Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

[Jimmy Bignutz]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

I can't find it now, but I've read a mad website devoted to the grammatical simiarities between Welsh & Japanese. All because (they reckoned) a boat-load of Buddhist monks shipped up in Anglesey in 200BC and became druids.

That explains the Japanese restaurant, Yakee-daria.

[Wyatt Earp]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

The food's better at Taidijobu.

[Jimmy Bignutz]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Or Jones! the Sushi.

[Wyatt Earp]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Bryantop wrote:

Counting in Iranian and Irish is fairly similar, because they are both Indo-European languages that pre-date the Romans and Greeks.

[/useless fact]

"Haon, dó, trí, ceathair, cúig, sé, seacht, hocht, naoi, deich"

plays

"Yek, doe, se, char, panj, shish, haft, hasht, noh, dah."

I dunno, it looks close-ish, but not much closer than either is to

"Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez"

or some other Indo-European one.

[Wyatt Earp]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Eight-nine-ten is a good match, though.

[AMMS]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

I know I shouldn't laugh but I can't help it.

BBC Alba was launched on Friday night (as I'm sure you all knew). It will broadcast entirely in Scots Gaelic a language spoken by about 75,000 people all of who can speak English too. So is this a waste of the tax payers hard earned?

Gaelic is enjoying something of a renaissance just now outside of its traditional heartlands. A Gaelic language secondary school opened in Glasgow for the first time recently and is currently over-subscribed so the language is far from dead.

Although the reasons are complex I don't think there is any doubt the Welsh, Scots, Cornish and Irish are trying to exert their 'non-Englishness' just now and language is one way of doing it. When you are Northern Irish this is more complicated as you don't want to be English and you don't want to be Irish. Whilst I agree that many use Ulster-Scots as a political tit-for-tat against the nationalists equally superfluous insistence on Irish Gaelic there are some who see it as an expression of their identity and a real part of their culture.

I've a friend who is Turkish and Jewish. As well as speaking Turkish, Hebrew and English he speaks a form of ancient Spanish. This language is apparently spoken by most of the Turkish Jewish community and is almost unique to them. It derives from the time of the inquisition and sounds not unlike Shakespearean English does to us.
I can't help but feel there are parallels here.

All that being said it still looks really funny written down and is pretty much how I speak.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Wyatt - I think it's the way of counting. Irish uses different words for the numbers themselves, numbers of people, and numbers of oother things. It also never uses "aon" for one when counting, but instead will say "amháin", which is more or less "alone".

Ie "aon rud" is unintelligible, but "rud amháin" means "one thing", or "just one thing".

[Guest]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

I like how the Japanese count, with different words depending on whether you're counting say small round things or larger cylindrical shaped things or flat things or whatever.

Re Scots Gaelic, has anyone seen Seachd? Came out on DVD not that long ago and involved much work by yours truly. For they had decided that since the film is mostly in Scots Gaelic, it would be appropriate to have subtitles in Scots, Welsh and Irish as well as English. Fun job that was. Nice film too, you know, I recommend it anyway.

[Furtho]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

I like how the Japanese count, with different words depending on whether you're counting say small round things or larger cylindrical shaped things or flat things or whatever.

I fucking don't like it.

[Wyatt Earp]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

AMMS, I think that language is called Ladino?

This language is apparently spoken by most of the Turkish Jewish community and is almost unique to them.

I think that's only because the Salonika Greek Jews, who were the other main community of Ladino-speakers, were all killed by you know who. That's if I remember my Primo Levi right. I guess a lot of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 would have spoken Ladino, but that most adopted the language of wherever they ended up.

There's a certain amount of determination not to let Ladino die out, though, I think. At some mates' Chanukah party last year, the kids from their daughter's school all sang a Ladino song called "Uno, dos, tres candelitas" or something.

Sounded like a lovely language, which, to be fair, not even the world's leading philosemite could accuse Yiddish of.

[Wyatt Earp]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Toro De France wrote:

Wyatt - I think it's the way of counting. Irish uses different words for the numbers themselves, numbers of people, and numbers of oother things. It also never uses "aon" for one when counting, but instead will say "amháin", which is more or less "alone".

Ie "aon rud" is unintelligible, but "rud amháin" means "one thing", or "just one thing".

Ah, I see. Thanks. And Farsi does that as well? I love this kind of thing.

[garcia]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Surely there must be Ulster Scots words for disablity, race, sexual orientation, no?

"Spastecs, auld cunts, woags n bufties aw wekkum".

ha ha ha.

the guy who presents the irish language programme on our station (10-12pm, friday night) went to a conference where someone was talking about ulster scots. he had learned some vocabulary - the two i remember are "fluresucker" meaning hoover, and "daftie wean" meaning mentally handicapped child.

i'm not against limited government spending on preserving fossilised national cultures, it seems like a worthwhile form of conservation. in ireland however we have long had an idiotic situation where the study of irish is compulsory, but no other foreign languages are taught in the vast majority of primary schools. irish should instead be offered as an option alongside other languages.

[David Agnew]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Spearmint Rhino wrote:

There are definitely swear words in Welsh. I had most of them shouted at me by one of my exes.

Are there? My mother reckoned that there weren't any.

[WOM]

Whun lukkin a form, ye maun pit doon name...

Radio vulgarian Howard Stern played a clip of a black guy talking to a tv reporter about a domestic fight that put a guy in the hospital. He kept mentioning that this one guy 'kept hittin' him with a smoothie'. The reporter finally said "what's a smoothie?" and the guys says "You know...it gets hot and you smooth your clothes with it...a smoothie".