Seriously, this is on request. Yeah, I like language facts, too. That’s why I have a huge collection of websites that have such content.

Sometimes, the world gets so small that you think you and your neighborhood is the only place in the world. However, as long as we enjoy different languages and cultures, we just go beyond this easily.

I just wanna say there is a huge world out there to discover!

And, let’s go back to our topic- well, language facts.

Here, more… 

There are only 4 words in the English language which end in “duos”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

There are at least two words in the English language that use all of the vowels, in the correct order, and end in the letter Y: abstemiously & facetiously.

There are 41,806 different spoken languages in the world today.

The word “queue” is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.

The word “honcho” comes from a Japanese word meaning “squad leader” and first came into usage in the English language during the American occupation of Japan following World War II.

The shortest word in the English language with all its letters in alphabetical order is the word “almost.”

The Philippines has more than 1,000 regional dialects and two official languages.

The only MLB team to have both its city’s name and its team name in a foreign language is the San Diego Padres.

The longest word in the Finnish language, that isn’t a compound word, is ‘epaejaerjestelmaellistyttaemaettoemyydellaensaekaeaen’. In English it means ‘even with their lack of ability to disorganize’.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters ispneumonoultra-microscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

Source: http://www.muskurahat.us/amazing-facts/language-facts-1.asp

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This is the first part… I hope you enjoy all these funny language facts!

According to Illinois state law, it is illegal to speak English. The officially recognized language is “American.”

Widow is the only female form in the English language that is shorter than its corresponding male term (widower).

Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable contains one of the longest sentences in the French language 823 words without a period.

There is only ONE word in the English language with THREE CONSECUTIVE SETS OF DOUBLE LETTERS…. Bookkeeper

There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times: “indivisibility.”

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, “therein”: the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: “abstemious” and “facetious.”

There are thirteen languages spoken by more than 100 million people. They are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French, Japanese, German, and Urdu.

There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most widely spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are 885,000,000 people in China that speak that language.

There are only two sequences of four consecutive letters that can be found in the English language: “rstu” and “mnop.” Examples of each are understudy and gynophobia.

Source: http://www.muskurahat.us/amazing-facts/language-facts-1.asp

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So, if you want to keep up with your deadlines, you just have to make some rules for themselves. Whenever I get a translation, I use this tactic: “I will not check other websites until I finish 5 pages.” I’m sure you all have such rules and it will be useful if you share them with us.

Let’s see another alternatives…

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But it doesn’t work like that for people who are interested in foreign languages. Instead of listening to an alien speech, we try to understand some certain patterns, we give attention to syllable stresses, we try to find some lexical similarities between our own language and this “alien speech”.

So, I discovered an interesting website showing the similarities between languages. It does not go in detail and it only shows the percetages of the similarities in certain categories, but I’m sure you’ll want to check it up.

First, you select the language that you want to compare to other languages:

Than you can see the similarities a certain language shares with others.

Cactuses () indicate the relative difficulty of learning this language if you already speak Italian. The fewer cactuses/cacti, the easier.

Here is the website: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/similarities/index.html

Enjoy!

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I literally had no idea about Madagascar- except for the animation movie.

So last week, I’ve heard a lot in a conversation about Madagascar so I decided to search about the country and the languages spoken. Let’s see what I’ve found interesting about Malagasy!

Malagasy  is an Austronesian language and the national language of Madagascar.

According to Roger Blench (2010), the earliest form of language spoken on Madagascar could have had some non-Austronesian substrata. Malagasy shares much of its basic vocabulary with the Ma’anyan language, a language from the region of the Barito River in southern Borneo. This indicates that Madagascar was first settled by Austronesian people from Maritime Southeast Asia who had passed through Borneo.

There are two principal dialects of Malagasy, eastern, including Merina, and western, including Sakalava, with the isogloss running down the spine of the island, the south being western, and the central plateau and much of the north (apart from the very tip) being eastern.

Malagasy has been written using the Latin script since 1823, before which the Arabic Ajami script, or Sorabe (“large writings”) as it is known in Madagascar, was used for astrological and magical texts.

The alphabet consists of 21 letters: a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, v, y, z.

Diacritics are not obligatory in standard Malagasy.

Malagasy has a verb–object–subject word order:

Mamaky ny boky ny mpianatra
(reads book the student)
“The student is reading the book”

Malagasy has no grammatical gender, and nouns do not inflect for number.

Now let’s learn some words in Malagasy!

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It is amazing to see that we are getting globalized day by day. When something happens at the other end of the world, we hear it immediately through social media. While we have such a high level of communication, it is inevitable for languages to evolve.

One of my friends from France shared an interesting post last week. The post says, French borrowed many words from English. The interesting part is that French does not take them as they are, but in French. I know it sounds confusing but when you see the examples, you will get what I’m talking about:

Subway salmon
« I am late. There were subway salmons » : Je suis en retard et il y avait des « saumons de métro ».

Whale tail
« Look at this great whale tail » : Regarde cette superbe queue de baleine

Sofalize
« Why socialise when you can just stay home and sofalize ? » : Pourquoi socialiser quand vous pouvez rester à la maison et communiquer de votre sofa ?

Parade Maker
« Could the parade maker go faster ? » : Est-ce que l’organisateur de la parade pourrait aller plus vite ?

Hiberdating
« Hiberdating has its benefits in the short run, but it should not last more than one month » : Hiberner en couple a des avantages à court terme mais ne devrait pas durer plus d’un moins.

Mall feet
« Honey, let’s go home, I have had mall feet since two hours » : Chérie, rentrons, j’ai des pieds de supermarché depuis deux heures.

A bromance
« Jake has spoken publicly about his bromance with Paul » : Jake a parlé publiquement de son amitié très forte avec Paul.

Defriend
« I don’t know this guy. I’m defriending him » : Je ne connais pas ce gars. Je le supprime de ma liste d’amis.

Lego hair
« Look at that ugly guy with the Lego hair » : Regarde ce mec moche avec sa coupe Lego.

For more details and the source, please visit the website itself. (It is French though ) http://www.topito.com/top-mots-anglais-seraient-utiles

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To be honest, I had never heard of that language before- even in my linguistic courses! Well, that means, we will discover it together!

Let’s find out what kind of language Igbo is!

- Igbo is a native language of the Igbo people, an ethnic group primarily located in southeastern Nigeria. There are approximately 20 million speakers that are mostly in Nigeria and are primarily of Igbo descent.

- Igbo, like many other West African languages, has borrowed words from European languages, mainly English. Example loanwords include the Igbo word for blue [blu] and operator [opareto].

- Igbo has an extremely limited number of adjectives—just eight: ukwu ’big’, nta ’small’; oji ’dark’, ọcha ’light’; ọhụrụ ’new’, ochie‘old’; ọma ’good’; ọjọọ ’bad’.

- Words may also take on multiple meanings. Take for example the word akwụkwọ. Akwụkwọ originally means “leaf” (as on a tree), but during and after the colonization period, akwụkwọ also came to be linked to “paper,” “book,” “school,” and “education”, to become respectively akwụkwọ édémédé, akwụkwọ ọgụgụ, ụlọ akwụkwọ, mmụta akwụkwọ. This is because printed paper can be first linked to an organic leaf, and then the paper to a book, the book to a school, and so on.

-Proverbs and idiomatic (ilu in Igbo) expressions are highly valued by the Igbo people and proficiency in the language means knowing how to intersperse speech with a good dose of proverbs.

- Igbo is a tonal language with two distinctive tones, high and low.

- The language features vowel harmony with two sets of oral vowels.

- The Igbo people have long used Nsibidi ideograms, invented by the neighboring Ekoi people, for basic written communication.

-  The current Önwu (/oŋwu/) alphabet, a compromise between the older Lepsius alphabet and a newer alphabet advocated by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC), was agreed to in 1962.

Igbo had a written script known Nsibidi:

If we have natives here, please share more information with us!

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To keep up with the latest English, one should not only watch movies and TV series, also study them. I guess they are the best source for those who do not have the chance to visit England or US.

I’m sure each and every language is evolving and changing over time… Now, let’s look at some words that have recently been added to Oxford Dictionary:

Maybe, most of the people is just interested in major languages which are English, French, German, Chinese etc. However, a translator is interested in ALL the languages no matter how many people speak it- or no matter if it is already dead or not.

Here comes another language in which you will be interested. I hope there are native speakers of this language among us and I hope they can give more information about it.  

The Fula or Fulani language is a language of West Africa. It belongs to the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family. It is spoken as a first language by the Fula or Fulani people from Senegambia and Guinea to Cameroonand Sudan.

Fulani is an official language in Senegal (Pulaar) and Nigeria (Fulfulde), an official regional language in Guinea (Pular), where many speakers are monolingual, and a national language of Mali (Maasina) and Niger (Fulfulde).

There are several names applied to the language, just as there are to the Fula people. They call their language Pulaar or Pular in the western dialects and Fulfulde in the central and eastern dialects.

It uses suffixes (sometimes inaccurately called infixes, as they come between the root and the inflectional ending) to modify meaning.

There are about 25 noun classes (the number may vary slightly in different dialects). Each noun class has a singular and plural form, and each form has a corresponding article, nominative pronoun, accusative/dative pronoun, demonstrative adjective and adjective agreement pattern.

This is written in Fula language. It means:

One evening a judge found in a book that everyone who had a little head and a long beard was a fool. Now the judge had a little head and a long beard, so he said to himself, “I cannot increase the size of my head, but I will shorten my beard.” He hunted for the scissors, but could not find them. Without further ado he took half of his beard in his hand and put the other half into the candle and burnt it. When the flame reached his hand he let go, and all the beard was burned. Thus the judge felt ashamed, for he had proved the truth of what was written in the book.

P.S. Most of the information is taken from Wikipedia. I’ve just summarize the certain parts and have not included all the information there.

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Thanks to one of my friends, I come across with a perfect mobile application for language lovers: Duolingo!

Its web site is quite colorful and funny. It makes you practice a language and it turns this process into a game…

You have your own skill tree and you can compete with your friends as you complete new missions!

It also has its iPhone application. Wherever you go, you can continue gaining new skills and beat your friends out.

Do you want to try? You can visit the website here: http://duolingo.com/

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