Return to Brighton

By Simon

I arrived back in Brighton last night after an enjoyable week of studying and using Welsh in Nant Gwrtheyrn. There were only six others on the courses – all men – and I was the youngest. Most of the others were Welsh, or had Welsh connections, or at least make regular visits to Wales. Most of us were roughly at the same level, but there was one bloke from the Rhondda who spoke Welsh almost like a native speaker, and another who could read and write Welsh very well and had a huge vocabulary, but who couldn’t speak Welsh all that well.

A view of Nant Gwrtheyrn

We had about five hours of classes a day, which were interesting and useful. There were also a couple of organised evening activities, and an afternoon trip to Caer Gors, former home of one of Wales’ best known Welsh language authors, Kate Roberts (1891-1985), after which we had a look round Caernarfon. The rest of the time we spent chatting (mainly in Welsh), stuffing ourselves with the delicious food provided in the on-site restaurant, Caffi Meinir, and admiring the spectacular views.

Nant Gwrtheyrn is in a very isolated, beautiful and peaceful spot on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales. It’s surrounded on three sides by mountains with the sea on the fourth side. The nearest village, Llithfaen, is three miles away up a narrow, winding and very steep road. On a clear day you can sea Anglesea, and on a very clear day you can apparently see Ireland.

A view of Nant Gwrtheyrn

Apart from a bit of rain on Thursday, the weather was fine and fairly warm, and the sun made quite frequent appearances. I was expecting a lot more of the wet stuff to be falling from the sky, so was pleasantly surprised.

There are a few more of my photos of Nant Gwrtheyrn on Flickr.

Nant Gwrtheyrn

By Simon

Tomorrow I’m off to Nant Gwrtheyrn, the Welsh Language and Heritage Centre in North Wales, where I’m going to learn some more Welsh. I’ll be there for a week and probably won’t have internet access, so won’t be able to answer your emails. I’m also going to turn off comments to prevent the usual flood of spam that inundates this blog.

In the meantime, here’s a recording of a poem in a mystery language. Can you work out which language it is? I’ll give you the answer when I return from Wales.

Polyglot Scrabble

By Simon

Today I received an email from someone at Mattel, the owners of Scrabble, about their plans to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of Scrabble this year.

One idea they’re working on is to run a polyglot Scrabble game where you can play Scrabble in a number of languages at the same time. It’s likely to be staged in Spain and there will be a monetary prize for the winner.

They’d like to tap into a network of people who speak a number of languages who might represent their countries. Do you belong to or know of any Scrabble clubs or organisations that might be interested in this? Or might you be interested in it yourself?

If you can help, please contact Philip Nelkon at Mattel Games.

Foreign Language Expertise

By Simon

On a website I came across today, there’s some useful and interesting advice about studying languages. The author of the site, Alexander Arguelles, is a professor of linguistics and has studied many many languages – you can find out which ones on the how to learn any language forum.

There’s also some discussion of polyglottery, which is described as “a quest to develop an encyclopedic mind and to philosophically understand the nature of your own consciousness through the passionate, in-depth, and respectful study of as many different languages as possible, focusing both upon their diachronic evolution of as actual entities and upon the intellectual heritage they have left in the form of great texts”.

Prof. Arguelles has plans to set up a foreign language academy where he will teach people how to teach themselves languages. His methods include shadowing, which involves listening to a foreign language and repeating what you hear in a loud, clear voice while walking outdoors as swiftly as possible and maintaining a perfectly upright posture. There are videos explaining this and other methods on the language study section of the site.

Word of the day – priodol

By Simon

Today’s word, priodol, means appropriate, proper or suitable in Welsh. I came across it while reading a web page about self-employment and had to look it up as I wasn’t sure what it meant in the context. I knew that the root priod had something to do with marriage, but didn’t know it also meant proper.

Example of usage:

Mae rheolau a gyflwynwyd yn Neddf Cyllid 1994 yn golygu bod angen i chi gadw’r holl gofnodion priodol bellach.
The rules introduced in the 1994 Finance Act mean that you have to keep all the appropriate records now.

There are many more examples in the Llyfrgell Owen Phrasebank.

Related words include:

priod – married, husband, wife, spouse, proper
priodi – to marry
priodas – marriage
priodasol – marital, matrimonial, married, nuptial, conjugal, connubial
priodferch – bride
priodfab – groom
priodol – proper, appropriate, intrinsic, peculiar; respective, apposite
priodoli – to attribute, ascribe, impute
priodoldeb – propriety, appropriateness
priodoledd – attribute, property

Police signing

By Simon

A number of police officers in Lancashire have been learning sign language (BSL) in order to communicate more effectively with deaf people, according to an article in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph.

The BSL-trained officers use their skills to help people who have been arrested and to gather statements from victims, witnesses and offenders. The Lancashire also has a Deaf Liaison Officer, who promotes training in sign language and deaf awareness, and also provides a emergency text messaging service for those unable to call the emergency services in the usual way due to deafness or speech impediments.

Some of the comments on the article rant about “political correctness gone mad” and the “waste tax payers [sic] money” – no surprise there. They also suggest that deaf people and the police could communicate with each other in writing. Other comments make the case the BSL; that writing is not a satisfactory substitute for speech in these situations, and that deaf people have as much right to receive public services as other tax payers.

A related news item on the BBC News site tells of two police officers in Manchester who are learning BSL as well.

Creating fonts

By Simon

If you would like to turn your constructed alphabets into fonts, there are a number of ways to do so: you could buy one of the professional font creation tools available from Fontlab, you could use a free font editor such as FontForge or Softy, or use the font creation service Fontifier.

Today I found out about another font tool, FontStruct, a free online font editor which looks good and fairly easy to use. The site also has a gallery where you view fonts created by other people and add your own creations. When I can find a spare moment or two, I’ll have a go at converting some of my ideas for con-scripts into fonts.

Irreversible binomials

By Simon

Irreversible binomial is a linguistic term I came across today on this blog post. It was coined by Yakov Malkiel in a 1959 article in the linguistics journal, Lingua, and refers to pairs of words on either side of a conjunction such as and that are always used in a particular order. For example, bread and butter, salt and vinegar, fish and chips, meat and potatoes, gin and tonic, time and tide, cloak and dagger, ladies and gentlemen, knife and fork, and head over heels.

Some such pairs are reversible in parts of the English speaking word – is it cheese and bacon or bacon and cheese, for example? Both versions are used in the UK at least. To some extent is depends on the ratio of cheese to bacon – if you have more cheese than bacon in your sandwich, then you might call it a cheese and bacon sandwich.

Can you think of any other irreversible binomials in other languages?

In Welsh there’s bara menyn (bread (&) butter).

Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus

By Simon

Image you’re at a party to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It’s a Saturday or Sunday, the party’s been going on for quite a while and you’re starting to feel somewhat fatigued. In English and most other languages it would take a whole sentence to explain this situation.

In Estonian however, there’s a word that covers just such an eventuality – Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus, which according to Corcaighist, means “The tiredness one feels on the afternoon of the weekend birthday party”. Or if you break it down into parts “birth.day.week.end.party.after.lunch.tiredness”.