Why Afrikaans is (also) the easiest language for English speakers to learn

Two years ago I wrote a post on why Norwegian is the easiest language for English speakers to learn. In it I give reasons why this is the case, and it also places Afrikaans as a kind of close second. At the same time, however, Norwegian and Afrikaans are relatively easy to learn in different ways, and since each language student has his or her own style when learning a language Norwegian may feel more natural to one, and Afrikaans to another. This post will look at Afrikaans in greater depth than the other, and also bring Norwegian up for contrast as the other Germanic language English speakers tend to have the easiest time with.

Two points before beginning:

- The term "easiest language to learn" is often misunderstood. "Easiest" means easy in comparison to others, and does not mean that learning a language is like learning to ride a bike. Saying that one language is the easiest to learn is like saying that one musical instrument is easier to learn than another, or a type of jet, submarine, or programming language. Claiming that the ukulele is objectively easier to pick up than the sitar does not mean that anyone can become the next Jake Shimabukuro in a week.



- Constructed languages (Esperanto, Ido, Occidental...) and English creoles (Tok Pisin, Bislama...) are special cases and are not included here. The former are created with quick learnability in mind, and the latter derive almost all their vocabulary from English (usually over a Melanesian grammar).

Now on to Afrikaans. Afrikaans is actually the fourth-most spoken Germanic language after English, German, and Dutch, with an estimated 20 million speakers including second language speakers. Most Afrikaans speakers are found in South Africa and Namibia but a large number of them live abroad too - London has a particularly large number of Afrikaans speakers. It is one of the newest languages in the world, as it is an offshoot of Dutch spoken in southern Africa that simplified over time, acquiring a much more analytic grammar than any of the other Germanic languages, except perhaps English. In light of this, it is an excellent entrance to the Germanic world for an English speaker.

Distribution of Afrikaans in South Africa.

Distribution of Afrikaans in Namibia (bordering South Africa on its northwest).

The best quick intro to the language as spoken and written is probably this video, showing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Afrikaans.



While it still looks and sounds a lot like Dutch, Afrikaans is a lot easier to simply pick up and use, mainly for the following reasons:

• Grammatical gender has disappeared. In the same way that English only uses the single the for the singular and plural, Afrikaans also just uses die. In contrast, every other Germanic language has two or three genders. Dutch has de and het, German has die, der and das.
• Verb conjugation is almost nonexistent and irregularities are few. The Dutch word to be conjugates as ik ben, jij bent, hij is, wij zijn, jullie zijn, zij zijn. Afrikaans doesn't conjugate at all here: ek is, jy is, hy is, ons is, julle is, hulle is. More on this later, but suffice to say Afrikaans verbs do not conjugate by person.
• Spelling has been simplified and is more intuitive for an English speaker. -ij has become -y (Dutch mij is Afrikaans my), -tie (English -tion) is written -sie, z which is usually pronounced as the English s in Dutch is written s in Afrikaans (Dutch zon for sun is son), among others.

As is often the case, however, being easier to learn here is contrasted by a much smaller amount of good learning material. The major West Germanic languages are quite interesting in this regard:

Afrikaans: easiest to learn, fewest learning materials
Dutch: somewhat harder to learn, more learning materials
German: hardest to learn, a phenomenal amount of great learning materials


So let's take a look at some Afrikaans from the point of view of the student, and with Norwegian for comparison.


Verbs: as mentioned above, verbs in Afrikaans do not conjugate by person. To use a verb in the present tense, take any verb and put a pronoun in front of it. Ek is, hy werk, sy slaap - I am, he works, she sleeps. Norwegian verbs also do not conjugate by person so neither is more difficult here. As with other Germanic languages besides English, the simple present is used where English speakers would use the progressive - "I'm going to school" instead of "I go to school".

Past tense: the past tense in Afrikaans looks like the past perfect in German and Dutch, and is formed in this way:

het (have) + ge-(verb)

Ek praat (I talk) becomes Ek het gepraat (I talked).
Hy werk (we worked) becomes Hy het gewerk (he worked).

Verbs that have a prefix (like the English undergo, return, befall) do not add ge-, so hy belowe (he promises) becomes hy het belowe (he promised). There are also eight verbs that conjugate more like verbs in other Germanic languages, but since these end up resembling English they are not particularly difficult. Some examples:

is becomes was in the past tense, not geis
wil (want) becomes wou, not gewil
kan (can) becomes kon (could, was able to), not gekan




One other very important difference between Afrikaans and other Germanic languages is that it has a single past tense, so there is no need to differentiate between "I was" and "I had been", or "I went" and "I had gone".

Norwegian on the other hand conjugates in a slightly more complex way, but in a way that resembles English a bit more. While Afrikaans has the het ge-(verb) for the past tense Norwegian usually puts a -te on the end (like English -d or -t), and of course has the perfect tense and a lot of strong verbs. Drikke for drink becomes drakk (drank), gi (give) becomes gav (gave), bli (become) becomes ble (became). Once again, these require some extra memorization but still feel quite natural, and so one student may prefer the feel of Norwegian here while Afrikaans will appeal to another.



Word order. This is probably the trickiest part to learning Afrikaans as its word order resembles Dutch, and German to a lesser extent. Basic word order is the same:

Ek werk in 'n skool. -- I work in a school.
Werk jy in 'n skool? -- Do you work in a school?
Ek sal doen. -- I shall (will) go.

But more complex sentences show a different word order than English:

Môre werk ek in die skool. -- I work in the school tomorrow. (lit. Tomorrow work I in the school)
Hy het gesê, dat hy dit gedoen het. -- He said that he did it. (lit. He has said, that he it did has)

Along with this Afrikaans has a double negative (like the French "je ne sais pas") that takes a bit of getting used to. Word order is the first tricky part (out of three) for an English student of Afrikaans.

In contrast to this, Norwegian word order is almost always the same as in English. "He said that he did it" is Han sa dat han gjorde det (exactly the same word order), and just about the only variation is where a sentence begins with an adverb - Morgen skal jeg jobbe på skolen (I will work at school tomorrow, but word order is "tomorrow shall I work in the-school"). This means that English speakers can rattle off complex sentences in Norwegian without a great deal of thought about word order, while Afrikaans requires more switching around.



Grammatical gender. As mentioned above, Afrikaans is one of the few Indo-European languages that does not have grammatical gender. Others besides English are Bengali, Assamese, Armenian, Ossetian/Ossetic, Persian, and a few others, but the vast majority of Indo-European languages have two or three. No grammatical gender means that every time you want to say the you simply say die, and when you want to say a/an you just say 'n (pronounced like a). It couldn't be easier. In contrast to this Norwegian has 2.5 genders - technically it has three, but you can get by with two (and in Bergen they only use two), and the third gender (feminine) is more used for a kind of Norwegian flavour than anything else. Suffice to say, the student of Norwegian has to remember whether a noun is an en noun or an et noun, while the student of Afrikaans never will. Thus:

Die huis is groot. Dit is my huis. -- The book is big. It is my book. (Afrikaans)
Huset er stor. Det er mitt hus. -- The house is big. It is my house. (Norwegian)
Die kat is groot. Dit is my kat. -- The cat is big. It is my cat. (Afrikaans)
Katten er stor. Det er min katt. -- The cat is big. It is my cat. (Norwegian)



Adjectives. English is the only Germanic language where adjectives do not decline before a noun. In other Germanic languages, however, an adjective after a noun (predicative) is different than one before a noun (attributive). In practice in Afrikaans it usually means putting an -e at the end of an adjective before a noun.

Die kos is smaaklik. -- the food is good.
Die smaaklike kos. -- the good food.

But other adjectives change in different ways before a noun. Luckily they will often end up resembling English and their attributive form is not that hard to remember:

Die seuntjie is jonk. -- the boy is young.
Die jong seuntjie. -- the young boy.
Die klere is nuut. -- the clothing is new.
Die nuwe klere. -- the new clothing.
Dit is reg. -- it is right.
Die regte vraag. -- the right question.

Some adjectives also do not change before a noun.

In contrast to this, Norwegian adjectives inflect in a more regular, but also more complex way. See this page for examples. The student of Afrikaans then will have to watch out for irregular adjectives but will only have to memorize an irregular adjective once, whereas Norwegian requires a bit more work up front but after getting the rules down they become easier to predict.



Plurals. After word order and adjectives, plurals finish up most of what the student will find tricky about Afrikaans. Most words in Afrikaans put an -e on the end to form the plural:

voet - voete (foot - feet)

but sometimes (as in English) it will also require a doubled consonant or slight change in the preceding vowel:

bus - busse
minuut - minute

words ending in -g will usually lose the g:

tyd - tye
dag - dae

another often seen plural suffix is -s:

moeder - moeders
voël - voëls

and some are just irregular:

kind - kinders
nag - nagte

So along with adjectives before nouns, the student of Afrikaans will also have to keep an eye out for irregular plurals. In contrast to this, Norwegian plurals are almost always regular, being formed with the -er suffix (-r if it ends with a vowel). Norwegian does have a few irregularities in the plural though, and since this is somewhat easier to predict if you know the gender of the noun (et- verbs of one syllable don't have a plural for example), once again we have an example of Norwegian requiring a bit more work up front but being more regular later on if you have learned the grammar well enough.



Pronunciation. Besides the guttural g (like the ch in loch), Afrikaans is not that difficult to pronounce. It is mostly pronounced as written, and does not have the singsongy feel that Scandinavian languages have. Overall Afrikaans feels a bit more natural and 'robust' to an English speaker when read out loud, whereas with Norwegian you sometimes wonder whether it really sounds right to not pronounce so many of the consonants (and apparently Danish is even worse):

Du og jeg er glad for at... (you and I are happy that) --> This sounds like "doo oh(g) yay eah glah for a(t)". In contrast, Afrikaans would say Ek en jy is bly dat... to say the same thing, with no silent consonants. Afrikaans feels a bit more like something you can sink your teeth into, Norwegian is kind of wispy and vague in comparison.



Dialects. Norwegian is infamous for being spoken in different ways throughout the country, whereas Afrikaans doesn't vary all that much in comparison. There is also only one written standard for Afrikaans, while Norwegian has bokmål and nynorsk.


Resources. Resources for Norwegian are easier to find given its much stronger online presence, while Afrikaans is not the sole official language of any one country and thus doesn't have the full weight of an entire sovereign nation behind it. Both are spoken in countries where almost everybody speaks very good English so they are similar here. On the other hand, it is much easier to find Afrikaans speakers who feel very strongly about protecting their language (somewhat similar to the way Quebecers are fiercely protective of French - some towns in South Africa are modelled after an Afrikaans-only policy) and will very much enjoy teaching it to a student, while Norwegians in general are more relaxed about Norwegian and aren't quite as concerned about how many speak it. After all, Norway is stable and well-off and part of a larger Scandinavian dialect continuum, so Norwegians in general simply learn other languages out of necessity but know in the meantime that their mother tongue isn't in any danger. For the student this means that Norwegian will be a bit harder to use in practice unless you are very stubborn about not using English, whereas if you choose the right location in South Africa you will be able to live in a community that will bend over backwards to help you learn the language to fluency.


As you can see, whether one is more difficult than the other is quite hard to say, and since the two languages are spoken on opposite hemispheres it usually isn't hard to pick between one and another. In the end it will come down to personal preference and learning style. Afrikaans is best learned by simply using it and seeing it in practice, while Norwegian is best learned by priming yourself with some basic grammar (not nearly as much as German though), and then using it in practice.



So where is the best place to begin learning Afrikaans? This site. Along with grammar and audio samples it also has an extremely extensive number of songs, some of which I think are particularly good.

Radio sonder grense has a lot of Afrikaans podcasts here. My favorite is sterre en planete (stars and planets), an astronomy podcast.

The largest single resource for text and matching audio by far is the New Testament recorded in Afrikaans. Text for that is here, audio can be streamed or downloaded (600+ MB) from this site.

Some other Afrikaans audio can be found on librivox.org, though besides the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (same as the video above) there isn't a great deal else.

The Afrikaans Wikipedia is of surprisingly high quality for a Wikipedia of its size, and you can find the longest articles here.

Scribd has some assorted reading material in Afrikaans such as this grade 7 textbook.

And of course for those willing to pay, there are many Afrikaans textbooks and novels that can be purchased. Other suggestions for good links for students of Afrikaans are welcome.

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Good news on the Estonian and Kalmyk front

A few days ago I wrote about an excellent resource I found for a large number of rare languages, a site with dramatized audio versions of the New Testament. Dramatized means having more than one speaker plus music and some sound effects, as opposed to one person recording the whole thing all by him/herself. In that post I mentioned that Estonian and Mongolian have not yet been recorded.

However!

Yesterday I found an Estonian version, and after all this searching through YouTube and Eesti Raadio and all the rest for audio content with text it was surprisingly easy. Going to the Estonian Wikipedia I went to the Uus Testament page, and lo and behold there was a link to audio files of the whole thing. Not a dramatic version, but since Estonian has been extremely difficult to find, this is now the best source of audio + matching text for Estonian I know of.

As for Mongolian: still haven't been able to find large amounts of Mongolian audio with text. I did notice however that the same site has the NT in Kalmyk, which I overlooked the first time as Kalmyk is simply a language you don't expect to see and it never occurred to look for that. This page has pdfs of all the books and letters that make up the NT. Since Mongolian is not yet my specialty I asked a friend of mine who has studied it and he said that Kalmyk sounds extremely different. On the other hand I have noticed comments on YouTube videos with Kalmyk speech from Mongolians that say it was very easy to understand. In any case, Kalmyk has always been appealing to me since it's a type of Mongolian that is spoken in a part of the world that doesn't completely freeze over during the winter (and is close to Armenia/Azerbaijan/Iran/Turkey). Mongolian even has a word (zud) for a particularly harsh winter, defined as:

A zud or dzud (Mongolian: зуд) is a Mongolian term for an extremely snowy winter in which livestock are unable to find fodder through the snow cover, and large numbers of animals die due to starvation and the cold.

Yeah, I don't think I'd like zud.

Let's compare the weather for Ulaanbaatar (the coldest capital in the world) and Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, for the next four days.

Ulaanbaatar:

-21°C | -36°C
-19°C | -33°C
-18°C | -29°C
-18°C | -33°C

Elista:

6°C | 5°C
5°C | -1°C
1°C | -5°C
4°C | -2°C

So it's just a tad more pleasant in Elista in the winter. Interestingly it's located directly west of Mongolia.


View Larger Map

Unfortunately Kalmyk is a minority language even in the places where it is spoken (last census gives 52% Kalmyk but it's doubtful that they are all fluent), and the region's president (correction: ex-president as of two months ago) is a bit nutty. Then again, Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev has just found a way to skip the next two presidential elections so being somewhat nutty and very power hungry is pretty much par for the course for the Caucasus to Central Asia.

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Spanish CNN+ goes off the air due to low ratings, to be replaced by 24 hour coverage of Big Brother (Gran Hermano)

After 11 years being on the air (since January 1999), CNN+ will no longer be broadcasting in Spain. In its place we will be treated to 24 hour coverage of Gran Hermano, the Spanish version of Big Brother. Here's the final video before CNN+ went off the air.



Menéame (Spanish Reddit/Digg) is all over this:

"Replacing a 24-hour international news channel with 24-hour Big Brother is a symptom of the really sick society that we've created."

"Regardless of its political bias which it undoubtedly had, the closing of a television station dedicated to information is sad news. Wanting more Big Brother 24 than CNN+ says much about a society. We get what we deserve. Thanks CNN+ for these years of continuous information you gave us. So long!"

"It's sad and a tragedy every time a medium of information is closed. This isn't the case here. What is being closed is a medium of propaganda, which praises its ideology and hides its corruption and wrongdoing. It's not the only one, in Spain we don't get information, we only have propaganda."

"The worst thing about this is not that it's closing, but what it's being replaced with, 24-hour Big Brother. If this is the future of television, especially TDT channels, it's obvious that they are announcing its death. For obvious reasons the internet is more attractive..."

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TIME's right, Verdade is pretty good

TIME has an article today on a Portuguese newspaper in Mozambique called Verdade and the positive effects it has had on the country so far (including electoral turnout), and taking a look at their website it is quite a nice paper. On the right in a small box is a link to download their most recent issues, and this page will enable you to download any and all of them (total of 119 so far).

In their next to most recent issue for example they have fully translated four of the leaked embassy cables that pertain to Mozambique, and here's the first page of it (you'll have to click to see it at full size):

Given that one of my pet peeves is writing articles on issues or speeches with no or hardly any sourcing to back it up (at least a paragraph or two from the issue or speech in question), magazines and newspapers that go to this much detail will almost always win my approval. Or at least a link to the primary source so that readers can verify what is being written with a single click.

As for the status of Portuguese itself in Mozambique, see here. Unsurprisingly, it's used much more in urban areas than rural.

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Facebook map shows why Canada needs high-speed rail

This month you may have noticed an interesting map made by people at Facebook (I think), showing the world with respect to the number of Facebook connections it has. It ends up kind of like one of those images of the world at night, except that this measures something a bit more specialized than just light. It looks like this:

Right away you'll notice that this isn't representative of population all the time, as China hardly exists here, and neither does Russia. India loves Facebook though. As a gauge of activity in North America and Europe though it's quite accurate, and shows in particular what Pierre Burton used to say: Canada is a long and thin country like Chile. Canadians love to remind themselves and others that they are the second-largest country in the world, but this image is particularly unhelpful when it comes to high-speed rail, as it leads to the conclusion that yes, it's good for places like Europe and Japan where there are many people in a small location, but Canada is somehow different. This is a myth though. Let's zoom in on Canada to make this even clearer:

There it is. Long and thin, long and thin. Looking at it this way it's easy to see why Canada has just a bit over a tenth the population of the US, as we simply don't enjoy trying to fill up every bit of space allotted to us in the even colder north.

As for why I'm bringing this up today - see this article, a piece on the front of CTV right now about Canada's failure to build high-speed rail while the rest of the world is doing so (now even the US).

An even easier refutation of the "Canada is big so it doesn't need high-speed rail" argument is probably Russia. Russia is much bigger and already has high-speed rail, and will have even more lines by 2018 when it hosts the World Cup. There simply is no excuse for Canada to not have three lines: one from Montreal down to Toronto (and maybe into Detroit), Calgary to Edmonton, and Vancouver down into Portland. Montreal to New York is another good option.

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2010: the year that was almost great

Looking back on 2010, and particularly regarding space and astronomy, 2010 was quite a good year. But it wasn't quite great. As we near the end of the year there is a lot of anticipation for game-changing events that will very likely or almost certainly take place in 2011, and since they haven't taken place yet 2010 was not exactly a game-changer, but it was the year that came just before. Some of these are:

The discovery of another Earth or something similar to it (a planet near our size in an area where liquid water can exist). We came pretty close to that this year with Gliese 581g and there was a spike of interest at the time as well, but another team was not able to confirm the planet and it actually may not exist. Kepler announced this year that they had some 700 candidate planets and this also ignited a spark of interest, but since the team has saved the best candidates for themselves and has not yet announced their discovery, we're still waiting for the announcement of one that will truly spark the imagination of even the most extreme "let's fix everything on Earth before we spend a dime on space" cynic.

2010 was a very good year though in that we discovered more extrasolar planets this year than in any year before, and are currently sitting at 515. Very good, not quite great.

WISE and the discovery of a brown dwarf near the Solar System. The discovery of such a brown dwarf is not guaranteed, but mathematically it is very likely. WISE will not be releasing this data until February though, so we have a bit longer to wait. Once again 2010 ends with anticipation, while the real announcement will happen in 2011. If WISE has discovered a brown dwarf nearby then we will know then.

SpaceX. A very good year considering the success of the Falcon 9, as well as the Dragon capsule. For SpaceX itself this year was definitely a great year. For the average person though SpaceX still represents more promise than reality, and it won't be until SpaceX is ferrying people to and from the ISS that it will represent a real game-changer in the way we see space. Next year might be characterized as a great year on this front if the ferrying of cargo to the ISS turns out to be as interesting to everybody else as it is to those of us that follow developments in space all the time, and if not then maybe a year or two later. It really depends on how long it takes for the idea of relying on a private company to explore space to sink in.

Dawn. This year Dawn basically just looped around the Sun once, but it has gone from being out in the middle of nowhere nearly a year after a gravity assist from Mars, to now being just 9 million km from its first target, Vesta. Arrival is slated for July, and this will be the first encounter with an entirely new significant object (quick definition of significant: several hundred km in diameter) since...since Cassini's arrival at Saturn, I suppose. Even with Cassini though the most interesting location (Titan) was already somewhat known before its arrival, so it wasn't as if we got our first close-up of the moon starting from 2004. So while Cassini and Galileo did show us entirely new views of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Vesta is completely and entirely new.

These four items are events that don't just happen any year; they have the potential to completely change the way we view space itself and our role/location in it.

On top of that there are a few other items that seem to be fairly good, not great. The world economy is beginning to recover and is doing much better than 2009, but nobody would call it great. The US kind of got its troops out of Iraq, which means they went down to 50,000 and are officially not there in a combat role any longer. Some pretty significant legislation was passed this year as well, but some of it is pretty long-term (health care changes come fully into effect by 2014), some of it shouldn't even have been controversial in the first place (new START), and other projects such as high-speed rail in the US won't even begin construction for a few years.

Canada: er...what did Canada do this year? It had the Olympics, and then it uh...then we watched the Conservatives go up by a few points in the polls, and then the Liberals up by a few points in the polls. Rarely has there been a less interesting year in the country of my birth.

On the IAL front, the only languages that seem to have made significant progress this year have been Sambahsa and Lingwa de Planeta. Of course, that's mostly due to the fact that they are so small in the first place. With a community the size of Ido or Interlingua, the amount of content created for Sambahsa and LdP this year would be extremely small.

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Christmas day randomness

It's Christmas day and there are a number of things worth mentioning so let's just put everything together and see what happens.

First of all, I've written two posts on 90 Years Ago Today since I last mentioned it here, as I don't always make a note of it on Page F30 when I do. The US has elected a new president and the League of Nations is shiny and new. It's Christmas 1920 and 1921 is just around the corner.

Over in Occidental land I've just finished uploading Cosmoglotta to 1930. I've never read old issues of Cosmoglotta before so I'm watching the progression of the language for the first time, and though by 1930 it mostly resembles the Occidental of today and the language went through quite a bit of fine tuning that year, it still has the apostrophe that denotes a very soft y sound here and there.

Cosmoglotta November - December 1930

In Sambahsa land Olivier has finished translating another movie, this one a fan-made Star Wars movie called Revelations. I watched it once back in 2006 or so and don't remember a great deal about the story. I believe this makes four movies that we have subtitles in Sambahsa for: The Hunt for Gollum, Born of Hope, The Man from Earth, and this one.



Dawn is now just 9 million km away from Vesta, or just 6% the distance from the Earth to the Sun (23 times that from the Earth to the Moon). The chief engineer updates at the end of every month and I had hoped he would mention when they expect to take and release their first images of Vesta during the last two but nothing so far. In under a week we should see the next update here, and maybe he'll bring up the subject. Because entering orbit with an ion engine requires a lot more finesse than your typical chemical engine, it will continue to slow down more and more compared to Vesta until it finally achieves the same orbit, when finally a tiny thrust will be enough to enter orbit. This is why it's still going to take seven months to 'arrive' even though it's already at an extremely close distance. Your average interplanetary probe flying by an object would cover this distance in just ten days or so.

More on Martin Gaskell, the astronomer who is suing the University of Kentucky for religious discrimination: for some debate and background on the case see these threads here and here.

Want to compare the altitude of two locations? You can do that here. Click on one location on the map, click on another, then to the right of that select draw profile and you'll end up with something like this.

It's potentially quite useful when looking for a place to live in a city with a varied topography, as lower generally = warmer and less windy. There's a world of difference between a house in the suburbs in the hills and away from downtown compared to a south-facing apartment by the river near downtown, which benefits not only from the lower altitude and less wind but also the heat island effect being near downtown brings. In the end this is only a couple of degrees, but when gardening this makes a huge difference:

A superb example of a unique microclimate is the Calgary Zoo and Botanical Gardens’ site on the flood plain of the Bow River which has become a resource to many Southern Alberta gardeners. The gardens benefit from river moisture and a high water table in well-drained sandy soil. There is a good canopy of mature trees and bushes designed in part to protect much of the area from the extremes of wind, hail, rain and sun; the soil has been cultivated and well mulched for decades by expert gardeners. Extra heat is provided because of the proximity to the downtown core and the nearby major traffic routes. A consequence of all these factors is an array of trees, shrubs, annuals and perennials that thrive in a few communities in Calgary, but can be replicated in some areas of many gardens, especially near downtown Calgary and within the Bow and Elbow flood plains. The Perennial Trial Gardens sites at the zoo, Olds College and at the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton test and publicize plant varieties that should grow well over much of south-central Alberta. At the zoo, some of the more unusual trees include the Manchurian walnut, and linden, but some “exotics” like the Hick’s yew (Taxus x media ‘Hicksii’) can be susceptible to winter kill.

My favourite new Portuguese band: Madredeus.



I found out about them (and a number of other singers and bands) on Yahoo! Answers of all places.

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Giving the Khan Academy a shout out too

I have another excellent site to share today that doesn't have to do with language and/or religion this time (well, a little bit about language - more on that in a bit), this one here called the Khan Academy. This is one example of some of the excellent free and open course material that has been available online in greater and greater volume in the past few years, and the subject matter here is more general than what one usually sees here on Page F30. Subjects such as banking, finance, calculus, and so on. It does have about 40 videos on cosmology and astronomy though, and as with the other subjects it starts from the simplest of introductions and eventually works into more complex subjects. The part on banking for example starts out with the concept of a bank (people make money and hide it in their mattress, somebody has a good idea for a business but doesn't have enough money, the bank finds a way to save the money of group A and lend it out to people in group B that have good enough ideas that they should be able to pay their loans back without defaulting), and then moves on to other subjects. The astronomy section also starts out with something quite basic (size of the Earth, wowzers it takes 17 years to fly around the Sun in a jet), and then moves on to slightly more complex subjects such as parallax, as you can see here.



As for what this has to do with language - some of the videos have an English transcript added, making it good for English L2 speakers as well as anyone who prefers to have a fairly accurate automatic translation below if studying another language. Unfortunately most of the time only the first few videos in a section have a proper transcript, so the rest of the time if you want to see one you'll have to use the automatic transcription service which is much less accurate.

The total number of videos is about 2000, so to watch them all would take about 500 hours. Lots of stuff to learn there if you have the time.

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More audio for rare/rarish languages: Ossetic, Afrikaans, Low German, Ojibwe, etc.

Back in August I wrote a post on an account on YouTube that was great for listening to audio samples of rare languages, an account that is devoted to introducing the most common type of Christianity in North America (the "Western Branch of American Reformed Presbo-Lutheranism" as Simpsons put it), with videos in languages that I and you have never even heard of. The only downside to these videos is that most of them don't have a transcript, so it's a bit of a tease if you're studying a rare language and would like to have an audio sample along with text but have only found an audio sans text sample yet again.

Well, the other day I found something much better - this site. Instead of just 9-minute or so video clips this site has New Testaments in some 500 languages now, and most of them are not just one person recording the text but also a bit of drama and music as well, making it much more fun to follow along. Entire New Testaments can be downloaded, but it's very slow so if you simply want to sample some of the languages offered it's best to just stream a track or two using the player at the bottom. I've been listening to the Afrikaans version and it's great, especially considering how rare such content is in Afrikaans. This site has a lot of good music and a fair number of audio recordings, but with the entire New Testament (+ psalms and proverbs) that means a total of some 400+ tracks which is phenomenal. It's fun to hear it read in a large number of voices instead of just one as is usually the case, although Mary's voice in the beginning of Luke in Afrikaans is a bit weird. She sounds like she's somewhere in her 60s already even though she would have been somewhere around high school age as a young woman who had just gotten engaged.

Some of the languages they have that I'm interested in and have written about before:

• Ossetian/Ossetic: drama version of the New Testament, a very rare find. Ossetic is one of the hardest languages to find content for, especially if you don't know Russian.
• Armenian - has Western non-drama version, nothing yet for Eastern.
• French - regular French, but also Canadian French! Both drama versions.
• Ojibwe - drama version of the New Testament. I've never written about Ojibwe here before but as a native language it really stood out. Once again a very rare find.
• Tok Pisin - drama version. No Bislama yet though.
• Latvian, Lithuanian - non-drama versions.
• Low German (plautdietsch) - non-drama version.
• Estonian - nothing yet. Damn! *Shakes fist at the sky* I can never find good audio with text for Estonian.
• Maltese - nothing here either.
• Persian - drama version, a nice find.
• Romanian - drama version, also a nice find.
• Mongolian - nothing yet
• Uzbek - drama version of 'nothern' Uzbek
• Tatar - drama version

And many more. This group is focusing on rare languages and languages where literacy is low (hence the audio), and is aiming for 3000 language by 2016 so chances are languages like Maltese, Mongolian, Estonian etc. will be added on relatively soon, and I expect Eastern Armenian to show up sooner rather than later too.

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Solstice is finally over, astronomer sues university

Now that the solstice is finally over, even though it's still winter we can begin to watch the days grow longer bit by bit. After the solstice this site becomes a point of reference for me as even knowing that tomorrow we'll receive just two more seconds of sunlight than today is somehow comforting. This year it was noteworthy that we had the full moon right at solstice, so the Moon at its brightest at the darkest part of the year. Of course, in terms of total illumination there is no contest:

full moon - 0.27 lux
overcast day - 1000 lux
2 extra seconds of sunlight (even on an overcast day) = 2 hours of extra moonlight

So by the 26th here in Seoul the extra amount of sunlight we receive in a day is greater than any full moon during its entire time in the sky, but the relatively feeble light of the Moon is still quite nice to have at night around now.

Astronomer sues university: what's this about? The story is found here and here, and involves a court case brought up by an astronomer Martin Gaskell who alleges that the University of Kentucky was just about on the verge of hiring him (one member quoted him as being "breathtakingly above the other applicants") until members of the university after a bit of searching found out that he was a Christian and might be "potentially evangelical" based on some lectures he had previously given, and he was eventually turned down for the position. The case is due to go to court in February and so we will see then whether the university actually was about to hire him and then refused to do so mostly on unfounded fears that he would bring religion into the science classroom, or whether they had good reason to fear this / he wasn't actually about to be hired by them in the first place.

I have to admit that I'm also a bit fascinated by the resurgence of conflict theory and the ever more public debate between the evangelical religious and the evangelical anti-religious (in the sense that one can't not sneak a look at a car crash as one drives by), but if it turns out that we're beginning to enter a stage where the next Georges Lemaître may be denied the ability to conduct the research we so desperately need to become a true spacefaring race due to unfounded fears about his ability to do proper research, then things may have become a bit worrisome. I wouldn't have wanted to see the steady state theory be given precedence either for any longer than necessary simply because its greatest proponent at the time was non-religious.

In the meantime it seems that Prof. Gaskell has taken a job in Chile, pretty much the best place in the world to conduct astronomy, so no problem there.

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A reminder about the Moon tonight

The lunar eclipse has just finished and over here in Korea I was able to catch the tail end of it. In the US and Canada where it was supposed to be most visible unfortunately there was heavy cloud cover pretty much everywhere. Keep in mind though that there really is nothing particularly special about this eclipse compared to others except that it happened to fall on the winter solstice. What actually does make a difference is the distance of the Moon from the Earth at any one time, as this can vary from 363,000 to 405,000 km.

So what's the reminder? Well, consider your average dystopian movie. Mankind is living in some kind of medieval / technological age where some technology is still around to use while other tools have long since faded away, and the accomplishments of the past are no longer part of that day's society. In a similar vein though much less dramatic, we are currently at a point in time where we simply aren't able to send people to the Moon. Even though we went there before and technology has improved drastically since then, in terms of the ability to send people there and back we no longer have that ability. We're no longer a species capable of traveling past LEO than Portugal is an empire anymore. In fact, Portugal has ceased being an empire for longer than we've ceased being able to go to the Moon.

Fortunately though we're doing a pretty phenomenal job (compared to the funds allocated) in unmanned exploration. Tweaking the orbits of two unused satellites in order to send them into orbit around the Moon with only a minimal fuel usage might be the most impressive feat I've seen this year, and the longevity of the Mars rovers goes without saying.



This blog has been following the Opportunity rover on its way to Endeavor crater on Mars since 2008, and now that the rover has arrived it's time to celebrate.

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A tribute to Ancient Greek astronomers

Looking through this book (Portuguese) on astronomy and astrophysics the other day I particularly enjoyed the section in the beginning on the astronomers of the ancient world, and thought a reminder here on their achievements would be worth writing, mostly a translation of the page or two in the book there but with a number of changes and additions. It's pretty amazing what one can do with just the naked eye and a lot of careful careful record keeping.

Interestingly, ancient astronomy is also quite a bit more fascinating than recent astronomy a few decades old. Astronomy and space exploration from the 1970s and 1980s was interesting at the time and we owe much of what we know of the universe thanks to that, but from a technological standpoint it's really just a less advanced version of the techniques we use now. Somewhat smaller telescopes, less impressive probes, simple landers instead of rovers, etc. On the other hand a lot of the techniques used in the ancient world have been forgotten and their rediscovery can be both helpful and inspirational, kind of like how Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine drawings are more interesting and unique now than a Boeing 707 (the Boeing 787, however, is very exciting). This post on the astrolabe is a good example of that.

-----

Thales statue at
Union Station in
Washington, D.C.

Thales of Miletus (~624 - 546 B.C.) introduced to Greece the fundamentals of geometry and astronomy, brought from Egypt. He saw Earth as a flat disc in a vast expanse of water. Along with his disciple


Anaximander (~610 - 546 B.C.), also from Miletus, they were the first to propose celestial models based on the movement of celestial bodies and not as godly manifestations. Anaximander discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic, namely the inclination of the Earth's equator in relation to the annual apparent trajectury of the Sun in the sky.

Possible rendering of Anaximander's world map:

Pythagoras with bells!

Pythagoras of Samos (~572 - 497 B.C.) thought the Earth, the Moon and other celestial objects to be spheres. He believed that the planets, Sun and Moon were transported by separate speheres that carried the stars. He emphasized the importance of mathematics in the description of cosmological models that could be compared with the observed movements of celestial bodies, in a regularity of "cosmic harmony". The Pythagoreans (his followers) were the first to call the universe the "cosmos", a word indicating a rational, symetrical and beautiful order.

Philolaus of Crete (~470 - 390 B.C.) introduced the idea of the movement of the Earth: he imagined that the Earth turned along its own axis and, along with the Sun, Moon and the planets, revolved around a "central fire" that would be the centre of the universe and the source of all light and energy.

Eudoxius of Cnidus (408 - 344 B.C.) was the first to propose the duration of the year as 365 days and 6 hours. He explained the observed movements of the Sun, Moon and planets through a complex and ingenious system of 27 concentric spheres that moved at different velocities around the Earth, fixed in the centre.

Aristotle of Stageira (384 - 322 B.C.) gathered and systematized the astronomical knowledge of his time, seeking rational explanations for all natural phenomena. He explained that the phases of the Moon depended on how much of the face of the Moon illuminated by the Sun was facing the Earth at any given time. He also explained eclipses: that an eclipse of the Sun happens when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun; an eclipse of the Moon happens when the Moon enters into the Earth's shadow. Aristotle argued for the sphericity of the Earth, given that the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is always round. He believed in a geocentric model of the universe partially due to his observation of the stars: since the stars did not move amongst each other (at least, not to the naked eye) they must be fixed, unlike planets which wandered to and fro. To him the universe was composed of a number of concentric spheres that rotated around the Earth, and the stars were fixed on one of them. Had Aristotle lived long enough to observe the motion of stars amongst each other (that is, a lifespan thousands of years long instead of decades) he certainly would have come to a different conclusion about their fixed nature.

Aristarchus of Samos (310 - 230 B.C.) was the first to propose a heliocentric (Sun-centred) model consistent with the Solar System, predating Copernicus by almost 2000 years. He arranged the planets in the order of distance from the Sun, in the same order we have them arranged today. He developed a method to determine the relative distances of the Sun, Moon and the Earth, and measured the relative size of the Earth, Sun and Moon. He calculated that the Sun was about 30 times larger than the Moon (the actual diameter of the Sun is 400 times greater), concluding that the Sun could not be in orbit around the Earth because a body that large could not orbit a body as small as the Earth.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276 - 194 B.C.), librarian and director of the Library of Alexandria from 240 to 194 B.C., was the first to measure the diameter of the Earth. He noted that in the Egyptian city of Syene (now Aswan), on the first day of spring at noon the sunlight would reach the base of a large pit, meaning that the Sun was perpendicular to the Earth at that location. In Alexandria to the north though this did not occur. Measuring the shadow with a vertical rod, Erastothenes observed that in Alexandria at the same day and hour, the Sun was about seven degrees further to the south. The rest of this is best explained by quoting Wikipedia:

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth without leaving Egypt...He also knew, from measurement, that in his hometown of Alexandria, the angle of elevation of the sun would be 1/50 of a full circle (7°12') south of the zenith at the same time. Assuming that Alexandria was due north of Syene he concluded that the meridian arc distance from Alexandria to Syene must be 1/50 of the total circumference of the earth. His estimated distance between the cities was 5000 stadia (about 800 km) by estimating the time that he had taken to travel from Syene to Alexandria by camel. He rounded the result to a final value of 700 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of 252,000 stadia. The exact size of the stadion he used is frequently argued. The common Attic stadion was about 185 m, which would imply a circumference of 46,620 km, i.e. 16.3% too large. However, if we assume that Eratosthenes used the "Egyptian stadion" of about 157.5 m, his measurement turns out to be 39,690 km, an error of less than 1%.

Hipparchus of Nicaea (190 - 120 B.C.), considered to be the greatest astronomer of the pre-Christian era, constructed an observatory on the isle of Rhodes, where he carried out observations from 160 to 127 B.C. From this he compiled a catalogue showing the position and magnitude of 850 stars. Magnitude, which specifies the brightness of a star (and any other object), was divided into six categories - category 1 being the brightest, and 6 the hardest to see with the naked eye. Hipparchus correctly deduced the direction of the celestial poles, and even the precession of the poles, a process taking 26000 years by which the rotational axis of the Earth wobbles about like that on a spinning top, eventually reaching the original point. To find out this precession, he compared the position of various stars with those catalogued by Timocharis of Alexandria and Aristillus of Alexandria some 150 years earlier (around 283 to 260 B.C.). These were members of the Alexandrian School in the 3rd century B.C., the first to measure the distance of the stars from fixed points in the sky (ecliptic coordinates). Hipparchus also calculated the Moon was a distance of 59 radii from the Earth, which was only off by a single radius (the actual number is 60), and the duration of a year with a margin of error of just 6 minutes.

Ptolemy (85 A.D. - 165 A.D.) was the last major astronomer of the ancient world. A Roman citizen, it is unknown whether he was Greek or Egyptian. He compiled a series of thirteen volumes on astronomy known as the Almagest, the greatest source of information on astronomy in Greece. Ptolemy's greatest contribution was a geometric representation of the Solar System with circles, epicycles and equants, which allowed one to predict the movement of the planets with considerable precision, and was used until the Renaissance in the 16th century. Despite the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, a copy of the Almagest was found in Persia (Iran) in 765 A.D. and translated into Arabic. The Spanish Gerard de Cremona (1114 - 1187 A.D.) translated a copy of the Almagest into Latin left behind by the Arabs in Toledo, Spain.

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Thanks Google! Ngram viewer has answered my question...

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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Wordproject.org another good site for learning languages, but especially for Chinese and Hindi

I came across another site yesterday that is quite useful for reading and listening to languages - it's called Wordproject.org and is another multilingual Bible site. The best site by far for comparing a large number of translations side by side is Unbound Bible, but this one also has a few advantages, namely:

- Some of the translations also have recorded audio, so you can listen and follow along as well. But more important for students of Chinese:
- There are three Chinese editions (plus audio), simplified Chinese, traditional, and...pinyin!
- The Hindi edition has a transliterated version as well.

This means that when they are put side by side it ends up looking like this:

with the English translation on the left, Chinese in the middle, pinyin on the right. See it for yourself here:

http://wordproject.org/multi/bi_en_cn_py.htm

For Chinese it doesn't get any better than that.

Of course, the student of Chinese has the luxury of a ton (virtually unlimited) of other resources too with Chinese characters, pinyin and audio, such as the language courses here.

Hindi is a much harder language to find resources for so the pages here:

http://wordproject.org/in/01/1.htm
http://wordproject.org/in_tr/01/1.htm

are probably the most unique resource. Unfortunately there is no audio for Hindi. Edit: Just took another look and there is audio for Hindi, for the New Testament only. Looks like a lot of the languages there have NT audio but no OT. Good enough.

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Korea's ignored northeast

The lack of people in the northeast part of the country along the ocean has always struck me as odd. Take a look at this population map:



Seoul has the largest concentration of people by far, followed by Busan in the southeast and its close neighbor Daegu, and the area from Seoul directly south down to Gwangju also has a fair amount of people. The development of the KTX (high-speed rail here, based on the French TGV) reflects this as well:

Now, if there was something wrong with the northeast there would be a good reason for this, but the northeast is actually the nicest part of the country. When Koreans talk about going to the sea for fun they never mean the sea in the west, which is shallow and cold and an industrial centre shared by a number of large Chinese cities as well - they mean the part on the east side (Sea of Japan / East Sea) down to Busan and off to the west until you reach the southwest corner and the islands there, never Incheon and the area nearby. In contrast to this the sea on the east side is the stiller and deeper Pacific Ocean, the sun rises there, and lots of people make road trips to go see it in the morning.

Here is a quick rundown of the climate in Korea:

Seoul and nearby: super hot in the summer and rainy season just before that, cold in the winter (down to -15 but also very windy), Incheon along the sea is windier.

Gwangju: one would think that being located down in the south would make it quite a bit warmer than Seoul but it's less than you would think, only about three degrees warmer there.

Busan: the warmest part of the country outside Jeju-do, but quite windy and rainy at times.

Jeju-do: like Busan but even more so. Higher temperatures, even more wind and rain.

Northeast: temperatures similar to Gwangju, but the Taebaek Mountains just to the west block a lot of the wind and snow and the ocean on the east moderates the temperature.

This satellite picture in the winter probably demonstrates this best. Seoul is snowed in, as area the mountains in the northeast and southwest. Busan in the east is nearly always free of snow as is the ocean to the south, but also note that the area in the east at the same latitude as Seoul is free of snow as well. North Korea is almost entirely snowed in.

There actually is a reason why the northeast has remained relatively free of people: a catch-22 type situation where the mountains make it more difficult to set up rail and road links which means fewer people, and with fewer people there's less motivation to set up rail and road links in the first place. Fewer people = less rail, less rail = fewer people. But if the transportation problem were to be solved (KTX is eventually expected to extend there) then there's no reason why it shouldn't become a popular place for more people to live. It's a bit like Vancouver and Seattle in how the areas right by the ocean are quite mild, but just a little ways away you have some of the best mountains in the nearby area with a lot of skiing and other winter sports. This is one of the reasons why the results of the 2018 Olympics will be particularly interesting as if Pyeongchang finally gets them (their third try and apparently Pyeongchang is the bid to beat) then high-speed rail to the northeast will be given priority and we'll see the region get paid attention to for the first time.

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New iPad/iPhone app is out - Portuguese through Spanish

After a lot of work, our newest app is finally out. This one is a language learning app in contrast to others I've made the content so far that have been about history, space and other such subjects. The name of the app is Portuguese through Spanish, and looks like this:



A book for people who know Spanish (either fully or partially) and now want to learn Portuguese. Considering the similarities between the two though (about 90% lexical similarity and much the same grammar) for a lot of people it would be better to begin by converting the Spanish they already know into Portuguese whenever possible instead of starting entirely anew on the assumption that they know English and nothing else.

You'll notice that it says it's been created by the US government and that's because it comes from here, and I chose it to convert into an app as one of the most interesting FSI courses out there. As for the question of why one would choose to pay for an app when the FSI course can be downloaded for free - it's the same as why someone would pay for Sherlock Holmes or a Charles Dickens book at the bookstore when these books are now free of copyright as well. Nobody is stopping a person from going to Project Gutenberg and reading them there, but sometimes it feels better to read it as a book. In the same manner this app has been created for someone who is soon going to Brazil for whatever reason (or even at the airport waiting for a flight) and suddenly realizes that they speak Portuguese over there and wants to learn some before going. For someone like this the quickest way is to download an app and learn from that.

This doesn't mean that one can just speak Portuguese by converting Spanish, but when beginning to learn it it's best to start by finding out what can be converted, where the two languages are the same and where they differ. You'll notice notes on not just vocabulary transfer but also subtle differences in the way ser and estar are used, how Portuguese allows you to add suffixes to the infinitive where Spanish does not, and so on.

As it has just been released I have a number of promo codes, and I'll give Page F30 readers first crack at them if they want, so send me an email if you'd like one. After that I'll give the rest of them away somewhere else in a day or two.

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Ogaki city in Gifu, Japan begins broadcasting local news in Portuguese

Here's a piece of news in Japanese from today about a Portuguese-language news program that has begun in Japan. This is particularly interesting to me as this is the exact area where I first lived in Japan. The news program is for Brazilians living in Ogaki, which is just west of Ichinomiya where I lived, and the area in general is kind of a suburb of the much larger Nagoya, with the city of Gifu at about the same distance to the north if you feel like going to a bigger city on the weekend but are bored of always going to Nagoya. When I first lived there I was also struck by the large number of Brazilians, though at the time I was fully engaged in learning Japanese and Japanese only so I had no interest in Portuguese whatsoever then. Actually, the first non-Japanese person I ever spoke to in Japanese was a Mormon from Brazil.


View Larger Map

On the 14th of December (2010) Ogaki City's Ogaki Cable Television began broadcasting a local news program all in Portuguese for Brazilians living in the area. According to the prefecture Information Industry Division, "such a program entirely in Portuguese on cable television has never happened in Japan before".

A bit about how the program provides information for life in Japan, emergency services etc., skipping that...

The program is translated and created by a commission from the prefecture and is 30 minutes in length, broadcasting in Ogaki-shi, Kaizu-shi, Ikeda-shi, Kobe-cho, Tarui-cho, and Sekigahara-cho. Broadcasting time is Tuesday to Friday at 11 am, Saturday and Sunday from 1:30 pm and 11 pm.

The show can also be heard at any time online, and will also be shown in other places such as the TV monitor in the Brazilian-oriented school "HIRO Gakuen".

As of November there are 3142 Brazilians living in the city.

The internet address is: http://www.gifu-news.com/

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Google Translate has a few new tricks

Yesterday I noticed that Google Translate has been upgraded again, with the following:

- a tiny keyboard in the corner for each language, letting you type even when you don't have access to a keyboard or layout in said language:

This is pretty much a no-brainer and the only remarkable thing about it is that it's taken so long to be added. So good that they finally got around to it.

More interesting than this is the ability to tweak translations. Actually I'm not sure if this was added yesterday too but that's when I noticed. It looks like this:

Moving the mouse over the translation on the right will cause parts of the original on the left to be highlighted in yellow, showing which part corresponds with the part you have the mouse arrow over. In addition to that you can click on that section to get other suggestions. This is particularly useful when you are dealing with a piece of text that you know is wrong but don't know exactly what it's supposed to say, as clicking on that section may bring up a better suggestion that will obviously be more correct.

It's also useful when going from English to another language, as instead of receiving one answer for something you want to say you can take a look at a number of suggestions. Sometimes Google Translate gets confused by simple sentences. I just wrote "toothpaste was expensive" for English - Portuguese and got the following:

Creme dental era caro

but clicking on each of the words I could also change it to:

pasta de dentes
dentífrico

(and a few others)

while era could be estava or foi, and so on.


These simple sentences are still the bane of Google Translate, which still often translates phrases in the positive as negative, and vice versa. Yesterday I watched Mulan in Portuguese and at the end the Emperor says to Lee Shang that he should go see Mulan because she's one of a kind (i.e. date her before you lose the opportunity). He says:

Não se encontra uma garota como ela em toda dinastia.

But Google thinks the Emperor is telling him there are many fish in the sea:

There is a girl like it throughout the dynasty.

Where's my look of disapproval?

Come on Google, Fa Mulan's not just some common tramp.


Oh and while we're on the subject, a few weeks ago I was typing out the following:

Видях една хубава къща

Bulgarian for "I saw a nice house". It's from The Little Prince. In the middle of typing it out though I got:

Now that, I don't get. Here, see for yourself.

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Qatar 1-b, a new extrasolar planet discovered in Qatar

Space.com has an article here today about the discovery of an extrasolar planet, a planet that doesn't seem to be particularly interesting (another gas giant), but one I consider to be important given who discovered the planet. I write often on the role smaller countries should play in space and astronomy, especially countries just about this size that may not be large enough to have their own space agency, but can still play an important role by contributing to the discovery of other planets, asteroids, and so on.

In spite of its high GDP per capita Qatar is still extremely tiny, with a surface area that makes even South Korea look huge in comparison (it's the same size as Gyeonggi-do, the province that surrounds Seoul) and a population of just 1.7 million. In terms of total GDP it's at 56th, sharing a space with a number of other countries that also lack the economic clout to build their own space agency but can certainly help out from the ground - Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Vietnam, Peru, etc.

Now, if a group of smaller countries feel up to it they could also do something even more impressive: pool funds together for a project like the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, which would cost about $2 billion to construct. While space agencies need to be funded year after year, an observatory is mostly about up-front investment and simple maintenance later on so an observatory of this type could be doable if a number of countries feel up to it.

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Number of North American university students learning Portuguese up by 10.8% between 2006 and 2009, still behind Biblical Hebrew

Here's an article on the increase in the number of students learning Portuguese in between 2006 and 2009, which has increased by 10.8% over the period but is still well behind what Portuguese should be at as one of the most spoken languages in the world. In comparison it seems that the number of students learning Spanish in North America is somewhere around 60 times that learning Portuguese. It will be interesting to see the numbers about a decade from now assuming that Brazil continues to grow as it is now, moving from the world's 8th largest economy to 5th by then. CBS had a special on Brazil just the other day too:



Info from the article:

Students learning Portuguese in North American universities have increased by 10.8% between 2006 and 2009, but still represent a small percentage of those studying foreign languages. The figures were revealed on the 8th of December by the Association of Modern Languages.

According to the numbers Portuguese is in 13th place in languages learned in higher education in North America, with a total of 11,371 students. In comparison with the 10.8% for Portuguese Arabic has increased by 46.3%, Chinese by 18.2%, Korean by 19.1% and sign language by 16.4%. Portuguese is now ahead of Korean (14th place) and behind Biblical Hebrew (12th), Classical Greek (11th) and Russian (10th), whereas the most studied languages Spanish, French and German have registered "modest" gains.

The increase in Portuguese is greater than the average of all languages during the period, 6.6%. The growth in Portuguese was greater however during the period between 2002 and 2006 when it increased by 22.4% compared with the average of 12.9%.

Its growth over recent years has let Portuguese reinforce its position as one of the principal foreign languages studied in higher education, with a total of 0.7%. In comparison, Spanish represents more than 50%. Numbers from the Association show that the increase in students studying Portuguese has taken place mostly among graduate students, whereas port-graduate students studying the language have dropped from 487 in 2002 to 438 in 2009.

Taking these numbers this means that in 2006 the number of students studying Portuguese was about 10260, and back in 2002 it would have been 8380.

2002: 8380
2006: 10260
2009: 11371

In sheer numbers then this represents 470 students more per year between 2002 and 2006, and 370 students more per year after that.

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Putting old Cosmoglotta (Occidental) issues online for easy reference

The other day the Occidental community was informed about a great resource here, the complete archives of Cosmoglotta from its inception until 1950, except the war years of course. It's still not the most user-friendly format though so about ten days ago or so I decided to create a blog that would have these issues - just a one-column blog, no widgets or anything else, and one page per issue. The blog is here:

http://cosmoglotta.blogspot.com/

I began by uploading them one image at a time per page, but that quickly began to use up the space allotted to me and in any case PDF is probably a better way to do it, so from about 1928 onward I've been uploading them to Scribd.com. Here's what the latest issue looks like:

Cosmoglotta March 1929


In the meantime you can see other issues typed up here, and coincidentally those issues are also done up to 1929, but that's over a much longer period of time. Simply turning them into a PDF and uploading them is quite a quick task, and if I didn't have so much else to do the whole archive would probably take only a week or so to finish. Now that it's 1929 Occidental is almost exactly the same as that seen today, except for some small points such as verbs like attin'er. Hopefully it'll soon begin to exactly resemble the Occidental of today as from that point onward they will serve as a good introduction to the language for new students.

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This year's most exciting astronomical photo - HR 8799

For me this is probably this year's most exciting astronomical photo:

A direct image of four planets around the star HR 8799, kind of like this image from 2008 but with more than one. This is but one step away from what I consider to be the holy grail of exoplanet imaging, namely the direct imaging of a planet at just high enough resolution that anyone can make something out besides just a dot. The first one we image in this manner will end up looking something like this:

That's actually Neptune, but this is somewhere along the lines of what our first exoplanetary gas giant at high resolution will look like. Given how attached we are to things we can see even the fact that it's a gas giant will do nothing to lessen the impact of when such an image is released.

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