Omniglot News (14/11/21)

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There’s a new constructed script on Omniglot this week called Abbekosima, which can be used to write English and Russian, and was inspired by the Japanese, Chinese and Korean scripts.

Sample text in Abbekosima in Russian

There are new language pages in:

East Frisian (Ōstfräisk), or East Frisian Low Saxon, a mixture of Eastlauwers Frisian, Low German, Dutch and French that is spoken in northern Germany.
Moloko (Ma Mǝloko), a Chadic language spoken in the Far North Province of Cameroon.
Wanetsi (وڼېڅي), an Eastern Iranian language spoken in southwest Pakistan.
Sukuma (Kɪsukuma), a northeast Bantu language spoken in northern Tanzania.
Migaama (mìgáàmá), an East Chadic language spoken in central Chad.

There’s also a new numbers page in: Migaama.

There’s a new phrases page in: Tamasheq (Tafaghist), a Berber language spoken in parts of Mali and Burkina Faso.

The Celtiadur post this week is about words for words, calls and cries in Celtic languages.

This week on the Omniglot blog there’s a post about IndyLan, a EU-funded project to promote and teach languages such as Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Northern Saami, Basque and Galician. There’s a post called Misdirection about directional words such as upward, downward and awkward – read it to find out which direction awkward is, and the usual Language Quiz

The mystery language in last week’s language quiz was Blang (Pu Lang), a Palaungic language spoken in southern China, and northern Myanmar / Burma and northern Thailand.

This week’s Adventure in Etymology looks at the origins of the word nogging, which should not be confused with noggin, although they might be related.

I also made improvements to the Marwari language page.

Last week I wrote a blog post inspired by the Welsh idiom Mae e’n cadw draenog yn ei boced, which means that he is careful with his money, or literally “he keeps a hedgehog in his pocket”. This inspired me to write a new song this week called Pocket Hedgehogs. You can also hear this on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube: