Inscripció dels emporitans, a photo by Sebastià Giralt on Flickr.

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.

Stooshie an Stramash, a photo by Scots Language Centre on Flickr.

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 learner of Scots I have some concerns, too.

When I moved to Scotland in 2002, I couldn’t understand half of my Scottish colleagues at all (the other half had such a posh pronunciation that I could just about follow what they were saying). It only lasted a few weeks before I was more or less able to understand them, but it just shows that a strong Scottish pronunciation of English (we’re not talking about Scots here!) is enough to complete confound a foreigner. It’s also obvious that my parents are still struggling to understand their daughter-in-law and their grandchildren (when they aren’t speaking Danish, of course), although they have such a posh pronunciation that some Scots think they’re English.

After getting used to the Scottish pronunciation of English, building up a decent vocabulary of Scots work took a long time (and there are still many I don’t know).

The reason I’m mentioning this is because Scottish people often forget how hard is is to understand Scots if you haven’t lived in Scotland. It can be very difficult even if you’re a native speaker of English, and it’s practically impossible if you’re a non-native speaker.

If we start encouraging young people to speak Scots in public, the effect will be that they will find it harder and harder to use their language abroad. It would be a bit absurd if Scotland became the only place in Europe where nobody speaks English.

I guess the solution would be to encourage Scots/English bilingualism. I’m not sure whether that should be done through English-as-a-foreign-language lessons at school, or whether there’s another way.

I guess Scotland could learn some lessons from Switzerland:

Unlike most regional languages in modern Europe, Swiss German is the spoken everyday language of all social levels in industrial cities, as well as in the countryside. Using dialect conveys neither social nor educational inferiority and is done with pride. There are only a few specific settings where speaking Standard German is demanded or polite, e.g., in education (but not during breaks in school lessons, where the teachers will speak in dialect with students), in multilingual parliaments (the federal parliaments and a few cantonal and municipal ones), in the main news broadcast or in the presence of German-speaking foreigners. This situation has been called a “medial diglossia”, since the spoken language is mainly the dialect, whereas the written language is mainly Standard German.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

I had this idea that the way to express “should” would be through some obscure verb form, but when I finally looked it up in my copy of “Scottish Gaelic in Three Months” 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:

Am	bu	chòir	do dh’	Alba	a bhith	na	dùthaich	neo-eisimeilich
Q	is	proper	for	Scotland	to be		country	independent

(I’m not entirely sure about the na. I believe it means “in her” here — “in his” would lenite the following word, and the genitive form of the definitely article would require the genitive form of dùthaich — and I suspect it’s here to bind together the infinitive with the rest, but I must admit I don’t remember the details.)

If the government provided ballot papers in Gaelic, too, they would presumably then look as follows:

Am bu chòir do dh’Alba a bhith na dùthaich neo-eisimeilich?

• Bu chòir
• Cha bu chòir

I wonder whether it would change the number of Yes and No votes if the question in English had been “Is it proper for Scotland to be an independent country?” too…

For instance, here’s a bit of Auld Lang Syne together with its pronunciation in IPA (thanks to Wikipedia):

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?	ʃɪd o̜ːld ə.kwɛn.təns bi fəɾ.ɡot, ən nɪ.vəɾ brɔxt tɪ məin? ʃɪd o̜ːld ə.kwɛn.təns bi fəɾ.ɡot, ən o̜ːl lɑŋ səin?
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere ! and gie’s a hand o’ thine ! And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught, for auld lang syne.	ən ðeːrz ə ho̜ːn, mɑ trʌs.tɪ fiːɾ! əŋ ɡiːz ə ho̜ːn ə ðəin! ən wiːl tak ə rɪxt ɡɪd wʌ.lɪ wo̜ːxt, fəɾ o̜lː laŋ səin.

NY – Albany: Washington Park – Burns Monument, a photo by wallyg on Flickr.

Sadly, these days even Scots find it hard to liberate themselves from English when they recite or sing the Bard’s poems.

For instance, if you go to BBC’s page about A man’s a man for a’ that, there are a good number of renditions of the poem. However, none of them are likely to resemble how Burns himself would have pronounced it. Even fairly basic words such as head is pronounced as /hɛd/ rather than /hid/ by most of them.

Have we got to the point where most people in Scotland are unable to pronounce the words shared between English and Scots in Scots rather than English when they haven’t been spelt in a way to indicate the difference? If so, somebody needs to republish Rabbie Burns’s poems in Scots orthography before people get irrevocably used to the English pronunciation.

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 vaguely remember trying out this sentence in the early days of Google Translate, with amusing result.

However, I recently decided to try it again, and imagine my surprise when I realised that Google Translate can translate this exact phrase into any of the available languages and back into English without making a single error.

The obvious explanation is that Google must have added Mark 14:38 to the training corpus to ensure that nobody mocks them for getting it wrong.

It’s only this specific sentence that it handles this well. As soon as you start moving the words around or adding extra words, the quality of the translation decreases. For instance, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” becomes “Ånden er rede, men kødet er skrøbeligt” when translated into Danish, but “The spirit in the bottle is willing, but the flesh in the box is weak” becomes “Ånden i flasken er villig, men kødet i boksen er svag”. I’m not saying this translation is bad, but I find it interesting how it suddenly becomes unable to add the neuter -t to svag, although it managed perfectly well to add it to skrøbelig.

It’s quite interesting to investigate how Google Translate handles the individual words in this sentence. For instance, in the case of translating “spirit”, it appears the singular normally triggers the soul sense, whereas the plural triggers the alcohol sense. The result is that “The house of the spirits” gets translated into Danish as “Huset af spiritus” (“The house of alcohol”) rather than the expected “Åndernes hus”.

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 Spanish myself. This shouldn’t cause any issues for those of my followers who know the same languages as me, but if you only speak English, it must be a tad annoying to see your Twitter stream filling up with gibberish.

In theory I could set up separate Twitter accounts for all the languages I’m likely to tweet in, but that would be a complete mess. Not only would I need to flit back and forwards from one account to another, but it would appear that I had fewer followers than I do, and many people would only follow one of my language personas, even if they would be capable of following more.

I think Twitter should consider adding languages to the user interface, even if it would make it slightly more complex. This would involve adding language capabilities to the user profiles (allowing you to list the languages you can read) and tagging each tweet with a language (presumably everybody would have a default tweeting language). Twitter would then hide tweets written in languages that you cannot read.

I think this would really make life easier for the multilingual twitterers out there.

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 changes immediately.

The changes introduced today include the following:

1. Abolishing alternative forms that correspond to pronunciations that aren’t used any more:
   • Baskerlandet or Baskien > Baskerlandet
   • federal or føderal > føderal
   • langust or languster > languster
   • taifun or tyfon > tyfon
   • øjelåg or øjenlåg > øjenlåg
   • roastbeef or rostbøf > roastbeef
   • billiondel or billiontedel > billiontedel
2. Abolishing simplified spellings of loanwords that haven’t caught on:
   • croquis or kroki > croquis
   • håndmikser > håndmikser or håndmixer
   • jogurt or yoghurt > yoghurt
   • krep or crepe > crepe
   • majonæse or mayonnaise > mayonnaise
3. Introducing an alternative ending -ie for some words ending in -ium:
   • kriterium > kriterie or kriterium
   • ministerium > ministerie or ministerium
   • sanatorium > sanatorie or sanatorium
4. Abolishing simplified spellings of native words that haven’t caught on (I’m personally very unhappy about these changes!):
   • elleve or elve > elleve
   • tredive or tredve > tredive
   • drøbel or drøvel > drøbel
5. Bizarrely, merging two words that in my idiolect have different pronunciations and different meanings:
   • sauce > sauce or sovs
   • sovs > sauce or sovs
6. Messing about with the hyphens in some compounds:
   • e-mail-adresse > e-mailadresse
   • stand-up-comedy > standupcomedy
   • play-off-kamp > playoffkamp
   • roll-on > rollon or roll-on
   • built-up-tag > builtuptag
   • tagselvbord > tag selv-bord
   • T-bone-steak > T-bonesteak
   • a-våben-fri > a-våbenfri
   • DAMP-barn > DAMP-barn or damp-barn or dampbarn
7. Introducing some optional instances of -t in some adverbs (which actually comes as a surprise to me — I thought -t was already allowed here):
   • gladelig > gladelig or gladeligt
   • klogelig > klogelig or klogeligt
   • unægtelig > unægtelig or unægteligt
8. Making it possible to drop the space in some compound prepositions when followed by a complement. The space was never allowed when the prepositions occurred without a complement (e.g., han fulgte bag efter/bagefter manden, but han fulgte bagefter (not *bag efter):
   • bag efter > bag efter or bagefter
   • bag i > bag i or bagi
   • inden for > inden for or indenfor
   • neden under > neden under or nedenunder
   • oven på > oven på or ovenpå
   • ud over > ud over or udover
   • frem for > frem for or fremfor

   Interestingly, many compound prepositions still don’t allow this freedom. For instance, in the following four sentences it is not allowed to write *udaf, *optil, *udefra and *opad:

   • De har altid haft svært ved at komme ud ad døren i ordentlig tid.
   • Plæneklipperen kører op til 4 timer på en opladning.
   • Ude fra gaden lød der et stort brag.
   • Vejen gik stejlt op ad bakke.

   I’m pretty happy about some of the changes, whereas some of the others are annoying me. However, I need to learn the new rules so that I can spell Danish correctly if I need to, even if I might defy the rules on my blog.

   (PS: Don’t ask me about the photo — it was the only result I got when I searched for Retskrivningsordbogen on Flickr.)

   ]]> http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/11/09/6385/feed/ 3 http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/11/03/6301/ http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/11/03/6301/#comments Sat, 03 Nov 2012 22:51:05 +0000 thomas http://blog.widmann.org.uk/?p=6301
   
   Autumn leaves
   Originally uploaded by PhylB
   

   Da Léon var lille, skrev jeg her på bloggen flg. om hans udtale:
   

   [H]an har problemer med stødte konsonanter, så her udvider han stødet med et homorganisk lukke: and, blomst, seng, ild og nej udtaler han ['ænʔd], ['lʌmʔb], ['hɛŋʔɡ], ['ilʔd] og ['najʔd].

   Da jeg tilfældigt faldt over dette gamle indlæg, gik det op for mig, at jeg havde glemt at blogge, at Amaia gør præcist det samme (eller rettere gjorde, da hun stort set er holdt op med det nu, men hun fylder også tre i januar).

   Fx udtaler/udtalte hun vand som ['vænʔt] (helt forskelligt fra Annas ['wænʔ]), nej som ['najʔt] og hund som ['hunʔt].

   Jeg ville ønske, jeg kunne huske flere eksempler, men disse tre ord er vist de eneste, hvor homorganiske lukke ikke er forsvundet igen.

   ]]> http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/11/03/6301/feed/ 0 http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/10/28/6273/ http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/10/28/6273/#comments Sun, 28 Oct 2012 22:53:20 +0000 thomas http://blog.widmann.org.uk/?p=6273
   
   Scandinavian Flags
   Originally uploaded by olemiswebs
   

   The Scandinavian languages are all quite similar, so the normal approach is to learn only one of them properly. But which one should one go for?

   Here are the options:

   • Swedish: Swedish is spoken by 10m people, so it’s by far the biggest Scandinavian language. It’s the language of August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf and Astrid Lindgren — and Stieg Larsson, of course. Many Finns know it reasonably well, because it’s one of the two official languages of Finland. Also, Norwegians tend to be relatively good at understanding Swedish, whereas many Danes find it difficult.
   • Danish: Danish has less than 6m native speakers. It’s spoken by a minority in northern Germany, and the Greenlanders and Faroese know it well, and it’s also an obligatory foreign language in Iceland. It’s the language of Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Karen Blixen and Peter Høeg, and many Norwegian writers before WWII (such as Henrik Ibsen) wrote in a language that was closer to modern Danish than to modern Norwegian. Norwegians are very good at reading Danish, but they might find the spoken language difficult to understand; Swedes find it even harder.
   • Norwegian (Bokmål): There are about 5m Norwegians, and they tend to speak their local dialect rather than one of the official written language, Bokmål and Nynorsk. Appr. 80% of them them write Bokmål, which is very similar to Danish. However, both Norwegian languages allow a lot of variation, and spelling reforms are frequent, which can be confusing to a learner.
   • Norwegian (Nynorsk): Written by less than 1m Norwegians, this is by far the smaller of the two Norwegian written languages. Very few internationally known authors write in Nynorsk. However, Nynorsk is arguably a better basis for understanding the Norwegian dialects — if you learn Bokmål, the Norwegians will understand you, but you might find it very hard to understand them. Also, Nynorsk is closer to Swedish and Icelandic in many regards, so you might find it more useful as a basis if you’re planning to learn Icelandic (or Old Norse) and Swedish later.
   • Icelandic: Icelandic is very close to Old Norse in its written form (although the pronunciation is quite different from the one reconstructed for Old Norse) — it has preserved all the nominal and verbal inflections — so it is useful if you plan to move on to Old Norse and the sagas. However, given that it is only spoken by a third of a million people, and given that it isn’t mutually intelligible with Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, it really isn’t be most useful language to pick from the list.
   • Faroese: Sorry, but I can’t see any good reason to learn Faroese, unless you’ve got Faroese family or are into Faroese dancing. Because the Faroe Islands are a part of the Danish Realm, all Faroese speak Danish well, but linguistically Faroese is much closer to Icelandic.
   • Old Norse: If you’re not really interested in modern Scandinavia but love the sagas, you might as well learn Old Norse instead of one of the modern languages. However, it would be a bit like learning Old English without having any knowledge of Modern English.
   ]]> http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/10/28/6273/feed/ 0 http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/10/08/6189/ http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/10/08/6189/#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:00:38 +0000 thomas http://blog.widmann.org.uk/?p=6189
   
   Danish PM:
   Austerity and growth
   are two sides of the same coin
   Orig. upl. by European Parliament
   

   Lykke Friis har i dag en artikel i Berlingske om det danske sprog i EU. Hun påpeger, at tolketjenesten er truet. For det første går de fleste tolke snart på pension, for det andet findes der ingen tolkeuddannelse længere i Danmark, og for det tredie gider danskerne ikke gøre brug af tolkningen:
   

   Da Danmark, i tæt konkurrence med Malta, er europamester i at afstå fra tolkning, har Kommissionen allerede for længst truet med at lukke den danske tolketjeneste. For hvad skal vi med den, hvis den alligevel bliver brugt så sjældent?

   Som dansker bosat i Skotland på elvte år må jeg sige, det ikke lyder for smart.

   For det første er de allerfleste danskere slet ikke så gode til engelsk, som de selv tror. Naturligvis kan mange føre en forståelig samtale på engelsk, men de fleste har store huller i ordforrådet, er grammatisk og stilistisk usikre, og blander britisk og amerikansk engelsk sammen i én pærevælling.

   For det andet er der et demokratisk problem, hvis politik skal føres på engelsk. Politikere er jo principielt helt almindelige mennesker, der er blevet valgt til at varetage vores fælles interesser, og de kan altså så risikere at skulle diskutere torskekvoter, softwarepatenter, medicintilskud, menneskerettigheder og mange andre problemstillinger. Det skulle jo nødigt gå sådan, at man skal vælge folk efter sproglige kundskaber i stedet for politiske standpunkter.

   For det tredie går tolkning jo begge veje: Man slipper ikke blot for at formulere sig på engelsk, men alle andre tolkes til dansk. Da mange briter og irere taler regiolekter, der ikke høres ofte i Danmark, giver det let problemer. Torskekvoteforhandlinger skal jo potentielt føres med en skotte fra Aberdeenshire, og man kan altså ikke bare bede skotter om at tale skoleengelsk.

   ]]> http://blog.widmann.org.uk/2012/10/08/6189/feed/ 0