Parrot Time - Issue 3 - May / June 2013

Parrot TimeThe Thinking of Speaking Issue #3 May / June 201 3

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BBeenn jjaammiinn WWhhoorrffaanndd tthhee RReellaattii vvii ttyyooff LLaanngguuaaggee

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LLooookk bbeeyyoonnddwwhhaatt yyoouu kknnooww

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Contents

Parrot Time | Issue #3 | May / June 2013 3

06 The Voynich Manuscript - Cryptic CodexThis medieval book contains bizarre illustrations and amysterious script which no one has been able to translate. Is ita fantastical look at the world around us, or some bizarre hoax?

20 At the Cinema - Lost in Translation

1 4 Benjamin Whorf - Relativity of LanguageWhorf took a very unconventional approach to studying lin-guistics, both in the manner in which he started and the viewshe took. His work extended into several fields and he pursuedeverything with a fierce passion for answers to the world.

22 Languages in Peril - The Polish Connection

25 Word on the Streets - Romanian Poets

31 Where Are You?

40 Revisited - Words From National CharacterThere are many words that we have adopted into Englishregarding other people's of the world. Sadly, these are rarelytruly reflective of their national character.

Parrot TimeParrot Time is a magazine

covering language, linguisticsand culture of the world around

us.

It is published by ScriveremoPublishing, a division of

Parleremo, the language learningcommunity.

Join Parleremo today. Learn alanguage, make friends, have fun.

39 A Language DreamA guest writer tells us about a language dream he had onenight.

Departments

Features

05 Letter From The Editor

Editor: Erik ZidoweckiEmail: [email protected]

Published by Scriveremo Publish-ing, a division of Parleremo.This issue is available online fromhttp://www.parrottime.com

The editor reserves the right toedit all material submitted. Viewsexpressed in Parrot Time are notnecessarily the official views ofParleremo. All rights of reproduc-tion, translation and adaptation re-served for all countries, exceptwhere noted otherwise. All copy-right material posted in the public-ation retains all its rights from theoriginal owner. Parrot Time, Par-leremo, officers and administra-tion accept no responsibilitycollectively or individually for theservice of agencies or persons ad-vertised or announced in thepages of this publication.

Cover: Dovecote at Manoird'Ango, near Dieppe, France.A dovecote is a structure in-tended to house pigeons ordoves. The Manoir d’Ango wasbuilt in the 1500s by JehanAngo and is a work of Italianarchitects and artists.

49 Sections - Language Exchange

34 Celebrations - Holi

44 Language Learning Methods - ClassesThe third in our series of articles about language learningmethods is about the oldest and most widely accepted: classes.

¿¿HHaabbllaa uusstteedd eessppaaññooll??

PPaarrlleerreemmoo

LLeeaarrnnaallaanngguuaaggee,,MMaakkeeffrriieennddss,,HHaavveeffuunn!!

wwwwww..ppaarrll eerreemmoo..oorrgg

Letter From The Editor


IIf you are reading this magazine, you probably have some interest inlanguages. You might be fascinated by the sounds of people speakingin a language that is unfamiliar to you. You might be intrigued by thedifferent ways languages use grammar and phonology. It might bethe mystery of how languages work and evolve that draws you. Itmight even be the way a language presents you with a path to anoth-er culture. I was personally drawn to languages by seeing the differ-ent writing systems, specifically Cyrillic and Mayan. To see anothermeans of communications so completely foreign to what I knew was atrue wonderment.

Whatever the reason, you have probably then also found yourself at aloss of trying to explain this obsession to others. As it is with manysubjects, if a person isn’t “into it”, it’s hard to explain the attraction.Over the years, I have heard many language lovers refer to them-selves as “freaks”, because that is how they felt among their non-communication obsessed associates. How many times have you hadto try to explain why you want to study language X when the only re-sponse is the question of what is wrong with your native language.Isn’t that good enough for you?

Some people study languages for very practical purposes. They may wish to pursue a career whichdeals with foreigners, in which knowing a second or third language would be a great asset. Somepeople start studying a language because of an interest in something cultural, like understanding Ja-panese Anime or watching Bollywood movies without subtitles. Some may even start it because theyhave met or want to meet a person they wish to be involved with romantically.

As an American, my first formal language training began in High School (age 15-18) . We were expectedto study a language, but the small school only offered two options: Latin or French. By now, I wasalready intrigued by different alphabets, but neither of these two languages really gave me that. I hadstarted learning the Greek alphabet on my own already, so I decided to go with another ancient lan-guage. Few students chose Latin, so our classes were literally composed of just a handful of students.Despite this small turnout, our Latin teacher was always full of energy for the subject and made everyclass interesting. If it wasn’t for him, I probably would have done as most people do when forced totake a language course: forgotten it as soon as they could and never touch it again.

I also started teaching myself Russian and was very happy to find another student who was doing thesame. We would spend our study halls (class time in which we were just supposed to study anything)practising what we learned with each other. It was during this time one day when we were reciting thealphabet that we commented on the way just saying the letters sounded like new words. It was fromthis interchange that was born the nick I use online now: Abavagada.

We didn’t get very far in our studies of Russian, and I’m afraid I have forgotten most of the Latin Ilearned (it’s hard to find ways to apply Latin on a daily basis) , but it was the start that keeps me stillfascinated with languages to this day.

What got you interested in languages, and where do you hope to go with them? I hope you wear yourtitle of “language freak”, whether it’s self-proclaimed or imposed on you by others, with pride. Youhave most likely earned it!

Freaking Out

Erik ZidoweckiERIK ZIDOWECKIEDITOR IN CHIEF

Botanical drawings, astrologicalfigures, nude women and anuntranslatable text in an unknownlanguage make up one of the oddestdocuments history has ever uncovered.It is known as the Voynich Manuscript,but where it came from, who wrote itand why are questions that have yet tobe answered.

The Voynich Manuscript

Cryptic Codex

The Voynich Manuscript - Cryptic Codex


The exact starting place andtime of this story are not com-pletely known, so we will beginin Frascati, near Rome, in 1912.There was the Villa Mondragone.It was built in 1573, and servedas a temporary residence fornobles and popes for a few cen-turies before being sold to Jesuitpriests in 1865. The Jesuitsturned it into a college, the No-bile Collegio Mondragone, foryoung aristocrats. In 1912, thecollege found itself in need ofmoney and decided to sell, verydiscreetly, some of the objects ithad collected over the centuries.

An American antique bookdealer and collector, Wilfrid M.Voynich, took an interest andpurchased a collection of thirtyancient manuscripts from thepriests. Among them was a veryodd manuscript, containing textin a language that Voynich hadnever seen before, as well as nu-merous coloured drawings. Thiscurious document came to beknown as the VoynichManuscript.

ContentsVoynich could make little senseof the manuscript, so he madecopies and hadthem sent tovarious expertsof the time, in-cluding manywell knowncryptologists andscholars. Theyalso could un-derstand verylittle of it, butthey did learn a few things aboutit.

First of all, from a piece ofpaper which was once attachedto it, they were able to determinethat the manuscript was oncepart of the private library of Rev-erend Petrus Beckx S.J. , a Bel-gian Jesuit, elected 22ndSuperior-General of the Societyof Jesus. There is no evidence,however, that he was the author.

The experts believe it isEuropean and perhaps writtenbetween the 15th and 17th cen-turies.

As to the writing, it has beendetermined to be an alphabeticscript, with somewhere betweennineteen to twenty-eight letters,but they don’t show any rela-tionship to any English orEuropean letter system. The textis written smoothly, indicatingthe author understood what hewas writing, and there doesn’tappear to be any corrections.There is, however, some evid-ence that possibly two differentlanguages, if that is indeed whatthey are, were used and that itwas written by more than oneperson. The text of themanuscript is clearly writtenfrom left to right, as can be seenbecause there is a slightlyragged right margin and some ofthe longer sections are brokeninto paragraphs with “bullets”on the left margin.

But the text isn’t the onlyodd part of the manuscript. It isfull of hand-drawn images, manycoloured, of a variety things.Some are unidentified plants,which might relate to what seemto be herbal recipes or botanicalclassifications. There are myster-ious charts which seem to showastronomical objects as seenthrough a telescope as well assome of live cells as seenthrough a microscope. Thestranger drawings involve naked

women, sometimes in bathtubsthat are connected by elaborateplumbing, sometimes in chartswhich contain strange zodiacalsigns.

The physical dimensions ofthe manuscript are smaller thannormal modern book sizes, beingjust around seven by ten inches(18 x 25cms), but it is ratherthick. It contains just over 240pages, but is estimated to haveoriginally contained 272 pages,as shown by gaps in the pagenumbering. Just 33 of thosepages contain only text, the restcontain drawings or a combina-tion of both text and drawings.

Possible OriginsThe origins of the VoynichManuscript are confusing andunverified. The earliest dateanyone can place on it is 1586.It is believed that EmperorRudolph II, the Holy RomanEmperor, purchased the strangebook from a man who visitedRudolph’s court. The Emperorwas a lover of art and the occult,and so this book of strange writ-ing and imageswould have im-mediately inter-ested him. Theman bearing themanuscriptpresented it witha letter whichstated that itwas the work ofthe Englishman

Wilfrid Voynich

Emperor Rudolph II,the Holy Roman

Emperor

Pages of the Voynich Manuscript, with foldout, showing plants and the strange text


8 Parrot Time | Issue #3 | May / June 2013

Roger Bacon, a thirteenth cen-tury English philosopher andFranciscan friar. Rudolph paidsix hundred gold ducats for it,which was an amazing amountof money at that time to pay foranything as simple as an un-known manuscript.

The Emperor collected manythings and among them were amenagerie of exotic animals andbotanical gardens, which werehoused at Prague Castle. Heeven had to have a northernwing added to contain his grow-ing collections. Jakub Hořčickýbecame administrator of theproperties of the St. George’sConvent in the Prague Castle in1606. He was also the personaldoctor of Emperor Rudolf II whogranted him the title ’de Te-penecz’. At some point, Jakubhandled the manuscript, evensigning his name at the bottom of the first page. This was faintly

seen, as it had been erased, butwas revealed with the help ofchemicals. Unfortunately,Voynich tried to find more suchhidden writings on that page bychemical treatment which onlysucceeded in erasing Jakub’sname. It can only now be seenon photocopies of the document.It is not known why Jakubwould have signed it.

Sometime after this, themanuscript became property ofGeorg Baresch, a European al-chemist and antique collectorfrom Prague. He was also curi-ous and puzzled about themanuscript and wanted to findsomeone who might be able tohelp him understand it. Heheard of a Jesuit scholar from

the Collegio Romano, Athanasi-us Kircher, who had published aCoptic dictionary and worked ondeciphering Egyptian hiero-glyphs, so Baresch sent a copyof some script to him in 1637.After receiving no reply, he sentanother letter in 1639, present-ing his view that the manuscriptrepresented ’Egyptian science’.

Kircher did not have anyanswers, but was interested inacquiring the book. However,Baresch refused to give it up,and it was only after Baresch’sdeath in 1662 that more actionwas taken. The manuscript wasinherited by Baresch’s friend,Jan Marek Marci (JohannesMarcus Marci) , who was thenthe rector of Charles Universityin Prague. He knew of Baresch’s

The Letter

Here is the contents of the cover letter that Johannes Marcus Marci sentalong with the Voynich Manuscript to Athanasius Kircher in 1666.

REVEREND AND DISTINGUISHED SIR, FATHER IN CHRIST:

This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I destined for you,my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into my possession, for Iwas convinced it could be read by no one except yourself. The formerowner of this book asked your opinion by letter, copying and sendingyou a portion of the book from which he believed you would be able toread the remainder, but he at that time refused to send the book itself.To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil, as is apparent fromattempts of his which I send you herewith, and he relinquished hopeonly with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as theseobey no one but their master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as itis and long overdue though it be, of my affection for you, and burstthrough its bars, if there are any, with your wonted success. Dr.Raphael, tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand Ill, then King ofBohemia, told me the said book had belonged to the Emperor Rudolphand that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book 600ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman. Onthis point I suspend judgment; it is your place to define for us whatview we should take thereon, to whose favor and kindness Iunreservedly commit myself and remain,

At the command of your Reverence,JOANNES MARCUS MARCI,of Cronland.PRAGUE, 19th August, 1666

Castle of Prague, where the manuscript waskept after the Emperor bought it

Page of the manuscript showing nudewomen bathing in bathtubs connected by

strange plumbing



letters to Kircher and sent themanuscript, along with a coverletter explaining its origins, toKircher in 1666. It is from thisletter that we know the previoushistory of the manuscript.

After that, nothing is knownof what happened to it during aspan over over two hundredyears. Most likely, it was keptwith the rest of Kircher’s corres-pondences in the library of theCollegio Romano , now thePontifical Gregorian University.In 1870, the troops of Victor Em-manuel II of Italy captured thecity and annexed the PapalStates. The new Italian govern-ment began confiscating manyproperties of the the Church,and those included the Collegiolibrary. Many books were quicklytransferred to personal librariesbefore this happened, so as toavoid being confiscated. This isprobably how it finally came toPetrus Beckx. His “private” lib-rary was later moved to the VillaMondragone.

Theories of AuthorshipWhile the origins of themanuscript aren’t completelyclear, even less is known aboutthe person or persons that wroteit. A number of suggestions havebeen given and argued about.

According to the letter fromMarci to Kircher, the manuscriptwas originally presented to Em-peror Rudolph with a cover letterexplaining that the documentwas written by Roger Bacon.Voynich believed that was thetruth, and tried for many yearsto confirm it. However, otherscholars that studied both themanuscript and Bacon’s workhave said it is notpossible.

If the docu-ment had beenwritten by Bacon,then it is as-sumed that themysterious manwho presented

Rudolph with it would have beenJohn Dee, who was known tohave a large collection of Bacon’sworks. Dee was a mathematicianand astrologer at the court ofQueen Elizabeth I, and, with hisassistant Edward Kelley, lived inBohemia for several years, hop-ing to sell their services toRudolph. This connection hasbeen discounted because Deekept highly accurate diaries ofall his sales and the manuscriptis never mentioned in them.Some speculate that Dee himselfmay have written it and attrib-uted it to Bacon, in the hopes ofselling it for a high price.

Still going with the Bacon-Dee connection, some suspectKelley might have written it. Kel-ley was a bit eccentric, claimingthat he could turn copper intogold, which is an alchemist’s

dream. He also claimed to haveconversations with angels usinga crystal ball, which Dee recor-ded. He even had a language theangel’s used which becamecalled Enochian. It is believedthat Kelley fabricated theseclaims in order to fool others, in-cluding Dee, and so he may havecreated the Voynich Manuscriptto swindle the Emperor as well.The problem with this theory isthat it rests on Dee being theone who delivered themanuscript, claiming that Baconwrote it, and that theory is de-pendent on Bacon being the au-thor. Note too that the entirestory of the man selling Rudolphthe manuscript is from the letterMarci sent Kircher, and it is un-known how Marci obtained thisknowledge.

Another suggestion is that

Jakub Hořčický (Jakub de Te-penecz) could be the author. Notonly was his signature found onthe first page, but he was also aspecialist in herbal medicine,which the manuscript seemed tomake many references to.However, the writing in themanuscript does not match thatof Jakub’s signature. It is pos-sible that he was the author andthat the signature itself was ad-ded by a later owner who hadalso speculated that Jakub wasthe author. It has also been sug-gested that the signature wasadded by Voynich in order togive more credence to the RogerBacon theory.

Even Voynich himself hasbeen suspected numerous timesof creating the the manuscript.He was an antique book dealer,and it is hypothesized that hehad the knowledge to fabricate afake, for an unknown book byRoger Bacon would have beenvery valuable. Experts havedated the manuscript, andfound it to be much older,however, and it can’t explain theletters by both Baresch andMarci to Kircher.

At this point, the ideas be-comes more conspiratorial.Marci and Kircher had beenfriends for 27 years after meet-ing at the Charles University toRome in 1638 and had ex-Roger Bacon

Rudolph paid six hundredgold ducats for it, whichwas an amazing amount ofmoney at that time to payfor anything as simple asan unknown manuscript.

Page showing many colourful plants



changed letters many times.Marci had been part of astruggle by the secular side ofthe University to keep it fromjoining their rival, the Clem-entinum college in Prague. Thetwo universities did merge,however, in 1654, and fell underJesuit control. It has beenthought that perhaps Marci heldsome further animosity towardthe Jesuits and created both themanuscript and Baresch’s let-ters, sending them to Kircher, inthe hopes of discrediting himbecause he was a major figureamong the Jesuits.

This idea is not completelyunprecedented. A similar trickhad already been played onKircher by orientalist AndreasMueller who has once sent himan unintelligible manuscript,claiming it came from Egypt.Mueller wanted Kircher to trans-late it, and supposedly, Kircherprovided him with a translation.

It is also interesting to notethat the only proof that GeorgBaresch even existed is the let-ters from he and Marci. Thereisn’t even a proof of ownership ofa house in Prague to Baresch,although it is claimed he livedthere. Also, there is no moreknown correspondences betweenKircher and Marci after the cover

letter and manuscript were sentto Kircher. But there is no proofthat Marci had any such resent-ment or hostility toward the Je-suits. He was a devout Catholichimself and had studied to be-come a Jesuit, even being gran-ted an honorary membership intheir Order shortly before hisdeath.

TranslatingWhen Voynich submitted themanuscript to experts for trans-lations, many expert cryptolo-gists thought it would be simpledecode. Indeed, it appeared to bewritten in some kind of validlanguage. The text has almosttwo-thousand glyphs, written

Enochian

Enochian is the name of the angel’s language asrecorded in the journals of John Dee and hisassistant Edward Kelley, two alchemist of 16thcentury England. The name comes from“Enoch”, the Biblical father of Methuselah, who,according to legend, had been taken on a tourof Heaven by angels, which he then wrote aboutin a book.

Kelley claimed to talk to the angels using acrystal ball and he dictated to Dee what theytold him. Some scholars of magic believe it to be a constructedlanguage that can be used in the working of magic. However,scholars of constructed languages believe it to be just a poor im-itation of an ancient language using basic English grammar.

The journals of these two men contain a great deal written in thelanguage, with only a little of it having English translations.Those who have studied Enochian do not consider it to have anextraordinary features. The journals also never describe the lan-guage as “Enochian”. Instead, they contain references like “An-gelical”, the “Celestial Speech”, the “Language of Angels”, and afew others. The term “Enochian” was assigned to it because ofDee’s own assertion that Enoch had been the last previous hu-man to know the language.

Edward Kelley

Page showing women and astrologicalsymbols



with one or two strokes, but theyare not all distinct, and an es-timated thirty distinct glyphscould account for most of thetext. Groups of these glyphs,separated by larger gaps thanthose between each glyphs, givethe text flow. Put simply, thedocument clearly has letters andwords. Some of the words occurmore frequently than others,such as articles and conjunc-tions would. These words, ap-proximately 35000, are ofvarying lengths and seem to fol-low some phonetic or ortho-graphic laws, such as someletters must appear in eachword, like vowels. Also, some let-ters never follow others andsome may be doubled while oth-ers never are. These traits are allsimilar to most modern knownlanguages and appear to followZipf’s laws of statistical frequen-cies in languages. There are evenwords that appear on mostpages as well as some wordsthat only appear in certain sec-tions, suggesting some kind ofvocabulary specialization. In theherbal section, some words onlyappear only as the first word onthe page, suggesting that is thename of the plant being de-scribed.

However, there are a num-ber of orthographic oddities aswell. Almost no words are morethan ten letters. Similar to Arab-ic, some letters only ever occurat the beginning of a word, somealways in the middle, and some

only at the end. This is notfound in most European lan-guages however. Some of thewords are more repetitious aswell, with a few appearing up tothree times in a row. Evenodder, some words that are onlydifferent by one letter repeatmore often than normal. Despitethese apparent clues, themanuscript has not been suc-cessfully translated or evenlinked to any other known lan-guage.

That doesn’t mean that no

progress has been made. In thelate 20th century, Prescott Cur-rier made some very interestingstatistical discoveries which hepresented in New Research on

the Voynich Manuscript: Pro-

ceedings ofa Seminar in 1978.Among these, he showed thatthe manuscript is actually com-posed of two “languages”. Hecalled these simply A and B(sometimes referred to now asVoynich A and Voynich B). Eachpage was written in one of theselanguages, and the pages of one

Zipf's Laws

Zipf's law, named after the American linguist George KingsleyZipf who first proposed it, is an empirical statistical conceptused to describe some aspects of natural language. Basically, itstates that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional toits rank in the frequency table. In simple terms, the most fre-quent word will occur approximately twice as often as thesecond most frequent word, three times as often as the thirdmost frequent word, etc. The law seems to hold true for mostlanguages.

Sample of the text



were grouped together with otherpages containing the same lan-guage. This differed only in theherbal section. He also statedthat the writing seems to havebeen made by more than oneperson, perhaps even anywherebetween five and eight with dis-tinct handwritings being used.He concluded that at least twopeople had written it.

Another possibility is thatthe manuscript is written in anartificial, or constructed, lan-guage. Two prominent cryptolo-gists who were studying it, W.Friedman and J. Tiltman, bothcame to this idea independently.Although these became popularin the later part of the 20th cen-tury, there is only one knownconstructed language before thetime of the Voynich manuscript,and that was was the “Lingua Ig-nota”, created by Hildegarde ofBingen in the 12th century.

Still, many people believethat the manuscript is a hoax,created by one of the possibleauthors mentioned before fortheir own reasons. If Currier iscorrect about the idea of severalpeople writing it, then the likeli-hood of it being a hoax is re-

duced, for it would require morepeople to be used in the decep-tion. Another problem with thehoax theory relates to Zipf’slaws. It is doubtful that anyonecould have accidentally createda text that conformed to Zipf’slaws, which were not themselvespostulated until 1935. A con-structed language howeverwould follow those laws.

TodayPeople around the globe contin-ue to attempt to decipher themysterious Voynich Manuscript.Many theories and ideas are be-ing exchanged, and a few haveeven claimed to have cracked thecode. Edith Sherwood claimsthat the names of the plants areItalian anagramswritten in anelaborate script,and has presen-ted her transla-tions for those.Dana Scott hasalso come up withhis own analysisof the botanicalimages and listedwhat he believesthe plants to be.

However, the names these twopeople have proposed for eachplant do not match.

A Finnish businessman,Viekko Latvala, claims that hehas decoded the manuscript,saying it can only be translatedby someone with a “direct line toGod”. He also claims to be onesuch person. Latvala says thestrange writing is actually “sonicwaves and vocal syllables”, andwhile the manuscript containsdescriptions of plants, astro-nomy and astrology, it also con-tains prophecies. The text, hesays, is a mix of Spanish, Itali-an, and other languages, usedby the author because he had nolanguage to write the direct wordof God. This sounds a bit likeKelley’s “language of the angels”.Latvala even provides a transla-tion of some parts, but there isno evidence that these are valid.

There are many other theor-ies surrounding the manuscriptregarding its origins, authorship,contents and translations. Itdoesn’t appear as though we willever know the truth behind it,however, and it is more thanlikely that it will remain anotherof history’s mysterious oddities.PT

Pages with odd drawings and text written correctly, sideways, and upside-down

Villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome,where the manuscript was kept untilVoynich purchased it in 1912

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Benjamin Whorf was a man with many in-

terests, including botany, astrology, ciphers,

Mexican history, Mayan Archaeology, photo-

graphy and linguistics. His studies of American

Indian languages helped him develop a theory

of "linguistic relatively" which was eventually

combined with Edward Sapir's own

work to form what is

commonly known as

the Sapir-Whorf

hypothesis.

Benjamin Whorf

RReellaattiivviittyy ooff LLaanngguuaaggee

Benjamin Whorf - Relativity of Language


Whorftook a very unconventional ap-proach to studying linguistics, both inthe manner in which he started andthe views he took. His work extendedinto several fields and he pursuedeverything with a fierce passion for in-tellectual answers to the world.

His LifeBenjamin Lee Whorf was born on April 24,1897, in Winthrop, Massachusetts, theeldest of three sons of Harry and SarahLee Whorf. He graduated from WinthropHigh School in 1914 and then received aB.S. in Chemical Engineering from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in1918. After college, Whorf joined the Hart-ford Fire Insurance Company as a traineein fire prevention engineering. He settledin Hartford and in 1920, he married CeliaInez Peckham. Together, they had threechildren: Raymond, Robert and Celia.

Whorf got his interest in linguists in arather unique way. Whorf was religiousand while his family was Methodist, it isnot quite known what his personal beliefswere. He seems to have been interested inTheosophy, a nonsectarian organizationwhich is based on Buddhist and Hinduteachings, promoting the view of the worldas an interconnected whole.

During the time, the conflict betweenscience and religion was a major issueand Whorf thought that language mighthold a key to resolving it. He became fas-cinated by the seemingly powerful sig-nificance of the letters of the Hebrewalphabet. Around 1924, he started analyz-ing Biblical texts in an effort to find hid-den meanings. He started a semantic andgrammatical analysis of Biblical Hebrew.He began to search in other languagessuch as Mayan for special meanings inthe glyphs and letters, and from there be-came interested in Native American lan-guages and learned about the effort toreconstruct the languages of the ancientMayan and Aztec people.

Whorf began to study Biblical linguist-ics at the Watkinson Library, now theHartford Public Library, which had an ex-tensive collection of materials regardingNative American linguistics and folklore.In 1925, he started studying the Nahuatllanguage and in 1928 he began studyingthe collections of Mayan hieroglyphictexts. His interests and skills grew rapidly

and, in 1928, he first presented a paper atthe International Congress of Americanistswhich was his translation of a Nahuatldocument on display at the Peabody Mu-seum of Harvard. From there, he began tostudy the comparative linguistics of thenewly designated Uto-Aztecan languagefamily, as described by linguist EdwardSapir.

Mesoamericanists (one who studiesthe cultures and artifacts of Mesoamerica)Alfred Tozzer, the Maya archaeologist atHarvard University, and Herbert J.Spinden, of the Brooklyn Museum, wereimpressed by Whorf’s work and encour-aged him to apply for a grant with the So-cial Science Research Council (SSRC) tofund his research. Whorf was planning touse the money to travel to Mexico to ob-tain Aztec manuscripts for the Watkinsonlibrary, but Tozzer suggested instead thathe spend his time in Mexico documentingmodern Nahuatl dialects.

And so, in his application for thegrant, Whorf proposed to establish the oli-gosynthetic nature of the Nahuatl lan-guage. An oligosynthetic language is onethat uses very few morphemes, perhaps asa few as only a few hundred. These wouldcombine synthetically to form statements.Whorf also presented a paper titled Stem

series in Maya at the Linguistic Society ofAmerica conference which professed thatin the Mayan languages, syllables carrysymbolic content. Whorf was awarded thegrant by the SSRC and, in 1930, hetraveled to Mexico City. Once there, Pro-fessor Robert H Barlow connected himwith several speakers of Nahuatl. This tripproduced a posthumously published out-line of Milpa Alta Nahuatl and an articleon a series of Aztec pictograms.

By the time Whorf returned fromMexico in 1930, he had become a wellknown figure in Middle American linguist-ics. He still worked as an inspector for theHartford Fire Insurance Company andwould do so for his entire life, for itprovided him with a steady income.However, he found himself still drawn intothe linguistics world and, in 1931 he en-rolled in a program of graduate studies atYale. He did so for his own interest, not asa means of obtaining a degree. One of hiscourses was American Indian Linguistics,taught by Edward Sapir, and he was soonpart of the the circle of Sapir’s students



that included many prominentlinguists of the time, such asMary Haas, Charles F. Voegelin,Morris Swadesh, Harry Hoijerand G. L. Trager. Trager andWhorf became close friends and,at the urging of Sapir, publishedseveral articles together on thehistorical and descriptive lin-guistics of Uto-Aztecan, continu-ing Whorf’s work on thatsubject.

Sapir was also a huge in-fluence on Whorf’s view of lan-guages. While Whorf already hadcome to embrace the view thatmuch of theworld was inter-connected, it washis time with Sa-pir that reallyguided thatthought in lan-guages. Sapirhad also workedwith NativeAmerican Indianlanguages, which he combinedwith his concepts of phonologyand grammar. From those, Sapirformulated that culture shouldbe viewed as part of individuallylearned patterns, both consciousand unconscious, and not as ex-ternal elements. If culture comesfrom learned rules of the societyinstead of as fixed structure,and language plays a key role inthought and communications,then culture and language aredistinctly tied together. The waya person expresses themselvesshapes their culture, even if theydon’t realize this is happening.Furthermore, because of a lan-guage’s central place in a cul-

ture, it works as a “guide to’social reality”’ and largelyshapes an individual’s and aculture’s perception of the world.Since language can be subjectedto a systematic analysis, it canalso be an essential tool for un-derstanding a culture, even itsmost elusive aspects.

These ideas of Sapir workedvery well with Whorf’s own stud-ies of languages and alphabets.Whorf already understood theway a person’s perception of theworld was altered by the lan-guage they used. An anecdote ofsuch understanding was relatedto Whorf’s own time working asan inspector. In this, Whorf de-scribed a work area that storedfull gasoline drums in one roomand the empty drums in anotherroom. Workers would be verycareful around the full drums,but not around the empty ones,even smoking in the same roomas the empty drums. This, Whorfexplained, was because of the la-bel “empty” which led incorrectlyto the idea that the drums wereinert and thus not dangerous.However, the “empty” drumswere probably more dangerousbecause of the flammable vaporsthey still held. Because of theusage of the inaccurate wordand the belief behind it, theworkers chose the wrong way ofdealing with the reality.

Sapir urged Whorf to studythe Hopi language as part of thislanguage studies. Whorf tooklessons from Ernest Naquay-ouma, who was a speaker ofHopi from Toreva village andcurrently living in Manhattan,

New York. He also traveled to theHopi reservation in New Mexicoand learned the language so wellthat he compiled a Hopi-Englishdictionary. He wrote severaldozen articles in the 1930s,many of which published as thebook Language, Thought, and

Reality (1956) after his death. Inhis writings, he used examplesfrom a number of Native Amer-ican Languages, but the mostused for the basis of his ideaswas Hopi.

The reason for the main fo-cus on Hopi is that, according toWhorf, the Hopi Indians did notthink in terms of past, present,and future, which is the naturalway of English and many otherlanguages. They divided theworld into what comprised of thephysical universe, which hecalled the manifested, and themore abstract concepts of thefuture, desires, power, intelli-gence, thought, and life force,which he referred to as mani-festing. This philosophy wasbound up in the language itself,with verbs exhibiting conceptsthat would normally be repres-ented by nouns in English.

Whorf was appointed “Hon-orary Research Fellow in An-

Chaco Culture National Historical Parkshowing remains of Indian dwellings

Edward Sapir



thropology” at Yale in 1936. Hewas also invited by Franz Boas,who was a mentor of Sapir, toserve on the committee of theSociety of American Linguistics.Whorf was awarded the SterlingFellowship by Yale in 1937 andhe became the lecturer there onAnthropology from 1937 to1938. He replaced Sapir, whohad fallen ill.

Whorf himself became illwith cancer in 1938. He was alsodeeply affected by Sapir’s deathin 1939, and he wrote The Rela-tion ofHabitual Thought And Be-

havior to Language in 1939, inmemory of him. This has becomeaccredited as his most definitivework on the subject. He contin-

ued publishing his ideas on lin-guistics in major scholarlyjournals and more popularjournals, like the M.I.T. ’s Tech-nology Review. Three essays inthat publication [Science andLinguistics (1940), Linguistics asan Exact Science (1940), andLanguages and Logic (1941 ) ]helped make his ideas morewidely known.

He continued writing manyessays and papers on a varietyof topics, which appeared regu-larly in the journal Main Currentin Modern Thought. The topicsincluded his research on the

Hopi and Boasian anthropology.His work in linguistics was away to create an understandingof how language worked.However, he died at the age of44 in 1941 at his home in Weth-ersfield, Connecticut, beforemany of his theories could beproven. They have, however,provided many future linguistswith help in their own studies.

Sapir-Whorf HypothesisAfter Whorf’s death, his closefriend Trager was appointed asthe curator for his unpublishedmanuscripts. While Whorf hadworked on many theories andareas of linguistics, his name ismost commonly attached to theSapir-WhorfHypothesis. Whorfhad published his own observa-tions on how linguistic differ-ences have consequences inhuman cognition and behavior,separate from Sapir. HarryHoijer actually created the term“Sapir–Whorf hypothesis”, eventhough Sapir and Whorf neverput forth any such hypothesis oreven worked together to formu-late the ideas apart from theteacher-student relationship.Whorf referred to this concepthimself as linguistic relativity.

Trager and Hoijer publishedmany of the works and workedhard to popularize Whorf’s ideasabout linguistic relativity. It fo-cused extensively on the way aperson views and interprets theworld based upon their languagestructure and therefore, alsoshaped the world according totheir language. From his Scienceand Linguistics (1940):

“We dissect nature alonglines laid down by our nativelanguage. The categoriesand types that we isolatefrom the world of phenom-ena we do not find there be-cause they stare everyobserver in the face; on thecontrary, the world ispresented in a kaleidoscopeflux of impressions whichhas to be organized by ourminds—and this meanslargely by the linguistic sys-tems of our minds. We cutnature up, organize it intoconcepts, and ascribe sig-nificances as we do, largelybecause we are parties to anagreement to organize it inthis way—an agreement thatholds throughout ourspeech community and iscodified in the patterns ofour language. The agree-ment is of course, an impli-cit and unstated one, but itsterms are absolutely obligat-ory; we cannot talk at all ex-cept by subscribing to theorganization and classifica-tion of data that the agree-ment decrees. We are thus

During the time, theconflict between scienceand religion was a majorissue andWhorf thoughtthat language might hold akey to resolving it.

Hopi woman dressing hair of unmarried girl



introduced to a new prin-ciple of relativity, whichholds that all observers arenot led by the same physicalevidence to the same pictureof the universe, unless theirlinguistic backgrounds aresimilar, or can in some waybe calibrated.”

HopiWhorf’s work with the Hopi lan-guage was an example of lin-guistic relatively. It also becamethe most discussed and criti-cized example. While Whorfclaimed that the Hopi languageused a different method of view-ing time, linguist EkkehartMalotki tried to prove this incor-rect by giving numerous ex-amples how the Hopi languagerefers to time. He stated thatwhile the the Hopi language sys-tem of tenses was composed of afuture and non-future, manifest-ing and manifested in Whorf’sterminology, the only significantdifference between the Hopi sys-tem the three-tense system ofEuropean languages was thatHopi combined the past andpresent into a single category.

Many viewed this analysis asproof that Whorf’s ideas and hisconcept of linguistic relativitywere false. However, others de-fended Whorf, arguing thatWhorf wasn’t claiming that Hopilacked words or categories to de-scribe time, but that the Hopiconcept of time is altogether dif-ferent from that of Englishspeakers. Whorf had also de-scribed a group of stems whichhe called tensors which de-scribed aspects of temporality,but did so without referring tocountable units of time.

AllophonesWhorf had also introduced theconcept of the allophone, whichis a word that describes posi-tional phonetic variants of asingle superordinate phoneme.This was also promoted byTrager and Bernard Bloch and

subsequently became a standardpart of linguistic structuralism.Whorf viewed allophones as an-other example of linguistic re-lativity because they describeshow acoustically differentsounds can be treated as reflec-tions of a single phoneme in alanguage. Through this, the dif-ferent sounds might appear sim-ilar to native speakers of alanguage. Whorf described themas “Objectively, acoustically, andphysiologically the allophones of[a] phoneme may be extremelyunlike, hence the impossibility ofdetermining what is what. Youalways have to keep the observerin the picture. What linguisticpattern makes like is like, andwhat it makes unlike is unlike”.

Uto-Aztecan languagesSapir was the first to conclus-ively show the Uto-Aztecan as avalid language family and Whorfhad worked extensively in thelanguages of it while in Mexico.Among his published works wereNotes on the Tübatulabal lan-

guage, The Comparative Linguist-ics ofUto-Aztecan, and a reviewof Kroeber’s survey of Uto-Aztecan linguistics. His grammarsketch of the Milpa Alta dialectof Nahuatl, as was mentionedearlier, was not published untilafter his death. It was used as abasic description of modernNahuatl, it is still considered tobe technically advanced.

Part of his legacy in the InUto-Aztecan languages is thediscovery of the reason that theNahuatl language has the phon-eme , which is not found inthe other languages of the fam-ily. It had puzzled other lin-guists, even Sapir. Whorfpublished a paper in the journalof American Anthropologists in1937 which claimed that thephoneme was a result of some ofthe Nahuan or Aztecan lan-guages having undergone asound change from the original/*t/ to in the position before

*/a/ . This became known as“Whorf’s law”, although a moredetailed understanding of waythis occurred has since been de-veloped.

MayanRemember that Whorf’s earliestexperience with linguistics washis study of Hebrew and Mayan.Whorf said that Mayan writingwas, to an extent, phonetic, butthe main authority on the An-cient Mayan culture, J.E.SThompson rejected this notion,claiming that Mayan writinglacked any kind of phoneticcomponent and thus couldn’t bedeciphered using linguistic ana-lysis. Whorf argued back that itwas the very refusal to approachit that way was what was washolding back the work on deci-phering it. While Mayan writingturned out to be logo-syllabicand was deciphered in the1950s by Yuri Knorozov, it wasWhorf’s idea of its phoneticnature that helped Knorozovmake the breakthrough.

While Whorf never sought adegree in linguistics, his studiesand publications in several areasof the field have contributedgreatly to an understanding ofhow language worked. He mayhave died before many of histheories could be published orproven, but they have earnedhim a position among the mostprominent of linguists. PT

Plaster cast ofSeibal, Stela10, a Mayanartifact fromSeibal,Guatemala



Writings on LinguisticsPublished Writings• Toltec History, 23rd International Congress of Americanists, Abstracts of Papers 1 928• Aztec Linguistics, 23rd International Congress of Americanists, Abstracts of Papers 1 928• An Aztec Account of the Period of the Toltec Decline, 23rd International Congress of Americanists, Proceedings 1 928• The Reign of Huemac, American Anthropologist 1 929• A Central Mexican Inscription Combining Mexican and Maya Day Signs, American Anthropologist 1 932• The Phonetic Value of Certain Characters in Maya Writing. Mil lwood, N.Y. 1 933• "The Comparative Linguistics of Uto-Aztecan." American Anthropologist 1 935• Maya Writing and its Decipherment, Maya Research 1 935• "Review of: Uto-Aztecan Languages of Mexico. A. L. Kroeber" American Anthropologist 1 935• "The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi, " Language 1 936• Notes on the Tubatulabal Language. American Anthropologist 1 936• "The Origin of Aztec TL," American Anthropologist 1 937• "Some Verbal Categories of Hopi, " Language 1 938• "Science and Linguistics," Technology Review 1 940, 1 966• "Linguistics as an Exact Science," Technology Review 1 940• "Languages and Logic," Technology Review 1 941• "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language," Language, Culture, and Personality 1 941• "Decipherment of the Linguistic Portion of the Maya Hieroglyphs," The Smithsonian Report for 1 941 ,1 942• Maya Hieroglyphs: An Extract from the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1 941• Language Mind and Reality." Theosophical Society 1 942• "The Hopi Language, Toreva Dialect, " in Harry Hoijer, ed. , Linguistic Structures of Native America 1 946• The Milpa Alta dialect of Aztec. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 1 946• "Four articles on Metal inguistics" Foreign Service Institute, Dept. of State 1 950

Unpublished Writings• A New Conception of Semitic Roots 1 927• The Inner Nature of the Hebrew Language 1 928• A Contribution to the Study of Aztec Language 1 928• Investigations in Aztec Linguistics and Toltec History. 23rd International Congress of Americanists 1 928• Notes on the Oligosynthetic Comparison of Nahuatl and Piman, with Special Reference to Tepecano 1 928• Appendix to Notes on the Oligosynthetic Comparison of Nahuatl and Piman (Tepecano) 1 928• Plan of Project, submitted to the Social Science Research Council 1 928• Translations from the Annals of Quauhtitlan 1 928• Translation of Aztec MS, Gates Coll . #758A/1 1 929• Conclusion of Report on Research Project, Social Science Research Council 1 930• Stem Series in Maya and Certain Maya Hieroglyphs, Linguistic Society of America 1 930• Notes on Two Recent Findings from Central Mexico 1 930• Pitch Tone and the Salti l lo in Modern and Ancient Nahuatl 1 930• The Problem of American History Before Columbus, Connecticut Historical Society 1 931• The Structure of the Athabascan Languages 1 932• Characteristics of the Uto-Aztecan Stock 1 932• The Uto-Aztecan Stock 1 932• First Report on Hopi 1 933• Recent Determinations of Phonetic Characters in Maya Writing, Linguistic Society of America 1 933• The Phonology of Hopi 1 934• Hopi Phonemes 1 934• Hopi Text 1 934-1 935• Educational Project: Study of Learning- Inhibitions and their Prevention and Treatment 1 935• First Steps in the Decipherment of Maya Writing 1 935• Outl ine of Hopi Morphology 1 935• The Hopi Language 1 935• Hopi Verb Classes 1 934• The Hopi Language 1 935• A Comparative Decipherment of Forty-one Ancient Maya Written Words, American Anthropological Association 1 936• Notes for the Chemistry of Language and Thought, Hartford Technical Club 1 936• "Azteco-Tanoan" 1 936• Macro-Penutian 1 936• Response to circular letter on the status of American l inguistics 1 937• Classification of the Languages of North America North of Mexico 1 937, 1 939• The Reading of Maya Glyph C of the Supplementary Series and other Glyphs 1 938• Phonemes of the Toreva Dialect of Hopi 1 939• Some Experiments with Language, Wethersfield Rotary Club 1 939• Descrifamiento de la Parte Linguistica de los Jeroglificos Mayas, Eighth American Scientific Congress 1 940• Maya Vocabulary from Motul Dictionary 1 940• Analysis and Translation of a Short Maya Text in Hieroglyphs, Linguistic Society of America 1 940

PARTIAL LIST OF WORKS

At the Cinema - Lost in Translation


rom the title itself, “Lost inTranslation” sounds like a greatmovie about languages. It does

have a few languages in it, with thestory revolving around two Americansin Japan. English and Japanese areobviously involved, but there are alsobrief flashes of German and French ina few scenes.

Languages are the not reason I amreviewing this movie, however. Thestory is about Bob Harris, played byBill Murray, and Charlotte (ScarlettJohansson). Bob is a movie star whosecareer is fading and he is in Japan do-ing an advertising campaign for Sun-tory whisky. Charlotte is the new wifeof a photographer who is doing photoshoots in Japan and she finds herselfleft alone much of the time in the for-eign country.

We see that both Bob and Char-lotte are having trouble sleeping andseem to be walking around in a daze,not really being part of the worldaround them. They are lost, unsureabout where they are in their lives andwhat they should be doing: Bob is in aloveless marriage of 25 years andCharlotte, while recently graduatedfrom college and only married a year,has no idea what she wants in life.While they are lost in their ownthoughts, the culture around themprovides them with no enjoyment.

Eventually, both the charactersstart talking to each other, since theyshare the same hotel and can see thatthe other person seems to be as lost

as they are. When Charlotte’s hus-band John travels to another part ofJapan for a few days, leaving Char-lotte alone again, she decides to go outon the town with some Japanesefriends and invites Bob to join them.The two find themselves bonding dur-ing their adventures in the Japanesenightlife and as they find themselvescoming to life, the culture also be-comes something they enjoy.

The movie isn’t about Japaneseculture. It is not trying to make astatement about it, negative or posit-ive, nor does it try to explain it. I thinkthe movie would have worked if it hadbeen set in any number of foreigncountries, since it is acting as a meta-phor for the characters own emotionalconfusion. They are struggling to findtheir place in their own lives as well asin another country. Only when theystart to figure out their places throughtheir friendship are they able to reallyinteract with the culture around them.

Having said that, the Japaneseculture and society is very much ondisplay in the film. When Bob first ar-rives, exhausted, in Tokyo, he is jarredby everything from the polite businesscard exchanges to the automatic cur-tains opening in his hotel room.

One very odd scene involves a“Premium Fantasy Woman” who hasbeen sent to his room. She tries tocarry out her job of providing Bob witha role-play fantasy, shoving one of herstocking clad legs into his face and in-sisting that he “lip my stocking”.

At the Cinema

Lost in Translation

Lost in TranslationR 1 01 minDrama3 October 2003 (USA)

Country: USA, Japan

Language: English

“It is the backdropofJapan and itsculture that helpsus see them gofrom being lost tofound as they areable to adapt to itas well.

At the Cinema - Lost in Translation


When he finally understands that she means “rip”and attempts to do so, she goes into some con-fused mix of role-playing, finally lying on the flooron her back, kicking her feet into the air, yelling.When Bob tries to help her up, she latches ontohim and pulls him down, causing him to smashthe lamp providing them light, plunging them intodarkness. We are never told what she was trying toachieve.

The changing of “r” into “l” is done a few moretimes in other dialogues before Bob finally under-stands what is happening. Charlotte asks him whythey do that, and he flippantly tells her, “Foryucks. Just to mix things up”. Probably not thelinguistic explanation one would expect.

There is a scene early on that is a version ofan old translator/interpreter joke. While Bob is do-ing a photo shoot, holding a glass of the whiskeyhe is advertising, the photographer is speaking tohim loudly and forcefully in Japanese to give himdirections. A female translator then tells Bob thathe wants Bob to turn his head. The length of whatwas said and what was translated obviously con-fuses Bob, and he tries asking about it, but thetranslator just ignores him. This happens a fewmore times, with the photographer obviously say-ing much more than is being repeated. It is a dir-ect representation of the title of the movie,showing that something is lost in the translation.

When Bob and Charlotte have their first nighton the town, they get chased out of a bar by a BB-gun wielding bartender, run through a few stores,take a taxi with their friends, and finally end upsinging (badly) in a Karaoke bar. In another part ofthe movie, they are in a restaurant trying to orderfor what seems to be several identical dishes onthe menu, only to be served with raw meat theymust cook at their table themselves. Charlottehurts her toe at another point and Bob takes herto the hospital, where, while neither of them speakJapanese, they are able to make themselves some-what understood.

Less hectic aspects of Japanese life are also ondisplay. We see Charlotte traveling to a shrine

where monks are chanting, then later she findsherself wandering into an ikebana event (the Ja-panese art of flower arrangement) . She does finallybecome more comfortable, and is even seen tying aprayer to a tree (one of the customs).

The story is about two people struggling tofind themselves in their own lives and finding abond between each other that helps them do that,although we don’t know how successful that trulyis since we don’t see them when they are reunitedwith their spouses. It is the backdrop of Japanand its culture that helps us see them go from be-ing lost to found as they are able to adapt to it aswell.

There is a funny bit of trivia regarding the title.In South American Spanish, it was translated as“Perdidos en Tokio”, the Chinese title was “Mi ShiDong Jing”, and the Hebrew title in Israel was“Avudim be-Tokio”, all of which mean “Lost inTokyo”, so the title itself was lost in translation,literally. These versions were at least closer thansome others. In Portuguese, it became “Love is aStrange Place” and in Polish, it was “In BetweenWords”.

The movie won a few awards, including anOscar for best Original Screenplay and receivedgood reviews. It also received an R rating, althoughthis only because of a short scene in the moviethat takes place in a strip club in which a womanis shown topless. I don’t know why they neededher topless, because otherwise, this movie wouldhave been rated PG-13. There is no violence, nosex besides that scene mentioned, and a minimumof swearing. There is a warning I would give,however, for those who might be offended: theopening title shot is of a woman in panties lying ona bed.

Lost in Translation is a very good movie forthose that like soul-searching dramas, but it isn’tfor everyone. You might find it boring, or youmight find it very touching and emotional. I hopeyou do give it chance, however: you might findsomething yourself. PT

Languages in Peril - The Polish Connection


The Slavonic branch of theIndo-European languageshave a number of well knownlanguages, such as Polish andRussian. However, there are afew languages in that groupthat have struggled with beingrecognized as more than justdialects. Now, they evenstruggle for their own survival.Three of those are Kashubian,Rusyn, and Silesian.

KashubianKashubian, also known as Cas-subian, is a Lekhitic language,which is a group of the Slavonicfamily of languages. It is repor-ted to have roughly 200,000speakers total, with only 53,000speakers using it daily. Most ofthe speakers use it as a second-ary language to Polish and it isconsidered to be a seriously en-dangered language.

Kashubian gets it name fromthe the tribes which first spokeit, called the Kashubians. Thesetribes lived in the central Polandregion called Pomerania, whichlies on the southern coast of theBaltic Sea. Most current speak-ers of it live still in this region,but there are also someKashubian speakers living inCanada.

For many years, Kashubianwas viewed as a dialect of Polish,but during the 14th century, itbegan to be seen as a distinctlanguage in itself. It is theclosest “living” relative to Polish

and, like Polish, it includes loan-words from both Low and HighGerman, as well the Baltic lan-guages and Russian. However,the several dialects of Kashubianare not highly mutually intelli-gible, such as a speaker ofsouthern Kashubian would haveconsiderable difficulty in under-standing a speaker of the north-ernmost dialects.

Examples of printedKashubian literature go back tothe late 1500s. Many authorswrote in Kashubian, and that lit-erature has been translated intoEnglish, Czech, Finnish, Ger-man, Belarusian, Slovene and,of course, Polish. A large body ofChristian literature has alsobeen translated into Kashubian,including the New Testament.The current written form of thelanguage was developed fromone introduced by FlorianCeynowa in hisbook Zarés do

grammatikj kaseb-

sko-slovjnskjé

mòvé (An Outlineof the Grammar ofthe Kashubian-Slovincian Lan-guage), publishedin Poznań in 1879.The alphabet usedis based on theLatin alphabetwith added dia-critics.

After the endof communism in

Poland, Kashubian began risingin status in Poland. In 2005, itwas granted legal protection inPoland and became recognizedas an official regional languageand is the only language in Po-land to achieve this status.There are a number of schools inPoland, perhaps as many as 90,that Kashubian is used in as ateaching language. Books andmagazines are also published inKashubian, and there are someradio and TV programs in it. It iseven an official alternative lan-guage for local administrationpurposes in Gmina Sierakowiceand Gmina Parchowo in Pomer-anian Voivodeship. However,this may not be enough to pre-vent it from becoming extinct.

RusynRusyn, also called Ruthenian orRuthene, is an East Slavic lan-

Languages in Peril

TThhee PPooll ii sshh CCoonnnneeccttiioonn

Bilingual Polish-Kashubian road sign in Poland



guage spoken by the Rusyns ofCentral Europe. The Rusyns arenot part of just one country,however, which makes trackingthe number of speakers difficult.They are one of the multiple eth-nic groups of Slovakia, like theGermans, Slovaks, Hungarians

and Romanies (Gypsies) , andhave never had their own coun-try. Their current homeland isspread over the a few countries,mainly Ukraine, Slovakia, Hun-gary and Poland.

In Ukraine, the Rusyns livein the Transcarpathian Region.While it is often considered to bea dialect of Ukrainian inUkraine, the dialect spokenthere is referred to as Carpatho-Rusyn. It is composed of a mix-ture of some Eastern Slovak dia-lects and East Slavic features, aswell as other languages such asRussian Church Slavonic, Rus-sian and Old Ruthenian, be-cause the Rusyns thereemigrated to Bačka from EasternSlovakia and Western Ukraineduring the mid-eighteenth cen-

tury.In Slovakia, Hungary and

the Serbian province of Vojvod-ina, the dialect spoken is Panno-nian-Rusyn. However, inHungary, the people and lan-guage are called “Ruthene”. ThePolish call it “Lemko”. In north-ern Romania, the people arecalled “Ruteni” and the languageis called “Ruteană”. It is similarto West Slavic languages, partic-ularly Slovak, but also has EastSlavic phonetics and vocabularyand it has been influenced bysurrounding South Slavic lan-guages, like Serbian and Croa-tian. There are also speakers ofRusyn in the USA and Canada,where it is called “Ruthenian”.

While this diversity in dia-lects and regions has made it di-fficult to get an accurate count,there are approximately 1 .5 mil-lion Rusyns in Europe today,and approximately 120,000 ofthem are in Slovakia. There havebeen attempts to standardise thevariants of Rusyn, but they havebeen unsuccessful. Different or-thographies have been de-veloped, most using variants ofthe Cyrillic script. Meanwhile, anumber of different grammaticalstandards exist based on region-al dialects.

Most Ukrainian scholars donot recognize Rusyns as a separ-

ate ethnicity, despite the factthat some Rusyn speakers con-sider themselves ethnically dif-ferent from Ukrainians. ManyRusyns immigrated to Americabetween 1880 and 1914. Duringthe 1950s, the Rusyn nationalityin Czecho-Slovakia was declaredto be Ukrainian, but the vastmajority of Rusyns refused toaccept a Ukrainian identity andinstead declared their nationalityto be Slovak. Existing Rusyncultural institutions werechanged to Ukrainian, and theuse of the Rusyn language in allofficial communications wasended. As a result, most Rusynvillages had only a Slovak-lan-guage school and a Slovak iden-tity was adopted by most of theRusyn population.

The first scholars to recog-nize the existence of Rusyn as aseparate language were fromformer Institute of Slavic andBalkan Studies in Moscow (nowthe Institute of Slavonic Studiesof the Russian Academy of Sci-ences) in 1992. Serbia has alsorecognized Pannonian-Rusyn inVojvodina as an official minoritylanguage, and since 1995, Ru-syn has also been recognized asa minority language in Slovakia.

In Slovakia today, Rusynsare undergoing a revival in theirculture and language. They have

In Slovakia today, Rusynsare undergoing a revivalin their culture and lan-guage.

Rusyn farmsted from the village of Lyuta, Beliko-Bereznyanski region

Rusyn woman's costume from Presov



their own weekly newspaper,magazine, radio programs, artmuseum and dramatic theatre.Some elementary schools intowns and villages also nowprovide instructions to their stu-dents in the Rusyn languagealong with Slovak. Rusyn is lis-ted as a protected language bythe European Charter for Re-gional or Minority Languages inSlovakia, Serbia, Croatia andRomania. However, they muststill struggle to overcome count-less years of denationalization ifthey are to survive as a peopleand language.

SilesianSilesian (or Upper Silesian, asthere is a “Lower Silesian” inGermany, which is now called“Silesian German”) is a WestSlavonic language, spoken in aregion called Upper Silesiawhich is split between the north-eastern region of the Czech Re-public and southwestern Poland.About 509,000 people declaredSilesian as their native languagein the last official census in Po-land in 2011 . In the combinedcensuses of Poland, Czech Re-public and Slovakia, nearly 0.9million people claimed Silesiannationality.

Like its language sisters ofKashubian and Rusyn, Silesianhas fought hard to be recognizedas a language on its own. SomePolish linguists claim it is a dia-lect of Polish, although studieshave shown that it could only beclassified as a dialect of Old Pol-ish, and not the modern version.Others claim it is a part of theCzech language. Polish peoplehave some trouble understand-ing Silesian, but they are able to,which neither proves nor dis-proves its status as an inde-pendent language, since Polishspeakers can also understandCzech and Slovak speakers. TheSilesians living in Poland mostlyview themselves as a separatenation within Poland. Some in-

ternational linguists regardSilesian as a separate language.

Silesian itself has severaldialects. In the Czech Republic,there are the Cieszyn Silesian,Opava Silesian, JabłonkówSilesian and Lach Silesian dia-lects. In Poland, there areNiemodlin Silesian, Gliwice

Silesian, Kluczbork Silesian,Prudnik Silesian, Opole Silesianand Sulkovian Silesian dialects.

Only in the last decade hasSilesian really gained ground inbeing recognized as a language.In July 2007, it was recognizedby an ISO Joint Advisory Com-mittee, Library of Congress, In-ternational Information Centrefor Terminology and SIL Interna-tional, confirming its place in theareas of technology. A fewmonths later in September, thePolish parliament made a state-ment about a new law to giveSilesian the official status of aregional language. In 2008, twoorganizations promoting Silesianlanguage were created: Pro Lo-

quela Silesiana and TôwarzistwoPiastowaniô Ślónskij Môwy“Danga”.

One of the outcomes of thesenew agencies was the formationof a new alphabet. Pro LoquelaSilesiana created the new alpha-bet to better cover the sounds ofSilesian, since previous alpha-bets, like the Polish one, wereunable to do so properly. Pub-lishing of Silesian materialsbegan before that, though. In2003, the National PublishingCompany of Silesia (NarodowaOficyna Śląska) was started. Itwas founded by the Alliance ofthe People of the Silesian Nation(Związek Ludności NarodowościŚląskiej) and it prints booksabout Silesia and in the Silesianlanguage.

It has also received greaterusage in other media. There arenow TV and radio stations, mu-sic groups, theatre perform-ances, films and teachingteaching aids for Silesian. This isvery promising for the continuedsurvival of this language. PT

The Silesians living inPoland mostly viewthemselves as a separatenation within Poland.

Group with Pro Loquela Silesiana banner

TThhee ssttrreeeettss ooff

PPaarrlleerreemmoo aarree nnaammeedd

aafftteerr ffaammoouuss wwrriitteerrss ffoorr

tthhee llaanngguuaaggee ooff eeaacchh

qquuaarrtteerr..TThhiiss iiss wwhheerree

wwee ttaakkee aa qquuiicckk llooookk aatt

wwhhyy tthheeyy aarree ffaammoouuss..

Word on the Streets

RRoommaanniiaann PPooeettss

Word on the Streets - Romanian Poets


Mihai Eminescu is con-sidered the greatest Romani-an poet of the 19th century,and some would say he is thebest known Romanian poet ofall time. He was a Romanticpoet, novelist and journalistwho introduced a new spiritinto Romanian poetry. Draw-ing heavily on mystical and

historical subjects, his writings glorified the Ro-manian past while criticising the society of con-temporary Romania, both directly and throughsatire. But he was also a melancholy person, andmuch of his poetry has a feeling of sadness andimpending doom.

Eminescu was born on January 15, 1850, al-though some records, including his own claims,have the date as December 20th, 1849. He wasborn in Ipateshti, near Botoshani, in the north ofMoldavia. His surname was originally Emin, butthis was changed to Eminovici (his farther wasGheorghe Eminovici) and finally to the RomanianEminescu. The last change was chosen by publish-er Iosif Vulcan when he started publishing theboy’s work, for Vulcan disliked the Slavic suffix “-ici” of the young poet’s last name and wanted it tobe “more Romanian”.

He attended school in Czernowitz, spent some timethe civil service, then returned to studying inTransylvania in 1864. In January of 1866, Ro-manian teacher Aron Pumnul died and his stu-dents published a pamphlet, Lăcrămioareleînvăţăceilor gimnaziaşti (Tears of the GymnasiumStudents) , in his memory. In this was publishedmany pieces by the students, including the poemLa mormântul lui Aron Pumnul (At the Grave ofAron Pumnul) by then 16 year old Eminescu. Thiswas the start of his poetry writing.

While in Transylvania, he joined a theatrical com-pany where he worked at the various positions ofactor, prompter and stage manager for a few years.During this time, he continued to write and pub-

lish poems and worked on a novel Geniu pustiu(Wasted Genius) .

He went to Vienna at the age of 19 in 1869 tostudy and remained there until 1872. There he at-tended many lectures, especially on philosophy,and had a very active student life. He became acontributor to Convorbiri literare (Literary Conver-sations) and, in 1870, he wrote three articles (un-der the pseudonym “Varro”) in Federaţiunea, onthe situation of Romanians and other minorities inthe Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later became ajournalist for the newspaper Albina (The Bee) .From 1872 to 1874 he was a student in Berlin,with the help of a stipend offered by Junimea, theRomanian literary society that edited Federaţiun-

ea.

Thanks to his friendship with Titu Maiorescu, theleader of Junimea, Eminescu worked as the dir-ector of the Central Library in Iaşi, a substituteteacher and editor of the newspaper Curierul deIaşi (The Courier of Iaşi) from 1874 to 1877. Afterthat, he moved to Bucharest where he worked as ajournalist and then editor-in-chief of the newspa-per Timpul (The Time). He continued his own writ-ings all through this, including Scrisorile andLuceafărul.

Eminescu fell seriously ill In June of 1883 andentered the hospital of Dr. Şuţu. During his lastyears, he suffered from manic-depressive psychos-is, a hereditary disease of his family, and he finallydied in the hospital on June 15, 1889. He wasburied in Bucharest at Bellu Cemetery.

Eminescu’s presence is found extensivelythroughout modern Romania. Statues of him areeverywhere and he even appeared on the 1000-leibanknote issued in 1998 and is on the new 500-leibanknote issued in 2005. There are many schoolsand institutions which are named after him, andthe anniversaries of both his birth and death arecelebrated each year in many Romanian cities.

Mihai Eminescu1 5 January 1 850 – 1 5 June 1 889

Bulevardul Mihai Eminescu



BibliographyMost Famous

• Lacul, 1876 [The Lake]• Luceafărul, 1883 [The Vesper]• Mai am un singur dor, 1883 [I Have Yet One Desire]• Odă (în metru antic), 1883 [Ode (in Ancient Meter]• Şi dacă, 1883 [And if.. . ]• Doina, 1884• Dorinţa, 1884 [Desire]• Epigonii, 1884 [Epigones]• Floare albastră, 1884 [Blue Flower]• O, rămii, 1884 [Oh, Linger On]• Sara pe deal, 1885 [Evening on the Hill]• La Steaua,1886 [At Star]• Scrisori [Letters or "Epistles-Satires"]

• Adio [Farewell]• Atit de frageda [So delicate]• Calin (file din poveste) [Calin (pages from a tale)]• Ce e amorul? [What is love.. .]• Ce te legeni codrule [Why do you wail, o forest trees]• Cezara (Caesara)• Cind amintirile [When memory]• Craiasa din povesti [Legendary queen]• Criticilor mei [To the critics]• Cu maine zilele-ti adaogi.. . [With life's tomorrow timeyou grasp]• Dalila (Scrisoarea V) [Delilah (satire v)]• De ce nu-mi vii? [Why don't you come?]• De cite ori, iubito [How many a time, beloved]• De-or trece anii [Although the world]• Departe sunt de tine [Now far i am from you]• Despartire [Separation]• Diana [Diana]• Din valurile vremii [The waves of time]• Dintre sute de catarge [Of all the ships]• Dupa ce atita vreme [So long, dear one, since youdeparted]• Egipetul [Egypt]• Făt-Frumos din lacrimă [The Tear Drop Prince]• Freamat de codru [The murmur of the forest]• Geniu pustiu [Empty Genius]• Glosa [Gloss]• Imparat si proletar [Emperor and proletarian]• Inger de paza [Guardian angel]• Inger si demon [Angel and demon]• Kamadeva [Kamadeva]• La mijloc de codru [Midst the dense old forest stout]

• Lasa-ti lumea.. . [Come dear, set your world apart]• Melancolie [Melancholy]• Mortua est [Mortua est]• Nu ma intelegi [You never knew my soul]• O, mama [O, mother.. .]• Oricite stele.. . [How many a star burns.. .]• Pajul Cupidon... [Cupid]• Pe aceeasi ulicioara.. . [Beats the moon upon mywindow ]• Pe linga plopii fara sot.. . [Down where the lonelypoplars grow]• Peste virfuri [O'er the woods]• Povestea codrului [The tale of the forest]• Revedere [Return]• Rugaciunea unui dac [A Dacian's prayer]• Sărmanul Dionis [Wretched Dionis]• S-a dus amorul [Fair love, our mutual friend]• Scrisoarea I [Satire I]• Scrisoarea II [Satire II]• Scrisoarea III [Satire III]• Scrisoarea IV [Satire IV]• Se bate miezul noptii [The brazen bells of midnight.. .]• Singuratate [Solitude]• Somnoroase pasarele [Drowsy birds]• Sonet I [Sonnet I]• Sonet II [Sonnet II]• Sonet III [Sonnet III]• Sonet IV [Sonnet IV]• Sonet V [Sonnet V]• Sonet VI [Sonnet VI]• Stelele-n cer [High o'er the main]• Strigoii [Ghosts]• Te duci [You go]• Venere si Madona [Venus and Madonna]

Works by Mihai Eminescu

OnlineSome of Eminescu's works online:http://www.romanianvoice.com/poezii/poeti/eminescu.php



Strada Vasile Alecsandri

Vasile Alecsandri21 July 1 821 – 22 August 1 890

Vasile Alecsandri was one ofthe leading Romanian poets,playwrights, political and dip-lomatic figures of the 19th cen-tury. His works inspired andinfluenced other Romanianwriters during his time and

long after his death. He collected Romanian folk-songs and poetry and his own poetry and heroicdramas were highly successful.

Alecsandri was born in the Moldavian town ofBacău and was one of three surviving children outof seven. He was educated privately at the VictorCuenim “pensionnat”, an elite boarding school forboys in Iaşi, until the age of 13, when he was sentto Paris. There he studied law, literature andmedicine. But his only true love was for literature,and he wrote his first essays in 1838 in French.

In 1839, Alecsandri returned to Iaşi and startedworking in the Treasury of Moldova. During thistime, he published and promoted, along with sev-eral other young intellectuals, the idea of rebellionagainst the administration imposed by ImperialRussian authorities upon Moldova. While workingwith the underground, he frequently visited theCostache Negri estate, which was a center forMuntenian and Moldovan reformers.

It was there that he fell in love with the 21 -year oldand recently divorced Elena Negri, sister of Cost-ache. Elena returned his affections and Alecsandribegan writing love poems to her. A sudden illnessforced Elena to head abroad to Venice, however,and Alecsandri met her there. They became loversand traveled around to Austria, Germany andFrance before Elena’s chest illness became moreaggravated, forcing them to return home in 1847.Before they arrived, Elena died on the ship in Alec-sandri’s arms. Alecsandri was devastated, butchanneled his mourning into a poem, Steluţa(Little Star) . He also later dedicated his Lăcrimioare(Little Tears) collection of poems to her.

The political situation in Moldova continued to es-calate and 1848, Prince Mihail Sturdza invitedsome of the young idealists, including Alecsandri,to a meeting to present their complaints. In re-sponse, Alecsandri co-wrote a manifesto, Dorinţelepartidei naţionale din Moldova (Wishes of the Na-tional Party of Moldavia), for the revolutionaries,promoting the ideas of union and liberty. He also

wrote his poem-manifesto Desteptarea Romaniei(Romania’s Awakening), urging the public to joinin the cause. Despite all this, the revolution failed,and Alecsandri fled to Transylvania to avoid arrest.

He continued writing his politically charged poetryand became even more of a unionist, pushing forthe union of Moldavia and Wallachia. A fewmonths later, he moved to the Hurmuzakis in Cer-nauti and became the secretary of the Moldovanrevolutionary committee. From that position, heissued the “Proclamation of the National Party ofMoldova to All Romanians,”. In September, the re-volutionaries sent him to Paris to be both diplomatand propagandist, informing Europe of the Ro-manian national cause. He was also sent to Con-stantinople, Hungary and Transylvania to promotethe ideas, and settled in Paris.

When the liberal unionist Prince Grigore Ghica re-placed Prince Mihail Sturdza in 1849, he invitedAlecsandri back to Moldova and made him StateArchivist. Among his nationalist and unionistactivities, Alecsandri published the journal Ro-mania Literara in 1855, his Hora Unirii in 1856,and he eventually became one of his key advisersto newly elected Alexandru Ioan Cuza in 1859.

During this time, Alecsandri also found love againwith Paulina Lucasievici, the daughter of aninnkeeper. They moved in together at Alecsandri’sestate at Mirceşti and their daughter Maria wasborn in 1857. When the two Romanian provinceswere finally united, he was appointed minister ofExternal Affairs and toured the West, pleading foracknowledgement of the newly formed nation andsupport its emergence. However, after a few yearsthe touring tired him and in 1860 he settled inMirceşti. He married Paulina in 1876.

In the years between 1862 and 1875, Alecsandriwas prolific and wrote 40 lyrical poems. He alsotried writing epic poems and published them as acollection “Legende”. He even dedicated a series ofpoems to the soldiers who had participated in theRomanian War of Independence. He received theaward of the Romanian Academy for his dramaDespot-Vodă in 1879 and in 1881 he wroteTrăiască Regele (Long Live the King), which be-came the national anthem of the Kingdom of Ro-mania. Alecsandri finally died in 1890 at his estatein Mirceşti after a long battle with cancer.



Doine (1842-1852)• Doina• Strunga• Andrii-Popa• Baba Cloanţa• Hora• Groza• Cinel-cinel• Dorul româncei• Cântec ostăşesc

Lăcrimioare [Tears]• Steluţa• Gondoleta• Pe mare• Adio• Lăcrimioare

Suvenire [Souvenirs]• Pe un album• Adio Moldovei

Mărgăritarele (1852-1862) [Pearls]• Hora unirii• Deşteptarea României• Sentinela română• Muntele de foc• Înşiră te, mărgărite• Stelele

Pasteluri (1862-187...) [Pastels]• Miezul iernii• Gerul• Bradul• Sania• La gura sobei• Noaptea• Dimineaţa• Fântâna

• Malul Siretului• Varia [Various]• Soarele, vântul şi gerul• Imn lui Ştefan cel Mare• Ştefan Vodă şi codru• Ştefan şi Dunărea

Legende [Legends]• Cuza Vodă• Dan, căpitan de plai• Legenda rândunicăi• Legenda ciocârliei• Legenda lăcrimioarei

Ostaşii noştri [Our soldiers]• Peneş Curcanul• Sergentul• Oda ostaşilor români• Hora de la Plevna

Din periodice [Of the period]• 15 mai 1848• Ţara

Postume [Posthumously]• Fluierul• Romanţa de toamnă

Coming in April

• Find and decipher the Phaistos Disc

• Meet the Danish linguist and creator of Novial, Otto Jespersen

• Party with Brazil during Carnival

• Learn about major Kannada writers

Partial l ist of works by Vasile Alecsandri

OnlineSome of Alecsandri's works online:http://www.romanianvoice.com/poezii/poeti/alecsandri.php

The Parleremo 2013 Calendar is now availableonline! This beautiful calendar is full of imagesfrom countries around the world along withdescriptions oftheir languages.

The countriesinclude Malta,Finland, India,Latvia, Lao andthe languagesinclude Amharic,Xhosa, Kannada,Pashto andPanjabi .

Available in both PDFformat and individualimages suitable for yourcomputer desktopwallpaper!

Don'tspendanotherdaywithout it!

http: //www.parleremo.org/deskcalendar

Where Are You?


This capital city dates back to pre-Roman times,and legend has it that Ulysses founded it. Inthose years, it was a constant battlegroundbetween three rivals: the Phoenicians, theGreeks and the Carthaginians. When theRomans began a two-century reign over it, itbecame the most important city in the westernIberian region.

Centuries later, the Moors took over the city,fortified it, and held out against Christianattacks for almost 400 years. Finally, however,the Christians recaptured it, and made it thecapital of its home country. It rapidlydeveloped a booming maritime and inlandtrade.

A famous navigator later decided to breakIslam's economic power by finding a wayaround that region by sea, and with the help ofthe best sailors, map makers, ship builders andastronomers he could find, he did find a way.In 1434, one of his ships sailed beyond thegreatly feared Cape Bojador on the WestAfrican coast, ending the maritime superstitionthat it was the end of the world. This route,along with Vasco da Gama's own expedition in1497 which opened a sea route to India, quicklymade this city into the seat of a vast empire.

However, these years as a prosperous tradingcenter would not last long. Even with the hugeamount of wealth it was amassing, the cost ofmaintaining its empire was far too great, and itcollapsed under its own power. A few centurieslater, it was dealt a crippling blow when a massive earthquake reduced the city to rubble. It was neverable to recover its power after that.

Napoleon's occupation of the city started a long succession of power struggles over the region. A coup inthe early 20th century brought almost four decades of authoritarian rule under a one-time financeminister. During this regime, political parties were banned and censorship, propaganda, and brute forcemaintained order in the country.

Finally, another revolution brought the country into the path of democracy, which it followed faithfully.It finally joined the European Union, and that inclusion helped restore a strong economy to the country.Today, this city is a thriving city with a rich cultural mix of immigrants. It continues to drawinternational attention as a host city for world expos and has even played host to the continent's biggestfootball tournament. Ulysses would be proud.

Can you name this city and country?

Where Are You?

Last month's answer: Alesund, Norway

Head to Mexico for your nextvacation and experience all themagic, color and warmth of thisunique country!

We have a grand mix of the oldand new, from ancient pyramids tosoaring skyscrapers. Experience thevibrant pulse of the modern city aswell as the mystery and beauty ofthe old world.

MMee xx ii cc ooMexico will constantly surprise youwith new experiences, adventures,sights and sounds.

Visit Mexico today and fall in lovefor a lifetime!

Holi Bonfire in front of Jagdish Temple in Udaipur.The burning is done to clense away evil andcelebrate the triumph of good over evil with theburning of the evil demoness, Holika.

Celebrations - Holi


very spring, most parts of India have a celeb-ration to mark the end of winter called Holi(pronounced the same as English “holy”) . Itnormally lasts two days and while it is celeb-

rated slightly differently, according to region, themain festival involves lighting bonfires, eating richfood, and coating other people in coloured powderand liquids. During this time, the normal societalstrictness is relaxed, allowing people of all age,gender, status and caste to come together in atime of excitement and fun. This year, Holi willstart on Wednesday, the 27th of March and willcontinue for 2 days until Thursday, the 28th.

LegendsThe celebration is attributed mainly to a legendabout a king of demons named Hiranyakashipu.The Demon King had been granted a boon (favor orblessing) by Brahma, making him almost im-possible to kill. With this power, he became arrog-ant, attacking both the Heavens and the Earth,demanding that people stop worshipping the Godsand praise only him instead.

However, his own son, Prahlad, disobeyedhim, and continued his devotion and prayers toLord Vishnu. This infuriated Hiranyakashipu, sohe tried many times to kill his son for his in-solence. Each attempt was foiled by Lord Vishnu.Finally, the Demon King turned to his Demonesssister, Holika. She had also been granted a boonwhich made it impossible for her to be burned byfire. Hiranyakashipu ordered Prahlad to sit on thelap of Holika while she sat on a burning pyre.Prahlad obeyed his father, but also prayed to LordVishnu to protect him from the fire. When the pyrewas lit, it was Holika that burned instead, whilePrahlad was unharmed. The boon only workedwhen Holika entered fire on her own. This miracleof Prahlad surviving while Holika burned is celeb-rated as Holi, being seen as a triumph of good overevil as well as devotion to god. Specifically,

bonfires are lit on the eve of the festival, which iscalled Holika Dahan (burning of Holika).

Another legend associated with Holi is thestory of Dhundhi. She was an evil ogress who usedto trouble the children of the kingdom of Prithu.She had a boon on her that made her almost in-vincible. However, she was also cursed by LordShiva, making her vulnerable to shouts andpranks by children, which eventually allowed thechildren she tormented to drive her away. For thisreason, children play pranks during the time ofHolika Dahan.

A third legend is one of love. Young LordKrishna, who was dark of skin, was confused byhow fair skinned his beloved Radha was, so hismother, Yashoda, told him to apply colour to herface. The mischievous young Krishna did just that,throwing coloured powder on her as well as others.This became a tradition among the young whicheventually spread to everyone. This aspect of thecelebration gives Holi the name Festival ofColours.

Celebrations

Holi

A rajah and his wife celebrating holi


Celebrations - Holi

Historical ReferencesSome of the oldest depictions of Holi celebrationsgo back to the 16th century. A panel from thattime in a temple in Hampi has a scene showing aprince and princess among maids who have largepichkaris (water pumps) full of water to soak theroyal couple. A Mewar painting from around 1755depicts the Maharana giving gifts to some peoplewhile a dance is happening. In the center of thescene is a tank full of coloured water.

CelebrationThe way Holi is celebrated, as well as the dur-

ation, varies by region all over India. A primarypart of it is the lighting of bonfires the night beforethe festival, which is always on a full moon, onmany street corners. This is often called HoliPaurnima (“Holi Full Moon”) and is done as a cel-ebration of the burning of Holika as well as ameans of cleansing the air of evil spirits. The nextday, all shops and offices are closed. Everyonecomes out of their homes and into the streets,dressed in white. During this time is the wild cel-ebration as people run around throwing colouredpowder and squirting coloured water at each oth-er. Water balloons filled with coloured water mayalso be used. Some people form groups called tolisand move around more slowly, spreading coloursand greeting others. There is also singing and dan-cing among the activities and eating of many sweetfoods. This goes on for a few hours before everyonefinally goes to the river or baths to wash them-selves before relaxing for the afternoon. In most

areas, Holi lasts abouttwo days.

Many regionsbring in their ownways of celebrating,extending the holiday,and even giving it oth-er names. In Gujurat,for example anothertradition is to hang a

pot of buttermilk highabove the street.Young boys form hu-man pyramids in at-tempts to reach andbreak it while girls tryto stop them bythrowing colouredwater at them. Theyoung boy that man-ages to break the potis crowned the “Holi King”. In some places, thewomen of the family will beat their brother-in-lawswith their rolled up saris in mock anger while thebrother-in-laws try to drench them with colouredwater. In the evening, the brother-in-laws willbring them various treats.

The region of Uttar Pradesh has a number ofvariants. In Barsana, they have the “Lath marHoli” (“that Holi in which people hit with sticks”)before the regular Holi. For this, women chaseaway men and beat them with sticks while otherswatch, singing songs.

Kanpur extends Holi to seven days and is fol-lowed by a large fair called “Ganga Mela” to celeb-rate the freeing of Kanpur from British rule afterthe First Indian War of Independence in 1857.People from all castes, creeds, religion and societ-ies join in. The Ganga Mela, which takes place afew days after Holi, marks an end to it with thewashing in the river. On the eve of Ganga Mela, allgovernment offices and shops remain closed somajor business groups and politicians gatheralong the Ghats (steps that lead down to the water)of the River Ganga banks. The next few days arefull of remembrance and worship along with vari-ous fun contests and selling of toys and otheritems at fair stalls.

The Kumaon region of Uttarakhand has a veryunique form of Holi. Much of the celebration in-volves a great deal of singing songs based on clas-sical ragas (melodic modes used in Indianclassical music) . The singers usually wear tradi-tional white churidar pyjama and kurta while dan-

Holi party in Delhi, with crowd anda tree decorated in coloured fabrics.

Braj Lath mar Holi in Barasana, India.Bonfire on Holi Dahan

Celebrations - Holi


cing in groups.In Bengal and Orissa, Holi is called Dol Purn-

ima (“Swing Festival”) and is dedicated more toLord Krishna and Radha. On the Dol Purnima dayin the early morning, the students dress up in theearly morning in saffron-coloured or pure whiteclothes, wearing garlands of flowers, and sing anddance to the accompaniment of traditional musicalinstruments like the ektara and veena. Icons ofKrishna and Radha are places on a richly decor-ated swinging palanquin and taken round themain streets of the city. Women dance around theswing and sing devotional songs while men keepspraying them with coloured water and powder. InOrissa, however, icons of Jagannath, the deity ofthe Jagannath Temple of Puri, replace the icons ofKrishna and Radha.

While Dol Purnima focuses more on the

Krishna legend, Holi in Maharashtra is mainly as-sociated with the burning of Holika. There, HoliPaurnima is also called as Shimga. A week beforethe festival, chil-dren go aroundthe community,collecting fire-wood and money.The firewood isarranged in alarge pile at onthe day of Holiand is lit thatevening. Eachhousehold thenmakes an offeringof a meal anddessert to the fire

Holi PreparationsThe coloured powder of Holi is called calledgulal. In the days before Holi, merchants putout many bowls of gulal and abeer (or aabir -small crystals that are added to the gulal tomake it sparkle) in many bright colours inpreparation for the celebration. Thesepowders will also be mixed with water whichcan be sprayed on people using hand pumpscalled pichkaris or used to fill water balloonswhich will be thrown. In medieval times,these powders were made by drying tesuflowers, which were bright red or deep orangecoloured, then grinding them to dust. Today,the colour added to the powder is chemicalbased.

The pichkaris, which have been used since the sixteenth century, constantly come out in new stylesto attract children, and many of them even become collectibles. Traditional ones looked like largesyringes, but now they can be almost anything, from modern squirt guns to toy figures and come inall different sizes.

Women also spend much of the time before the festival preparing various traditional foods, likegujiya (a sweet dumpling made with wheat flour and stuffed with khoya, a thick milk food), mathri (akind of flaky biscuits) , papri (crisp fried dough wafers) , papads (thin, crisp crackers) and pakoras

(fried snacks, like fritters) . These are consumed along with large amounts of the intoxicating bhang,which is a preparation from the leaves and flowers cannabis plant, and thandai (a cold drink pre-pared with a mixture of almonds, fennel seeds, magaztari seeds) .

Man playing an Ektara

Mathri Papads Papri


Celebrations - Holi

god. Shimga is about the elimin-ation of all evil. Unlike the Holifestivals of the north, the colourcelebrations here normally takeplace on the day of Rangapan-chami, which is five days afterHoli. The festival is supposed tohelp people forget about rivalriesand to start new, healthy rela-tions with others.

In Manipur, Holi is celeb-rated for six days and is mergedwith the centuries-old festival ofYaosang. The festival starts withthe burning of a thatched hut ofhay and twigs while young chil-dren go around to the housescollecting money, known as na-kadeng (or nakatheng) , as giftson the first two days. At night,youths perform a group folkdance, the Thabal Chongba, onthe full moon night along withfolk songs and rhythmic beats.Similar performances are donein the Krishna temples, in whichdevotees sing devotional songsand perform dances while wear-

ing traditional white and yellowturbans.

No matter what it’s called orhow it’s celebrated, Holi ismainly a celebration of renewal.It is the time to start the newyear, drive away bad feelings,and to celebrate with everyonearound you. Formalities and in-

hibitions are dropped and aspirit of joy and love is spreadthroughout the community. TheFestival of colour is truly a won-derful tradition for the entirecountry. PT

Vocabulary

Holika Dahan

Holi Paurnima

pichkaris

nakadeng

ghats

tolis

ragas

gulal

abeer

churidar pyjamas

kurta

ektara

veena

- Burning of Holi

- Holi Ful l Moon

- hand-pumps

- collected money

- steps that lead down to the water

- group of people that travel around together

- melodic modes used in Indian classical music

- coloured powder

- small crystals added to gulal to make it sparkle

- tightly fitting trousers worn by both men & women

- a loose shirt fal l ing to the knees of the wearer

- one-string instrument often used in traditional music

- a generic name for a string instrument

Other scenes of Holi: Shop selling colours for Holi, Old Delhi; Women preparing the Holika Dahan bonfire atThapathali, Kathmandu. Nepal; Holi celebrations, Pushkar, Rajasthan; Girl in Holi colours.

Special Feature


ast night I had a sort of a language dream,that is, a dream involved with language-

learning or with speaking foreign languages.Dreaming in a foreign language is not uncommonamong language enthusiasts, the so-called “lan-guage freaks”, but this one seemed quite authenticand realistic.

At this dream I was sitting on a counter with mysister, in front of a commercial building. It wasSaturday, early in the morning. I would have anappointment at the eye doctor that day and Iwould also visit a language school. It turned outthat my appointment had been cancelled, so sheand I decided to wander a bit downtown then re-turn.

When I came back to the building, I entered thebuilding and went to the language school, locatedat the second (actually middle) floor. The recep-tionist greeted me and I told her I was looking forsome language courses or materials:

’I’m aware you’re into less commercial languagessuch as Georgian, Aramaic, Papiamentu and Esto-nian, and I’m afraid I won’t have much to offeryou, right?’

’Yep. I can see nothing new on the shelves, any-way. Besides, what you have is quite expensive. ’(At that time I took a glance at some packs of whatlooked like those famous language courses withtapes. One of them seemed to cost around 1 ,500US$).

I turned around and stepped into what seemed tobe an inner courtyard with a balcony to the left,from which I could see the central span of thatbuilding. A group of students and their teacherwere sitting around a large bench that surroundedthe courtyard. The teacher started talking to me inEnglish about my progress, learning strategies andso on. He was speaking so fast that I could barelyunderstand anything. I knew that he was Brazilian

and he was trying to speak fast, unintelligible onpurpose, just to confuse me. As he realized Iwasn’t replying very enthusiastically, he switchedto Portuguese, and he advised me to try out thecourses for more commonly learned languages, asthey could also help me at that stage.

I went back to the school and asked the reception-ist what she could offer me. She reminded me thatI had already done a few placement tests. My Eng-lish should be about C1 , but she was unsure asfor which class should I take.

’I don’t think I will take any present Englishcourses anytime soon’, I replied.

’Then you should check our French courses. Hereare the results of the placement tests’.

I looked at the results sheet and I saw that most ofthe people were assigned to one of two textbooks. Ican’t recall their names.

’You see, those people will get either our upper-be-ginner or intermediary textbooks and classes. You,on the other hand, were assigned to a more ad-vanced French book, the Cambriopolitain. I’mafraid I can’t give you a prediction of how long itwill take till a class with a minimal number of stu-dents is formed’.

I turned back, not surprised or disappointed withthe standard response a self-learner gets after aplacement test. What kept boggling my mind wasthe name of that textbook: “Cambriopolitain”.What on Earth would such textbook be about? TheFrench language as spoken in the bigger cities ofFrance during the Cambrian geological period?Now that is what one would call an archaizing lan-guage course.

I woke up. I made sure to google for “Cambriopoli-tain”, “Cambropolitain”, “Cambrolitain” and al-ternate forms. No results until now. PT

AA LLaanngguuaaggee DDrreeaamm

Revisited - Words From National Character


[Editor’s note: This article is areprint from “Stories ThatWords Tell Us” By ElizabethO’Neil l . I t was published in1 91 8, but sti l l gives a goodlook at how we have dertivedsome words in English fromnational characters. ]

here is one group of meta-phorical words which isspecially interesting forthe stories of the past

which they tell us if we examineinto their meaning. Many namesof ancient tribes and nations,and some names of modernpeoples, have come to be usedas general words; but the newmeanings they have now tell uswhat other peoples have thoughtof the nations bearing thesenames in history.

One of the best things thatcan be said about a boy or a girlis that he or she is “frank,” bywhich we mean open andstraightforward. The Frankswere, of course, the Teutonictribe which conquered Gaul (thecountry we now call France) inthe sixth century. Unlike theEnglish when they conqueredthe Britons, the Franks mixedwith the Gauls and the Romanpopulation which they

conquered; but for a long timethe Franks were the only peoplewho were altogether free. Fromthis fact the word frank came in-to use, meaning “free.” A “frank”person is one who speaks outfreely and without restraint.

The name Frank has givenus a word with a very pleasantmeaning, but this was not thecase with all the Teutonic tribeswhich broke in upon the RomanEmpire. A person who is veryuncivilized in his manners issometimes called a “Goth.” Theword is often especially used todescribe a person who does notappreciate pictures and booksand works of art. Sometimes ar-chitects will pulldown beautifulold buildings tomake place fornew, and thepeople who ap-preciate beauti-ful thingsdescribe them as“Goths.” Moreoften, perhaps,the word Vandal

is used to de-scribe suchpeople. TheGoths and Van-dals were two ofthe fiercest and

most barbaric of the Germantribes which overran the RomanEmpire from the third to the fifthcentury. They showed no respectfor the beautiful buildings andthe great works of art whichwere spread over the empire.They robbed and burned likesavages, and in a few years des-troyed many of the beautifulthings which had been madewith so much care and skill bythe Greek and Roman artists. Sodeep an impression did their de-structiveness make on the worldof that time that their nameshave been handed down throughsixteen centuries, and are usedto-day in the unpleasant sense

RReevviissiitteedd

WWoorrddss FFrroommNNaattiioonnaall CChhaarraacctteerr

Statue of barbarian king imprisoned. Notice the thick beard

Revisted - Words From National Character


of wilful destroyers of beautifulthings.

The words barbarian andbarbarous are used in the sameway. We describe a child who be-haves in a rough way as “a littlebarbarian,” or a grown-up per-son without ordinary good man-ners as “a mere barbarian.” Andthe word barbarous has an evenworse meaning. It is used to de-scribe very coarse, uncivilizedbehaviour; but most often it hasalso the sense of cruelty as wellas coarseness. Thus we speak ofthe barbarous behaviour of theGermans in Belgium. But whenthe word barbarous was firstused it meant merely “foreign.”

To the Greeks there wereonly two classes ofpeople—Greeks, and non-Greeksor “barbarians.” The name bar-barian meant a bearded man,and came from the Greek wordbarbaros. The Greeks wereclean-shaven, and distinguishedthemselves from the “bearded”peoples who knew nothing ofGreek civilization. The Romansconquered Greece, and learnedmuch from its civilization. Tothem all who were not Greeks orRomans were “barbarians.”Some Roman writers, likeCicero, use the word in the mod-ern sense of unmannerly or evensavage, but this was not a com-mon use. St. Paul was a Romancitizen, for he belonged toTarsus, a city in Asia Minorwhich had been given full Ro-man rights; but he was a Greekby birth, and he uses the wordin the Greek way. He speaks ofall men being equal according tothe Christian religion, saying,“There is neither Greek nor . . .barbarian, bond nor free.”

The word slave, again, con-tains in itself whole chapters ofEuropean history. It comes fromthe word Slav. The Slavs are therace of people to which the Rus-sians, Poles, and many other na-tions in the East of Europebelong. The Great War has been

partly fought for the freedom ofthe small Slav nations, of whichSerbia is one. The Slavs have along history of oppression andtyranny behind them. They havebeen subject to stronger nations,such as the Turks, and, in Hun-gary, the Magyars. The first“slaves” in mediæval Europe be-longed to this race, and the word“slave” is only another form ofSlav. The word gives us an ideaof the impression which the mis-fortunes of the Slavs made onthe people of the Middle Ages.

The words Turk and Tartar

have almost the opposite mean-ing to slave when they are usedin a general sense. We call anunmanageable baby a “youngTurk,” and in this expression wehave the idea of all the troublethe Turks have given the peopleof Europe since they swarmed infrom the East in the twelfth cen-tury. The word Turk in thissense is now generally usedamusingly to describe a trouble-some child; but a grown-up per-son with a very quick temper orvery difficult to get on with is of-ten described also, chiefly infun, as a “Tartar.” Tartar is the

name of the race of people towhich the Turks, Cossacks, andseveral other peoples belong.The name by which they calledthemselves was Tatar; butEuropeans changed it to Tartar,from the Latin word Tartarus,which means “hell. ” This givesus some idea of the impressionthese fierce people made onmediæval Europe—an impres-sion which is kept in memory bythe present humorous use of theword.

It is chiefly Eastern peopleswhose names have passed intocommon words meaning fierceand cruel people. Our fairy talesare full of tales of “ogres.” It isnot quite certain, but it is prob-able that this word comes fromHungarian. The chief people ofHungary are the Magyars; butthe first person who used thename Hungarian in the sense of“ogre” probably did not knowthis, but thought of them asHuns, or perhaps Tartars, andtherefore as very fierce, cruelpeople. The first person who isknown to have used it is Per-rault, a French writer of fairytales in the seventeenth century.

The Great War has given usanother of these national namesused in a new way. Many peoplereferred to the Germans allthrough the war as the “Huns.”The Huns were half-savagepeople, who in the early MiddleAges moved about in greathordes over Europe killing andburning. They were at lastconquered in East and West,and finally disappeared fromhistory. But their name re-

But the original assassinswere an Eastern peoplewho believed that themurder ofpeople of a reli-gion other than their ownwas pleasing to their God.

Depiction of a Turk in the 16th century

Revisited - Words From National Character


mained as a synonym forcruelty. The Kaiser, in an unfor-tunate speech, exhorted his sol-diers to make themselves asterrible as Huns; and whenpeople heard of the ill-treatmentof the Belgians when their coun-try was invaded at the beginningof the war, they said that theGermans had indeed behaved

like the Huns of long ago. Thename clung to them, and duringthe war, when people spoke ofthe “Huns,” they generally meantthe Germans, and not the fierce,half-savage little men who fol-lowed their famous chief Attila,plundering and burning throughEurope about fifteen centuriesago.

Another name with a some-what similar meaning is assas-sin, which most people wouldnot guess to have ever been thename of a collection of people.An assassin is a person who ar-ranges beforehand to take someone by surprise and kill him.But the original assassins werean Eastern people who believed

that the murder of people of areligion other than their ownwas pleasing to their God. TheArabs first called this sect by thename hashshash, which thescholars of the Middle Agestranslated into the Latin assas-

sinus. The Arab name was givenbecause these people were greateaters of “hashish” or dry herbs.

The name Arab itself hascome to be used with a specialmeaning which has nothing todo with the people whose nameit is. A rough little boy whospends most of his time in thestreets is described as a “streetArab,” and this comes from thefact that we think of the Arabsas a wandering people. The“street Arab” is a wanderer also,of another sort.

Another name of a wander-ing people has also come to havea special meaning in English.The French word for gipsy is bo-hemien, and from this we havethe English word Bohemian.When we say a person is “a Bo-hemian,” we mean that he livesin the way he really likes, anddoes not care whether otherpeople think he is quite respect-able or not. It was the novelistThackeray who first used theword Bohemian in this sense.

Bohemia is, of course, thename of a country in Germany,but it is also used figuratively todescribe the region or com-

munity in which “Bo-hemian” orunconventional peoplelive.

The word gipsy it-self is used to describea very dark person, oralmost any kind ofpeople travelling roundthe country in cara-vans. But gipsy reallymeans “Egyptian.”When the real gipsiesfirst appeared in Eng-land, in the sixteenthcentury, peoplethought they came

from Egypt, and so gave themthis name.

Another name often given tovery dark people is blackamoor,a name by which negroes aresometimes described. This reallymeans “Black Moor,” and showsus how confused the people whofirst used the word were aboutdifferent races of people. TheMoors were a quite differentpeople from the negroes, beingrelated to the Arabs. But tosome people every one who isnot white is a “nigger.” Niggercomes, of course, from negro.

The Moors inhabited a partof North-west Africa. It was alsoa North African people, the Al-gerians, who gave us the wordZouave. Every one has seensince the Great War began pic-tures of the handsome andquaintly-dressed French soldierscalled “Zouaves.” Perhaps somechildren wondered why theywore such a strange Easterndress. It is because the Zouaveregiments, which are now chieflycomposed of Frenchmen, wereoriginally formed from an Algeri-an mountain tribe called theZouaves—Algeria being a Frenchpossession. The name is almostforgotten as that of a foreign

In the Middle Ages schol-ars wrote in Latin, but po-ets and taletellers beganto write in the language ofthe people -- the romancelanguages in France andItaly.

Painting of a Bohemian woman

Painting "Arabs Drinking Coffee in Front of a Tent"

Revisted - Words From National Character


tribe, but has become insteadthe name of these light infantryFrench regiments.

The name of the most fam-ous of Eastern nations nowspread all over the world, theJews, has become a term of re-proach. For hundreds of yearsafter the spread of Christianityover Europe the Jews werelooked upon as a wicked andhateful people. In many coun-tries they were not allowed tolive at all; in others a portion ofthe towns was set apart forthem, and they were allowed tolive there because they were use-ful as money-lenders.

Naturally the Jews, perse-cuted and distrusted, made asmuch profit as they could out ofthe people who treated them inthis way. Perhaps with thegrowth of their wealth they grewto love money for its own sake.In any case, before long the Jewswere looked upon as people whowere decidedly ungenerous inthe matter of money. Everybodyknows the story of the JewShylock in Shakespeare’s greatplay “The Merchant of Venice.”Nowadays a person who is notreally a Jew is often describedcontemptuously as a “Jew” if heshows himself mean in moneymatters; and some people evenuse a slang expression, “to jew,”meaning to cheat or be verymean over a money affair.

Another name of a nationwhich stands for dishonesty ofanother sort (and much more ex-cusable) is Gascon. The Gasconsare the natives of Gascony, aprovince in the south of France.It is proverbial among otherFrenchmen that the Gascons arealways boasting, and even inEnglish we sometimes use theword Gascon to describe a greatboaster, while gasconade is nowa common term for a boastfulstory.

Another word which we useto describe this sort of thing isromance. We often hear the ex-

pression, “Oh, he is only roman-cing,” by which we mean that aperson is saying what is nottrue, inventing harmless detailsto improve his story. The wordromance has now many mean-ings, generally containing theidea of imagination. A person iscalled “romantic” when he or sheis full of imaginings of greatdeeds and events. Or we say aperson is a “romantic figure”when we mean that from hislooks or speech, or from someother qualities, he seems fit foradventures.

But romance, from which weget romantic, was at first merelyan adjective used to describe thelanguages which are descendedfrom the Latin language, likeFrench, Italian, and Spanish. Inthe Middle Ages scholars wrotein Latin, but poets and tale-tellers began to write in the lan-guage of the people—theromance languages in Franceand Italy. The tales of adventureand things which we should nowcall “romantic” were written inthe “romance” languages; andfrom being used to describe thelanguage, the word came to beused to describe the kind ofstory contained in these poemsand tales. Gradually the wordsromantic and romance got themeaning which they have to-day.

We have seen in anotherchapter that we have a numberof words taken from the namesof persons in ancient history. Wehave also a modern and specialuse of words formed from thenames of some of the ancientnations. We saw that we use theword Spartan to describe anyvery severe discipline, or a per-son who willingly uses such dis-cipline for himself.

There are several other suchnames used in a more or lesscomplimentary way. We speak of“Roman” firmness, and everyone who has read Roman historywill agree that this is a good useof the word. On the other hand,

we have the expression “Punicfaith” to describe treachery. TheRomans had had many reasonsfor mistrusting their great en-emy, the Carthaginians, andthey used this expression, FidesPunica, which we have simplyborrowed from the Latin.

We use the expression “Attic(or Athenian) salt” to describe avery refined wit or humour. TheRomans used the word sal, or“salt,” in this sense ofwit, andtheir expression sal Atticum

shows the high opinion they hadof the Athenians, from whom,indeed, they learned much in artand in literature. It is this sameexpression which we use to-day,having borrowed and translatedit also from the Latin.

We speak of a “Parthianshot” when some one finishes aconversation or an argumentwith a sharp or witty remark,leaving no chance for an answer.This expression comes from thestory of the Parthians, a peoplewho lived on the shores of theCaspian Sea, and were famousas good archers among the an-cient nations.

The way in which the namesof nations and peoples havetaken on more general meaningsgives us many glimpses into his-tory. PT

Statue of a Japanese ogre


Language Learning Methods - Classes

hile in this column wehave talked about meth-

ods of learning languagesthrough self-study, the mostpopular means of learning isprobably still by attendingclasses. Schools all over theworld offer classes in at leastone language to students. Inmany schools, taking such aclass is even mandatory.

These kinds of classes aredone with many other studentslearning together at the sametime. A teacher presents the stu-dents with the material andhelps them master the basics ofthe language. Textbooks areusually the primary source ofthe materials, but with the ex-pansion of language mediatypes, students can now makeuse of audio, videos, magazinesand newspapers, and even com-puters.

A version of this media us-age isn’t entirely new. Language

labs have been used for over acentury in some schools, thefirst appearing in the Universityof Grenoble, France in 1908. Es-sentially they are classroomswith each seat having direct ac-cess to media equipment to aidthe students in learning. Somemay even be so advanced as tobe separate sound booths, clos-ing out the noises of the otherstudents. From the 1950s to the1990s, these were mostly tape orcassette based systems, but theyare more likely to be using mul-timedia computers now.

Taking classes means show-ing up regularly for a fixedamount of time to receive in-structions from the teacher, re-view what was learned, andpractise with other students.This is one of the few ap-proaches that offers a regulardirect, face-to-face interactionwith other learners. This is ahuge asset, as it allows the stu-

dents to truly usethe language to itsfullest extent. Theyare able to practisespeaking andlistening in realtime as well asformation andcomprehension.This differs fromthe more passivemethods of booksand audio whichonly allow a personto utilize onemeans of input.

Learning by audio can only trulyimprove your listening skills,while books can only improveyour reading. You have no feed-back from a person to help cor-rect your progress. Even whenusing a more interactive ap-

proach, like posting or chattingonline, some aspect is missing.

Another major benefit ofclasses is that you can get clar-ification of the vocabulary andgrammar as you learn from aperson who is fully knowledge-able. When studying on yourown, there is often not anyone tohelp clarify a point, so unlessyou have someone you can askor another reference to help, youwill find your understanding hit-ting a sudden wall. This may notbe a major problem, but it dis-rupts your flow of studying.

LLaanngguuaaggee LLeeaarrnn iinngg MMeetthhooddss

CCllaasssseess

Ofcourse, you hope thatthe teacher of the class iscompetent in the language.Sadly, this is not alwaysthe case.

A teacher explaining some grammar detailsto a class

A basic language lab for teaching English in the Middle-East.



Along with the direct feed-back, a student in a larger classalso gets the social interactionwith others sharing the desire tomaster the language. This mightsound trivial, but to anyone thathas tried learning a language ontheir own, this can make all thedifference. You are no longerstruggling alone. You have agroup of peers that are learningand practising right along withyou. Since you are all beginners,this can also greatly ease thefear of making mistakes. Whenyou study alone then try to prac-tise with someone more ad-vanced or even a native, you arelikely to be very afraid of sayingsomething wrong. This can bealmost completely wiped awaywhen everyone else is at thesame level as you. You can relaxand enjoy the shared learningexperience.

Of course, you hope that theteacher of the class is competentin the language. Sadly, this isnot always the case. The teachermay have learned the languageas a second language themselvesand therefore their abilities willdepend greatly upon their owneducation as well as their experi-ence. For example, a Germanwho learned Spanish in a Ger-man school and goes on to be-come a Spanish teacherthemselves will probably notspeak it as well as a teacher thatlearned it by living in Spain for afew years. A student’s abilitywith the new language willtherefore be majorly impacted by

their teachers ownabilities.

These brings usto the second prob-lem of this method.While the studentsare learning the lan-guage with severalother people at thesame time, this canlead to a what I call aclosed system situ-ation. What that

means is that everyone is repeat-ing what they have learned fromthe teacher, books, andwhatever other media they areusing. The less influence theyhave outside the classroom, themore restricted their educationbecomes.

Think about only ever eatingat a single Italian restaurant allyour life. You might try everydish, memorize the entire menu,and always feel firm in yourknowledge of Italian food be-cause of this. However, what ifone day you eat at another Itali-an restaurant which has a differ-ent way of preparing the dishesyou know, or even offers onesyou have never heard of. Youwill realize that you have a greatdeal more to learn. You mighteven find out that what you wereeating in your restaurant wasn’tcorrect. It would be like thinkingyou were eating real Italian foodall your life because you ate atthe Olive Garden, only to travelto Italy and visit a restaurantthere. Everything you thoughtyou knew might suddenly beproven wrong.

This can hap-pen in theclassroom as well.If what you havelearned there is in-correct, yet every-one repeats itconstantly, it be-come ingrained.Then when a stu-dent tries to con-verse with a true

native, or perhaps even a stu-dent of the same language froma different class, they may findthemselves lost. This is likely tohappen with any system oflearning, of course, and how badthe damage is will depend onhow incorrect the original sourceor teacher was.

A real world example of thisis when I traveled to Italy for thefirst time. I had met an Italianexchange student named Luciowhen he attended my school oneyear and so I visited him thenext year in his country. Whilein his home town, we went to hisEnglish class briefly and there Imet his English teacher. Theteacher, while able to makehimself clear to me, was cer-tainly not fluent and made a fewbasic mistakes while talking tome. I diplomatically did notpoint these out, but I did realizethat Lucio’s English was muchbetter than his teacher’s fromhaving had spent a year in theUnited States. If he hadn’t donethe exchange program, I wonderhow much his English couldhave improved with this teacher.

Advanced InteractionMethodsWith the increase of technologyand the internet, many classescan now supplement the learn-ing experience by allowing stu-dents to talk to other learnersand native speakers via the in-ternet. Going back to our fic-tional German learning Spanish,

Students practising their language skills during class

Classroom with computers to use more learning technologies



he could be studying in the classwhile also having a chance totalk to a native Spanish speakerby using a voice-chat like Skype.This advanced interaction canhelp decrease the closed systemeffect as well as infusing the en-tire class with greater enthusi-asm. Rather than just speakingwith fellow classmates and par-roting what they have learned,they can practise with nativesand quickly refine both theirlistening and speaking skills.This then becomes a hybrid ofclasses and internet learningmethods.

Setting the PaceWhile working with a class givesyou the benefits of havingsomeone who can (hopefully) an-swer your questions as well asdirect interaction with otherlearners, it does have the relatedproblem of acquisition speed. Aclass is meant to make sureeveryone learns the language,which means the class can onlyprogress as fast as the slowestlearner. If a student isn’t grasp-ing the material as swiftly as theothers, the teacher may end upspending more of the class timeattempting to assist that onestudent, leaving the other stu-dents waiting and perhaps even-tually resenting the slowerstudent. This can quickly lead tobad feelings in the class as wellas boredom. The alternative is

that the teachercontinues at a reg-ular pace and anystudents that cannot keep up areleft struggling.Meanwhile, thereare going to besome students thatpick up the mater-ial much fasterthan the othersand they will be-come bored andfrustrated with theclass as well. Thisis a problem with classes in anysubject. The larger the class, thebigger the problem is likely to bebecause there will probably bemore students that are eitherslower or faster than the rest.For this reason, many peopleprefer individual study in whichthey can work at their own pace.

ImmersionClasses may also use more ofthe immersion technique, as pi-oneered by the Berlitz schools.Immersion is when the learner isput into a situation in whichthey can only speak the lan-guage they are learning. Theyare also only spoken to in thatlanguage. This forces them touse the language in a real-worldsetting they might not otherwiseget a chance to experience. Aclass can simulate this by hav-ing the teacher constantly

speaking in thenew language andinsisting the stu-dents only usethat language aswell in responseor when talking toothers. Of course,this can only bemaintained dur-ing the class time.Some more ex-pensive classesmay involve hav-ing students ac-tually traveling to

another country and being im-mersed in the language full timefor a period of a few weeks ormonths. Immersion is con-sidered one of the best ways tolearn, and we will discuss it fur-ther in another article.

I did find myself attending aFrench immersion class while Iwas in my university. The teach-er would enter the class andstart speaking in French, firstgreeting us then telling us whatwe would be covering for thatclass. The only problem with thiswas the it was a French historyclass, and the only person thatunderstood any French in theclass was the French exchangestudent. After a week of this, wefinally asked him to stop speak-ing French, since we were therefor the history, not the language.

CostsA major drawback to takingclasses is the cost. If the lan-guage class is part of your nor-mal school criteria, then the costis no more than whatever yournormal tuition is (if any, sincepublic schools are usually paidfor by the government) . However,if you are not in school, thentaking classes may become ex-pensive. You are paying for theteacher, the use of the facilities(wherever the class is beingheld), and any textbooks you willbe expected to purchase.A large class which can leave slower students behind or drag on

faster students.

The University of Da Nang's Foreign Languages School



In New York, USA, a Berlitzimmersion course can cost $250per month for 90-minute classeswhile another course may cost$210 to $285 for ten hour longclasses. At the University of Cali-fornia, Los Angeles, a traditional,three-month language classcosts $480. These are relativelyinexpensive. By comparison, asan immersion course in anothercountry, KCP International offersclasses in Japanese in Japan,with a cost of $2900 persemester for just the course it-self. Add a few thousand dollarsmore depending on where youlive during that time.

Time SpentDepending on the nature of theclass, whether it is part of yourdaily school activity, a few nightsa week at a local university orcourse center, or an extensiveimmersion school, you are likelyto be spending a great deal oftime NOT involved in the actuallearning. If you need to travelregularly to the location of theclass, that time is wasted. Andduring a class, whenever theteacher needs to assist any stu-dent who is having a problemwith the material, including you,that is time you aren’t actuallypractising and learning. Thismight make you think then thata full immersion course like theJapanese one is the most effi-cient. That might be true, yetconsider that you are actuallydedicating several months tolearning the language. Howmuch are you sacrificing whenyou can’t be doing the stuff you

might normally be doing back inyour own country? No matterwhat format the classes take,you have to attend them accord-ing to their time schedules, notyours.

TutoringA related means of learning istaking classes with a private tu-tor. This has many of the samebenefits as a class, but alsosome further drawbacks. With atutor, a student will be able toget all the help they need andwork at their own pace.However, the amount of socialinteraction will be severely lim-ited, since the only other personthey are likely to be speakingwith is the tutor. The quality oftheir education will also be dir-ectly tied to the abilities of thetutor. A native speaker might beideal as a tutor, but it is alsolikely the teacher may havesimply learned the language in aclass they attended a few yearsbefore. Private tutors are alsolikely to be far more expensivethan a group class, because thesingle student is paying for theentire salary of the tutor, ratherthan having that cost splitamong many others.

There are many benefitswith learning through classes,and they will probably always bea major method of language ac-quisition. As newer technologiesevolve and become integrated,the classroom can actually ex-pand its capabilities rather thanhaving to compete with these al-ternative means. For example,with software becoming more

advanced and the introductionof internet facilities, a classroomhas more resources and inter-active means. Even more im-portant, a student has a greaterchance to practise and expandtheir learning outside theclassroom, either on their own oras assigned by the teacher. Thishas already led to a hybrid ofdistance learning, in which aperson can attend a class in realtime, with full visual and audio,in a class that is hundreds oreven thousands of miles away.Imagine sitting on your com-puter at home in France and be-ing able to attend a Spanishlanguage class being held inGermany. You instantly elimin-ate the travel time or cost of liv-ing there while still benefit fromgroup learning experience.

Classes will not be the bestchoice for everyone, of course.Those who can’t afford them orfind them locally will be unableto participate while those thatdon’t learn at the same pace asothers are likely to prefer self-study or private tutoring. Still,they should certainly be con-sidered for anyone wanting topick up another language orthree.

We hope you enjoyed thisthird article in this series of lan-guage learning methods. Previ-ous articles have discussed themethods of audio learning andbooks. We would like yourthoughts and comments on thearticle and your experienceswith classes. Please write to usat [email protected]

Language school in Delhi

Classroom of the future?

Sections - Language Exchange


Sections is a mothly column about different

parts ofPaleremo, explaining their purpose

and how to use them.

very popular method of using the internetto learn languages is the language ex-change. Because there are people from allover the world on the internet daily, and

potentially millions of them wanting to learn a newlanguage, then connecting them directly with otherlanguage learners benefits everyone.

Basically, you want to match up two peoplewho each want to learn the other persons nativelanguage. For example, a Frenchmen that wants tolearn German would become a partner to a Ger-man woman wanting to learn French. They couldthen work together to help the other person withtheir own native language.

Of course, finding a partner is the hard part,and that is where the language exchange programsare used. Essentially, a person signs up for one,telling what their native or fluent languages are aswell as what language or languages they want tolearn. Along with their name and languages, theymight give more personal data, like age, genderand location along with some description of them-selves, their lives and their interests. Each per-son’s information becomes part of a largesearchable database so that anyone can find a po-tential partner easily and contact the person.

Entire web sites are devoted to this method oflanguage study, and they vary greatly in the meth-od of communication between partners.Everything from simply giving out email addressesto creating elaborate discussion areas and ex-change formats is possible.

Parleremo Language ExchangeSince Parleremo is already a collection of peoplewanting to learn new languages, we naturally builtin our own exchange system. A few things have tobe different from dedicated exchange sites. Sincenot all members on Parleremo will want to be in-volved in an exchange, a member must create aprofile for the exchange program in order to parti-cipate in it. This takes some information from theirexisting Parleremo profile and gives them placesfor extra details.

On the introduction exchange page is basicdescription of the program. Options are given tocreate a new profile or edit an existing profile (ifthe member has already signed up for one) and tosearch among the potential partners. Below that isa list of recently added members as well as mem-bers that are online at the moment, if any.

Creating a ProfileWhen a member creates anew profile, some basic in-formation is copied fromtheir existing site profile.These include a few of theirnative or fluent languages, afew of the languages theyare studying, birthdate,gender, country and loca-tion. Any information that ischanged here will not be altered in the site profile,since this profile is meant to be just for finding anexchange partner.

There is also a place for a member to put insomething about themselves. This can be anythingthey want to share and helps a potential partnersee how much they might have in common witheach other. For example, if a member likes Bolly-

Sections

Language Exchange



wood movies, they might mention that, inthe hopes of finding a partner that alsolikes them. Having similar likes can helpcreate a closer bond between partners aswell as giving them something to discusswhile practising their languages.

A member can also select the prefer-ences they would like for communicating.Since the main purpose of the exchangesystem is to help people find others, howthose people actually communicate andpractise together is completely for them todecide. These options are to help furtherrefine a search. If a member wants to onlycommunicate via email, they should se-lect that, and when they search for apartner, they can search for those thatalso want to use email.

There is an option to have this profilein the search or not as well. This mightseem odd, since why would someone cre-ate a profile that they didn’t want listed?The purpose of this is so once a personfinds a partner (or partners) , they can re-move themselves from the search withoutdeleting their profile. Then when they areready for a new partner, they can changethis so they are listed again. It’s like changing astatus from “single” to “married”.

The member should then save or delete theirprofile. Deleting a profile here is permanent, but itonly deletes the exchange profile. The site profilewill remain unchanged.

Finding the OneOnce the new or editedprofile is saved, the personcan then search for a part-ner. It isn’t necessary to jointhe exchange to search for apartner. Joining just makesit possible for others to knowa member is interested.

The search containsblanks for various parts of the profile. By filling inthe appropriate blanks or selecting certain boxes,the search becomes refined to people matchingthose selections. For example, if a member wantsto find a partner that knows Japanese, they wouldselect “Japanese” in the “Knows” box. Since theoptimal exchange is finding a partner who is a nat-ive speaker in the language for the language beingstudied and also studying the a language thesearcher knows, a language should also be put inthe “Studying” box which the searcher is native orfluent in. That is, if the searcher is a native Span-ish speaker and wants to learn Japanese, they

should put “Japanese” in the “Knows” box and“Spanish” in studying. The information in thesearch should be about the potential partner, notthe searcher.

The language selections are the most vital,since that is the purpose of the exchange. Otherinformation that can be used to filter through po-tential partners are age, gender, country, andkeywords. The keywords are used to search thepersonal interests information, and a match canbe found on either all the words or any of them.

That is, if keywords “dog” and “cat” are given andthe “any” option is selected, then people that haveeither “dog” and “cat” in their profiles are listed. If“all” is selected, then only those that have both willbe found.

To limit a selection based on the preferredcommunication methods (email, voice chat, etc) ,checkboxes are given for those options. Note thatthe more of these that are selected, the more lim-ited the results will be. If someone selects just theemail option, only those that want to use email willbe listed. If email and voice chat are selected, then

There are people from all over theworld on the internet daily and poten-tially millions of them wanting to learna new language.

A language exchange will help you find someone among the millions of peoplewho are online everyday.



only those that want to use both of those optionswill be listed. They might want to use other meth-ods as well, but anyone that only has one of thosein their profile options will not be listed in the res-ults.

Lastly, to limit results to more active mem-bers, a search can performed on just those thatare online. The results can also be sorted basedupon when a member was last logged in, last ed-ited their profile, or the date they joined the ex-change. This can be critical, since a person thathas not been on in over a year will probably not beavailable for the exchange, having signed up atone time and forgotten about it.

ResultsOnce all the information for the search is submit-ted, the matches are listed. Each entry shows thebasic details of the profile, including their avatarand whether they are online at the moment or not.If they have provided further information aboutthemselves in a language the searcher doesn’t un-derstand, there is an option to translate it.

When the searcher finds someonethey would like to connect with, they canselect one of the options that are dis-played as icons. They can see the mem-bers site profile, email the person usingthe site email system (personal emails arenot displayed. Partners can exchangethose privately if they wish), or send thema private message (PM). Viewing their siteprofile will give more details about theperson as well as several other ways tocontact the person, such as Facebook,email, Skype, etc. , depending on whatthat person has added.

Finally, there is a way to report aprofile to an administrator if the viewerthinks someone is abusing the system.

Such an abuse might be posting something ob-scene in the personal information or using the ex-change system as a dating service. Selecting thisoption will give the viewer a report form to fill outand submit. This reporting system should not it-self be abused. People should not report someonethey are angry about just to get them into trouble.

StatisticsFor those obsessed with numbers, there is a stat-istics section that lists countries, languagesknown and languages studied, sorted from most toleast, of the exchange members. Age range andaverage is also given, along with the number ofmales and females.

We hope that the language exchange section isbeneficial for members. We are always looking forways to improve our members experience, so let usknow anytime of suggestions on how we can makethings better. PT

Meeting people in a language exchange is a bit like a party, only online.

Credits


Letter From the EditorWriter: Erik ZidoweckiImages:Petey: Mayan Stela

Voynich Manuscipt - Cryptic CodexWriter: Lucil le MartinImages:Stefan Bauer: Prague Castle todayEstec sarl. : Panoramatic view to Charles Bridge and the Prague CastleObankston: Enochian alphabetPetey: Wilfrid Voynich, Rudolph I I , Johannes Marcus Marci, Roger Bacon, Edward Kelley, Vil la Mondragone, al l images of theVoynich ManuscriptSources:• "Voynich Manuscript" World Mysteries <http: //www.world-mysteries.com/sar_1 3.htm>• "The Voynich Manuscript" Crystal l inks <http: //www.crystal inks.com/voynich.html>• "Voynich Manuscript" Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library <http: //beinecke. l ibrary.yale.edu/col lections/highl ights/voynich-manuscript>• "The Voynich Manuscript" John Baez, University of California, Riverside <http: //math.ucr.edu/home/baez/voynich.html>• "Voynich manuscript" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_Manuscript>• "Enochian" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian>• "Zipf's Law" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law>• "Georg Baresch" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Baresch>• "Rudolf I I , Holy Roman Emperor" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_I I ,_Holy_Roman_Emperor>

Benjamin Whorf - Relativity of LanguageWriter: Sofia OzolsImages:WestportWiki: Yale Old Campus CourtyardDaderot: Stela 1 0, Mayan artifact from Seibal, Guatemala (AD 849)Petey: Benjamin Whorf, Edward Sapir, Chaco Canyon Indian dwell ings, Stone house of the Hopi vi l lage of Oraibi, Hopi womandressing hair of unmarried girlSources:• "Benjamin Lee Whorf" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf>• "Benjamin Lee Whorf" Citizendium <http: //en.citizendium.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf>• "Benjamin Lee Whorf" princeton.edu <https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki1 00k/docs/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf.html>• "Benjamin Lee Whorf" Encyclopedia of World Biography <http: //www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf.aspx>

At The Cinema - Lost in TranslationWriter: Erik ZidoweckiSources:• "Lost in Translation" Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) <http: //www.imdb.com/title/tt0335266/>All images are copyright Focus Features, Tohokashinsha Film Company Ltd. , American Zoetrope, Elemental Fi lms

Languages in Peril - The Polish ConnectionWriter: Lucil le MartinImages:Zygmunt Put Zetpe0202: Zasanska Pass (title) West Carpathian Mountains, PolandTomasz Sienicki: Bi l ingual Polish-Kashubian road sign in PolandRussianname: Rusyn farmsted (from the vil lage of Lyuta, Beliko-Bereznyanski region)Silar: Rusyn woman's costume from PresovLajsikonik: Banner Pro Loquela Silesiana the fourth Palestinian marchSources:• "Kashubian language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_language>• "Kashubian" Omniglot <http: //www.omniglot.com/writing/kashubian.htm>• "Kashubian language: Meaning" explanationGuide <http: //explanation-guide. info/meaning/Kashubian-language.html>• "Rusyn language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusyn_language>• "Pannonian Rusyn language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Rusyn_language>• "Ruthenian" Omniglot <http: //www.omniglot.com/writing/rusyn.htm>• "What is a Rusyn?" slovakia.org <http: //www.slovakia.org/society-rusyn.htm>• "Silesian language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si lesian_language>• "Silesian" Omniglot <http: //www.omniglot.com/writing/si lesian.php>• "Silesian language and the Polish language" Claritaslux.com <http://claritaslux.com/blog/si lesian-language-polish-language/>

Word on the Streets - Romanian PoetsWriter: Sofia OzolsImages:Petey: Romanian street, Eminescu, Alecsandri

Credits


Sources:• "Mihai Eminescu" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihai_Eminescu>• "Mihai Eminescu" NNDB <http://www.nndb.com/people/868/000095583/>• "Mihai Eminescu" Polymer Notes <http: //www.polymernotes.org/biographies/ROU_bio_eminescu.htm>• "Vasile Alecsandri" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasile_Alecsandri>• "Vasile Alecsandri" Encyclopedia of 1 848 Revolutions <http: //www.ohio.edu/chastain/ac/alecsan.htm>

Where Are You?Writer: Sonja Krüger

Celebrations - HoliWriter: Sonja KrügerImages:Diganta Talukdar: Holi celebration at Nagaon (title)FaceMePLS: Holi Feest 2008Ronaldo Lazzari: Bonfire on Holi DahanKaren Sandhu: Holi party in Delhi, with crowd and a tree decorated in coloured fabricsgkrishna38: Braj Lath mar Holi at Barasana, IndiaBiswarup Ganguly: Holi Colors at a street shop at Deanesh Skeikh lane, HowrahCharles Haynes: Papads; Papri ChaatMd. Saiful Aziz Shamseer: Man playing EktaraEliza Raschke: Shop sell ing colours for Holi , Old Delhiwonker: Women preparing the Holika Dahan bonfire at Thapathali , Kathmandu. Nepaljudepics: Holi celebrations, Pushkar, RajasthanChris Wil l is: Girl in colorsIngo Mehling: Holi Bonfire in front of Jagdish Temple / Udaipur (flash page)Petey: A rajah and his wife celebrating holi ; MathriSources:• "Holi" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi>• "Holi Festival" Holifestival.org <http: //www.holifestival.org/hol i-festival.html>• "Hinduism" About.com <http://hinduism.about.com/od/holifestivalofcolors/a/holybasics.htm>• "Holi - the festival of colours" Indiaexpress.com <http://www.indiaexpress.com/rangoli/hol i .html>• "Indian Holidays : Holi" Calendarlabs <http: //www.calendarlabs.com/holidays/india/hol i .php>

A Language DreamWriter: Hidson GuimarãesImages: Petey: Building

Revisited - Words From National CharacterWriter: Elizabeth O'Neil lImages:CristianChirita: Statue of barbarian king imprisonedPetey: "Barbarians from the South" (title); Painting of a Bohemian woman; "Arabs Drinking Coffee in Front of a Tent"; Depiction ofa Turk in the 1 6th century; Statue of a Japanese ogreSources:• "Words From National Character" Stories That Words Tell Us Elizabeth O'Neil l , M.A. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, Ltd. 35Paternoster Row, E.C. And Edinburgh 1 91 8

Language Learning Methods - ClassesWriter: Erik ZidoweckiImages:Vmenkov: Lnxia Foreign Languages SchoolKubaru: English Language LabThe LEAF Project: FLCC Classes @ Canandaigua CampusShane Global: General English ClassRbok: Japanese High school Language LabHBS1 908: Inside a classroomDragfyre: The University of Da Nang's Foreign Languages School.Subhashish Panigrahi: School of languages, Jawaharlal Nehru UniversityNiepr: State-of-the-art Collaborative Classroom

Sections - Language ExchangeWriter: Erik ZidoweckiImages:Karoly Czifra: people gatheringkris krüg: women meeting

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except forPetey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

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Documents

Parrot Time - Issue 3 - May / June 2013