zwäg

The Internet is amazing…

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How to pronounce “zwäg” in Swiss German?

I started using Leo’s English – German dictionary regularly long time ago – in the late 90s. I think it must have been about 1997 or 1998 at my first full-time job after uni. The vocabulary wasn’t as extensive as it is today. And at the time many people questioned and challenged its reputation as a reference. But, working in an IT company, we had unlimited access to the Internet. And Leo’s website was accessible from every workplace, whereas hard copy dictionaries were few and bulky.

I remember lively discussions with a secondary school teacher for German and English. Her main point was that there was too little information on usage and folks studying English as a second language would be confused and misled by the simple list views. I felt that this also applied to most hard copy dictionaries. Regarding usage I – in turn- recommended Oxford’s monolingual Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.

From early on, Leo offered access to a forum where dictionary users could ask questions, make suggestions, improve dictionary entries, clarify usage, etc. And they added links to other language resources. Which indirectly helped me to find a job during the dotcom downturn.

Well, here I am walking to the office in Züri on a fine, sunny morning… just 13 years later… and Leo is helping to sell smartphones:

Related links:
Leo’s history
Online version of Oxford Advanced Learner Dictionary

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Leo

Tobias Kumwenda has started a blog to teach Tumbuka ( via Global Voices):

The mission of this weblog is to teach those people who are not ChiTumbuka speakers located across the world, but have developed passion to learn this language.

A great idea. Keep up the good work!

See also Wikipedia:

The Tumbuka language is a Bantu language which is spoken in parts of Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania.

The language of the Tumbuka people is called chiTumbuka – the ‘chi’ in front of Tumbuka meaning ‘the language of’, similar to ‘ki’ in kiSwahili or ‘se’ in seTswana.

The World Almanac (1998) estimates approximately 2,000,000 Tumbuka speakers exist in the aforementioned three countries.

There are substantial differences between the form of Tumbuka spoken in urban areas (which borrows some words from Chichewa/Nyanja) and the “village” or “deep” Tumbuka spoken in villages. The Rumphi variant is often regarded as the most “linguistically pure”, and is sometimes called “real Tumbuka”.

Disclaimer: Coming from Blantyre, my Tumbuka knowledge is non-existent, except for some vocab overlaps with Chichewa, even though I went to college with lots of northern Malawians.

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Malawi Blog on Learning Tumbuka

In southern Africa (Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, SA) most people are multi-lingual with varying levels of language competency in at least 3 languages.

For example in Malawi, children learn English and Chichewa from the first class onwards. Their mother tongue being Chitumbuka or Chisena or Chilomwe. At secondary school level, nearly all subjects are taught in English.

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Most People Are Multilingual

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double t

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TV documentary

Usually I just skim thru the weekly Duden email newsletter. Not today. Here’s a quote from today’s newsletter regarding the spelling of foreign (usually English) loan words in German:

Neue Rechtschreibung 2006 – Zusammengesetzte Fremdwörter

Zusammengesetzte Fremdwörter werden zusammengeschrieben. Besteht die Zusammensetzung aus Substantiven, kann zur besseren Lesbarkeit ein Bindestrich gesetzt werden:
- Desktoppublishing (auch: Desktop-Publishing)
- Airconditioning (auch: Air-Conditioning)
- Sciencefiction (auch: Science Fiction)
- Midlifecrisis (auch: Midlife-Crisis)

Ist der erste Bestandteil ein Adjektiv, kann zusammengeschrieben werden, wenn die gemeinsame Hauptbetonung auf dem ersten Bestandteil liegt. Andernfalls gilt nur Getrenntschreibung:
- Longdrink oder Long Drink
- Hotspot oder Hot Spot
- Aber nur: High Fidelity, Electronic Commerce, Top Ten

Bei Substantivierungen aus dem Englischen, die auf eine Verbindung aus Verb und Partikel (Adverb) zurückgehen, setzt man gewöhnlich einen Bindestrich; daneben ist auch Zusammenschreibung möglich:
- Black-out (auch: Blackout)
- Count-down (auch: Countdown)
- Kick-off (auch: Kickoff)

Weird. Anyway, who cares about spelling on a Friday evening…

A couple of links that crossed my paths this week:

• Indian Recipes – Chicken Curry
• Study on the number of unpaid parking tickets incurred by UN diplomats
• find code snippets (and passwords!) with Google Code Search

Buon weekend.

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pêle-mêle

17 299 JavaPolians registered

And I started wondering why JavaPolian, why not JavaPolitans?

After all, people living in a metropolis are metropolitans or have metropolitan characteristics.

The same applies for people from Minneapolis.

Maybe the ending for metropolis is different in French or Flemish…
And what about the inhabitants of Atlantis, what are they called?

As you can see, the benefits of a linguistics degree are endless.

More linguistic nit-picking available here.

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About the inhabitants of JavaPolis

Source: Definition of mouse potato – Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

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mouse potato

1. Begin with a story
2. Use short words
3. Write shorter sentences
4. Remove clichés
5. Use bridges or connectors
6. Use concrete examples rather than concepts
7. Pay attention to your verbs

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Writing Copy