There’s a website with over 60 YouTube videos where you can hear as many European languages, spoken by natives. The videos are a mixed bag: new and old, natural and formal speech, traditional songs and raps and so on. The website is in Dutch, but the language names are also given in English.

I read the occasional e-book, but there’s no denying they have a downside. Being invisible spirits in the material world (if I may quote Sting entirely out of context), they easily slip my mind. I forget where they are (in what application), I forget that they’re there at all and I forget that I was reading them or that I can look things up in them.
But I’ve worked out a solution, I’m proud to annouce. Here’s what to do.
1. Print the cover. Open the e-book on your computer, navigate to the cover and take a screenshot of it. On a Mac, Command + Shift + 4 does the trick, on a PC, Alt + PrintScreen should work. Print this.
2. Take a notepad (the good old paper type, not the digital impostor – you still have several, languishing in a drawer) and stick the print in with glue or tape.
3. Leave the notepad open at the right page and let it lie around the house. It will pop up in unexpected places, as books will – mine will –, thus reminding you of its existence.
This works only for books you want to read more or less from cover to cover. Works of reference demand a slightly different approach. I suggest that you buy one or more blank books, write something like ‘e-reference’ and a subject on the spine (‘e-reference – linguistics’, ‘e-reference – kite-flying’), stick the book covers in and add them to your library, putting each one on the relevant shelf. In the case of the Language Lover’s Guide to Europe, to name an arbitrary example, including it in the ‘e-reference – travel’ book seems best.
This is the first lifehack I share with the world. I suspect it means that lifehacking is going out of fashion.

In late March, Google was throwing its weight about by demanding that the Swedish Language Council correct its definition of ogooglebar (‘ungoogleable’). Instead of “unable to be found on the web with the use of a search engine” it should be “unable to be found on the web with the use of the Google search engine”. The wiser Council, loath to spend money on legal battles, didn’t try to prevail, but gave in without a shot fired. Or to be more exact, it turned its guns on its own word list and killed the entry.

These sorts of actions show how Google’s power has gone to its head. They also demonstrate either how little the company knows of linguistics (which is conceivable in spite of Google Translate) or how good they are at getting themselves in the spotlights – after all, the intervention made the news not just in Sweden, but all over Europe.

However, the Swedes have struck back. Not only have they kept using the word ogooglebar – that every first year in linguistics could have predicted – but they have also ridiculed Google by coining a new version of the controversial word, ogogoogoglolebobaror. According to the Swedish source that broke the news, the Academy itself was behind the move, aiming to make the word fly under Google’s radar. Needless to say, that didn’t work. What perhaps does need to be said is that the whole scheme was an April Fools’ prank, not by the Academy, but by Datormagazin, a trade magazine for the IT industry.

Interestingly, the seemingly far-fetched ogogoogoglolebobaror is a word that any Swede who has ever been a child understands immediately, because it is the so called ‘robber language’ translation of ogooglebar. Introduced by Astrid Lindgren, the famous author of children’s books (1907-2002), in her books on Kalle Blomkvist (Bill Bergson in the English translations), it uses simple rules to change any word, no matter in what language. These rules are: double every consonant, and insert an o between the two; leave vowels as is. (Spelling trumps pronunciation, so know becomes koknonowow.)

Ogogoogoglolebobaror. It’s my favourite Swedish word already, better than smörgåsbord or ombudsman. Thank you, Ms Lindgren. And even, willy-nilly, thank you, Google. For your churlishness, which brings out finer qualities in others.

****

Sources: Datormagazin, Wikipedia.

(review of my book Taaltoerisme by Hendrik Spiering; from NRC Handelsblad, 24 November 2012)

The Romansh language has only 35,000 speakers. Yet even they have difficulty understanding one another, because nowhere has the medieval fragmentation of Latin remained in evidence more clearly than in the Swiss valleys. From one valley to the next, people speak differently, and these differences add up fast. ‘I’ is eu in Romansh, but also ja. Until recently, school primers were published in five varieties.

This is just one of many fascinating facts to be found in a lovely book, Linguistic tourism: Facts and stories on 53 European languages. Though it has the cheerful and light-hearted tone typical of many books about language, linguistics writer Gaston Dorren offers an excellent overview of Europe’s languages, focusing on one aspect in each chapter. It’s very educational, and very well done.

Of these languages it is Lithuanian, we learn, whose phonetics has remained most faithful to the original Indo-European. We say ‘four’, the Lithuanians say keturi and, six thousand years ago, the first speakers of what was to become the enormous Indo-European language family said *k^wetwóres. Even their seven grammatical cases are similar to those that have been reconstructed for Indo-European.

The story of Albanian is a real tear-jerker. Not a soul outside Albania was interested in the history of this language except one Norbert Jokl, a German Jew who was killed at the hands of the Nazis. Later, the communist regime in Albania also turned a blind eye to the history of the language, unimpressed that the old documents were largely of a religious nature. Fortunately, another German scholar, Joachim Matzinger, has now taken an interest and is churning out one study after another. As Dorren puts it: the old widow has found a new young lover.

Dorren reports on the madness of Monégasque, a variety of Ligurian, itself an Italian dialect. Though it has only a hundred native speakers left (and even these speak French most of the time), it is a compulsory school subject all over the microstate of Monaco.

He also writes a loving chapter on Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken in parts of the former East Germany. Their language does not get the respect it deserves, the Sorbs feel, because unlike most other Slavic languages, it has articles. Dorren comes to their defence: in the other Slavic languages, ‘semi-articles’ like ‘one’ and ‘this’ are becoming increasingly frequent in colloquial speech. Before long, articles may be all the rage.

In his discussion of Romani, the language of the Roma – which has no less than eight cases – Dorren explains how cases can arise. As it happens, word suffixes begin life as post-noun prepositions (postpositions) before gradually merging with the preceding nouns.

What’s more, the book also has a handy checklist for identifying European languages on paper: A D with a bar across it? Serbo-Croat. An L with the same bar? Polish (or Sorbian). A language with no accents or other diacritics? English. The combination ij? Dutch (though it might be Latvian, too). A double z between vowels? Italian, of course. Ragazzi!

The best chapter is that on Dorren’s mother tongue, Limburgish. As a young child, he thought of Dutch not as a different language, but rather as “a different way of talking”, for he understood people either way. Not until his school days did he grasp that there was a real system to the Dutch language. And it took lessons in foreign languages for him to discover that there was a system to Limburgish, too. A system in which the declension of to go (ich gaon, doe geis) was echoed by to stand (ich staon, doe steis), to cite but one example. “I was amazed by what I found hiding out in my mind – all these things I knew without knowing I knew them!”

Translated with Alison Edwards