Irish language strategy / Straitéis don Ghaeilge

By Simon

According to an article I found today, the Irish government has a strategy, launched yesterday, to increase the number of regular speakers of Irish in Ireland by a factor of three over the next 20 years. Apparently there are currently about 83,000 who speak Irish on a daily basis, and the government would like this number to increase to 250,000 by 2030.

Their aims are:

  • – to increase the number of families throughout Ireland who use Irish as the daily language of communication
  • – to provide linguistic support for the Gaeltacht as an Irish-speaking community
  • – to ensure that in public discourse and in public services the use of Irish or English will be, as far as practical, a choice for the citizen to make
  • – to ensure that Irish becomes more visible in society, both as a spoken language by citizens and also in areas such as signage and literature.

Details of the strategy can be found at:
http://www.pobail.ie/en/IrishLanguage/Strategy/Strategy.pdf (English)
http://www.pobail.ie/ie/AnGhaeilge/Straiteis/Strait%C3%A9is.pdf (Irish)

I haven’t read it all in detail, but it looks like there are plenty of good ideas in there. Whether they can all be implemented and how well is another matter. Reversing a language shift that has been going for centuries is a difficult process.

Sniaghtey

By Simon

Sniaghtey er Straid William, raad ta mee cummal ayns Bangor

V’eh ceau sniaghtey dy trome oie Jerdein as Jeheiney shoh chaie, as ta yn sniaghtey foast ayn ayns shoh nish. Ta yn sniaghtey aalin, as t’eh feaee er yn oyr nagh vel mooney gleashtanyn er ny raaidyn, agh t’eh feayr agglagh, as ta yn shiaghtey riojit stooalt er ny pemmadyn as er ny cooyl-raaidyn, as t’eh shliawin agglagh fo chosh. Cha ren mee fakin wheesh da shiaghtey rieau ayns Bangor.

Golwg o Fae Hirael a'r Carneddau efo eira arnynt

Eira

Roedd hi’n bwrw eira yn drwm Nos Iau a Ddydd Gwener yr wythnos diwetha, ac mae’r eira yn dal i fod yma bellach. Mae’r eira yn hyfryd, ac mae hi’n dawel oherwydd nag oes llawer o draffig ar y strydoedd, ond mae’n oer ofnadwy, ac mae’r eira wedi ei rhewi yn galed ar y palmentydd ac ar y strydoedd cefn, ac mae’n lithrig iawn dan droed. Dw i erioed wedi gweld cymaint o eira ym Mangor.

Colds, streams and rivers

By Simon

A snow-covered Siliwen Road in Bangor

It’s rather cold here at the moment with daytime temperatures not much above freezing, and nighttime dropping to -10°C (14°F) or even -20°C (-4°F) in places. As a result, some of the snow that fell last week has frozen solid and been trampled down on pavements and ungritted back streets making them decidedly icey and slippery.

I also have a cold at the moment, so I thought I’d look into how to say “I have a cold” in a number of languages. In French it’s “Je suis enrhumé” or “I am enrhumed”. Enrhumé comes from rhume (cold), which comes from the Old French reume, from the Latin rheuma, from the Greek rheuma (stream, current, a flowing), from rhein (to flow), from the Proto-Indo-European *sreu- (to flow). The Proto-Indo-European *sreu- is also the root of the Irish sruth (stream, river), the Welsh ffrwd (stream) and the Polish strumyk (brook). [source].

The Czech word for cold rýmu appears to be spring from the same source – mám rýmu is “I have a cold” by the way – as does the English word rheumatism. You can also say jsem nachlazený for “I have a cold” in Czech, which has a similar structure to the French phrase – “I am colded” or something like that.

In Welsh you don’t have a cold but rather a cold is on you: mae annwyd arna i, and the other Celtic languages use the same structure, “Is cold on/at me”: tá slaghdán orm (Irish), tha ‘n cnatan orm (Scottish Gaelic), ta feayraght/mughane aym (Manx).

In German “I have a cold” is Ich bin erkältet (“I am becolded?”), with erkältet coming from kalt (cold).

In Mandarin Chinese you say 我感冒了 (wǒ gǎnmào le) or “I catch cold [change of state particle]”.

Languages in the Czech Republic

By Simon

According to a report I found today in The Prague Post, less than half of Czechs speak foreign languages. A survey by the Social and Economy Analyses Institute (ISEA) found that while 27% of Czechs can communicate in at least one foreign language – the most popular languages are English and German, 54% of Czechs have no foreign language abilities. The survey also found that younger people are more likely to know a foreign language, and that 77% of university graduates speak at least one foreign language.

All my Czech friends speak English, and some of them speak other languages such as Russian, German, French and/or Welsh. They are all graduates, so this isn’t entirely surprising.

The idea that’s common in Anglophone countries that most people in continental Europe speak several languages, including English, doesn’t seem to reflect the reality everywhere.

Knock hardly

By Simon

Today I saw a note on someone’s door in my neighbourhood which reads “Please knock hardly”. This got me wondering whether they meant that people should knock on their door only a little, or whether they want people to knock hard on the door. I suspect they mean the latter, though I haven’t seen hardly used in this way before. Have you?

Lussyn ny cam-ching

By Simon

Lussyn ny cam-ching

Jiu ren mee soiaghey y fraueyn lus ny cam-ching dy chionnee mee meeghyn er-dy-henney. Ren mee soiaghey fraueyn elley (blaaghyn sniaghtee, crocysyn, cliogaghyn, a.r.e.) shiaghtyn ny ghaa er-dy-henney. Ta doghys aym dy ghoaill paart jeu toshiaght cur magh blaaghyn veih Jerrey Geuree yn vlein ry heet.

Cennin Pedr

Heddiw mi blannes i y bylbiau Cennin Pedr y brynes i rhyw fisoedd yn ôl. Mi blannes i fylbiau eraill (eirlysiau, crocysau, gellysg, ayyb) wythnos neu ddwy yn ôl. Gobeithio bydd rai ohonynt yn dechrau blodeuo ym mis Ionawr y blwyddyn nesaf.

Endangered Alphabets Poetry Project

By Simon

Today’s post comes from Tim Brookes

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

My Endangered Alphabets Project is in the process of giving birth to a new phase: the Endangered Alphabets Poetry Project. Let me explain what I’m trying to do.

I’ve written a short, simple poem about the importance of preserving endangered languages in their spoken and written forms. It goes like this:

These are our words, shaped
By our hands, our tools,
Our history. Lose them
And we lose ourselves.

If it makes the translation easier, it could also be written like this:

These are our words, shaped
By our hands, our tools,
Our history. If we lose our words,
We lose ourselves.

I would like to get this poem translated, with your help, into as many endangered languages–in their original scripts–as possible.

I’m hoping that you may be able to translate the poem into any of the world’s minority or endangered writing systems, or, failing that, pass the poem on to someone who can.

I don’t have an urgent deadline. If I could get the first of these translations within a few weeks, I can start working-and if it takes two or three months for them all to trickle in, that’s fine.

Once I have the translations, I’d like to create two pieces of work with them-two different versions of the project.

For one of these versions, I’ll pass the text along to Bob Holman, who has won a substantial grant to have poems projected onto the sides of large buildings in New York. He’s very interested in projecting poems in endangered languages and endangered alphabets.

The other version will be another major carving project. I plan to build a sculpture that consists of four tall pieces of beautiful maple wood, each facing toward a different point of the compass. Each face of the sculpture will display the poem in two, three or four endangered alphabets, depending how many I’m able to collect. This sculpture will then go on permanent exhibition in a major public building in the United States.

I hope very much you’re as interested in this project as I am. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

For more information on the Endangered Alphabets, please visit http://www.endangeredalphabets.com.

With very best wishes,

Tim Brookes
Director, Professional Writing Program,
Champlain College, Burlington, Vermont

Language quiz

By Simon

Today’s language quiz is slightly different from the usual recordings. Instead your challenge is to try to guess what the text below said before it was ‘babelized’.

It will not be shown blind.
Deaf or hearing
Pool of people can not talk about.

I wrote the original text in English, than translated it between 15 different languages and English using Google Translate. The languages were Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Georgian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Swahili, Thai, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh and Yiddish.