Here’s a text in a mystery language sent in by Renato Figueiredo. Any ideas which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Papa tumus su in kosao, E’los oal payi. Togusaï lalos tuku. Orok ma nu fwalu, ou elos oru in kosao. Kite kit len si ini ma kut mono misini: A nunok munas nu ses ke ma koluk las, oanu kut nunok munas sin met orek ma koluk nu ses. A tiu kol kit kut in mel, a es kit la liki ma koluk, to togusaï lalos, a ku, a mwolanu, ma patpat. Amen.
A researcher at University College London who is looking into how we come by our accents, among other things, has found that more of the brain is involved in speech than previously thought.
An article in The Times explains how the brain of an impressionist was scanned while he was saying short phrases in a variety of accents, or as an impersonation of someone famous. The scan revealed that not only was he using the parts of the brain known to be involved with language, but also other parts involved with movement: one for visualising images and one for body movement. The conclusion was that he was “literally thinking himself into someone’s skin when he was adopting a different accent.”
It is suggested that this research could lead to new ways to help people with communication problems.
The question at the beginning of the article – “Why do some people hold on to their accents all their lives while others drop them overnight?” is no really discussed.
Do you still have the accent you had as a child? Or has it changed? Do you slip into other accents from time to time?
I used to have a bit of a Lancashire accent, but it now closer to RP and tends to vary depending on whom I’m talking to. I often slip into other accents, especially Scottish, Irish and Welsh ones.
Here are a couple of online resources I came across today for learning Irish:
Everyday Irish – a series of Irish language lessons by Liam Ó Maonlaí, lead singer of the Hothouse Flowers, and offered for free by the Irish Independent. The lessons are in the form of mp3s with accompanying worksheets in PDF format. They are available for beginners and more advanced students.
Talk Irish – a new Irish language learning project which will offer free Irish word-a-day emails, podcasts and flashcards. At the moment only the word-a-day is available, once you’ve joined the site.
What do the above have in common?
Well, believe or not they’re different sizes of paper in the English Imperial system. An emperor is the largest size – 72 × 48 (all measurements in inches), an antiquarian is 53 × 31, and an elephant is 28 × 23. There are also double elephants (40 × 27) and grand eagles (42 × 28 ¾), while the smallest size of writing paper is the pott (15 × 12 ½). A bit more interesting than A4, A3, etc!
Quantities of paper also have special terms to describe them:
Quire comes from the Latin quaternī, set of four, four each, via the Vulgar Latin quaternus, the Old French quaer and the Middle English quayer.
Ream comes from the Arabic rizma, bundle, via Old Spanish resma, Old French reime, and Middle English reme.
Sources: The Free Dictionary and Paper measures
This is a guest post by by Siôn Jobbins.
Wrth tecstio yn Gymraeg ar fy ffôn poced dwi’n ceisio osgoi defnyddio llythrennau dwbwl gan fod hynny’n cymryd gormod o amser. Mae’n hawdd peidio dyblu ‘n’ ac ‘r’ (a dweud y gwir, dwi ddim yn deall pam na wnaeth John Morris Jones gael gwared arnyn nhw yn yr 1920, fel y cafodd wared ar ddyblu ‘m’ a ‘t’). Byddaf yn osgoi dyblu ‘d’ ar gyfer y lythyren ‘d’ trwy ddefnyddio’r symbol ð sydd ar allweddell rhif 4 fel arfer ar y ffôn. Mae’n rhaid dyblu ‘l’ ar gyfer ‘ll’. Byddaf hefyd yn defnyddio ‘x’ ar gyfer y swn ‘ch’ gan fod hynny’n gynt.
Ond hoffwn holi, gan fod dyblu llythrennau mor drafferthus wrth ddanfon neges destun, sut mae ieithoedd sy’n llawn llythrennau dwbwl fel Iseldireg, Estoneg neu Ffineg yn mynd i’r afael gyda’r broblem (os ydyn nhw’n ei weld yn broblem wrth gwrs!)? A fyddai gan ddarllenwyr dy flog atebion neu awgrymiadau?
Texting in Welsh I try to avoid doubling letters as it’s a nuicance whilst texting. Not doubling ‘n’ and ‘r’ is easy and I don’t understand why we need them in Welsh in anycase (we got rid of doubling t and m with John Morris Jones’s reforms in the 1920s). I can avoid doubing ‘d’ for the ‘dd’ sound by using the ð symbol which is on the d key, though many Welsh-speakers aren’t familiar with this letter. I can’t find a way of not doubling l to get the ll letter.
This got me thinking how do language with many double letters; Dutch, Estonian or Finnish cope with this problem (if they see it a problem)?
Here’s a recording of a song in a mystery language. Any ideas which language it is and where it’s spoken?
[Update] Here are the lyrics of the song:
Ferðist eg í millum landa
Síggi gleði sorg og stríð
Men ein myndin bjørt man standa
Minnir meg um bestu tíð
Ja har heima í tí dali
Har alt grønt og vakurt er
Eg í huga kátur spæli
Meðan skip um sjógvin fer
and here’s a translation:
??? in the midst of bright stars
In the midst of the sound of waves and lambs
Where harsh storms blow
Where no strings tie
Where I’m always free
Where the ocean is a friend
Where I’m free to go somewhere distant
Where fresh ???
“Well”, “there you are then”, “Oh dear!” and “That’s life!” are all examples of phatic expressions, which are used as conversation openers, to establish and maintain contact with people, to show that you’re listening, and/or to give you time to think of something else to say. They don’t usually have much meaning in themselves. Greetings and farewells are also examples of phatic language.
The term phatic was coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s and comes from the Ancient Greek φατός (fatos) ‘spoken’, from φάναι (fanai) ‘to say’. Other terms for these types of expressions include small talk and grooming talk – one theory is that humans developed phatic language to replace grooming, an activity that takes up quite a lot of time for our ape relatives and ancestors.
If you’re able to use the common phatic expressions in languages you’re learning, you will sound much more fluent. The actual content and usage of phatic expressions various from culture to culture, so just translating such expressions from your mother tongue won’t necessarily work. You need to find out which expressions to use and when to use them.
For those of you learning Chinese, this blog post on phatic communication between Chinese people and Westerners will probably be of interest.
When I was at university I used flashcards quite a lot to learn Chinese characters and vocabulary in Chinese and Japanese. After I’d learnt each character, I stuck the cards on the wall and eventually they covered almost ever inch of wallspace. Since then however, I’ve rarely used flashcards. They are quite effective, if you look at them regularly, but for various reasons I thought they weren’t for me.
Recently I’ve decided to give them another chance. This time I’m using Mnemosyne, a downloadable flashcard program, rather than paper flashcards. Some flashcard programs, including Mnemosyne, have a built-in spaced repetition system which
tests you after different periods of time depending on your assessment of how well you know the word/phrase/sentence. This apparently helps you to commit the information to your long-term memory.
So far I’ve entered quite a few sentences in Irish from articles on Beo, an online Irish language magazine. I’m using sentences rather than individual words because this enables me to see how the words and grammar is used in context. I plan to add many more sentences and phrases in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and maybe other languages.
I found a useful site today, the FlashcardExchange, which provides readymade online flashcards for many languages, as well as for other subjects. You can also make your own cards and share them with your friends. Most of this is free, but a one-off fee is payable for some of the services on the site.
Do you use flashcards or flashcard programs? Do you know of any flashcard programs which you can add sound to?
I came across the term timeboxing today on this blog. When I first read it, it conjured up images of someone boxing with a clock. Now I know that it’s a technique for managing your time that’s often used for software development projects. It involves setting yourself set ‘boxes’ of time to do things, but not worrying about completing them. Instead you just do as much as you can as well as you can in the time available. Then you use as many more timeboxes as you need to complete the tasks. The aim is to curb perfectionist tendencies by setting a time limit and to avoid overcommiting to a task.
The author of the blog post mentions that he finds it easier to make a start on tedious tasks because he has decided in advance that he’ll stop after a set time. Once he’s conquered the initial inertia of getting started and becomes more focused and interested in the tasks, he might spend longer than originally intended working on them.
This technique could be applied to language learning. You could set yourself a box or boxes of time each day when you’ll study, and study as much as you can manage in that/those time(s). While you might find it difficult to study a whole lesson in the time available, studying part of a lesson is still a useful thing to do.
One of the commenters on the post mentions that he rewards himself each time he completes a period of study. He finds that he rewarding himself in small doses at regular intervals helps him get a lot more done. This idea could be applied to language learning as well – the rewards could be doing something you really enjoy in the language, such as listening to or singing a song or watching a video.
This is another guest post by Marcis Gasuns.
Namaskar,
It’s been a problem ever since the first font was created and never truly solved until this day. The typefaces used to print Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary or MacDonnell’s Grammars have not been beaten by the PC fonts – they are much weaker. The god of typography is in the small details. And without those nuances, fonts are worthless. Below is an example of Mangal Devanagari Unicode font, installed on every XP, Vista PC:
बहवो न विरोद्घव्या दुर्जयो हि महाजनः।
स्फुरन्तम् अपि नागेन्द्रं भक्षयन्ति पिपीलिकाः॥
No variants are available for vowels (in MSS there are variants for – two for “a”, three for “e” etc.); there are no udatta markers as in Boehtling’s dictionaries, which remain the best Sanskrit dictionaries to this day. Different fonts have different issues.
There is no perfect TrueType or OpenType font at the moment, no matters whether it’s free or commercial. So there are the Unicode Devanagari and non-Unicode Devanagari fonts, from which we have to choose – or one can scan old books and Xerox them. I choose to use imperfect fonts rather than to copy old books.
The Unicode Devanagari fonts don’t support several (Vedic) accent marks and they’re rather low on all kinds of typographic nuances (ligatures like “drsthva” are totally wrong). The best Unicode Devanagari font for Windows available today is Ulrich’s Sanskrit 2003. It does look like the more up-to-date Hindi fonts (which is no good, as we deal with Rigveda and other rarer ancient sacred texts), but it does have a few hundred ligatures. However, as with all the Unicode fonts, it can’t have variants of the same ligature, some of them have up to four known variants, as “la”, for example.
There is an alternative font, called Chandas, containing 4347 glyphs: 325 half-forms, 960 half-forms context-variations, 2743 ligature-signs (which should be enough, to print even Panini’s grammar), but the author, Mihail Bayaryn from Minsk, has abandoned the project and there are still some additional Devanagari marks from the MSS missing there. I have to admit that Ulrich’s font, on which he has worked more than year, looks better when printed, but contains fewer ligatures (so you can’t print Ashthadyayi with any of the Ulrich’s fonts).
So there remain the non-Unicode fonts (some of them even with Mac support). Ulrich is also the author of Sanskrit 99, which has a very interesting counterpart, entitled Ancient Sanskrit 98 with Bombay-Mumbay characters like 
instead of the more common Delhi-Varanasi styled fonts. From a typographical point of view (not web), the best looking fonts are the “French” (called Gudakesha, as found in Bopp, 1816) and “German” (Shantipur, as found in Harvard Oriental Series vol. 14, 1914) fonts that we have created together with Tikhomirov, which have been made public at Ulrich’s website without my allowance, breaking our copyrights (the legal copy can be downloaded here). For 5 years I’ve been looking for each of more than 500 more common ligatures in the Sanskrit books published in Paris, Bonn, Oxford, to find every sign.
In late 2005 the fonts were still not finished, in 2006 they were hinted by Mihail Bayaryn (a private OpenType version was made) and the fonts have never been finished. They are replicas of old book fonts. You can see the history of making of both the fonts at Nagari Sanskrit Group and the second Devanagari font as well, also a specimen.
To put it in a nutshell. If you need an easy-to-type font – Sanskrit 2003 is the one to choose (forget about Mangal installed on Windows XP by default, it’s for Hindi, not for Sanskrit), but if you want to have the Indian flavour – use the unfinished fonts by Marcis Gasuns & Tikhomirov hinted by Mihail Bayaryn, having some of the missing characters from Ancient Sanskrit 98. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.