| français | English | Cymraeg | Brezhoneg |
|---|---|---|---|
| nain | dwarf | corrach | korr; korrigan |
| les préparatifs (mpl); le dispositions (fpl) | arrangements | trefniadau; paratoadau | darbaroù; danvezidigezh |
| prendre des dispositions | to make arrangements | trefnu; paratoi | aozañ; brientiñ |
| se mettre d’accord; parvenir à un arrangement | to come to an arrangement | dod i gytundeb/ddealltwriaeth (â rhywun) | glevet e yezh all |
| prendre des dispositions nécessaires pour faire qch | to make an arrangement to do sth | trefnu i wneud rhywbeth | |
| la composition florale | flower arrangement | trefniad blodau | bokederezh |
| la betterave | beetroot | betysen (goch); bitrwden | beterabez |
| rouge comme une tomate | red as a beetroot | cyn goched â gwaed |
La Saint-Sylvestre
As today is New Year’s Eve I thought I’d look at what this day is called in various languages:
French:la (fête de) Saint-Sylvestre, which is celebrated with le Réveillon de Saint-Sylvestre, a feast which well involve champagne and foie gras, and a party, with kisses under the mistletoe at midnight. Saint Sylvestre was Pope between 314 to 335 AD and his feast day happens to be on 31st December. [source].
German: Silvester or Silvesterabend, which is celebrated with parties and fireworks, and/or by watching the 1920s British film Dinner for One [sources].
Spanish: la Noche Vieja, which is celebrated with parties and by eating 12 grapes for each of the 12 chimes of midnight [source].
Welsh: Nos Galan (“night of the calend”), which is celebrated with parties and fireworks, and there’s a tradition of giving gifts and money, or these days bread and cheese on New Year’s Day [source].
There are more details of New Year traditions on Wikipedia.
How do you celebrate new year?
Happy New Year, by the way.
Language quiz
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
Babbling and motherese
Over the past few days I’ve been observing, and to some extent participating, in my niece’s language acquisition. She is 8 months old and babbles a lot to herself and to others. Some of her babbling can sound like possible words, like dada, but they don’t seem to be associated with anything yet. She is also starting to direct her attention at various things, and especially at people, who she charms with her smiles.
From her mother (my sister-in-law) she is getting mainly Russian, and from her father (my brother) she is getting English. When I first heard her mother talking to her in Russian I didn’t understand much, but when I listened more closely I realised that the same phrases where coming up frequently – as with motherese or Child Directed Speech generally. Two phrases I understood where Что ты хочешь? (What do you want?) and Всё (all, everything). There are also a lot of terms of affection, which in Russian are often diminutives like котёнок (kitten).
I found more examples of Russian motherese on: http://www.russianforfree.com/adoptive-parents.php.
Всё seems to be quite a useful word which appears in various phrsaes:
– вот и всё, это всё = that’s all
– чаще всего = most often
– мне всё равно = it’s all the same to me
– всё там же = still there
– всё же = all the same
– всё ещё = still
– а всё-таки = all the same, nevertheless
Merry Christmas
Zalig kerstfeest / Nadolig Llawen / С Рождеством / Nollaig chridheil / Joyeux Noël / Nollick Ghennal / Frohe Weihnachten / Nollaig shona daoibh / A Blithe Yule and a Multilingual Merry Christmas to you.
My Dutch studies a sort of on hold this week, but will continue after New Year – I was planning to learn it just for one month, but will continue as I’m enjoying it and finding it fairly easy, a lot easier than Russian, anyway.
How’s your language learning going?
Language quiz
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
Les mots de la semaine
| français | English | Cymraeg | Brezhoneg |
|---|---|---|---|
| un salon (canapé et deux fauteuils) | three-piece suite | set dridarn; swît dridarn | |
| sous les auspices de | under the umbrella of | dan nawdd/gysgod/adain | |
| arnaque; escroquerie | rip off | twyll; hoced | c’hwepat; c’hwipañ |
| arnaquer; arracher | to rip off | twyllo; rogio | c’hwepat; diframmañ |
| la tartelette de Noël (aux fruits secs) | mince pie | tarten Nadolig; teisen/cacen friwdda; mins-pei | tartezennig nedeleg (?) |
| muet | mute | mud | mud |
| le chèque-cadeau; le bon-cadeau | gift token/voucher | tocyn anrheg | chekenn prof |
| la coccinelle | ladybird | buwch goch gota | buoc’han |
| il fait nuit/noir | it’s dark | mae’n dywyll | ez eo teñval |
| commencer à faire nuit | to get dark | tywyllu | krog da zuañ |
| l’oie (f) /wa/ | goose | gwydd | gwaz |
Bosky bosses
I discovered today that bos is a Dutch word for forest or wood, and this immediately made me think of the wonderful English word bosky, which is defined by the OED as “Consisting of or covered with bushes or underwood; full of thickets, bushy”.
The OED says that bosky comes from bosk, a Middle English version of bush, which like the Dutch words bos and bosje (bush), comes from the late Latin boscum / boscus (wood).
A similar-sounding English word, boss, is not related to bosky, but does come from Dutch – from baas (boss, owner), from the Middle Dutch baes, which originally meant uncle, and was first used to mean master in America during the 17th century [source].
Fluent Forever
Today we have a guest post by Gabriel Wyner.
Hi everyone! I wanted to share with you a project I’ve been working on to help folks learn languages faster. To help introduce it, let me give you some background on myself and what I do.
I’m an opera singer, and for my career, I needed to learn German, Italian, French and Russian. Over the course of studying those languages, I developed a language learning method that began to produce really phenomenal results: I was able to learn French to C1 fluency in 5 months and Russian to B2/C1 fluency in 10. This method eventually turned into an article at Lifehacker, which went viral and led to a book deal with Random House, and has basically turned my life upside-down (In a good way, fortunately! While I don’t have much time for singing, I adore writing and learning about languages!)
One of the central tenets of my methods revolves around pronunciation. I learn pronunciation before anything else, because once my ears are attuned to a language’s sounds, I have a much easier time memorizing vocabulary, and I don’t have to fight against bad, ingrained pronunciation habits when I’m ready to start speaking.
The tricky part in all of this is that effective pronunciation training tools are few and far between. For most common languages, there are some scattered YouTube pronunciation guides, perhaps a brief discussion in the front of your grammar book, but very little that’s comprehensive, systematic, and enjoyable to use. And there’s little to nothing that will successfully train your ears to hear sounds you haven’t heard before – subtle things like the differences between German’s “See” [ze:] and “Sie” [zi:], “Bahn” [ba:n] and “Bann” [ban], or German’s “mein” [maen] and English’s “mine” [maɪn].
However, there is research that describes exactly how to train ears to hear new sounds. It’s a pretty simple process: you find a pair of sounds that are tricky to distinguish (say, German’s mein and English’s mine), you play a recording of one of the words at random, guess which one you heard, and then see whether you were right. Every time you go through this cycle, your ears get better. And with a bunch of well chosen word pairs and good recordings, an app could take you through that cycle and teach you the pronunciation system of a language within a couple of weeks. I’ve made one using Anki for my own Hungarian studies, and it took me ~10 days at 20 minutes a day to get a handle on the [occasionally stupidly difficult] sounds of Hungarian (tyuk vs gyuk, kar/kor/kór, ad/add, has/hass…).
11 days ago, I launched a Kickstarter to fund development of this app. The campaign has done phenomenally well, funding in 2 days and doubling after day 7, which has allowed me to add all sorts of stretch goals and bonuses for all the backers of the project. I think this is going to be a wonderful and much-needed tool for the language learning community, and I’m excited about working on it. If you or anyone you know wish to learn languages, please do help spread the word. You can use these handy links below:
Language quiz
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?