For a while I’ve been considering rearranging Omniglot’s homepage and have come up with the following alternative. I’m trying to make it to easier for visitors to understand what the site’s about and to be able to find the contents they’re looking for.
What do you think? Is the new version better than the old one?
Here’s a recording of part of a song in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess the language?
An interesting site I came across today called the Chinese Pear Stories features material in seven Chinese languages – Mandarin (普通话), Cantonese (广东话), Hakka (客家话), Shanghai Wu (吳), Xiamen Min Nan (閩南话), Xiang 湘 and Gan 贛. The material consists of recordings and transcriptions of stories told by speakers of each of these languages. This is the first time I’ve heard the latter two and to me they sound a lot like Mandarin.
A researcher from the University of California made a short film, which can be seen on the site, called ‘Pear Stories’ about some children stealing fruit.The film has no dialogue and is designed to elicit samples of various languages, including the Chinese ones already mentioned and also English, German, Greek, Japanese, and one of the Mayan languages. People watched the film, then were asked to say what they’d seen in their language. The idea was to compare how speakers of different languages describe the same events.
One finding that emerged was that the structure of the stories was very similar across all the languages – there appears to be a common ‘story grammar’. There were however some minor differences in the vocabulary used, and some people added moral comments about stealing.
A report I found today talks about a school in Seattle called sponge which aims to teach babies and children four languages – Spanish, Mandarin, French and Japanese – through play, songs, stories, etc. They have teachers who are native speakers of the languages they teach and take children from as young 5 months and up to 5 years old.
This sounds like an interesting approach to language teaching and I’m sure that children will benefit from this multilingual environment. I wonder whether they’ll become fluent in all the languages though – they may not get sufficient exposure to each to acquire them fully. Perhaps that isn’t the point of the school.
When other people discover that you speak a foreign language, they sometimes ask you to say something in that language. You might want to say something complicated thinking it will impress them, but if they don’t speak the language themselves, anything you say will probably do that. But what to say?
Poems, songs, proverbs, sayings or tongue twisters are all possible choices. They will sound impressive, even if you stumble over parts of them. If that happens and you just keep going as if nothing happened, nobody will notice. Simple sentences such as “My name is ….”, “I come from …”, “Isn’t it a nice day today?” or something similar are another possibility. Or if you’re feeling flippant, you could just say the equivalent of “something” or “something in [name of language]”.
When asked to perform in this way I usually just say a few simple sentences, though afterwards I think maybe I should’ve said something along the lines of, “As you don’t speak this language I can say whatever I like and you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. So I just want to mention that my hovercraft is full of eels, as well you know!”. Unfortunately I can’t always manage to construct this kind of thing on the fly.
What do you usually say when asked to say something in a foreign language?
This post was inspired by one on Corcaighist.
The words for trees in Míkmaq, an Algonquian language spoken in parts of Canada and the USA, are apparently based on the sounds the trees make in the wind. More specifically, according to this book, the names come from “the sound that the wind makes when it blows through the leaves during autumn about an hour after sunset, when the wind usually comes from a particular direction.” The names can therefore change over time depending on the wind and the age and size of the trees. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any of the actual names of trees in Míkmaq.
Míkmaq words for animals are also based on sounds – the sounds made by those animals. For example, kitten is miaojij. The same happens to some extent in other languages. For example, the Mandarin Chinese for cat is 猫 (māo).
In English the names of some birds are onomatopoeic, including cuckoo, whippoorwill, morepork, chiffchaff, chickadee, whooping swan and peewit.
Can you think of other examples of onomatopoeic birds, animals or other creatures?
Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language. Any ideas which language it is and where it’s spoken?
Poklop is a Czech word I came across today which means trapdoor or hatch. I’m not sure of its etymology, but I just like the sound of this word.
An alternative word for the same thing is padací dveře (lit. “falling door”). Related words include padací most drawbridge, (lit. “falling bridge”) and padací mříž portculis, (lit. “falling bar/grating/grid”).
While looking through Language Log today, I came across the unusual words, grawlix, which is apparently a spiral used by cartoonists to indicate a character is swearing or cursing, along with other typographic symbols – for example @$£*&%!! (Here the ampersand (@) stands in for the grawlix).
According to Wiktionary, grawlix means “A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swearword.” It was apparently coined by American cartoonist Mort Walker.
Walker also coined a number of other terms for symbols used in comics, including jarn and quimp, which are also used as alternative names for typographic swearing; phosphene, which describes the stars that form over characters’ heads after they’ve been knocked out; and squean, which might float around a drunken character’s head.
Here’s an example of a comic character saying the cartoon-style swear squiggles.
Grawlix dollar sign jarn asterisk hash quimp!
The other day I heard that one of my colleagues had been “signed off”. As this was the first time I’d heard this expression in this context I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Later I discovered that she had been signed off by her doctor due to carpal tunnel syndrome and would be spending a week or two at home resting.
Have you heard this expression used in this way before?
I’ve heard of radio and television stations signing off at the end of the day, though many stations no longer do so as they broadcast 24 hours a day. I’ve also heard of projects, expenses and budgets being signed off.
There are a number of other English idioms involved signing here, including sign on, sign up (for), sign over and sign out. I suspect such expressions, and similar ones like get on/off/up/down, etc. might be quite tricky for learners of English.