Here's what Google Translate made of the famous speech from Shakespeare's Hamlet (English-Chinese Traditional, Back to English, into Thai and back to English again). I swear I never altered a single word, so how "pharmaceutical sciences" got in there I haven't a clue!
In order to survive or is this is a problem. Whether it is a noble soul. Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Or, armed with a sea of trouble,. Opposition and end? Die: sleep; Sleep and by sleep to say we end. Heart - thousands of research in pharmaceutical sciences and natural shocks. Texture those who succeed. Pious hope that the dead sleep; Sleep: maybe to dream: it is life threatening; Death of a dream come true for sleep When we roll this salad man,. We need to stop: with respect. This will cause a disaster for long life; For those who would bear the whips and scorn of the time. Oppressors wrong people proud of their disdain,. Profane love, pain, the laws of the delay. Office of arrogance and rejection. The patient is not worth attention,. But to make your own. Simple small dagger?
STUPIDLY I went and downloaded the most up-to-date PDF Broschüre for the course I have set my heart on. I hate setting my heart on anything, because I might not get it. But I've set my heart on this. The desire to do it is eating me up inside. In fact I feel like I'm festooned with army ants and being eaten alive. I feel like a hydrogen bomb inside me is about to detonate at any moment.
This is what they say about the languages on offer, re the application process:
3.2 Zulassungsvoraussetzungen Für das Bachelorstudium besteht in den Sprachen Englisch, Französisch, Spanisch eine Zulassungsbeschränkung (Numerus clausus). Der NC-Wert ergibt sich für jedes Semester neu aufgrund der freien Studienplätze, der Abiturnoten, der Wartezeiten und der Anzahl der BewerberInnen. Eine Vorhersage über die für das jeweilige Zulassungsverfahren geltenden Grenzwerte kann daher nicht getroffen werden. Als Zugangsvoraussetzungen für das Studium am FTSK sind neben der allgemeinen Hochschulreife oder einem äquivalenten ausländischen Abschluss fundierte Kenntnisse in Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Englisch, Französisch und Spanisch und Grundkenntnisse in Chinesisch erforderlich, falls diese Sprachen als Fächer gewählt werden. Genaue Informationen zu den Eingangsvoraussetzungen für alle Sprachen entnehmen Sie bitte den Merkblättern der einzelnen Sprachen, die Sie auf der Seite http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/261.php finden.
Well I have to read it in German ~ so can you!!
To summarize, English, French and Spanish ~being so highly popular, are subject to entry restrictions in numbers. Being as English is my mother tongue and the only language over which I feel I have some genuine mastery, I don't have much choice in the matter. But I can avoid French by not applying for it, and doing Russian instead, as I've already decided. Some basic knowledge of Chinese is required. So I'm determined to trounce the other students by achieving A Level standard (or higher) before I even start. As you cannot fail to have noticed, I have a genuine fascination for Chinese characters. I already know about 2-300. If I could multiply this by a factor of ten, I'd have a pretty good basic reading knowledge in Chinese.
I couldn't find any entry restrictions or requirements for Russian, but would feel compelled to reach at least GCSE (lower school certificate) level, simply to underline my interest (and distinguish myself from the vulgar hoardes I'll be up against in the application process). The greatest novelists of all time wrote in Russian ~ Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenyev, Pasternak... imagine how amazing it would be to read those in the original?!
My biggest worry of all doesn't concern waiting lists because I'm English or beating others at Chinese: it's the German language test to which I'll be subjected. I tried on before on the Goethe Institut website (admittedly when my German was clagged up with 18-years of unpractised rust) and got a dreadful score.
As I shall point out, not having a teacher here, I have focused my energies on acquiring a passive reading vocabulary. And it's working amazingly. The novel I'm reading, Seegrund, which means Lake-Bed is a thriller about a dead body found... you guessed it. In a pool of blood in the snow on the banks of a frozen lake. I was astonished to comprehend the words for river-bank (das Ufer) and corpse (die Leiche) ~ both of which I've picked up and remembered in the past couple of months. So you see reading books and keeping my amateurish German blog has got me somewhere after all. There are many expressions for which I know two or three words in German, just as I do in English. I get a real sense of achievement from this. Especially as I DROPPED OUT of a languages degree in the early 90s in disgrace and despair, convinced I would never achieve any degree of mastery over German, let alone any other tongue. Somehow, amazingly, the magic has happened.
I think my turning point came one night as I listened to BBC World Service radio. I realized that across the world there are millions of people who have never set foot on Anglophone soil, who have learned to speak our language fluently by following radio broadcasts and slogging their way through English literature, dictionary in hand, referring and re-referring constantly to every word they're not entirely sure about. So I did this and look! I'm seriously considering applying to uni in Deutschland. How amazing is that. Six months ago I wouldn't even have been able to read the prospectus... Well enough of my babbles.
It's 5:34. The clocks went back last night, meaning darkness now falls not long after 4pm. It's dead romantic ~ like a Siberian goods train yard full of onion-picking babushkas, with immigrant workers hiding in the cattle trucks smoking Cyrillic cigarettes and babbling away in Chinese. (I must fit the two new languages into this silly fantasy.) German, Russian and Chinese are also, of course languages of the former Communist Block. Life behind the Iron Curtain has long held an enduring fascination for me. That was a big reason why I so loved German doing at school. When I started the A-level course Germany was separated by 200 yards of watch-towers, searchlights and tripwired minefields. By the time I actually sat the exams the wall had come tumbling down and a new world order was upon us.
What the future world order shall bring, I shudder to think. It's capitalism capitalism capitalism everywhere. I'm a capitalist, but I see excesses everywhere. And greed is not always good, despite what Gordon Gecko would have us believe. Anyway I must ping. I wonder if anyone actually read this post to the end? If so, I commend you with a 金奖章jīn jiǎngzhāng ~ a gold medal!
PS Here's an entertainment for you: the oldest recording JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, et al... he appears in this early English Linguaphone course in units 13 "the wireless" and 20 "at the tobacconist's"! What a blast from the past. (He was well into his "pipe-weed" as anyone who's seen the films will know...)
... SO YESTERDAY I SPENT MY DRUG MONEY ON BOOKS (and food). £10 got me a 972-page German tome called Der Turm (The Tower") by Uwe Tellkamp. £3.50, beautiful hardback with acid-free cream paper. Set in the former DDR... well I can't tell much about it as I'm only on page 7. But it's set behind the Iron Curtain and I have a thing about life in former communist states. The other books were give up smoking for 50p, Byron Childe Harold/etc 30p special offer (minuscule hardback) and Peyton Place (80p) by Grace Metalious, who died of alcoholic cirrhosis at 39 and sold well over 20,000,000 copies of this book about moral degeneracy in a drab New England Town. This reprint comes with intellectual introduction by some academic and I have to say Metalious's literary style isn't bad (nowhere near as bad as Jacqueline Susann's, if you're into trash fiction of the 1950s and 60s).
The rest of my tenner went on food.
I was actually hoping for Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese book and CD set for £5 (well I can hope, can't I?) but Mandarin will have to wait till next week.
The urge to educate myself is eating me up inside. An all-consuming craving, far worse than any drug-craving I've experienced for a very long time.
Today will be a test day. I KNOW a friend who will come to me in need (he always does) and how on earth I will get out of that situation without scoring heroin I have no idea.
By the way there is a terrible drought on at the moment. The drug purity has fallen ~ even in the best stuff I've found ~ to less than a third of what it normally was. I can tell this by the way methadone holds me so much better than any street heroin I've bought in weeks.
My favourite hobby is complaining about the lousy gear. So people assume I'm being ripped off, introduce me to their dealer and I'm even MORE BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED with minuscule bags of even poxier gear!
In my opinion anything that's not China white is rubbish anyhow. Heroin is properly white, not brown.
The worst stuff that was around can't have been more than 1% pure ~ if that. And it was full of some sort of resin that re-congealed on cooling, making the stuff uninjectable unless you filtered it three times.
The root of the shortage is blight on Afghanistan's poppy crop, reducing this year's opium yield from around 8000 tonnes (enough to make 800 tonnes of heroin) to something like 2500 tonnes opium (250 tonnes heroin). The UK alone uses an estimated 35 tonnes annually (at import strength), so if there's blight next year it's curtains for heroin (hurrah!)
Hurrah, because I can be free. I feel like a pan of boiling water, seething with pent-up energy and furious steam. One day I will go out and smack the world right between the eyes, because the world deserves it.
Meanwhile I have to 1. give up heroin 2. learn fluent German 3. write several bestselling books 4. learn fluent Chinese 5. learn fluent Russian 6. get on course I've been wittering on about 7. graduate with summa cum laude or whatever the phrase is.
Then at long last I will be qualified to do something.
When I was little and heard foreigners going blubble-blubble-blubble, I thought they all spoke one language called Foreign. I was determined to learn this mystery tongue, so nobody could prattle over my head again.
Also I was affronted by the way almost all foreigners appeared to be fluent in English, giving my family, friends and I no linguistic privacy whatsoever almost anywhere in the world.
My goal is to speak at least 10 languages fluently, including Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Thai ... blah blah. If I'd only not been so incredibly lazy all my life I could be a long way to achieving this goal. As it is, I barely speak fluent English!
My goblin-bitten computer cable replacement is here! Whoopeee! Now I must run in the shower. I'm so minging I'm infectious...
I AM READING NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a cheery tome by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov (which my English teacher dubbed "the most boring book ever written") and The Insulted and Injured ~ I'm sure the authors of modern misery memoirs are peeved to find that particularly evocative title already used up!
I had some drinks this afternoon and sat under an electronic posterboard leafing through the cheery tale, which is set in a Siberian hard labour camp.
Dostoyevsky's characters ~ murderers, alcoholics, gamblers ~ remind me of some of the junkies I have met in my time ... I'm not saying anything else.
I googled various topics concerning Siberian labour camps and came up with a page from a school punishment book, detailing how many lashes of the cane various miscreants received for such crimes as stabbing someone with a pear(!) and grave robbing~(!!!) Am I badly misreading things (you can click on the picture to enlarge)~? Or was the world even crazier in Victorian times (or whenever those whippings are from)..? ~ than it is now?? (Surely not!)
I thought I would invent some comedy crimes of my own ...
The only sample offences I could come up with were:
Allowing school hamster to grow too tubby.
Allowing goblin to chase school hamster ...
I don't think I'd have done too well making up school rules in the dark ages, do you?
COMPETITION TIME ~ roll up and give your guesses, educated or otherwise, please! Tell me WHAT LANGUAGE ARE THESE SCRIBBLES WRITTEN IN?
Answers in the commentary box, if yer please...
PS the end of my HAMMY AND THE GOBLIN tale of wonder is coming soon. I bet y'all are yawning with excitement!
HIER ist mein besonderer deutschsprachiger Artikel über den kleinen Vogel in meiner Straße. Dieses Jahr, scheint es mehr Vogelarten als je zuvor zu geben, die von den Bäume und Dachern zwitschern. Vor zwei wochen zeigte sich eine Ringeltaube, die auf der Fernsehantenne meines Nachbars sitzt. Ringeltauben sind eher flatterhaft und schüchtern. Sie gurrt und gurrt praktisch der ganzer Tag. Ich ahnte, dass sie in mir verknallte sich. Jedesmal wenn ich die Haustür öfnete, oder die Straße entlang trabte ~ da war sie! Hinter der Mülltonne meines Nachbars, hinter dem Kirschenbaum... immer hinter etwas. Sie tat, als ob sie im Gras pickte; dann sah sie ganz erschüttert aus. Sie klappte die Flügeln und auf dem Dach verschwand. Deshalb nannte ich sie "Flapper". Letzte Woche fand Flapper noch einandere Ringeltaube. Sie sitzen einander gegenüber und girren den ganzen Tag lang. Mein anderer Lieblingsvogel ist eine Nachtigall, die Chogstable oder Chogga heißt. Ich nannte sie Chogga nach ihrem Lied, das geht: twit twit twit jug jug mit vielen komplizierten Triller darin. Als ich das Thema googlete, fand ich, dass die Nachtigall in England überwintert, und dann im Sommer nach West- und Zentralafrika fliegt. Sie seht sehr unwichtig aus ~ ganz klein und braun. Aber ihr Lied ist eine der schönster aller Vogellieder. Chogga lebt oben im Kirschenbaum neben meinem Haus, darin Flapper auch saß, bevor sie ihren Partner fand. Im Winter sah ich Chogga im Gebüsch meines Nachbars. Heutzutage sehe ich sie nicht. Aber ich höre sie laut und klar! Die ganze Nacht, und fast den ganzen Tag lang zirpt sie ihr tranzendent melodische Lied, und ich fühle, als ob ich von einem romantischen Gedicht träume!
J W VON GOETHE
WANDRERS NACHTLIED II Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.
I HAVE BEEN EATING ultra-wholemeal Polish seedbread... Very bourgeois... very nice.
Usually I eat Hovis bread. Crack open a fresh pack, put your nose in ~ mmmm! That lovely malted wholegrain..!
It goes really lovely with Lurpak unsalted butter...
Last week I survived almost solely on fishfingers sandwiches... Unlike this one though, not dripping with baked beans!!!
Today I bought CREMA DI NOCCIOLATO ice cream: "hazelnut ice cream with nougat sauce (17%) and hazelnut pieces" ~ a bargain at £1.79 from Lidl.
Here's a tiny doggie film: TWO NORWICH TERRIERS DOGGEDLY PLAYING AT HAVING A FRIENDLY LITTLE SAVAGE ON AN AMERICAN LAWN...
For those of you interested in a mysterious dialect moo'd by black-&-white cattle, here are some literary works written in the same... a couple of links I stumbled across yesterday on a Dutch website for literature in the Frisian tongue...
OK THIS is a very random post... made up of my trawlings from the www. I found a video of a man being tested on his knowledge of 58 languages on South American TV... + some nice trains. I've loved trains for as long as i can remember. I like the smooth ride. I like being able to move about. And I love the view you get of the back of things...
Today's original title was "not coping" ~ penned when I was cold and depressed yesterday morning. But now it's 4am and I feel fine...
I WAS trying to go for a title a little less like a cry for help. Not doing it proper. (Life.) But who does?
Always something that needs to be done that is not being done. It's always too late. (Or too early; usually too late!) Even when I'm on to one thing, I'm neglecting something else. I'm like the proverbial plate-juggler it's never too long till the inevitable...
Sleep is like a waste of time. I try and do without it, thinking I'm being healthy or at least "respectable" ~ not lying in bed all day...
... Eventually it bites back, catches up with me. And then, as if it's some kind of disease, sleep takes me out for an entire day. Aargh!
For those of you in a hurry and wondering what video of today's multitudes is best, it's this one, of a cat playing tambourine with its tail:
I had a game of blogospherical Six Degrees of CyberSeparation tonight: find a blog at random by pressing next. It needs to have comments or links to other blogs. Pick one of these (comments are best; you get a feel of who that person is), and jump this way from blog to blog until you find someone you know, which, with 70 million blogs out there you'd think was nigh on impossible, right? Wrong! I've done this several times and usually get "home" within 30 blogs! The point of the exercise, of course is to find good reading material and nice photographs. I found some pretty good stuff tonight:
This one has some of the best photographs I've ever seen (little boy in flat cap): karmenlindner.blogspot.com Have a look at these fantabulous cake-creations ~ there's one where you cut through and see flowers ~ I've never seen a cake like that before... iammommy.typepad.com/i_am_baker This guy says he's only an amateur photographer? Can't he get a paid job? Is there no justice in the world? tharpography.blogspot.com gun story iwannabeafarmer.blogspot.com
Lebanese-born Ziad Fazah is Guinness-listed as the most polyglot person alive. Here he is on Chilean TV, being tested on his fluency in 58 languages. Don't complain about the Spanish ~ think how much harder it is for him: Finnish, Chinese, Farsi etc etc etc!
This guy is interesting, he's talking about the languages he's picked up over the years ... IN ENGLISH ~ wooo-hoohh! It's little because there's little to see
If you like trains you'll like this. A clip about an expert from Deutsche Bahn training up local drivers on the new Taiwanese bullet train. See my German's not that furchtbar ~ I can follow this perfectly:
This one's really good if you like watching trains whoosh past... ... this film brings up a longing in me to travel, it encapsulates what i love about being abroad ~ the difference: different trains, different roads, different stamps, different thing, just different I love the double-decker blue ones. You'll never see double-decker trains on the britische Zwergbahn, because our railways, having been built first in the world, all have diddy little bridges and tunnels...
See you can see how bad my French is now. This is how I write it:
Film francais au sujet des infiltres, immigrants illegaux, qui se cachent sur les camions a Callais pour arriver en Angleterre ou ils vont commencer un nouveau vie.
And yet I can follow the clip easily without subtitles ~
And a last word on sleep:~ Mrs Thatcher's 4 hours... She famously ran the country on that little sleep the entire length of her premiership... I wish I could do with that little. As it is, night becomes day and the days stretch together... and then I crash and end up sleeping round the clock. I hate being like that and I don't need coke to do it (or any drugs ~ that's the point). I heard that sleep deprivation can jolt one out of depression, but it doesn't. Not on me. I tell myself I'm being lazy by sleeping too long but then I try to stop and all the hours I shaved off are snatched back ~ and never at a time that's convenient to me! Omniglot: which language should i learn? www.omniglot.com/language/which.htm Hey: last but by no means at all least ~ here's Wikipedia's list of languages in order of difficulty, with links to WIKIBOOKS FREE TEXTBOOKS in each of over 40 languages! en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers And one last-but-not-least; I STOLE this idea from Kat'rina du C who has a thing about this: here's a Japanese cat called Maru, which means round (Spherical the hamster was also called Maru in Japanese)... having a brush. Look at the look on her face, the furry swine! (K d C's cat's called Mango btw; Maru/Mango/Maru/Mango ~ no relation but ... geddit?)
3: OK I know this was difficult; the pot contains beeswax ~ I had to use a foreign container otherwise the word would have appeared on the side: POLISH!
... das Fischstäbchen, de visstick ~ I think they're known as fishsticks in America, too.
I have been practising these languages in the most practical way I know how ~ by writing out trilingual shopping lists: die Milch/le lait/de melk (and just for good measure, Esperanto: lakto)... deze vissticken of mine come in cod ~ der Kabeljau/la morue/de kabeljauw/moruo and haddock ~ der Schellfisch/un aiglefin/de schelvis/eglefino ~ I bought both (special offer/Sonderangebot/promotion spéciale/speciale aanbieding/o Esperanto can go hang it's late... it seems to have taken all evening just researching 20 words, with much continental Wikipedia comparison... driving me round the twist. I really need printed information.
I've continued researching educational opportunities, but feel my old chasing rabbits in two directions syndrome threatening to reappear.
I am referring to that Chinese proverb I've mentioned before: he who chases two rabbits goes home empty-handed and it has been the story of my life. Full of interest in too many different things I'm unable to focus and very little comes of the efforts I do put in. Well now I'm too old, and will have to sit down and do something constructive (and profitable) before I die. I now realize that an undergraduate degree does not have to, and indeed is not meant to, encapsulate your interests in every academic subject going. It is quite OK to be well into one thing but to do a degree in another. When I was younger I was also against vocational degrees. At the more intellectual end of academia they were unfashionable and only the "new universities" (that is: the former polytechnics") tended to offer them. I was all into penning great intellectual critiques on classic works of literature (which I was good at, when I gave myself a chance). The idea of business German, to me seemed soulless.
Anyway I've had a peruse around the subjects that interest me. For the record these are basically European and Asian languages: German with one or more of: Japanese, Dutch, French, Chinese, Italian or Spanish. These are the languages I want to speak. Those are my goals. Obviously there are three or more BAs there so I'll have to be selective...
Oxford do what sounds like a very good FIVE YEAR course in BA Japanese ~ which includes one year abroad. In five years' intensive study I would expect a very high level of fluency to be attained.
There are several universities in Germany offering Germanistik/Japanologie at BA. To get on one of these courses I would need a very high level of German proficiency as (unlike the translator's degree in Mainz) they are squarely aimed at mother-tongue German speakers and any language exercises would refer back to German...
Perhaps studying a third language through the medium of a second sounds very high-falluting ~ but students with English as foreign language study in British universities all the time, so I don't think it would be that unusual for me to do the equivalent in Germany...
Now I do really want to learn Japanese and I love the subject and when I pore over my kanji books I feel centred in a way that only heroin and novel-writing could ever compete with...
But I have to bear in mind, the point of any degree would be to get me as near as possible to QUALIFIED to do something, namely to translate. And I think at my age I really need to focus energies where they are best spent... Common sense tells me that for a translator, a course in translation would obviously be the way to go. I already have French and German to A level, which represents five years' study (seven years in the case of French)....
Bearing in mind that Birkbeck's Japanese promises to take students from ab initio to "one year post A-level" and you see how much further I could take German and French. The course I'm looking at promises "near mother tongue fluency" ~ which is considerably further along.
Whatever I decide to do I am going to have to focus my energies economically. If I want to do a European D language on top of the other two I need to start that now. Three languages at once isn't quite as confusing as it sounds ~ remember I'm pretty much at book-reading level in the other two, so my hellos, how are you? ~ please would you be so kind as to direct me to the railway stations... shouldn't get into too many tangles.
In the BA programme, as a native speaker of English you can either study German as your only foreign language (B language, excellent active competence), or you can choose a second foreign language (C language, excellent passive competence), which can be Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish. (Please note that there are admission restrictions for French and Spanish.) Ab initio courses are not offered in all C languages. However, you can attend introductory courses in Finnish and Turkish (D language).
(Every language offered as a C-language can be studied as a D-language also.)
Without any school certificates in Spanish, it doesn't sound like I'd be able to take that (the most obvious practical choice of D-language) anyhow. Another factor to bear in mind is the competition: loads of professionals can offer Spanish. As far as I know it is now the number one most popular choice of foreign language in British schools (being easier than French and, people suppose, more useful, though I'd dispute that (the number of speakers might be lower, but French is extremely widely spoken)). German is least popular of the big three ~ and yet, so I hear, there is more work for professional linguists in German than every other EU language combined! Perhaps Italian would be the most "sensible" choice. Finnish appeals because it is non-Indo-European (related to Lappish, language of the mysterious reindeer-herding Saami) ~ hence difficult and exotic ~ from a land of lonely pines, ice-lakes, snow-capped crags and the midnight sun... Italian: best food in Europe, easier than French (and much more crisply pronounced)... classical ruins, great literature and poetry and opera... high fash in Milan, porn stars in parliament. Yeah: Italian is cool. But none of those others really grabs me. To learn any language it's essential to be exceedingly highly motivated and the fire isn't there.
As for Dutch, I've already prattled on about that before: Mainz is only a couple of hours from Dutch-speaking territory, I already have studied the basics of Dutch grammar and it's easy. As you can see from the examples I gave, most vocabulary echoes both English and German. And when I studied Dutch I felt centred, in the zone... like I do with Japanese and heroin (strange but true).
I need to make up my mind soon... and now it's a quarter to midnight, nothing has been done. I am drowning in word lists for fish, bread rolls and tomato sauce... How do I come up with a programme, by myself, to focus the skills I need to build up? (Without wasting time or running round in circles..?)
I have lost one decade solid of my life to heroin and mental ill-health. The decade before that was pretty much scuppered by health concerns, too ~ though I wasn't a full-on addict (it's difficult to date precisely when which problem began because they're so interwoven and in the beginning I was extremely cautious with heroin. I had no intention of getting addicted and so continuously "picked it up" (as NA say) ~ loved it, but forced myself to renounce it. This happened again and again over a period of years. Somehow the occasions when I used crept closer and closer together until I found myself withdrawing without even knowing it!... And THAT is a long story...
Now I must go. Has anyone any advice on what I should do? And how??
Here's an some interesting stats: TOP 10 INTERNET LANGUAGES by number of users: www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm English is number one with just under 500 million, Chinese number two with just over 400 million. German comes just ahead of Arabic ~ about 72 million... French is 57 million...
MUSIC: KAREL FIALKA: HEY MATTHEW Produced for just £200 from the singer's Bradford & Bingley account, this got to #2 in the UK chart, it's called "New Wave" and that's it really
OK I'll try and be polyglot: Deze hier is een £200 productie van het engelse sangschrijver Karel Fialka. Het is wel goed. Och! It moet nu gaan! Ik heb niet maar toe zeggen! OK, tot later
IF I'M GOING for this uni course in French/German/Dutch translation in Mainz I'm going to have to refresh my rusty French (no study in 18 years) on top of my German. I did study some Dutch when I was enamoured with the idea of moving to Amsterdam and completed half a Linguaphone course, which means in theory I would have had a vocabulary of about 700 words... but THAT was 18 years ago too!
So I decided the thing to do is give up entirely googling anything in English and migrate exclusively to their French, German and Dutch portals. I have just been reading up on blue roses and la situation linquistique en suisse (Switzerland) on French Wikipedia.
Looking back I can see I have been extremely lazy in my attitude. But I also see that my attitude has been nothing unusual for an English-speaker. In many parts of the world it is quite ordinary to have to read books, conduct business and look up information in one's second, third or even fourth languages. I think if I can pick up this attitude, instead of grumbling to myself that this is "like looking at a beautiful view through a dirty window" (which is pretty much what it's like having to read a text in an idiom where not every word is familiar and a few are downright incomprehensible) and remind myself that I'm killing four birds with three stones (or whatever I'm doing: what is the metaphor? I'm killing two birds with one stone three times then.)... If I can do this then maybe I will qualify to get on that course, maybe I'll actually get on it, maybe I'll go and do it and graduate with flying colours and everything will change for the good. I can but try (!!)
MI kunigis espterantan retklubon hodiaŭ, kaj mi trovis diversajn paĝojn kaj rettagolibrojn en la lingvo internacia. Mi ŝerĉas bonan vortaron, sen sukceso. Mi esperas povi skribi esperante fluante en kelkaj monatoj. Ĉu oni komprenas min?...
Did anyone get any of that? Many years ago I learned a bit of Esperanto, but I was at school learning three other languages anyway so my head was a bit crowded out. Esperanto is said to be very easy to learn and indeed for most Europeans this is probably true because the vocabulary is a mixture of Romance and Germanic with a tiny bit of Greek and Slavonic chucked in for good measure. Esperanto grammar is quite regular, but the language insists on making distinctions that I'm sure many people ~ and not just native English-speakers ~ would consider quite superfluous. Grammatically speaking Esperanto is NOT the easiest language I've come across. That honour would go to Thai. It's no coincidence that Pidgin English comes from East Asia:
Two girl go market buy chicken; no chicken there so go home come back next day get fat chicken. Du knabinoj iris al la vendejo aĉeti kokidon; sed tie ne estis kokido, tial ili revenis hejme kaj aĉetis grasan kokidon sekvantatage.
Esperanto was originally concocted as a solution to the language problem in Europe; only later was it proposed as a world language. There are said to be as many as two million Esperanto speakers worldwide, but I suspect this estimate to be overoptimistic. Esperanto has never been adopted as an official language by any country. You would think the European Union could save themselves a great deal of trouble by insisting that all delegates learn Esperanto instead of laying on full conference-interpreting facilities in TWENTY-THREE languages. Then again I shouldn't diss the EU for this ~ that university site I was looking at in Mainz pointed out that EU-translators can earn 70,000 Euros. Now that would be a tasty pie to bite!
Back in the 1980s the Esperanto Associo de Britio sent me a spattered timetable of Esperanto broadcasts on shortwave radio. Now I had a decent radio set, and yet I don't recall ever managing to tune into a single one.
Esperanto has come into its own in the age of the internet where people who would never otherwise be able to talk one to another can share the common ground of a "planned language" that belongs to no-one and therefore welcomes everyone.
Do I think Esperanto will ever take off? It would solve a great many problems if it did. But I think people enjoy problems a lot of the time, so my answer is NO...
HISTORIO DE LA ESPERANTA LINGVO Kun subtekstoj The folks talking here sound suspiciously like native English speakers (listen closely to the vowel sounds) ~ twisting their tongues over Espeanto's clustrous consonants...
And last but not least: here's a little dog at the barber's... Notice how relaxed it is... Someone once said Norwich terriers "were far from the front of the queue when canine beauty was handed out" ~ what a perverse thing to say! This little doggie is beautiful!
Now I always thought "Scots" meant badly spelled English with a Scottish flavour, and that the Gaelic tongue ~ related to Welsh ~ was the "proper" language of Scotland. But Gaelic never has been spoken in Lowland Scotland, where lots of people, including so it appears the Scottish government, believe Scots to be a proper language, distinct from English (and very distinct from Gaelic). Walcome tae the Scottish Pairlament wabsite
Banner featuring images of the Scottish Parliament and Public Information Service leaflets
The Scottish Pairlament is here for tae represent aw Scotlan’s folk.
We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as possible can finn oot aboot the Scottish Pairlament. Information anent whit we can dae tae help ye engaige wi the Pairlament gin ye arenae fluent in English can be haen at Langage assistance providit by the Scottish Pairlament (22.2KB pdf).
This pairt o the wabsite hauds information anent the Scottish Pairlament that we hae producit in Scots. Uise the link aneath tae find oot mair.
* Garrin the Scottish Pairlament Wark for You (1.59MB pdf)
Contactin the Scottish Pairlament
Gin ye hae a quaistion anent the Scottish Pairlament or the Memmers o the Scottish Pairlament (MSPs), ye can contact the Public Speirins Service in ony leid by post, email or fax.
And here, from Wikipedia's Frisian entry, are sentences in the Frisian and Low Saxon dialects. Of all the languages in the world, the closest to English is said to be Frisian, a separate tongue from Low Saxon/German, spoken in the Eastern Netherlands and parts of Northern Gernmany up to Southern Denmark, where, according to Wikipedia, quadrilingualism used to be widespread (North Frisian, Standard German, Low German and South Jutlandic Danish).. And there I was, thinking Frisian was a language moo'd by black and white cows...
Comparative sentence
Saterland Frisian Die Wänt strookede dät Wucht uum ju Keeuwe un oapede hier ap do Sooken.
North Frisian (Mooring dialect) Di dreng aide dåt foomen am dåt kan än mäket har aw da siike.
West Frisian De jonge streake it famke om it kin en tute har op 'e wangen.
East Frisian Low Saxon De Jung straktde dat Wicht um't Kinn to un tuutjede hör up de Wangen.
Danish Drengen aede pigen på kinden og kyssede hende på kinderne.
Dutch De jongen streelde/streek het meisje rond haar kin en kuste haar op haar wangen.
Dutch Low Saxon De jonge strek 't dearntje um de kinne en gaf heur een smok.
German Der Junge streichelte das Mädchen ums Kinn und küsste sie an den Wangen.
English The boy stroked the girl on the chin and kissed her on the cheeks.
Lancashire dialect and accent Th' lad strorkt 'lass on 'jib an busst er on th' cheaks.
Lancashire dialect and accent Th' lad strorkt 'lass on 'jib an gev er a smeawch on th' cheaks.
Scots The laddie straikit the lassie oan the chin an gied hir a smouch oan the chouks.
Notice Lancashire II: smeawch ~ just like one of our modern words for kissing: smooching ....
GERMANIC LANGUAGE MAP Showing the High-Central-Low German to Dutch continuum in green and English-Frisian in orange...
FRISIAN LANGUAGE MOVEMENT No gabbly Germanic dialect here ~ you can pretty much follow what they're getting at. They want road signs in the language, children to learn it at school and so on
FRISIAN VICTORIA'S SECRET SUPERMODEL DOUTZEN KROES ... speaks about Frisian in Lower Franconian (Dutch!)
Here's what Google Translate made of the famous speech from Shakespeare's Hamlet (English-Chinese Traditional, Back to English, into Thai and back to English again). I swear I never altered a single word, so how "pharmaceutical sciences" got in there I haven't a clue!
