"Indeed"

[stevec67]

I didn't know about Albanian but Basque is a famous outlier with no similar or related European languages.

I looked this up, Basque is totally isolated, it is the only language in use in modern Europe that isn't a descendant of PIE (Proto Indo European). It is considered to be a "language isolate" where it evolved prior to the invasions/tribe movements that led to PIE introduction and became isolated in a corner of Europe. Albanian OTOH is its own branch of surviving languages but does go back to PIE and so has some limited links to Turkish, Greek, and other languages being spoken in that part of the Med 1000-2000 years ago.

I think Sami is considered Ungaro-Finnish too, at least according to Wikipeia.

I was wondering about the Sami when I wrote that I thought there were only 3 Ungaro Finnish languages. It seems that there are several Sami languages, some are nearly extinct with fewer than 100 speakers, some have recently become extinct because the last speaker has died. Wiki shows one part of northern Finland where there are FOUR official languages, roadsigns have Finnish and then 3 Sami languages. All of them look like an explosion in a print factory. You'd have to stop the car to have time to read them. Turn left for Saami Ukkuraattapikkaa, or do I want to go to Saamu Ukkattaakippaakkasippa?

Edit: I have of course made up these place names but the originals are no more intelligible. A look at the road sign above reveals that Saami mattaattaskuavdas appears to be the same place as Saa mvuuvdskoou 'ljemkooskos and Sami oahpahhusguovddas and Saamelaisalueen koulutuskeskus. I'm not even sure I have copied these accurately. Road maps must be a nightmare, good thing there's lots of space on the map. Christ knows what Finnish Scrabble looks like. You must need about 20 letters at a time, most of them k and v. "Right, so that's "kouluaattaavuskeskaatus" on a double word score, with double letter for k and v, triple letter for t and l, oh and another double word score, so 4 times, I make it 272. Your turn."

 

[Finnegan]

Or "yes indeedly doodly"...

And don’t forget Comic Book Guy. He gained his doctorate by translating The Lord Of The Rings into Klingon. Quite an achievement I’m sure we’d all agree.

 

[stevec67]

And don’t forget Comic Book Guy. He gained his doctorate by translating The Lord Of The Rings into Klingon. Quite an achievement I’m sure we’d all agree.

Bloody hell, that body of work certainly improved the lot of the human race, didn't it?

 

[Finnegan]

I was wondering about the Sami when I wrote that I thought there were only 3 Ungaro Finnish languages. It seems that there are several Sami languages, some are nearly extinct with fewer than 100 speakers, some have recently become extinct because the last speaker has died. Wiki shows one part of northern Finland where there are FOUR official languages, roadsigns have Finnish and then 3 Sami languages. All of them look like an explosion in a print factory. You'd have to stop the car to have time to read them. Turn left for Saami Ukkuraattapikkaa, or do I want to go to Saamu Ukkattaakippaakkasippa?

There’s a wonderful passage in the late US geographer Barry Lopez’s account of his time in the Arctic- Arctic Dreams- where he takes a pair of binoculars out of his backpack. The accompanying Inuits ask if they enable him to see into tomorrow? Lopez initially thinks the Inuits are reading some primitive magical quality into an instrument they are unfamiliar with. He then realises that huge expanses of ice and the crystal clear, pollution free air enable to see the Inuits to see vast distances. They can spot a reindeer or caribou so far off in the distance that it would be tomorrow before it reached the point where they could hunt it. A wonderful example of what can be lost through translation.

He talks about the place names. Translated from the Inuit language they mean things like “the river where we killed our first walrus,” or “the hill where our first son was born.” Then along came European colonialists and renamed them after a bunch of royal mediocrities. So much knowledge of history and folklore is lost by anglicisation and cultural colonisation. Scots Gaelic possesses the same beautiful, lyrical quality. But it’s fast heading for extinction, which will be heartbreaking.

 

[KrisW]

Interesting, I wasn’t aware of that. I used to work with (older) Czech and Slovak colleagues who told me the differences were often just in pronunciation, emphasis etc. But, as you say, if the dissolution of Czechoslovakia has resulted in much less intermingling then the languages will inevitably change and evolve, and mutual intelligibility will lessen over the generations.

The big difference that non-speakers or learners would spot is that Slovak omits the letter ř, and the fiendishly difficult sound it represents. It's in the surname of the composer Antonín Dvořák, is pronounced something between a rolled R and the J in "Jungle", and is regarded as the most difficult sound in any spoken language: Czech children generally don't master it until the age of 10.

In a former life, I worked in Software Localisation, and a common QA problem at the time was engineers accidentally inserting the translated text for one language as the text of another. For some misplacings this was easily spotted, but if you didn't speak either, you could easily miss an errant Slovak translation in a Czech build (but not so much Czech in Slovak, thanks to ř). Most cases can be spotted automatically by analysing the letters used, but the absolute hardest pair to distinguish was (Bokmål) Norwegian and Danish: only our resident Dane could ever spot those.

 

[Finnegan]

Bloody hell, that body of work certainly improved the lot of the human race, didn't it?

Well I’m not sure what Comic Book Guy’s translation brought to the text, but I’d be interested to give it a go, although my Klingon is rudimentary at best.

 

[Mike Reed]

It's in the surname of the composer Antonín Dvořák, is pronounced something between a rolled R and the J in "Jungle", ....

I've only known his name pronounced as above (correctly) and have never heard it uttered with 'r' instead of your 'rj' but didn't know why it is pronounced as such. I wonder how the Americans mangled his name on his sojourn to the east coast. R3 and Classic FM presenters only rarely got the final 's' of Saint-Saens but never tripped up on Dvorak.

 

[mandryka]

Thank you! I'd forgotten about this series. I watched a couple of episodes on a flight years ago and loved it. That's my next few evenings sorted.

Be sure to get the gritty Japanese original and not the rather sentimental (though pretty good in its way) Chinese makeover on Youtube.

 

[George J]

Well, George. I, as a Swede, has problems with that. I can see that it's not Swedish and therefore must be either Danish or Norwegian, but which one?
A much younger me once tried to play the early, text based computer game 'Adventure' in Norwegian. Honestly, I failed.

Even whole sentences can be identical for spelling and layout in Danish and Norwegian [though they sound different for sure], but the real give away is the Norwegian word "ikke' meaning "not." So the question "Er det ikke slik?" means "Is it not so?" in Norwegian means" Is it not so?" in English. I have never seen "ikke" in Danish text. In speech it often comes as "Ikke silk?" which, with the correct upward intonation, means [also with the correct upward intonation] in idiomatic English as "Not so?" I am not sure that it would be polite to be as blunt as a flat intoned "Not so!" "I am not sure that I can agree with that," would be a more polite [if rather and typically] indirect way to say that in English, and then we go full circle as the other person says sarcastically, "Indeed!"

How would that come out in Swedish, Please?

Best wishes from George

 

[stevec67]

There’s a wonderful passage in the late US geographer Barry Lopez’s account of his time in the Arctic- Arctic Dreams- where he takes a pair of binoculars out of his backpack. The accompanying Inuits ask if they enable him to see into tomorrow? Lopez initially thinks the Inuits are reading some primitive magical quality into an instrument they are unfamiliar with. He then realises that huge expanses of ice and the crystal clear, pollution free air enable to see the Inuits to see vast distances. They can spot a reindeer or caribou so far off in the distance that it would be tomorrow before it reached the point where they could hunt it. A wonderful example of what can be lost through translation.

To be fair I'd say that this isn't lost in translation as much as cultural differences and people who live in remote and/or mountainous regions expressing distances in terms of time. A mate recounts the story of being on a trekking holiday in the Himalayas and asking one of the porters or guides where he came from. The man gave him a village name and upon being asked "How far away is that?" gave the rather surprising but entirely logical answer "About 2 days".

He talks about the place names. Translated from the Inuit language they mean things like “the river where we killed our first walrus,” or “the hill where our first son was born.” Then along came European colonialists and renamed them after a bunch of royal mediocrities. So much knowledge of history and folklore is lost by anglicisation and cultural colonisation. Scots Gaelic possesses the same beautiful, lyrical quality. But it’s fast heading for extinction, which will be heartbreaking.

I like the mountain names in Scots Gaelic. Buachaille Etive Mor. The Great Shepherd of Etive. Next to it, B.E Beag. The Little Shepherd of Etive. Alpine names are great too. The Big Hunchback. The Maiden, the Monk, The Ogre. Not quite as lyrical as Everest's "Goddess Mother of the Snows" (some say world) but pretty good.

 

[kasperhauser]

To be fair I'd say that this isn't lost in translation as much as cultural differences and people who live in remote and/or mountainous regions expressing distances in terms of time. A mate recounts the story of being on a trekking holiday in the Himalayas and asking one of the porters or guides where he came from. The man gave him a village name and upon being asked "How far away is that?" gave the rather surprising but entirely logical answer "About 2 days".

In the southern US, communicating distance in terms of travel time is more rule than exception.

 

[les24preludes]

Even whole sentences can be identical for spelling and layout in Danish and Norwegian [though they sound different for sure], but the real give away is the Norwegian word "ikke' meaning "not." So the question "Er det ikke slik?" means "Is it not so?" in Norwegian means" Is it not so?" in English.

I speak fairly decent Norwegian, though don't write it to any extent. The thing with Norwegian is that there are several dialects. Bokmal is the official language, but there are many dialects as you go further North up the very long coastline. Norway top to bottom is the same distance as Norway to Italy. And because there are so many fjords flowing out into the sea you have to take several ferries to go from one place to another, hence the regional variations due to isolated communities. In an attempt to average out these dialects the government invented "Nynorsk" or "New Norwegian". I don't know how useful this has been since I lived in Oslo, but as far as I know it's a written rather than spoken language. The Northern dialects are quite lovely - soft and singing.

To show how different the dialects are, the Bokmal for "how are you", "hvordan har du det?" would be something like "kurleis er det" up North.

 

[Finnegan]

I speak fairly decent Norwegian, though don't write it to any extent. The thing with Norwegian is that there are several dialects. Bokmal is the official language, but there are many dialects as you go further North up the very long coastline. Norway top to bottom is the same distance as Norway to Italy. And because there are so many fjords flowing out into the sea you have to take several ferries to go from one place to another, hence the regional variations due to isolated communities. In an attempt to average out these dialects the government invented "Nynorsk" or "New Norwegian". I don't know how useful this has been since I lived in Oslo, but as far as I know it's a written rather than spoken language. The Northern dialects are quite lovely - soft and singing.

To show how different the dialects are, the Bokmal for "how are you", "hvordan har du det?" would be something like "kurleis er det" up North.

A similar situation to the Hebrides. There was never a standard Gaelic so there is quite a lot of differences in dialect between the different islands.

 

[Finnegan]

I like the mountain names in Scots Gaelic. Buachaille Etive Mor. The Great Shepherd of Etive. Next to it, B.E Beag. The Little Shepherd of Etive.

Gaelic was once spoken in the south west of Scotland but Gallovidian Gaelic became extinct around 400 years ago, in comparison to parts of the Highland Gaeltacht where Gaelic was still widely spoken well into the 20th century. The anglicised ‘Galloway’ is from the Gaelic Gall-Ghàidhealaibh, which translates as ‘Land of the Stranger Gael.’ I think this was because the dialect was quite unique and differs from Ulster Gaelic spoken just a few miles across the North Channel.

 

[les24preludes]

A similar situation to the Hebrides. There was never a standard Gaelic so there is quite a lot of differences in dialect between the different islands.

There must be a lot of Norwegian place names in Scotland - there are certainly quite a few in Wales.

Example - Haverfordwest might come from "havn fjord vest" meaning the harbour on the West fjord. Wiki has it as "ford used by heifers" but I have my doubts.....

 

[Finnegan]

There must be a lot of Norwegian place names in Scotland - there are certainly quite a few in Wales.

Gaelic absorbed a significant level of Norse words from Vikings who settled and intermarried into what is now modern Ireland and Scotland.

 

[Mike Reed]

There must be a lot of Norwegian place names in Scotland - there are certainly quite a few in Wales.

Example - Haverfordwest might come from "havn fjord vest" meaning the harbour on the West fjord. Wiki has it as "ford used by heifers" but I have my doubts.....

I'll go with Wiki as it's around 7 miles from a coast with no fjords. Loads of heifers though, but not in the town centre, for what it's worth. Not a tourist attraction !!!

 

[RJohan]

but the real give away is the Norwegian word "ikke' meaning "not." So the question "Er det ikke slik?" means "Is it not so?"

How would that come out in Swedish, Please?

Best wishes from George

Let me think... I'm not sure what a Norwegian mean when saying "Er det icke slik?"
There is a Swedish expression for "indeed." "Eller hur.", often used by younger people and with an ironic touch. You can use "Eller hur?" as a question to in the end of a sentence, probably the nearest to "Er det icke slik?" I can think of.

 

[les24preludes]

Let me think... I'm not sure what a Norwegian mean when saying "Er det icke slik?"

I've never heard "Er det ikke slik?". More likely "virkelig" or "ja, det er sant".

 

[Brown Bottle]

No, tea is the new beans. It caught me out as well.

In this case ‘T’ is ‘The Truth’. Daughter #2 will often confirm something you say to her with “ain’t that the T”.

Cheers BB