Parrot Time - Issue 4 - July / August 2013

Parrot TimeThe Thinking of Speaking Issue #4 July / August 201 3

TThhee PPhhaaiissttooss DDiissccOOttttoo JJeessppeerrsseenn aannddtthhee pprrooggrreessss ooffll aanngguuaaggeeLLaanngguuaaggee LLeeaarrnn iinngg

TThhrroouugghh SSooffttwwaarree

LLaanngguuaaggeess IInn PPeerrii llHHaallkkoommeelleemm,,SSqquuaammiisshh ,, NNuuxxáállkk CCaarrnn iivvaall !!

KKaannnnaaddaa WWrrii tteerrss

LLooookk bbeeyyoonnddwwhhaatt yyoouu kknnooww

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Contents

Parrot Time | Issue #4 | July / August 2013 3

06 The Phaistos Disc - Puzzle of CretePerhaps the worlds greatest linguistic puzzle, the Phaistos Disc,found in the basement of an ancient palace, has confusedscholars for a century with it’s unknown text and purpose, andto this day remains undeciphered.

1 8 At the Cinema - Kukushka - The Cuckoo

1 2 Otto Jespersen - Progress of LanguageOtto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who was not only active inlanguage teaching reform but also instrumental in the creationof the international phonetic alphabet and the work being doneon international auxiliary languages.

26 Languages in Peril - The Sadish Tragedy

30 Word on the Streets - Kannada Writers

34 Where Are You?

35 Revisited - Stories In The Names Of PlacesEvery place, from small towns to entire continents, have names,and those names have stories behind them. We look at wheresome of the worlds place names come from in English.

Parrot TimeParrot Time is a magazinecovering language, linguisticsand culture of the world around

us.

It is published by ScriveremoPublishing, a division of

Parleremo, the language learningcommunity.

Join Parleremo today. Learn alanguage, make friends, have fun.

42 New SoulsA story of breaking through in language listening... and gettinga new soul.

Departments

Features

05 Letter From The Editor

Editor: Erik ZidoweckiEmail: [email protected]

Published by Scriveremo Publish-ing, a division of Parleremo.This issue is available online fromhttp://www.parrottime.com

The editor reserves the right toedit all material submitted. Viewsexpressed in Parrot Time are notnecessarily the official views ofParleremo. All rights of reproduc-tion, translation and adaptation re-served for all countries, exceptwhere noted otherwise. All copy-right material posted in the public-ation retains all its rights from theoriginal owner. Parrot Time, Par-leremo, officers and administra-tion accept no responsibilitycollectively or individually for theservice of agencies or persons ad-vertised or announced in thepages of this publication.

Cover: A young girl in áo dàiby H Tây, Tay Ho district,Hanoi city, Vietnam. The áodài is a Vietnamese nationalcostume, now most commonlyworn by women. 50 Sections - Parleremo YouTube

20 Celebrations - Carnival

44 Language Learning Methods - SoftwareThe fourth in our series of articles about language learningmethods is about one of the newest forms: software.

Beszél magyarul?

PPaarrlleerreemmoo

LLeeaarrnnaallaanngguuaaggee,,MMaakkeeffrriieennddss,,HHaavveeffuunn!!

wwwwww..ppaarrll eerreemmoo..oorrgg

Letter From The Editor


WWe refer to Parrot Time as covering “languages, linguistics and culture”.Note how both language and linguistics are separated out, and not justreferred to by a single word. That is because they are different.

It seems that for most of the world, the term “linguist” gets applied toanyone that speaks another language. Probably most of you that arereading this and have learned another language have been called a lin-guist by someone at some point in your lives. Did you correct this? If so,what term did you use to define your language knowledge.

A linguist is, by definition, a person who studies linguistics, and lin-guistics is the scientific study of human language. Some who learn lan-guages might say they study languages, but it is not the same.Linguistics covers the nuts and bolts of a language. It looks at the waylanguages evolve, how they affect the way we think, and their origins.Studying linguistics means examining syntax, morphology, comparativegrammar and phonetics. A linguist can even work with computer pro-gramming and speech recognition, etymologies, psychology, neurologyand much more. They will also work with recording dying languages soas to preserve the knowledge of them.

A person that learns languages, however, will learn the vocabulary, grammar, and some other linguisticaspects of a single language, but they aren’t really studying the way the language is put together. Its abit like the difference between the physicist who works in the lab, examining the movement of electrons,as compared to the physics student that learns the formulas and equations to calculate occurrences inthe natural world. They are both dealing with physics, but one is dissecting while the other is applying.

So if a person who learns languages shouldn’t be called a linguist, what should they be called. If a per-son knows a single language, they are deemed monolingual. One that knows two is bilingual and one thatknows three is trilingual. But those words describe the person’s language capability, not that they are aperson that knows other languages. No ones says “I’m a bilingual”, but they might say “I am bilingual”.

The term that has come into usage in the past few decades is polyglot (from Greek poly, many + glotta,language). While this should represent someone who speaks several languages, it has come to meananyone speaking more than one.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the two groups are mutually exclusive. A linguist might know a couple oflanguages, and a polyglot might work with components of linguistics as well. But not all linguists arepolyglots, nor are all polyglots are linguists.

It is for this reason that Parrot Time makes sure to use both “languages” and “linguistics” as two differ-ent areas it covers. Biographies on linguists with information on what their theories were might not in-terest a person who is learning, say, a Romance language, but an article on endangered romancelanguages might. The two areas might even overlap in an article. An article on a particular languagemight discuss the vocabulary and grammar as well as the way these have evolved and how the languagerelates to others in its language family.

So welcome, whether you are a polyglot, linguist, both, or even neither. We hope you enjoy reading themagazine and we welcome your contributions!

Linguist or Polyglot

Erik ZidoweckiERIK ZIDOWECKIEDITOR IN CHIEF

A single clay disc has confoundedarchaeologists and linguists for acentury. The unknown text haseluded not only decipherment buteven an understanding of itspurpose. The Phaistos Disc isconsidered to be one of thegreatest puzzles of the world.

The Phaistos Disc

PPuuzzzzllee ooffCCrreettee

The Phaistos Disc - Puzzle of Crete


Ancient Crete has been asource of a few languagepuzzles. In the palace of Knos-sos, three different writing sys-tems were discovered, in theforms of a hieroglyphic script,Linear A, and Linear B (see Par-rot Time issue two for Linear A -

Lost Minoan) . But they weren’tthe only mysteries found.

single disc containing anunknown writing systemwas also found in the ru-

ins of the nearby palace ofPhaistos. This circular clay disc,covered with inscribed symbolson both sides which are unlikeany signs in any known writingsystem, became known as thePhaistos Disc, and to this day,remains undeciphered.

DiscoveryPhaistos was an ancient citynear Hagia Triada on the southcoast of Crete, dating perhaps asfar back as 6000 BC. The cityrose up from the fertile plains ofthe Messara region and becamepart of the growing Minoan em-pire. The first Minoan palace ofPhaistos was built around 2000BC, about the same time as themain palace of the empire wasbuilt in Knossos. Both of thesePalaces were destroyed by astrong earthquake in 1700 BCand rebuilt on top of the oldones. The earthquake was

caused by a volcano erupting onthe nearby island of Thera (mod-ern day Santorini) . The palace ofPhaistos was destroyed a fewcenturies later, and again, re-built. Around 1400 BC, Cretewas invaded by the Achaeans ofGreece and both cities ofPhaistos and Knossos were des-troyed. The Phaistos palaceseems to have been abandonedafter that, but the city itself wasrebuilt and thrived for a fewmore centuries, even minting itsown coins. However, the city wasfinally destroyed in the first cen-tury BC by the neighboring cityof Gortyn.

During the Minoan empire,Phaistos became a major city-state, with its power stretchingfrom Lithinon to Psychion, in-

cluding the Paxim-adia islands,during its peak. Itwas a participantin the Trojan war,as recorded by theGreek poet Homer,and had two ports,Matala and Kom-mos. The palacecontrolled the Mes-sara valley and wasthe center of thecity as well as theadministrationaland economicalcenter for the area.

It was surrounded by luxuriousmansions and crowded urbancommunities.

The precise location ofPhaistos was first established byBritish admiral Thomas AbelBrimage Spratt, commander ofthe Spitfire, a paddle steamer,during the Mediterranean Sur-vey of 1853. The survey wascataloging the topography andsettlements of Crete. The loca-tion was a ridge, rising from themiddle of the Yeropotamos rivervalley and extending from thesea to the Messara Plain. Therewas a small village of sixteenhouses there, but the remains ofsome walls showed that a cityhad once been existed on thatspot.

An archaeological investiga-tion of the palace started in1884 by Italian archaeologistsFederico Halbherr and AntonioTaramelli. After removing thehouses, they began to discoverwhat remained of a large palacecomplex. They found three dis-tinct construction phases show-ing the destruction andrebuilding of the palace. Fromcontinuous archaeological ex-cavations, the true magnificenceof the palace was revealed. Ithad great royal courts, a theatre,and numerous storerooms,which were used for mainlyholding traded goods.

Map of Crete, showing both Knossos and Phaistos

Stairs in the remains of the palace of Phaistos, leading down to astoreroom like where the disc was found


8 Parrot Time | Issue #4 | July / August 2013

The disc was discovered inJuly, 1908, in the basement ofone of the rooms of the palace.Its finder was another Italian ar-chaeologist, Luigi Pernier. Thebasement was the main room ofan underground “temple depos-itory” in which all the roomswere only accessible from above.The contents of the rooms weremostly black earth and ashes,and everything was covered in alayer of plaster dust. The discwasn’t the only item found in theroom. Several centimeters fromit was a stone tablet containingtext written in Linear A.

DescriptionThe disc itself is around 16 cen-timeters (6.5 inches) in diamet-er. Both sides of the disc arecovered with symbols, arrangedin a spiral pattern, going clock-wise around into the center. Thesymbols are similar to hiero-glyphs, being more drawingsthen simple letters. There are241 of these hieroglyphs on thedisc, composed of only forty-fiveunique ones. They are furthergrouped together as “words” withvertical lines separating them.Some of these words are recur-ring, suggesting a refrain of asong or ritual. There are sixty-one of these words.

The symbolswere imprinted intothe disc when theclay was still wet,and the consist-ency between simil-ar glyphs suggestthat they werepressed in usinghieroglyphic“seals”, or stamps.These would sug-gest some kind ofmass production,although no othersuch discs have yetbeen discovered.

The symbolsthemselves re-semble common

objects. These include humanfigures and body parts,weapons, fish, birds, insects,plants, a boat, a shield and astaff. Some of the last symbolsin a word also have a small diag-onal line under them which wasscratched on, not pressed in.

Translation AttemptsOver the years, many amateurand professional archaeologistshave made attempts to decipherthe code of the disc. It is not ne-cessarily a script, but most at-tempts have assumed that it is,even going further in believingthat it is a syllabary , an alpha-bet or a logography. The mainproblem in deciphering is thatthere is simply not a largeenough body of text to analyze.This has left the meaning opento some wildly speculative

guesses.How the symbols should be

viewed is another point of de-bate. A symbol could be a picto-graph, meaning it is translateddirectly as the object it shows. Asymbol that looks like a boatwould be translated as “boat”.However, it the symbol is anideogram, it might represent anidea instead. In that case, a boatmight mean something like“travel”.

While it is generally acceptednow that the characters shouldbe read from the outside movingclockwise into the center, ratherthan from the center movingoutward, there is not an agree-ment on how the charactersshould be displayed when tran-scribed into text. Because of theclockwise rotation of the textwith the bottom of the charac-ters facing out from the center,the text is probably meant to beread right-to-left, like Arabic.This also means that the readingdirection is going into the facesof the people and animals, as itis with Anatolian and Egyptianhieroglyphics. This is disputedby the idea that if the text movesclockwise, then it should alsoshould be read left-to-right.

Some symbols have beenshown to be similar to Linear Acharacters. Other scholars havepointed to similarities withAnatolian or Egyptian hiero-glyphs. However, no matches forall the characters in single set ofcharacters has been found.These similarities, along with thefinding of tablets written in Lin-

Writing Systems

Alphabet - set of basic written symbols or graphemes, called let-ters, in which each letter represents a phoneme (basic significantsound) of the spoken language.

Syllabary - set of written symbols that represent the syllableswhich make up words.

Logography - set of written symbols in which each symbol repres-ents a word, morpheme or semantic unit.

The Phaistos Disc, today on display at the Iraklion ArchaeologicalMuseum



ear A in both palaces, makesthese three writing systems thebest candidates for providing asolution. Some of the signs areclose enough to Linear A and itstranslated counterpart, Linear B,that some scholars believe theymight have the same phoneticvalues. In his recent book, DerDiskos Von Phaistos (ThePhaistos Disc) , Torsten Timmdeclares that the language onthe disc is the same as Linear A.However, only 20 of the 45 char-acters match those found ofwhat is known of Linear A, leav-ing over half of them still unac-counted for. And even if they arethe same, it doesn’t truly aid inthe decoding, since Linear A it-self has yet to be deciphered.

Other scholars look atAnatolian hieroglyphics beingthe key, not just to Linear A butto the Phaistos Disc as well.During the 1960s, a theoryevolved that Linear A could bean Anatolian language, close toLuwian, an extinct language ofthe Anatolian branch of theIndo-European language family.Part of that is the idea that theextra stroke under some of thecharacters is similar to a symbolused in Luwian. These couldthen be used to match up withlogograms, the basic charactersin a logography, found inLuwian.

SolutionsMany people have claimed tohave solved the mystery of thedisc, but none of them havereally been proven beyonddoubt. The main reason for thatis because without a larger body

of text to compare to, there is nomeans of testing the theories.

One theory is that the disc isa calendar system. One side has12 words, each ending in a disk-helmet combination, whichcould depict the twelve months.The words between those coulddenote special events, such aschanging of seasons, or dates.The other side has just a singleword ending with the disk-hel-met combination and the side isdivided into 30 words, whichcould represent the days of amonth. One obvious complaintabout this proposed solution iswhether something almost four-thousand years old would con-firm so closely to our modernidea of a calendar. Nonetheless,a number of people have latchedonto this theory.

The dissension betweenthem seems to be how its inter-preted. While some have thoughtthe extra symbols and wordsamong the months would benatural events, like a farmer’salmanac, others have claimedthat the images de-scribe ceremoniesor duties thatshould be per-formed on specificdates. It has evenbeen proposed thatthe disc is a sched-ule is for palaceactivities.

Another strongidea is that it is

some kind of puzzle or gameboard. It does have some traitswith Egyptian games whichtrack the sun god and moongoddess, both astronomicallyand mythologically. Anothergame it could be related to isknown as “Game of the Goose”.This is a board game played on aspiral with numbered space,usually 63, with the startingpoint on the outside. The playersmove pieces according to thethrow of dice. The name comesfrom the depictions of a goosethat are scattered throughoutthe board. Landing on such acharacter allows the player tomove again the same distance.Other symbols can cause a play-er to move to other positions,move backwards, or lose a turn.Some believe the “Game of theGoose” could have been derivedfrom the game on the disc.

The proposal of it being apuzzle can be shown by con-necting identical symbols to seepatterns, much the same as aconnect-the-dot puzzle of mod-

The symbols themselvesresemble commonobjects. These includehuman figures and bodyparts, weapons, fish,birds, insects, plants, aboat, a shield and a staff.

Copy of the disc, showing both sides

Drawings of the tablet found near the Phaistos Disc. The writingis Linear A, which might be related to the writing on the disc.



ern day. Each group of theseconnections is alleged to depictsomething specific. One of theseimages is said to be the cavewhere the Nimrud lens, the old-est discovered lens in the world,was found. Another image ispurported to be an image of theconstellation Argo. Other imagesmight depict the star Sirius inthe center of seven planets andone of the the Great Pyramids.

A few problems with thisconclusion exist, though. First, asimple drawing consisting ofstraight lines to points can’t beaccurate enough to be a singleitem. It’s similar to an ink blottest, in which the observer isasked what they see. The waythe dots are connected to makethese drawings vary, as if the

person is forcing a specific imageto be there. For example, thecave is “found” by connectingthree circles, one inside the oth-er. However, the drawing for thepyramid only appears by con-necting five dots directly to asingle top dot. If the pyramiddots are connected in any otherway, the image is completely dif-ferent. Another problem is therandomness of these images.Just from the four listed, tworefer to astronomical occur-rences, one to a man-madestructure, and one to a location,a cave. The person or personsthat made the disc would haveto have knowledge of all thosethings. That brings us to a thirdproblem: why? Why wouldsomeone go through so much

trouble to produce a hidden de-piction of unrelated items?

A commercially available ex-planation of the Phaistos Discbecame available in 1997 whenSteven Roger Fischer publishedhis book “Glyphbreaker”. In it,Fischer to claims to havecracked the code of the disc, ex-plaining that it is actually a callto arms, to repel the Carians,invaders from Anatolia, writtenin some form of ancient Greek.This is produced first by an as-sumption at what each symbolmeans as a syllable, then thisbasic decoding is “cleaned up” towhat might be Greek. Thiscleaned Greek is then decoded.And example of this is a series ofwords being “e-qe ku-ri-ti, / de-ni qe, / ma pa-si / ma ma-pi. “.This can then be made into moreproper Greek as “Ekue, KurwitisDeneoi-que: ma pasis, ma ma-poi” which could translate as“Hear ye, Cretans and Greeks:my great, my quick!”. The entiretranslation would then go as:

’Hear ye,Cretans andGreeks: my great, my quick!He ye, Danaidans, the great,the worthy! Hear ye, allblacks, and hear ye, Pudaanand Libyan immigrants!Hear ye, waters, yea earth:Hellas faces battle with theCarians. Hear ye all! Hear

A version of "Game of the Goose", which might have descended from the Phaistos Disc



ye, Gods of the Fleet, ayehear ye all: faces battle withthe Carians. Hear ye all!Hear ye, the multitudes ofblack people and all! Hearye, lords, yea freeman: Hearye, Lords of the Fleet: ToNaxos!’’Hear ye, ye immigrants,

the great and the small; yecountrymen skilled, moststalwart; lords Idaian; allCretans: Strike ye out withthe Greeks and smite theCarians, mine enemy, andsuccor my stricken. Safe-guard me, Idaians: I am soreafraid. Loose me now. Mynight, my great: Ye loose menow. These afflictions so ter-rible and so great, verily somolestful: Ye loose me now.Down to the sea, everyone!Yea, deliver me of my greatafflictions!’

Some have credited this asbeing the true solution, whileothers view it to be far too manyassumptions to be factual. Thisis because a general problemwith decoding bodies of text isthe lack of checks to eliminatebad assumptions. With a shorttext like that on the PhaistosDisk, if you make enough as-sumptions you can get a legibletext in whatever language youwant. But perhaps the biggestproblem with this solution is

that the Carians didn’t appear inthe Mediterranian region until afew thousand years after thedisc was created.

Besides claims of the textbeing in some form of Greek orLuwian, it has also been pro-posed by Sergei V. Rjabchikov

that both Linear A and the diskare some unknown Slavonic lan-guage. He also says the discsigns are a decorative version ofLinear A script.

Adam Martin suggests thedisc is actually bilingual, withone side being the text for a fu-neral service in Greek, and theother side is a Minoan version ofthe same text.

Hedwig Roolvink claims shetoo has translated the disc, andthat is describes the expeditionof mountain people in their ef-forts to find a new place tosettle.

Kevin and Keith Masseyclaim it is in a Greek dialect,and that the disc is a receipt forgoods, which would then have

been destroyed.There are even suggestions

that the disc was created by ex-traterrestrials that visited theEarth in ancient times.

The list of possible solutionscontinues on, with over sixtypublished explanations already.None have gained widespreadacceptance, and most conflictwith all other claims.

Hoax?Naturally, with no deciphermentfound, many people have specu-lated that the Phaistos Disc is ahoax. Most scholars believe thatit is valid, though, especiallygiven its connection to otherproven writing systems of thetime as well as its proximity tosimilar artifacts, such as a tabletin Linear A.

ConclusionAfter one hundred years of spec-ulation, people still are workingto crack the meaning of thePhaistos Disc. One of the pro-posed solutions may be correctbut unverifiable. It may alsoforever remain a mystery. Whatit does tell us that we still haveso much more to learn about ourancient languages. PT

Some of the signs areclose enough to LinearAand its translated counter-part, Linear B, that somescholars believe they mighthave the same phoneticvalues.

Looking out over the Messara valley,which was all under the control ofPhaistos at one time

Linguist and school teacher, Otto Jespersen

was always focused on progress. He talked

about the progress of language, but also was

a major contributor in the work done on

language teaching reform. He also worked

directly on reforming phonetic transcription

and establishing an international auxiliary

language.

Otto Jespersen

PPrrooggrreessss ooff LLaanngguuaaggee

Otto Jespersen - Progress of Language


Famed Danish linguist Otto Jespersenworked all his life not only in linguisticsbut also in reforms of language teaching,phonetic transcription and an internation-al language. He is considered to be one ofthe most famous linguists.

His LifeJens Otto Harry Jespersen was born on16 July, 1860, in the town of Randers inJutland, Denmark. His father was a dis-trict judge and his mother was the daugh-ter of the clergyman. When his father diedin 1870, Jespersen and his family movedto Hillerød, Northern Zealand.

Young Jespersen was inspired by thework of Danish linguist Rasmus Rask,who had mastered over twenty-five lan-guages and dialects, and so while he at-tended the public school of Frederiksborg,he taught himself some Icelandic, Italian,and Spanish using Rask’s grammarsguides. In 1877, at the age of 17, Jesper-sen entered the University of Copenhagen,where he initially studied law, as his fath-er, grandfather and great-grandfather haddone. In his spare time, he studiedFrench, Italian, Spanish and English liter-ature. He also worked part-time as a lowersecondary school teacher and a shorthandreporter in the Danish parliament to sup-port himself.

In 1881 , Jespersen stopped studyingand turned all his attention to languages.He began attending lectures on phoneticsby the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen,who became his mentor, as well as takingclasses in Old and Modern French. Healso developed interests in English andGerman.

His first publication was a review inthe Nordisk Tidsskrift for Filologi (NordicJournal of Philology) in 1883. His next twopublications, a translation of FelixFranke’s pamphlet on the practical ac-quisition of language, Die Praktische

Spracherlernung (The Practical LanguageLearning), into Danish, and his own Kort-

fattet engelsk Grammatik (Brief EnglishGrammar) were published in 1884 and1885, respectively, and got him noticed asa linguist. Kortfattet engelsk Grammatik

was one of the earliest examples inEurope of learning material produced ac-cording to phonetic principles which werejust beginning to become popular. In1886, along with several other scholars

and teachers, he helped to establish aScandinavian association for the reform oflanguage education, named Quousque

tandem (Latin: for how long).Jespersen earned his master’s degree

in French, with English and Latin as hissecondary languages in 1887. After that,he traveled to England, Germany andFrance, during which time he met withnotable linguists like Henry Sweet andPaul Passy while also attending lectures atinstitutions like Oxford University. He re-turned to Copenhagen in August 1888 onthe advice of Thomsen, and began work onhis doctoral dissertation of the Englishcase system, which he completed in 1891 .In 1890, he established the phoneticnotation “Dania”, which was specially ad-apted for Danish. It was used in severalmajor Danish reference works.

For two years, Jespersen worked as aPrivatdocent (a private teacher or lecturerrecognized by the university but receiving

no payment from it) at the University, giv-ing lectures on Old English and Chaucer.Then, In 1893, he replaced retiring GeorgeStephens as professor of English in theUniversity of Copenhagen, and Jespersenremained there until he also retired in1925. He was also the Rector of the Uni-versity from 1920 to 1921 .

Jespersen was best-known as a lan-guage teaching reformer and phoneticianduring the 1890s. He published manyworks on phonetics during that time, in-cluding The Articulations ofSpeech Sounds

in 1889, in which he put forth a newanalphabetic system (representing soundsby composite signs rather than by singleletters or symbols, like previously usedRoman letters) for scientific transcription.Jespersen’s Fonetik, published in 1899,was also a major contribution, and wastranslated into German in 1904, where itwas split into two books: Lehrbuch der

Phonetik and Phonetische Grundfragen.Twice, efforts were also made to get thebook published into English, but those

“Language is a tool used bypeople to make themselvesmutually understood, thuspeople will work to shorten theforms and simplify the gram-matical system.



never were completed. In Dan-ish, he further published Moder-

smålets fonetik (The Phonetics ofthe Vernacula) in 1906 and En-

gelsk fonetik (an English hand-book for Scandinavian students)in 1912.

Jespersen published extens-ively on English. Two of hisgreatest works in this area wereModern English Grammar, 7 vol.

(1909-49), which concentratedon morphology and syntax, andGrowth and Structure ofthe Eng-

lish Language (1905), which wasreprinted in 1969 and remains acomprehensive view of Englishby someone with another nativelanguage.

Jespersen visited the UnitedStates twice, lecturing at theCongress of Arts and Sciences inSt. Louis in 1904, and then visit-ing both the University of Cali-fornia and Columbia Universityduring a trip from 1909 to 1910.

Even after he retired, Jes-persen remained active in the in-ternational linguisticcommunity. Not only did he con-tinue writing, but he also con-vened and chaired the firstInternational Meeting on Lin-guistic Research in Geneva in1930, and he acted as president

of the Fourth International Con-gress of Linguists in Copenha-gen in 1936. Jespersen died inApril, 1943, at the age of 82.

His WorksJespersen, with Paul Passy,founded the International Phon-etic Association, which created astandard in pronunciation nota-tion. He was an active supporterand developer of artificial inter-national languages such as Es-peranto, was also involved in thedelegation which created Ido.However, his main achievementin this area was the developmentof his own artificial language,Novial.

IPADuring his trips to Europe in1888, Jespersen met with theFrench linguist Paul Passy. Theyhad been exchanged letters forseveral years before this andeach was familiar with the oth-er’s work. Passy was dissatisfiedwith the methods of languageteaching and in 1886, he foun-ded the Dhi Fonètik Tîcerz’ Asó-

ciécon (Phonetic Teachers’Association) in Paris. One of hisconcerns was the limitation inlanguage transcription by the

letters that wereavailable totypesetters andon typewriters.

Jespersenwas also inter-ested in thisproblem and hejoined withPassy and Ger-man linguist Wilhelm Viëtor in1889 to expand the associationinto L’Association Phonétique des

Professeurs de Langues Vivantes

(Phonetics Association of Teach-ers of Modern Languages) . Jes-persen published The

Articulations ofSpeech Sounds topresent his own ideas for a sys-tem to represent sounds by newcomposite signs.

The organization becameL’Association Phonétique Inter-

nationale (API) or the Interna-

tional Phonetic Association (IPA)in 1897. It created a chart ofsounds and symbols, resultingin an alphabet for a uniformstandard of phonetic writing, orphonetic transcription. This al-phabet became known as the In-

ternational Phonetic Alphabet,also using the IPA acronym. Ithas been refined and updatedmany times over the years to ac-

Paul Passy

University of Copenhagen



commodate the sounds of of theworld’s languages. The IPA sym-bols are often used beyond lin-guistics literature, such as forpronunciation guides in diction-aries and in orthographies cre-ated for previously unwrittenlanguages.

NovialJespersen was one of the firstphilologists to actively supportthe work being done on estab-lishing an international auxiliarylanguage, referred to as an IAL.In his Progress in Language with

Special Reference to English,published in 1894, he expressedhis support for the developmentof an effective IAL:

“Primitive language nodoubt had a superabund-ance of irregularities and an-omalies, in syntax and wordformation not less than inaccidence. It was capriciousand fanciful, and displayed aluxuriant growth of forms,entangled one with anotherlike the trees in a primevalforest. Human minds ofthose times disported them-selves in these long and in-tricate words as in thewildest and most wantonplay. Primitive speech wascertainly not, as is oftensupposed, distinguished forlogical consistency; nor, sofar as we can judge, was itsimple and facile: it is muchmore likely to have been ex-tremely clumsy and un-wieldy.”

He rejected Volapük, theconstructed language created in1879 by the Roman Catholicpriest Johann Martin Schleyer.He was more interested in thework being done on Esperantoand closely followed the work ofLéopold Leau and Louis Coutur-at and their founding of Déléga-tion pour l’adoption d’une langue

auxiliaire internationale (Delega-tion for the Adoption of an Inter-national Auxiliary Language) in

1901 . The purpose of this organ-ization was to decide on whichinternational auxiliary languageshould be chosen for interna-tional use.

In May, 1907, Jespersenwas elected a member of thecommittee of the delegation. Thecommittee eventually chose Es-peranto, but with certain re-forms, which eventuallyproduced a distinct languagecalled Ido. After that, he becamepresident of its Academy and be-came active in the linguistic dis-cussion in the journal Progreso.Further improvements weremade on Ido and there was con-siderable development on thevocabulary of the language,thanks largely to his experiencesas a linguist as well as the cri-teria which he applied to all pro-

posals for the formation anddevelopment of the internationalauxiliary language.

The committee also workedhard to promote Ido for use inthe rest of the world, but WorldWar I interrupted these efforts,and, in spite of the initial suc-cess, the world remained largelyindifferent to adopting it. Notdeterred in his enthusiasm, Jes-persen published a new lan-guage, mainly based on Ido,called Novial In 1928. This wasdone in his book An International

Language (1928) in which hefirst reviewed the history andtheory of international languagesthen presented the Novial gram-mar and some texts. The namecame from the word Nov (“new”)and I.A.L (International AuxiliaryLanguage).

In this book, Jespersen alsoexplained the reason for the in-difference to adopting Ido, saying“In the first place the time wasnot yet ripe (in 1907) for a finaldecision; the principles for aninterlanguage had not beenthrashed out scientifically, andmuch of the short time at thecommittee’s disposal had to bespent in clearing away much oldrubbish, so that a great manydetails had to be left for furtherdiscussion in Progreso . . . . but inspite of all - in spite also of theamount of energy squanderedaway in the quarrels of Esper-antists and Idists - the Delega-tion and the Ido Academy haveleft their indelible mark on theinterlanguage movement, and

However, his mainachievement in this areawas the development ofhis own artificial lan-guage, Novial.

The creation of auxiliary languages is taken very seriously. Even flags are created to represent each one.

Esperanto flag Ido flag Novial flag



their influence has been chieflyfor the good.”

He also refuted an objectionabout the great number of differ-ent systems, declaring that theselanguages may differ in their de-tails but they contain manycommon features and principles.He stated that “the less arbitraryand the more rational the forms,the more stable they will be.”

A Novial dictionary for Eng-lish, French and German waspublished in 1930 as Novial

Lexike. Many reviewers werevery positive of Novial, declaringthat it was built with commonsense and that anyone couldlearn it.

Rank & NexusOne of Jespersen’s most originalcontributions to grammaticaltheory was his ideas of rank andnexus, as put forth in his workThe Philosophy ofGrammar

(1924). In his theory of ranks, heproposed that the parts ofspeech be kept out of syntax,while identifying words asprimaries, secondaries, and ter-tiaries. For example, a nounwould be a primary, with a worddescribing or defining it being a

secondary. A third word definingthe secondary would be a ter-tiary. Nexus refer to the core as-pect of a sentence, while adependent nexus would be partof the entire sentence as a sub-ject, object, etc. Another termwas junction, which representsone idea expressed by two ormore elements, while a nexuscombines two ideas. These newtheories helped bring togetherorganically related elementswhich in previous grammaticalworks were kept separate.

Other WorksJespersen was very much con-cerned with the progress of lan-guage, and much of his work isbased upon two fundamentalprincipals. The first of thesedeals with the forms of language.He believed language has anouter form, represented in thephonetical and grammatical as-pects, and an inner form, whichis the meaning in a wider sense.He believed that sound changesare due to semantic factors, thatis, they change because of themeaning words, and not to in-ternal phonetic factors.

He was against the German

Neogrammarians’ “mechanisticphilosophy” which followed theidea that sound laws operate ina systematic nature. They be-lieved in the regularity of soundchange, in which a diachronicsound change affects simultan-eously all words in which its en-vironment is met, withoutexception. That is, if within alanguage, the way a letter orcombination of letters is pro-nounced is altered, all wordsusing that combination immedi-ately have their pronunciationschange within the same area thechange has been implemented.

The second principal Jes-persen worked with was an op-position to the notions of decayor degeneration of languagesfrom their purer, primitiveforms. He felt instead that lan-guages progress, achievinggreater regularity and claritywhile becoming more pliable toconvey new meanings. He main-tained that “language is activity,chiefly social activity undertakenin order to get in touch withother individuals and commu-nicate to them one’s thoughts,feelings and will” (Efficiency in

linguistic change, 1941 ) . Lan-guage is a tool used by people tomake themselves mutually un-derstood, thus people will workto shorten the forms and simpli-fy the grammatical system.

Jespersen’s primary work onlinguistic evolution is Language:

Its Nature, Development and Ori-

gin, published in 1922, anddedicated to Vilhelm Thomsen. Itis divided into four books, withBook I presenting the history oflinguistic science and Book IItalking about the linguistic de-velopment of children. Book III,titled The Individual and the

World, has chapters on The For-

eigner, Pidgins and Congeners,The Woman, and Causes of

Change, all of them discussinglinguistic development withthose groups. Book IV discussesthe problem of progress or decay

An exerpt of Jespersen’s work, describing some aspects of his proposed reform of phonetictranscription



(1 883) Nordisk Tidsskrift for Filologi (Nordic Journal of Philology)

(1 884) Die Praktische Spracherlernung (The Practical Language Learning)

(1 885) Kortfattet engelsk Grammatik (Brief English Grammar)

(1 889) The Articulations of Speech Sounds

(1 889) Fonetik

(1 894) Progress in Language with Special Reference to English

(1 901 ) Sprogundervisning (How to Teach a Foreign Language)

(1 905) Growth and Structure of the English Language

(1 906) Modersmålets fonetik (The Phonetics of the Vernacula)

(1 909) Modern English Grammar, 7 vol.

(1 91 2) Engelsk fonetik (an English handbook for Scandinavian students)

(1 922) LanguageIts Nature, Development and Origin

(1 924) The Philosophy of Grammar

(1 928) An International Language

(1 930) Novial Lexike Novial to English, French and German dictionary

(1 933) Essentials of English Grammar

(1 937) Analytic Syntax

(1 941 ) Efficiency in linguistic change

PARTIAL LIST OF WORKS

and other aspects of his prin-ciples. His last book, Efficiencyin Linguistic Change (1941 ), re-examined these ideas.

Jespersen wrote about syn-tax and the history of languagein Growth and Structure ofthe

English (1905). He focused onsyntax in his works The Philo-

sophy ofGrammar (1924) andAnalytic Syntax (1937). In these,Jespersen talked about how syn-tax must start with meaning andinvestigate the way particulargrammatical notions are ex-pressed, while morphology startsfrom the form and asks what itstands for. When this happens,categories like negation and

tense are seen in a completelynew way.

Sprogundervisning (How toTeach a Foreign Language), pub-lished in 1901 , was another ma-jor contribution by Jespersen,based upon his prior experienceas a secondary school teacher,and it helped prepare futureteachers.

By means of his numerousworks, Jespersen made manyvaluable contributions to generalphonetics and grammar, as wellas increasing knowledge of Eng-lish and Danish and other lan-guages. Throughout his career,he received numerous honours,

including three honorary doc-tor’s degrees from universitiesabroad, but he never ignored theimportance of modern languageteaching in schools. His im-provements on the teaching ofmodern languages has in-fluenced educators beyond hisown country. He lived in thehonorary residence of the RoyalDanish Academy of Sciences andLetters in Elsinore from 1934until his death in 1943. Not onlywas Jespersen an extremely tal-ented and productive linguist, hewas also an excellent commu-nicator, and he is consideredone of the most famous of lin-guists. PT

At the Cinema - Kukushka - The Cuckoo


omeone suggested I watch thismovie because of the language in-

teractions, so I figured I would try it.From what I read, it involved soldiersduring World War II, and, I confess, Iwasn’t really enthusiastic aboutwatching a war movie. I have neverbeen particularly drawn to the eventsof WWII, and rarely enjoy storieswhich revolve around them.

Fortunately, my worries about themovie were completely unnecessary.This movie was fantastic! It takesplace at the end of WWII, but it isn’tabout the war. It’s about two soldierson opposing sides that end up togeth-er along with a Saami woman, andthey must try to overcome their preju-dices. . . or kill each other.

Viekko is a Finnish soldier who isa pacifist, and when the German sol-diers he is with understand this, theyfear he will desert. To punish him,they chain him to a boulder, leavinghim with just a rifle, some ammuni-tion, and a few days rations. Theydress him as a German, so any Russi-ans that might find him would be hos-tile and Viekko would have to shootthem. In essence, they force him to bea sniper, or, as they called it, akukushka (“cuckoo”) .

Ivan is a Russian captain who isaccused of collaborating with the en-emy. On his way to a court marshal,Ivan and the two men driving himthere are accidentally bombed by theirown planes. Viekko watches this fromhis boulder through the scope on hisrifle. He also sees Anni, a Laplander,who is out scavenging for food, come

across the bodies. She starts to burythem, only to find Ivan is still alive,but barely. She manages to drag himback to her house and works to nursehim back to health.

Viekko is finally able to escapefrom the boulder, but he still has achain attached to his ankle, so heseeks out Anni’s house to find a wayto remove the shackles. All of thistakes up the first half-hour of themovie, and there is almost no dia-logue.

Viekko and the recovering Ivanmeet, but they do not understandeach other’s language. Ivan believesViekko is German, and tries to killhim with a knife. Viekko tries to ex-plain to Ivan that he is done fightingand just wants to go home. Anni,speaking only Saami, doesn’t under-stand either of them. Her husbandwent off to the war years ago, and shehas managed on her own. She thinksboth of them are behaving stupidly, asmen do.

Now, the reason this movie is sointeresting from a language point ofview isn’t just because of the lan-guages used. All the characters speak

AAtt tthhee CCiinneemmaa

Kukushka - The Cuckoo

Kukushka - The CuckooPG-1 3 99 minDrama / War / Comedy1 2 September 2002 (Russia)

Country: Russia

Languages: Saami / Finnish/ Russian / German

“The movie alsoshows us howthe languagebarrier can alsolead to misunder-standings andtrouble, even atthe most basiclevel.

At the Cinema - Kukushka - The Cuckoo


in their own language throughout the film, so youget to hear a large amount of Russian, Finnish andSaami. What is interesting is how the charactersinteract with each other. They are able to get someof their ideas across with gestures and tones, buteven those are misunderstood quite often. The hu-mor of the film comes from seeing how completelythey misunderstand each other.

Right from the start of their discussions is theclassic question of names. Viekko tries to get Ivanto tell him his name, and instead, Ivan tells him“Poshol ty!” (Fuck off! ) . Viekko and Anni assumethat is his name, so call him “Psholty”. This nameI only understood after reading a little about themovie. The English subtitles I watched it in gavehis reply as “Get lost!”, so they called him “Ger-lost”.

Ivan refers to Viekko several times as a fascist,which is a word Viekko does understand, and triesmany times to make Ivan understand that he isdone fighting by using the names of authors andtheir works to convey the message. He tells Ivan“Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Ernest Hemingway, AFarewell to Arms!”, but Ivan just stares at himblankly.

Even while they are unable to understandeach other, they never stop trying, so we learnabout the characters through their needs to talk tosomeone. Both men work to help Anni, repayingher for her kindness; Ivan for her saving him andhealing him, Viekko for the tools with which he re-moved the shackles, and both for the food andshelter she gives them. Anni, however, wants alittle more than someone helping her collect fish orchop wood. She has been on her own for four

years and managed fine with those things. Shetakes Viekko to bed with her, which makes Ivanjealous and feeling alone.

One of the more notable confusions is overmushrooms. Ivan happily collects some mush-rooms, determined to make a nice stew of them.Anni sees this and tells him that eating the mush-rooms will make him sick and crazy. When shefinds Ivan is upset about her and Viekko havingsex, she thinks he is ill because of the mush-rooms, so tells him she will make an infusion toget rid of the mushrooms. She gives him the broth,which he eats happily, not understanding what itis. Turns out the infusion is intended to act as alaxative, and Ivan finds himself suddenly rushingfor the privacy of the bushes. He is furious atViekko and Anni, thinking they did this to humili-ate him.

Shortly after this, a plane flies low overhead,and the two men figure it must be low on fuel andabout to crash, so they run off to find the it. Theycome across the crashed plane with two deadRussian soldiers in it. The area is littered withsmall leaflets, written mostly in Finnish. Viekkoreads one and learns that Finland is pulling out ofthe war. He is overjoyed, since he can now travelhome without risk of being shot.

Meanwhile, Ivan finds a gun on one of thedead soldiers. He is angry that, as he believes, theGermans shot down a Russian plane, and ap-proaches Viekko with the gun hidden behind hisback. Viekko is excited and tries to explain to Ivanwhat it means by tossing away his rifle, but as hedoes so, Ivan thinks he is preparing to shoot him,so he shoots Viekko.

I am not going to give away the ending to themovie. You will have to watch it yourself to seewhat happens. You should watch it anyways justbecause of the many messages in it. It shows howthree people who can not understand each othercan still find a way to bond. The movie also showsus how the language barrier can also lead to mis-understandings and trouble, even at the most ba-sic level. But most of all, you should watch it justfor the beauty of the film. You will not be disap-pointed. PT

Samaba dancers dressedin colourful costumes,performing in the streetsat night during Carnivalin Rio de Janeiro.

Celebrations - Carnival


arnival is a celebration that is best known forits participants dancing in elaborate and re-vealing costumes. This festival is often wildly

extravagant and full of suggestive eroticism, takingplace in some kind of parade which is more like acircus and street party combined. These celebra-tions can last for days or even weeks, and are cel-ebrated differently all over the world. Given such adescription, it is odd to think that it is a traditionof the normally conservative Catholic religion.

HistoryCarnival probably originated as a pagan festival inancient Egypt. The Greeks and Romans may haveadopted it for themselves, in the forms of the Ro-man festivals Lupercalia and Saturnalia and theGreek festival of Dionysia. When the Romans ad-opted Christianity during the first millennium,they did not want to give up their pagan festival,so they looked for a a way to incorporate it intotheir new religion.

In the Catholic tradition, there is a period offorty days before Jesus’ death on Good Friday,called Lent. It begins on Ash Wednesday, whichusually occurs in February. During Lent, Catholicsare not supposed to eat meat as a reminder of Je-sus’ sacrifice. Since it is a period of sacrifice, itseemed a good idea to have a large celebration be-fore this reflective time, so a new tradition of eat-ing all the meat in the house as well as having awild costume festival right before the start of Lentwas begun. The name “Carnival” was given to thiscelebration from the Latin term “carne levare”which translates to “to remove meat”.

Over time, the festivals grew in size and pop-ularity, and the practice spread to Spain, France,and other Catholic countries of Europe. Whenthese Europeans invaded the Americas and estab-lished colonies, the tradition came with them.Brazil, which was once a Portuguese colony, is

famous for its Carnival. Now, Carnival celebrationsare found throughout the Caribbean in Barbados,Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica, Haiti, Cuba, St.Thomas and St. Marten. They can also be found inCentral and South America in Belize, Panama andBrazil. Even large cities in Canada and the UnitedStates where Caribbean people have settled enjoyCarnival. These cities include Brooklyn, Miami,Toronto and San Francisco.

BrazilPerhaps the best known Carnival celebration is theone that takes place in Brazil, where it is morecommonly called Carnaval. There, it is generally asix-day party of dancing and singing. Some placeshave official parades just for watching, whilesmaller ones are held for people to interact with.Each region has its own particular style and mayeven specialize in the dance and music they use.Carnival has become the most famous holiday inBrazil and during this time, almost the entirecountry shuts down to participate. The festivitiesoften continue all day and night and draw in mil-

CCeelleebbrraattiioonnss

Carnival

Painting of Carnival celebration in medieval times



lions of people, even hundreds ofthousands of tourists.

If Brazil is the best knowncountry for Carnival, then Rio deJaneiro is the best known cityfor the festival, where it is con-sidered to be the world’s biggestand best party. At the heart ofthe celebration are the sambaschools, with each of these so-cial clubs named after famousBrazilian samba dance style.Each one is based in a differentneighborhood of Rio de Janeiro,and there is a fierce rivalrybetween them. Throughout theentire year, members work tocreate the best costumes,themes, floats and dance per-formances. During Carnival,each school participates in aparade in the Sambadrome,which is a large building forholding thousands of spectators.There are several Sambadromesall over Brazil.

These parades date back tothe 1920s, with the festivitiesbecoming more grand each year.All of the dancers wear spectac-ular costumes of sequins andfeathers that manage to be botheye catching and revealing at thesame time. Millions of peoplealso party throughout the city,often dressing in their own exot-ic costumes and makeup.

Street CarnivalBands, called “Blo-cos de Rua”, havealso become a ma-jor part of Rio’sCarnival. There areover 400 of thesegroups, and theyare usually formedby groups of parti-ers, adopting theirown titles whichmay be puns oridentifiers of theirneighborhood. They may travelaround the city or remain intheir own block of the city theentire time. These bands oftencompose their own music as wellas perform classic and popularsongs.

While Rio had the most fam-ous of Carnival festivals, the cityof Recife in Pernambuco has thebiggest carnival parade in theworld, Galo da Madrugada,based upon the number of parti-cipants. The name means“dawn’s rooster” and it is onlyheld in the morning. The celeb-ration is guided by two mainmusical rhythms: the Frevo,which is influenced by Africandances and acrobatics, and isfast and electrifying, often in-volving the use of an open um-brella, and the Maracatu, whichactually embraces two styles,each being heavily influenced byAfrican beats and styles. Thegroups dance and play music to-gether, rather than competinglike Rio. Giant dancing dolls arealso a part of the parade.

ItalyIn Italy, the official Carnival dateis Shrove Tuesday, the day be-fore Ash Wednesday, but is cel-ebrated for two to three weeksbefore it. It is the biggest festivalin Italy, and is celebrated in allparts of the country. Besidesparades, there are numerousother kinds of entertainment,masquerade balls and parties.The Carnival of Venice, in partic-

ular, has been around since the12th century. It differs greatlyfrom the Brazilian dance con-tests, with masks being at theheart of it.

It is believed that the Carni-val of Venice was started whenthe “Repubblica della Serenis-sima”, Venice’s former name,defeated Ulrico, Patriarch ofAquileia, in 1162. To celebrate,the people began a tradition ofslaughtering twelve pigs and a

bull in the Piazza San Marco toremember the victory. This ex-panded over the decades andbecame an official festival duringthe Renaissance in the 14thcentury.

The first documented date ofusing masks as part of the cel-ebration is 1268. The reason foradopting masks is unsure, butone idea may have been to re-move all social division amongpeople. They may also have beenused as a way to protect thewearer’s identity when perform-ing decadent acts. There are anumber of distinctive maskstyles, normally made frompapier-mache and decoratedwith gems, fur and fabrics. Onthe last weekend of Carnival, acontest is held and a panel ofinternational costume and fash-

The festivities often con-tinue all day and nightand draw in millions ofpeople, even hundredsof thousands of tourists.

Parade with giant dolls in Pernambuco, Brazil

Samba dancer in costume in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil



ion designers vote for “LaMaschera più bella” (“The mostbeautiful mask”) .

FranceThere are two major Carnivals ofFrance, one in the city of Niceand the other in the capital cityof Paris. The Paris Carnivaldates back to the 16th centuryor earlier and traditionally oc-curs after the Feast of Fools. Atthe heart of it is the workingclass, with butchers, tradersand police among the multi-class participants. There are twomajor events of the modern Car-nival of Paris. The first is thewalk of masks in which a hugenumber of people disguise them-selves and meet at a specificplace and time for other to seetheir creativeness. The otherevents are the various proces-sions for different groups, withthe largest being the Promenade

du BoeufGras (“Procession ofthe Fat Ox”) .

The Carnival of Nice datesback to 1294, and is one of theworld’s major carnival events,along with the ones of Brazil andVenice. It began from pagan cel-ebrations and has grown to ahuge annual twelve day party.During this time, the city is filledwith parades of floats, streetevents and stalls selling food,gifts, lavender and brightlycolored fabrics.

This Carnival starts off witha huge parade containing abouttwenty floats that travel through

the streets. Eachyear, the theme ofthe parade changesand the floats aremade to match thetheme. Joining thefloats are aroundfifty giant puppets,grosses tetes (“bigheads”) , which aremade of paperglued together andpainted in flamboy-ant colors. These

giant heads often weigh over 2metric tons and are 8 to 12metres high. “King Carnival” isone of these giant creations andleads the parade.

Another major part of theCarnival of Nice is the Bataille

de Fleurs (“Battle of Flowers”) .This originally started back in1856 to entertain the touriststhat had begun to visit the southof France. During this, a paradeof floats covered in flowerstravels the streets, with peopleon them and walking along sidethem tossing out various kindsof flowers to the crowds. The“battle” aspect comes from theonlookers competing to get theflowers, often being men tryingto get the best flowers to presentto their lovers. Around 100,000fresh-cut flowers are used, with

about 80% of them producedlocally. The parade ends at PlaceMassena, where King Carnival isburnt on the last night. This isfollowed by a huge fireworksdisplay over the Baie des Anges(“Bay of Angels”) .

United States & MardiGrasCarnival is also celebrated indifferent places in the UnitedStates, but there it is oftencalled Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras isFrench for “Fat Tuesday”, whichrefers to the tradition of eatingricher, fatty foods. Mardi Grasrefers particularly to the lastday, but over time it has grownto be the name for the entirefestival. It came to the states aspart of the French Catholic tra-dition when France set upcolonies in the south during the17th century.

There are Mardi Gras fest-ivals all over the United States inmany states, including Califor-nia, Alabama, Florida, Michigan,Mississippi, Missouri, Ok-lahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas,Wisconsin and Louisiana. Ofthese, the festival of Louisiana’scapital, New Orleans, is thelargest and best known. There,the celebrations last about twoweeks, with a major parade oc-

People dressed in full costume with masks in Venice

The King and Queen of carnival of Nice, France at Masséna place



Coming in May: Malayo-Polynesian Special Issue!

• Examine the undeciphered the Rongorongo

• Meet the German linguist and anthropologist Otto Dempwolff

• Hear about endangered languages of Rapa Nui, Chamorro & Rotuman

• Learn about major Malay authors

curring on most days. Some ofthese days have several largeparades. The largest and mostelaborate of these parades takeplace in the final days of theFestival, along with manyevents, both large and small, oc-curring throughout New Or-leans.

The parades are organizedby Carnival krewes. Krewe floatriders toss items, known collect-ively as throws, to the crowds.Throws are normally strings ofcolourful beds, wooden coins,and small toys. In order to getattention and get more throws,people often expose certain bodyparts. This activity, known asflashing, is discouraged by thepolice, and doing so can get aperson arrested or ticketed.

More Bizarre?Carnival is celebrated in someform in over 50 countries. Theseinclude most of the Europeancountries, Cape Verde Islandsand Seychelles in Africa, Indone-sia, India, Israel and Japan in

Asia, and most ofthe countries ofNorth and SouthAmerica. It wouldbe impossible toexamine even afraction of them inthe space of thisarticle. Most ofthese involve peopledressing up andparticipating invarious paradesand processions.There are a fewmore bizarre versions of the cel-ebration that are not as wellknown.

The Carnival of Oruro,Bolivia, is over 2000 year oldand mixes native rituals with theCatholic event. Oruro was once amajor mining town, so part ofthe celebration is a religious ce-remony in honor of the Virgin of

the Mineshaft. Another part isthe Diablada, or “dance of thedevils”, in which people dress upas demons and dance in thestreets along with some dressed

as angels, repres-enting good con-quering evil and theseven deadly sins.

In Binche, Bel-gium, they haveone of the oldeststreet carnivals inEurope. The mainfigures in this Car-nival are calledGilles. Hundreds ofmen wear costumeswith the colors ofthe Belgium flagand are covered instrange crests, tas-

sels and bells. The Gilles wearwooden clogs on their feet andstrange masks on their faceswhich have curled moustachesand large green glasses. Thecostumes are also stuffed withstraw to give the men a muchbulkier look. The Gilles dancedown the streets with basketsfull of blood oranges, which theyhurl at onlookers. No one is ex-actly sure of the meaning of theGilles. The shoes might be usedto stomp away the winter andthe masks to represent equalityamong everyone, similar to themasks of Venice. The orangesare considered to be a gift fromthe Gilles, but sometimes theyhave caused property damage.

Learn MoreYou probably have some kind ofCarnival festivals in your coun-try, even if you don’t know aboutthem already. Since we can’t ex-plore all the various forms ofthis celebration, try to learnabout them and compare themto what you have read here, orresearch other versions in differ-ent countries. Have fun! PTAt one of the parades, New Orleans Mardi Gras

Gilles wearing their masks in Binche, Belgium

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Languages in Peril - The Salish Tragedy


Many native people around theworld find themselves either leftin almost total isolation or sup-pressed, with their younger gen-erations joining a larger, modernworld. When this happens, thelanguage and culture of theirpeople suffer and all too oftenbecome extinct. This is the situ-ation with most Native AmericanIndian tribes.

he various native peoplesin Canada who are neitherInuit nor Métis are called

“The First Nations”, and thereare currently over 630 recog-nized First Nations governmentsor bands throughout Canada.History has not been kind tothese First Nations, which flour-ished until the 1700s. It wasthen that Europeans started ex-ploring the new world and estab-

lishing claims. They broughtdiseases, mainly smallpox,which the native peoples had noimmunities to. Those that wer-en’t wiped out were often movedonto “reservations”, land putaside for them to live on, so thatthe Europeans could take overthe rest of the territory. Christi-an missionaries came to convertthe natives and set up schools to“educate” them. In 1867, the “In-dian Act” was created, whichwas a policy that focused on as-similating the natives into “civil-ized society”, and this was madelaw with the EnfranchisementAct later that same year. Soon,aboriginal children were forcedinto the schools and made togive up their language, cultureand beliefs. It wasn’t until laterin the 20th century that somerights were re-established for the

native people. But by then, thedamage was done, and manypeople and languages had beencompletely wiped out, whilethose that remained were on thepoint of extinction. Of over 300original native languages inNorth America, over half are nowextinct, with over fifty of thosevanishing in just the past 15years.

A group of these languagesis the Salishan, or Salish.“Salish” is the name a particulartribe gave itself, but now refersto the larger group of what issometimes called “Flathead Indi-ans”. The Salishan people livemainly in northwest NorthAmerica, on the Pacific coast,spanning the two countries ofthe United States and Canada.In the US, they are found in thestates of Washington, Oregon,Idaho and Montana, while inCanada, they are in the provinceof British Columbia.

The Salishan language fam-ily has twenty-three languages,with all of them being either ex-tinct or endangered. Most haveunder one thousand speakers,and most of those are over theage of sixty. We are going to lookat three of these: Halkomelem,Nuxálk and Squamish.

HalkomelemHalkomelem is the name of aCoast Salish language found in

LLaanngguuaaggeess iinn PPeerriill

TThhee SSaalliisshh TTrraaggeeddyy

Salish men standing by tepees near St. Ignatius Mission, Flathead Reservation, Montana, 1903



British Columbia and Washing-ton state. It covers three dialectsof the region. The name“Halkomelem” comes from acombination of the three namesof the dialects, which was thenanglicized.

The first is the Upriver dia-lect, called Halq’eméylem, which

is spoken in the Fraser Valley ofBritish Columbia. The peoplewho speak this are called Stó: lō,with “Stó: lō” being theHalq’eméylem word for theFraser River. The first evidenceof the Stó: lō living in the FraserValley goes back over 8,000years ago. The Stó: lō name forthe area was S’ólh Téméxw. Thepeople were hunter-gatherersand traveled between the lowerFraser Canyon and the mouth ofthe Fraser River seasonally,moving to take advantage of thehunting and fishing of the re-gion. Today, the Stó: lō Nationencompasses other other bands

as well, like theMatsqui. Thename “Matsqui” isHalkomelem,meaning a“stretch of higherground” and is thename of the dis-trict.

Next is theDownriver dialect,Hun’qumi’num’,which is spokenby the people wholive downriverfrom Matsqui.This includes theMusqueam andTsawwassenbands. TheMusqueam areperhaps the old-est-known resid-ents of Vancouver.They have lived inthe Fraser Riverestuary for over 9,000 years,with their traditional territoryencompassing the lands, lakesand streams from modern HoweSound to English Bay to HarveyCreek. Today, it is the only Indi-an band whose reservation lieswithin the boundaries of the Cityof Vancouver.

Lastly, the Is-land dialect,Hul’q’umín’um’, isspoken on Van-couver Island. Theisland has beenthe homeland tomany indigenouspeoples for thou-sands of years,grouped into threelanguagebranches withCoast Salish be-ing the largest.TheHul’q’umín’um’speaking nationswithin the CoastSalish peoples in-clude the Che-mainus, the

Cowichan of the Cowichan Val-ley, the Nanoose, the Nanaimoand the Malahat.

The Spanish began to ex-plore the island in 1774, but in1790, there was a disputebetween Spain and Britain forthe territory. In 1792, CaptainGeorge Vancouver was sentthere by the British to establishan agreement, while the Spanishsent Juan Francisco de la Bo-dega y Quadra. Although theirmeeting ended in deadlock, withneither side wishing to give itup, Quadra did propose the is-land be named “Quadra andVancouver Island”. Eventually,during the 19th century, theSpanish left the area and thename was shortened to “Van-couver”. The European struggleover the island was a disaster forthe natives, as diseases likesmallpox devastated tribes whilethe European culture also com-peted with their own.

Halkomelem has onlyaround one hundred speakersremaining, with most of thosebeing elderly. Of those, it is es-Map showing Salish language region in North America

Stó:lō woman with a cedar basket

The Salishan languagefamily has twenty-threelanguages, with all ofthem being either extinctor endangered.



timated that the number offluent speakers was less thanone dozen in 2000. The differ-ences in dialects are mainlybetween the Upriver and Islandones, but each dialect has itsown distinct orthography, mak-ing recording these languagesfor preservation even more com-plex. In order to help saveHalkomelem, language programsat the Stó: lō Nation, Seabird Is-land First Nation (the Stó: lōpeople living on Seabird Island),and Cowichan First Nation havebeen developed. Many youngpeople from the Halkomelem-speaking tribes are also workingto keep their language alive.

SquamishSquamish is another language ofthe Coast Salish branch, spokenby the Squamish people who livemainly on reservations inSquamish, North Vancouver,and West Vancouver. Thesepeople call themselves

, with the symbol 7used to represent a glottal stop.It is greatly in danger of extinc-tion, but it still used in ceremon-ies, events and basicconversations. All the speakersof it are elderly, and as of 2010,there were only 10 fluent speak-ers left.

Little is really known aboutthe language before the 1800s.Before Europeans made contact

with them, the Squamish peoplespoke Squamish and theChinook Jargon in all their vil-lages. After contact, spread ofdisease wiped out much of thepopulation and colonization bythe Europeans forced the lan-guage to become a minority inits own region. This worsenedeven further when the Canadiangovernment enforced assimila-tion and a school was set up inthe village of Eslha7an in whichthe children were forbidden tospeak Squamish. If a child brokethat ban, he was punished and

beaten. As a res-ult, the next gener-ation lost theknowledge of theirnative tongue andEnglish becamethe dominant lan-guage.

Many anthro-pologists and lin-guists havestudied Squamish,including FrankBoas, Charles Hill-Tout, and HomerBarnett. Dutch lin-guist Aert J.

Kuipers worked on the firstcomprehensive grammar of theSquamish language in the1950’s. The British ColumbiaIndian Language Project workedto further document the Squam-ish language and culture, andfrom this, a writing system wasdevised. Some schools startedoffering languages classes withmore than the usual Frenchlanguage option, and a chil-dren’s school, Xwemelch’stn Es-timxwataxw School (“CapilanoLittle Ones School”) , with gradeskindergarten to third, was builtto assist in language immersion.Finally, to ensure funding for thelanguage and its revitalization,Squamish was declared the offi-cial language of the Squamishpeople by its Chief and Councilin 1990.

NuxálkNuxálk is a Salish language be-longing to its own branch. It waspreviously called Bella Coola,which is the name of the area itis spoken in British Columbia,but the natives refer to them-selves as Nuxálk, which mightbe derived from what the coastallonghouses once located in 1886 at Coal Harbour

Stó:lō people fishing with traditional dipnets on the Fraser River



Heiltsuk people called them,(“plxwlaq’s” in Nuxálk or-

thography), meaning “stranger”.While it forms its own sub-

group, Nuxálk shares phonolo-gical and morphological featureswith Coast Salish languages. Italso borrows many words fromsome North Wakashan lan-guages, especially Heiltsuk, aswell as from nearby Athabascanlanguages and Tsimshian. It wasonce spoken in over one hun-dred settlements. Prior to con-tact with Europeans, the Nuxálkpopulation was approximately

35,000. They were a fishing,hunting and gathering people,fishing for salmon and eulachonin the Bella Coola River. The firstrecorded encounter they hadwith Europeans was in the sum-mer of 1793, when CaptainGeorge Vancouver brieflyentered their waters. A fewweeks later, an explorationteam, led by Alexander Macken-zie, arrived. The Nuxálk peoplegave Mackenzie a huge welcome,which is still a source of pride intheir stories today. It didn’t turnout to be such a joyous occasion

for the band, however.After contact, with the

spread of smallpox, the Nuxálkvillages were almost completelywiped out, with just 300 surviv-ing. The Nuxálk becamescattered throughout the region,either moving on their own tosurvive or being forcibly removedby the Department of Indian Af-fairs. Those that were removedwere placed on a settlement inwhat is now known as BellaCoola.

While the the language istaught in both the elementaryschool system and the NuxálkNation’s own school, Acwsalcta(“a place of learning”) , there hasnot been an increase in thenumber of truly fluent speakers.In 1996, the registered popula-tion was 1185, with 706 peopleliving on the reservation. It isnow spoken fluently by underthirty elderly natives.

With their economic situ-ation worsening as employmentopportunities disappear withinthe fishing and forestry industry,many of the people have had toexpand their education and lookfor jobs outside of the com-munity. If these things don’tchange soon, Nuxálk is likely tobecome extinct within this dec-ade. PT

Nuxálk People gathered around an eulachan stink box, which is located near the Bella CoolaRiver. A stink box is a large box in which eulachon are placed to ripen after being caught.

British Columbia Indian Language Project

“The British Columbia Indian Language Project wasundertaken from 1973 to 1976 in Victoria. Project or-ganizers included Randy Bouchard, and those involvedin the various studies included Nancy J. Turner,Randy Bouchard, and Dorothy I.D. Kennedy. Manylinguistic and ethnographic works were produced un-der the Project’s auspices, including word lists, studiesof dialects, and studies of Indian people’s uses of wild-life. The Project’s scope was later expanded to thestudy of Indians in the Pacific Northwest.”

- The British Columbia Archival Information Network

TThhee ssttrreeeettss ooff PPaarrlleerreemmoo aarree

nnaammeedd aafftteerr ffaammoouuss wwrriitteerrss

ffoorr tthhee llaanngguuaaggee ooff

eeaacchh qquuaarrtteerr..TThhiiss

iiss wwhheerree wwee ttaakkee

aa qquuiicckk llooookk aatt

wwhhyy tthheeyy aarree

ffaammoouuss..

WWoorrdd oonn tthhee SSttrreeeettss

KKaannnnaaddaa WWrriitteerrss

Word on the Streets - Kannada Writers


B.M.Srikantaiah was an author and translator ofKannada literature and foremost among scholarsin the study of the Kannada language. Consideredthe “Father of modern Kannada literature”, heworked toward a new era of writing original worksin modern Kannada and moving away from out-dated Kannada forms. He made significant contri-butions with his personal writings as well as thedirection he provided to a generation of scholars.

Srikantaiah was born in Bellur, a village in theMandya district of Karnataka, India. He studied atCentral College in Bangalore, where he earned hisBachelor of Arts degree, then later earned a Masterof Arts degree from the University of Madras. Fromthere, he started lecturing in English at the Maha-raja College, Mysore, in 1909, where he eventuallybecame the head of the department.

The University of Mysore appointed him the firstProfessor of Kannada, and he served as as the Re-gistrar there from 1926 to1930. He was respons-ible for the sanctioning of money to publish of aseries of Kannada books, of which he was the edit-or. This led to a number of valuable works, edi-tions of old Kannada literary works, referencebooks, and translations from western literaturebeing published.

After that, he was transferred to the Central Col-lege in Bangalore where he was appointed as Seni-or Professor. While there, he became Vice-President of the Kannada Sahitya Parishat, an In-dian non-profit organisation that promotes theKannada language, from 1938 and 1942. He re-tired in 1942 and died in 1946.

Srikantaiah was a great promoter of the Kannadalanguage, encouraging authors to use it for theirwritings. This was important at the time becausethere was so much interest in the literary tradi-tions of English and Sanskrit. English was becom-ing the common language for literature, andSrikantaiah wanted Kannada to have its placethere as well. He also faced the British influenceon their literature, and wanted to create a new,modern literature for Kannada. Part of this hehoped to achieve by severing the ties that Kannadaliterature had with religious dogmatism.

In his push to revitalize the Kannada language,Srikantaiah gave many suggestions to writers. Forexample, they should expand the vocabulary ofKannada by adopting loan words from other lan-guages as well as composing new words to identifynew objects and ideas, while rejecting words bor-rowed from Sanskrit, which he said the averageman cannot comprehend. He wanted to makelearning Kannada compulsory for students up to acertain level so as to provide a readership base forKannada writers, and said that authors shouldavoid using high-sounding words, instead usingfree and natural modern Kannada.

Another way was through translation. In 1921 , hepublished a volume of English poems he hadtranslated into Kannada, called English Geetegalu.He hoped to help authors assimilate western in-fluences, which he believed was the only way toregenerate the Kannada language and literature.This goes against a common idea of protecting alanguage by making it “pure”, for he wanted Kan-nada to be expanded, not isolated.

Srikantaiah had a great interest in the Dravidianculture and its impact on Kannada. He was one ofthe few scholars who began a comparative study ofDravidian languages in prosody and grammar. Healso had great knowledge of English, was well ac-quainted with Tamil and Telugu, and could readGreek plays in their original forms.

Srikantaiah was greatly influenced by Greek tragicdramas and regretted how absent tragedy was inthe Indian literary tradition. His first play, Gaday-uddha Natakam, was published in 1926. He alsowrote Ashwatthaman, a play modeled after theGreek play Ajax by Sophocles and Parasikaru,which was a translation of Persae by Aeschylus.Other works included a collection of his poems,Honganasugalu, published in 1943, and Kannad-

igarige Olleya Sahitya, which was a collection ofhis speeches, reviews and forewords, published in1948.

Srikantaiah, through his teachings and lifetimework as well as his own writing, was one of ahandful of people who was responsible for a cul-tural renaissance, ushering in an era of modern-ism in Kannada literature.

B. M. Srikantaiah3 January 1 884 - 5 January 1 946



Mogeri Gopalakrishna Adiga was one of the fam-ous poets and scholars of Karnataka and knownas the “pioneer of New style” poetry. Through hisessays, translations and poems, he influencedmodern Indian literature for over five decades. Hiscontributions to Kannada literature is vast, and hehas been called the “Doyen (dean) of the NaveenaSaahitya Chaluvali (the modernist literary move-

ment) ”.

Born into an orthodox Brahmin family in thecoastal village of Mogeri, Udupi district,Karnataka, Adiga had his primary education inMogeri and Baindur. He then earned his Bachelorsof Art degree in English from Maharaja College,University of Mysore. After working at several jobsin Karnataka, he started working at Sarada VilasCollege as a lecturer in English in 1948. Whilthere, he completed his Master of Arts degree fromNagpur University. In 1952, he started working inSt. Philomena College in Mysore, where he re-mained for ten years. In 1964, Adiga became theprincipal at the newly created Lal Bahadur

Shashtri College in Sagara, then from 1968-1971 ,he was the principal of Poorna College in Udupi.Later, he worked as the Deputy Director for theNational Book Trust of India. He was also an edit-or of Saakshi, a literary magazine. Adiga was mar-ried to Lalitha, and they had five children and ninegrandchildren. He died in 1992.

Adiga wrote poetry, but he also translated otherworks into Kannada, including those of Ibsen andWhitman. While Adiga taught English literature,he wrote mainly in Kannada, except for his singlepoem, Rabindranath Tagore, written in Englishand published in 1961 . This was written on re-quest for The Radical Humanist magazine. Hisstyle of writing was called Navya, referring to thenew times inspired by the independence of Indiafrom British rule in 1947. Through his poetry, heset out to portray the feelings of the country dur-ing that time.

Gopalakrishna Adiga1 8 February 1 91 8 - 1 4 November 1 992

Bibliography• 1946 Bhavataranga• 1954 Ananthe (novel)• 1959 Bhoomi Geetha• 1962 Saakshi (Magazine)

• 1966 Mannina Vasane (book of essays)• 1972 Vardhamana• 1975 Idanna Bayasiralilla (poems)• 1976 Samagra Kavya (collection of poems)

BibliographyWorks• 1926 Gadayuddha Natakam (play)• 1929 Aswatthaaman (Play)• 1935 Parasikaru (play)• 1943 Honganasugalu (poetry)

Translations• 1921 English Geetagalu (English Songs)

Literary Criticism• 1947 Kannada Sahitya Charitre (study of ancientKannada poetry)• 1948 Kannadigarige olleya saahitya (Good literaturefor Kannada People)• 1967 Kannada Kaipidi (History of KannadaLiterature)

Works by B. M. Srikantaiah



Ambale Ramakrishna Krishnashastry was a prom-inent writer, researcher and translator who en-riched Kannada language and literature throughhis teachings, writings, and other works. He wasloved and respected by his students because of theaffection and concern he had toward them, andwas also respected and honored by his literarycontemporaries. Even four decades after his death,he is still very popular.

Krishnashastry’s father, Ramakrishna Sastry, wasa distinguished grammarian and principal ofSanskrit Pathashala of Mysore. His mother died ofplague when he was only ten and his father raisedhim and his siblings alone. Krishnashastry wantedto become a scientist, but because the family waspoor and could not afford to send him to the Cent-ral College of Bangalore for that, he accompaniedhis father to the school and studied Kannada andSanskrit. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in1914 then started workings as a clerk in AtharaKacheri, Mysore. He later became a tutor and re-searcher at Oriental Library and earned his Masterof Arts degree at Madras University. In 1918,Krishnashastry started Prabuddha Karnataka, thefirst Kannada newspaper, and worked as its edit-or. Finally he became Professor of Kannada atMysore University, where he remained until his re-tirement in 1946. He married Venkatalakshammawhen he was sixteen and they had two daughters.

Krishnashastry was master of many languagesbeyond his native Kannada, including English,

German, Sanskrit, Hindi, Pali, and Bengali. Thisenabled him to translate some of the great worksfrom these languages to Kannada. He also workedas a biographer, and it was his work about theBengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee thatearned him a Sahitya Academy Award. He alsowrote biographies of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa,a famous mystic of 19th-century India, and ofNaga Mahashaya, a sainted disciple of the teach-ings of Ramakrishna.

Krishnashastry wrote many short stories and nov-els, with his best known being Vachanabharata,Nirmalabharati and Kathamrita. The first two are acondensed translation of the Mahabharata, a ma-jor Sanskrit epic of ancient India. The last is a col-lection of stories translated from Kathasaritsagara,a famous Sanskrit 11 th-century collection of Indi-an legends, fairy tales and folk tales. His Shreep-

atiya Kathegalu is a collection of short stories,known for its deep insight into human nature andblending of personal experiences with philosophic-al ideas.

Many of these works were written after his retire-ment. Despite failing health, Krishnashastry wrotefor four to six hours daily. He led a hermit like life-style, and died at the age of seventy-eight in 1968,but he left behind a solid body of work which setthe trend for many future writers.

A.R. Krishnasastry1 2 February 1 890 - 1 February 1 968

BibliographyNovels• 1950 Vachana Bharata• 1952 Kathamritha• 1960 Nirmala Bharathi

Biographies• 1917 Ramakrishna Paramahamsa• 1939 Naga Mahashaya• 1961 Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Short story collections• 1948 Sripathiya Kathegalu (Short Stories)

Other Works• 1927 Kannada Kaipidi, Part 1, Kavya Lakshana• 1937 Samskrita Nataka• 1948 Sarvajna• 1948 Bhashanagalu mattu Lekhanagalu• 1960 Bankimachandra

Where Are You?


This month’s city dates itsfoundation back to around700 BC, when a settlementwas formed on a table ofland above a harbor. It wasunder Persian rule for 400years, until a “great” lead-er invaded and brought itinto his immense empire.Almost fifty-five yearslater, an independent statewas established in the re-gion, and this city servedas its harbor port, supply-ing it with timber andproducts of its mines andshipyards.

When the Roman Empirewas split into two parts,this city fell under the do-main of Rome with theEastern Black Sea region.By the second half of thefirst century, it had gainedimportance and started developing quickly. Commercial opportunities were created, and roads connect-ing Persia to upper Mesopotamia were built. Then it became a Roman state under a new ruler, and later,a new harbor was built, along with a theater, hippodrome, inner fortress, and aqueducts.

All of this lasted only until Goths invaded and looted the city in the middle of the third century. The citywas reconstructed, but failed to regain its old beauty. However, it did become a major religious centerduring the expansion of Christianity (seems like all cities did). Many churches and monasteries werebuilt here, but Muslem Arab armies started attacking the region at the start of the eighth century, and theeffects were extensive. The Christian governors of the city tried to protect their independence, but werenot successful. When a new fortress was built at the end of the eleventh century, the city was transformedinto an important military base. It was fought over constantly from that point on, and changed emperormany times.

By the second half of the thirteenth century, the city was a vital harbor on the trading routes, even as itcontinued to swap conquerors. In the middle of the fifteenth century, it became an important center onthe Black Sea coastal strip, and a soon-to-be sultan became its governor. During World War I, the city wasinvaded by the Russians, but was returned to its country under an agreement at the end of the war.

Today, the city remains a fantastic historical site. It has a thirteenth century church, which has been re-stored as a museum. To the east is a fascinating nineteenth century mansion, and to the south are severalexcellent hiking and picnicking areas. It contains the largest tunnel of its country, and a fantastic nationalpark that contains a fourteenth century monastery, which attracts thousands of foreign visitors everyyear.

Can you name this city and country?

Where Are You?

Last month's answer: Lisbon, Portugal

Revisted - Stories In The Names Of Places


[Editor’s note: This article is areprint from “Stories ThatWords Tell Us” By ElizabethO’Neil l . I t was published in1 91 8, but sti l l gives a goodlook at where many placenames come from.]

he stories which thenames of places can tellus are many more innumber, and even more

wonderful, than the stories inthe names of people. Someplaces have very old names, andothers have quite new ones, andthe names have been given forall sorts of different reasons. Ifwe take the names of thecontinents, we find that some ofthem come from far-off times,and were given by men whoknew very little of what theworld was like. The namesEurope and Asia were given longago by sailors belonging to theSemitic race (the race to whichthe Jews belong), who sailed upand down the Ægean Sea, anddid not venture to leave itswaters. All the land which lay tothe west they called Ereb, whichwas their word for “sunset,” or“west,” and the land to the eastthey called Acu, which meant“sunrise,” or “east;” and later,when men knew more aboutthese lands, these names,changed a little, remained as thenames of the great continents,

Europe and Asia.Africa, too, is an old name,

though not so old as these. Wethink of Africa now as a “darkcontinent,” the greater part ofwhich has only lately becomeknown to white men, and with anative population of negroes.But for hundreds of years thenorth of Africa was one of themost civilized parts of theRoman Empire. Before that timepart of it had belonged to theCarthaginians, whom theRomans conquered. Africa was aCarthaginian name, and wasfirst used by the Romans as thename of the district roundCarthage, and in time it came tobe the name of the wholecontinent.

America got its name inquite a different way. It was notuntil the fifteenth century thatthis great continent wasdiscovered, and then it took itsname, not from the braveSpaniard, ChristopherColumbus, who first sailedacross the “Sea of Darkness” tofind it, but from AmerigoVespucci, the man who firstlanded on the mainland.

Australia got its name,which means “land of thesouth,” from Portuguese andSpanish sailors, who reached itswestern coasts early in thesixteenth century. They neverwent inland, or made anysettlements, but in the queer,

inaccurate maps which earlygeographers made, they putdown a Terra Australis, or“southern land,” and later, whenEnglishmen did at last exploreand colonize the continent, theykept this name Australia. ThisLatin name reminds us of thefact that Latin was in the MiddleAges the language used by allscholars in their writings, andnames on maps were written inLatin too, and so a great moderncontinent like Australia came tohave an old Latin name.

There is a great deal ofhistory in the names ofcountries. Take the names of thecountries of Europe. England isthe land of the Angles, and fromthis we learn that the Angleswere the chief people of all thetribes who came over and settledin Britain after the Romans leftit. They spread farthest over theland, and gave their name to it;just as the Franks, another ofthese Northern peoples, gavetheir name to France, and theBelgæ gave theirs to Belgium.The older name of Britain did notdie out, but it was seldom used.It has really been used muchmore in modern times than itever was in the Middle Ages. It isused especially in poetry or infine writing, just as Briton isinstead of Englishman, as in theline--

“Britons never, never, nevershall be slaves.”

RReevviissiitteedd

SSttoorriieess IInn TThhee NNaammeessOOff PPllaacceess

Revisited - Stories In The Names Of Places


The name Briton is now usedalso to mean Irish, Scotch, andWelsh men--in fact, any Britishsubject. We also speak of GreatBritain, which means Englandand Scotland. When the ScottishParliament was joined to theEnglish in 1702 some name hadto be found to describe the new“nation,” and this was how thename Great Britain came intouse, just as the United Kingdom

was the name invented todescribe Great Britain andIreland together when the IrishParliament too was joined to theEnglish in 1804.

We see how Gaul andBritain, as France and Englandwere called in Roman times, hadtheir names changed after thefall of the Roman Empire; butmost of the countries round theMediterranean Sea kept their oldnames, just as they kept for themost part their old languages.Italy, Greece, and Spain all kepttheir old names, although newpeoples flocked down into theselands too. But though newpeoples came, in all these landsthey learned the ways andlanguages of the olderinhabitants, instead of changingeverything, as the English did inBritain. And so it was quitenatural that they should keeptheir own names too.

Most of the other countriesin Europe took their names fromthe people who settled there.Germany (the Roman Germania)

was the part of Europe wheremost of the tribes of the Germanrace settled down. The divisionsof Germany, like Saxony,Bavaria, Frisia, were the parts ofGermany where the Germantribes known as Saxons,Bavarians, and Frisians settled.The name Austria comes fromOsterreich, the German for“eastern kingdom.” Holland, onthe other hand, takes its namefrom the character of the land. Itcomes from holt, meaning“wood,” and lant, meaning“land.” The little country ofAlbania is so called from Alba, or“white,” because of its snowymountains.

But perhaps the names ofthe old towns of the old worldtell us the best stories of all. Thegreatest city the world has everseen was Rome, and manyscholars have quarrelled aboutthe meaning of that great name.It seems most likely that it came

from an old wordmeaning “river.” Itwould be quitenatural for thepeople of earlyRome to give sucha name to theircity, for it was amost importantfact to them thatthey had builttheir city justwhere it was onthe river Tiber.

One of the

best places on which a towncould be built, especially in earlydays, was the banks of a river,from which the people could getwater, and by which the refuseand rubbish of the town couldbe carried away. Then, again,one of the chief things whichhelped Rome to greatness washer position on the river Tiber,far enough from the sea to besafe from the enemy raiders whoinfested the seas in those earlydays, and yet near enough tosend her ships out to trade withother lands. Thus it was,probably, that a simple wordmeaning “river” came to be usedas the name of the world’sgreatest city.

Others among the greatcities of the ancient world werefounded in a quite different way.The great conqueror, Alexanderthe Great, founded cities inevery land he conquered, andtheir names remain even now tokeep his memory alive. The cityof Alexandria, on the north coastof Africa, was, of course, calledafter Alexander himself, andbecame after his death morecivilized and important than anyof the Greek cities whichAlexander admired so much,and which he tried to imitateeverywhere. Now Alexandria isno longer a centre of learning,but a fairly busy port. Only itsname recalls the time when ithelped in the great work forwhich Alexander built it--to

The Tiber river in Rome, near the Porto di Ripa Grande

White covered mountains of Albania



spread Greek learning andGreek civilization over Europeand Asia.

Another city whichAlexander founded, but whichafterwards fell into decay, wasBucephalia, which the greatconqueror set up in the north ofIndia when he made hiswonderful march across themountains into that continent. Itwas called after “Bucephalus,”the favourite horse of Alexander,which had been wounded, anddied after the battle. The townwas built over the place wherethe horse was buried, andthough its story is not sointeresting as that of Alexandria,as the town so soon fell intodecay, still it is worthremembering.

Another of the world’sancient and greatest cities,Constantinople, also took itsname from a great ruler. In thedays when the Roman Empirewas beginning to decay, and newnations from the north began topour into her lands, theemperor, Constantine the Great,the ruler who made Christianitythe religion of the empire, chosea new capital instead of Rome.He loved Eastern magnificenceand Eastern ways, and he chosefor his new capital the old Greekcolony of Byzantium, thebeautiful city on the GoldenHorn, which Constantine soonmade into a new Rome, withchurches and theatres andbaths, like the old Rome. Thenew Rome was given a newname. Constantine had turnedByzantium into a new city, andit has ever since been known asConstantinople, or the “city ofConstantine.”

We can nearly always tellfrom the names of placessomething of their history. If wethink of the names of some ofour English towns, we noticethat many of them end in thesame way. There are severalwhose names begin or end in

don, like London

itself. Many othersend in caster orchester, ham, by,borough or burgh.

We may besure that most ofthe places whosenames begin or endin don were alreadyimportant places inthe time before theBritons wereconquered by theRomans. TheBritons were divided into tribes,and lived in villages scatteredover the land; but each tribe hadits little fortress or stronghold,the “dun,” as it was called, withwalls and ditches round it, inwhich all the people of the tribecould take shelter if attacked bya strong enemy. And so thename of London takes us backto the time when this greatestcity of the modern world,spreading into four counties,and as big as a county itself,with its marvellous buildings,old and new, and its immense

traffic, was but a British fort intowhich scantily-clothed peoplefled from their huts at theapproach of an enemy.

But the British showedthemselves wise enough in theirchoice of places to build theirduns, which, as in the case ofLondon, often became centres ofnew towns, which grew largerand larger through Romantimes, and on into the MiddleAges and modern times.

The great French fortresstown of Verdun, whicheverybody has heard of because

of its wonderful resistance to theGerman attacks in 1916, is alsoan old Celtic town with thisCeltic ending to its name. It wasalready an important town whenthe Romans conquered Gaul,and it has played a notable partin history ever since. Its fullname means “the fort on thewater,” just as Dundee (fromDun-tatha) probably meant “thefort on the Tay.”

By merely looking at a mapof England, any one who knowsanything of the Latin languagecan pick out many names whichcome from that language, andwhich must have been given inthe days when the Romans hadconquered Britain. The endingcaster of so many names in thenorth of England, and chester inthe Midlands, xeter in the westof England, and caer in Wales,all come from the same Latinword, castrum, which means amilitary camp or fortified place.So that we might guess, if we didnot know, that at Lancaster,Doncaster, Manchester,Winchester, Exeter, and at theold capital of the famous KingArthur, Caerleon, there weresome of those Roman campswhich were dotted over Englandin the days when the Romansruled the land.

Here the Roman officerslived with their wives andfamilies, and the Roman soldierstoo, and here they builtchurches and theatres and

The greatest city theworld has ever seen wasRome, and many schol-ars have quarrelledabout the meaning ofthat great name.

View of Pompey's Pillar with Alexandria in the background inc.1850

Revisited - Stories In The Names Of Places


baths, such as they were used toin their cities at home in Italy.Here, too, it was that many ofthe British nobles learnedRoman ways of living andthinking; and from here theRoman priests and monks wentout to teach the Britons that thereligion of the Druids was false,and instruct them in theChristian religion.

Another common Latinending or beginning to thenames of places was strat, stret,or street, and wherever we findthis we may know that throughthese places ran some of the viæstratæ, or great Roman roadswhich the Romans built in allthe provinces of their great

empire. There are many remainsof these Roman roads still to beseen up and down England; buteven where no trace remains,the direction of some, at least, ofthe great roads could be foundfrom the names of the townswhich were dotted along them.Among these towns are Stratford

in Warwickshire, Chester-le-Street in Durham, Streatham,etc.

Then, again, some of thetowns with port and lynne aspart of their names show uswhere the Romans had theirports and trading towns.

It is interesting to see thedifferent names which theEnglish gave to the villages in

which they dwelt when theRomans had left Britain, andthese new tribes had won it forthemselves. Nearly all townsending in ham and ford, andburgh or borough, date from thefirst few hundred years after theEnglish won Britain. Ham andford merely meant “home,” or“village.” Thus Buckingham wasthe home of the Bockings, avillage in which several familiesall related to each other, andbearing this name, lived. Ofcourse the name did not changewhen later the village grew into atown. Buckingham is a verydifferent place now from thelittle village in which theBockings settled, eachhousehold having its house andyard, but dividing the commonmeadow and pasture land outbetween them each year.

Wallingford was the home ofthe Wallings. Places whosenames ended in ford weregenerally situated where a ford,or means of crossing a river orstream, had to be made. Oxfordwas in Old English Oxenford, or“ford of the oxen.”

Towns whose names end inborough are often very old, butnot so old as some of thoseending in ham and ford. Therewere burhs in the first days ofthe English Conquest, butgenerally they were only single

A view of the Tower Bridge in London



fortified houses and not villages.We first hear of the moreimportant burghs or boroughs inthe last hundred years or sobefore the Norman Conquest.Edinburgh, which was at first anEnglish town, is a very earlyexample. Its name means“Edwin’s borough or town,” andit was so called because it wasfounded by Edwin, who was kingof England from 617 to 633.

The special point aboutboroughs was that they werereally free towns. They hadcourts of justice of their own,and were free from the Hundredcourts, the next court abovethem being the Shire court,ruled over by the sheriff. So weknow that most of the townswhose names end in burgh orborough had for their earlycitizens men who loved freedom,and worked hard to win theirown courts of justice.

There are other endings tothe names of towns which goback to the days before theNorman Conquest, but whichare not really English. If a childwere told to pick out on the mapof England all the places whosenames end in by or thwaite, heor she would find that most ofthem are in the eastern part ofEngland. The reason for thismight be guessed, perhaps, by avery thoughtful child. Both by

and thwaite are Danish words,and they are found in theeastern parts of England,because it was in those partsthat the Danes settled downwhen the great King Alfredforced them to make peace inthe Treaty of Wallingford. Afterthis, of course, the Danes livedin England for many years,settling down, and becomingpart of the English people.Naturally they gave their ownnames to many villages andtowns, and many of theseremain to this day to remind usof this fierce race which helpedto build up the English nation.

The Normans did not makemany changes in the names ofplaces when they won England,and most of our place-namescome down to us from Romanand old English times. Theplaces have changed, but thenames have not. But though

towns and counties have hadtheir names from those times, itis to be noticed that the namesof our rivers and hills comedown to us from Celtic times. Tothe Britons, living a more or lesswild life, these things were of thegreatest importance. There areseveral rivers in England withthe name of Avon, and this is anold British name. The rivers Usk,Esk, and Ouse were allchristened by the Britons, andall these names come from aBritish word meaning “water.”Curiously enough, the namewhisky comes from the sameword. From all these differentways in which places have gottheir names we get glimpses ofpast history, and history helpsus to understand the storiesthat these old names tell us. PT

Castle ruins remains of Saint Nicholas College in Wallingford, where the Wallings lived

The River Avon in Bristol, looking towardsBristol Bridge with Welsh Back on the left.

The Parleremo 2013 Calendar is now availableonline! This beautiful calendar is full of imagesfrom countries around the world along withdescriptions oftheir languages.

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Special Feature


onald woke up as if it was just anotherordinary day. He couldn’t imagine whatsurprises the linguistic world reserved

for him under the striking mid-afternoon sun.

Having been into the language “business“ forso long, he had been lately resigned to thefact that he wouldn’t be able to understand aspoken language as spoken by its natives, ata natural speed. He could read without anyproblem, and that was usually the first giftlanguage learning would bring him. He couldalso make his point over a wide range of sub-jects - unless talking about cooking, house-keeping, farming and several other activitiesthat did not catch his attention in his nativelanguage alone. When it came to listeningcomprehension, though, all those texts in for-eign languages became a solid, inscrutableblur. And they’ve remained so for the past 10years. His writing skills kept on improving, helearned a few more languages at a basic level,but the invisible and sounding wall stoodthere, as if centuries would not have any ef-fects on it.

People kept telling him - if not directly, atleast through those many fortune-cookie lan-guage forum threads that keep popping up inthe web - that he should stop worrying aboutthe fact that he would listen to English TVseries and French films and not get a wordfrom them. He should know that his problemwas just lack of practice. His ability to under-stand the subtitles of either French or Englishvideos added to this fact.

Lack of confidence and fear of failure com-bined made a suggestion from a friend comein handy: why not try watching a lot withsubtitles? “That would not be cheating“, hisfriend says. “That will just help you associatethe acoustic image with the script. You’ll be-come more and more trained.“

“Why not try that for a while? I have nothingto lose. I’ll be watching some nice TV seriesand, if nothing happens with my listeningskills, I can try other methods.“, he thought tohimself.

So he did this for a few weeks. Twoseasons, to be more precise. Hisfirst TV series in French was adubbed one. He kept following thesubtitles, not realizing he couldunderstand more and more of it.The mere idea that he could missan important detail, a gag, an in-sightful remark from his favoriteseries kept him tied to the subtitlesas a castaway to his lifeboat. As apositive side-effect, by reading thesubtitles he could easily spot thenew words. He learned a lot ofFrench slang that way.

NNeeww SSoouullss

Special Feature


Parallel to this, he watched an-other TV series, this time in ori-ginal American English audio.There was also a character whospoke with a heavy Australianaccent. That and the excessiveslang made things a little moredifficult, but at least he washappy that he could understandthe US English better and better.

Dropping the subtitles happenedfirst in English, as the series hewas watching in English didn’thave a sort of a continuous plot.Missing one episode or two due to bad com-prehension wouldn’t hinder the comprehen-sion of the upcoming ones. In the case ofFrench, he proceeded to finish the wholeseries with the help of the subtitles. At theend, he barely looked up the subtitles as aseparate text file at the computer.

Then came two new series. Dubbed again inFrench, original audio again in English. Thistime he made sure to find two series hewouldn’t feel specially attached to the plot. Noneed to worry if anything went off the track,after all, these are just two ordinary stories.

Ronald got the episodes and decided to givethem a try, a few hours after lunch, after henormally would have been through all of hislearning activities for other languages atwhich he was still a beginner. No pressure, notime constraints.

“Time to hit the the ’Play’ button and see whathappens.“

And it happened! The Greeks would have uscall this an epiphany, and no word is less ap-propriate than that. You get the vocabulary,the grammar, the ear training over the yearsand one day, expectedly but unpredictably, itsimply clicks. The blur starts to make sense.Instead of getting fixed short expressions, youget dialogues. You follow the story. You usethe context, the environment, the emotions of

the characters to help you understand what isgoing on. After all, that is what you do withyour native language, namely when you watchTV in the background.

He tried it again the day after, the week afterand he will keep doing this again and again,now with even less pressure. It is no longerabout language learning. He thought the bestpart of seeing his goal achieved after so manyyears would be the joy of seeing the frustra-tions gone. It is much more than that, actu-ally. Just like it happened with reading, whenthousands of works became accessible to him,it happens all the same now with audio andvideo. An inexhaustible source of cultural,technical and entertaining materials is lyingin front of him, ready to be explored. He isfinally part of these cultures, because now hecan listen to them. He learned to listen, thehardest skill to develop in this world wherepeople want so much to be heard that theyscream and shout and whine all day long atthe newly-born social networks that seem tohave always been there for the younger gen-erations.

Now Ronald is finally able to share and un-derstand. He got a new soul. Actually, twonew souls at once, if you count English andFrench. He is ready for more. Ready to meetbrother and sisters from close and distantplaces that up to now sounded as if they wer-en’t there. Latin America, anyone? PT

To have another language is to possess a second soul. - Charlemagne


Language Learning Methods - Software

ith the explosion of thecomputer scene in the

past few decades, allowing forpeople to have computers ontheir desks, on their laps, andeven in their pockets, computersoftware is now available for justabout anything. Naturally, then,there is software available tohelp learn languages.

Language software variesgreatly in the approach to learn-ing. Some are basic game anddrill programs, while others in-clude more developed methodsthrough reading and listening.Prices also range from the relat-ively cheap to the very expens-ive. We are going to look at a fewof the popular software pro-grams, their approach, and howbeneficial (or not) they are.

Rosetta StoneWe might as well start with oneof the most talked about soft-ware programs, Rosetta Stone. Itattempts to teach languagesthrough the concept of “learnlike a child learns”. This means,in this case, using word andphrase associations to pictures.

The setup is simple. A useris given a word or phrase in thetarget language. Underneaththat are four pictures. The usermust select which picture bestfits the given word or phrase.Once they have selected theproper one, the word or phrasechanges, as does the order of theimages, and the user guessesagain. This continues until allfour of the images have beenmatched, then a new set of im-

ages is used. Through this pro-cess, a person should belearning the language subcon-sciously while matching images,like a child learns by associatingwords to objects around it.

The entire process dependson repeition, so the student willneed to be working through alarge number of these imagesbefore they really retain much.

The process has a sense offun because the learner is get-ting a direct sense of accom-plishment as they click on theimages. This is probably themain reason that so manypeople like Rosetta Stone. . . be-cause of this feeling of accom-plishment.

There are a few problemswith this process, however. Firstof all, it is a false sense of ac-complishment. Since the userhas multiple choice of fouritems, and each image is usedjust once in a batch, then aslong as the user doesn’t selectan image twice, the chance ofgetting it correct increases eachtime. For example, when theuser sees four images, they havea one-in-four chance of selectingthe correct match for the firstphrase. After that, with all thesame images being presentedagain, the user knows that theone they chose previously willNOT be the answer to the secondphrase, so they have just threeimages to select from, a one-in-three chance. After that, theyhave just two to select from,

LLaanngguuaaggee LLeeaarrnn iinngg MMeetthhooddss

Software

Computer running Rosetta Stone TOTALe



then lastly, they can’t get thefourth one wrong. It would be amore fair assessment of theirprogress if every new word orphrase had four completely newimages, rather than using agroup of four.

The second problem is vari-ety and expanse. The images willoften display things like a num-ber of colored balls or people do-ing things. Once a person has,from these, learned some basiccolors like red, blue and green,they would then need to gothrough many other images tolearn orange, yellow, brown,black, white, purple, etc. Thismight not be a problem if theseries of phrases focused on col-ors, but it can take a very longtime if these are being donealong with, say, learning num-bers.

With respect to numbers,the pictures might be able toteach a few numbers, perhapsfrom one to ten, but how doesone teach larger numbers, likethirty, or one hundred, usingjust images? This could only bedone by switching back to justvocabulary and numeric pic-tures (the picture consisting ofjust the numerals) .

Similar problems withpeople. While the user mightstart getting down concepts like“boy”, “girl”, “man” and “wo-man”, what about relationshipsof those people? Does that imageof a boy mean “boy”, “brother” or“son”? Is that a “woman”, “wife”,“sister”, “aunt” or “mother”? Wetook a long time as children tolearn those differences, and theywere explained to us. No explan-ation will be coming from just aset of pictures.

That last point highlights amajor drawback to learning byjust visual references in general.If someone holds up a plate ofhot spaghetti and points to it,saying “grond”, how do we knowwhat “grond” refers to? Theplate? The food on the plate?

The temperature of the food?The color of the food? The kindof meal it is, such as breakfast,lunch, or supper?

Another problem with imagelearnig is how to represent moreabstract concepts. Show me apicture of “want”. How about“think”? You can think ofsomething that might representthose, like a child reaching forsomething, or a man looking offinto space, but there is no wayto make sure the learner is get-ting the real meaning.

Lastly, how do you representaction, especially in differenttenses? If there is a child with abook, you could say “The boy isreading the book”. But how doyou say “The boy will read thebook” or “The boy read thebook”?

Oddly enough, a commercialfor Rosetta Stone uses a testa-ment to how useful the programis by giving an example thatwouldn’t happen. A womanclaims that now her grand-daughter can say “Te amo, tita!”,which is (debatedly) Spanish for“I love you, grandmother!”. Thatis a phrase that could never beproperly displayed in an image.The best that could be given is achild hugging an older woman,but that could be interpreted inseveral ways, with “I love you,grandmother!” being the least

likely.The silliness of the example

also makes one question whythe woman (or granddaughter)would need to learn all of Span-ish in order to say that. If thegranddaughter is saying it to thegrandmother who speaks Span-ish, then the grandmother cer-tainly doesn’t need to useRosetta Stone. And I am hopingshe didn’t put her granddaugh-ter through endless repetition tolearn a single phrase.

Now, in fairness, the idea ofusing multiple choice, images,and repetition isn’t bad. Vocab-ulary is often practised usingsuch methods, as we will talkmore of later. The problem hereis that you can’t use that meth-od to learn a whole language. Atbest you can learn basic words.Advanced vocabulary, like ab-stract concepts, verb tenses andlarge numbers, will be ignored.Grammar rules will also be ig-nored.

Rosetta Stone has also ad-ded some new aspects to theirsoftware. One is voice recogni-tion. By setting certain things,like speaking level and agerange, a student can speak tothe computer and have it com-pare the sounds to a nativespeaker. The student must getthe software to recognize whatthey are saying to be granted

Woman using computer to learn



points for that section.This sounds very innovative,

allowing not just a comparisonto a sound but having the com-puter analyze it and scoring it.Unfortunately, this aspect of theprogram seems to have someflaws, and many people havecomplained that it won’t recog-nize anything they say, evenwhen they are native speakers.This represents a problem withhaving a machine attempting tounderstand human speech.

Rosetta Stone Studio allowsthe student to have lessons withteachers through the software.The lessons are limited to fiftyminutes and focus on specificideas or vocabulary, like a nor-mal lesson should. These les-sons need to be done duringspecific time slots, so you can’tjust do them at your own con-venience, which is similar to tak-ing a class. However, having alesson with a real person over adistance using a computer isreally another form of class,learning through the software(the connection) and not reallylearning by the software.

Transparent LanguageI first used Transparent Lan-guage software back in the early1990s, and I was impressed withtheir approach. Like RosettaStone, they didn’t focus onteaching vocabulary and gram-mar. Instead, they attempted toteach the user through another

attempt at immer-sion, this time us-ing readings.

The basic pro-cess of the programwas to present thestudent with abody of text, suchas a story, in thetarget language.The student wouldthen try to read it.If they didn’t un-derstand a word,he or she could

click on it and get a translation.This approach is definitely moreaimed at the advanced learner. Itis also a varient on the dual-lan-guage books. One could use thisprocess with other media, like

books and newspapers, using adictionary to look up what isn’tknown. The drawback to that isthat constantly looking up wordsstunts the flow of learning, sohaving it incorporated into inter-active software is a much betterapplication.

Another version of Transpar-ent Language software exists intheir Foreign Language Series.This one incorporates entire les-sons using the same process,giving the meaning of the wordas well as the entire phrasewhen an word is highlighted. Italso displays any grammar rulesattached to the word, such asverb tense, and allows a studentto play a recording of the wordspoken, the entire phrasespoken, or to read the entire les-son out audibly. The recording isdone by a native speaker, notsynthesized, which allows a stu-dent to hear how the wordssound so they get a direct con-nection between the written and

spoken.This playback ability alone

shows how much more versatilesoftware can be, as compared toother methods like audio andbooks. Both of those methodsutilize one aspect, but rarelyboth. The software allows a per-son to replay any part as manytimes as they want instantly.

The software offers muchmore than just this capability,however. It also offers some ba-sic games, such as crosswords,plug-n-play, unscramble, vocab-ulous, and segment unscramble.The crossword is straightforwardfill in the words to complete thesentence clue. The plug-n-playhas a user drag words to com-plete phrases that are similar toother phrases in the game. Un-scramble has the student drag-ging words around in a sentenceto get the proper order of thegiven translation. Vocabulous isa basic fill-in to complete a sen-tence. Segment unscramble is. . .well, to be honest, I couldn’tfigure out this one. It involvedmoving parts of dialogue aroundon a grid.

Another part of the softwareallows the reader to recordthemselves speaking words orphrases and comparing them tonative recordings, complete withwave form representations. Thiscan be a very good way to finetune pronunciation when youdon’t have access to a nativespeaker. This differs from

There are a few problemswith this process,however. First of all, it isa false sense ofaccom-plishment.

Software for language learning can be used on many devicesnow, even phones

Software is available to teach almost anylanguge, including this one for Kurukh



Rosetta Stone voice recognitionbecause the software is not at-tempting to analyze the speechitself. It shows the student agraphical comparison of the dif-ferences as well as allowingthem to hear a comparison oftheir recording against the nat-ive. While it leaves the final ap-praisal to the student for this, itis providing more of a tool thansimply rejecting or accepting apronunciation.

The strength of this softwareapproach is that it allows a userto read entire text, sentences, orsingle words, which are assistedby audio recordings and gram-mar rules.

For those who want to prac-tice basic vocabulary, there isalso a simple flashcard setup, al-lowing the user to review wordsby reading or typing in the equi-valent word or phrase. It is not acomplete spaced repitition soft-ware setup (at least, not in theolder version I have), but it doeshelp.

Transparent Language hasalso developed a downloadablevocabulary trainer called “Byki”(stands for ’before you know it’) .This is available for mobile

phones as well as desktop PCs.The “Lite” version is free, andmainly just teaches basic vocab-ulary through flashcards.

The program will display aword and play the audio pro-nunciation, done by a nativespeaker. The user guesses theanswer, and the program keepstrack of how many times youwere shown a word and how of-ten you got it correct. It can thenreplay words thewords you got cor-rect less often, so astudent can focuson the ones they gotwrong.

This is a verygood process ofmemorizing largeamounts of vocab-ulary. Flashcardshave, of course,been around fordecades, usually aslarge piles of cardsused in classrooms.Using software tomimic and expandthem has becomecommon practicenow, and it is themost frequently im-

plemented method of softwareaided learning. Of course, youcan not learn much more thanvocabulary or simple phrasesfrom flashcards.

Other SoftwareMany other kinds of softwareexists, with most of them usinga combination of flashcards,games, and readings. Most soft-ware is not likely to incorporatemuch grammar into the traininghowever, so be aware thatwhatever software you mightuse, you should have a grammarbook to accompany it.

AnkiWhile Byki has become ratherpopular, the most popular flash-card software is probably Anki.The reason for it’s success islargely because it is free andthat it allows people to createtheir own groups of vocabulary,called decks. A person can enterwhatever they want for theflashcards, including pronunci-ation and grammar notes. Whilethis may not sound very useful,it can actually help a studentlearn the material much faster.It is similar to practising a list ofwords by reading and writing

Flashcards have existed for many years in their non-digital formHere is a soldier using flashcards to teach children in Iraq

Screenshot of a version of Anki



them, rather than simply read-ing and repeating. Writing outthe material forces the studentto process the information com-pletely.

Of course, not everyone willwant to create their own decks.For those that want to just startinstantly, numerous decks canbe downloaded via the Anki sitethat other uses have created andshared. And those that have cre-ated their own decks can alsoupload them to this repository.

Anki uses a space repitionsystem (SRS) in its display of theflashcards. The basic idea of anSRS is to increase the timebetween reviews of materials aperson has learned. For ex-ample, if a student learns thewords “apple”, “book” and “cat”,these will be repeated a fewtimes immediately. As the stu-dent learns more, those wordswill be displayed among them forreview. The time between thesereviews will be increased andnewer words will also be placedinto the system for reviewing.This forces the student to keepthe materials they have alreadylearned in their mind, ratherthan just learning and forget-ting, which is what is more likelyto happen without constant re-view.

Some systems will have thestudent tell the program how di-fficult the word was, so it will be

recalled more often. A systemmight also have the words pre-defined for difficulty withoutneeding the user to provide thatinformation. This method is sim-ilar to what Pimsleur developedfor his audio lessons, with previ-ously learned words and phrasesbeing mentioned in later lessons.

Anki is avaible for a numberof different platforms, includingmobile devices and game sys-tems, so a person can practisewherever and whenever theywant.

CostsBesides the methods used bysoftware, the cost of the softwaremust also always be looked at.For the specific software I havementioned here, the expenserange is very large. The most ex-pensive software is, without adoubt, Rosetta Stone.

The real Rosetta Stone was avery important artifact thathelped decode Egyptian hiero-glyphics, so you would expect

something named after it wouldbe of similar worth. The basicsoftware with a single level of alanguage, like Spanish I, willcost 130 EUR ($180 USD),while getting all five levels willcost 384 ($500 USD).

Transparent Language offersseveral language program series.The one I mentioned is around7 ($9), but the different pro-

grams on their site range from139 ($180) downto 24 ($30).

Byki, the complete program, isoffered for 6 ($8) while BykiLiteis free.

Anki is completely free, butdonations are welcome.

If you do intend to investany large amount of money intolanguage learning software,make sure you read as many re-views of it as you can. Also see ifyou can try a demo of it, becauseno matter what reviews say, theonly real value it will have isbased upon what you think of it.An example is how RosettaStone is used by thousands ofpeople, and many people willclaim it is the best while otherswill claim it is useless.

ConclusionI wasn’t necessarily trying to re-view specific language softwarein this article so much as look atthe very different approaches afew have used. In general, aswith most of the other learningmethods, it is best to use a vari-ety of sources when attemptingto learn a language, becausenone can provide you witheverything you need to becomefluent.

We hope you enjoyed thisfourth article in this series oflanguage learning methods. Pre-vious articles have discussed themethods of audio learning,books and classes. We wouldlike your thoughts and com-ments on the article and yourexperiences with useing soft-ware. Please write to us at [email protected]. PT

Kiosk selling Rosetta Stone software

Most software is not likelyto incorporate muchgrammar into the traininghowever, so be awarethat whatever softwareyou might use, youshould have a grammarbook to accompany it.

TThhee RReeggiissttaann,, oorr ""SSaannddyy PPllaaccee"",, wwaass tthhee hheeaarrtt ooff tthhee aanncciieenntt cciittyy ooffSSaammaarrkkaanndd ooff tthhee TTiimmuurriidd ddyynnaassttyy..

WWaallkk tthhee oolldd ssiillkk rrooaadd!! FFiinndd aa ppllaaccee wwhheerree mmaannyy cciivviilliizzaattiioonnss ccoonnttrriibbuutteedd ttooccrreeaattee aa uunniiqquuee wwoonnddeerr..

DDiissccoovveerr

UUzzbbeekkiissttaann

Sections - Parleremo YouTube


Sections is a mothly column about different

parts ofPaleremo, explaining their purpose

and how to use them.

ver the past decade, YouTube has becomethe most popular place for people to postvideos online. This has encouraged people to

make their own videos for teaching others lan-guages. Some of these are very amateurish, with asingle person talking into their video cam, whileothers are of a fully professional quality. Thesevideos are available for free through YouTube,providing a whole new media source for learninglanguages.

Along with these teaching videos are a largenumber of short clips of cultural events, musicevents, and even television shows and movies inforeign languages.

The only drawback to this is with literally mil-lions of videos online, how does one findsomething that might help or be of interest tothem? In order to help make this sorting task easi-er, we developed the Parleremo YouTube system,or PYT.

Parleremo YouTubeThe PYT basically has two main components to it.The first is the YouTube search, which allows auser to search YouTube using keywords. This isaccessed by selecting the “YouTube” tab above thesearch bar. Two icons allow for a selection ofmatching videos or playlists. Another option re-stricts the number of results returned, from 20 to300, in increments of 20. Last is the way to sort:by relevance (best matches the keywords), pub-lished (date the video or playlist was put online),viewCount (number of times a video has beenwatched), and rating (giving the highest ratingfirst) . Once a user has set all these options, theyclick “Go” to get the results.

If the search was done on videos, they will bedisplayed below in a column on the left, with each

entry showing a thumbnail image of the video, thelength, title, topic (as defined in YouTube), andnumber of views it has received. Only 20 videoswill be listed at a time, so if the user set a higherlimit for results, there will be a multiple pagenumbers at the top of the list to use to navigatethrough them all.

If the search was done for playlists, which aregroups of similar videos, the left column will splitinto two parts, with the upper part showing theplaylists and the bottom showing the videos of aselected playlist. Note that there is a slight changein the search bar if you select to search for playl-ists. The sort option changes to an option to dis-play thumbnails. If a user selects to seethumbnails, the playlists will attempt to showthumbnails for a few of the videos in it.

Clicking on a thumbnail or title will bring thevideo into the viewing area on the right. Once it isthere, the user must click on it to begin watchingit. Below that will be the title of the video, the dateit was uploaded, the name of the original uploaderof it and a description, if any is available. Thevideo is displayed using the YouTube player, so itwill have all the capabilities of that, such as pauseand play controls, volume control and full screen.

Now, this is nothing new. You can already doall this from the YouTube site itself, of course, plusa whole lot more. So why did we build this? Well,this gives users the ability to find the videos theylike or think would be helpful to others. Once theyhave found such a video, they can save it in thePYT database so that other members can find iteasily.

If the video (or playlist) hasn’t been added tothe PYT database yet, there will be a green plusicon on the right of the title in the listing. Clickingon that will open a popup window which gives theuser the options for adding. If they are wanting toadd a video, the options are for a language andcategory. The user should select which languagethe video is for, and the category will be what kindof video it is, like if it is educational, entertain-

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Sections - Parleremo YouTube


ment, cultural, or something else. Once those areset, the user clicks on Save. If they don’t want toadd the video after all, they can click Cancel.

If the user selects to add a playlist, then theoptions vary slightly. They should still select a lan-guage and category, but they may also select ifthey want to add just the playlist, just the videosof the playlist, or both. This can be a good way toadd a lot of related videos at once.

Once a video orplaylist has been ad-ded, it must be ap-proved by anadministrator beforeit can be stored in thePYT database. This isto prevent abuse ofthe system as well assimple mistakes. In the approval section, an ad-ministrator can change the language or category ofa video or delete it if it is inappropriate. Any userthat deliberately tries to post vulgar or obscenevideos will be warned not to do so again.

CategoriesThere are currently just a few specific categoriesthat a video or playlist can be given. Learning isexactly as it sounds, with these videos being les-sons on a language. If there is something very edu-cational about a culture, those videos might alsobe allowed. Entertainment is more flexible, with itcovering things like music videos that allow a per-son to hear a language sung, a language relatedskit, etc. Culture videos should be showingsomething related to the society a language is usedin, and these can include festivals, rituals andanything else that gives an insight into anothercountry or culture. Member is a category specific-ally for highlighting videos that a member has cre-ated, such as themselves greeting others in manylanguages or giving their own lessons. Lastly,Karaoke is for any music in another language thatshows the lyrics, so a person might sing along withit. This is a specific kind of learning, so it has itsown category. If anyone has an idea for categoriesthat might be useful for others, they should con-tact an administrator.

LanguagesThe languages that a video or playlist can be ad-ded for are the same as what is available for selec-tion on the rest of the site. If a user would like toadd a video for a language that isn’t yet available,they should contact an administrator to suggestthat the language be added. We do not plan to addall possible languages, so a request should bebased upon providing actual materials others can

use.

Local SelectionOnce a user has added a video and it has been ap-proved, or if they just want to see what hasalready been added, they should select the “Par-leremo” tab.

The options for this search are slightly differ-ent than the one for YouTube. First is the keywordarea, which remains the same. Then are optionsfor language and categories. If these are left totheir defaults of “any”, then the results will be inthe order they were originally added to the data-base. The next option is to view just the most re-cently added videos. If this is selected, only thenewest ones will be listed. The last options are forvideos or playlist and the number of results, sameas in the YouTube search.

Also like the YouTube search, the listing willsplit into groups of 20 to be paged through, as wellas into two sections if a playlist search is selected.The listings are basically the same as well, withshowing a thumbnail, length, and title and cat-egory. However, instead of a view count, there willbe the language the video is for.

Another difference in the listing is the optionalicons on the right side. If a video is newer, it willdisplay an orange ball. There is also an icon thatallows a user to report a video if they think it isinappropriate or has the wrong language or cat-egory. Clicking on that icon will open a window toallow the user to type a message for an adminis-trator.

User PlaylistIf a user has their own playlists they have createdon YouTube, those can also be added to the PYTby doing a search on the users name. These mustbe set to be public and embedded, however, or elsethey can not be views by anyone except the origin-al creator.

DrawbacksThe PYT does not store any videos itself, just theinformation to obtain them from YouTube, so if avideo is removed from there, it will also be gonefrom the PYT. Also, since the video player is alsothe same as used by YouTube, we have no powerto control what other videos it might offer you afterplaying one. We also don’t control any ads theymay lay over a video.

We have tried to make this video system easyto use, but if anyone has any suggestions or prob-lems, they should not hesitate to contact an ad-ministrator. We hope it is useful for everyone, and,most of all, that people have fun! PT

“These videos areavailable for freethrough YouTube,providing a whole newmedia source forlearning languages.

Credits


Letter From the EditorWriter: Erik ZidoweckiImages:Petey: Pictish stone

The Phaistos Disc - Puzzle of CreteWriter: Lucil le MartinImages:Jerzy Strzelecki: View of Paistos, Crete (title)Olaf Tausch: Stairs in ruins of palaceBibi Saint-Po: Map of Minoan CreteAserakov: Phaistos Disk. Side A. Heraklion Archaeological Museum. GreeceHelix84: Large image of the replica of Phaistos diskKramer96: Messara plain in South cretePetey: Goosy Goosy Gander GameSources:• "Phaistos Disk" World Mysteries <http: //www.world-mysteries.com/sar_9.htm>• "Phaistos Disc" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc>• "Phaistos Disc" Crystal inks.com <http://www.crystal inks.com/phaistosdisc.html>• "The Phaistos Disk" cs.rochester.edu<http: //www.cs.rochester.edu/~nelson/courses/cryptology/phaistos_disk/phaistos_disk.html>• "Phaistos" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos>• "Phaistos Disc decipherment claims" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_decipherment_claims>• "Information about the Efforts to Decipher the Phaistos Disk" Anthony P. Svoronos Home Page<http: //users.otenet.gr/~svoronan/phaistos.htm>• "Game of the Goose" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_the_Goose>

Otto Jespersen - Progress of LanguageWriter: Sofia OzolsImages:Jim G: Copenhagen, Denmark (title)Mik Hartwell : Copenhagen University Main Buildingx-Flare-x: Novial FlagPetey: Otto Jespersen; Paul Passy; Esperanto Flag; Ido Flag; Excerpt from bookSources:• "IPA" Oxford Bibl iographies <http: //www.oxfordbibl iographies.com/view/document/obo-97801 9977281 0/obo-97801 9977281 0-0022.xml>• "Otto Jespersen" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Jespersen>• "OTTO JESPERSEN" Denmark.df <http: //denmark.dk/en/meet-the-danes/great-danes/scientists/otto-jespersen/>• "Otto Jespersen (1 860-1 943)" ELT Archive <http: //eltarchive.com/1 9th-century-mfl-innovators-and-reformers/otto-jespersen-1 860-1 943/>• "Otto Jespersen" Niels Haislund <http: //interlanguages.net/haislund.html>• "Otto Jespersen" Encyclopedia Britannica <http: //www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/302975/Otto-Jespersen>

At The Cinema - Kukushka - The CuckooWriter: Erik ZidoweckiSources:• "Kukushka" Internet Movie Database <http: //www.imdb.com/title/tt0308476/>• "The Cuckoo (fi lm)" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo_%28fi lm%29>All images are copyright CTB Film Company [ru], Sony Classics, Sony Pictures Classics

Celebrations - CarnivalWriter: Sonja KrügerImages:Team at Carnaval.com Studios: Samba Dancer; Samaba dancers dressed in colourful costumes at nightAntônio Cruz/ABr: Giant heads at Carnaval do Olinda, Pernambuco, BrazilScarantino: Masks at Carnival of VeniceJesmar: The King and Queen of carnival of Niceacedout: New Orleans Mardi GrasMarie-Claire: Binche, Gil les wearing their masks.Petey: Carnaval of Nantes (title); Carnival scene paintingSources:• "Carnival" About.com <http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/Carnival.htm>• "Brazil ian Carnival" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil ian_Carnival>• "Carnival Origins" Michael La Rose <http: //www.carnival ineducation.com/node/29>• "The Top 1 5 Carnivals Around The World" Krew Central <https://sites.google.com/site/krewecentral/carnival-celebrations/the-top-1 5-carnivals-around-the-world>• "Carnival of Venice" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice>• "Venice Carnival" Study English Today <http: //www.studyenglishtoday.net/venice-carnival.html>• "Paris Carnival" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Carnival>

Credits


• "Mardi Gras" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardi_Gras>• "New Orleans Mardi Gras" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Mardi_Gras>• "Mardi Gras in the United States" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardi_Gras_in_the_United_States>• "Carnival" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival>• "Nice Carnival" About.com <http://gofrance.about.com/od/provence/a/Nice-Carnival.htm>• "Carnival of Binche" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Binche>

Languages in Peril - The Salish TragedyWriter: Lucil le MartinImages:Mimigu: Fraser River Panorama (title)Ish ishwar: Salishan languages mapM. Lounsbery: View looking east on the Fraser RiverPetey: Salish men on Flathead Reservation, Montana, 1 903; Stó: lō woman with a cedar basket; longhouses;Stó: lō people fishing with traditional dipnets on the Fraser River; Nuxálk People gathered around an eulichan stink box, near theBella Coola RiverSources:• "District of Matsqui" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Matsqui>• "Musqueam Indian Band" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musqueam_Indian_Band>• "Vancouver Island" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_Island>• "First Nations" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Nations>• "Salishan languages" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salishan_languages>• "Halkomelem language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halkomelem_language>• "Halkomelem Language" Native languages.org <http: //www.native-languages.org/halkomelem.htm>• "The Halkomelem Language" Yinka Déné Language Institute <http: //www.ydl i .org/langs/halkomelem.htm>• "Halkomelem Language" languagegeek.com <http://www. languagegeek.com/salishan/halkomelem.html>• "Hul’q’umi’num’ / Halq'eméylem / " First Peoples' Language Map of B.C. <http: //maps.fphlcc.ca/halkomelem>• "Squamish language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squamish_language>• "Squamish culture" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squamish_culture>• "Nuxálk language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nux%C3%A1 lk_language>• "Nuxalk Nation" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nux%C3%A1 lk_Nation>• "Nuxalk (Bella Coola)" The Canadian Encyclopedia <http: //www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/nuxalk-bel la-coola>• "British Columbia Indian Language Project fonds" The British Columbia Archival Information Network<http: //memorybc.ca/british-columbia-indian-language-project-fonds;rad>

Word on the Streets - Kannada WritersWriter: Sofia OzolsImages:Daniel Hauptstein: Pilgrims washing on temple ruins, HampiSources:• "B. M. Srikantaiah" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._M._Srikantaiah>• "SRIKANTAIAH B.M. , 1 884-1 946" Classical Kannada<http: //www.classicalkannada.org/DataBase/KannwordHTMLS/CLASSICAL%20KANNADA%20SCHOLARS%20HTML/SRIKANTAIAH%20B.M. .htm>• "B.M.Sri. , the leading l ight of Kannada Renaissance" Karnataka History <http: //karnatakahistory.blogspot.com/201 2/04/leading-l ight-of-kannada-renaissance.html>• "A. R. Krishnashastry" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._R._Krishnashastry>• "Amma's Column - Prof. A.R. Krishnasastry (1 890-1 968)" Kamat's Potpourri<http: //www.kamat.com/jyotsna/blog/a_r_krishnasastry.htm>• "Gopalakrishna Adiga" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopalakrishna_Adiga>• "Gopalakrishna Adiga - The Poet of Karnataka" Karnataka Spider <http: //www.karnatakaspider.com/resources/3207-Gopalakrishna-Adiga-The-Poet-Karnataka.aspx>

Where Are You?Writer: Sonja Krüger

Revisited - Stories In The Names Of PlacesWriter: Elizabeth O'Neil lImages:idobi: View from Fierza dam in northern AlbaniaNotFromUtrecht: The River Avon in BristolPetey: Tirana Albania pano (title); The Tiber river in Rome; View of Pompey's Pil lar with Alexandria in the background; Towerbridge, London; Wall ingford castle ruins; Rome, a view of the river Tiber looking southSources:• "Stories In The Names Of Places" Stories That Words Tell Us Elizabeth O'Neil l , M.A. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, Ltd. 35Paternoster Row, E.C. And Edinburgh 1 91 8

Credits


New SoulsWriter: Hidson GuimarãesImages:Petey: Sunset

Language Learning Methods - SoftwareWriter: Erik ZidoweckiImages:ruiwen: Software Freedom Day Singapore 09 (title)slgckgc: Rosetta StoneStéphane M. Grueso: Woman at computerKevin Krejci: Phone with softwareNemhas Ekka: Kurukh Sp(Kurukh Speaking Practice)Damien Elmes: Screenshot of Anki© BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons: Rosetta Stone boothPetey: Flashcards with students in Dhi Qar province, Iraq

Sections - Parleremo YouTubeWriter: Erik Zidowecki

Uzbekistan Ad:Images:dalbera: The madrasa Ulugh Begh RegistanArian Zwegers: Samarkand, from Ulugbek Medressa's Minaretsiehe (Thomas Würtz): Sher-Dor Madrasa in Samarkand, UzbekistanFaqscl: Inscription above the door of a cell of the madrasa Ullough BegSteve Evans (babasteve): Registan mosques in Samarkand

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except forPetey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

This cat learned Maltese to

take a holiday in Malta.

You can too!

LLeeaarrnn MMaalltteessee!!

Parrot Time - Issue 4 - July / August 2013

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Transcript of Parrot Time - Issue 4 - July / August 2013