I’ve been thinking for a while about starting a new blog to practise my languages. What I can’t decide is whether to have one new blog on which I post in various languages, or to have one for each language I want to practise. Another thing I can’t decide is what to call the blogs. Any ideas?
The course is going well, we’re speaking plenty of Welsh and we don’t have so much homework tonight.
I started this blog exactly a year ago, so today is its first anniversary. It currently contains 319 posts and 3,213 comments, and is visited by around 300 people a day. Unfortunately it also attracts a huge amount of spam posts – over 30,000 to date – fortunately the spam filters catch most of these.
When I took my first tentative steps into the blogsphere, I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to find enough things to write about, but so far I’ve managed to write posts almost every day, and enjoy writing them as well. While perhaps not every post is a perfectly honed gem, I do try my best to make them interesting and informative.
I decided to give the blog a new theme today – hope you like it.
According to a report I heard on the radio this morning, the British Museum is going to stage a major exhibition of the terracotta warriors who guard the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇), who unified China and was its first emperor from 221-210 BC. The exhibition will include not just some of the warriors, but also terracotta bureaucrats, acrobats and musicians. Apparently the emperor is attend in death by his army plus quite a few other members of his court.
The term ‘terracotta bureaucrat’ is not one you hear everyday and caught my ear.
The word bureaucracy combines bureau, meaning desk or office, with the Greek suffix -kratia, which denotes ‘power of’, and was coined by the French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-59). The word bureaucrat first appeared in writing in 1842. A bureau was originally a type of cloth used for covering desks and tables. It comes from the Latin Latin burra, wool, shaggy garment; via the Old French burel, coarse woolen cloth.
Terracotta comes from Italian and means ‘baked earth’.
A new series of BBC Radio 4’s fascinating programme about language, Word of Mouth, started this week. One of the things they discussed was Hinglish, a blend of English, Hindi, Punjabi and other South Asian languages spoken in India and by people of Indian origin in the UK, and elsewhere.
In the UK, British Indians pepper their English with Hindi and Punjabi words and expressions, such as yaar (a friend), javaani (youth), ganja (bald), chamcha (a spoon, a lackey, or a sycophant). While in India, many people mix English words and phrases with their native languages, for example time kya hua hai? (what time is it?).
A team of intrepid researchers from Icelandic and Turkey are planning a three-month journey through Central Asia to research the origins of Runic writing, according to the Zaman online newspaper. They believe that Runic writing was transmitted to Europe from Mongolia via the Silk Road.
The usually explanation of the origins of the Orkhon script of Mongolia is that it developed from the Sogdian script, and that resemblances between it and the Runic scripts of Europe are probably coincidental. Perhaps the Turkish and Icelandic researchers will be able to shed new light on these scripts.
A number of you have suggested that I add a forum to Omniglot. I’ve been investigating this and it doesn’t appear to be too difficult to set up. What I’m not sure about is how long I’d need to spend administering and moderating it.
Do any of you act as forum adminstrators or moderators? How much time do you spend on this? Would you be willing to act in this role on an Omniglot forum? Also, do you have any suggestions for discussion categories?
In the meantime, there’s quite a good forum for language-related discussion over on How to Learn any language.
When writing posts on this blog I’m never sure whether anybody will comment and how many comments there will be. Yesterday’s unresearched, ill-thought-out little post has stirred up plenty of discussion, which, to some extent, was the idea. You could say I was playing devil’s advocate. Other posts that I spend hours crafting from nothing but the finest, most carefully-researched factoids might generate few if any comments.
It’s always interesting to hear your opinions and experiences. Each comment you leave reveals a little more about you, and I find these tidbits interesting.
Once upon a time, the only trace most people left was their name on a gravestone. Now you can leave snippets of information about yourself in many places, especially online. This should make it easier for our descendents to trace us, their ancestors, unless the future turns out to be something like it’s portrayed in such fine movies as Water World, The Day After Tomorrow or Terminator.
If, like me, you have a large collection of books, trying to put them in some sort of order is can become quite a time-consuming task. In fact, just trying to fit them all on your shelves can be a real challenge.
Every so often I go through my books and try to decide which ones to sell or give away. Then I usually put them on one side and promptly fail to do anything about them. Although when I left Taiwan, I did actually manage to sell most of the books I had there, but also sent about a hundred or so home.
Until recently I was buying and reading two or more books a week. I still read two books a week on average, but I usually borrow them from my local library rather than buying them. Thus my shelves and bookcases have been largely spared any further overcrowding.
I arrange my books by genre and author, more or less, and to some extent by size and language. I don’t bother putting them in alphabetical order, though do put some of them in chronological order, especially trilogies and other series.
Brighton library used to arrange fiction books alphabetically by genre, but recently they stopped grouping them by genre. This makes it easier to find books, if you know the name of the author, and sometimes you come across interesting-looking books from genres you might not normally read.
How do you arrange your books?
This blog has been online for nearly four months, which is apparently the average life of a website, and I’ve been wondering whether you have any ideas or suggestions for what you’d like to see here. I haven’t run out of ideas myself, but thought asking you would be a good plan.
If any of you would like to post something here, for example details of your language learning advantures, language-related news items, stories, poems, songs, etc., please contact me at the usual address.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Finding time to study languages, and do all the other things I enjoy doing (including writing this blog), is quite tricky. Fortunately, because I work at home most of the time, I have some flexibility in when I start and finish my work, and I can take breaks to practice my juggling, etc without disturbing colleagues.
I usually learn a bit more Manx while making toast in the morning – the lessons in the course I’m currently following are all quite short so this works out well.
While eating meals I tend to read serious tomes – at the moment that’s An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, by Ralph W. Fasold and Jeff Connor-Linton, which is very interesting.
While working I listen to online radio in various languages (currently Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh). I don’t actually listen to it closely all the time, but having it playing in the background helps me to absorb new vocabulary and grammar, and to reinforce what I already know of these languages.
In the evening, I study Russian and Irish, practice the tin whistle, and/or learn some more Gaelic songs. When the weather’s fine, I spend the evenings, and weekends, blading, playing hockey and just hanging out with my friends.
Somehow I manage to keep on up-dating and improving Omniglot, and replying to all the correspondence the site generates as well. Maybe one day I’ll be able to give up the day job and concentrate on Omniglot. Now that would be wonderful!