How old is language?

By Simon

This morning I listened to the first in a new series of a BBC Radio 4 programme called Fry’s English Delight in which the Stephen Fry discusses the development, design and functions of the mouth. According to an evolutionary biologist interviewed on the programme, the human mouth attained it’s modern form between about 80 and 50 thousand years ago, and this allowed our ancestors to make the full range of sounds used in languages. These dates also fit with some estimates of when first language emerged.

They also mention that art and related activities also start to appear in the archaeological record roughly between those dates. This is not conclusive evidence that language is between 50 and 80 thousand years old – there is some evidence of possibly older artist activity, but is very interesting nonetheless.

Fušování‏

By Simon

Fušování‏ is a Czech word I discovered recently that appealed to me and that means “tinker, dabbling”. The related verb, fušovat means “to potter, to tinker at, to botch, to dabble, to mess about, to tinker”. Other related words include:

– fušer – quack, tinker, blunderer, boggler, botcher, bungler, cobbler, dabbler
– fušerská práce – botch
– fušersky – shoddily
– fušerský – empirical, patch work
– fušersky pracovat – tamper
– fušerství – botch, fudge, bungle
– fušeřina – patch work, tinker, botch
– fuška – elbow-grease
– fuška – job, chore, elbow-grease, hard work (also – dřina)

Sources: slovnik.cz, Wiktionary

These words could be used to describe the way I teach myself languages – I tend to do this is quite a haphazard way without any particular plan, and just follow my interests, and never know quite where I’ll end up. I keep thinking that perhaps I should try to learn things in a more structured way, but somehow rarely put such thoughts into practise. Languages are a hobby and passion for me. I dabble with them for fun.

Do you dabble or tinker with languages? Are you a linguistic botcher / bungler / tinkerer / dabbler? Or do you approach them in a more structured and focused way?

Lannrolláil

By Simon

De Domhnaigh seo caite chuaigh go Conwy chun lannrolláil a dhéanamh. Bhí lá breá ann agus bhí rún agam ag lannrolláil ó gConwy go Llandudno ar an cosán cósta. Bhí dromchla an cosáin go maith ar dtús, ach i ndiaidh tamaillín d’éirigh sé go garbh, agus níorbh fhéidir liom lean ar aghaidh ar mo lannrolláí, agus dá bhrí sin shiúil mé an chuid is mó den bhealach go Llandudno. Bíonn na radhairc go hálainn ar píosa an cósta sin agus bhí a lán daoine ag súgradh ar an tráth. I ndiaidh dul ann i Llandudno, cheannaigh mé greim bia agus an sin chuaigh mé ag lannrolláil ar an promanád. Bhí rún agam ag lannrolláil ar ais go Conwy, ach bheartaigh mé ag dul ar ais go Bangor ar an mbus ó Llandudno.

Last Sunday I went to Conwy to do some inline skating. It was a lovely day and I was planning to skate from Conwy to Llandudno along the coastal path. The surface of the path was good at first, but soon became rough and it wasn’t possible to continue on skates, so I ended up walking most of the way to Llandudno. The views on that piece of coast are beautiful and lots of people had come out to play on the beach. After arriving in Llandudno, I bought a bite to eat then went for a skate along the promenade. I was planning to skate back to Conwy, but decided to take the bus back to Bangor from Llandudno.

Careers with languages

By Simon

The other day I came across an interesting piece in The Guardian about “Career options for foreign language speakers“. The piece is just a short introduction to an online Q&A session that took place last Friday, and it claims that:

The words “graduate with a foreign language” on your CV will have many recruiters going back for another look. That’s because a relatively small pool of Brits have foreign language credentials, so they stand out from the crowd and, consequently, have far healthier career options, according to a recent Independent article.

Many people have commented on this, and the general tone of the comments seems to be that foreign language skills alone are not sufficient to secure a job; that few employers value such skills or understand what it takes to acquire them; and that most jobs which require foreign languages are relatively low paid. Some comments mention that if you speak foreign languages and have qualifications and experience in other areas, such as IT, engineering, medicine, etc, you can probably find a job in foreign parts, though you may end up spending most of your time speaking English. Others say that some British employers prefer to employ native speakers of particular languages with the relevant skills, rather than Brits who have learnt those languages.

There are some positive comments as well from people in language-related professions, but the overall tone is quite negative.

I got my first proper job, with the British Council in Taipei, partly because I speak Mandarin, and I used my Mandarin a lot while working there.

What is your experience? Are you in a language-related profession? Would you like to be? Are foreign language skills valued by employers in your country?

Llygad yr haul

By Simon

I heard the Welsh phrase llygad yr haul (eye of the sun) on the weather forecast on Radio Cymru this morning and thought it was a poetic way of describing sunny weather. I think it appears in a sentence something like Bydd sawl mannau dan llygad yr haul yfory (“Many places will be under the sun’s eye tomorrow”).

In English you might talk about the eye of a storm, but I haven’t heard the expression the eye of the sun or the sun’s eye used in relation to the weather. Are there similar expressions in other languages?

A review of Rocket Hindi

By Simon

In April this year I was offered a free subscription to a Rocket Languages course in return for writing a review. My plan was to write the review after completing the course, however I realise that it’ll take me quite a while to work my way through the entire course so decided to write the review now.

A bit of background
Rocket Language courses are primarily provided online, though the courses are also available on CDs. The company was started in 2004 by Jason Oxenham and Mark Ling, who wanted to create an online Spanish course that was fun and easy to use, and that gave students the confidence to speak the language as soon as possible. The course proved popular, and the company now offers courses in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Hindi, German, French, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, ASL and English for Spanish speakers.

Why Hindi?
I wanted to try out the course in a language I didn’t know at all, which narrowed the choice down to ASL and Hindi. I chose Hindi because I know a number of people who speak it and I thought it might be interesting and useful to know. While this review focuses on Rocket Hindi, it is relevant to the other courses as they have a similar structure.

Details of the course
When you log into your Rocket Language course you see a welcome screen featuring links to Your Course, which contains all the language lessons; Your Motivation, which contains tips on learning languages, improving your memory, measuring your progress and so on, and Your Community, which links to the learners’ forums for the language you’re learning, and also for the other languages offered by Rocket Languages.

The course is split into two stages: stage 1 includes sections entitled Greetings and Meetings, The Perfect Tourist, In Town and Food and Drink. Stage 2 has sections entitled Retail Therapy, Family and Friends, Activities and Hobbies and a review section. There is also a section called the Survival Kit, which contains lessons on body parts, city, clothing, colours countries, days, food, house, numbers. In addition, you can download a piece of software called MegaHindi, which tests you on vocabulary with a number of quizzes.

Each lesson features a short conversation in Hindi which is presented in the Devanagari alphabet, in Romanized form and in English. You can listen to just the conversation, or listen to the full lesson, which is narrated by an American with the Hindi parts spoken by native speakers of Hindi. The lessons go through the conversation line by line explaining what all the words mean and how they go together. It explains how the words and structures can be used to make other sentences, and encourages you to make your own sentences. Lessons after the first one also review the conversation from the previous lesson and encourage you to go back to that lesson if you don’t understand everything.

Additional vocabulary used in the lessons is provided, and the end of each lesson you can test whether you have absorbed everything with the Rocket Review – a short quiz on the recorded lesson, and with a written quiz. You can save words into a custom dictionary, and make notes as well.

As well as the main language lessons, there are also lessons on language and culture. These are written lessons which introduce you to various aspects of the culture and include relevant words and phrases with recordings. Within these lessons you can also learn the Devanagari alphabet.

When you have completed each stage there is a comprehensive test on everything covered in that stage. If you score 80% or more, you pass the test and receive a certificate by email. The course aims to take you to A2 level of the Common European Frame of Reference for Languages.

My assessment
So far I have only completed part 1 of stage 1 and have learnt greetings, how to talk about myself, ordering food and drink, booking a hotel and such like. I need listen to each lesson several times before I can understand and produce all the words and phrases, and am gradually becoming more familiar with the sounds, rhythms, structures and the Devanagari alphabet. I would prefer more explanations of the grammar and a more standard Romanization system. The system used looks like this: kaisee haiM aap? (कैसी हैं आप?) – How are you?, while I’m more familiar with the UN system, in which that phrase would be kaisī haiṅ āp? It would also be very useful to have a lesson or some lessons showing you how to write the Devanagari letters and numerals by hand. In the absence of this, I found the SOAS Hindi Script Tutor very useful.

The course has a similar structure to other courses I’ve tried, including Teach Yourself, Colloquial and Pimsleur courses. It covers a lot more material than Pimsleur, though perhaps not quite as much as the Teach Yourself and Colloquial courses – they tend to have more grammatical explanations and exercises, but only the dialogues and some of the exercises are recorded. With the Rocket Language courses every bit of foreign text is recorded, so you’re not left wondering how to pronounce something. The Rocket conversations are recorded at normal conversational speed, I think, and the speakers pronounce things clearly. When explaining words and phrases they pronounce them more slowly and break up some words into syllables.

While the Rocket courses are primarily provided online, you can order an offline version on CDs, and you can also download all the mp3 files and listen to them whenever you like. This feature appeals to me as it means I don’t need to be online or tied to my computer to use the course. I have also made PDFs of all the lessons as well, so can peruse offline if I choose.

The Rocket Language courses seem to be aimed mainly at people who have little of no previous language learning experience and who are planning to visit a country where the language they’re learning is spoken. The conversations I’ve listened to and studied so far are mainly focused on language useful to tourists, however the lessons also show how the phrases used can be applied to different situations, so are useful even if you’re not planning a trip to a relevant country.

How much does it cost?
The online version of each Rocket Language costs US$149, which gives you unlimited, lifetime access to the course, and to any changes and improvements to it. The offline version on CDs costs US$299. Discounts are often available, and free 60-day trials are offered for all languages. These costs compare very favourably with Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur courses, though are more than Teach Yourself and Colloquial courses.

Do I recommend it?
Yes, definitely. I have enjoyed this course so far and hope to complete it eventually. I have successfully tried out some of the phrases on Hindi-speaking friends, and when I listen to online Hindi radio broadcasts, such as BBC Hindi, I am starting to pick odd bits and pieces.

Multilingual poetry

By Simon

On Sunday I attended an evening of multilingual poetry in Bangor that feature poets from Wales and India who read poems in Welsh, English, Bengali, Malayalam and Manipuri. It was part of a project to build links between Wales and India which involved the Welsh poets translating poems by the Indian poets into Welsh, and vice versa. They also translated their poems into English. A similar event will be taking place in Ultracomida in Aberystwyth tomorrow.

I could understand the poems in Welsh quite well, and while I didn’t understand any of the poems in the languages of India, it was fascinating just to hear these three very different languages, each of which belongs to a different language family – Bengali is Indo-Aryan, Malayalam is Dravidian and Manipuri is Tibeto-Burman. Unfortunately I didn’t get any recordings of them so I can’t share them with you.

Understanding poetry in foreign languages can be quite challenging, even if you speak them well. Poetic language can differ from every day language in various ways, but I find it worth the effort to try to read and appreciate poems in their original languages rather than just relying on translations.

Feeleeaght

By Simon

Riyr hie mee dys fastyr feeleeaght ‘syn Blue Sky Café. Va bardyn ayn veih Bretin, Lucsemburg as yn Injey, as lhaih ad daanyn ayns Frangish, Baarl, Bretnish, Bengalish, Malayalam as Manipuri. Ga nagh hoig mee yn daanyn ayns nyn çhengaghyn Injinagh, v’eh feer hymoil dy chlashtyn ad.

Last night I went to an evening of poetry at the Blue Sky Café. There were poets from Wales, Luxembourg and India, and they read poems in French, English, Welsh, Bengali, Malayalam and Manipuri. Although I didn’t understand the poems in the Indian languages, it was very interesting to hear them.