Whistle This!

By Simon

Today I came across a website for (tin/penny/Irish) whistle players called Whistle This! which is based on an interesting idea: every two weeks a new tune is posted on the site with the sheet music, whistle notation and a recording. Visitors are invited to learn the tunes, record themselves playing them, and to send in their recordings, which others can then listen to and comment on. There is also a forum for whistle and music-related discussion. I plan to start learning the tunes and sending my recordings in, perhaps starting when the next tune is posted.

This concept could possibly be adapted for language learning. Instead of tunes you could have dialogues, extracts from literature, poems or short stories for people to learn, recite and record. Ideally you’d have native or fluent speakers providing the initial recordings. Maybe someone has already thought of this and a site or sites like this already exist, though I haven’t found any yet.

Comments

By Simon

When writing posts on this blog I’m never sure whether anybody will comment and how many comments there will be. Yesterday’s unresearched, ill-thought-out little post has stirred up plenty of discussion, which, to some extent, was the idea. You could say I was playing devil’s advocate. Other posts that I spend hours crafting from nothing but the finest, most carefully-researched factoids might generate few if any comments.

It’s always interesting to hear your opinions and experiences. Each comment you leave reveals a little more about you, and I find these tidbits interesting.

Once upon a time, the only trace most people left was their name on a gravestone. Now you can leave snippets of information about yourself in many places, especially online. This should make it easier for our descendents to trace us, their ancestors, unless the future turns out to be something like it’s portrayed in such fine movies as Water World, The Day After Tomorrow or Terminator.

Polyglots

By Simon

It struck me today that many polyglots and hyperpolyglots are male. I wonder if this has something to do with the instinct to collect things and the tendency to get a bit carried away with particular subjects, traits that seem more common in males than females. Perhaps it might also be a result of the male inclination to show off. The ability to learn many languages is quite a good indicator of intelligence, after all.

Any thoughts on this?

Addition
I suspected this might be a controversial observation. Maybe I should expand my point a bit: I’m certainly not implying that there are no female polyglots, or that men are better at languages than women. What I mean by polyglots here is people who learn a large number of languages, i.e. ten or more. If you look at the list of polyglots on Wikipedia, you notice that most of those who know 10+ languages are men.

Books books books

By Simon

my language learning bookcase - home to language courses, dictionaries, grammars, phrasebooks, etc

If, like me, you have a large collection of books, trying to put them in some sort of order is can become quite a time-consuming task. In fact, just trying to fit them all on your shelves can be a real challenge.

Every so often I go through my books and try to decide which ones to sell or give away. Then I usually put them on one side and promptly fail to do anything about them. Although when I left Taiwan, I did actually manage to sell most of the books I had there, but also sent about a hundred or so home.

Until recently I was buying and reading two or more books a week. I still read two books a week on average, but I usually borrow them from my local library rather than buying them. Thus my shelves and bookcases have been largely spared any further overcrowding.

I arrange my books by genre and author, more or less, and to some extent by size and language. I don’t bother putting them in alphabetical order, though do put some of them in chronological order, especially trilogies and other series.

Brighton library used to arrange fiction books alphabetically by genre, but recently they stopped grouping them by genre. This makes it easier to find books, if you know the name of the author, and sometimes you come across interesting-looking books from genres you might not normally read.

How do you arrange your books?

Postilions and lightning

By Simon

There’s an urban legend that sometime during the 19th century a phrasebook was published that including the extemely useful phrase “My postilion has been struck by lightning”. There seems to be various theories about the origins of this phrase, and a number versions of the phrase, including “Our postillion has been struck by lightning!”, or “Stop, the postilion has been struck by lightning!”.

According to Nigel Rees on the Quote Unquote website, both postilions and lightning are mentioned in Karl Baedeker’s The Traveller’s Manual of Conversation in Four Languages (1836), in which the phrase: “Postilion, stop; we wish to get down; a spoke of one of the wheels is broken.” appears. In an 1886 edition of this book, there appears the phrase: “Are the postilions insolent?; the lightning has struck; the coachman is drunk.”

Other useful phrases including the the Baedeker book include “Can we get a pony or a donkey for Madame, to mount up that hill?”, “Clean that looking-glass a little, it is quite dull.”, and “Come, make haste. Plait my hair, and make the curls; for I want to go out.”

Do any of you have a copy of Baedeker’s book, or something similar? I’d like to find out how he translated these phrases. Which of the phrases that appear in current phrasebooks do you think people will be laughing about in 100 year’s time?

A postilion or postillion, in case you’re wondering, is one who rides as a guide on the near horse of one of the pairs attached to a coach or post chaise especially without a coachman.

Spot the difference

By Simon

Can you spot the difference between the following two Urdu words?

the Urdu words for donkey and cushion

If your house was on fire and you had to jump out of the window, which of the above would you prefer to land on?

One of these words means cushion (gadda), the other donkey (gadha), and they got mixed up in the Urdu translation of a fire safety leaflet that was produced in Scotland, according to Translation is an Art. The English text said “Never jump straight out of a window. Lower yourself on to cushions”, while the Urdu translation said “Never jump out of a window straight. Put yourself on a donkey.”

According to the dictionary on UrduWorld.com, gadda actually means mattress, rather than cushion.

Polyglot language exchange

By Simon

I came across another useful site for language learners today – Polyglot, which describes itself as a ‘free language exchange community’ where you can ‘learn languages and make friends’. The site apparently has over 100,000 members.

As well as finding online language exchange partners and penpals, you can also use the site to set up realworld meetings with other language learners. I might try to set something up in Brighton.

Some of the features of the site, like the forms, only work properly in Internet Explorer, and if you try to enter more than eight languages in the ‘Languages you want to learn’ section it says ‘Don’t over estimate yourself’, but apart from that, the site looks good.

Head over heels

By Simon

When you’re head over heels about something or someone it means that you’re very excited, and/or turning cartwheels to demonstrate your excitement. This idiom is often used in the phrase ‘head over heels in love with’. It was probably first used in the 14th century, when it was ‘heels over head’, which makes more sense. At some point the components got reversed.

Other idioms used to indicate that things are not as usual include ‘upside-down’, ‘topsy-turvy’, ‘arse over tea-kettle’, ‘higgledy-piggledy’, and ‘arse over tit’.

The Spanish equivalent of this idiom is patas arriba (paws on top) – this is one I learnt today, and in Chinese it’s 亂七八糟 (luànqībāzāo = confusion seven eight rotten). What about in other languages?