MJ (They/he)

Hello dear! Oh my, I’m majoring in translation studies, you know, so I have a lot of feelings about this—I actually wish to become a Shakespeare translator in the future.

My knowledge is limited to the languages I understand, of course (so Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, French, and Italian), but in my experience, a translation is ultimately a metamorphosis. Each language has a different vibrancy, a sort of uniqueness that defines it; they embody reality in their own peculiar way, and the speaker’s thoughts flow differently through the shape of its words. What distinguishes a language is its own rarity and its personal beauty.

The act of translation must be conceived within these differences; it is about changing a text, furnishing the words with new colors. That is, you have to cheat on Shakespeare in order to do him justice: in your translation, Mercutio and Romeo might not play with the word ‘goose’ in 2.4, but they shall play with another animal or thing which is related to race, folly, and women in your language. Ultimately, what we must do is alter the flesh of the text, its words, and hopefully keep its true essence intact: we must learn to discern that wordless beauty which lies beneath the language of the play and let it flow it in our own text with new words. It’s a constant paraphrase. To quote Juliet, we need to drink from the utterance of the characters’s tongues. To translate a Shakespeare play is to delve into all its complexity—a translator must be a reader, an editor, a critic, a writer all at once. One must bare the play entirely, and then dress it again.

No, they’re not alphabet soup, no they do not look like “you’ve thrown letters at a wall and used what stuck,” they are living, breathing languages which we did CPR on after the British Empire shot them.

Like, people DIED to keep them alive.

Every time I see some (English/American) interviewer make an entire segment forcing Saoirse Ronan to list off Irish names, I die a little inside. It’s particularly galling to see the same people ooh-ing over how “mystical” they sound, or claiming ancient heritage to us.

BRINGING BACK THE DAY OF LANGUAGES!!!

This year's 7th of May 2023 we use our own language again!

A few basic rules (this is very much copied from the original UYLD creators):

If your language is something other than English, on May 7th you can speak that language all day!

Speak whatever language feels good for you! Any and all!!

You’ll blog in your language all day: text posts, replies, tags (except triggers and organizational tags), the whole nine yards. Regardless of what language people choose to speak to you, you answer in your own.

Midnight to midnight according to your own time zone

English native speakers, if you wanna participate you can practice a second language you’re learning

The tag is gonna be #Speak Your Language Day or #spyld

Non-verbal, non-written languages (like ASl, dialects, otherwise non-written languages) are more than welcome!

As a polyglot, he is super passionate about learning and teaching languages and wants to help students and language learners succeed. He has been working on this project 24/7, so your feedback would make his day! Here is the problem:

His website is still young, so they have limited funds to obtain licenses for movies and television shows. To help as many people as possible, he is wondering what languages you would like to learn or have exams for, so he can focus on expanding the media collection for these languages. I really like him and want his project to succeed, so I created a form where you can vote.

The following languages are available at the moment: Japanese 🇯🇵, Korean 🇰🇷, Spanish 🇪🇸, French 🇫🇷, German 🇩🇪, Italian 🇮🇹, Portuguese 🇵🇹 and English 🇺🇸

Like, first of all, the categories themselves are arbitrary for the most part. “Masculine” and “feminine” for nouns doesn’t actually mean that your chair is a woman. The word for chair in Spanish is feminine, which means that it gets described with feminine articles (la, una, las, unas), adjectives (usually ending in an -a), and objective pronouns (la). Again, none of this has anything to do with the chair actually being female. It’s just the category that the word falls under, and that category tells us how to talk about it in a sentence. The grammatical genders could literally be anything; maybe some words are purple and some are green, and you have to describe purple words differently than green ones.

Second, some words even to describe people have a specific gender that does not ever change. La persona is a feminine word regardless of the gender of the person being talked about. Soy una persona, even though I’m not a woman. Even in a gendered language, there are some words that don’t gender the person in question.

They also have a pretty common phenomenon known as gender polarity where say, the plural form of a masculine noun takes on feminine markers and perhaps adjectival agreement but that’s highly variable—it doesn’t change the perceived gender of the noun but it changes the grammatical marking for sure. So in, er, Gorwaa (a Cushitic language from Tanzania) you have:

[t͡sʼaχwáj t͡ɬʼéːr] ‘a long grasshopper’

[t͡sʼaχwáj t͡ɬʼét] ‘a long swarm of grasshoppers’

While there’s of course other things going on here the difference between the singular masculine [-éːr] and plural feminine [-ét] does of course incorporate an interplay between gender and number that has nothing to do with the perceived gender of the noun in this case.

Some of these you might already do, some not, but I hope it helps a bit!!

Listen to lots of music

And not just listen, read the lyrics (you can also use this opportunity to learn new words) and say them! Sing them, read them out, mutter under your breath on public transport, try to mimic the exact way the singer says it, try to get your mouth accustomed to the way the words are shaped.

Listen to podcasts, if possible

This makes you more accustomed to the sound of the language as it is in an everyday context. In music, people often give words a different rhythm than natural, or slur their speech and omit syllables, so podcasts can help provide you with more "usual" speech too.

Study phonetics

Actually take a book on phonetics and study it, with rules and exceptions and preferably audio example.

Every time you learn a new word, check the pronunciation

This goes especially for languages with inconsistent pronunciation or where the stress changes the word a lot! Listen to the Google/Yandex translate audio of it, or check wiktionary, and try to say it out loud too. Sounds frustrating and pointless but does genuinely help

When you encounter a new word, don't type it into the translator, use voice recognition instead

Say the word until it recognises, check the meaning and the correct pronunciation, and if you were wrong at first, say it a few times out loud again. This helps build your intuition about correct pronunciation

If it's possible, ask the opinion of native speakers

They can give you feedback and point out any consistent mistakes, it helped me more than I expected

Talk as much as you can!

Remember, practice makes perfect

Most importantly, remember that it's okay to have an accent and it sounds really pretty :]

English is such a bizarre choice to become the universal language as it is slowly becoming. It's hard to learn, even harder to master, and a ridiculous blend of a bunch of other languages.

The true ideal, I guess, would be a conlang with its own script, truly phonetic spelling, and grammar that is as simple as possible. But that has obviously never worked when tried in the past (Esperanto) and still has the issue that it will have to have grammar based on something and therefore will have similar issues as picking an existing language in regards to being easier for some people to learn than others (for example, I don’t speak Esperanto but if I recall correctly it’s most similar to the Romance languages?).

—

Rhona NicDhùghaill, “Don’t Neglect the UK’s Indigenous Languages”

The whole article is great, but this quote is especially stellar. 

[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:

My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or “the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha” which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.

end ID]

Like, first of all, the categories themselves are arbitrary for the most part. “Masculine” and “feminine” for nouns doesn’t actually mean that your chair is a woman. The word for chair in Spanish is feminine, which means that it gets described with feminine articles (la, una, las, unas), adjectives (usually ending in an -a), and objective pronouns (la). Again, none of this has anything to do with the chair actually being female. It’s just the category that the word falls under, and that category tells us how to talk about it in a sentence. The grammatical genders could literally be anything; maybe some words are purple and some are green, and you have to describe purple words differently than green ones.

Second, some words even to describe people have a specific gender that does not ever change. La persona is a feminine word regardless of the gender of the person being talked about. Soy una persona, even though I’m not a woman. Even in a gendered language, there are some words that don’t gender the person in question.

https://www.youtube.com/user/billvicars

and here’s the link to the website he puts in his videos:

Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.

He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms

His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.

Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore

Try and pronounce “jragon.”

It doesn’t sound any different than “dragon,” does it?