2013/03/22 8:30
Scot Independence Podcast 19 is an interesting chat with Michael Hance from the Scots Language Centre. At one point they discuss what should be done to improve the prospects for Scots, and one thing Michael stresses is that schools should stop telling kids Scots words are wrong. I have a lot of sympathy for this view, but as a foreign...
2012/11/28 23:46
When I was a linguistics fresher back in 1990, we were told a well-known anecdote about the early days of machine translation: When the sentence "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (an allusion to Mark 14:38) was translated into Russian and then back to English, the result was "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten".I...
2013/04/13 10:57
Many years ago, somebody told me that Yle (the Finnish Broadcasting Company) were broadcasting weekly in Latin. However, in those pre-Internet days I had no idea how to find a way to listen to it.
These days things are much easier.
Yle have created a webpage containing podcasts, so that we can all easily get our weekly five minutes of Latin.
I must say, however, that the presenters sound very Finnish. I also find it interesting that they pronounce ‘c’ as /k/ before front vowels while at the same time pronouncing ‘ae’ as /ɛ/ — I would have thought that would be a somewhat unlikely combination.
2013/03/16 22:01
[caption id="attachment_5455" align="alignright" width="150"]" today, I learnt that it's expressed as bu chòir do "it's proper for".With that information in hand, it didn't take me long to find a BBC blog page which gives the question as Am bu chòir do dh'Alba a bhith na dùthaich neo-eisimeilich?Although I have no way to verify it, this looks correct to me. The structure is as follows:(I'm not entirely sure about the na. I believe it means "in her" here -- "in his"...
2013/03/11 20:30
Burns wrote his poems in Scots, but he generally used English orthography.For instance, here's a bit of Auld Lang Syne together with its pronunciation in IPA (thanks to Wikipedia):It's not obviously if you don't know Scots that hand and right should be pronounced at /ho̜ːn/ and /rɪxt/ (rather than RP /hænd/ and /raɪt/) -- one might (wrongly) assume that only...
2012/11/13 10:35
Most of the people I follow on Twitter tweet in English, and so do I most of the time.However, I often retweet stuff written in other languages, and I do also from time to time tweet in Danish and occasionally...
2012/11/09 20:29
The orthography of the Danish language is regulated by Dansk Sprognævn through their official orthographical dictionary, "Retskrivningsordbogen".Any revisions take effect as soon as a new edition is published, so if you're keen to spell correctly, you have to learn the...
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