Swahili in Chinese

Posted on April 28th, 2012by Michelle
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Just last week I posted about a man who had made it his life’s work to produce a Yiddish-Japanese dictionary.

Now it’s revealed a Chinese man is compiling a Swahili-Chinese dictionary. Twenty-six year old Shen Yuning announced the plan on his blog last December, and has so far completed nearly 5,000 words.

Yuning is studying African languages at university in Germany, but is currently an exchange student in Kenya. He works up to 15 hours a day on the dictionary, and plans to include 25,000 words by August. The words included come from interaction with locals as well as Yuning’s study of books, newspapers and television.

Yuning’s friends say he is very interested in linguistics and can talk about word meanings for hours. He hopes that his dictionary will help international workers:

There is an increasing exchange of labor between Africa and China, but many Chinese workers here can speak only Chinese, while locals only speak Swahili and poor English,” said Shen, an exchange student at Kenya’s Kenyatta University.

“Of the several African languages I’ve learned, Swahili is my best,” Shen said, adding that Swahili is also the most important language in East African countries including Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, with more than 80 million speakers.

He hopes the dictionary will be helpful for Chinese workers in East Africa.

“There are free online translation tools, but they are rubbish when it comes to the translation of African language,” Shen said.

“Moreover, most Chinese workers in Africa don’t have easy access to the Internet, while a dictionary is portable and much more convenient to use.” (Source: China Daily)

Yiddish in Japan

Posted on April 22nd, 2012by Michelle
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Yiddish is most associated with Jewish people, particularly the Ashkenazi Jews. It has been translated into many languages, but until now not a non-European one.

One man has changed this through his life’s work. Kazuo Ueda is a Japanese linguist who originally specialised in German before teaching himself Yiddish. He is now Japan’s leading scholar in the language, and several years ago published a Japanese-Yiddish dictionary.

But why did Ueda become so devoted?

He stumbled upon the Jewish language while reading Franz Kafka, himself a fan of Yiddish theater.

Ueda was immediately smitten with the language that is written in Hebrew letters, but is a hybrid of German, Hebrew, Russian and other languages.

“Yiddish was full of puzzles for me,” Ueda says. “That’s what I love about it. Reading sentences in those strange letters — it’s like deciphering a code.” (Source: NPR)

Perhaps language learners can take something from this story – to learn a language well requires a little bit of love.

Indigenous language: Yiddish

Posted on November 12th, 2011by Michelle
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The excellent blog Indigenous Tweets has a fascinating interview with Jordan Kutzik, a fellow at the National Yiddish Book Center in the USA.

Kutzik explains the history of Yiddish, and how it was almost wiped out by the persecution of the Jewish people before and during World War II. He states that it was the strongest non-territorial language in the world and had a large literature, including some respected newspapers.

Now it is estimated there are around 250,000 Hasidic Yiddish speakers worldwide, with efforts being made to teach new generations the language. Kutzik explains the lack of internet resources in Yiddish and what efforts are being made to correct this, as well as his vision for the next 10 years. Read the whole interview, it’s well worth a look.

The survival of Yiddish

Posted on October 7th, 2009by Michelle
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A friend has brought to my notice an interesting programme on the BBC World Service (also available on the BBC website) about the Yiddish language.

Once a German dialect, Yiddish (literal translation “Jewish”) developed into a full language over the course of a millennium. Whilst the early history of the language is uncertain, it’s thought that it grew from a distinct Jewish culture called Ashkenazi in Germany in the 10th Century. At its height, more than ten million people spoke or understood the language.

Events in the 20th Century meant that many Yiddish speakers were killed and those remaining assimilated in to different cultures and languages. Today it’s estimated there are 3 million speakers worldwide.

In the first part of the programme:

Dennis Marks travels to New York to discover what has become of Yiddish and how much of the language survives today.

On the Lower East Side, where many Jewish migrants first came to live, he finds a musical and theatrical tradition which once supported a dozen Yiddish theatres on 2nd Avenue.

He hears from the publisher of The Forward, once the world’s most popular Yiddish newspaper, but which is now in seemingly terminal decline.

And he explores the enormous influence of Yiddish culture on American life, its literature and its comedic tradition. (Source: BBC World Service)