Double letters in txt msgs

By Simon

This is a guest post by by Siôn Jobbins.

Wrth tecstio yn Gymraeg ar fy ffôn poced dwi’n ceisio osgoi defnyddio llythrennau dwbwl gan fod hynny’n cymryd gormod o amser. Mae’n hawdd peidio dyblu ‘n’ ac ‘r’ (a dweud y gwir, dwi ddim yn deall pam na wnaeth John Morris Jones gael gwared arnyn nhw yn yr 1920, fel y cafodd wared ar ddyblu ‘m’ a ‘t’). Byddaf yn osgoi dyblu ‘d’ ar gyfer y lythyren ‘d’ trwy ddefnyddio’r symbol ð sydd ar allweddell rhif 4 fel arfer ar y ffôn. Mae’n rhaid dyblu ‘l’ ar gyfer ‘ll’. Byddaf hefyd yn defnyddio ‘x’ ar gyfer y swn ‘ch’ gan fod hynny’n gynt.

Ond hoffwn holi, gan fod dyblu llythrennau mor drafferthus wrth ddanfon neges destun, sut mae ieithoedd sy’n llawn llythrennau dwbwl fel Iseldireg, Estoneg neu Ffineg yn mynd i’r afael gyda’r broblem (os ydyn nhw’n ei weld yn broblem wrth gwrs!)? A fyddai gan ddarllenwyr dy flog atebion neu awgrymiadau?

Texting in Welsh I try to avoid doubling letters as it’s a nuicance whilst texting. Not doubling ‘n’ and ‘r’ is easy and I don’t understand why we need them in Welsh in anycase (we got rid of doubling t and m with John Morris Jones’s reforms in the 1920s). I can avoid doubing ‘d’ for the ‘dd’ sound by using the ð symbol which is on the d key, though many Welsh-speakers aren’t familiar with this letter. I can’t find a way of not doubling l to get the ll letter.

This got me thinking how do language with many double letters; Dutch, Estonian or Finnish cope with this problem (if they see it a problem)?

Language quiz

By Simon

Here’s a recording of a song in a mystery language. Any ideas which language it is and where it’s spoken?

[Update] Here are the lyrics of the song:

Ferðist eg í millum landa
Síggi gleði sorg og stríð
Men ein myndin bjørt man standa
Minnir meg um bestu tíð
Ja har heima í tí dali
Har alt grønt og vakurt er
Eg í huga kátur spæli
Meðan skip um sjógvin fer

and here’s a translation:

??? in the midst of bright stars
In the midst of the sound of waves and lambs
Where harsh storms blow
Where no strings tie
Where I’m always free
Where the ocean is a friend
Where I’m free to go somewhere distant
Where fresh ???

Phatic expressions

By Simon

“Well”, “there you are then”, “Oh dear!” and “That’s life!” are all examples of phatic expressions, which are used as conversation openers, to establish and maintain contact with people, to show that you’re listening, and/or to give you time to think of something else to say. They don’t usually have much meaning in themselves. Greetings and farewells are also examples of phatic language.

The term phatic was coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s and comes from the Ancient Greek φατός (fatos) ‘spoken’, from φάναι (fanai) ‘to say’. Other terms for these types of expressions include small talk and grooming talk – one theory is that humans developed phatic language to replace grooming, an activity that takes up quite a lot of time for our ape relatives and ancestors.

If you’re able to use the common phatic expressions in languages you’re learning, you will sound much more fluent. The actual content and usage of phatic expressions various from culture to culture, so just translating such expressions from your mother tongue won’t necessarily work. You need to find out which expressions to use and when to use them.

For those of you learning Chinese, this blog post on phatic communication between Chinese people and Westerners will probably be of interest.

Flashcards

By Simon

When I was at university I used flashcards quite a lot to learn Chinese characters and vocabulary in Chinese and Japanese. After I’d learnt each character, I stuck the cards on the wall and eventually they covered almost ever inch of wallspace. Since then however, I’ve rarely used flashcards. They are quite effective, if you look at them regularly, but for various reasons I thought they weren’t for me.

Recently I’ve decided to give them another chance. This time I’m using Mnemosyne, a downloadable flashcard program, rather than paper flashcards. Some flashcard programs, including Mnemosyne, have a built-in spaced repetition system which
tests you after different periods of time depending on your assessment of how well you know the word/phrase/sentence. This apparently helps you to commit the information to your long-term memory.

So far I’ve entered quite a few sentences in Irish from articles on Beo, an online Irish language magazine. I’m using sentences rather than individual words because this enables me to see how the words and grammar is used in context. I plan to add many more sentences and phrases in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and maybe other languages.

I found a useful site today, the FlashcardExchange, which provides readymade online flashcards for many languages, as well as for other subjects. You can also make your own cards and share them with your friends. Most of this is free, but a one-off fee is payable for some of the services on the site.

Do you use flashcards or flashcard programs? Do you know of any flashcard programs which you can add sound to?

Word of the day – timeboxing

By Simon

I came across the term timeboxing today on this blog. When I first read it, it conjured up images of someone boxing with a clock. Now I know that it’s a technique for managing your time that’s often used for software development projects. It involves setting yourself set ‘boxes’ of time to do things, but not worrying about completing them. Instead you just do as much as you can as well as you can in the time available. Then you use as many more timeboxes as you need to complete the tasks. The aim is to curb perfectionist tendencies by setting a time limit and to avoid overcommiting to a task.

The author of the blog post mentions that he finds it easier to make a start on tedious tasks because he has decided in advance that he’ll stop after a set time. Once he’s conquered the initial inertia of getting started and becomes more focused and interested in the tasks, he might spend longer than originally intended working on them.

This technique could be applied to language learning. You could set yourself a box or boxes of time each day when you’ll study, and study as much as you can manage in that/those time(s). While you might find it difficult to study a whole lesson in the time available, studying part of a lesson is still a useful thing to do.

One of the commenters on the post mentions that he rewards himself each time he completes a period of study. He finds that he rewarding himself in small doses at regular intervals helps him get a lot more done. This idea could be applied to language learning as well – the rewards could be doing something you really enjoy in the language, such as listening to or singing a song or watching a video.

More information about timeboxing.

Devanagari Ligatures in Sanskrit Fonts

By Simon

This is another guest post by Marcis Gasuns.

Namaskar,

It’s been a problem ever since the first font was created and never truly solved until this day. The typefaces used to print Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary or MacDonnell’s Grammars have not been beaten by the PC fonts – they are much weaker. The god of typography is in the small details. And without those nuances, fonts are worthless. Below is an example of Mangal Devanagari Unicode font, installed on every XP, Vista PC:

बहवो न विरोद्घव्या दुर्जयो हि महाजनः।

स्फुरन्तम् अपि नागेन्द्रं भक्षयन्ति पिपीलिकाः॥

No variants are available for vowels (in MSS there are variants for – two for “a”, three for “e” etc.); there are no udatta markers as in Boehtling’s dictionaries, which remain the best Sanskrit dictionaries to this day. Different fonts have different issues.

There is no perfect TrueType or OpenType font at the moment, no matters whether it’s free or commercial. So there are the Unicode Devanagari and non-Unicode Devanagari fonts, from which we have to choose – or one can scan old books and Xerox them. I choose to use imperfect fonts rather than to copy old books.

The Unicode Devanagari fonts don’t support several (Vedic) accent marks and they’re rather low on all kinds of typographic nuances (ligatures like “drsthva” are totally wrong). The best Unicode Devanagari font for Windows available today is Ulrich’s Sanskrit 2003. It does look like the more up-to-date Hindi fonts (which is no good, as we deal with Rigveda and other rarer ancient sacred texts), but it does have a few hundred ligatures. However, as with all the Unicode fonts, it can’t have variants of the same ligature, some of them have up to four known variants, as “la”, for example.

There is an alternative font, called Chandas, containing 4347 glyphs: 325 half-forms, 960 half-forms context-variations, 2743 ligature-signs (which should be enough, to print even Panini’s grammar), but the author, Mihail Bayaryn from Minsk, has abandoned the project and there are still some additional Devanagari marks from the MSS missing there. I have to admit that Ulrich’s font, on which he has worked more than year, looks better when printed, but contains fewer ligatures (so you can’t print Ashthadyayi with any of the Ulrich’s fonts).

So there remain the non-Unicode fonts (some of them even with Mac support). Ulrich is also the author of Sanskrit 99, which has a very interesting counterpart, entitled Ancient Sanskrit 98 with Bombay-Mumbay characters like Ancchar instead of the more common Delhi-Varanasi styled fonts. From a typographical point of view (not web), the best looking fonts are the “French” (called Gudakesha, as found in Bopp, 1816) and “German” (Shantipur, as found in Harvard Oriental Series vol. 14, 1914) fonts that we have created together with Tikhomirov, which have been made public at Ulrich’s website without my allowance, breaking our copyrights (the legal copy can be downloaded here). For 5 years I’ve been looking for each of more than 500 more common ligatures in the Sanskrit books published in Paris, Bonn, Oxford, to find every sign.

In late 2005 the fonts were still not finished, in 2006 they were hinted by Mihail Bayaryn (a private OpenType version was made) and the fonts have never been finished. They are replicas of old book fonts. You can see the history of making of both the fonts at Nagari Sanskrit Group and the second Devanagari font as well, also a specimen.

To put it in a nutshell. If you need an easy-to-type font – Sanskrit 2003 is the one to choose (forget about Mangal installed on Windows XP by default, it’s for Hindi, not for Sanskrit), but if you want to have the Indian flavour – use the unfinished fonts by Marcis Gasuns & Tikhomirov hinted by Mihail Bayaryn, having some of the missing characters from Ancient Sanskrit 98. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi

By Simon

Neithiwr canodd y Côr Meibion Cymraeg Brighton mewn cyngerdd yn Lindfield ger Haywards Heath i ddathlu Dydd Gŵyl Dewi. Roedd tua 150 o bobl yn y cynulleidfa, yn gynnwys cryn dipyn o Gymry, a gwerthfawrogon nhw ein canu a’r gerddoriaeth a ganodd un o’r telynoresau arferol yn fawr. Codon dros mil o bunnau ar gyfer hosbis leol hefyd.

Lá Naomh David

Aréir sheinn an Cór Breatnach Brighton i gceolchoirm i Lindfield in aice le Haywards Heath, Lá Naomh David a cheiliúradh. Bhí 150 de de lucht féachana ann, lena n-áirítear cuid mhaith Breatnaigh, agus bhain siad an-sult as ár amhránaíocht agus ceol na cláirseiche a sheinn aon de ár cláirseachaí féiltiúil. Bhailigh muid níos mó na míle punt ar mhaithe le hospice áitiúla.

St. David’s Day

The Brighton Welsh Male Voice Choir gave a concert last night at Lindfield near Haywards Heath to celebrate St. David’s Day. The audience of 150 or so, which included quite a few Welsh people, seemed to really appreciate our singing, and also the harp playing of one of our regular harpists. We also raised over £1000 for a local hospice.

Name the language

By Simon

Here’s a text in a mystery language. Any ideas which language it is?

Fy vor or er i Chimeri.
Halaght vara nam dit.
La Konungdum din cumma.
La vill din vera guerde
i vrildin sin da er i chimeri.
Gav vus dagh u dagloght brau.
Forgive sindorwara sin vi forgiva gem ao sinda gainst wus.
Lia wus ikè o vera tempa, but delivra wus fro adlu idlu.
For do i ir Kongungdum, u puri, u glori, Amen

Accents of English

By Simon

A website I found today compares how people from many different regions and countries pronounce English words. It also gives the pronunciation of equivalent words in related languages, and in older forms of English and other Germanic languages. The pronunciations are all given in the IPA, and there are recordings of many of the modern words as well.

Shaetlan (Shetlandic)

By Simon

I found an interesting article about Shetlandic (Shaetlan) today entitled Shaetlan is Daed – Lang live Dialect or Shetlandic is dead – Long live Dialect.. It’s available both in Shetlandic and English. It raises some interesting points about the current status of Shetlandic, about relationship between languages and dialects, and the difference between linguistics definitions and popular perceptions of dialects.

Shetlandic is a Germanic language/dialect spoken in Shetland, a group of islands to the northeast of Scotland and to the south of the Faroe Islands. It’s a variety of Scots with Norn influence. Norn was a language derived from Old Norse spoken on Shetland, Orkney and in parts of northern Scotland until the 19th century.

Here are a few extracts:

… when I was young we spoke Shaetlan – we needed the word ‘dialect’ only if we were speaking English, when we would usually call it ‘The Shetland Dialect.’ When we were speaking Shaetlan, the distinction between dialect and language didn’t arise – it was an artefact of translation, a distinction which appeared only when you were looking at Shetlandic from an English-language viewpoint. The word ‘dialect’ implies that one language is a left-over scrap of another language. It’s a purely relative term, which becomes relevant only when you are looking at a language from an external viewpoint.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that an increasing number of people use the word ‘dialect’ to describe the Shetland tongue even when they’re speaking (or writing) Shetlandic.

He goes on to argue that creating a standard spelling system for Shetlandic would be a positive move and would help it to survive. He dismisses claims that such as system would kill off the forms of Shetlandic spoken in different islands; instead people would continue to pronounce words in their own way while writing them in a standard way. Moreover writers would not be forced to give up their idiosyncratic and creative spellings as they claim.

Further information, articles and texts about and/or in Shetlandic are available here.