Mondial example sentences, part 1

Since the best way to acquaint oneself with a language is to simply see it in action, here is the first section of the Mondial conversation book. As one would expect with a language of its type most of it is perfectly obvious, and so I have left out the English translation for most of them. I simply love the lack of doubled consonants.

So how much total conversational content is there in that book? A quick count shows it to be about 25 times the size of the examples given here.


Bon matin, senior!

Bon dia!

Bon sera!

Bon nocte!

Adeo! Al revidar!

A tosto!

A deman, car amico (amica)!

Bon dia, senior... seniora... seniorina...

Yo e felice da vidar vos.

Yo joya me da encontrar vos (far votre conosance).

Yo non ha hate le ocasion (plesur) da vidar vos avante. -- I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you before.

Yo non creda que nu ha encontrate unaltres avante.

Yo espera da revidar vos tosto.

Permita me da presentar...a vos.

Come sta vu? -- Multo bien, gracie.

Multe gracie(s)!

Yo e multo grate a vos. -- I am very much obliged / very grateful to you.

Yo gracia vos por votre amabilitá.

Yo e contente (satisfate).

Yo regreta (multo). (Yo e desolate).

Quel damage!

Pardon. Ple atenda un momente!

Excusa me.

Ma lo e (fa) nulo. -- Don't mention it / Mais ce n'est (ça ne fait) rien.

Presenta mi salutaciones a... -- Give my kind regards to...

Saluta lui (lei, les) de me. -- Say hi to him (her, them) for me.

Mi cordial felicitaciones.

Bon viage! Bon fortuna!

Bon Natal! Bon novel ano!

Gracie, lo mem a vos. -- Thanks, the same to you.

---


Vola vu far me un service? -- Will you do me a favour?

Vola vu acompaniar me a...?

Pova yo ofrar vos un cigarete (algo da bevar)?

Pova yo invitar vos al cinema (teatre)?

Vola vu andar con me al cinema?

Desira vu cafe / te?

Pova yo questionar (pregar) vos de algo?

Coi desira vu? -- What do you want?

Coi demanda vu de me?

Coi dica tu de lo? -- What do you say about it?

Coi dicavi tu?

De qui parla tu?

A coi pensa tu?

Coi vola vu dicar?

U ha tu sete? -- Where have you been? (ser -- sete)

U anda tu? -- Where are you going?

Du vena tu? -- Where do you come from?

Cuando parta tu?

E tu preste?

E tu fatigate (ocupate)?

Por coi non creda tu lo?

E lo ver? E lo posible?

E lo necesari?

Come sava tu lo?

Por coi tacia tu? -- Why are you silent?

Audia (Vida) tu lo?

Comprenda tu?

Promita tu lo? -- Do you promise?

Non osa tu far lo? -- You don't dare to do it?

Ha tu pavor? -- Are you afraid?

Non reconosa tu me?

Ha tu ubliate lo? -- Have you forgotten it?

Non memora tu te lo? -- Don't you remember?

Cuanto costa lo?

Cuante tempo prenda lo? -- How long does it take?

Come longuemente deva yo atendar? -- How long must I wait?

(Note: longuemente is pronounced longemente; the u is because e after g is pronounced like g in giant)

Quel e votre adrese i numero de telefon?

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The big IAL announcement: Mondial can now be revived!

At long last the mail has arrived, and I can write the big IAL announcement I have been hinting at for the past two weeks.

The announcement is this: the language Mondial, a Romance and English-based IAL created in 1948, has been freed from the shackles of the Library of Congress and other massive libraries around the world, as with the help of Paul Bartlett from auxlang I now have a copy of four textbooks written by Helge Heimer on the language, how it works and how it is used.

So why is this so important? I will get into the language itself in a bit, but first a comment on its current state: there is some information on Mondial online, but it truly is nearly nonexistent. There is a short Wikipedia article on the language, a blog called yo parla Mondial...and that's really about it. Pretty much every other notable IAL has at least a good amount of learning material online. Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua have more than enough, Novial has a few textbooks, writing samples and a Wikipedia, Occidental has the same, and even Idiom Neutral has a number of textbooks online that I was able to peruse and type out last year. But Mondial has nothing. No longer.

Now to the language itself and why I like it. I wrote one post comparing Mondial and Interlingua a while back, and the short conclusion is this: Mondial is the language that I wanted Interlingua to be when I first found out about it in 2005. Back then I first became attracted to Interlingua after learning Ido due to its overall appearance and pan-Romantic/modern Latin feel, but was quickly turned off by a few of its qualities:

- irregular stress (teléphono)
- irregular pronunciation (words like marketing ("mal marketing!")
- overall length
- susceptibility to Romantic drift, namely the fact that Interlingua can vary quite a bit by speaker. Romance language speakers in particular like to move pronouns around ("ille me da" instead of "ille da me"). Both are correct but the overall impression one gets from time to time is that a more English word order is incorrect when it is explicitly not so.

The first two points are especially important from a marketing perspective, since even Spanish is superior to Interlingua on this front. That is, give a student of one or two weeks a Spanish text and he will at least be able to read it; do this with Interlingua and the pronunciation and stress will often be wrong.

As for Mondial vs. Occidental: while Occidental has a superb design and derivation is quite good, there is something about Mondial that is difficult to describe but just comes across as more pleasant. Perhaps having le instead of li, -vi for past tense instead of -t, no doubled consonants (Occidental has that option, but this is not the standard), a combination of a number of small points that make it feel less strained, for lack of a better way to explain it. Perhaps others can do a better job at explaining this.


So, on to Mondial! I still haven't read through the whole grammar but upon skimming it it is very easy to understand and will present no surprises to anyone familiar with this type of language. Here is a very quick introduction.

Orthography: much like Italian. ch before i and e is pronounced as k, gh as g in good. However, c before e and i is ts, not ch (citá = tsitá, not chitá).

Stress: much like Spanish. Penultimate stress unless a word ends in a consonant. S is the exception here given how it is used to form the plural.

Accent marks: almost nonexistent, but sometimes one sees them in words like bontá (goodness), economía (economy), café, etc.

Definite article is le. Mondial uses lo to refer to abstract things like the English "it" as in "it's raining". Lo tute (the whole), lo bel (the beautiful), etc.

Possessive is de, a is to, this contracts to del. No surprises here. Da le flores al amicos -- Give the flowers to the friends.

-a turns a masculine noun feminine, no surprise here either. Actor = actor, actora = female actor. Amico = friend, amica = female friend.

Adjectives do not inflect. Le flor e bel -- the flower is beautiful. Le flores e bel -- the flowers are beautiful.
An adjective can take -s when it is used in place of a noun. Da me le beles -- give me the beautiful ones.

Comparison of adjectives uses plu for more, mas for most, men for less, min for least. Il e (le) mas inteligente -- He is the most intelligent.

Some irregular adjectives here: melior (better), pejor (worse), major (greater), minor (smaller). The book also says that plu bon and mas bon etc. are fine.

Adjectives can be used as nouns: le riche (a rich man), le riches (the rich people), le richas (the rich women).

Personal pronouns are what one would expect, but slightly clearer than most other languages of Mondial's type. Each one has a nominal and an accusative form. yo (I) -- me, tu (you) -- te, nu (we) -- nos (us), li (they) -- les (them). Some examples will help here:

Nu ha parlate de les. -- We have spoken of them.

Now let's turn this on itself:

Yo ha parlate de me. -- I have spoken of me.
Tu ha parlate de te. -- You have spoken of you.
Il ha parlate de lui. -- He has spoken of him.
Il ha parlate de se. -- He has spoken of himself.
El ha parlate de lei. -- She has spoken of her.
Il ha parlate de lo. -- It has spoken of it.
Nu ha parlate de nos. -- we have spoken of us.
Vu ha parlate de vos. -- You have spoken of you.
Li ha parlate de les. -- They have spoken of them.
Li ha parlate de se. -- They have spoken of themselves.

Possessives: mi, tui, sui, sei, su, notre, votre, lor.

This also shows how verbs work. Verbs all end in -ar, past tense is -vi, "have (verb)" is "ha (verb)te", etc.

From the verb section of the book we also get:

Present participle: -ante
Future: -ara
Conditional: -aria
Imperative: -a or -amo (-amo = "let us (verb)!")

Amamo ambes! -- Let's love both!

Passive voice is interesting and uses var, to become, plus the past participle. Apparently ser (to be) is also acceptable when the situation is not vague.

yo va amate = I am loved
yo vavi amate = I was loved
and so on, all the way to hante vate amate (having been loved).

Ser is the only irregular verb. e = is, evi = was, semo (let's be), etc.

Adverbs are easy: -mente. Probablemente = probably. If the adjective ends in -m, then drop the m. Intim (intimate) = intimente (intimately).


And so on and so forth, but there is too much to write of today. I will finish with a few closing examples.

Vola vu far me un service? -- Will you do me a favour? / Voulez-vous me rendre un service?

Coi demanda vu de me? -- What do you wish be to do? / Que me demandez-vous?

E tu fatigate? -- Are you tired? / Et-tu fatigué?

Por coi non creda tu lo? -- Why don't you think so? / Pourquoi ne le crois-tu pas?

Parlamo de altro! -- Let's talk about something else! / Parlons d'autre chose!

Non trova vu mondial facil? -- Don't you find Mondial easy? / Ne trouvez-vous pas le mondial facile?

Sui gramatica ha solo poque regles i nul exepciones. On aprenda lo in algue horas. On scriba come on parla, i on parla come on scriba. -- Its grammar has only a few rules and no exceptions. It can be learnt in a few hours. One writes as one speaks, and one speaks as one writes. / Sa grammaire n'a que peu de règles et pas d'exceptions. On l'apprend en quelques heures. On écrit comme on parle, et on parle comme on écrit.

Si, yo ha baniate me i natate plure voltes per dia, yo ha remate i andate a vela presque tute dia. Le banies de sole sur le plage evi deliciose. -- Yes, I bathed and swam several times a day, I rowed and you sailed almost every day. Sunbathing on the beach was delightful. / Oui, je me suis baigné, j'ai nagé plusieurs fois par jour, j'ai ramé et j'ai fait de la voile presque chaque jour. Les bains de soleil sur la plage étaient délicieux.



That's enough for now! Now the question is what to do next with the books. I am tentatively thinking of the following:

- type out the books to learn the language and keep the content forever even in case of fire or who knows what else can happen to paper
- rewrite the books / write my own, since I think they are still under copyright

And then record some spoken content, since the regular stress and pronunciation makes this a cinch.

And after that, we will see...


Edit: let me know if there are any typos, as I wrote this in a state of high excitement and haven't bothered to proofread yet.

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Using Radio D to create matching text and audio samples

I made a quick video on YouTube just now showing an example of Macedonian from Deutsche Welle's Radio D, the radio course I often criticize for being a sucky Germany course but praise for its plethora of audio and matching text in a great number of other languages, for many of which it's hard to find these for.

These texts are not too hard to make: simply use a program like Audacity to remove everything but the Macedonian audio (or other language), which will reduce the length from about 15 minutes to 5. Then copy and paste the text from the pdf into Google Translate, and now you have a mostly yet not entirely accurate, sometimes awkward, but helpful translation to work from. Here's kind of what the final result looks like.



Thanks to the Defense Language Institute you don't have to work so hard to obtain these texts in a great number of otherwise rare languages, but there are still a few missing where Deutsche Welle is quite helpful.

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How to kind of create matching audio and text for rare languages

One more language learning tip for those learning rare languages and who are having a hard time finding audio with matching text. The language used here as an example is Slovene/Slovenian.

First, find a video on YouTube in the language with English subtitles. Not always the easiest thing to do, but much easier to find than a Slovenian video with Slovenian subtitles (native speakers don't have much need for them). One good example is this one on the "Communist Manifesto and the new Left", as the title goes.



Step two: change the subtitles to Slovenian. Now you have a translation of the original translation, and it will end up being maybe...50 to 75% accurate. While not perfect, this is good enough to provide you with plenty of text 'anchors' to keep you from getting lost and missing out entirely on just what the video is about. And of course you also have the original English translation to refer to whenever you need it.

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Wall Street Journal plans German online version from December

This news is about two weeks old but I just noticed it today:

News Corp is to start a German version of the American economic journal "Wall Street Journal". It will be available at wsj.de, and a million euros is to be invested in the German version. It will focus on international economic news and be free for users to read. No print version of the German version is planned.

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Trade between China and Portuguese language countries grows 25% from the first half of 2010 to 2011

An article in Portuguese today, kind of an update to my last post on the same subject about half a year ago. Note that the numbers are quite different this time - this one is about half a year of trade while last time it compared monthly volume. Also, it turns out that the source article from the last post on this subject is now gone.

Trade between China and Portuguese language countries increased 25% in the first half of the year compared to the first half of 2010, to $52.2 billion of trade. Statistics released from Macau show Chinese purchases from Portuguese language countries reaching $34.7 billion, 19.7% more than the same period last year. Sales from China to these countries increased by 38% to $17.5 billion. Brazil remains China's principal trade partner here with trade volume of $36.7 billion, 39% more than last year....next is Angola with total trade at $13.16 billion, down 2.1%. Third is Portugal at $1.86 billion, 22.7% more than last year.

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What German sounds like with an exaggerated American accent

Der Garten des Paradieses is one of the best German stories on LibriVox, in particular because the person who has done the recording has such a talented voice. The story features a conversation between the four winds where each one of them has been given an exaggerated accent, such as an Italian accent for the south wind, and an American one for the west wind. The story is here, and the link to listen to it is here. If you fast forward to about 11:30 you can hear what a stereotypical American accent sounds like when imitated by a German. W is pronounced like an English w (not v), r is an alveolar approximant (IOW an English r as in real), etc.

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Quote of the day: everything from RandomEtymology

For random etymology, see this account on Reddit. While only a few days old and so there are no guarantees that this novelty account (a user account based on a single theme) will last, there is already enough information written by the user that it's worth keeping an eye on.

One example:

Uninspired is the negative form of inspired, a word that comes to us from the Latin inspiro ("to breathe"), with the key root being spiro ("breath"). Latin borrowed that from the Greek, and it ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-European root -spei. The English word breath derives from a different PIE root, namely -bher, "to boil".

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WISE has discovered about 100 brown dwarf stars so far, the closest is 9 light years away

There hasn't been a great deal of news lately on WISE (the infrared telescope that surveyed the whole sky a year back), but that doesn't mean that work isn't ongoing: so much data has been sent back that it's taking a long time to sift through it, and follow-up work to confirm brown dwarfs takes quite some time, but so far about 100 brown dwarf stars have been discovered. There are two things in particular about discovering brown dwarfs through WISE, and they are:

1 - the possibility of brown dwarfs extremely close to us. I mention this quite a bit, and though we're still waiting the possibility remains high that there are brown dwarfs closer even than Alpha Centauri.

2 - because WISE is a full sky survey, we will eventually be able to use the data to approximately determine just how frequent brown dwarfs are, and thus know that much more about a part of the universe we haven't really known much about at all.

As for just how close nine light years is: that would make it the eighth closest to us. Not bad, though we would probably need to see something under about 6 light years for its discovery to be a really big deal.

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Looks like the Russia - Alaska highway may be good to go by 2030

Great news - it looks like a the Russian side of the project to link Russia with Alaska and therefore the rest of North America has been approved, with the Russian part to consist of 5,000 km of road and then a 100 km tunnel under the strait. Not sure whether the $100 billion estimated cost is only about the road or includes the tunnel, and whether the tunnel would be jointly financed by Russia and the US (assuming the US decides to go ahead with its part of the project too).

So what will the world look like then? According to future GDP estimates, we'll see the following change over that time among the countries closest to this rail link:

US: $15 trillion ---- $23 trillion
Russia: $1.5 trillion ---- $4.3 trillion
China: $5.8 trillion ---- $34.3 trillion
Japan: $5.4 trillion ---- $5.8 trillion
Korea: $1 trillion ---- $2.2 trillion

So this would be a link to quite a different market than that found in 2011.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the situation will not drastically change by then: North and South Korea is an obvious example as there is almost no possible way the North will have the same leader by then - the already fairly unhealthy Kim Jong-il would be almost 90.


While we're still on the subject of Russia, another Korean article I found yesterday - this article is about how interest in other languages besides the three Koreans usually study (English, Japanese, Chinese) is increasing, with more interest in Spanish, French and Russian. The reason given is that the first three are already fairly saturated with a hagwon (school) to be found anywhere to learn them, while there is a very small number of schools that teach the other three in comparison with demand.

No exact numbers are given, but the article gives the example of a hagwon that teaches Russian, German and Arabic along with the usual three, and has seen a lot of businessmen coming to learn these languages.

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Busan wants Russian medical tourists from Vladivostok.

Found an article in Korean on medical tourism in Busan from Vladivostok, Russia.

First some background: Busan is Korea's second-largest city, and has a relatively higher number of both Japanese and Russian people than the capital Seoul. A glance at the map shows why this is the case:


View Larger Map

Busan is a big port city located right in the middle of the easiest trade route between the far east of Russia, Japan, and China. Meanwhile Seoul, though technically a port city if you include Incheon, is quite out of the way.

And as for Vladivostok: it's Russia's largest city in the far east. Few people know that it exists though since flights there are super expensive and it has quite the reputation for high crime.

Now to the articles:

Article 1 explains how the Busan city government is putting up 6 x 3 metre billboards in the city of Vladivostok promoting medical tourism. The billboards are to say something to the effect of "come visit the health care Mecca of Busan" in Russian and English.

The article ends with some numbers: of the 5,921 patients who came to Busan from abroad, 28.9% (1,709) of them were Russian.

Health care, of course, usually means plastic surgery. Sometimes also cheaper health care, though I'm not sure how much general health care is in Vladivostok.

Their site promoting medical tourism is this one, and besides Korean it's in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

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Ido gets a mention in the German press

Note: this isn't my upcoming big auxlang announcement.

Ido got a mention in the German press some two days ago in an article here. There isn't any real need to translate any of the article as it is exactly what one expects: Ido is a language to help communication between peoples, it's easy to learn, originally came into being as a reform of Esperanto, etc. The author of the article obviously is not an auxlang supporter (which is good, makes it more of a real article instead of a letter to the editor-type PR piece) since hello in Ido is written there as saludo (it's actually saluto).

The article also says that Ido sounds a certain amount like Italian (true), Ido has no special characters besides the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (true and good they mentioned that), Ido is spoken by a few thousand people (true as far as I can tell), it's not a language made to suppress other languages but rather encourage language diversity, etc. They also talk a bit about why they chose this year's location in Luxembourg.

There are four comments below the article at the moment: three are from Esperantists promoting Esperanto to anyone who might be listening, and one from an Idist.

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Number of participants at the 2011 Ido Renkontro: 25

Some new information on the 2011 Renkontro here: it seems that there is a total of 25 Idists in Luxembourg this year for the conference, slightly more than last time. The countries they are from: Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Eritrea, Japan, Sweden, China, and of course Luxembourg.

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Only 3,000 students take the DELE?

Weird - according to this article, a total of 3,000 students worldwide took the DELE (Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera, Diploma of Spanish as a Foreign Language).

For comparison, another language test, the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), has about 600,000 test takers per year. Unless I'm missing something the Instituto Cervantes is doing a really bad job at promoting the DELE.

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Is Macedonian a language or a Bulgarian dialect?

A title like that seems just made for controversy. I do have a reason for wading into the fray though.

First of all an example of the fray: the comments below this video recorded by my favourite polyglot.



Even though the video is just a video in Macedonian about learning languages, the comments below are a complete firestorm. BLARGH YOU'RE JUST SPEAKING BULGARIAN ANYWAY WHATEVER and DON'T LISTEN TO TOHSE GREASY BULGARIANS TRY TO SAY MACEDONIAN ISNT A LANGUAGE is a good summary of how the debate goes. Read them if you dare.

I would like to add a third perspective to the debate, however.

One perspective is academic and linguistic, which naturally concludes that Macedonian is a standardized form of a dialect continuum that goes from Bulgaria and into Macedonia and Greece and Albania, and is strongly related but somewhat less so to Serbo-Croatian and up into Slovenian, which has some faint but interesting ties to Slovakian and so on. Macedonian happens to be a standardized form based in the centre to the west of FYROM Macedonia, and Bulgarian is a standardized form of the dialect continuum from the east of the country.

The political perspective is where all the arguments take place, and has to do with whether Macedonians avoid Bulgarisms and prefer Serbian whenever possible, whether Skopje was chosen as the capital on purpose, etc. etc. I won't get into that.

The third and most ignored perspective, however, is that of the student. The language student simply wants to know two things: can the standardized version of a language be learned and properly used on the street, and how hard is it to learn? According to the video it seems that Macedonian is used mostly like the version one reads but with a lot of Turkish slang.

What about the second point? Is there anything about Macedonian that makes learning it a different experience than learning Bulgarian? There is, and the main difference to a student is this: wonderful, blessed, regular stress.

Bulgarian is thought by many to be the easiest Slavic language for an English speaker to learn given the lack of cases in regular nouns. Word order is quite straightforward (lack of cases helps out here), and the two difficulties regularly cited are: verbs and variable stress.

Verbs because Bulgarian has more aspects and tenses than other Slavic languages. Macedonian has this too.

Variable stress because the stress of a noun is unpredictable. Water is vodá and not vóda, I understand is razbíram and not rázbiram, what is kakvó and not kákvo, many is mnógo and not mnogó. It's more or less the same as having to remember in English that you are a photógrapher who takes phótographs and not a phótographer who takes photógraphs - not the hardest thing in the world to remember but not something you want to get wrong. It's why the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) Bulgarian text has a lot of this to remind you:

Macedonian, on the other hand, has a regular stress with very few exceptions. It has antepenultimate (third from the last) stress, meaning that if a word has two syllables you stress the first, and if it has three or more you go three from the back. Thus:

Bulgarian segá (now) is séga
Bulgarian vodá (water) is vóda
Bulgarian planiná (mountain) is plánina.

Macedonian is also somewhat easier to pronounce with slightly fewer vowels. I also love things like во (in) instead of в and со instead of с for with, but maybe that's just me.

Macedonian to Bulgarian is a bit like Norwegian to Swedish:

- the smaller language has some aspects that make it more friendly to the student, but
- none of these friendly aspects make it phenomenally easier to learn, just marginally;
- they are mostly mutually intelligible but not 100%;
- if the two were a single country they would be regarded as dialects of each other and not languages.

So the answer is yes, they are distinct languages, and no, they are not. Different languages because they choose to be, but not inherently different enough that they couldn't pretend to be one language if they wanted to. After all, if China can pretend that Cantonese is a dialect and regional varieties of Arabic can pretend to be one language, then so could a lot of other Slavic languages. Romance languages too, for that matter.


So where is a good place to hear Macedonian with matching text? Besides Deutsche Welle's crappy yet great (crappy for learning German, great for hearing other languages) course Radio D (to see and here one example click here for the pdf and here for audio), beats me. I'd love to hear if anyone knows of a source.


My biggest beef with Macedonian? The keyboard. But then again nothing really compares to the Bulgarian keyboard, the equivalent of Dvorak except that everybody uses it instead of a tiny fraction of the population.

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Ido renkontro 2011, important auxlang announcement in a few days, NASA's GRAIL mission

The internet is acting up here today for some reason so some quick things to mention while it's working and may go down again:

1 - The Ido renkontro 2011 in Luxembourg is now in full swing, although we haven't seen any news of it online yet. This post on Idolisto is asking what's going on at the moment. We'll find out in a few days.

2 - I'll have a very interesting auxlang-related announcement in a few days. It's a surprise until then.

3 - NASA's GRAIL mission to the moon is launching in just a few weeks. The twin probes are to launch on 8 September, and are now being joined to the launch vehicle.

Travel time to the moon for these two is 3 to 4 months. Since a direct trip to the moon takes only 3 days any travel time this long means they are doing it to save fuel: generally the way to do this is to begin in an Earth orbit which is then lengthened bit by bit until eventually it reaches the moon, goes into orbit and then begins changing its orbit around the moon until it becomes ideal for the mission. I haven't checked whether this is the exact way GRAIL will be doing it but I assume it will be something like that. The timeline in particular hints at this:

Launch date: September 2011
Insertion into orbit: January 2012
Scientific mission: March-May 2012

Most interesting part of the mission besides the mission itself to precisely map the moon's gravitational field: MoonKAM.

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Complaints about French service in Ottawa increase by 137% in a year

From here:

The number of complaints regarding accessibility in the city of Ottawa has increased by 137% in 2010 compared to the year before. Many of these are about the public transportation company OC Transpo, which announces the names of stops in English only.

The actual number of complaints in 2010 was 88, of which 39 were related directly to this.

...

The budget for French services in Ottawa is $2.7 million for 2011. According to the census of 2006, 18% of the city is francophone and 39% of residents say they can speak French.

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77% of Czechs say that German language is important for work

No surprise when you're a relatively small country with both Germany and Austria just across the border. According to this article:

"77% of Czechs said that "German is important for one's work" in a questionnaire done in Prague by the Geothe-Institut and the German-Czech Future Fund. 30% of Czechs learn German at the moment as a second language, but there is a lot of room for growth here: according to the survey the German language is often not offered in school until the seventh grade.

So why doesn't Deutsche Welle have any German courses in Czech? As is the case with Italian, once again we have the otherwise superb Deutsche Welle seemingly dropping the ball on this one.

A chart showing German as a foreign language in the EU can be seen on Wikipedia here. Nothing is really a surprise there, with the Netherlands and Denmark near the top. Slovakia actually has more German speakers per capita than the Czech Republic, but when you notice that Bratislava to Vienna is just 75 km that is no surprise. From Prague to the nearest large German city (Dresden) is twice that, and to the capital is 350 km.

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Demand for Chinese language classes in Spain on the increase

An article here gives the account of a language school in Spain called Instituto Iberochino that reports an increasing interest in the Chinese language to the tune of 50% or 60% per year. According to the article the school started in 2007, and thus is a very small and limited sample from which to draw conclusions. However, it is certainly reasonable to say that Chinese language teaching is at the very least a good and continually expanding business to get into.

The school says it has 500 students in Madrid alone, who are "mostly young people and professionals under the age of 40."

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Ah, just like 2007 again.

The GOP presidential primary race so far is looking a lot like 2007, at least in terms of media coverage Ron Paul is getting. My favourite GOP candidate (okay, only GOP candidate...except for maybe Hunter...Romney would probably morph into something different yet again if he were to win the presidency so hard to say how he would govern) to win the nomination, his one-tenth-of-a-percentage-point-from-first-place finish in the Ames Iowa straw poll is largely being ignored.

I have also noticed a lot of debate online over whether Obama or Paul is the better candidate to vote for. But hold on just a second - the presidential election has not yet begun. Obama is already in for 2012, and the only question is which person is going to face him. For a progressive who wants to see a presidential contest with an honest political debate there really only is one choice: Obama vs. Paul. There is, of course, also other option: the hope that the GOP picks such an unelectable candidate (=Bachmann) that Obama would win in a landslide. While this is much more likely with Bachmann as the candidate, hoping for such a result is also playing with fire a bit since there is also the possibility that she could win.

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Ido - Luxembourgish dictionary released

On Idolisto an Ido-Luxembourgish dictionary has been uploaded, and group members can download it in the files section. If you're not a member and don't want to be for whatever reason then let me know and I'll send you the pdf.

One reason for this of course is that the Ido-renkontro this year takes place in Luxembourg and having a dictionary of this type is good for PR.

It also includes a few sample sentences at the end:

Me parolas nur poke luxemburgiana. - Ech schwätzen just e bësse Lëtzebuergesch.
Kande arivas la autobuso a...? -- Wéini kënnt de Bus op...?
Me ne komprenas vu bone. -- Ech verstin Iech nët gutt.

...and so on.

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Nice work, Esperanto Wikipedia

The Esperanto Wikipedia gets an honorable mention today for two things. One is this:

This time around the article count is the result of all human work and no automatic bots.

The article of the week is also exceptional: it's about one of my favourite subjects, the Nagarno-Karabakh Republic (Լեռնային Ղարաբաղի Հանրապետություն). That's the tiny de facto but not de jure country right next to Armenia and officially inside Azerbaijan that was created after the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the stumbling block in quite a few diplomatic relationships.

And while we're on the subject, Olivier also mentioned on Auxlang a few days ago that the Esperanto magazine La Riverego has an article on Sambahsa in its latest issue:

http://www.esperanto.qc.ca/files/riverego/Riverego-104.pdf

This is fairly significant considering the age of the magazine. Looking at its list of back issues one can see that the first time it was published was in 1986, well before the internet was ever popular.

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New Page F30 reader poll on Serbia and Kosovo

I've put a new poll up on the side on the situation between Serbia and Kosovo. After declaring independence Kosovo has been recognized by 77 UN member states (40%), border issues with Serbia are flaring up at the moment, and whether Serbian recognition of Kosovo will be a prerequisite to EU membership is up in the air.

I've put up all the responses I can think of, but if there are any other important ones that should be added by tomorrow I'll redo the poll in lieu of letting it remain flawed for the duration.

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Page F30 poll results on your favourite Slavic language

The repeatedly extended reader poll on favourite Slavic language(s) has finally ended. Without an idea for a new poll just yet I let it go until it reached 300+ votes, a much more satisfying one than the original 100+ about a week after it first went up. The poll results are a bit of a surprise:

Which Slavic language(s) do you like the most? Select based on personal preference alone, not economic advantage / ease of learning, etc.

Russian 138 (45%)
Ukrainian 25 (8%)
Belarusian 8 (2%)
Czech 45 (14%)
Slovak 18 (5%)
Polish 56 (18%)
Bulgarian 26 (8%)
Macedonian 14 (4%)
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian 88 (28%)
Slovenian / Slovene 26 (8%)

Votes so far: 305
Poll closed

The surprise (to me at least) is how little popularity Czech had compared to what I expected, and conversely how many votes Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian got. I had assumed that Bohemian imagery and popularity of the capital Prague would have given the language itself more votes than the relative population and bring it to third or maybe even second place, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

First let's rearrange them by popularity:

Russian 138 (45%)
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian 88 (28%)
Polish 56 (18%)
Czech 45 (14%)
Bulgarian 26 (8%) and Slovenian / Slovene 26 (8%)
Ukrainian 25 (8%)
Slovak 18 (5%)
Macedonian 14 (4%)
Belarusian 8 (2%)


Russian at the top is no surprise. After that in terms of population would be Polish, then Ukrainian, and after that Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, then maybe Czech or Bulgarian...after that it gets a bit difficult especially with Belarusian which is spoken as a second language even by a lot of Belarusians themselves.

New (and related) poll coming up in a few minutes...

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One more comparison of the moon we've explored vs. the moon we haven't

One more comparison to give an idea of just how little of the moon we have managed to explore in person:

The Apollo missions spent a total of about 13 days on the moon, over a total of six missions to the surface. Not all this time was spent actually walking around on EVAs (extra-vehicular activities). Apollo 16 for example spent almost three days on the surface, with EVAs totaling about 20 hours.

With this, we see the claim that "we've already been to the moon" - true in a literal sense, but very untrue if used in the "we've seen pretty much all there is to see" sense.

So let's compare this to the size of a few other countries. First of all the United States:

The moon is four times larger than the US. Imagine spending three days in the US in 1970, two days inside your hotel and one day outside. Have you seen enough that you don't need to go back once over the next 40+ years?

And some other countries:

Russia - the moon is 2.2 times larger. That's like seeing Russia for 6 days, two days outside the hotel.

Australia - the moon is 5 times larger. A trip to Australia for 2.6 days, almost one day outside the hotel.

England - the moon is 291 times larger. Imagine a trip to England for 1.07 hours, 20 minutes outside. Did you get to see much of the country?

Finally let's go with Hawaii. The moon is 3640 times larger than Hawaii, so the amount of manned exploration we've done on the moon is equivalent to seeing Hawaii for five minutes, two minutes outside.



So what about the argument that in spite of all this the moon is boring and bereft of surprises? To that one simply needs to look back over the past few years to show what we now know about the moon that we didn't know just five years ago.

- The moon has water in the soil, thought to be unlikely to impossible before. Finally confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt in 2009.

- There is definitely ice and water in the permanently shadowed craters. Suspected for a while, this was confirmed by LCROSS after its mission near the end of 2009.

- The moon has a volcano. News from just last month.

- The moon might have had a little brother for quite some time that eventually impacted it. A new theory that would explain why one side of the moon is so different from the other.


And then of course there is the giant impact hypothesis, our best explanation of how we got the moon in the first place. This theory was not very well supported back when we were walking on the moon, and our new perspective on the moon shows it to be an integral part of understanding our own history too.

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2012: possibly the year Chinese eclipses English on the internet (in number of native speakers online)

I put the extra information in parenthesis in the title in order to avoid it being misunderstood. Matt has informed me that Internetworldlanguages.com has finally updated their stats of languages on the internet, and you can see them here. This is the first update in a year. Some of the numbers have not changed at all, but this is certainly due to countries not having released new numbers in the last year so there is nothing that can be done about that. In the meantime though let's take a look at the numbers with the caveat that unchanged numbers are certainly higher than stated:

2000 -- 2011

English: 537 million -- 565 million (26.8%)
Chinese: 445 million -- 509 million (24.2%)
Spanish: 153 million -- 165 million (7.8%)
Japanese: 99 million -- 99 million (4.7%)
Portuguese: 83 million -- 83 million (3.9%)
German: 75.2 million -- 75.4 million (3.6%)
Arabic: 65.4 million -- 65.4 million (3.3%)
French: 59.8 million -- 59.8 million (3%)
Russian: 59.7 million -- 59.7 million (3%)
Korean: 39.4 million -- 39.4 million (2%)

As Matt also noted, Indonesian + Malay is more than Korean, about 55 million users total. Korean as a language is near saturation if you look at it one way (South Korea), and not if you look at it another way (almost 0% penetration in North Korea).

Chinese is of course the most interesting number. Internet penetration is at 37%, and as a language mostly tied to a single country it is easy to predict how it will change in the future: even achieving around 60% penetration (similar to Malaysia today, about 20% less than Japan and South Korea) would bring the current number to 720 million.

This is also the reason why the number of native (L1) users will certainly eclipse English soon: English is used as a first or primary/important official language in areas that are either mostly saturated (USA, Canada, UK...) or nowhere close to it and with very little progress on that front (Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia...); in either case there is little growth expected in the next few years.

An old edit of the Wikipedia page on global internet usage shows us what the numbers were just a few years ago:

English -- 35.2%
Chinese -- 13.7%

Those numbers came using a different method so take them with a grain of salt, but the overall trend is clear. While I am not exactly a cheerleader for the PRC (it's an okay place but having Wikipedia blocked for me when I was there was highly annoying) it will be nice to see a new linguistic dynamic in the near future, and one that can only be good news for international auxiliary languages.

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Today's new word/term: Brizinski spomeniki / Freising Manuscripts

Something I learned yesterday: Slovenian/Slovene is the first Slavic language to have a written record in the Latin script, a few pages of text from perhaps the 9th century that can be seen with a number of translations (Latin, English, German, Polish, Italian) here.

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The United Kingdom is increasingly interested in Chinese

One day after the last article about how Chinese still lags behind in Germany comes this one (also in German), about how the popularity of the language is taking off there.

Some info from the article:

One out of three private schools in the UK offer courses in Mandarin Chinese, a boom that comes at the expense of other European languages as subjects.

(standard quote from interview with bright student who says China is the future, skipping that)

While many European companies are reducing costs at home, they are expanding in China. HSBC Holdings said in June that it would do away with 700 positions, and the next month announced that over the next five years it would create 2000 new positions in China and Singapore.

Burberry Group has seen an increase of 30% in turnover in China in the second quarter...China's second-largest trading partner in Europe is the UK, after Germany. PM David Cameron said that bilateral trade would double by 2015, reaching 100 billion dollars.

Some 100,000 Britons learn Chinese, and a total of 54 British universities have Chinese courses. 16% of state schools in 2010 offered Chinese, 4% more than in 2006. Independent (private) schools with Chinese were at 37% in 2010, compared to 2006 when the number was 18%.

No information about how this comes at the expense of other European languages, however.

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Germany still isn't very interested in Chinese

From an article here in German today.
I found another article on the same subject in a different country today but I'll save that for tomorrow.

-----

The Chinese language is having a tough time in Germany: with over a billion speakers Chinese is the language tho most spoken as a mother tongue, but in spite of this there are very few students learning it in Germany.

China is seen as a new world power and one can find the language being learned already in kindergarten...but recent numbers from PAD (Pädagogischer Austauschdienst) show that an insignificant number of students learn the language in Germany. According to them there are 433 schools offering Chinese as a foreign language. In 226 of the schools (the other half was surveyed last year) there was a total of 5570 students.

In spite of this low number, it has gone up by 75% over the past four years. In the 2007/08 school year there were a total of 3200 that studied Chinese. In comparison with this, however, other numbers are huge in comparison: 7.5 million learn English, 1.7 learn French and 56,000 learn Italian.

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Watch your grammatical gender when moving from Spanish to Portuguese or vice versa

An article in Portuguese on words to watch out for when taking Spanish tests shows just how different learning Spanish is for a Portuguese speaker compared to other languages: it's one of those languages that one can have a passive fluency in with very little work at all, but on the other hand this can give one an aversion to spending the necessary time hitting the grammar books to really get into the makeup of the target language. This is especially the case where Portuguese speakers choose Spanish as a second language in school instead of English or something else, as a lot of the time this is due to laziness - those who don't want to study another language choose the easiest one they can find if they have to choose one.

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Serbians etc. sound to Bulgarians like they aren't sure what happened.

I like this:

Tense system also isn't that big of a deal. The only think I can think is that when listening to other Slavic languages, including Serbian, their past simple tense is the same as our past renarrative mood which we use for things we did not witness or are not sure happened. So when I listen to Serbian, it always sounds like they aren't sure about what happened.

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Italy's Italian test for immigrants

Found a few articles on a new obligatory Italian test for immigrants here, here and here. I don't have the time to read about it in detail today but it appears to be an obligatory test where those that get 30+ points get residential status in the country, below that they have to try again, and zero or close to zero results in expulsion.

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Wolof language gaining strength in Senegal at the expense of French?

That's according to this article, which asks if Senegal is still a francophone country. According to it Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire still prefers French for both international and national communication, but in Dakar (Senegal) Wolof is spoken not just as a local tongue but also as a language of education and intellectualism as well, and this makes it difficult sometimes for even other francophone Africans to ask for directions there.

There are 34 comments below the article, the first one mentioning that Senegal != Wolof, and that French works as a common language within the country itself.

Another comment below links to a source saying that 35% of the Senegalese population 10+ years of age can read and write French. Another survey on 1000 individuals 15+ years of age shows that 72% to 74% of those in Dakar can express themselves in French, with 30% "with difficulty". There is a lot more information to be found in the comments below too.

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Well, I'll be. Looks like flowing water on Mars.

Today's big news in space is this, on Mars. I like the quote at the beginning of this article in particular, as it mentions that this is certainly the umpteenth time the words water and Mars have appeared in a recent news article. The type of water we're talking about makes a big difference though: there's ice water underground, ice water on the surface, and then there's flowing water on the surface. The last is what appears to be found, or at least thawing water on the surface that shows up in the summer. Such water would have to be salty due to the lower freezing point (i.e. salty water can be in liquid form at colder temperatures). Flowing water is also a much stronger indication of possible life than permanently frozen water.

For information about the discovery itself, see that article or this one or this one or any others in the news today. What I would like to reiterate here however is my stance as a moon-first proponent: while the moon is clearly the best destination for manned exploration (three days' journey away, no launch windows, landing is easy, has water, many other nations can help out, etc.), this comes with a qualifier: this is assuming our current levels of funding and interest for manned exploration and colonization. 

In other words, if you only have $20 to put away per week on travel then I would recommend a weekend in the mountains over a summer-long cruise ship trip, even though the latter would certainly be more fun if you were willing to put the money away to make it happen. In the same way, if the world were to one day suddenly decide that Mars is the place to be, and is willing to quadruple (for example) the current money spent on space to make it happen, then by all means let's go to Mars.

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Well, I'll be. NASA can take donations.

WHAT

http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/npg_img/N_PD_1210_001G_/N_PD_1210_001G__main.pdf


That's straight from NASA.

NASA may accept and utilize monetary gifts, donations, or bequests given as cash, check, or money order, provided they are unsolicited and offered without conditions on their use.

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So the Earth might have had a second moon

An interesting study is making the rounds today: the possibility that Earth had two moons for a while, after which the smaller one crashed into the other, leaving us with one.

The reason for the theory: one side of the moon is quite different from the other (the article explains in exactly which ways), and the impact of a body about 1200 in diameter at a slow speed could explain that. The theory doesn't claim that the moon formed in any other way but the most accepted theory, that of a giant impact with a body about the size of Mars, but suggests that the impact created two moons that coexisted for a time until they eventually collided.

The article calls the other moon 'a tiny second moon', but a diameter of 1200 km is anything but: that would make it larger than Ceres, larger than Enceladus. 1200 km is actually the diameter of Charon, Pluto's largest moon.

The theoretical impact is a slow 2.3 or so km per second. According to the asteroid impact calculator, the average speed for asteroid impacts is 17 km/s and for comets it's 51 km/s.

So let's see what happens when such a body were to hit Earth at a low speed? The minimum speed of impact for an object hitting the Earth is actually 11 km/s but luckily the asteroid impact calculator doesn't mind inputting a lower number. The results are:

(1200 km diameter, made of porous rock, lands 5000 km away in water 5000 m deep, hits at a 30 degree angle)

To see the results, click here. No fireball is created at this velocity.

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Moldovans with Romanian passports: 30,000

An article here on Romania and the Schengen Zone has two numbers that are worth remembering:

According to unofficial statistics, around 30,000 Moldovans have gained Romanian passports since 2000. This is just the start: according Romania's President Traian Basescu, as many as one million Moldovan nationals have begun the process of gaining Romanian citizenship, a process eased and accelerated since 2009 by a change in Romanian policy.

Not sure about the source of these 'unofficial statistics', but 30,000 sounds about right. This will be an interesting number to watch as Moldova doesn't seem to be moving anywhere towards EU membership or a union with Romania, which will keep the possibility of obtaining a Romanian passport an attractive one.

The total population of Moldova is 3.6 million, making 30,000 almost one in a hundred.

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First Dawn news conference now up on YouTube

Just in case you missed it:



Total duration: 58 minutes.

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What's going on in Idolando this summer

I haven't written about Ido in quite some time. As the second or third-largest IAL the good thing about Ido is that there is a good amount of activity even if you are too busy with other things for a few months. The smallest major languages (Novial for example) can see their activity easily double with a dedicated user, and reduce to close to nothing if one or two of them become too busy with 'real life' (=money, bills, moving, etc.) to contribute.

Not that Ido is large enough that a dedicated user won't make a difference, mind you.

So what's new?

The first obvious piece of news is the Ido Renkontro this year, to take place in Luxembourg. The renkontro starts on the 17th of August, which is just two weeks from now. I naturally won't be going as it's across the sea and I don't have the time to just take off for a week, desfortunoze. Last time there were some 20+ people in Tübingen (Germany), and with a location about as central as the last I expect there to be about the same amount of participation.

Literature: at least four stories have been published in the past two months. They can be downloaded (pdf) here if you are signed in to Idolisto (Yahoo).

(Ido was the only reason I ever created a Yahoo! account in the first place)

The first one is two stories called Experimento and Sentinelo, written by Frederic Brown and translated into Ido.

Another one is also a translation of the same author, called Terani kun Donacaji.

A third one is called Josh, ocidero di alieni. Science fiction, seems to be humorous, translated.

The last one mentioned here is the longest, also science fiction and translated, called La Nexta, Logikala Pazo.

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Dawn scientists still have no idea what to make of Vesta

I watched the news conference this morning showing the first rotation video and other interesting images of the surface of Vesta, and there was an interesting theme to it: pretty much everything the scientists on the team talked about they had to qualify by saying that they would require a closer look and more time to confirm. In other words, there is a lot on Vesta that we haven't seen the likes of before, and that's a very good thing. It would have been disappointing, on the other hand, if they simply listed feature after feature saying "Yeah, this is an X, this is a Y, this is a Z, we've seen all this before and recognized it instantly".

The rotation video they released is the most striking part of the conference:



Right away, the first thing thing that catches the eye are the grooves around the equator. There was a lot of speculation at the conference but no conclusions, and perhaps one of the reasons for this, and for the origin of the big mountain on the south too, is that the north part of the protoplanet still hasn't come into view (it's winter there).

Over on unmannedspaceflight.com they have unsurprisingly improved on the work the team has done, releasing a much smoother version of the video than the one embedded there:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=25048

If that link doesn't work just look for it on this page.

Let's just take a second to remember what Vesta looked like to us before Dawn's arrival:



So yeah, just a bit better than before.


I also find myself wondering whether this continued focus on Vesta over the year Dawn will be there will contribute to the debate on what is a planet, and what isn't. One of the scientists there (the guy that answered most of the questions, can't remember his name) mentioned that they keep on referring to it as a planet because to a planetary scientist it simply doesn't feel like an asteroid - it has a differentiated interior, complex terrain, all sorts of features that one sees on planets and almost entirely lacking on a typical asteroid. The overall roundness of Vesta doesn't hurt here either. Whether it has cleared its orbit or not begins to feel like less of an immediate concern and more of an academic issue when one looks at something like Vesta up close.

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Canada to conduct study to check out just how bilingual the capital is

Interesting article here in French: the Commissioner of Official Languages in Canada (Graham Fraser) is looking for 'spies', people that will go around Ottawa to see in which language services are offered - in hotels, stores, and restaurants.

The ad for these positions was released without fanfare, but it was immediately noticed by the media.

The objective of this project is to understand the 'message' given to tourists who visit as well as citizens, whether the city gives the impression of a bilingual city or an English city with a bit of bilingual atmosphere here and there, or something else. The mystery shoppers will also see just how far a person can get in the capital only knowing French.

The project is to go from 22 August to 30 September, and 545 'observations' are to be conducted for a total cost of $40,000 for the project.

The results of the study are to be published 15 months from now, in the 2012 annual commissioner's report.


Another article on the same subject is here.

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