When you’re very busy, you can say that you’re up to your ears with work, as I was last week with reports, presentations, an essay and lots of reading to do.
In English you can also say that you’re up to your eyes, eyeballs, elbows or neck, snowed under, drowning, swamped, rushed/run off your feet with/in work.
Are there equivalent phrases in other languages?
Yesterday I went to an interesting talk on Japanese mimetic words, which are onomatopoeia (擬声語 giseigo / 擬音語 giongo) or words connected to actions, emotions or states (擬態語 gitaigo). For example, くすくす (kusu kusu) – to giggle,ぐずぐず[する] (guzu guzu [suru]) – to procrastinate or dawdle.
Researchers in Japan have found that Japanese mothers use a much higher proportion of mimetic words with young children (60%) than with adults (10%), and their experiments found that children find mimetic verbs (those that use sound symbolism) easier to learn than non-mimetic verbs. They call this process mimetic bootstrapping. They also tested English-speaking children and adults using Japanese mimetic verbs and found that they were able to guess their meanings above the level of chance.
They also mentioned that mimetic words are not just found in Japanese – they are in fact found in the form similar to gitaigo in many of the worlds languages, though are rare in Indo-European languages.
This is a question I received recently to which I don’t know the answer. Can you help?
Can you please tell me something about Hebrew. I want to know if the Hebrew we get in Biblica Hebraica, which I think is based on the masoretic text, used gender specific pronouns. Are references made to he and she with a different term for each as in English or is only one term used as in Thai?
I particularly need to know if I am correct in thinking that God is referred to with “He” “him” and “his” as the translators of the New Amer. Std. seem to think. Of course, in English, they have no choice. We don’t have a gender neutral term for a human being. So I just need to know what the original Hebrew is like. I hope you know. Thanks.
Gensis 1:27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Here’s a recording in a dialect of English. Do you know or can you guess which dialect this is?
[audio:http://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/blog/quiz161108.mp3]Yesterday I found a useful looking website about Chinese Etymology which shows variant forms of characters including Oracle Bone characters (甲骨文 jiăgŭwén), Bronze characters (金文 jīnwén) and Grass script characters (草書 căoshū). Some characters have many forms in the older versions of the Chinese script – up to 50 or so in some cases.
It also has information about the etymology and history of characters and written Chinese.
Another useful website I came across recently is a Chinese text annotation tool, which adds pop-up annotations containing pinyin transcriptions and English translations when you move your cursor over the characters in a Chinese text. The annotations can be applied to web pages or to Chinese texts pasted in the box on that site.
At the end of the day I personally think it’s not rocket science, and at this moment in time and with all due respect, it absolutely shouldn’t of been a 24/7 nightmare that’s fairly unique.
What on earth am I on about? Well the above sentence contains the top ten most overused phrases in English, according to this blog post. The phrases are listed below in descending order of usage.
These phrases all come from the Oxford English Corpus and the list was compiled by scholars at Oxford University.
Do you use/avoid these phrases? Are there other phrases that you think are overused?
A visitor to Omniglot has contacted me on behalf of a relative who recently moved to Israel. The relative is finding Hebrew a very challenging language to learn and is looking for an alternative to Ulpan, the total immersion courses for immigrants to Israel. Any suggestions?
An article I found in The Jerusalem Post reports that 60% of immigrants to Israel who are over 30 finish their initial Ulpan courses consisting of 500 hours of instruction without fully mastering Hebrew. Many such immigrants are unable to find work, or have difficulties doing so. The article dates from 2006, and I haven’t been able to find any more recent ones on this problem.
Have any of you been through the Ulpan system, or something similar in other countries?
Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?
[audio:http://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/blog/quiz091108.mp3]I did some research on grammatical gender for my bilingualism class today which was similar to the experiment I tried out here last week.
The victims participants were all native speakers of Welsh and we asked them to assign male or female voices to inanimate objects, some of which are usually associated with men – (beard, hammer, screwdriver); some are usually associated with women (brooch, dress, needle); while others are semantically neutral (clock, table, television). We were trying to see whether they would be guided by the semantic or Welsh grammatical gender, and in most cases they went with the semantic gender, except for the neutral objects, for which some of them followed the Welsh genders.
Apart from the assignment of genders, I found it interesting that most of the participants learnt Welsh first and only started learning English from the age of 4 or 5, i.e. when they started school. This is quite common in this part of Wales. We also asked them estimate the percentage of Welsh and English they use. Some said they use both languages equally, others use Welsh far more than English -up to 90% of the time.
The Welsh word rhewlif was mentioned during Iolo Willams’ programme, Byd Iolo, on Radio Cymru yesterday. At first I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, but then I realised the word was a compound of rhew (frozen) and llif (flood) and guessed that it meant glacier. He was in Patagonia at the time, so the context helped. It’s great when you can work out what a word means without having to look it up.
Another Welsh word for glacier is afon iâ (ice river). The equivalent in Irish is oighearshruth (ice river/flow) and in Chinese it’s 冰川 (bīng chuān) – ice river.
The English word glacier comes from the France glacier, which is apparently from Savoy dialect word glacière (moving mass of ice) and is related to glace (ice).