Happy New Year to you all!
If you make New Year’s resolutions, have you resolved to learn a new language or to learn more of language?
I don’t really make resolutions, but plan to continue my studies of Breton and Russian this year. I don’t know how long it will take me to get to a level I feel comfortable with in each, but once I get there, I may have a go at Swedish or Norwegian, probably using an Assimil course in German, which will help to improve my German as well.
Last Saturday at my brother’s wedding I had plenty of opportunities to use my Russian – my brother’s wife is Russian, and while she speaks very good English, few of her family speak any, so I did my best to speak with them in Russian. I was able to have some basic conversations, with help from the Ukrainian bridesmaid, who speaks Ukrainian, Russian and English. I wasn’t worried about making mistakes, just trying to communicate, and managed to do so reasonably well. It was a little difficult to explain that I live in Wales and that it isn’t part of England, but is part of the UK.
I also had a chance to speak French as the bride’s brother-in-law speaks it – he learnt it in school and he visits France regularly on business – and there there were a couple of French people there – one of whom is the bridesmaid’s husband. So it was quite an international and multilingual gathering.
Russian is starting to sound more familiar now and I’m getting better at reading it. I don’t understand a lot much, but am continuing to learn a bit more every day and making progress.
This week I decided to start learning Russian and Breton again. I’ve learnt bits and pieces of them before but haven’t managed to get back into the habit of studying any language regularly for quite a while. I keep on making plans, and then due to inertia, laziness and procrastination don’t implement them.
So I will spend each morning listening to online Russian radio (Голос России) and then going though a lesson, or at least part of a lesson, in my Russian textbook just before lunch – I’m using Oxford Take Off in Russian. I might also use a number of online courses. Once I’ve learnt enough to have a basic conversation, I’ll seek out Russian speakers to practise with.
I plan to spend each afternoon or evening listening to online Breton radio (Radio Breizh) and then going through a lesson or two in Le Breton Sans Peine, and possibly also in Colloquial Breton. Using Le Breton Sans Peine gives me the chance to improve my French at the same time. I know a few Breton speakers I could practise with, and would like to visit Brittany once I have a basic conversational knowledge of Breton.
I might write bits and pieces in Russian and Breton on my multilingual blog – I’ve already started adding Breton to les mots de la semaine, some fo the words and phrases that crop up at the French conversation group I go to – and maybe I’ll make some videos as well.
According to an article I came across in the Daily Telegraph today, the best / most useful languages to study, for those in the UK, are:
1. German
2. French
3. Spanish
4. Mandarin
5. Polish
6. Arabic
7. Cantonese
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. Portuguese
The reasons why each language is useful vary quite a bit. For example Brazil is the sixth largest economy in the world and will be hosting the next (football) World Cup and Summer Olympics; apparently Russia is the UK’s fastest-growing major export market; and Poland is the largest consumer market in the EU. Languages valued by UK employers includes German, French, Spanish, Polish and Mandarin.
If a language is useful or in demand by employers, that’s quite a good reason to study it, but if you that’s your only reason for choosing a particular language, studying it might seem like hard work. If you also have an interest in the language itself, the culture of those who speak and/or the places where it’s spoken, you’re more likely to enjoy your studies and became proficient in the language.
Have you studied any languages solely because you thought they might be useful?
One of the comments on the article suggest that it is better to study a vocational subject such as science, medicine or law and to study a language as a secondary subject, rather than just focusing on a langauge. Another comment states that a university in a language or languages isn’t particular useful if you don’t have other skills.
The other day I saw a play based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, which was linguistically interesting. When I read the book many years ago I was able to guess the meanings of most of the Nadsat words from the context – Nadsat is the form of speech used by some characters in the book which combines English with a lot of slang words, most of which come from Russian and are given English spellings and pronunciations. At that time I didn’t know any Russian, so none of the words sounded familiar.
Now I do know a bit of Russian and found that I knew the meanings of quite a few of the Nadsat words borrowed from Russian, though it took me quite a while to recognise some of them. The word horrorshow, for example, is used frequently but it wasn’t until near the end of the play that I realised that it was a version of хорошо (khorošo = good).
Other Russian loanwords I recognised include:
– droog = друг (drug) – friend
– bratty = брат (brat) – brother
– goloss = голос (golos) – voice
– govoreet = говорить (govorit’) – speak
– malchick = мальчик (mal’čik) – boy
– millicent = милиция (militsija) – police
– noga = нога (noga) – foot
– slovo = слово (slovo) – word
– slooshy = слушать (slušat’) – to listen, hear
– yahzick = язык (yazyk) – tongue
Here’s a Nadsat dictionary.
According to an article I found today, the Russian Ministry of Education and Science plans to ‘clean up’ Russian by removing foreign loanwords and replacing them with native words. They plan to revise dictionaries, school textbooks, and to set up a website to explain the changes. The website will give Russian speakers a chance to check Russian usage with experts. Examples of foreign words give in the article are policymakeri and trendsetteri
This is the kind of thing that organisations like L’Académie française have been trying to do for years, without much success. While the new words might be adopted in formal usage, the chances of this happening in everyday speech and writing don’t seem very high. People tend to stick with the words they’re used to, unless new words become trendy.
Have there been efforts to ‘clean up’ other languages that you know of and that have succeeded?
Characters in the novels by Andrey Kurkov (Андрій Юрійович Курков) that I’ve read recently often enjoy a bowl of dish of pelmeni, which is obviously some kind of food, but is not translated. I wondered what pelmeni might be, so thought I’d find out.
According to Wikipedia, pelmeni are “dumplings consisting of a filling wrapped in thin, unleavened dough that originated in Siberia”. The dough is made of flour and water, with eggs sometimes added, and the filling is minced pork, lamb, beef, mutton or other meat, mixed with pepper or other spices and onions, or with fish or mushrooms. They are cooked by boiling them in water or broth, or by frying.
In Russian they are known as пельмени (pel’meni – pl) / пельмень (pel’men’ – sg), in Belarusian they are пяльмені (pyal’meni), in Ukrainian they are пельмені, (pel’meni), and in Latvian they are pelmeņi. The name comes from пельнянь (pel’nyan’), which means “ear bread” in the Komi, Udmurt, and Mansi languages.
According to the School of Russian and Asian Studies Russian pelmeni (русские пельмени) come from Siberia and the word comes from Komi, though the receipe might originally come from China. They certainly sound like to Chinese 餃子 (饺子) jiǎozi.
Here are some pelmeni recipes:
http://tasterussian.com/russian-pelmeni-recipe.html
http://www.russianfoods.com/en/pelmeni/
http://www.ruscuisine.com/recipes/breads-and-pastry/dumplings/n–524
Are you a fan of pelmeni, or do you have something similar in your country?
The Russian word for table (the piece of furniture) is стол (/stol/) which sounds a bit like stool in English. In most other Slavic languages the words for table are simliar: стол (Belarusian), stol (Croatian), stůl (Czech), stolŭ (Old Church Slavonic = throne, seat), stół (Polish), сто (Serbian), stôl (Slovak) and стіл (Ukrainian). Although in Bulgarian and Macedonian стол means chair and table is маса (masa), and in Slovenian a table is miza and chair is stol.
The Russian for chair is стул (/stul/), which sounds even more like stool, and stool is табуретка (/taburʲetka/), which probably comes from the French word for stool, tabouret. The English word stool comes from the Old English stól (seat for one person), from the Proto-Germanic *stōlaz, probably from the Proto-Indo-European root *stō-/sta- (to stand). The Slavic words for table probably come from the same root.
Stool came to mean a small seat without arms or a back when the word chair was adopted from French, via the Middle English chaere/chaiere from the Old French chaëre from the Latin cathedra (seat), from the Greek καθέδρα (chair, especially the seat of a bishop, or a teacher’s or professor’s chair) from κατά (down) and ἑδ (sit). In modern French the word chaire means a pulpit or a university chair (professorship), while a normal chair that you sit on is a chaise.
The English word table comes from the the classical Latin word tabula (board, plank, writing/votive tablet, map, picture), and was influenced by the Anglo-Norman tabul/tabull (board, plank, writing table, picture). The origin of the Latin word tabula is uncertain.
Sources: OED, Reverso, Online Etymology Dictionary
I finally finished learning the handwritten cursive version of the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian today – I’ve been learning it a few letters at a time, so it has taken a while. Now I can write down the Russian words and phrases I’m learning more easily – writing the printed versions of the letters seems decidedly awkward to me. I might even investigate Russian calligraphy.
Now I just need to map my fingers to the Russian keyboard layout so that I can type Russian as well, instead of picking the letters one at a time from BabelMap, as I’ve been doing. I just found an online typing tutor that helps you learn various keyboard layouts for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. There’s a similar site with even more keyboard layouts here.
After many years of trial and error, I can touch type English fairly well, and type the other Western European languages I know as well. I can also type Chinese using pinyin, and Japanese using romaji. When typing Czech though (not something I do very often), I get accented letters like ě, č, ů and ž from BabelMap.
When learning a new language, especially a new alphabet, do you usually learn how to type it?