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Language
Unicode Jewels: Ogham Alphabet Made Personal
I’ve just had a super new ring made for me by Irish designer Breda Haugh. It’s in sterling silver with a single pink sapphire stone set around Ogham symbols. Wikipedia tells us that Ogham is “an Early Medieval alphabet used to write the early Irish language (in the so-called “orthodox” inscriptions, 1st to 6th centuries AD), and...
An Cód: Craicing the Code in Irish
It’s often assumed that computing coding lessons are always taught in English because most (though not all) programming languages use English language syntax. Not so. Take this great example of learning to code in Irish (Gaeilge), part of the Hour of Code initiative in 2016, thanks to computer science professor Kevin Scannell (@kscanne), from Saint Louis...
A Cute Irish Accent
Irish accents, dontcha love ’em? In this case I’m talking about Irish language (Gaeilge) orthography, specifically the Irish language equivalent of the acute accent, the fada or síneadh fada. A letter in the Financial Times newspaper points out how the presence or absence of the a fada results in different words. Brendan Cahill corrects the newspaper for its...
Kudos and Comhghairdeas* to Duolingo’s Irish Language Volunteers
The Irish President (Uachtarán Na hEireann) Michael D. Higgins (Micheál D Ó hUigínn) (@PresidentIRL) has publicly recognized seven volunteers for their work in building up the Irish language (Gaeilge) version of the crowd-sourced, language-learning social app Duolingo (@duolingo). This is first time I’ve read about a head of state doing something like this in the language space, although volunteerism is something...
The Secret Language of … Elephants
The Elephant Listening Project is putting elephant sounds together with behavior to create an elephant language dictionary. CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” just ran a segment (video also available) on the central African forest elephants. The segment profiles Andrea Turkalo’s two decades of observing these elephants, and categorizing their sounds and actions. Many of the sounds are...
Striking a blow for idioms
A book on “novel”-sounding idioms in ten languages will save you the trouble of learning the languages yourself, according to Jag Bhalla, the author of I’m not Hanging Noodles on your Ears and other Intriguing Idioms from around the World, a collection of 1,200 idioms from National Geographic Books, illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Julia...
Sand calligraphy
Feast your eyes on these pretty symbols. No, they don’t necessarily fit together into a meaning message, but who can complain when looking at beautiful calligraphy on a gorgeous beach with the light hitting the symbols “just right”? (The characters in this piece take their inspiration mainly from the Adinkra symbols of the Akan people...
Don’t sleep, there’s a good book
“Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” is a fascinating book by Dan Everett detailing living, studying language and observing culture among the Pirahã people of the Amazon jungle. Everett, who is currently the chair of Languages, Literature and Cultures at Illinois State University, was funded by SIL to study the Pirahã language, and to translate the...
Chinese input on the new Mac OS
Perhaps it is because the new Mac operating system is nicknamed “snow leopard.” (What’s with the cat names? Personally, I am holding out for “margay”– should be fast and small. But I digress.) The snow leopard’s habitat is mostly in China. And the new Macintosh OS (more mundanely known as OS X 10.6) has a...
