Radio Lingua

By Simon

A useful site I found this week is Radio Lingua, which offers podcasts to help you learn Spanish, French and German, or the basics of Polish, Irish, German and Russian in one minute chunks. The one minute podcasts are also available here.

Learning languages a little at a time like this seems to be quite a good way to get started. Most of the language courses I’ve tried tend to throw you straight into quite complex dialogues, which are often about subjects that are of little interest or relevance. However, one of my Irish courses, Irish On Your Own/Now You’re Talking, includes a lot of short dialogues and I found it much more useful.

Word of the day – Arbejdsglæde

By Simon

Arbejdsglæde is a Danish word meaning literally “work gladness/joy”. There are apparently similar words in the other Scandinavian languages, and also in Dutch (arbeidsvreugde) and German (Arbeitszufriedenheit). The closest equivalent I can find in English is job satisfaction, though this doesn’t seem to have quite the same meaning as the Danish one.

I found this word on Alex Kjerulf’s blog, Chief Happiness Officer, in a post where he discusses some of the differences in work cultures between Scandinavia and Japan, where there’s a word meaning ‘death by overwork’ 過労死 (karōshi).

Do you know if there’s an equivalent to arbejdsglæde in other languages?

Devanagari Fonts

By Simon

Namaste,

Simon agreed that I’ll occasionally post reviews about Asia, India and devanagari, typography and some font & linguistic software related matters as well.

I’m a young man, born in Riga and spreading the Sanskrit message around the world. Working as a Sanskrit Reader in Russia, teaching at the Russian State University and writing a PhD about Sanskrit verbal roots. I’m planning to publish several Sanskrit manuals and reprints of old books in the near future. I’m an editor as well of the Sanskrit section of the Open Directory and http://nagari.southindia.ru. So you can download some dictionaries there, etc.

It is strange that 200 years after the first Nagari typefaces where cast in iron in India, we’ve got no fine Devanagari fonts at our disposal. Ok, we have quite a few Hindi fonts. But, hey, there are many differences. No Devanagari fonts at the moment supports the four variants of “la” or the northern (Varanasi) and southern (Mumbai) variant of the letter “a”. Ok, some may say that who cares about Nagari font, but you do know and notice the difference, if you’re a teacher – students get stuck seeing a letter they’ve never seen before and have no reference chart to look upon.

None of the True Type Unicode fonts have a precoded ligature for “sthva” (which means the “va” should be under the “sth” and not beside it) as it was in the good old times when Harvard Oriental Series was printed (even they have lost the type in the latest editions, e.g. the 50th edition was printed in transliteration only). All the letters in Windows fonts are written without even the slightest break, though it is well known that in the manuscripts and books printed before 1914 in Europe, Devanagari letters are separated buy 1-1.5 mm. Maybe it is not very good from the point of view of grammarians, but, sure, it looks much better. Devanagari font differences like these can be continued.
That’s it for today, next post will be in a while. Is there anybody who’s interested to hear about Unicode Devanagari font matters?

Word of the day – transliteration

By Simon

Transliteration, from the Latin trans, across, and littera, letter, is the practice of transferring a text from one writing system to another. Transliteration can be used to give people who can’t read other alphabets an idea how to pronounce words and names, though without some knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of pronunciation of the original languages, their pronunciation will probably sound only vaguely like the original.

In phrase books you often find transliterations designed to show how to pronounce things based on the mother tongues of the readers. Such guides tend to be confusing as the ‘phonetics’ might not make much sense to you. A few phrase books and language course provide IPA pronunciation guides, which are great, if you’re familiar with the IPA.

In the phrases section on Omniglot, I try to provide transliterations for all languages written with non-Latin writing systems. Many languages have several different transliteration systems and I usually choose the most widely-used. The transliterations may not make sense to everyone, but there are recordings of quite a few of the phrases, so you can at least hear how to pronounce them. Ideally there would be sound files for all the phrases, plus maybe IPA transcriptions, and with your help, maybe that will be the case one day.

I chose this word today because someone suggested that some of the transliterations on my phrases pages are confusing, especially to Americans. The trouble is, if I made the transliterations American-friendly, people from other countries might not find them useful.

Musicians’ brains are different

By Simon

Brain scans have found that the corpus callosum, the contection but the two halves of musicians’ brains tends to be significant enlarged in comparison the corpus callosum found in the brains of the non-musicans. A number of other differences between the brains of musicians and non-musicians have been found, including enlargements to the cortex, auditory and motor parts of the brain. Another finding was that music tends to be processed in the left hemisphere of musician’s brains in the same areas as language, whereas the right hemisphere tends to be responsible for this task in the brains of non-musicians.

Oliver Sacks’ book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain discusses these findings, and other music and language-related cases, including one of a man who after being struck by lightening, developed an overwhelming urge to play the piano and to compose music, and felt that he was actually tuning in to the music of heaven.

Corau

By Simon

Yr wythnos hon, ymunais â’r Côr Meibion Cymraeg Brighton. Maen nhw’n ymarfer bob Nos Lun yn Eglwys Sant Leonard yn Hove, taith weddol fyr ar y bws o fan hyn, ac maen nhw’n perfformio mewn cyngherddau bob ail mis ar gyfer elusen. Torf o hogiau diddorol ydyn nhw, a mwynhaf canu gyda nhw, dw i’n meddwl. Darganfodais llais bas sy ‘da fi ac felly mae rhaid i mi ailddysgu y clef bas nawr.

O’n i’n bwriadu ymuno â côr cymunedol lleol hefyd, ond maen nhw’n chwilio am arweinydd newydd ar hyn o bryd a dydyn nhw ddim yn ymarfer. Gobeithio bydden nhw’n ailddechrau cyn bo hir. Beth bynnag, chwiliais am gorau lleol eraill y gallwn ymuno amdanynt, a dw i wedi synnu bod cymaint o gorau yn yr ardal hon – corau proffesiynol, corau cymunedol, corau siambr a hyd yn oed côr Iddeweg.

Coir

An seachtain seo, chuaigh mé i gCór Breatnach Brighton. Bíonn siad ag cleachtadh achan Oíche Luan in Eaglais Niamh Leonard i Hove, turas measartha gearr ar an mbus ó anseo, agus bíonn siad ag seinn i gceolchoirm achan dara mí ar mhaithe le carthanacht. Grúpa fir suimiúla atá siad, agus sílim go bhainfidh mé sult as a bheith ag canadh leo. Aníos tá fhios agam go bhfuil dordghuth agam, agus dá bhrí sin, tá orm an dord-eochair a fhoghlaim arís.

Bhí rún agam téigh i gcór pobail áitiúla freisin, ach tá siad ag lorg stiúrthóir nua ar faoi láthair agus ní bhíonn siad ag cleachtadh. Tá súil agam go mbeidh siad ag tosú arís go luath. Ar aon nós, bhí mé ag lorg cóir áitiúla eile go bhíodh mé in ann téigh iontu, agus tá iontais orm go bhfuil an oiread sin cóir san áit seo – cóir gairmiúil, cóir pobail, cóir seomra agus fiú cór Giúdais.

Choirs

This week I joined the Brighton Welsh Male Voice Choir. They practise every Monday evening in St Leonard’s Church in Hove, a shortish bus ride from here, and give concerts for charity every other month. They seem like an interesting bunch of blokes and I’m sure I’m going to enjoy singing with them. I discovered that I’m a bass, as I suspected, so I have to relearn the bass clef, something I haven’t needed to read for a long time.

I was planning to join a local community choir as well, but they are currently looking for a new conductor and are not practising. I hope they’ll start again soon. Anyway, I’ve been looking for other local choirs I could join and have been surprised how many there are – professional choirs, community choirs, chamber choirs and even a Yiddish choir.

Nòs Ùr

By Simon

Nòs Ùr (New Style), the first West European Minority Languages Song Competition will be held in Inverness in June of this year, according to this article. It is one of four regional finals which will be held in different parts of Europe, the winners from each will compete in the Pan-European Minority Languages Song Competition, Liet Lavlut, which will take place in Luleå in Sweden in October.

The competition aims to bring music in minority languages to a larger audience, to promote cultural and musical diversity, and to encourage and inspire a new generation of minority language singers and song writers. It will probably feature songs in such languages as Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Ulster Scots, Irish, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton.