One aim of the project is to make the UDHR more accessible, especially to people who are illiterate or visually impaired. They already recordings of the UDHR in over 85 languages
You can see the translations and hear the recordings on their web app. You can also submit recordings.
This site could also be useful to language learners, as it provides texts and recordings in many different languages. You can read and listen to the texts on the UHRI site, with parallel texts in other languages on this site.
I have now been learning Icelandic for a couple of weeks, and am still on Lesson 1 in Colloquial Icelandic. I’m in no hurry, and just want to learn the basics, at least at first, so my lack of progress doesn’t worry me.
There seem to be quite a few ways to greet people in Icelandic. These include:
– Halló
– Góðan dag(inn) = Good day
– Komdu sæll og blessaður (>m) = “Come joyful and blesed”
– Komdu sæl og blessað (>f) = “Come joyful and blessed”
– Komdu sæll (>m), Komdu sæl (>f)
– Sæll (>m), Sæl (>f)
– Sæll vertu (>m), Sæl vertu (>f)
– Blessaður (>m), Blessað (>f)
Goodbyes include:
– Vertu blessaður (>m), Vertu blessuð (>f) = “Be blessed”
– Vertu sæll (>m), Vertu sæl (>f) = “Be joyful”
– Bless á meðan = “Bye as long as”
– Bless bless = Bye bye
– Bless = Bye
– Við sjáumst = “We (will) see each other again”
– Sjáumst síðar = See you later
This weekend I visited Rochester in Kent for first time, and had a nice day exploring the town. Among its historic buildings, which include an impressive Norman castle, there is the French Hospital. This was founded in 1718 to provide accommodation for Hugenots (French protestants), fleeing religious persecution in France. It now provides sheltered accommodation for elderly descendents of those Hugenots.
I also visited the nearby Hugenot Museum, which is very interesting.
One question that is apparently often asked, is where does the name Hugenot come from?
There are various answers to this, but nobody knows which is correct.
The Hugenots in fact referred to themselves, at least early on, as members of L’Église Réformée (the Reformed Church).
The most credible theories are:
– It is derived from the Flemish Huisgenooten (House fellows), and/or the Swiss German Eidgenosen (confederate), and also possibly from the name of Hugues Besançon, a leader of the Genevan partisans.
– They are named after King Hugo’s Gate in Tours, which was reputedly haunted by Le Roy Huget.
– They are named after Hugh Capet (941-996), the first King of the Franks of the House of Capet.
Apparently my surname, Ager, is a Huguenot name, though there is no Huguenot connections in the family history, as far as I’m aware.
The following useful sentence came up in one of the Russian Duolingo lessons I went through today:
У неё меньше кошек, и это хорошо.
This means, “She has fewer cats, and that is good.”
To me this suggests a whole backstory:
There once was a woman who had really liked cats. Her family always had cats when she was growing up, and when she had a place of her own, she got a couple of kittens. When they grew up, one of them had kittens, and the woman liked them so much, she couldn’t bear to part with them, so she kept all four of them. She also took in cats from animal shelters, and before long her house was full of them. Her friends were worried about her as she spent all her money on her cats, and spent most of her time with them. They offered to find alternative homes for the cats, and eventually persuaded her to give some of them away. She has fewer cats now, and that is good. The End.
Now, if I could just write that all in Russian, it would be a very useful exercise.
Does the Russian sentence suggest anything to you?
The cats in the photo are my sister’s, when they were kittens. The ginger one is Fletcher, and the black and white one is Smudge.
Last week I learnt a lovely new word – huffkin – which is apparently a traditional type of bread roll from Kent in the southeast of England (see photo).
According to A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms, a huffkin, or hufkin, is “A kind of bun or light cake, which is cut open, buttered, and so eaten.” Such rolls were traditionally served at a hopkin, a supper for hop pickers.
Kent is an area of the UK I know quite well, as some of my relatives live there, and my dad grew there. However, I didn’t know anything about the local dialect, until now.
I couldn’t find any etymology for huffkin, but guess that the -kin part is a diminutive. It comes from the Middle Dutch -ken, and is used in words like catkin, bodkin, manikin, munchkin, pumpkin and napkin, and can also used with names – Jenkin(s), Simkin(s), Hopkin(s), Watkin(s) [source].
Other interesting Kentish dialect words I found include:
– joskin = a farm labourer (particularly a driver of horses, or carter’s mate), engaged to work the whole year round for one master
– galligaskins = trousers
– strooch = to drag the feet along the ground in wallking
– hopkin = supper for the work-people, after the hop-picking is over
– huffle = a merry meeting; a feast
Few people speak Kentish dialect anymore. You can hear a sample on the Survey of English Dialects, and on the video below:
The name Kent comes from the Old English Cent, from the Latin Cantium, from the Brythonic *Cantio. In Welsh it is Caint.
What’s the connecting between the words filibuster and freebooter?
The answer is, they both come from the same Dutch word vrijbuiter [ˈvrɛi̯bœy̯tər] (plunderer, robber), from vrij (free), buit (booty) and -er (agent suffix).
A freebooter as originally “an adventurer who pillages, plunders or wages ad-hoc war on other nations”, and apparently also means “one who rehosts online media without authorization”. It is a calque translation from Dutch, and was first recorded in English in the 1560s [source].
A filibuster originally meant “a mercenary soldier; specifically, a mercenary who travelled illegally in an organized group from the United States to a country in Central America or the Spanish West Indies in the mid-19th century seeking economic and political benefits through armed force”. Over time it also came to mean, “A tactic (such as giving long, often irrelevant speeches) employed to delay the proceedings of, or the making of a decision by, a legislative body, particularly the United States Senate”.
Filibuster was first recorded in English in the 1580s as flibutor. It was borrowed from the Spanish filibustero (pirate), from French flibustier (pirate), from the Dutch vrijbuiter.
Filibustering freebooters! sounds like the kind of curse Captain Haddock uses in the Tintin stories. He does in fact say Filibuster(s)! and Fancy-dress freebooter!, but not Filibustering freebooters!, as far as I can discover.
The French exclamation C’est inouï ! means “It’s incredible!”.
The word inouï [inwi] means unprecedented, incredible, unheard-of, extraordinary, amazing. It is a combination of the negative prefix in- and ouï, which comes from ouïr (to hear, to listen), from the Old French oir (to hear, listen), from Latin audiō (I hear, listen, pay attention), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ew-is-d-, a compound of *h₂ewis (clearly, manifestly) and *dʰh₁-ye/o- (to render) [source].
A friend told me last week that the TGV (le train à grande vitesse), France’s high-speed rail service, is being rebranded the inOui. In fact, inOui is the new name, introduced in 2017, for certain premium services on the TGV. All premium services will be known as inOUi by 2020. The name Ouigo was introduced for discount TGV services in 2013 [source].
The name inOui has been mocked and criticised by many.
Ouigo works in English as well (We go), but I’m sure English speakers will be joking about inOui, if they aren’t already.
