06.20.05
Posted in Language at 1:15 pm by Mithridates
Sorry about the light posting lately - real life has been intruding. In any case, here is some info about Welsh and the EU:
Plaid Cymru’s Euro-MP Jill Evans has welcomed last night’s decision by Europe’s Foreign Ministers on a framework which gives semi official status to languages such as Catalan, Galician and Basque and on the regulation which gives the Irish language the status of a working language used at the European level.
Ms Evans - who has been leading Plaid Cymru’s campaign for Welsh to become an official EU language - says that the deal opens the door for Welsh to get a similar status if the UK Government has the will.
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06.14.05
Posted in Language at 10:02 am by Mithridates
With traditional songs, hand puppets and an enthusiasm that’s infectious, Sonia Kinequon is fighting to preserve her culture through the minds — and mouths — of young people.
Kinequon is a Cree language teacher at Albert elementary school in inner-city Regina.
It’s a place where, starting last fall, administrators and parents decided to replace French class with the study of the indigenous language as part of a pilot program.
The aim is to give the aboriginal students a better connection to their past .
“Without the language and without the children learning it, it is going to evaporate,” Kinequon says. “And if we don’t have a setting where children can learn their language, they are eventually going to lose it.”
Full story here.
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06.08.05
Posted in Language at 10:45 am by Mithridates
A debut dictionary of all known words in Nootka, the 5,000-year-old tongue of North American tribes in an island outpost of the Rockies, has been published by a team in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Years of interviews with some 300 surviving speakers of the language, almost all now aged over 60, have led to 537 pages of unique and remarkably versatile terms. Entire sentences of meaning can be crammed into very short words.
“There are only three basic vowels but 40 consonants and a very complex sound structure when they are spoken,” said John Stonham, of Newcastle University, who started collecting Nootka words 20 years ago. His dictionary also draws on the fieldwork of the linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir, who investigated the tribes’ homeland on Vancouver Island between 1910 and 1924.
Full story here (via Cronaca), and the website for the Nootka Nation is here.
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06.06.05
Posted in Language at 3:57 pm by Mithridates
In case you were planning on voting on the EU consitution in a country in which you do not speak the lanaguage, here’ s a primer.
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