Category: Language

No more Latin

By Simon

A number of local councils in the UK have decided to ban their staff from using phrases of Latin origin, such as vice versa, bona fide, ad lib, QED and pro rata, in speech or writing, according to this report.

Some of the councils believe that Latin is elitist and discriminatory because not everybody understands it, especially if English is not their first language.

Suggested alternatives include ‘for this special purpose’ for ad hoc and ‘existing condition’ or ‘state of things’ for status quo.

Classicists have not welcomed this move and one described it as “absolutely bonkers” and the “linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing”, but the Plain English Campaign approve and believe that officials only use Latin to make themselves feel important.

Globalizing the Korean alphabet

By Simon

A group of linguists in Korea are looking into giving people with no written form of their language ways to write using the Korean alphabet (hangŭl), according to this article.

A number of communities they visited in Indonesia were keen on using hangŭl to write their languages and plan to send representatives to Korean to learn the alphabet, who will then to teach it to their communities.

The Korean alphabet is currently used only to write Korean, so it will be interesting to see how well it will work for other languages.

Linguistics experiment

By Simon

This is a little experiment I’ll be doing for my bilingualism class next week which I thought I’d try out on you first.

Imagine you’re making a cartoon featuring the things listed below as characters. Which ones would you assign a male voice to, and which ones would you assign a female voice to?

1. A rock 2. A tree 3. A river 4. A bear 5. A salmon 6. A boat

Could you also tell us your native language, and whether you speak any other languages fluently? If you do speak other languages, when did you acquire them, do you use them regularly, and would you consider yourself bilingual or multilingual?

Word of the day – optionulsory

By Simon

The term optionulsory was coined by one of my classmates the other day to refer to things that are somewhere between optional and compulsory – in this case the Linguistics Circle Research Seminars. Linguistics postgrads are expected and encouraged to attend these seminars, but are not absolutely obliged to do so.

I went to one of the seminars on Wednesday – quite an interesting talk on Spanish verbs which focused particularly on the preterite tense.

David Crystal

By Simon

We met David Crystal today and had a very interesting question and answer session with him. He’s an Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, but has so many other commitments that take him all over the world, he rarely has time to visit.

Among the topics we discussed whether it’s possible for major world languages such as English and Spanish, to live in ‘harmony’ with minority languages. David believes that this is possible, if the minority languages are supported politically and economically, and if their speakers are determined to continue using them. He gave the example of Catalonia, where major investment in the economy has been a major factor in the strength and growth of Catalan. In other regions where investment has been mainly in language teaching and language preservation organisations, the minority languages are not doing nearly as well.

We also talking about the future of English as a global language – David believes the current dominance of English is likely to continue, that the centre of English is shifting towards those who speak it as a second or foreign language, and that a new form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) could emerge. ELF is likely to be a simpler, formal style of English stripped of region and country-specific idioms and expressions. This is already happening to some extent. He also mentioned that English as a global language only started to be seriously discussed by linguistics about ten years ago.

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.