Language of the week: Italian
Buongiorno!
Italian is our language of the week, in celebration of an annual tradition, Il Palio, which dates back to the 12th century and is held on the 16th of August.
This is a horse race unlike any other, and is all over in 90 seconds. It’s held in the beautiful city of Siena, where the 17 districts compete against each other for the glory. Amazingly a district can still win if the horse loses their jockey during the race, as long as they’re over the finish line first (this has actually happened 23 times since records began). If you have a chance to visit Siena while the Palio is on, you should go – the main square is filled with flags from each district and there is an incredible atmosphere throughout the whole town.
If you want to see just how much the Palio is celebrated in Siena have a look at this…
Here are some of the best things we’ve discovered this week about Italian:
- One of the longest words in Italian is ‘precipitevolissimevolmente’ which means ‘extremely quickly’.
- This Italian tongue twister: ‘Trentatré Trentini entrarono a Trento, tutti e trentatré trotterellando’… which means ‘thirty three Trentonians came into Trento, all thirty three trotting.’
- The word ‘Gelato’ means Italian style ice cream (different to normal ice cream for a number of reasons; firstly it is made with a higher proportion of milk to cream, secondly it has a slower churning process and finally it is served at a slightly warmer temperature than ice cream). Gelato is potentially one of the most important words to know in Italian, as the ice cream cone is an Italian invention and Italy is famous for its Gelato. There’s even an ice cream university in Bologna (Carpigiani Gelato University).
- Italian is a Romance language, meaning it has a Latin origin. Gesture could also be considered important to the Italian language, as messages are often conveyed using hands and facial expressions. When in Italy, you’ll probably hear people saying ‘Ciao Bella!’ to each other as a friendly greeting – but if you don’t want to be too familiar, you may wish to stick to ‘Buongiorno’ (good day) the first time you meet someone.
- The Italian alphabet has twenty-one letters in it. It does not include the letters J, K, W, X and Y; these letters can only be found in foreign words that are common in everyday Italian writing.
- To wish someone good luck in Italian, you should say, ‘In bocca al lupo!’, which translates literally as ‘In the mouth of the wolf’. The correct response to this expression is, ‘Crepi il lupo!’, which means ‘May the wolf die!’
Do you have a favourite Italian word or phrase? We would love to hear from you, so feel free to comment below, tweet us @EuroTalk or write to us on Facebook! And if you’d like to learn some Italian, why not try our free demo, or download our uTalk app to get started.
Alex
Language of the Week: Emoji
You may have seen on the uTalk app that you can now search for words in any of our languages by using emoji. With emoji becoming the fastest growing language in Britain, we have decided to make it our language of the week!
If you’re anything like me, the most frequent way you choose to stay in touch with friends and family is by text messaging. If I think about it, I don’t even know what my ringtone sounds like, and I only answer my phone if I’m expecting an important call, otherwise, everyone that knows me just sends a text.
Furthermore, I overheard this conversation the other day:
‘So he called me in the middle of the day and I thought, omg, what a freak, why can’t he just text me?‘
Okay, I was part of the conversation, but anyway you get the idea.
Nevertheless, sometimes it can be quite challenging to express your exact feelings or tone in a text, and so you risk being misunderstood by the recipient or worse – come off as too serious when you’re actually joking. So at some point in the past, the techies have come up with this brilliant way to make our text conversations more fun and emotive: emojis!
Now, some of you may not know what they are and that’s okay – my boss didn’t know either, until a couple of days ago when our app was updated with this brilliant way of searching for words by using emoji. I admit – I love emoji! They’re cute and funny and a great way to interact with your friends without using actual words.
Did you know?
- The word emoji comes from Japan, with the ‘e’ meaning picture and ‘moji’ meaning character or letter.
- There are more than 6 billion emoji sent worldwide everyday, with more than half of these being smiley faces.
- Some emoji are confusing…
- Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick has been translated into emoji; the book was released with the title Emoji Dick.
- Many celebrities love emoji, with Roger Federer recently tweeting his whole day in emoji during Wimbledon. And in April, Andy Murray tweeted his wedding day in emoji:
🌞☔😂👔💅💇😂👰😂🚗💒💃👫🙏💍💏👏📝🎹📷🎥🚗🍷🍴🎂🎊🎉👯🎶🎤🍹🍻🍷🍺🍩🍦🍷🍹🍸🍺🌙❤💕😘💤💤💤💤💤💤💤
— Andy Murray (@andy_murray) April 11, 2015
- Even Australia’s Foreign Affairs minster, Julie Bishop gave the first ever political emoji interview on Buzzfeed.
So go ahead and see which ones have been matched with which uTalk words by our brilliant developers! Which is your favourite emoji? We love to hear from you, so please do join in the conversation here on the blog, or on Facebook or Twitter.
Ioana and Alex
Language of the Week: Esperanto
Here at EuroTalk, we love languages (obviously). And we particularly enjoy discovering fun facts about languages; they’re all so different and each has its own unique character. So we’ve decided to bring back the Language of the Week series. Each week, we’ll choose a new language, and we’re always open to suggestions!
Please do get involved – we love to hear from you, so join in the conversation here on the blog, or on Facebook or Twitter.
This week’s Language of the Week is Esperanto, to celebrate its release as the 128th language in our uTalk app, which we’re very excited about…
Some of you may not have heard of Esperanto, or you may want to learn some more about it; so here are some interesting facts about the world’s most widely spoken constructed language:
Dr Zamenhof introduced Esperanto in 1887; his aim was to allow people from many different native languages to communicate with each other through a second shared language, whilst retaining their individual cultural identities.
- Esperanto’s full name is ‘Doktoro Esperanto’, which translates into ‘one who hopes’ – this reflects the aim of Dr Zamenhof, who wanted this language to create peace and diplomacy across the world.
- Although the language did not become as popular as Dr Zamenhof predicted, today there are still a large number of people who speak the language. Estimates range from 10,000 fluent speakers to 2 million people who understand quite a lot, and it is spoken all over the world. There are also over 1,000 native speakers of the language:
- The four main languages that Esperanto’s roots are taken from are Italian, French, German and English. However, Esperanto has no irregular verbs – unlike French, which has over 2,000!
- J.R.R. Tolkien had a huge interest in Esperanto, stating that people should ‘back Esperanto loyally’. He even had his book The Hobbit translated into Esperanto.
- Esperanto is believed to be easier to learn than any other language. Here are some simple phrases:
Smile! – Ridetu!
Have a good day – Bonan tagon
Have a cup of tea – Havu tason da teo
Do you know any Esperanto? We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to say hello in the comments below, join us on Facebook or tweet us @EuroTalk 🙂
Alex
Language of the Week: Samoan
To celebrate Samoan Language Week which runs from 24th May to 1st June this year, here are ten facts about this beautiful language and nation, which many of us know very little about.
If you fancy giving it a try, you can now start learning Samoan for free with uTalk. And for this week only, we’ve reduced the price of the Essentials and Premium upgrades to £2.99 and £6.99 (usually £7.99 and £11.99).
10 Facts about Samoan
- Samoan is a member of the Polynesian language family, one of the oldest branches still in existence today.
- It’s the official language of Samoa, where it has approximately 200,000 native speakers.
- It’s also spoken in New Zealand, where it’s the third most-spoken language, after English and Māori.
- The Samoan language is written using a Latin-based alphabet.
- Samoan’s alphabet has just 14 letters: 5 vowels and 9 consonants. 3 more consonants – H, K and R – are used in loan words from other languages.
- The Samoan flag’s upper left quarter is blue and has five white, five-rayed stars representing the Southern Cross. The rest of the flag is red.
- Samoa consists of seven islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The two main islands are Savai’i and Upolu.
- It takes 20 hours to fly to Samoa from London.
- Lu’au is a traditional Samoan dish, consisting of coconut cream, onions and taro, wrapped in taro leaves and then cooked.
- Samoans are known throughout Polynesia as ‘happy people’.
5 Samoan proverbs
The Samoan language is full of proverbs and idioms; here are five of our favourites:
E pala le maʻa, a e le pala le upu
Translation: Even stones decay, but words endure.
A reminder of the damage that hurtful words can do.
Ia malu le vai i lou finagalo
Translation: May your mind be like cool water.
This phrase is used to ask someone for forgiveness if you’ve offended them.
Se’i fono le pa’a ma ona vae
Translation: Let the crab take counsel with its legs.
This proverb advises us to think things through before we take action.
Amuia le masina, e alu ma toe sau
Translation: Fortunate is the moon, to go and then return.TranslationHumans only get one life, unlike the moon; so we should make the most of it.
Humans only get one life, unlike the moon; so we should make the most of it.
Ua ‘afa le aso
Translation: A day for plaiting ‘afa.
A rainy day. ‘Afa is a plaited rope made from dried coconut fibres, and used in architecture and boat building.
We’ll be sharing more fun facts about Samoan as the week goes on…
Language of the Week: Japanese
As it was the Japanese Grand Prix on Sunday, we have chosen Japanese as our Language of the Week.
First and foremost, our thoughts and good wishes go to Jules Bianchi for his full recovery following his crash on Sunday at Suzuka.
Though in many respects I’m a complete petrol head, I have never found Grand Prix very interesting to watch, lap after lap, rarely exciting in my book. However, when I started to research the history of the Japanese Grand Prix, I found some interesting facts:
Surprisingly it is the only circuit that crosses over itself in a figure of eight and therefore runs both clockwise and anti-clockwise.
The fastest lap ever recorded at the Suzuka circuit is 1:30.54 minutes and was set by Kimi Räikkönen in 2005. To put this into perspective, since the track is 3.387 miles long, if a Cheetah could run at its fastest for further than 1500ft, it would take it approximately 2.7mins!
When looking to learn Japanese it can appear very daunting because of the characters. However, it is one of those languages which is much easier to speak than write. Unlike the majority of languages, nouns do not have genders and there is also no differentiation between singular and plural. Personally, we love both these facts. There are also no pronunciation or tones.
Here are a few fun facts about Japan:
Japan’s trains are among the most punctual in the world, their average delay is just 18 seconds. (What we’d give for that on a rainy Monday in London!)- Japanese farmers are growing square watermelons, because they are easier to stack and store. (Now that is thinking outside the box! Or is that inside?)
- In Japan there is a cat café where you can and go drink coffee whilst hanging out with cats for hours (Is that a new kind of speed dating opportunity?)
- This one has to be one of our favourites – sleeping on the job is acceptable as it’s a sign of exhaustion from working hard. (Sweet dreams!)
- In Japan there is no Ronald McDonald!! But panic not Big Mac fans, he’s called Donald McDonald due to the lack of a clear “R” sound in Japanese.
- There is an island in Japan called Ōkunoshima or Rabbit Island, since numerous feral rabbits run wild, though apparently they are quite tame!
The challenge for you all this week is another tongue twister:
Niwa no niwa ni wa, niwa no niwatori wa niwaka ni wani wo tabeta
Which means: In (Mr) Niwa’s garden, two chickens suddenly ate a crocodile.
So let’s see your best efforts! Send us your videos on Twitter to @EuroTalk using #itsJapaneasy or send them to us on Facebook – our favourite will win a free uTalk Premium in a language of your choice. Get twisting!
Are you learning Japanese? Or do you have any favourite facts about the language or the country? Let us know in the comments!
Amy
