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You know that phrase, “I am out of the office at the moment” that commences auto response messages in business emails? Well, guess where it ended up? On a traffic sign in Wales! And did it cause some confusion!

It all started when someone in the traffic department in the city of Swansea (or Abertawe in Welsh) decided to send an email to the city translation department requesting the translation for a traffic sign. The sentence read “Strictly residential area. No traffic of heavy vehicles.”

The translator was on vacation and the requestor immediately received an automatic response with the phrase “I am out of the office at the moment, etc.,” except that it was written in Welsh. “How efficient!” the requestor must have thought. And as he did not know a single word in Welsh, immediately sent it for print, assuming that this should be the Welsh translation for the English traffic sign.

Translator went on holidays??!!

Then it hailed protests… Mistakes like this are common in a country where all notices and official signs have to be translated into two official languages; in this case, English and Welsh.

To show support for the Welsh speakers, the Golwg Magazine (or View, in English) has been publishing pictures of signs containing absurd or incorrect translations. And the amount of confusion and misunderstanding these signs cause is immense. According to the magazine editor, Dylan Iorwerth, these signs are created by people who completely ignore the language and do not consult with subject matter experts. In his opinion, the ideal situation would be to use two separate texts rather than translations from English to Welsh.

If you are interested in the story, take a look at the BBC News website to learn more. By the way, it is also worth re-reading a recent post in the Ccaps Blog Save the… languages? There is a reference there to the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, which classifies Welsh as a vulnerable language. The 2001 census identified 750,000 speakers, which corresponds to 20.5% of the population of the country. In England, Australia, the US and other parts of the world, you can also find speakers of this modern Celtic language spoken in the British Isles,

OK, everyone. Stretch those jaw muscles and warm up those tongues because we are training for the Word Olympics in today’s Ccaps Blog post.

Do you have hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia? If so, you might want to stop reading this post now.

According to the Wiktionary, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of big words. The word is actually a derivative of sesquipedalian (foot and a half), hippopotamus, and monstrum (monster) with the phobia extension added at the end. Though this word is scary enough just at first site, its more popular and scientifically used synonym sesquipedaliophobia isn’t much more user friendly.

Here are a few more big words to get your mouth muscles working:

Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the ablative plural of the Medieval Latin word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as “the state of being able to achieve honors.” It is mentioned by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. As it appears only once in Shakespeare’s works, it is a hapax legomenon in the Shakespeare canon. It is also the longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels. Now, I bet you did know that…

One quattuorquinquagintaquadringentillion (represented by a 1 with 1365 zeroes after it), is the natural number between a tresquinquagintaquadringentillion (a 1 with 1362 zeroes after it) and preceding a quinquaquinquagintaquadringentillion (a 1 with 1368 zeroes after it). Quattuorquinquagintaquadringentillion is recognized as the natural number with the longest name (without hyphenation), and it contains 37 letters.

Floccinaucinihilipilification is the estimation of something as worthless. The term is usually used as an example of a very long word. It originates from the Latin words flocci, nauci and pili, and it appeared in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (published in separate sections from 1884 to 1928).

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, also known as Lake Webster, is a small lake in South Massachusetts, in the town of Webster. The full form of its name is said to be the longest American place name. The translation of the name of the lake is believed to be, “Fishing Place at the Boundaries — Neutral Meeting Grounds.”

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a lung disease caused by breathing in particles of siliceous volcanic dust. Supposedly, the President of The National Puzzlers’ League, E. Smith, created this new “longest word” with 45 letters in 1935. While he wasn’t able to convince people to use it, it was included in various dictionaries!

And finally, because I know you were waiting for it…

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is an English word in the song with the same title in the musical film Mary Poppins. The song was written by the Sherman Brothers, and sung by Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke. The roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- “above,” cali- “beauty,” fragilistic- “delicate,” expiali- “to atone,” and docious- “educable,” with the sum of these parts roughly meaning, “atoning for educability through delicate beauty.”

Ok, get a glass of water and rest those jaws; we have done enough work for one day. Now it is time for some fun!

“One of the things important about history is to remember the true history.” Washington, DC. June 6, 2008
Trust me, I am trying to forget all the falsities created in politics.

“We got plenty of money in Washington. What we need is more priority.” Washington, DC. June 2, 2008
We can just buy that, right? For much again?

“And so the fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there’s jobs at the machine-making place.” Mesa, AZ. May 27, 2008
No really, was this a speech given to 5 year olds? The “machine making place”?

“We want people owning their home — we want people owning a businesses.” Washington, DC. April 18, 2008
Now wait a minute, owning a businesses?

“So long as I’m the president, my measure of success is victory — and success.” George W. Bush on Iraq. Washington, DC. April 17, 2008
Well spoken, I often measure success by success too.

“A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what’s not on their mind.” Sochi, Russia. April 6, 2008
Is that different than speaking without thinking?

“I thank the diplomatic corps, who is here as well.” Washington, DC. March 12, 2008
Unfortunately, only one person was left in that department.

“There is no doubt in my mind when history was written, the final page will say: Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world.” Addressing U.S. troops at Camp Arifjan. Kuwait. Jan. 12, 2008
When history was written, I’m sure they will make mention of that, right before they set sail on their time machine.

“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.” Washington, DC. May 12, 2008
Now ain´t that the truth!

From: http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm

For more Bushism fun, check out The Ultimate George W. Bushisms: Bush at War (with the English Language), listed for as low as $.01!

During the 12th Ibero-American Conference of Ministers of Culture, which took place in Portugal in April 2009, Maria Simón, Minister of Education and Culture of Uruguay, announced that in early 2010, the Portuguese language will be adopted as the second official language in the country. This means that the discipline will have to be part of the curriculum in the country’s public schools.

In Uruguay there are language centers where foreign languages are taught for free. These languages include English, French, German, Italian, and soon Portuguese.

The goal of this measure is to reduce the social divide in the country. The government will offer foreign language courses for Uruguayan teachers specializing in Portuguese.

From a political, social and economic point of view, this victory of the Portuguese language not only strengthens the link between Brazil and Uruguay, but it also increases the reach of our language around the world.

Just like Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: “So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a thousand battles without a single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.”

Three cheers for the Portuguese Language!

We often hear about endangered species or the endangered rainforest but a new endangerment is on the rise that is worrying scholars worldwide: the endangerment of languages.

Did you know that, according to UNESCO, of the 7,000 or so languages still heard in the world, about 3,000 are at risk, and 199 have fewer than 10 speakers left? Imagine that, a language with fewer than 10 speakers! It would be like having your own private code that only you and your closest friends and family knew. It is said that by half way through the century almost all humans will speak one of a handful of megalanguages – Mandarin, English, Spanish – although often a poor version of them.

To better illustrate the situation, UNESCO has created an Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger that shows the name of the language, degree of endangerment and the country or countries where it is spoken. The online edition provides additional information on numbers of speakers, relevant policies and projects, sources, ISO codes and geographic coordinates. Users can provided input and updates online in order to keep the information up to date.

Why do we need this and why should we care? Well, besides cultural preservation, languages provide a unique vision of the world by varying groups of people. According to scientists, balance in languages, like balance in the environment, is essential for human survival. “Every time we lose (a language), we lose that much also of our adaptability and our diversity that gives us our strength and our ability to survive,” said professor emeritus at University of Alaska Fairbanks, Michael Krauss, during his presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco.

Linguists know what causes languages to disappear. Demographic shifts, government neglect or suppression of regional and indigenous languages, the depredations of mass media all play a role. Less often remarked is what happens on the way to disappearance; language vocabularies, grammars and expressive potential all diminish.

“Say a community goes over from speaking a traditional Aboriginal language to speaking a creole,” says Nick Evans, an Australian National University linguist and leading authority on Aboriginal languages. (Article from The Australian) “Well, let’s just use talking about the natural world as an example. You leave behind a language where there’s very fine vocabulary for the landscape. Inside the language there’s a whole manual for maintaining the integrity of the landscape, for managing it, for using it, for looking for stuff. All that is gone in a creole. You’ve just got a few words like ‘gum tree’ or whatever.”

“There are times when what people speak is like seeing the
world through very badly made, thick glasses,
you can avoid bumping into objects,
but you don’t see all the beautiful detail.”

UNESCO hopes to reverse this process by creating awareness about extinction of languages and through preservation projects. The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has a mission to document, maintain, preserve and revitalize endangered languages. Their free online movie, The Linguists, documents some of the most extinct languages in the world and hopes to learn from them before they vanish. For example, did you know that over 80% of plant and animal species that exist in the world have not yet been named or classified by western science or given western language names? But these species have names in these endangered languages. These facts alone warrants the preservation and study of these thousands of dying languages.