New site for visualizing word origins (etymology)

Linas, the owner of Ikindalikelanguages, the owner of Interlinearbooks, the owner of Cooljugator, the owner of...(probably some others in here?) has another website that fits right in with what I do: Etymologeek. It's somewhat similar to etymonline.com in that you enter your search term and come out with the history of a word, but here's where it differs:

1) Etymonline has only English - Etymologeek has eight languages so far
2) Etymonline has a detailed written explanation. Etymologeek has a graphic showing the source languages.
3) Etymonline has much more detail. Etymologeek has explanations below the charts but not comparable for what Etymonline has for English.

Filling out #3 is what they are working on now, apparently.

The Etymologeek layout looks like a good fit for auxlangers (especially those making their own language) who would like something that gives the origin of a word in a single glance, given the number of words a single language requires. Here's an example of tongue and its related words in four languages:

Jazik is definitely an odd word for the original PIE word to change into. But I digress.

Ah, and the other nice thing about it is the super fast search. As you type it will bring up search results so you know ahead of time if you are going to find something or not. Definitely give it a try and see what you can find.

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Lingq just got a lot better

I just noticed today that Lingq.com now has a new interface, which is nice to see as its script-heavy and kind of early 2000s web 2.0-type design was its weakest point. There are also some new features that I'm still exploring but my favourite one so far is the ability to display traditional characters above simplified ones when choosing Mandarin. It ends up looking like this:

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Membus coming to 10 countries, including Portugal

The Kickstarter for Memrise's membus campaign has just ended, and it will include 10 countries. They had started out with an original goal of 50,000 pounds or something and other countries included in their stretch goal, and a few days before the campaign ended they had reached the point where they would go to Denmark but no farther. Now they've reached an amount where Norway and Sweden are included as well.

Just to explain the concept: they go around in a bus, record native speakers, and use that for their courses. They've already done this with English in the UK and now get to expand it. Apparently the CEO went without a salary for three months to buy the bus.

The other thing I like about doing it by bus is that they have to go to Portugal after Spain. So many Portuguese courses ignore Portugal for Brazil in spite of other countries like Angola, Mozambique etc. using a Portuguese much closer to the European version than the Brazilian one.

Also, one backer is not happy that they used the term "Swedish babes".

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Number of people learning German now up to 15.4 million

I've referenced similar articles over the past few years, but this new one from Deutsche Welle referencing the German Foreign Office's newest five-year study is about as official as a survey of this type can get.

It began in 1985, showing a peak in 2000 of 20.1 million, 16.7 million in 2005, 14.7 million in 2010, and now 15.4 million in 2015.

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Using Google's Ngram viewer to trace the decline of English long S

(Note: this post is from late 2010, and I found it in my drafts today. No idea why it was never published.)

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In case you haven't noticed, a few days ago Google put out a new tool that shows the results of keyword searches starting back as far as 1700, and yes it's as addictive as it sounds. It has also let me solve something that I was thinking of doing some looking into myself: frequency of the United States is vs. the United States are. I had suspected that the latter would have been more common during the country's early history when the country was not as quite as tight a union as it is today, and it looks like my suspicions were correct. Starting in 1800 the United States is begins to grow, and as the Civil War happens it grows at an even greater rate.

One other particularly interesting use of the tool is tracking the usage of the long s in English, as this chart shows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_usage_of_long_s.svg

Since the software recognizes a long s as an f, all you have to do to track this is to find a word using a long s that doesn't look like any other English word when you replace it with an f. Paradise Lost wouldn't work then as loft is a real word. Street and ftreet does though.

Also note that the tool is available for other languages besides English: French, German, Russian, Spanish, etc.

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Thee more maps: 2nd, 3rd, 4th most spoken languages by country in the European Union

These three maps showed up last week as well, and make a nice set with the North American ones a few days before. These show the most spoken foreign languages in Europe, followed by the second most, then third most.

The first one is not that surprising. Most countries opt for English, English countries have something else (French and Irish for example), and the Baltic countries have a lot of Russian. Czech and Croatian for Slovakia and Slovenia are also no surprise.

Things start to get interesting in this second map. English is the second most spoken second language in the UK. You'll see this in countries with a large immigrant population. Czech Republic's Slovak is interesting because for them Slovak comes after English while in Slovakia Czech comes before it. German is still fairly strong in nearby countries, French is of course popular here and there, and lots of Bulgarians speak Russian.

And now for the third map. Some of the countries that had French in the previous one now have German, Portugal interestingly is now finally getting around to Spanish (French came before it), Latvia's Latvian comes from the large Russian population there, Italian finally shows up somewhere (edit: wait, there it is in tiny Malta in the previous image). It looks like this is the point where people in countries with a very similar yet maybe not so useful sister tongue finally decide to learn it: see Finnish in Estonia, Spanish in Portugal, Swedish in Denmark, Spanish in Italy, Italian in Romania.

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Languages by state and province besides English, Spanish, and French

Two maps popped up last week that show the #3 (in most cases) language by state in the US, and by province in Canada. In other words, the language besides English and Spanish in the US and the language besides English and French in Canada. In most cases this is the third most spoken language, but not always.

The US one is here, and is done by Slate. The most common language on the map: German. On the other hand, it's the #3 language predominantly in states with a fairly low population. The state with German with the highest population is...I will guess Ohio, correct me if I'm wrong.

French is doing fairly well on the east coast and in Louisiana, of course. And in Florida we have almost French.

Inspired by this, a Reddit user created one for Canada.

Apparently in Alberta's case German almost made it, but was about 10,000 short of Chinese.

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We need a few hundred Voronoi diagrams

Remember this post from 2011? I do. It's about an interesting thread on HTLAL where a user named nway, one of our friends here as well, did some interesting statistical analysis on the present and future value of languages.

Also do you remember this post from 2009? I do. It's an article about Mpumalanga in South Africa, which is next to Mozambique and where Portuguese is naturally a more important language to know than in most other parts of South Africa. Taking a look at countries and states at a local level, especially their nearest neighbors, is very important in determining the future of language education in any country.

And now to Voronoi diagrams. These show the nearest something to somewhere. For example, the country that is nearest to you when you are in...Frankfurt, or somewhere else. These maps have been very popular on /r/mapporn recently. For example, this one of Germany.

It shows that if you are in Frankfurt for example, France is the nearest place to you. If you are in München, it's Austria. Berlin, it's Poland.

Here's another one with Canada.

France is there because of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.


If I had a team of ten or so people at my beck and call, I would design the following map:

First I would generate a world map similar to those maps that show countries by GDP size, but less ugly, and have it done by region as well since regions often have separate languages. Languages with certain international prestige, such as frequently being the official language of important groups (UN, NATO, EU, international airports, etc.) may be amplified even further beyond their GDP.

Then I would colour-code these regions by language.

Then I would make them all into a Voronoi diagrams, showing which language, and its GDP, is closest to you based on where you stand.

And because there's no way I would attempt something like this on my own, I hope somebody reads this and decides to take the time to do just that.

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L2 earnings potential: German well above average, French above average, Spanish below

This article in the Economist on the economic benefits of knowing a second language cites a 2002 paper that agrees with a constant refrain of mine: that parents should not have their children learn a language simply because it's popular, widely studied or spoken. At the end of the day an employee looking for an economic benefit from knowing a language only needs to find one job in order to make this happen, so languages like Norwegian (pop. 5 million) should not be looked down upon if knowing it means a good job at a company like Statoil, for example.

The chart in the article shows German at the top of increased earnings, French is below yet still above average, and Spanish is below. Spanish is easy to understand. Why would a company pay a premium for a fluent Spanish speaker when they can just find someone that speaks it as a mother tongue? As the article puts it:

Non-Latino Americans might study Spanish because they hear and see so much of it spoken in their country. But that might be the best reason not to study the language, from a purely economic point of view. A non-native learner of Spanish will have a hard time competing with a fluent native bilingual for a job requiring both languages. Indeed, Mr Saiz found worse returns for Spanish study in states with a larger share of Hispanics. Better to learn a language in high demand, but short supply...

And yes, of course one should learn the language one likes the best. But simply adding the GDP of countries that use the language together and claiming that it is therefore the one that makes the most economic sense is incorrect.

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New poll, this time on spaced repetition

There's a new poll on the right, which is now running concurrently with the Kazakhstan / Kazak Yeli one.

It's a simple poll with multiple answers allowed, and is about spaced repetition.

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How to fix language hotkeys not working in Windows 7 and 8

One problem I've had since I switched to Windows 7 a year and a half ago and Windows 8 a few months after that was this. Namely, that hotkeys to switch from one language to another would simply disappear. In XP I had about seven input languages set up for just about every number on the keyboard, that were activated with ctrl + shift + number, and in the newer versions of Windows they would simply vanish, though oddly enough some languages would always remain. Eventually I just began using Windows key + space to switch from language to language, which works fine but takes a bit longer.

But then a few days ago someone came along on the thread with the solution. It involves applying language bar settings to the welcome screen. I tried that, and now my hotkeys are working perfectly again. English (Dvorak) is 6, Korean is 2, Chinese is 3, Japanese is 4, Persian 5, Portuguese 8, Bulgarian 9. Everything is as it should be once again.

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Portuguese fifth-most used language online, Chinese very close to English

Came across an article here, apparently referencing data from the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body. After a good amount of searching on the ITU site though it turns out that the numbers do not come from there, they come from our well-known Internetworldstats, a very interesting site to visit but one that updates its numbers perhaps once a year.

French at 60 million still seems very low, and I wish they would add more languages to this top ten. Other back in 2009 was 15.1%, now it's 17.8%.

Portuguese is the fifth most "spoken" language on the internet. Data provided by the International Telecommunication Union show Portuguese to have surpassed Arabic, French and German among the languages with the largest number of online users. The expansion of the internet in Brazil in the past ten years explains most of this, giving at least 83 million people using Portuguese online. The expectation is that it will surpass Japanese (99 million users), reaching fourth place. 

Other numbers:  

English: 565 million
Chinese: 510 million
Spanish: 165 million
German: 75 million
Arabic: 65 million
French: 60 million

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New Pope Twitter follower numbers

The last time we took a look at the number of papal Twitter followers there was a total of about two million followers across all the languages offered, and now, after closing for a bit and reopening with Pope Francis, the number is 4 million. Let's compare the number of followers by language compared to last time to see which language is showing the most growth.

English: 1,262,000 -- 2,060,000
Spanish: 483,000 -- 1,040,000
Italian: 206,000 -- 437,000
Portuguese: 54,000 -- 122,000
French: 48,000 -- 92,600
German: 40,000 -- 76,700
Polish: 21,000 -- 55,200
Latin: 44,400 (new)
Arabic: 15,000 -- 38,300

Two changes in the rankings from last time: French has moved up a bit compared to German, and Latin has displaced Arabic.

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Languages on Twitter in New York, London

Found an article in Portuguese today that references a site here that has tracked the number of tweets based in New York by language, with London as well. The numbers for New York are as follows:

English: 8,071,871
Spanish: 228,534
Portuguese: 47,646
Japanese: 28,330
Russian: 21,324
Korean: 20,865
French: 19,034
Arabic: 17,072
Italian: 10,278
Turkish: 8,698

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Stephen Krashen interview on learning languages through input

This recently recorded and uploaded conversation between Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufmann is well worth the 30 minutes it takes to watch it (or listen in the background while doing something else). The subject: how students learning languages through tons of reading fare vs. those who work on mostly grammar or other methods. The part about the role grammar plays in both an L1 and L2 is especially interesting.

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All the former Deutsch - warum nicht languages

Deutsch - warum nicht?, probably my favourite German language course for beginners, is available on Deutsche Welle's website in all the languages they currently offer. There have been quite a few other versions made, however, in languages that were once offered by DW but have since stopped broadcasting. This page from the Deutsche National Bibliothek has a large list of them, probably the entire collection of languages into which the course was translated. That page is for the Italian version, and below it we find the following:

Alban. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Bosn. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Bulg. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Chines. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Dari-Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Engl. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Franz. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Georg. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Griech. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Hausa-Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Hindi-Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Indones. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Kisuaheli-Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Kroat. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Mazedon. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Norweg. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Paschtu-Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Poln. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Portug. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Rumän. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Russ. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Serb. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Slowak. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Slowen. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Span. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Tschech. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Türk. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Ukrain. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Ungar. Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?
Urdu-Ausg. u.d.T.:: Meese, Herrad: Deutsch - warum nicht?

So which ones are not available at present? Georgian, Norwegian, Slovak, Slovenian, Czech, and Hungarian. Stopping broadcasts in Norwegian to Hungarian makes sense (though not offering the language course does not) since they are well-integrated countries with small populations, but not broadcasting in Georgian does not. The languages offered by Deutsche Welle all fall into one of two categories: 1) languages with large enough populations to justify broadcasting in them, 2) languages with geopolitical significance, especially prospective EU member countries. Georgia fits into Category 2 so not seeing it anymore is out of place.

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Fresh Prince of Bel-Air through Google Translate 64 times

The title explains it all:



Edit: in case anybody is wondering where apricot comes from, it's the word maxing:

In west Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground where I spent most of my days
Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool
And all shooting some b-ball outside of the school

在西部费城出生和长大
在操场上，在那里我度过了我的天
冷，杏，放宽所有酷
所有拍摄部分B球外的学校

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European languages in danger online: Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese.

An article in Spanish here on European languages that are in danger of 'digital extinction' claims that the majority of the 80 languages in Europe are in danger of fading away online in the future. The study sampled 30 languages, of which 21 were in danger. According to the study only English has a good amount of technological support, followed by Spanish, French, German, Dutch and Italian which have 'moderate technical support'. The languages of the 30 with the least amount of support were Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Maltese (note: of these, only Lithuanian has a Wikipedia of any notable size). Catalan, Euskara, Bulgarian, Greek, Hungarian and Polish also have 'fragmentary' support.

Obviously the study did not include languages like Macedonian and Sorbian if Bulgarian and Polish are listed as being in danger while the former two are not.

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Link roundup for 28 September 2012

--- This is a great image showing the types of Kepler exoplanet candidates so far, and actually quite necessary considering their huge number. It divides them into type and zone (hot - temperate - cold), and as expected the hot zone planets, which are easiest to detect, are the greatest in number. Eventually the other two rows will grow as it takes three passes in front of a star to confirm a candidate planet.

The types of planet candidates from greatest to least are: hot superterrans, hot neptunians, hot jovians, hot terrans, hot subterrans, warm superterrans, warm jovians, warm neptunians, and the rest of them have zero or one.

--- So we've discovered an ancient Martian streambed. I am not a Mars-first advocate, but if Mars ends up being the key to a massive increase in funding for space due to some fascinating discovery then it deserves to be the benefactor of the extra funding. In the meantime it is a great planet for unmanned exploration.

--- Exciting news from YouTube: it's now possible to crowdsource translations of a video. That means that videos like this recent Bulgarian one I mentioned:



can be made with no effort at all, by others. Of course, your video will need to be popular enough that people will want to translate it.

--- Article in German with eight-minute mp3 on the usage of un in German (unmöglich, unberechenbar...). Usually a simple negation, but not always.

--- SpaceX's Grasshopper made its first hop a few days ago:



Not a single wobble, most impressive.

--- Looks like there is a new verklarende dictionary in Afrikaans, published by Oxford.

--- Dawn's current distance to Vesta: 176,300 km. To Ceres: 61.3 million km. In other words, a full month after leaving Vesta it is still less than half the distance from Earth to the moon. New Horizons covers this distance about every three hours or so. On the other hand Dawn is largely stress free, whether during the cruise stage or entering and leaving orbit.

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What the Eurobarometer says about language learning in Austria

A small part of it anyway - this article in German ponders some of the results for Austria in the Eurobarometer. The results they reference are here, showing Austria compared to the European average.

One of the things the article notes is that Austria is much more interested in Italian than the European average: while only 2% of those in Europe think Italian is good to learn for their children's future, this number is 10% in Austria. "Most useful for personal development" also shows 5% for Europe and 10% for Austria. Not much of a surprise given that Austria borders Italy, although this doesn't benefit Slovak at all: the two capitals are just 80 km apart but Slovak doesn't even show up anywhere, so local environment isn't the only factor here.

Austrians are also more likely to use their languages on holidays abroad: 71% compared with the European average of 50%.

One other interesting number: the top advantage given in Europe to learning another language is "to be able to work in another country" at 61%. In Austria this is down a bit at 59%, and is overshadowed by two other advantages: "to use on holidays abroad" at 64%, and "to be able to understand people from other cultures" at 63%.

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