Enhance Your Egyptian Experience

Ancient Egypt has a strange attraction to most of us. Many of us yearn to go to the land of Pharaohs. But do you want to be just like any other tourists: been there, done that? Of course not.

Now here is a way to enhance your experience. Learn how to read ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Imagine yourself in the ancient rock temples of Nubia, reading the script for yourself instead of depending on some tourist guide spinning stories.

You think I am joking?
Check out How To Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs and tell me if you still think I am.

What? You are not interested in ancient Egypt? Then how about some brain exercise? Learning to read an ancient script is just what the doctor ordered. Check it out anyway.

Essential Aid To Language Learning

Of all the online translators available, I think the Google Translate is by far superior. I used the Yahoo Babel Fish all these days. To put it as mildly as possible - the translation stinks. You need numerous attempt to coax the desired result. And to think that I translated a 200 page document from German to English using Babel Fish! Some patience!

It was quite by accident that I hit upon Google Translate and I am mighty pleased. (Actually I feel quite dumb about it - this service has been in existence for some time now).

The translation is 'live' - the text get translated as you press "enter"(I find this aspect missing and terribly annoying in Babel Fish. After entering a text, you have to click on the translate button. At times nothing happens.)

Don't like the translation provided by Google? Go ahead and recommend a better translation.

Yet another good feature of the Google Translate is that it also displays a tiny dictionary that can be explored. You can also search the word in the web from a link.

A good test of a well translated text is to reverse the translation. Google Translate allows you to swap the languages at a click of a button.

And, oh yes, Hindi is one of the languages that you can translate into or from. This is yet another instance of Google coming in late into a domain and providing a better solution that all existing ones.

I think this is an invaluable tool in learning a language.

Now if only I could have a mobile version of this ...

Spanish Potatoes

My fascination for the connection between Spanish and Hindi continues (see here). At times the connection stuns me. I hope you also will be.

The word "ki" (कि) in Hindi is equivalent to the English "that". "He said that ..." is "woh bola ki..."
Guess what is equivalent of the Hindi "ki" in Spanish?
You guessed right! It is "Que" - pronounced "kay". "él dijo que ..."

Ok consider this now ... slightly complicated.

है (ha-ay), in Hindi, is difficult to explain and can mean "is" or "... is there". Example, "Is there anyone?" is " कोई है?" (Ko-ee ha-ay). The word for "is there" in Spanish is "hay", pronounced aa-ee.

I find such similarity amazing. It is easy to ascribe such similarities to Indo-European langauges (Sanskrit, Spanish, German, all belong to this group of languages.) However, Hindi did not evolve from Sanskrit. It evolved from Prakrit, like other dialects, such as Braj and Awadhi. But absorbed heavily from Sanskrit to become a standard version. So the basic structure still remains different from Sanskrit.

Thus, the word है does not have any equivalent in Sanskrit. But yet, has similar sounding word in Spanish. I wonder what the connection is?

The only other strange connection I can see is in an entirely different domain - culinary. There is hardly any day when potato does not form part of the North Indian meal. Potatoes were introduced to India by the Portuguese - who were, of course, once upon a time part of Spain. Spanish and Portuguese most definitely have got this from Peru and Chile. I do not know the exact mechanism of how Potato was made popular in India by the Portuguese but I find it very difficult to believe that it was merely a case of dumping a sackful of potatoes on an Indian door step.

So is there a connection? After all both - language and cuisine - are the subject of the tongue.

This post is merely a flight of imagination. I do not claim any scholarly knowledge on this subject. There are much more learned people than I in this domain. If you are one such and happen to read this blog, I will be obliged if you could throw some light on this.

Good Resumes

These are two sentences from the covering letter of the CV I just received:

1. I vividly see that, my project work, coupled with short work experience and exposure glue very well with the domain in which your esteemed company is operating

2. As you will note from my resume, my courses, programming languages and project work become very much relevant and certainly help me in making an immediate punch.

My advice to all those who are seeking jobs when no company is willing to recruit ...

a) Bombastic English on CV covering letter doesn't work.
b) Write plain, simple English sentences.
c) Format the CV such that it is easy to locate relevant information.
d) Read and re-read so that there are no typos. Typos reflect carelessness and is unpardonable in the age of live spell-checking.

e) Maintain uniform font.

What I always look for in a CV but rarely find on any is a one page abstract on the top of the CV. Details of work experience and projects can follow.

Artificial Language - Loglan

A few posts ago, I discussed Esperanto as a language that failed ("used to day by only a few million speakers (with varying degree of expertise), one tenth of 1 percent of the world's population"). Clearly I am an ignoramus. For there is a language that is an even greater disaster.

The following is a from a delightful little book called Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus.

To my knowledge, only one person ever seriously tried to construct an ambiguity-free, mathematically perfect human language, mathematically perfect not just in vocabulary but also in sentence construction. In the late 1950s a linguist by the name of James Cooke Brown constructed a language known as Loglan, short for "logical language." In addition to a Wilkins-esque systematic vocabulary, it includes 112 "little words"that govern logic and structure. ... The English word he, for example, would translate as da if it refers to the first singular antecedent in a discourse, de if it refers to the second, di if it refers to the third, do is it refers to the fourth, and du if it refers to the fifth. [It is not as difficult as it seems - it merely follows the vowel sequence of a, e, i, o, u - da, de, di, do, du] ... To see why this is useful, consider the English sentence He runs and he walks. It might describe a single person who runs and walks, or two different people, one running, the other walking; by contrast in Loglan, the former would be rendered unambiguously as Da prano i da dzoru, the later unambiguously as Da prano i de dzoru.

But Loglan has made even few inroads than Esperanto. Despite its "scientific" origins, it has no native speakers. On the Loglan website [http://www.loglan.org/], Brown reports that at "The Loglan Institute ... live-in apprentices learned the language directly from me (and I from them!), I am happy to report that sustained daily Loglan-only conversation lasting three-quarters of an hour or more were achieved," but so far as I know, nobody has gotten much further. For all its ambiguity and idiosyncrasy, English goes down much smoother for the human mind. We couldn't learn a perfect language if we tried.

I wonder if it possible to write poetry using Loglan.

Making Devanagri Script Universal

As I learn new European languages, I can't help but feel amazed by the ancient wisdom of the creators of the Devanagri script. I am fairly certain that most European languages had their own script before turning to Roman script. Otherwise there is no reason to use same alphabet to generate different sounds.

Take 'j' for instance.
It is pronounced 'j' (as in jacket) in English, pronounced 'ya' in German and 'kh' in Spanish.
In Devanagri script, there are different alphabets for each of the above sounds. (ज, य, ख)

What about 'a'?
Both Spanish and German the 'a' is stretched and pronounced with lips open and relaxed, almost 'aah', like in father. In English, apart from a few exceptions, like father, 'a' is pronounced 'ay'.

In Devanagri script you can distinguish the two sounds, अ and आ.

Then there is the soft 't' and the hard 't'. The soft 't' is pronounced with the tongue between teeth like the Spanish do. In English it is always the hard 't'. In Devanagri script you have a त (soft 't') and a ट (hard 't').

These are a few illustrations. I could go on and on.
The advantage of the Devanagri script therefore is that you get read what you write.

Shouldn't the Devanagri script be made the universal script?
This could be India's second gift to the world - the number system being the first.

Taste The Living Language

Geoffery Chaucer is known as father of English. He wrote in the 14th century. Within a few hundred years the language was already changing.

I have extracted below from Wikipedia the language Chaucer used. Below that is the translation. The language used by Chaucer could be a bit ribald. So watch out before you read the translation aloud to your kids.

Line	Original
	This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
	And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;
	Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.
	For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle
	How that a frere ravyshed was to helle
	In spirit ones by a visioun;
	And as an angel ladde hym up and doun,
	To shewen hym the peynes that the were,
	In al the place saugh he nat a frere;
	Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.
	Unto this angel spak the frere tho:
	Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace
	That noon of hem shal come to this place?
	Yis, quod this aungel, many a millioun!
	And unto sathanas he ladde hym doun.
	--And now hath sathanas,--seith he,--a tayl
	Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl.
	Hold up thy tayl, thou sathanas!--quod he;
	--shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
	Where is the nest of freres in this place!--
	And er that half a furlong wey of space,
	Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve,
	Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve
	Twenty thousand freres on a route,
	And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute,
	And comen agayn as faste as they may gon,
	And in his ers they crepten everychon.
	He clapte his tayl agayn and lay ful stille.

Translation

This friar boasts that he knows hell,

And God knows that it is little wonder;

Friars and fiends are seldom far apart.

For, by God, you have ofttimes heard tell

How a friar was taken to hell

In spirit, once by a vision;

And as an angel led him up and down,

To show him the pains that were there,

In the whole place he saw not one friar;

He saw enough of other folk in woe.

To the angel spoke the friar thus:

"Now sir", said he, "Do friars have such a grace

That none of them come to this place?"

"Yes", said the angel, "many a million!"

And the angel led him down to Satan.

He said, "And Satan has a tail,

Broader than a large ship's sail.

Hold up your tail, Satan!" said he.

"Show forth your arse, and let the friar see

Where the nest of friars is in this place!"

And before half a furlong of space,

Just as bees swarm from a hive,

Out of the devil's arse there were driven

Twenty thousand friars on a rout,

And throughout hell swarmed all about,

And came again as fast as they could go,

And every one crept back into his arse.

He shut his tail again and lay very still.

The original language has a delightful rhythm to it, won't you say?

Now sample this:
goin 2 gr8 moov 2moro r u comin pos g2g txt bck. <3

It took me some time to figure out what this means:

Going to a great movie tomorrow. Are you coming? Parents Over Shoulder. Got to go. Text Back.Love.

Do you think 100 years from now, people will look back at today's English with the same amusement that most of us feel when we read Chaucer's English?

I think I should start blogging in textese for posterity.

Note: The image used belongs to 'miamiamia' (see gallery)