Category: Language

Word of the day – Bowser

By Simon

Today’s word, bowser, has been mentioned a lot on the radio and on TV here recently. In the UK a bowser is a mobile water tank used to supply fresh water in emergency situations, such as the recent/current floods, where normal supplies have broken down or are insufficient.

You can see some examples of water bowsers here.

Bowsers got their name from Sylvanus Bowser, an early designer of petrol pumps in Australia who founded the the company, S.F. Bowser, Inc., a pioneer in the production of fuel handling and oil purification equipment. Bowser is used as a trade name for petrol pumps in Australia and Canada, and the word’s meaning has expanded to cover other kinds of pumps, and also water tanks and fuel tanks.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowser

Urban Irish

By Simon

According to some of the people I met in Ireland last week, Irish might become a mainly urban language in the future. At the moment the majority of regular Irish speakers live in remote, rural areas, the Gaeltachtaí. These areas are suffering from depopulation because there are few opportunities for young people, who tend to move elsewhere to study and work. Some return, but many don’t. In some of the rural Gaeltachtaí the language remains strong, however in others the numbers of people using Irish as their main language is shrinking.

Not all Gaeltachtaí are in rural areas though – in West Belfast there is a thriving and growing community of Irish speakers, which was established in the late 1960s by six Irish-speaking families. In 1970 the first Irish medium primary school in Northern Ireland, Bunscoil Phobal Feirste, opened its doors, and the first Irish medium nursery school, Naíscoil, was set up in 1978. Since then numerous Irish medium nursery and primary schools have opened, and there are three secondary schools as well. There is also a daily Irish language newspaper – Lá Nua – and an Irish language community radio station – Raidió Fáilte. One of the people I met in Glencolmcille works for this radio station and he did a number of short interviews with people attending the summer school, including myself.

According to Wikipedia, the varieties of Irish native to Northern Ireland became extinct as spoken languages when the last native speaker of Rathlin Irish died in 1985. However over 10% of the population now have some knowledge of Irish – mainly the Donegal dialect of Ulster Irish. The Irish speakers in Belfast and Northern Ireland in general seem determined to keep the language alive there whatever obstacles are put in their way, and there is no shortage of obstacles.

Cathlab Multilingual Phrasebook

By Simon

I received an email today from a nurse who works in a hospital in Melbourne, Australia and who is compiling a collection of multilingual phrases to assist communication with non-English speaking patients while an interpreter is being sought. He is looking for more translations and sounds files. Can you help? His contact details are on the site.

In other news, tomorrow I’m off to Ireland to take part in the Irish Language & Culture Summer School at Oideas Gael in Glencolmcille. I’ll be away for a week and won’t be blogging during that time.

Amárach beidh mé ag dul go hÉirinn chun páirt a ghlachadh san Scoil Shamhraidh i dTeanga & Cultúr in Oideas Gael i nGleann Cholm Cille. Beidh mé as baile ar feadh seachtaine agus ní bheidh mé ag scríobh ar mo bhlog i gcaitheamh an t-am seo.

Rivers of white and run arounds

By Simon

Continuing yesterday’s theme of typography, here are a few more interesting typographic terms I came across today:

River of white
– a column of white space that occurs when word space in quite a few successive lines of type happen to end up below each other, as mentioned by P Terry Hunt in the comments on yesterday’s post.

Run around
– this when you fit the text around a picture or other design element.

Pagination
– this means either arranging the type and other elements so that they will be output in page format, or numbering the pages.

This is a term I heard frequently when I worked in the design department as a lone web developer surrounded by graphic designers. Since then the internet side of the company has expanded considerably.

Gutter
– the white space between columns on a page.

Widow
– either a single short line at the top of the page or column which is the end of a sentence or a paragraph, or a single word or syllable standing as the last line of a paragraph.

Source: http://www.typography-1st.com

Word of the day – knothole

By Simon

The term knothole is used to refer to a block of stacked characters in a text that occurs when you have the same words or phrases repeated several times and the text is laid out in such a way that the words or phrases line up.

This is apparently quite a frequent occurrence in encyclopedias, which tend to have a house style for entries, which leads to quite a lot of repetition, and also in publications that use fairly narrow columns, such as newspapers and magazines.

Here’s an example:

an example of a knothole

Those concerned with page layout are trained to avoid such undesirable alignments of text.

Found via David Crystal’s blog.

Aural small print

By Simon

Aural small print is apparently one name for the incredibly fast disclaimers you sometimes hear at the end of radio ads, and also as a good name for a band, according to a commenter on this blog. These disclaimers often contradict and undermine whatever the ad was about.

Do you know if there is a standard or official name for such disclaimers?

Do you get them in other languages?

There are some quite amusing parodies of email disclaimers here, and here’s my disclaimer for this post (to be read as fast as possible with much mumbling):

This post has been hand-crafted from only the finest ingredients and should be read within 48 hours with the eyes no more than 3 feet (91.44 ml) from the screen and the head tilted to the left at an angle of 85.6 degrees fahrenheit (20cm). Bake for at least half an hour, then leave to cool. Do not read while driving, operating heavy machinery, eating bananas, or having a bath. Omniglot accepts no responsibility (picture top right). Your mileage may vary. Words may settle in transit. Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary. If symptoms persist, consult a doctor. Suitable for vegetarians. May contains traces of nuts. Not tested on animals. Contains no additives or preservatives. Would the last one to leave please switch off the lights. Thank you and good night.

Rapid Language Learning

By Simon

Today I came across an interesting article entitled Rapid Language Learning, in which Konstantin Ryabitsev from Russia gives details of how he managed to learning enough French to pass TEF (Test d’Evaluation de Français). At the time he wrote the piece (2004), he was in the process of immigrating to Canada, where they favour applicants with knowledge of both English and French. He already spoke English, so decided to learn French as well, as he was planning to move to Montreal, where he now lives.

At first he tried to learn to read French using a French translation of Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban, but soon found that too difficult because he wasn’t familiar with French grammar. So he got hold of a copy of Schaum’s Outline of French Grammar and after about four months of working his way through that, he was able to read the Harry Potter book, then managed to tackled Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.

After that, he started working on his understanding, speaking and writing skills, using flash cards and associations to learn vocabulary and practising listening and speaking while walking to and from work. He also watched TV programmes that had been dubbed into French, French TV programmes and films, and also tried listening to audiobooks, but didn’t find that very helpful.

You can find out more about his methods in the article. I find such stories interesting. The methods he used wouldn’t necessarily work as well for other people, but he does have some good suggestions.