This is the thread for Kalman to argue endlessly with people about languages.
The Language Thread
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Frisian would be a Nederlandified English.
Frisian is a language of its own, it’s not a mix of two other languages. I think it’s tempting to do that, to say this language is “between” this one and that one, or some kind of amalgamation, but I think that is because of geographic proximity. Like some people say Dutch is a mix of English and German, which is nonsense.
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Like some people say Dutch is a mix of English and German, which is nonsense.
Yes, it’s clearly a mix between Danish and German.
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Like some people say Dutch is a mix of English and German, which is nonsense.
Yes, it’s clearly a mix between Danish and German.
With a hint of cinnamon.
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Iona Fyfe, a Scottish singer, tried to upload one of her songs to Spotify, and apparently one of the things you need to specify is the language of the song. This song was in “Scots”, which isn’t in Spotify’s list of languages. She began badgering Spotify to rectify this, and was soon joined by a host of other artists, academics, and politicians, all lobbying for “Scots” to be recognised as an official language. The matter was even raised in the Scotish Parliament.
It seem that she won, and Scots is now recognised by Spotify. So if you want to sing in Scots (and be paid 0.0000001p for your efforts) you now can.
To be clear: this is Scots, not Scottish Gaelic, which is a different language entirely. Many people argue that Scots is just a dialect of English, though the rules for when a dialect becomes a separate language are not strictly codified. I can mostly understand written Scots (I would probably struggle with it spoken by, for example, a Glaswegian, but I can’t understand them even when they speak English
) but a lot of it is by guesswork — there are a lot of different words. Enough to make it a new language? I don’t know… -
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Yes, it’s clearly a mix between Danish and German. With a hint of cinnamon.
no it is a mix between Danish and Belgian(waffle)
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Frisian would be a Nederlandified English.
Frisian is a language of its own, it’s not a mix of two other languages. I think it’s tempting to do that, to say this language is “between” this one and that one, or some kind of amalgamation, but I think that is because of geographic proximity. Like some people say Dutch is a mix of English and German, which is nonsense.
What I meant was that Old English and Old Frisian were closer to each other then either of them was to Old Nederlands, so without William the Conqueror, Frisian would look like and sound like a mixture of English and Nederlands to the kind of people who would say things like that.
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So I am at an intermediate level in my understanding and reading of Portuguese. Then I went to try to understand the news and a soap opera in Brazil and I can say that I understood 75%. It is a matter of more exposure and concentration when watching those shows. They spoke too fast for me, to be honest.
If I was there (well, not these days because of Covid) and immersed in it 24/7, I would be fluent in a short time.
One thing about these Latin based (Romantic) languages like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc… is know the grammar, know the conjugation rules and tenses, build up on the verbs, and then build up the vocabulary and practice a LOT…
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Was listening to a conversation between comedian Elis James and singer Gwenno today on a BBC podcast, one where James conducts chats in Welsh about being bilingual (although that’s a bit of a loose theme, it’s mostly just a chat about their lives). Anyway she was born in Cardiff and was raised speaking both Welsh and Cornish. Her dad is a poet from Cornwall and it was interesting that she said that she and her sister are probably the only two women in the world fluent in both languages.
I checked and the numbers for Cornish and she’s probably right, there are only 557 people who can speak it fluently (but over 3000 who can carry out basic sentences). To give some contrast for numbers for Welsh that would be around 80o,000 fluent and around 3 million for basic sentences or Irish would be 170,000 and 1.7m.
I didn’t actually know much about Gwenno who sings in both languages (and English) so checked her Wiki page and found out she was the lead singer of the Pipettes. I know of the Pipettes solely because their song ‘Pull Shapes’ was the focus for an issue of Phonogram by Gillen and McKelvie. Small world connections.
It’s also amazing when numbers are so small what an influence one album can have: In October 2018 the Cornish Language Board claimed that Gwenno Saunders’ album Le Kov had contributed to a 15% increase in the number of people taking Cornish language exams during 2018
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I remember standing at the grave of the last native speaker of Cornish a few years back on a trip through Cornwall.
It’s interesting, with these languages that used to be extinct and are now revived. There really is no way of knowing whether they really got the pronunciation right in the revival, for example. But then of course, we can assume that the pronunciation was subject to regional and historical changes anyway.
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Yes that’s true. I personally don’t think it matters that much though.
Cornish did go extinct and was then revived from written records so we’ll never really know (unlike Welsh and Irish which have had setbacks but retained a constant presence) but really we’re not that sure in the days before the wax cylinder really how people pronounced things in any language. Even in recorded times we have accents in British and American English from say the 1950s that no longer really exist and new ones created (like estuary English or Ebonics).
There’s an interesting Stephen Fry bit on Room 101 where he bemoans the introduction of the “Australian Upward Inflection” in a lot of British people which was apparently inspired by the popularity of Aussie soaps in the late 80s and early 90s. It basically changed statements into sounding like questions by lifting the tone at the end that never happened before. I remember a young guy of Indian origin but calling from London in my days working in a call centre and his sentences were like: So I went into the bank? And then I put my card in the machine? It spat the card out?
(Me quietly seething with ‘where’s the fucking question here?’).
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I like Mitchell but I am never giving much heed to a monoglot Englishman on this subject. He probably doesn’t realise it and believes that his soapbox is amusing new insight but all he’s saying is a list of well worn cliches.
Firstly the cost – Wales operates bilingually on much the same public budgets as the rest of the UK. In fact even in the private sector, my first ever job was providing banking services bilingually and I got paid the same as everyone else. The only cost to the company, which is a massive multinational and makes annual profits in the billions, was a couple of hundred pounds on the phone routing. I’m not going to lie that it’s all free but the billions the UK government has pissed up the wall on PPE that doesn’t work would cover it for a few hundred years.
Secondly the view that language is purely for communication is only really held by those with a single dominant language. The majority of the world who are at least bilingual understand the cultural and artistic value of knowing other languages. Does he ask if the hundreds of thousands of Welsh speakers are fluent in English why they choose to converse with each other in another language? It’s because they see a value and joy beyond simple ability to communicate which he as a writer should understand, his work is full of essentially redundant duplicate words used because of what they add to the ‘richness of the prose’ – i.e. it’s not solely communication, it’s art.
Thirdly the ‘natural selection’ part of his argument completely ignores all the moves from his compatriots to often deliberately kill them off. Scots Gaelic was hugely damaged by the highland clearances, Welsh pupils were punished and humiliated for speaking the language in Victorian times. They decreed it illegal for court proceedings to be in Celtic languages so people were unable to defend themselves unless they spoke English.
Lastly – there’s an inherent fallacy in the ‘more useful language’ element. Being raised bilingually makes it easier to learn further languages, not harder. It’s not an either/or scenario. As well as Welsh I learnt a modern language in school (French in my case) and left with the top exam grade of A as did every other student in my class – in a standard state school feeding from areas with below UK average earnings. We were taught French in Welsh as the Celtic tongues are closer in structure to the Romance languages, taught German in English because they are both Germanic structures. There’s also opportunity of usage, my French has fallen away because although over a hundred million people may speak it my life hasn’t really coincided with meeting many of them. So if you go and teach the population of Orkney to speak Hindi they in theory have the ability to speak it to 600m people but it’d largely be an even bigger waste of time and money because they’d never use it unless all their future jobs happened to be in diplomatic or business roles with northern India. Even then the middle class Indians in those roles can almost certainly all speak fluent English, that was my experience of working there.
So I guess you can gather I’m not a big fan of that soapbox entry. 😂
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This is a cool project. Two youth organisations Urdd Gobaith Cymru in Wales and TG Lurgan in Ireland produced a bilingual Irish/Welsh song and video while obviously kept apart due to Covid.
It’s easy for me but see if you can work out which singers are singing which language.
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I didn’t get it all, but it was obvious that the first male singer was singing in German
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This is interesting, you’ll notice (ignoring the Greek and Russian as I can’t read those alphabets) that Irish and Welsh differ in creating translations for a new word. In Welsh it is ‘hun = self’ and ‘llun-picture’. Lorcan can help me on the Irish but I can kind of work out it is doing the same thing.
I suspect it’s a reaction to the fact that every speaker is also fluent in English. Language is not just about communication but more about culture, as each new word comes into usage a committee creates a translation.
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The Greek and Russian are both “selfi”
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This is the site that gave me unpreparedly
https://www.bsarkari.com/selficko/meaning-english-czech/37633
That site is weird…it gives a few other translations as well and they’re all wrong. Reminds me of Monty Python’s Hungarian dictionary sketch.
edit: When looking up words through the “dictionaries” links below, they seem to be mostly correct. Weird.
2nd edit: hmm. Now I see the correct translations are there, but they are two lines above the wrong one. Like it says “francouzský paradox” and the translation next to it say “exogamous” but if you look two lines above that it says “french paradox” which is correct.
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The old English name for Instanbul is Mickleyard. In old Slavic languages it used to be called something like Tsargrad, or Carihrad (“city of emperors”.) A name still used in some languages is Constantinopolis, or a form thereof. The old name Byzantion or Byzantium is also still used in some languages.
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Mickleyard
Similar to the old Norse name, Miklagård.
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Nowadays “gård” has the same meaning as the english “yard” (as in courtyard or farmyard).
Earlier, it seems to have refered to the actual fence or wall surrounding the yard.
But it could also be used for a village or castle (presumably surrounded by a fence or wall).
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A name still used in some languages is Constantinopolis
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I learned the Swedish and the Latvian word for computer is the same namely “dators”. That’s interesting, I know Latvia used to be Swedish at one point. Baltic history gives me a headache, it is very convoluted. There are German, Scandinavian, Polish and Russian influences that intertwine. And even some Dutch ( traders that settled there.)
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In itself a shortening of the word “datamaskin”, I think you can see what that means.
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So, you think you are a good reporter? Top this dude! pic.twitter.com/t01HKKGFdU
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 22, 2022
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The last syllable is not silent, it’s like a “ruh” sound.
It’s difficult because it’s not quite a full syllable but a definite enunciated sound as you end the word. Those subtle sounds are some of the hardest things to get right as a non-native speaker, especially when there’s no real equivalent in your own language.
After decades of speaking French I still struggle with stuff like citrouille because my mouth just isn’t used to making those sounds.
Isn’t that something like see-troo-yuh…There’s definitely a little sound there at the end. I think in linguistics the vowel is called a “schwa”. Like the sound between t and m at the end of rhythm.
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Dutch and standard Flemish are pretty much the same language (officially Flemish is a dialect of Dutch, or rather a few different dialects because there are big local linguistic differences in Flanders. West Flemish is a very different dialect, while I understand standard Flemish 100 % West Flemish is gobbledigook for me.)
The big difference between Flemish and Dutch is the pronunciation of g. Dutch has this harsh phlegmy sound, whereas Flemish is much softer, like ch in German ich. They use the same softer g sound in the South of the Netherlands. Also they form diminutives differently, by adding -ke at the end of a word instead of -je which we do in Dutch. For instance “a little book” would be boekje in Dutch and boekske in Flemish. That’s pretty much the only things where standard Dutch and standard Flemish are different.
West Flemish is also still spoken by some people in the North West corner of France, around Dunkirk (Duinkerken in Dutch).
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