Fabricating fonts

By Simon

Last week I discovered a very useful site – Fontstruct. It has easy-to-use tools for constructing fonts; you can share your fonts in the online font gallery, though you don’t have to; and you can also download and edit fonts created by other users of the site. Once you’ve signed up to the site, which is free, you can start making fonts. The finished fonts can be saved on the site and downloaded.

I’ve started constructing a font for an alphabet losely based on British Sign Language finger spelling that I’ve been playing with for a while. I’ll post it on Omniglot once I’m satisfied with it. This may take quite a while though.

[Update] My finger spelling-based alphabet, which I named ‘Fingers’, is now online.

Listening is the key

By Simon

A researcher in New Zealand has found evidence that extensive listening to a foreign language makes a big difference to your ability to learn and understand the language, according to this article.

It doesn’t matter that if you don’t understand anything at first – your brain will automatically make the necessary neural connections it needs to process the unfamiliar sounds and combinations of sounds, just as it does when you’re acquire your native language. Without such connections it is very hard to remember new words. The more you listen to the language, the easier it becomes to learn new words and to understand the language.

This is something I’ve long suspected, and I use this technique in my own language learning. For example, when my first attempt to learn Welsh about 10 years ago wasn’t very successful. I worked my way through Teach Yourself Welsh a couple of times listening to the lessons and reading the notes. At that time I didn’t have any opportunities to hear or speak Welsh, and soon forgot most of what I’d learned. A few years later I started listening to Radio Cymru regularly, and when I had another go at learning the language I made much more progress.

Learning languages – the Myngle experience

By Simon

Today we have a guest post by Hala Masreya from Egypt.

This post is for everyone who is interested in learning languages. My name is Hala and I am currently active as a teacher on a language e-learning platform called Myngle. I would like to share with you my experience as an online language teacher.

I first started teaching languages online 7 years ago. Some of my friends wanted to learn Arabic but had difficulties finding the time, the place and the qualified teacher to do so. I decided I could teach them over the internet but, due to the lack of innovative technology, this wasn’t all that easy.

A year ago I discovered Myngle. Using VOIP and online classrooms I really enjoy teaching online. With online one-to-one classrooms, you can give your full attention to a student and see on which points he/she need to focus. Students really seem to appreciate this new way to learn and the great thing is that I am now teaching students who I’ve met in real life and then returned to their own country.

Apart from being a teacher I am also a student. Since I started to take language classes online I have learned to speak Italian and Latin, both from very qualified and friendly teachers and now I see why the students like it so much!

Learning a language online generates a lot of advantages:

– you can take classes wherever and whenever
– you can choose the teacher/student that appeals to you the most
– you can take contact with native speakers and all the cultures of the world

And I especially enjoy Myngle: here students and teachers are really enthusiastic they are constantly engaged in improving users experience and making e-learning better and easier to use.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this and I hope to see you soon as my students on Myngle!

Word of the day – thetatismus

By Simon

Thetatismus is apparently a term used in speech therapy to describe the inability to pronounce one or both of the dental fricatives: /θ/ as in three, and /ð/, as in these.

I came across it in Anthony Burgess’s book A Mouthful of Air – Language, Languages … Especially English.

So now I know what I ’suffered’ from when I was a lad – I couldn’t pronounce /θ/ and didn’t know there was a difference between /θ/ and /f/, so didn’t distinguish between three and free. I also substituted /v/ for /ð/ when it appeared in the middle of words. Even now pronouncing /θ/ is not entirely natural for me and I tend to say /f/ instead when I’m not concentrating.

Language mainly a cultural phenomenon

By Simon

A report I found the other day suggests that language is most likely to be mainly a cultural phenomenon and that any genetic underpinnings for language probably pre-date the emergence of human language.

Researchers in the UK and USA modelled how aspects of language might have been encoded genetically and concluded that this was very unlikely to have occured given the way human culture changes. For linguistic traits to become encoded in the genes they have to provide a selective advantage and there has to be a stable language envirnoment. Human languages change too quickly for this to happen, and modern humans haven’t existed for long enough either. Therefore they believe that language evolved culturally and that the existence of a genetic language module is unlikely.

They also argue that if human populations in different parts of the world had evolved separate, incompatible language modules, they wouldn’t be able to learn one another’s languages. This is obviously not the case.

Word of the day – cuddle

By Simon

Cuddle is an example of a false friend or cognate – it has one meaning in English (to hold (sb or sth) close; a close embrace) and one in Welsh (a hiding place). The pronunciation is different in each language: in English it’s /ˈkʌd.ḷ/ and in Welsh it’s /ˈkɨðlɛ/ or /ˈkɪðlɛ/.

The English word is a variant or cull or coll (to embrace,) which possibly comes from the Middle English couthelen from couth (known).

The Welsh word comes from cudd (hiding, concealment, hiding place; concealed, hidden) and lle (place).

Related words include:
cuddfa / cuddfan – hiding place, retreat, hoard
cuddiad – concealment
cuddiedig – hidden, concealed
cuddio – to hide, cover, bury
cuddiwr – hider
cuddlen – curtain, veil
cuddserch – fondness, affection
cuddswyddog – detective

Animated Chinese character dictionary

By Simon

Arch Chinese is a very useful site I came across the other day. It includes a Chinese character dictionary which provides animations showing how to write six thousand traditional and six thousand simplified Chinese characters, and gives you pinyin pronunciation (with audio recordings), stroke counts, English translations and examples of words and phrases that use each character. You can search characters by pronunciation, radical, English words, etc.

It can also character worksheets in PDF format, converts pinyin with tone numbers to pinyin with diacritics, and keeps track of the characters you’ve studied. You can even add your own characters and phrases, and import and export word lists to/from the flashcard function.