Interlinear books are bilingual translations where the original has a translation right below each word or expression. Try them out on Interlinear Books.
For multilingual verb conjugation, try CoolJugator - a tool that can currently conjugate in dozens of different languages. It also recognizes forms and provides examples for each verb.
This article and this 28-minute podcast from BBC arrived in a Google Alert the other day, and go into much more detail about Orania than some of the other articles I've referenced before. The War Reporter front pages from around 1899 on the wall of that pub are particularly interesting.
Read more...The general election in South Africa is now over and the results were consistent with what the polls were telling us. And now a quick chart showing the vote percentage for the two main parties, the ANC and the DA (formerly Democratic Party), since 1994.
A site here gives some interesting yet unsurprising numbers on the preferences of South African students. The site has an auto-loading video ad so beware of that if you want to read the article.
The numbers become interesting when contrasted with language-at-home usage.
English: 9.6% spoken at home, 65% preferred by students
Afrikaans: 13.5% spoken at home, 10% preferred by students
Zulu: 22.7% spoken at home, 7.5% preferred by students
Xhosa: 16% spoken at home, 6.6% preferred by students
A few articles:
An article here in Afrikaans gives an interesting example of the mutual intelligibility of Dutch and Afrikaans, through a hearing on the situation of Afrikaans in South Africa. During the hearing questions were asked in Dutch, answered in Afrikaans:
Die IPK bestaan uit Nederlandse en Vlaamse Parlementslede en hul vrae is in Nederlands gevra en in Afrikaans geantwoord. Wat ‘n voorreg om Afrikaans te hoor in die setel van demokrasie in Den Haag!= The IPK (interparliamentary committee) is composed of Dutch and Flemish members of parliament and its questions were asked in Dutch and answered in Afrikaans. What a privilege to hear Afrikaans in the seat of democracy in The Hague!
Five things to share today.
--- A paper on the silent period hypothesis, the method whereby students learn a language through a silent period whereby they focus on exposure and comprehension, and only later begin to produce the language themselves. I usually have a silent period of my own simply because I find it more interesting to delve into the language on my own schedule and using content I prefer, but have no problems switching over to active usage whenever the need arises, and have never found a particularly long or short silent period to affect the speed at which I learn a language.
--- Sword fighting as it was for the Vikings. Interesting not just due to seeing true swordfighting but also because the dad shows us an interesting example of a mostly fluent but slightly halting English. He knows exactly what he wants to say, but it takes a few extra tenths of a second to formulate it.
--- Le PQ veut franciser Montreal (the PQ intends to make Montreal more French / Frenchify it).
--- Iranian character of the Armenian language (pdf). Politically sensitive I'm sure, but from the view of the student this list of similarities is nice to have if one knows the first and wants to learn the second.
--- Afrikaans vs. Zulu in schools. It seems that Afrikaans has two advantages in being chosen as a second language: 1) the perception that it is easy, and 2) the Zulu in exams is apparently set to quite a high standard. But then it continues by saying that 99% of those studying Zulu passed compared to 70% of those who chose Afrikaans, so I don't know what to conclude from this.
Those numbers along with some others (average income, major cities) come from here.
Read more...--- We'll begin with this article from BBC, one of many on the recent Dawn press conference detailing what they know about the protoplanet so far. The term protoplanet seems to be being used more and more to describe it, as the term asteroid just doesn't seem to fit quite as well considering its makeup. One look at Vesta compared to all the other asteroids we've visited so far shows this to a certain extent:
This week was full of articles to mention in a link roundup. Here they are:
--- Denmark aims to get 35% of its total energy from renewables by 2020 and 100% by 2050 - pretty self-explanatory.
--- Japan Airlines now has its first Boeing 787 Dreamliner, giving the world a total of seven of these airplanes so far.
--- Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com billionaire and the guy behind Blue Origin) has found the original Apollo 11 rocket engines and intends to raise them from the ocean floor. They should end up in a museum (they are still NASA property, even if Bezos recovers them), and hopefully their age and original appearance when first lifted up will remind the world of just how long ago Apollo 11 took place - in other words, we didn't go to the moon, a previous generation that has now mostly died away did. We have only been to Low Earth Orbit, no farther.
--- An article on why young Americans are less and less interested in buying cars, and even in getting driver's licenses.
--- An article on the checks and balances in the US system vs. the Canadian parliamentary approach. Americans by and large do not seem to be aware of how weak a president is compared to the Prime Ministers in other nations, and are frequently disappointed when the country has not changed 180 degrees in the two or four years after a presidential election. Remembering back to the passing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the idea of a Prime Minister having to negotiate and negotiate again with his own party to pass a single bill is laughable.
--- From December - an interesting article on a French language program for Spanish speakers in Cal State.
--- The Office québécoise de la langue française, now with 246 staff, is adding another 69 (an increase of about 25%).
--- On Will Ferrell's Spanish immersion when filming Casa de mi padre and his language-learning ability. Will Ferrell is fluent in Swedish thanks to his wife, and so this is not the first time learning another language for him.
--- The PVV in the Netherlands on nomenclature in South Africa again.
--- An interesting brown dwarf has been discovered 29 light years away, trailing a star in the big dipper. I would prefer 1 light year away, but 29 is acceptable for now.
--- Votes and vowels: an interesting article on the pronunciation of certain vowels in parts of the US and how it affects the way a person comes across politically, plus a number of other things. I won't try to summarize it here, except to note that it's quite reminiscent of a Malcolm Gladwell book.
--- Finally, a small site with Italian etymology that I like. It seems to be just a number of images cobbled together from an old Italian dictionary, but being able to quickly search one word at a time is nice. The etymology for sbagliare (to be wrong) for example comes from Latin varius.
Let's start with Dawn orbiting Vesta.
--- While there is no major news besides the fact that Dawn is in its closest orbit to the minor planet, it's interesting to note that even before leaving Vesta, Dawn is slowly approaching Ceres as well. At the moment the distance between the two is 0.9843 AU, compared to about 1.7 AU at closest approach from Earth.
From here in Afrikaans about five days ago, the article is about a small dustup in the lower house in the Netherlands between the foreign minister of the ruling party (Uri Rosenthal) and a member of parliament for the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid) named Martin Bosma on whether the Netherlands should support its sister language Afrikaans, and especially when it comes to place names such as Pretoria, which was recently kind of demoted from a full city to a part of a city, called Tshwane. For details on that, see here.
According to Bosma, Pretoria is the "big prize" in changing place names that are in Afrikaans.
The response from the foreign minister that this is a South African and not Dutch concern is really the only real response a minister can give as one sovereign nation speaking about another one has no jurisdiction over, but the discussion of what sort of supportive role the Netherlands should have of Afrikaans (if any) is one worth having.
This article has a lot of good numbers based on an analysis of 4300 university modules, showing how many of them are not available in Afrikaans. The worst faculty for this seems to be Veterinary Science with almost nothing in Afrikaans, and the best is Theology where 55% of the modules are completely available in Afrikaans. It would be interesting to see if there are parallels to the protests against the decline of Afrikaans in universities and Quebec before Loi 101 (the Charter of the French Language).
Read more...An article here from a few months back gives some quick numbers to anyone curious:
North-West University (NWU) is now dethroning the University of Pretoria as the "largest Afrikaans university in the country". The latter has 16,400 Afrikaans-speaking students against NWU's 15,300...51% of its student body speaks Afrikaans while that for Tuks (UP) is just 36%. In Stellenbosch, the (previously) oldest Afrikaans university, 48% is Afrikaans.Read more...
A piece of news here in English that has to do with language: the founder of the town of Orania in South Africa has recently passed away. Orania is apparently a pretty interesting place, as it was built to be a town for Afrikaners and Afrikaners only but the founder does not seem to have been a racist, merely something of an isolationist. I speculated last year that Orania might be one of the best places in the world to learn Afrikaans, as the desire of the people there to preserve their Afrikaner culture shows itself in a hostility to English as well:
"We do not want to be governed by people who are not Afrikaners", said Potgieter, the previous chairman. "Our culture is being oppressed and our children are being brainwashed to speak English".So one would assume that they would welcome anyone of any colour that wishes to spend a month or two or more in the town (the article says "whites-only", but would they truly turn someone away who really wanted to live there for a while to learn Afrikaans?) in order to immerse themselves in Afrikaans. According to the article I link to here the founder of the town was also good friends with the current president of South Africa, who visited the town before, as well as Nelson Mandela. That said, I don't know anything about the town beyond what I've read and so anyone is free to correct me on it. Read more...
About two weeks ago the president of South Africa Jacob Zuma visited a small town located here:
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The town is called Orania and the only people that live there are Afrikaners. Interestingly, the president has been friends with the town's founder for two decades now which was one of the reasons why he went to visit. Naturally the mere existence of a town that only welcomes Afrikaners is enough to stir up debate, and you can see some of it in the comments below in the articles here and here. From a linguistic point of view though, what I find to be interesting is this (emphasis mine):
According to its founders, the purpose of Orania is to create a town where the preservation of Afrikanerdom's cultural heritage is strictly observed and Afrikaner selfwerksaamheid ("self reliance") is an actual practice, not just an idea. All jobs, from management to manual labour, are filled by Afrikaners only; non-Afrikaner workers are not permitted. "We do not want to be governed by people who are not Afrikaners", said Potgieter, the previous chairman. "Our culture is being oppressed and our children are being brainwashed to speak English".This is the attitude towards a person's mother tongue you can find sometimes with languages that are either threatened, seen to be threatened, or under revival. In those cases I find the attitude of the users of such languages to be either one of two: 1) resignation towards the usage and spread of larger languages, or 2) a fierce opposition. And while this is a big generalization, 1) people are generally found in larger cities and are often extremely surprised at the idea that anyone from outside would want to learn their language, while 2) people like to form groups in order to gather whatever strength they have. Orania is probably the best example of 2) that one could find, and for a person with English as a mother tongue there's no better place to learn a language than a community where people believe their children are being brainwashed to speak English.
The Netherlands won again last night and thus will end up in either 1st or 2nd place at the World Cup, and fifa.com had an article just before that game about how Afrikaners feel about the Netherlands at the World Cup considering the linguistic and cultural similarities between the two. A street vendor interviewed for the article also said that it was much easier to make his sales pitch to potential customers given how similar Afrikaans and Dutch are. The easiest way to show this is through this well-known video of Charlize Theron being interviewed by a Belgian reporter, where he asks questions in Dutch and she responds in Afrikaans; this is certainly the way conversations between Afrikaners and Dutch tourists at the moment are happening.
Apparently just before the World Cup began some Korean journalists were not happy with the fact that the Argentinian team only took questions in Spanish.
Three things were strange about the press conference for the Argentinian national team.The third "strange thing" mentioned in the article was about cell phones not being turned off, so not translating that either.
If you weren't from the press of a Spanish-speaking country all you could do was stare ahead for the twenty minutes it lasted, as English wasn't spoken there and if you didn't know Spanish you were treated like a criminal.
(next paragraph is about how players couldn't be seen at the practice grounds, skipping that)
At the press conference area one could meet the main players, but because there was no English interpretation the press members that couldn't speak Spanish effectively became deaf mutes. Only at the very end were a pair of English questions allowed.
However, one couldn't look forward to hearing answers in English from the players. This 'case of missing English' continued after the game in the mixed zone. Messi and Teves, when asked to give a response in English, just kept on talking on Spanish right to the end of the interview. The foreign correspondents who wanted to hear a few important words from the players had no choice but to leave without anything of substance.
This is a pretty funny story. In South Africa there are eleven official languages and students are to learn at least two of them in school. This often results in students learning both English and Afrikaans, but depending on one's mother tongue it may also be English and Zulu, English and Xhosa, etc. A principal from an Indian school in South Africa has recently been ranting against the teaching of Afrikaans in his school, in spite of the fact that the school is perfectly free to go with English and another official language of the country instead.
The reason why the school won't go with another language, of course, is that all the other languages besides Afrikaans and English are so hard to learn. The other choices are IsiNdebele, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, SiSwati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga.
The principal has been making the argument that students won't need to use Afrikaans after they learn it, but let's not forget its huge similarities to Dutch, as well as other Germanic languages. Being fluent in two Germanic languages can only be good for a student who later on wishes to learn other languages in the same family tree.
One subject I often write about here is how developing countries can contribute to astronomy and space exploration, and a post here from June has some good information on just how far along certain countries are. An article here from spaceref.com today also goes into the subject a bit, though with a focus on space exploration instead of astronomy.
The African countries that are most into space exploration at the moment are South Africa and Nigeria. South Africa as a country though is outshined by two of its citizens in private enterprise: Mark Shuttleworth and Elon Musk. Elon Musk by himself probably contributes as much to space exploration as the rest of the continent.
Back to Nigeria: they are planning to send a man to space by 2016. Countries spending money on sending their first people to space is usually not all that wise an expenditure compared to using the money for something else like constructing observatories and educating the next generation of astronomers, but Nigeria is probably an exception there given its huge population (150 million) and lack of national unity. Countries with smaller populations and good national unity certainly enjoy seeing their people go into space, but they are unified and stable enough without it, and any effects of seeing one of their citizens in space is spread out among a much smaller population. Nigeria is the opposite of this.
The danger in this of course is that if government is too corrupt and/or unpopular, a move like this just gets seen as a frivolous expenditure and could easily backfire, if the government is seen as being too involved in all the fanfare. Nobody in Iran at the moment for example would be impressed by Iran sending a man into space (an Iranian woman has already been to space BTW) if it involved a lot of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei next to the astronaut and a bunch of bluster about making a strong Iran to scare its enemies, but if they kept their distance and the astronaut was allowed to simply talk about space and science and bringing up a new generation of citizens interested in space then the people wouldn't mind. That's a pro-tip for those of you working in the government in Nigeria. Bookmark this page if that's you.
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