Welsh in Wales

Check out this bit in The Economist on the Welsh language in Wales. The first comment is lovely, I think.

More crossword vocabulary

The smallest unit of DNA was the clue. I ended up backing into the word. The dictionary definition includes a little more information, though.

muton: n. The smallest unit of DNA at which a mutation can occur; a nucleotide.

An ostrich-like bird? It ended up as "maa". The definitions I found were not quite consistent with the clue, though. An abbreviation for Master-At-Arms; an ethnolinguistic group in Vietnam; macroaggregated albumin (???); and a common European gull. Unless European gulls are significantly larger than their American cousins, the "ostrich" clue seems a bit off.

Pali's clue was a Sanskrit dialect. More specifically,

a dialect descended from Sanskrit, and like that, a dead language, except when used as the sacred language of the Buddhist religion in Farther India, etc.

Who knew that an echidna was an egg-laying mammal? Not I. Here's a more precise definition:

Either of two nocturnal, burrowing, egg-laying mammals of the genera Tachyglossus and Zaglossus of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea, having a spiny coat, slender snout, and an extensible sticky tongue used for catching insects. Also called spiny anteater.

Muger?

I just read Georgette Heyer's The Spanish Bride, which worked well enough as a military narrative. Heyer's use of Spanish bothered me, mostly because it seemed inconsistent with what she told me (as a reader) about Juana and Harry Smith's daily life. This is one of my pet peeves in books and in movies. If the audience is made aware of the other language but the text remains in English, please be thoughtful about how that other language is conveyed. Scattering Spanish phrases in with English dialogue when you've told me already that they are always speaking Spanish feels fake, forced and awkward to me.

Orthographically speaking, how long has mujer been mujer? Was it muger in the 19th century? Heyer spelled it that way several times in the book, and now I must go find out the history of the spelling and pronunciation of the word.

Expanding my English

Sometimes I despair of being truly fluent in any language, including my native tongue. There are always words, phrases, colloquialisms that are new or old or just different.

Recently discovered words:

kapok, meaning the silky down that invests the seeds of a silk-cotton tree (kapok tree), Ceiba pentandra, of the East Indies, Africa, and tropical America: used for stuffing pillows, life jackets, etc., and for acoustical insulation.

Discovered via the crossword puzzle -- it was spelled by default when I filled in the surrounding words, and I had to look it up to see if it was real.

hustings: (before 1872) the temporary platform on which candidates for the British Parliament stood when nominated and from which they addressed the electors

A character in a novel was standing near the hustings, and I couldn't set the scene in my mind until I learned what that mean.

sador: a stringed Indian instrument.

Another crossword discovery. I wanted to wedge "sitar" in that spot, but the surrounding words didn't make sense if I did so.

Language as culture

Check out this article in The Economist on language as part of culture. I found the example of kitaab vs. sefer (book in Arabic and Hebrew) fascinating, especially with respect to the author's speculation on the divergence of the nouns, given the closeness of the verb "to write" in the two languages (katab/katav).

(originally posted over at LJ)

Pathetic foreign language education

Check out this article from today's WaPo about the pathetic foreign language education available in the DC school district.

I blame NCLB.

Within the article there's a link to a table of all of the foreign language requirements for each state. It indicates that Maryland requires two credits of foreign language or ASL, but that there is no differentiated diploma system. Huh? There were several different "certificates" or tracks when I was in high school -- geared toward college, vocational, and technical education. Everyone had to have some foreign language education (the two year minimum) but for the academic track, three years were required and four years were strongly recommended. Has this program been abolished?