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Posts tagged ‘Twitter’

20
Jul

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!

uTalk now has emoji searchIf 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.

emoji cupcakes

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:

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

 

25
Aug

An introduction to Finnish

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 share some of them with you, in our new 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 send us your own favourite facts and have a go at our weekly challenge for a chance to win some fun EuroTalk prizes 🙂 You can join the conversation here on the blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, where we’ll be sharing more of our discoveries over the coming few days.

An introduction to FinnishSo this week, we’re starting with Finnish, in celebration of the annual Air Guitar World Championships, which start in Oulu on Wednesday, and may be our new favourite event of all time.

Here are a few of the best things we’ve discovered about Finnish this week:

– Finnish is thought to be one of the hardest languages for a native English speaker to learn, because of its complicated grammar, which is nothing like English or any of the other languages we’re used to learning. Finnish words can also look pretty daunting to a new learner, as they’re very long and seem to contain a lot of vowels!

– There is no word for ‘please’ in Finnish – not because Finns are rude, but because they just assume politeness. There is a word which means ‘thank you’, kiitos, which is sometimes used in place of ‘please’, and the other way to indicate politeness is to use the conditional – ‘Would you…’

– Also interesting is that a grandson can be either pojanpoika if it’s the son of a son, or tyttärenpoika if it’s the son of a daughter. The same with granddaughter – pojantytär is the daughter of a son and tyttärentytär is the daughter of a daughter. But don’t panic; you can use just lapsenlapsi, which means ‘child of a child’, for a generic term.

– The word sauna is the most widely used Finnish word in English. There are 3.3 million saunas in Finland, which means there is 1 for every 1.63 people. Visiting the sauna is as normal for Finns as going to the pub is to Brits. It’s also a tradition to jump into the lake outside after a hot sauna. This sounds a little crazy and very cold!

– The Finnish language holds the world’s longest palindrome, and just in case you don’t know what that means, it is a word that can be read the same both ways. And here it is: saippuakivikauppias, which is a dealer in lye (caustic soda). Probably not something you’d say every day, but always useful to know.

– The longest Finnish word is 61 letters long (which is outrageous compared to English’s mere 45-letter longest word) and it is:

entokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas

Which means: ‘airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student’.

– A Finnish tongue twister is:

Appilan pappilan apupapin papupata pankolla kiehuu ja kuohuu. Pappilan paksuposki piski pisti paksun papukeiton poskeensa.

There is no absolute translation but it’s about a vicarage’s assistant priest and his hot pot of beans, which are boiling on the stove and the vicarage’s fat mongrel who ate up the thick bean soup.

Language Challenge of the Week

So now it’s your turn. Have a go at pronouncing one of the words above, or, for ultimate respect, the tongue twister… Send us your videos on Twitter to @EuroTalk with hashtag #loveFinnish or post a link to your video in the comments below. If we’re really impressed, we’ll send you a code for uTalk Finnish 😉

Oh, and in case you wondered what’s so great about the Air Guitar World Championships…