Preserving immigrant languages

By Simon

I found an interesting article on the BBC News website about Asian languages in the UK which discusses how some UK families of South Asian origin are trying to encourage their children to continue speaking their native languages, such as Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati. The children are taught in English at school, but some also attend complementary and weekend schools run by local communities where they are taught in their native languages. Such schools are run by volunteers and receive no government funding, and are helping to maintain bilingualism among their pupils, and perhaps because of this, those pupils are also achieving good results in their mainstream schools.

It seems to be common among immigrant families that native languages last only two or three generations, unless community efforts are made to maintain their languages. The situation can be similar for minority languages such as Maori and Irish. Another article I came across today is not very hopeful about the future of the Maori language and predicts it will die out in 50 years or so. In spite of initiatives to promote the language, the young generation is increasingly turning to English, even those who attend the Maori-medium schools. In the schools they speak Maori, but elsewhere many speak only English.

Language Conference

By Simon

Other the past few days there was a conference at Trinity College Carmarthen entitled Reversing Language Shift: How to Re-awaken a Language Tradition, which was run by the Foundation for Endangered Languages. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to intend myself, but have found an interesting report and multilingual video from it on the BBC News.

Here’s a recording of delegates from the conferences speaking in their own languages. How many of the languages can you identify?

Did any of you attend the conference?

Dadsothachu

By Simon

This morning I heard an interesting Welsh word on Radio Cymru that I hadn’t come across before – dadsothachu [dadsɔ’θaxɨ̬]. It means “to declutter” and combines a verbed form of the word sothach (bilge, garbage, junk, trash, trumpery) with the prefix dad-, which is the equivalent of the English prefixes de- and un-, and also serves as an intensifier. Another word they used for the same action was dadclytero (I think that’s how to spell it). Neither of these words appear in dictionaries I’ve checked.

I’ve been trying to declutter since I moved, and indeed before that. So far I’ve taken quite a lot books to local charity shops, but there’s plenty more filling my bookcases. At the same time I’ve acquired quite a lot more stuff. I also have more space in my new house, so the temptation is to fill it with even more stuff.

Gleihagh ooyllagh

By Simon

Jesarn ren mee gleihagh ooyllagh jeh ooyllyn voish my gharey. Dy jarroo hoshee mee aarlaghey as coagyragh ny hooyllyn as ren mee broie y soo as hug mee eh ayns costraylyn yn laa roish shen. Ren kiare punt dy hooyllyn queig costraylyn dy lieh gleihagh.

Ta mooarane ooyllyn fooillagh aym as ta foym aym jannoo soo ooyllagh as reddyn elley roo.

Weeds

By Simon

Yesterday I finally started work on my garden, and one of the first things I did was a bit of weeding. The large crop of dandelions and other weeds in my lawn will take quite a while to remove, but in the meantime I thought I’d look at the origins of a few garden-related words.

Weed comes from the Old English word wēod (grass, herb, weed), which is related to the Old High German word wiota (fern), and probably comes from the Proto-Germanic word *weud-. The verb to weed comes from the Late Old English weodian [source].

Words for weed in other languages include: chwynnyn (Welsh), fiaile (Irish), 野草 [yěcǎo – “wild grass”] (Mandarin), mauvaise herbe (French – “bad grass”), 雑草 [zassō – “crude/miscellaneous grass”] (Japanese).

Dandelion comes from the Middle French dent de lion (lit. “lion’s tooth”), a calque translation of the Middle Latin dens leonis – the leaves are shaped a bit like lion’s teeth.

Folk names for dandelion include tell-time, which refers the practice of blowing the seeds – the number of breaths needed supposedly being the hour, and the Middle English and French names piss-a-bed and pissenlit, which refer to its diuretic properties [source].

Désherber

By Simon

Aujourd’hui j’ai commencé à désherber mon jardin. Enfin j’ai presque tous les outils de jardinage dont j’ai besoin, et il fait beau, donc j’ai décidé de tirer quelques mauvaises herbes, en particulier les pissenlits, dont il y a une récolte abondante. Jusqu’ici j’ai désherbé seulement un petit coin du jardin et il reste beaucoup à faire, mais j’essaie à focaliser sur les résultats – une pelouse sans des mauvaises herbes – et pas sur tous les travail qu’il me faut faire.

Et dans la maison, les décorateurs continuent à peindre – aujourd’hui ils peignent les murs de l’escalier et de la vestibule.