israel has issued stamps featuring ancient coins with this exact phrase on them: here and here.

One interesting feature here is the backwards letter Gimmel (the 8th letter, reading from right to left). I’ve been scouring the internet looking for an example of coins from this period with a backward Gimmel, but each one I’ve found has been facing forward. This, along with the owners comments, leads me to believe that this replica was made by a reader/writer of the Cyrillic alphabet who mixed up the Gimmel with the corresponding letter Ge – after all, what is a Cyrillic Ge if not a backward Gimmel.

Also, the Alephs are inconsistent (4th, 9th & 15th letters), and the Nun (2nd letter) looks more like a Mem but that could just be the picture quality.

As a side note, the current 1 and 10 New Israeli Shekel coins make use of Paleo-Hebrew; the ₪10 has a similar phrase, לגאלת ציון; LEGE’ULAT TZION; for the redemption of Zion.

All in all, a very cool coin to have – I’m jealous. As far as protection from spirits etc., could well have been intended for that. I’d wear it if I had it. -Aharon