Just one day before the end of the year. Here are some tabs I've had open for a few days now:
-- Latin Making a Comeback - this one is thanks to Steve Rice from auxlang. It mentions the most recent audio recording of the Latin New Testament that I've written about so much here.
-- The European Extremely Large Telescope's 2012 budget has been approved, meaning that construction can now start. This land-based telescope will have a resolution 15 times that of Hubble, and of course will be able to observe the entire night instead of 30 minutes at a time. Most exciting for me: the direct imaging of large exoplanets and characterizing their atmospheres. Thanks to Kepler I foresee a huge spurt in interest in building telescopes of this size, since the cost for even a massive observatory only ranges in the tens of millions to a bit over a billion dollars, a pittance for an ambitious nation or group of universities. The best part about a land-based observatory? No nail-biting launch to orbit.
-- An article here in German with the title "Der s-Plural ist originär Deutsch" (The plural in s is originally German) with plenty of discussion below.
That's one of the points made in an article here in the New York Times that fits the theme of this site perfectly - how the larger and larger number of Brazilians visiting Miami is changing the city. Included are some of the changes that happen when a country begins to become a regional power and a growing middle class, resulting in more and more tourists with money to spend abroad:
Aware that Brazilians will not spend freely unless they feel at home, shopping malls have enticed them by hiring Portuguese-speaking sales clerks to proffer Dolce & Gabbana dresses and Hublot watches. Even Target has posted help-wanted signs in Portuguese.
Unfortunately there are no concrete numbers about the presence of Portuguese. However, there are a great deal of numbers referencing finances, and this one is probably the most immediately interesting.
Most of the Brazilians who come to the United States visit Florida, and in the first nine months of this year, an estimated 1.1 million Brazilians spent $1.6 billion in the state, an increase of nearly 60 percent from the previous year. Among foreign nations, only Canada sends more visitors to Florida.
Increasing the number of US embassies in Brazil would seem to be a no-brainer.
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ţThe Afrikaans Wikipedia, which I often praise for its detailed articles in spite of its small overall size (20 402 articles at the moment), has a very detailed front page article this week on the Eastern Orthodox Church (Oosters-Ortodokse Kerk). A quick glance at other languages shows this article to be about twice the size of the one in its sister language Dutch.
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From here in Afrikaans about five days ago, the article is about a small dustup in the lower house in the Netherlands between the foreign minister of the ruling party (Uri Rosenthal) and a member of parliament for the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid) named Martin Bosma on whether the Netherlands should support its sister language Afrikaans, and especially when it comes to place names such as Pretoria, which was recently kind of demoted from a full city to a part of a city, called Tshwane. For details on that, see here.
According to Bosma, Pretoria is the "big prize" in changing place names that are in Afrikaans.
The response from the foreign minister that this is a South African and not Dutch concern is really the only real response a minister can give as one sovereign nation speaking about another one has no jurisdiction over, but the discussion of what sort of supportive role the Netherlands should have of Afrikaans (if any) is one worth having.
A new Facebook group was created yesterday here, and thanks to the way Facebook groups work now it already has a great deal of conversation. The difference between groups now and before is that now a person who creates a group can add members without consulting them. This means that one day you will end up seeing notifications in your email about activity in a group you have never seen before, and this was the case with this one. Notifications can also be turned off, but I prefer to see everything that goes on in the groups I have been subscribed to and prefer more emails to fewer.
Two other new groups that have a good amount of activity: this one for Lingua Franca Nova, and this one for Lingwa de Planeta.
Just a quick heads up for those who remember the launch of GRAIL in September - after an extremely leisurely trajectory (since Earth - Moon usually takes about two to five days), they will enter lunar orbit the day before the new year. Since they use conventional propulsion the entry into lunar orbit will be a nail-biter, but not overly so considering the precision of their trajectory and the fact that they are just 1.2 light seconds away.
The fact that Brazil is now the world's sixth-largest economy has been making some news today, with reports such as these:
The general theme of the articles and videos is that this is a good landmark for the country, but with issues such as reducing poverty making it more of a sober occasion than an all-out celebration. Brazil has just surpassed the UK, but it took 3.16 times the population to do so.
Brazil should surpass the UK and become the sixth-largest economy in the world at the end of 2011, according to projections from the Centre for Economic and Business Research) published in the British press today (26 December). According to CEBR, the decline of Great Britain in the rankings will continue in coming years with Russia and India pushing the country down to the eighth position.
The loss of position to Brazil is relativized by The Guardian, which mentions another change in the rise and fall in the rankings that can serve as a consolation to the British: "The only compensation for ministers concerned by Britain's relative fall is that France will fall at a faster pace. Nicolas Sarkozy can still boast that France is the fifth-largest economy behind the US at number one, China, Japan and Germany, but by 2020, the Centre for Economics and business Research (CEBR) forecasts it will fall past the UK into ninth spot. Germany will also slip to seventh place in 2020."
Moving into sixth place still remains just a number, and it doesn't seem that Brazil as a whole really views itself as being any sort of superpower just yet (China seems to be going through this process at the moment). A continued reduction of poverty, moving into fifth place by 2015, plus the World Cup in 2014 and Olympics in 2016 may end up being a turning point for the way the country views its role on the world stage, however. And perhaps by then the Brazilian Space Agency will get some real funding instead of the pitiful $275 million a year it receives now. For comparison, that's less than Canada at $424 million (with an economy 10% smaller than Brazil's) and about nine times less per capita (i.e. per dollar earned) than NASA in the US. Brazil could easily be a major player in space exploration if it chose to make it a priority.
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Czech Radio in French has a very detailed (about 12 PgDns to get to the bottom) article here today on French education in the country that is worth reading through.
- French is the third-most studied language in the country after English and German
- Orthography is quite intimidating in the beginning
- Geopolitical reasons plus a general liking of the language (its reputation as a language of culture, a beautiful language etc.) are some of the main reasons for choosing it. Lots of children 11-15 end up learning it because their parents believe it to be important.
- About 50,000 students learn French in school there, and the number tends to remain stable.
That was on the very top left for a while, and now it has been moved down a bit but is still on the main page. You'll notice from the bottom right of the image that it is about the entire region of Macedonia (not just the current Republic of Macedonia), since it juts out into the sea. The main page has the following explanation:
which means:
Какво ново в Уикипедия -- What's new in Wikipedia
10 000 статии в Българската Уикипедия за Македония — приблизително 10% от цялото ѝ съдържание и на практика най-сериозното и пълно четиво по Македонския въпрос. -- 10 000 articles in the Bulgarian Wikipedia on Macedonia -- approximately 10% of its content (note: 124 000+ articles total) and practically (?) the most serious and complete reading on the Macedonian issue.
Този успех е резултат на няколко години усилен труд, който не ще спре да се развива дотук. -- This success is the result of several years of hard work that will not stop developing here.
Поздравления за всички потребители, допринесли за бройката, -- Congratulations to all users who contributed to this number,
тъй като не са пестили време и ресурси, за да дадат възможност на цялата интернет общност да получи задълбочени познания по отношение на Македония. -- since they are saving time and resources to enable the entire internet community to get in-depth knowledge of Macedonia.Read more...
Noticed this here just now in French, and no need to translate anything as you can read about it in English here and here. The vote was 60 against (out of 100) and 31 members of Harmony Center walked out in protest. Apparently the referendum may take place in February.
This reminds me: are there are Indo-European languages with grammatical gender (two or three genders) that have a perfect correspondence between word endings and gender? Latvian comes close, but then so do Spanish, Bulgarian and a great many others. I have yet to come across one though where a student can simply look at the ending of any word and know exactly how to decline a noun.
For my first fumbling foray into seriously studying Icelandic I've made a quick interlinear translation of the Icelandic version of Reflection from Mulan, a particularly good version of the song:
The video itself already has the lyrics and translation, but an interlinear (word for word) translation is a nice complement to it. These types of translations are basically to save the student the effort of picking up a dictionary.
That's an assertion that I've been wanting to test out for quite some time. There are some languages out there that have an unjustified bad rap as being difficult to learn, Persian being one in particular. Persian seems difficult at first and certainly looks it, but the lack of grammatical gender, easy word order, simple verb conjugation and fairly standardized form (i.e. little regional difference) make it a treat to learn for the dedicated student. By no means is it a language that one can just pick up with exposure, but anyone willing to put in the effort will be pleasantly surprised.
The same I feel to be true about Icelandic, which is often claimed to be the most difficult Germanic language. The reasons I usually see cited are the three cases, grammatical gender, and irregularity. Yet German, which has all of these, is often claimed to be the easiest language for English speakers. My opinion is that this is largely claimed by those who have taken German for a course or two, who see immediate cognates like Das ist Wasser and Wir schwimmen und Sie trinken.
I won't get into too much detail here, but Icelandic I see as a language with middle-of-the-road difficulty for English speakers, something around the difficulty of Italian. Reasons for this are:
- Grammatical gender is usually indicated by the ending. Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian etc. have this, German is mostly random.
- Word order is similar to English, and relative clauses do not throw the verb to the end of a sentence as in German. Icelandic has the wonderful sem for this, like continental Scandinavian som.
- Verb conjugation seems to be about as irregular, but less complex, than Romance languages.
- Pronounced largely as written, and
- Almost no regional variation. In other words, no rude surprises where one learns a language, goes to a country to speak it, and finds out that everywhere has its own dialect. There is nothing wrong with dialects, but understanding them can be a nightmare for some.
However, what I am not quite certain about with Icelandic is its regularity or lack of it in other areas, and there may be other areas I have not yet considered either. Because of this, I intend to spend the next two months or so delving a bit deeper into Icelandic instead of just getting by on Norwegian and German cognates and little else as I have until now. In short, expect a lot more posts on Icelandic in the near future as I attempt to ascertain whether Icelandic really is as tricky as rumor has it, or whether this is yet another exaggeration.
I especially look forward to looking for slightly hidden cognates. Romance languages and English have a lot of obvious ones (so-called international or pan-European terminology) whereas those between English and Icelandic (and other Germanic languages) are often less recognizable. Words like hrafn for raven, landafræði for geology, or töluð (spoken), which I assume is cognate with tell/told.
By the way, why now? Tomorrow is the solstice, and at this time of year I find myself wondering about what the four hours of sunlight and sun a mere 2.8 degrees above the horizon feels like. The solstice seems like as good a time as any to begin a two-month look into the language.
Publico had an article here yesterday about a subject referenced here a few times: Portuguese citizens making their way to Angola for better jobs in the booming (yet still very underdeveloped) economy, usually as engineers. It would be interesting to see a comparison between the number of Portuguese citizens going to Angola vs. other booming economies, which would give a rough idea of how much of a difference sharing a common language makes.
Senior management are the ones that emigrate to Angola the most, but there are young people as well leaving for the adventure. In this country under construction, there are always more and more Portuguese leaving to live there for financial reasons.
It is called the El Dorado of Portuguese emigration and the data justify it. Since 2006 the number of Portuguese in Angola has not stopped: at the end of October 2011 there were 97,616 registered at the two consulated in the country, compared to 45,000 in 2005. That is, in six years the number has doubled. The actual number is naturally greater than this as not every Portuguese citizen registers with the consulate upon arrival. The majority of emigrants go on contracts, for periods ranging from three to five years.
Remittances have also increased. In 2010, 134 874 euros were sent from Angola to Portugal. In 2005 this number was 23 354 euros. Angola is expected to grow by 12% in 2012, while Portugal is expecting a contraction of 2.8% in its GDP. Roles are also reversed: in November, the prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho said that his government would look "very favorably" towards Angolan investment in Portugal.
Today marks a new record for exoplanet size, with the announcement of two further planets discovered by Kepler. These planets are the smallest discovered so far (well, except for the pulsar planets) with one even smaller than Venus. These two are far too close to their stars to be habitable however, so their discovery is only notable for their size/mass. And even if they were habitable they are too far (1,000 light years) to be reachable even by radio signals in the short term.
Gujarat, the state in India which is a model for its economic vitality, intends to open a Mandarin school and teach Chinese in its universities. The objective: to strengthen ties with China and attract investors.
It mentions the governor a bit too but there was nothing worth mentioning. I don't see any further information in English on Gujarat and Chinese either. I'll have to keep an eye out for articles with more detail than the two sentences found here.
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I feel that it's time I gave Evan1965 on YouTube another mention. Evan1965 is the name of an account by a guy who is a huge proponent of the revival of Latin, but also a French major who knows a good deal about other languages as well and has been churning out a lot of videos besides the main Latinum set he began with.
The French course (or rather, formal literary French) is quite interesting as there is no textbook, or at least not in the beginning. The student is supposed to make a crease in paper to divide it into two, and then listen and follow along by writing the French on one side and English on the other, and this over time becomes the textbook. Directly writing it out like that makes it impossible to skip over anything.
Here is a video explaining that:
And let's go with lesson 15 for an example of the course in action.
He mentions that he is not a French native speaker, but it doesn't matter here: his pronunciation is certainly good enough, he is working through a textbook that someone else has already made, and his teaching style is very clear. In other words, anyone who decides to learn French through these lessons (once they are all finished) will end up just as good at the language as anyone taught by a native speaker using the same text, which in the end is all that matters.
Mentioned before here, Hispan TV is set to launch on Wednesday. This is I believe the Spanish equivalent of Press TV, a channel where one can get one's fill of pro-Iranian government stories. You can see the site here.
The other one worth mentioning is an image here from a Norwegian article here, showing the results of another study on the top languages used on Twitter. The results of this study were: 39% English, 14% Japanese, 12% Portuguese, 8% Spanish, 6% Malay, 3% Dutch, 2% Korean, 1% Arabic, 1% Thai, and 14% all others. As for why Chinese is not there: Twitter is blocked in China.
The answer to that is obviously Google Street View, as Ålesund has been available for perhaps a year now. But one other fun way is this image, taken from the top of the mountain that everybody goes up to look at the city from above. This image is zoomable and goes into some pretty good detail at maximum magnification, showing people walking, individual roof tiles, cars, satellite dishes, the backs of buildings bordering on the ocean, all the areas that Google Street View was never able to image. Zooming in and looking around is very addictive.
There are some new articles out about this sort of study again, such as this and this one in Spanish. Unfortunately I have no time to translate any of them or go into greater detail today; I assume Google Translate will do a good enough job as is usually the case with a language like Spanish (German often still looks awkward thanks to the varying word order).
Dawn has now entered its most exciting phase of its mission around Vesta, as it has just completed its move into LAMO (low altitude mapping orbit). At an altitude of 210, it is closer to Vesta than probes around Earth in LEO.
GOP primaries: Ron Paul has been in second or third place in a lot of recent polls in the first two states (Iowa and New Hampshire), and the questions he has been getting in recent interviews seem to reflect that. A classic Ron Paul interview usually has him fielding a few questions about other candidates (Romney, Gingrich, previously Cain and Perry) plus one on running third party, but none of that here:
A small article here in Portuguese on an event from the 19th to the 21st called Sapatinho de Palavras to promote the teaching of Portuguese to children 6 to 10 in Praia, Cabo Verde.
"Why should Russian be an official language? As if for example we occupied your country and the declare that Estonian should be a language of the state fifty years later? The occupation authorities take control of the country, deport hundreds of millions of people to Siberia and send their agents here. Now that we have finally gained independents, the language of the occupying authority should be the second official language of the country? Don't ask me ridiculous questions."
This question was asked in response to the upcoming bill in Latvia on the same issue. Note the poll on the right here that I am hoping to get a few hundred responses to.
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Lots of articles on this subject since yesterday: here in Spanish, here in English, many more here and there. A French version was announced previously and will be available soon, and the Spanish version will be in cooperation with El Pais, so this will be largely centered on European Spanish news, not so much Latin America (though that is planned as well). Huffington Post Quebec is also in the works after the soon-to-be-available European French version.
I don't particularly like the Huffington Post (one example here), because it epitomizes the worst qualities of the so-called left in the United States: its total failure to realize that American presidents really have very little power without the House and the Senate as well, its endless striving for perfection and quick rejection of a president who isn't able to change the country in a year or two, and its quick abandonment in the mid-term elections when the inevitable disappointment happens. In other words, its tendency to want a savior, and to fail to realize that there are no one-man shows or quick fixes in American politics.
On the whole, however, I'm mostly ambivalent about it. It is nice to see such an influential paper expanding into other languages, however. I also see that there are a great number of potential freelance translation jobs, so interested readers might want to consider looking into that.
From here in Portuguese, where a group (a 'movement') has been set up to proactively oppose any future cuts by the Instituto Camões in Germany.
"We fear that Germany will be hit by reductions in the number of teachers teaching abroad as announced by the Instituto Camões", said Rui Paz, one of the promoters of the initiative to Agência Lusa.
Recently the Instituto Camoes announced that it would cut 50 teaching posts abroad, particularly in France (20), Switzerland (20), and Spain (9). Although the measure does not affect the network in Germany, the new movement is convinced that this "will be just a matter of time, because the Instituto Camões already said that the elimination of 50 positions was just the beginning".
The movement notes that the number of Portuguese teachers abroad totaled 598 in 2007, but was reduced to 517 in 2011 and will be 468 in 2012.
Of these, 54 are in Germany.
Interesting how this is happening at the same time that the Portuguese language is doing quite well in other parts of the world, particularly in Brazil and Africa. Comparing the GDP of Brazil, Angola and Portugal for 2007 to (estimated) 2012, we have:
On the last day of its congress, Québec Solidaire voted in favour of measures to defend the French language, including a better support for efforts for francization of immigrants and prohibiting employers to require a knowledge of English when hiring.
Party members did not, however, go as far as to want to expand the scope of Law 101 to include CEGEPS (public colleges).
Québec Solidaire only has one elected member (Amir Khadir), but from its strong 9% performance in the riding of Bonaventure last week they hope to elect more in the next general elections. On Saturday, members also voted in favour of the principle of a guaranteed minimum income, a concept that has been discussed for a long time in the left side of the Quebec political spectrum.
One interesting video and one article from Euronews to mention today:
1 - A video of ten minutes in length here in Portuguese and here in English (and for other languages, just change the language in the menu bar above) about Portuguese youth leaving the country for opportunities in other countries, in particular those that speak Portuguese such as Angola and Brazil. I recently wrote about how Angola's economy is helping Portuguese citizens find work abroad, so this is a nice complement to the previous post. In order to accentuate the video's theme it is replete with clip after clip of people standing in lines looking for work, and Portugal ends up looking like a pretty depressing place to be in this video.
2 - an article here on Vladivostok's voting communist in the recent Russian elections (once again, you can change the language if you want). Anything on Vladivostok is of particular interest to me since it is the only real major Russian city near Japan and Korea, and in spite of being located nearby it is not that easy to get to: a plane ticket to Vladivostok from Seoul for example costs about $800, about three times what it costs to get to somewhere like Japan or Taiwan. Flights also take place only once, or maybe twice a week. In Seoul it is easy to forget that Russia is just an hour away by plane, though the port city of Busan (Korea's second-largest city) has a much larger number of Russian sailors.
Descendants of Italian families founded the Atibaia Italian Circle (Circolo Italiano di Atibaia), a nonprofit organization that seeks to enhance and promote Italian culture in the city. Members of approximately 100 families participated in the event, held at the Hotel Gran Roca last Monday (28 November).
During the event, great-grandchildren, grandchildren, children, and even first-generation Italians themselves were able to share experiences about the coming of each family to Atibaia. Many see the group as an opportunity to strengthen the ties of Italian immigrants in the city.
The circle was created with the mission to promote the teaching of the Italian language in Atibaia. It also aims to promote and strengthen Italian culture, through cultural presentations and culinary events. The first board meeting will take place 12 December.
I just discovered this site today - a site called Romanian Insider that includes a good number of Romanian tutorials (too small to be called lessons). The audio, I must say, is pretty badass. Have a listen to this tutorial to hear it.
- It could be introduced into secondary schools as early as January
- The subject offering would depend on the availability of teachers
- Portugal will assist by training teachers and giving scholarships
- There are currently 4000 Namibians studying Portuguese, plus a number of foreign ministry officials.
This makes a total of three countries near Angola (and one bordering Mozambique as well) that have elected to introduce Portuguese into the schools.
Part of a particularly interesting article in German here on how Angola's booming economy has been a boon to Portuguese citizens who have either moved there to work or do business with the country:
More and more Portuguese are seeking their fortune in the former colony of Angola. While Portugal has until May to be rescued from bankruptcy with 78 billion euros from the EU and the IMF, the economy of oil-rich Angola is showing double-digit growth rates. In 2006 just 156 visas were given to Portuguese citizens. Now, however, the economic boom in Angola is bringing Portuguese university graduates and skilled workers in droves to the former colony. Meanwhile, 100 000 Portuguese citizens have settled there, a number four times that of the number of Angolan immigrants in Portual.
After the 27-year civil war in Angola, there is a great need for roads, telecommunications, utilities and finance. Professionals are needed, and Portuguese speakers are preferred. Having a common language is not the only appeal to a Portuguese worker in Angola - a Portuguese engineer working in Angola makes four times as much as one in Portugal.
The Angolan GDP has increased by more than 400% over the past six years. In comparison, the Portuguese GDP shrunk by 2.2% this year. Naturally, Angola has been building itself up from the ground since 2002 after the civil war, while Portugual remains an industrialized country in spite of its recent difficulties.
The press release also notes that the first transit of this planet was observed very soon after the start of the mission, meaning transits two and three took about two more years (the planet has an orbit of 290 days).
This also means that in 2012 we will see a veritable bonanza of these types of planets, as Kepler begins to confirm planets with orbits of 300 days, 310 days, 350 days, 400 days, and so on. 2012 promises to be very exciting indeed.
So what is it about this planet that makes it almost the holy grail of exoplanetology? Here's what the holy grail will look like:
1 - It will be a planet that is similar to our size. Kepler 22-b has this.
2 - It will be a planet that orbits a star similar to our own. Kepler 22 is this kind of star.
3 - It will orbit in the habitable zone of this star. Kepler 22-b has this.
3 - It will be relatively close to us. Kepler 22-b........is 600 light years away.
In discussions online today some have made the argument that since we can't get to stars that are 6 light years away any more than we can to one a hundred times that, the distance is irrelevant. Not so. Because:
- The psychological impact of a planet a few light years away is completely different from one a few hundred years away. The former distance is technically possible with enough interest and funding, and theoretical projects such as Project Longshot and Project Daedalus explore how it would be done. A planet at such a distance may motivate us to find ways to reach it, while 600 light years away is well beyond us to the extent that we wouldn't even bother thinking about it.
- A planet a few light years away is just a few years away by radio. Also, the planet we are looking at is more or less the planet as it currently is, not as it looked six centuries ago.
And now for your enjoyment the full press conference announcing the discovery. One hour in length, I still haven't found the time to listen to it today.
Also let's not forget another probably exoplanet/star discovery that will change the way we see our universe forever: a brown dwarf star closer to us than Alpha Centauri, assuming there is one or more of them at that distance. Doing so would decrease our isolation (the distance from our system to the nearest one) by a huge factor, and if something were to be found at one or two light years away it would even be reachable with theoretical propulsion (nuclear pulse propulsion) in under a human lifetime.
Of course, the easiest way to learn more about these is simply to build better and better telescopes. I am confident that we will see our interest and funding in the next generations of telescopes grow by leaps and bounds in the near future as we acquire more and more targets that we desperately want to know more about.
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For the first time, the growth of the Latino community in the United States is being produced by births and not by immigration. In the census of 2010 one can see the growth of the Hispanic population in the United States, 43% greater than that in the last census in the year 2000. These numbers are not surprising, given that the growth the previous decade (1990 to 2000) was 58%. According to the State University of California, the principal factor in the increase in population was births, more than from immigration. This is the first time in history that this has been the case. If the growth in population is maintained, by 2030 the United States will be the country with the largest number of Spanish speakers in the world, surpassing even Mexico and Spain.
Edit: I see the Economist has two articles on more or less the same subject today: here and here.
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I'm a bit late to notice this - a month ago Al-Jazeera launched a new channel called Al-Jazeera Balkans (site here), one that uses a single language: Serbo/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin...in the Latin alphabet.
I don't see any text with matching audio or podcasts, so the new channel is more of geopolitical interest than linguistic or pedagogic. But no worry for anyone studying Serbian/Croatian/etc., because the Defense Language Institute has tons of material. The only downside is that the news articles there are not current.
Regular readers will know that one of my favourite sources of audio with matching text for rare languages is this site here with the entire New Testament recorded in at least a few hundred languages, including a good number of creoles (Tok Pisin, Bislama, Haitian Creole, more) and rare languages like Ossetian/Ossetic, and Kalmyk. Just a year or two ago the amount of free online content with matching audio for these languages was virtually nonexistent. The site now even has a version in (Church) Latin.
They have announcements on the front page on new languages that have been added, but much of the time they neglect to mention every time a new language has been added. Such was the case with Latin: around August or September I read an article on the recording in Latin and that it would be released around October, then in October it was nowhere to be found, and later on in November, lo and behold, the Latin version of the New Testament had been snuck into the list of languages.
Because of this, every few weeks I will tend to do searches for languages I know and like, and sometimes even scroll through the entire list to see if anything jumps out. This week I noticed a language that wasn't there before: Portuguese.
Portuguese - well, that's certainly going to be Brazilian Portuguese, because it's always Brazilian Portuguese. Nevertheless I clicked on the language and had a listen...and it turned out that it was European Portuguese, a wonderful surprise given its relative rarity.
Next question was: which translation? According to the site it is a Bíblia para todos, which sounds like a new translation, and it is. That translation's official site also has a piece of news dated 25 November about the recording. Part of it goes as follows:
The New Testament now can be heard in Portuguese, recorded in Portugal. The 27 books that make up this part of the Bible are now available in audio format, in an effort that came from the hand of the Sociedade Bíblica...it has the impressive duration of approximately 21 hours and is the result of a month and a half of recordings, in which 25 professional actors gave their voice to all the characters in the New Testament. Jesus Christ was done by the actor Simon Frankel, known to the public as the voice actor for the Portuguese Tintin in the movie "The Adventures of Tintin". Adelaide de Sousa (Samaritan woman), Fernando Luís (Satan) and Heitor Lourenço are other recognizable voices..."a Bíblia para todos" is the most current Biblical text in Portuguese, and has been available in book form since 2009. This version is characterized by the usage of current and accessible language to people with different ages and instructional levels...the translation took 30 years and was done by Catholics and Protestants.
...and so on. To make a long story short, this is a great resource to have for learners of European Portuguese.
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This article goes into a good amount of detail on the teaching of Portuguese in various countries overseas, and how the government of Portugal intends to continue this in spite of the economic climate. Countries that the government has wanted to expand teaching in with new Institutos Camões were the US, Canada and Venezuela, but this will naturally not be happening at least in the near future.
Google Translate has done a good job with this article so you can read it in English here.
A day after the last post on the collection of signatures in Latvia, it seems that the necessary amount has been collected (article in Latvian). The Voice of Russia has jumped the gun a bit with the article "Russian to be language in Latvia" (I assume they mean official language in Latvia; it already was a language in Latvia), but apparently the process from now on is to:
1) validate the signatures
2) vote on the constitutional amendment in Parliament
3) have a national referendum if the bill is amended or rejected.
That first article has over 150 comments, and copying and pasting them into Google Translate is a lot of fun.
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