#linguisticdiversitychallenge

[gladiates]

Linguistic Diversity Challenge: Middle East and Western Asia Part 1, Armenian

Above: Mesrop creating the Armenian alphabet, by Francesco Maggiotto

For this challenge by @languagessi​ I'm going to learn about less commonly taught languages in the Middle East and Western Asia. I'm beginning with Armenian (I know Armenia is sometimes considered part of Europe but I figure the language is still not very commonly learned). There are around 6.7 million native speakers of Armenian, which is an Indo-European language that constitutes its own branch within the Indo-European language group, meaning it's not closely related to any other language. There are two standard forms, Eastern and Western Armenian, which are mutually intelligible. 

What is the language called in English and the language itself? In English, Armenian is called Armenian (of course), while in Armenian itself, it's known as հայերեն in reformed Armenian (spoken primarily in Armenia itself) or հայերէն in classical Armenian (spoken primarily among the Armenian diaspora.) Both spellings are transliterated as Hayeren.

Where is the language spoken? Armenian is spoken in Armenia as well as by members of the Armenian diaspora worldwide. About half of the total number of Armenian speakers live outside Armenia (according to Encyclopedia Britannica), which I definitely wouldn't have guessed! Georgia and Russia have the largest Armenian populations outside Armenia itself.

How many people speak the language? ~6.7 million

Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? Like I said above, Armenian is an Indo-European language with no immediate relatives. Other subdivisions within the Indo-European languages are Albanian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, Italic (which includes Romance languages), Anatolian, Illyrian, Daco-Thracian, Tocharian, and Phrygian.

What writing system does the language use? The Armenian alphabet, which was invented in 405 AD by a priest, Mesrop Mashtots (Մեսրոպ Մաշտոց). The first sentence written in the Armenian alphabet was from the Book of Proverbs: "To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding." In Armenian, it's written as follows: Ճանաչել զիմաստութիւն եւ զխրատ, իմանալ զբանս հանճարոյ (Čanačʿel zimastutʿiwn ew zxrat, imanal zbans hančaroy.)

What kind of grammatical features does the language have? I'm bad at this section because I don't know much about linguistics, so some of the complicated terms go right over my head. But I did think it's cool that Classical Armenian has no grammatical gender, and Armenian as it's currently spoken uses noun cases but no gender for nouns.

What does the language sound like? This video shows the pronunciation of some basic Armenian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgS3y30n_CM

What do you personally find interesting about the language? I think it's so cool that we know who came up with the writing system, and even what he first wrote! Also, the alphabet is so pretty.

Armenian resources:

Wiki with Eastern Armenian lessons

Lots of other resources listed at the bottom of this Omniglot page

Memrise doesn't have an official Armenian course, but there are several user-made ones.

Wiktionary

And lots of resources in this post! 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesrop_Mashtots

https://omniglot.com/writing/armenian.htm

[linguisten]

LDC: Australia and Oceania

And another Linguistic Diversity Challenge! This time, we focus on the languages of Australia and Oceania, including New Guinea: 

To participate in this challenge, you have to learn and post about 7 languages spoken in Australia, New Guinea or Oceania, one language per day. If you accept the challenge, please tag your post as #linguisticdiversitychallenge so that others can see what you wrote and learn something new as well! Here are some suggestions for what kind of information to look for:

What is the language called in English and the language itself?

Where is the language spoken?

How many people speak the language? Is it endangered?

Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages?

What writing system does the language use?

What kind of grammatical features does the language have? What is its typological profile?

What does the language sound like?

What do you personally find interesting about the language?

Here are some websites to help you find information: Wikipedia, Omniglot, Glottolog, WALS, Phoible, ODIN, OLAC, Endangered Languages Project, AIATSIS, and PARADISEC. You can also use Youtube to search for videos and music in the language to find out what it sounds like when spoken.

[ich-bin-der-baer]

Linguistic Diversity Challenge [4/4] Niuean

What is the language called in English and the language itself? The Language is called Niuean in English and ko e vagahau Niuē in Niuean itself.

Where is the language spoken? Niuean is spoken in Niue, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Tonga.

How many people speak the language?  The total number of speakers is around 8000, with 1600 speakers in Niue and the rest in other countries.

Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? Niuean belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of Austronesian languages. It is most closely related to Tongan.

What writing system does the language use? Niuean is written in the Latin script. 

More Info: (Wikipedia) (Wikivoyage) Niuean phrasebook (Youtube) Street Talk - Niue Language Week, Niuean Language Week 2020 

[banglanotebook]

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY CHALLENGE: southeast asia and oceania

K H M E R  |  ភាសាខ្មែរ

EXONYM | Khmer [kmɛər], Cambodian ENDONYM | ភាសាខ្មែរ [pʰiə.ˈsaː kʰmae]

LOCATION | Khmer is the official language of Cambodia, but is also natively spoken in Vietnam and Thailand.

POPULATION | Approximately 13 million speakers worldwide

BACKGROUND | Khmer is an Austroasiatic language of the Mon-Khmer branch, and has incorporated influence from Sanskrit and Pali. Most Khmer dialects are mutually intelligible but have very obvious differences. Old Khmer (600-800 CE) was heavily affected by Sanskrit, and with the fall of the Khmer Empire the language became less regulated and underwent a variety of changes. Middle Khmer (14-16th centuries) exhibited dramatic lexical, morphological and phonological changes when the language started borrowing more from Thai and Lao. Modern Khmer is governed by marginally different rules than Old Khmer as a result, making it hard to understand Old Khmer without prior knowledge. It is important to be aware that there are several social registers in Khmer which extends beyond variation in pronouns. The overall vocabulary you use to talk to your sister will not be the same as what you would use when talking to royalty.

GRAMMAR | Khmer is an analytic, isolating language, which means it often uses shorter words that include less morphemes and employs the use of helper words to convey meaning instead. For example, Khmer lacks inflections, conjugations, or case endings but instead has a wealth of particles and auxiliary words to compensate. Khmer follows an SVO word-order and places modifiers after the words their modifying. 

PHONOLOGY | Unlike many of its neighbors (Burmese, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese), Khmer is not a tonal language! Khmer generally places stress on the last syllable of a word, making stress non-phonemic (if you mess up your stresses, you will sound funny but you will not destroy the meaning of a word). Most words in Khmer are, on average, between one and two syllables. Most words with three or more syllables are loanwords, usually from Sanskrit or Pali. Intonation is used to distinguish mood and statements (kind of like how in English we may raise pitch at the end of a sentence to indicate a question). 

SCRIPT | The Khmer script is an abugida developed from the Pallava script of India and looks visually similar to Thai and Lao. There are two groups of consonants: series one with the inherent vowel /ɑː/, and series two with the inherent vowel /ɔː/. In Khmer, these series are referred to as “voiceless” and “voiced”, as series two was intended to represent voiced phonemes from Old Khmer. This makes Khmer kinda tricky to read because voiced stops have been lost, resulting in the use of dipthongs instead. Khmer now contains two symbols for most consonant phonemes, with vowel symbols having two possible readings depending on which series the consonant they come after belongs to.

SWADESH LIST

ក្បាល [kɓaːl] | head

សក់ [sɑʔ] | hair

ភ្នែក [pʰnɛːk] | eye

ច្រមុះ [crɑ.ˈmoh] | nose

មាត់ [mŏət] | mouth

ក [kɑː] | neck

ដោះ [ɗɑh] | breast

WHY KHMER? | Khmer is another one of those languages that despite their solid status and large speaking population they end up being neglected because they’re not “Western”, nor are they valued by the global community as much as they ought to be. I already knew about Burmese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao, which are the other big southeast Asian languages, so this seemed like the last one to know before I consider doing the lesser-known ones (maybe in future challenges!). Khmer also has a good number of free resources for this kind of challenge so it was an easy one lol 

Some of the other languages I considered also had scripts my computer wouldn’t display, which created a hassle I wasn’t ready for this time around; this obstacle is a good indication that some other languages need more recognition if major OS’s still don’t support them, so I noted those languages so I can give them special attention when I have more time to dedicate to a challenge. Part of the battle in making Langblr more diverse is finding a way to present languages that aren’t supported by half of modern devices. Just because a language has a substantial speaking population doesn’t mean it’s properly represented. Even widely spoken languages become underprivileged when they’re silenced on online platforms --Khmer just happened to be one of the luckier ones in this case.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Linguistic Diversity Challenge - Noongar

No idea if anyone is still doing these but I learned about a Cool Language (tm) (aka every language) so here have some free knowledge

What is the language called in English and in the language itself? It is known as Noongar or Nyungar although more other spelling exist 

Where is the language spoken? Noongar is spoken in Western Australia 

Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages?

The language belongs to the Pama-Nyungan family and is related to Dyirbal, which I featured on my blog before

What does the language sound like?

Here is a video of a song in Noongar

What kind of grammatical/morphological features does the language have?

Subject-Object-Verb Order

Agglutinative

Historically had no numbers higher than 3 with addition to ‘boola’ for many and ‘boola boola’ for many many

This is how you would count in Noongar nowadays:

Keyen

Koodjal

Dambart

Koodjal Koodjal

Maar (relates to fie fingers on the hand)

Maar Keyen

Maar Koodjal

Maar Dambart 

Maar Koodjal Koodjal

Maar Maar

What do you personally find interesting about the language?

I found a course in Noongar language and culture on EDX and because I have about half a year to spend at home before going back to uni I decided to broaden my horizon a little and learn something about a language I never heard about before and that is spoken at the other end of the world. I am currently learning many things that are valuable to my linguistics degree. The people behind this course support outsiders learning the language although surely non-fluent Noongar people and white people living on the Noongar boodja (country) benefit from this more than I do (but this is a free online course so please don’t worry about me stealing resources).

For anyone interested, Here is a link to the course on EDX

[nihunhu]

Linguistic Diversity Challenge // Yonaguni

What is the language called in English and the language itself?

In English it is called Yonaguni and in the language itself ドゥナンムヌイ  if I’m correct

Where is the language spoken?

The language is spoken on the Yonaguni island, part of the Ryuku Islands, close to Taiwan

How many people speak the language?

About 400 people speak the language and they are mostly over 50 years old.

Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages?

Yonaguni belongs to the Japonic languages and is mostly related to Japanese and Yaeyama.

What writing system does the language use?

Until the 1930s, Kaida Glyphs were used and now they mostly use Katakana, even though it is mostly a spoken language

What kind of grammatical features does the language have?

The language has a three-way-tonesystem consisting of high, low and falling. It also has only three vowels, which  vary in intonation.

What does the language sound like?

You can watch a video of someone speaking it here

What do you personally find interesting about the language?

I find it really interesting that it is strongly endangered and that there is a debate about it actually being an own language or a dialect of Japanese.

sources:

https://omniglot.com/writing/yonaguni.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_language

http://altaica.ru/LIBRARY/JAPANESE/Yamada_Pellard_Shimoji_2015_Dunan_grammar.pdf

[learn-everything]

linguistic diversity challenge day 5/6 | māori

(img ref)

What is the language called in English and the language itself? Maori is usually written as Māori (with a macron) or te reo Māori (the language Māori). Where is the language spoken? New Zealand (map). How many people speak the language? 149000 people report some knowledge, but the number of native speakers is unknown. Māori was the native language of most Māori people until the 1940s. The language went into the decline and revitalization efforts becan in the 1980s. Since 2015, the language has been reviving, with more celebration and acceptance even among people without Māori roots.  Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? Māori is a Polynesian language, specifically in the Tahitic subgroup. What writing system does the language use? Latin script. What kind of grammatical features does the language have? The basis of the Māori language is not the word, but the phrase. A word forms the “base” of the phrase, and it is modified from there. There are also many pronouns and many ways to modify verbs.

What does the language sound like? This is a news story about a Japanese woman learning Māori in Māori. This video explains the different dialects. What do you personally find interesting about the language? Māori and other polynesian languages sound very rhythmic and percussive. It sounds completely unique and exciting compared to the Indo-European languages I am more familiar with.

[culmaer]

Tshivenḓa ★ the Venḓa language

Venda (or Tshivenḓa) is a Southern Bantu language with about 1.3 million native speakers (2011 census) in the north of South Africa’s Limpopo province, as well as some speakers across in the border in Zimbabwe. Tshivenḓa is an official language in South Africa, but could be considered a minority language as it’s only spoken by around 2.2% of the population. it is also more distantly related to the other Bantu languages of South Africa, as such, there’s a perception that it’s a “very difficult language to learn.”

in terms of grammar, Tshivenḓa is a lot like the other Bantu languages of South Africa : it’s agglutinative, and has an extensive noun class system and set of prefixes, for example : muVenḓa (a Venḓa person), vhaVenḓa (the Venḓa People), tshiVenḓa (the Venḓa language). or tshimange (cat), zwimange (cats), ḽimange (big cat), kumange (kitten).

Tshivenḓa has a rather exciting phonology

Tshivenḓa’s five-vowel system is pretty standard in the region: /ä/, /i/, /ɛ/ [ɛ~e], /ɔ/ [ɔ~o], /u/, but as for consonants…

here are the highlights :

a three-way distinction in plosives and affricates : ejective, aspirated, and voiced, eg. [p’], [pʰ], [b]

<f> [f] is pronounced as in English, and is a completely separate sound to <fh> [ɸ], that f-like sound in Japanese

<v> [v] is as in English, while <vh> [β] is that Spanish sound in-between B and V.

<t, d, n> [t’ d n] are alveolar sounds, pronounced like T, D and N in English*. and <ṱ, ḓ, ṋ> [t̪’ d̪ n̪] are dental sounds, pronounced like T, D and N in some dialects of Spanish*, and Dothraki. and yes, those are phonemically distinct in Tshivenḓa !! (*the Ts are ejectives ofc)

<l> and <ḽ> are different, but what the precise difference in depends on dialect. either retroflex/alveodental or alveodental/lateral-fricative

<sh, zh> are pronounced as in “shoe” and “pleasure” in English, whereas <sw, zw> are like SZ and RZ in Polish

oh, and Tshivenḓa is also a tonal language. like most Bantu languages, it’s a fairly regular two-tone system (high and low tones). there are minimal pairs like ṱhóhó (head) and ṱhoho (monkey). tones are not written in the orthography though !

References

Gershkoff, Z. 2012. Tshivenḓa is Learned: A Grammar Guide. US Peace Corps.

Venda language [s.a.] (online) wikipedia. [11 July 2018].

Ziervogel, D. and Dau, R.Sh. “Die spraakklanke van Venda” in Ziervogel, D. (ed.). 1967. Handboek vir die spraakklanke en klankveranderinge in die Bantoetale van Suid-Afrika. Pretoria: Unisa. 108-116.