Sometimes people speak to you in a language you’re not expecting. You might assume they’re speaking in the language you were expecting, and try to make sense of their utterances as if they were in that language, which just confuses you.

An example of this happened the other day when I went to pick up my laundry from the laundrette. One of the guys who works there is Chinese, and I’d heard him speaking Mandarin on the phone so thought I’d speak to him in that language. He wasn’t expecting this and thought I was speaking English, so couldn’t understand me. I explained, in English, what I was saying, then we chatted in Chinese for a bit and he understood me perfectly.

A similar thing happened to me when I was in Dublin in June – most of the kitchen staff in the hostel I was staying in were Chinese and I thought I’d be clever and order my breakfast in Mandarin. They weren’t expecting this and could make head or tail of what I said to them.

Here’s a question for any Classicists out there – how do you pronounce the Ancient Greek names Lycos, Nycteus and Epirus? This question was sent to me by Persephone Vandegrift, who is writing a play based on the Bacchae by Euripides and has added these new characters, who are associated with Pentheus and the story of his altercation with Dionysus, but isn’t sure how their names should be pronounced.

If you can help, you can contact Persephone at:
pkimberlyv@hotmail.com

The strangeness of some of the questions received at Omniglot HQ never ceases to surprise me!

I came across a very useful online translation site today – Polly Glotto. It not only translates text between ten different languages (Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish), but also uses text-to-speech technology to speak the translations. The translations it produces aren’t always perfect, but they are generally quite good, and most of the voices sound fairly natural as well.

Here’s a example of the phrase ‘Hello, I am Polly Glotto’ in French.

There’s an old joke that someone who speaks four languages is quadrilingual, a speaker of three languages is trilingual, someone with two languages is bilingual, and someone who knows only one language is an American, or British. There’s certainly some truth in this.

How many languages do you have to speak before you can claim the much coverted title of polyglot? The prefix poly means (1) more than one, many or much; (2) having an excessive or abnormal number or amount, and comes from the Greek polus (much, many). This doesn’t help much really. As far as I’m concerned, a polyglot is someone who speaks four or more languages.

What do you think?

According to Ethnologue, there are 114 sign languages around the world. The most widely used is American Sign Language (ASL), with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million users, according to this site. Probably the next most widely used is British Sign Language (BSL), with up 250,000 users, between 30,000 and 70,000 of whom use BSL as their first language, according to the BBC.

Does anybody know whether there are any sign language polyglots – those familiar with many sign languages? Or whether there are many blind people who can read many languages in braille? I wonder what kind of challenges users of one sign language face when learning different sign language, and how difficult would it be for blind people to learn another language through braille.