One of the members of the Omniglot forum (imbecilica) has posted a video on YouTube featuring sceenshots from the Omniglot website, blog and forum, a select of texts in different writing systems, and extracts from recordings in different languages.
There is also an Omniglot page on Facebook.
The Taiwan government is planning to spend millions of dollars “improving Taiwan’s English-language environment”, which will include the setting up of two English-language villages, according to this report.
They will improve English language signage and aim to host more international concerts and exhibitions.
The idea of the English villages is to make it easier for the local residents to practise their English. The first village will probably be set up in Hsinchu Science and Technology Park, which has a large number of foreign staff. The villages will have English language signs, local businesses will be encouraged to provide English-language services, and will be given star ratings for the quality of those services.
Taiwan already has at least one English ‘village’ where children can be immersed in the language, according to this report.
Are there similar ‘villages’ in other countries?
Yn ddiweddar dw i wedi bod yn brysur efo aseiniadau ar gyfer y prifysgol. Cyn diwedd y semestr hwn mae rhaid i mi ysgrifennu pedwar traethodau ac i baratoi dau gyflwyniad. Dw i’n wedi gwneud yr cyflwyniadau ac un o’r traethodau yn barod.
Le déanaí tá mé an-gnóthach le tascanna ar an ollscoil. Roimh deireadh an seimistear seo, tá orm ceathair aistí a scríobh agus dhá léiriú a ullmhú. Tá mé i ndiaidh na léiriú agus aiste amháin a dhéanamh cheana féin.
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
This blog seems to be working again now and I’ve managed to restore the data up to last November. Unfortunately that was the last time I made a backup of the blog, and due to the problems with my old server, it is not possible to recover the data since then. Oh well, lesson learned. I will try to make regular backups from now on.
The forum is also up again, though I haven’t managed to restore any of the old data, so we’ll just have to start anew. Sorry!
In other news, one of the university assignments I’ve been working on is a presentation on bimodal bilinguals – that is people with normal hearing who have deaf parents and grow up fluent in sign language and a spoken language such as English. Unlike other bilinguals who switch between their languages (code switch), bimodal bilinguals can speak and sign at the same time (code blend). Normally the signs and words mean the same thing, though occasionally one adds to the meaning of the other. When speaking, for example, some of the words may be accompanied by signs, and vice versa. It is also possible to use both languages simultaneously, a difficult undertaking known as SimCom (Simultaneous Communication) which is used in educational settings.
I find this topic fascinating as I’m learning British Sign Language as the moment. So when I give my presentation on this, I’ll be able to demonstrate a bit of code-blending.
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
One of the seminars I went to this week was on innovation in London English. One interesting point noticed by the researchers was the range of quotatives being used. Quotatives are words and expressions used to introduce reported speech, including “I said” and “she went”.
The most common quotative among young Londoners is “be like”, as in “I was like”, “he was like”, etc. This expression is used with reported speech, and also with sounds and facial expressions indicating different moods and attitudes. There are apparently equivalents of it in many other languages.
A new quotative they found being used in London was “This is me” / “This was me”. I haven’t heard this being used anywhere, have you?
How do you introduce reported speech?
The subject of children playing school came up today in a lecture in the context of how children acquire literacy. The study we were discussing focused on literacy in monolingual English families and polyglot Bangladeshi families in a poor area of London. The researchers found that in the Bangladeshi families it was almost always the older siblings helped their younger siblings with reading, while in the monolingual English families, it was often the parents who helped with reading.
The Bangladeshi children saw reading as something very serious and they all went to classes almost every day after school to learn to read Bengali and Arabic, while the English children saw reading outside school as a fun activity that they enjoyed doing, but didn’t take seriously.
When playing school the Bangladeshi children took it seriously, were strict and imitated their teachers both from their day schools and their evening classes. This involved the younger children reading aloud until they came to a word they didn’t know, which the older children would tell them. The older children also corrected their mistakes. As the younger children became more confident in their reading skills, the older ones gradually removed this supportive scaffolding. This is a technique used in their Bengali and Arabic classes, but quite different to the methods used in the day schools, where the teachers will often simply repeat the words the children have read rather than helping with the next ones.
For the English kids the emphasis when playing school was on the play rather than the school, and it was more popular with the girls than the boys.
Did you play school when you were a kid? Do your children do this? How seriously did you/do they take it?
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
