Category: Language

Multilingual clock

By Simon

I plan to make a tool that will show how to tell the time in many different languages. It will function something like the one here, and will probably use Flash.

I’ve started gathering translations, as you can see in this spreadsheet. Can you help by adding other languages, and by making recordings?

The recordings don’t need to be of every phrase in the spreadsheet, but of enough parts of phrases so that I’ll be able to splice them together. If you can help, please send your contributions to feedback[at]omniglot[dot]com.

Multilingual resources

By Simon

I found some useful sites with information in multiple languages today:

The multilingual bird search engine contains the names of birds in eighteen languages, including Catalan, Danish, Esperanto, English, French, German and Swedish, as well as their scientific names.

The Multilingual dictionary of musical terms is a musical glossary in English, French, German and Serbian.

Multilingual Animal Glossary of Unveiled Synonyms (MAGUS) is a dictionary of the common names of wild and domestic mammals and birds in more than 50 languages of Europe.

Middle English Grammar Project

By Simon

A project is underway at the University of Stavanger in Norway to analyse the grammar of Middle English, according to this article. Philologists at the university have already digitised 1,000 Middle English texts from the 1300s-1500s from all over Britain, and made them available on their website. The corpus includes texts on legal, religious, medical and astrological matters, as well as cookery books and literary texts. Most are being digitised for the first time.

The texts can be used to study dialects, as at the time they were written, people wrote more or less as they spoke and there was no standardised spelling system. They can also be used as a way to learn more about the grammatical development of English.

Gaelic in Glasgow / Gàidhlig ann an Ghlaschu

By Simon

Scottish Gaelic is making something of a comeback in Glasgow, according to an article I found today in The Herald. This is largely thanks to the Sgoil Ghàidhlig Ghlaschu / the Glasgow Gaelic School, which provides education from nursery to secondary level through the medium of Gaelic.

Gaelic medium education has been available in Glasgow at primary level since 1986, when half the children who took this option had connections with the Gaelic-speaking highlands and islands. The Glasgow Gaelic School was opened in 2006 and currently has about 700 pupils, 80% of whom have no Gaelic connections, and some are from other countries. Demand for places outstrips supply and there are plans to expand the school over the next few years.

A new generation of young Gaelic speakers is emerging in Glasgow, and some of their parents are learning Gaelic as well. Similar things are happening in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. There is also an increased interest in Gaelic culture and music, and a thriving Gaelic pub scene.

In 1901 approximately 18,500 people in Glasgow spoke Gaelic according the census, though the actual number was probably higher. In 2001 the census revealed over 10,000 Gaelic speakers, and those speakers are spread across all age groups, whereas elsewhere in Scotland it’s mainly the older generations who speak Gaelic.

Adjusting to a new language environment

By Simon

Research undetaken at Michigan State University has found that girls can find it more difficult than boys to adjust to a new social and linguistic environment, according to an article on Science Daily.

The study was of 3-6 year olds at an international school in Beijing where the children, from 16 different countries, are in immersed in Mandarin and English. Most of them are learning at least one new language, and the researchers found that the girls generally had more trouble adjusting to the new environment than boys.

Previous studies have found that girls usually have better social and linguistic abilities than boys, however the girls in the Beijing study who could not understand their teachers or the other children tended to have more behavioural problems than the boys.

The study also showed that children find it harder to learn a new language than is generally thought. The popular idea is that children soak up new languages like sponges without too much effort, however this isn’t necessarily true.

Etymological help needed

By Simon

I’ve been asked for help in tracing the etymology of the Spanish word chedrón by Antonio from Canada.

The Spanish-speaking grandmothor of one of Antonio’s acquaintances used to use the word chedrón to refer to the colour of certain things. The problem is that she used the word quite inconsistently to refer to different shades of red, brown, pink, etc.

Antonino tried looking for chedrón, cheddrón, shedrón, chedron, cheddron, and shedron in the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española (DRAE) and the closest spelling he found was cedrón, but that refers to a plant (not a colour) and the plant is green anyway.

On the PROZ website there was a discussion about how to translate the word into English and the answer was “cedar red”.

A Google search for the word and variant spellings revealed some pictures of objects which, for the most part, are darker shades of red or brown.

Antonio hasn’t found an authoritative spelling or definition for the word chedrón, but the Google searches seem to indicate that the word is actually used at least by some Spanish speakers, even if inconsistently.

The question is, do any Romance languages have a word that sounds anything like chedrón to signify a colour as described above? If no Romance languages have a similar word, do any other languages?

He’s not so much concerned about what chedrón looks like, but where the word comes from and how it is spelt in whichever language Spanish borrowed it from.

Metonymy

By Simon

Metonymy cropped up in the readings for my Semantics class this week, so I thought I’d write about it here to make sure I understand what it is.

The word metonymy come for the Greek μετωνυμία (metōnymia), which means “a change of name”. A metonym substitutes one word to stand for another that’s connected in some way.

Here are some examples which show some of the ways in which this figure of speech is used:

All hands on deck! – here hands stands for sailors (part for whole)
To fill up the car – the car stands for the petrol/gas tank (whole for part)
I’ll have a Heineken – Heineken stands for beer (producer for product)
No. 10 declined to comment – No. 10 Downing Street in London is the official residence of the British Prime Minister (place for institution)
Can I pay with plastic? – plastic stands for a credit/debit card

The first example is also known as a synecdoche.

These examples are based mainly on those found in An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics by Freidrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid.

Idiolects, sociolects and other animals

By Simon

This is a guest post from James P in Chile:

Two things have made me think about “vocabulary worlds” recently: reading past papers for the DELE exam and picking up a José Donoso novel (Coronación) from the library.

The vocab section of the DELE exam is going to be rather a matter of chance as significant proportions of the vocab that is used on a daily basis in Latin America – at least in Chile and on Colombian radio which are my two main sources of spoken LA Spanish – are bound to be different from the vocab used in Spain. That is certainly true of British and US English (“I like your bangs”, “Do you have any spackle?). This, rather than my joking references before, is the more substantial problem with the DELE vocab test, at least for those of us who take it as speakers of LA Spanish: even when the words might be understood by a cultured Chilean or Guatemalan, they are not used much over here as compared to Spain and so we are much less likely to have heard them, even if our total vocabulary is larger than a learner in Madrid or Seville.

José Donoso, in common with a number of other Chilean writers of the second half of the 20th Century, spent a number of years living outside of Chile (in his case in Mexico, Spain and the USA). His diction (choice of vocab) is very unusual (one of my Chilean friends says that he makes up words!). Every author has a range of words they use commonly, but for me it seems that Donoso overlaps much less with my vocab than for example García Márquez, or Roberto Ampuero. Before I get round to Coronacíon I’m reading Pérez-Reverte’s El pintor de Batallas, which also has a different vocab world, one that is new enough for me to learn new words (such as estrambótico and un chasquido), but not so alien I want to give up (which is what happened last time with Donoso when I tried to read Casa de campo about a year ago).

Can others give examples of this phenomena of different “vocab worlds”, either with specific authors or with national forms of a language which is spoken in different countries?