Peter Harvey, linguist

Young translators

Pupils from across the EU are today (24 November) competing for EU-wide translation prizes in a competition designed to promote the profession among young people in Europe …

eurActiv.com

Not speaking foreign languages

The Lumière brothers screened the first moving pictures. The Los Angeles Times of Dec. 24, 1995 (on the occasion of the centennial of their first public exhibition of films to a paying audience) included this sentence:

The Lumière brothers have a special place in the hearts of the French, who now use the word lumière to mean "light."

Hat-tip to LanguageHat.

Predicting the unforeseeable

What, in the light of these definitions from the COED,

predict
state that (a specified event) will happen in the future.

foresee
be aware of beforehand; predict.

are we to make of this headline in today’s Guardian?

Cumbria floods: Unpredictable but not unforeseeable

From the text of the article

Even at the best of times, it is hard to predict the future. To forecast an unprecedented flood is harder still, and to protect effectively against such a flood hardest of all.

it seems that the Guardian is arguing that, while the occurrence of severe flooding may be unpredictable, it is possible to take precautions that will minimise its effects when it does happen.

Dhivehi

Having apparently maligned the no doubt estimable language of Maldives in a recent post, I am delighted to say that an English-Dhivehi dictionary can be found here.

What language?

The other day I mentioned Google’s problems in identifying languages. Today I found this on my screen:

Foam oia shev zhe rohewó kych, osb ce afír sút ych efee uesc aima. Sicela ce raa he asa lóra iméch seem heri zú, aenih ovea uazk enoia ká juota mescat ysár. Gum osgia sésh iao foso dja bea ehaa tha rer. óch aja boach noimoc bed met, tehic asr. Osrav supun ró wue oath nybá jepán naajú shaf moar. Ucuer asaj toc jíkasc uene izipsas oön, tak uaztó toam? Méczea úmou scá cá ost, jíkasc feou oöw kon aiv uzóz ych asa zasc aesh rig ecz.

What’s that then? Google offered to translate it from Czech, Slovak and Danish before giving up. If it is European it is clearly an odd thing. I can be sure that it is not Basque, Turkish, Hungarian or Finnish, and if it isn’t Finnish it won’t be Estonian for they are closely related. I toyed with the idea of Maltese, Lithuanian or Estonian but was far from convinced. Then I spotted mv in the URL. I wondered about Moldovan but, as I thought, the Moldovan language is identical to Romanian.

A Google search found a list of internet country identifiers and it turns out that mv is the Maldives. Thus it is probably Dhivehi, which Wikipedia tells us is:

an Indo-Aryan language closely related to the Sinhalese language of Sri Lanka. Dhivehi represents the southernmost Indo-Aryan language. Together with Sinhala, Dhivehi represents a special subgroup within the Modern Indo-Aryan languages which is called Insular Indo-Aryan.

The Indo-Aryan languages are in fact a part of the Indo-European family (Wikipedia):

SIL International in a 2005 estimate counted a total of 209 varieties, the largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu, about 540 million), Bengali (about 260 million), Punjabi (about 100 million), Marathi (about 90 million), Gujarati (about 45 million), Nepali (about 40 million), Oriya (about 30 million), Sindhi (about 20 million), Sinhala (about 16 million), Saraiki (about 14 million) and Assamese (about 14 million) with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million. They form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which consists of two other language groups: the Iranian and Nuristani.

It’s all Swedish to Google

The other day I looked at a web page in Spanish. Google put up a message asking if I wanted to have it translated. I said no, it should never translate Spanish. Fair enough.

Today I looked at my StatCounter page. I thought that it was in English, but Google thought that it was in Swedish and asked me if I wanted to have it translated!

Click to enlarge screenshot.

The BBC’s sources

What, if anything, is the meaning of the words ‘sources say’ in this from the BBC:

Sources say there is likely to be an EU summit next week to discuss who will fill the posts of President of the European Council and High Representative for Foreign Affairs.

Does not all journalistic reporting come from sources?