There has been a lot of talk in the Polyglot Community about the Georgian Language lately. Georgian is one of the South Caucasian Languages. Like many major languages in the Caucasus region, Georgian has several dialects which are all mutually intelligible.
The most obvious trait about Georgian is its alphabet, Mkhedruli. Mkhedruli has a very ancient feel to it. The shapes of each letter remind me of something that would have been used five thousand years ago in isolated mountain regions. The Mkhedruli alphabet has 33 letters in common use. The alphabet evolved, and lost many of its original letters. All current letters in the Mkhedruli alphabet correspond to the sounds of the Georgian language.
Georgian is an agglutinative language. This means words which are formed by joining morphemes together. As you should already know, a morpheme is the smallest component of a word with meaning. A morpheme is composed of phonemes, which are the smallest distinctive human sounds.
Si and Doch, the first word is French and the second is German. You say them after someone made a negative statement. The closest translation in English would be, ¨on the contrary.¨
Je ne parle pas Anglais. - Mais si! Tu parles Anglais!
I do not speak German so I cannot give you a German example of this negation in action. My question is this, can anyone tell me about any other languages that also have this? Please feel free to post directly on this blog.
Youtube is full of resources for anyone who wants to learn Arabic. There are lots of great channels for learning Arabic, but there is one little problem.
Youtube has a lot of Muslims who will try to convert you to Islam, or get you to learn Quranic Arabic instead of modern standardized Arabic. I just wish we could take the good Arabic Videos from Youtube, cut out all the religious stuff, and just put them together for people who want to learn the language - but do not want anyone trying to convert them to Islam.
Here are just three channels for learning Arabic on Youtube. These people have a lot of good videos, yet still can not manage to stay away from the religious stuff. They would get a lot more subscribers if the cut the religious stuff out completely.
Arabic One Great channel! Arabic Two This guy has the Quran as a background in his channel, but at least he does not mix religion into his channel. Arabic Three This man made a lot of good videos, but his early videos did have religious mumbo-jumbo.
I challenge anyone to make a Youtube channel for learning modern standardized Arabic and NOT do anything with religion. Is that possible ? Is this too much to ask???
I don´t know about you, but I love looking at maps. Ever since I was a child one of my favorite activities was looking at globes. The image above is a linguistic map of North East Caucasian Languages they comprise a language family spoken in Russian, Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia and northern Azebaijan.
A little background information on this war torn region. Azerbaijan is rich in oil and gas. The Russians want to control the pipe lines that run from Azerbaijan to the Black Sea. This region provides oil to much of Western Europe. It is pretty easy to understand the situation just by looking at this map. But, this blog is about languages not about politics. So lets hop back to the main point.
The people of Dagestan speak a rare languages. Languges of Dagestan are: Agul, Avar, Dargwa, Lak, Lexgin, Rutul, Tabasaran, and Tsakhur. One of those rare languages, Lak, is spoken only by 160,000 people. The current Lak alphabet is the Cyrillic alphabet. What is interesting about the Lak language, is that up until the nineteen twenties, Lak used the Arabic alphabet, then it was written in the Latin alphabet and now it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. This means that a person born during WWI, had to learn three different alphabets to write their own language.
Amazing. That my friends, is all about politics and religion.
One person referred to this region as...¨Nobody-gives-a-fucki-Stan.¨ BTW...you know who you are! Naughty, naughty, naughty!
One of the other rare languages of Dagestan is Aghul. Twenty eight thousand people speak Aghul, most of them live in Dagestan.The language contrasts voiced and voiceless pharyngeal fricatives with voiceless epiglottal stops and fricatives. Fricative sounds are produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel. The place of articulation is the pharyngeal, which basically means the root of the tongue against the back of the throat.
Avar Language, ¨language of the mountains,¨ is another official language of Dagestan. It is spoken by over one million people worldwide. Avar also uses the Cyrillic Alphabet.
Nearly eight million people speak Albanian. One would think that there would be more materials available for learning Albanian. I have had a hard time finding them. The interesting thing is that in New York City I knew a lot of Albanians. Many of them live in the Bronx. One would think that there would be some interest in learning this language. Below I have listed three things. Links to Albanian language resources, a few videos, and an image of the Albanian alphabet.
