language and a mention of technology

As you know, I am very interested in language and languages, yet I haven’t posted anything about them yet.  I’m really not sure why.

I spoke a lot of French, but wasn’t that satisfied by my abilities and how I spoke it.  Most people we encountered in France spoke better English than I do French, but in Morocco the opposite was true.  After a month in France and 3 weeks in Morocco, it was fun to see Jack understanding some things.  He can’t say much, but he can catch some words, get the gist of the word separation and understand me when I am telling a story he already knows.

I listened to about 8 hour long Pimsleur Italian lectures when we were in Italy.  They are quite helpful for general tourism, I think, however they did not cover much agricultural vocabulary.  To give you and idea of what they did cover, imagine asking someone out on a date – “How are you? Would you like to drink something? Would you like beer or wine?  Where is the restaurant? At my place? No, at your place?”  With that and French and a tad of Spanish I could understand things occasionally, though I couldn’t say much of anything.  Also, as you’ll recall our first hosts were kind of antisocial and our second host had three English-speaking wwoofers and thus no one to speak Italian too.

I can remember about 15 words of German from a trip when I was a kid.  Staying in Vienna with my friend was fun though because her three year old didn’t get why we didn’t speak German so there was a lot of repetition and a little bit of learning on everyone’s part.

I think I said “thank you” once in Hungarian, but it could have been Romanian – with two days in each country it’s just a blur.

After 5 weeks in Arabic speaking places, making zero effort, I now can say “Hello,” “Thank you” and “alone.”  I only remember “alone” because I thought contextually that it meant “there is/are”…. but it doesn’t.
Now we’re in Malaysia with a Malay/Mandarin/English/Italian speaking host.  I plan to go read the language section of the guide book now.  It’s a reminder that we should probably all learn Mandarin.
Oh and I didn’t get a single syllable of Icelandic, Turkish or Hebrew.  LOL.

This is the street we stayed on in Jerusalem.  I like this picture because it has three different scripts on it, and also because it’s a classical example of the challenges of text processing for language technology.  The abbreviation “St” can be expanded to “saint” or “street” and you have to know the context to know which one is correct.



During our week in Jordan and our five hours in the King Khaled airport in Saudi Arabia, we encountered a foreign way of writing numbers.  What’s this you say, we use Arabic numerals so why would they be different in Arab countries? 

Here’s the story, as I read it on Wikipedia.  Our system actually consists of Hindu-Arabic numerals.  They were developed in India, and were then adopted by Persians and then by Arabs.  Europe took them from North Africa in the 10th century, without crediting Indians for them.  Evidentially, Arabs still refer to this system as Hindu numerals.  The foreign digits we saw in Jordan also originated in India and are called Hindi numerals, by Arabs.

{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9} = Arabic, Hindu, Hindu-Arabic, Western Arabic
{٠‎ - ١‎ - ٢‎ - ٣‎ - ٤‎ - ٥‎ - ٦‎ - ٧‎ - ٨‎ – ٩‎} = Hindi, Eastern Arabic, Arabic-Indic

Confused?  Here’s a nice summary from Wikipedia:

“In English, the term Arabic numerals can be ambiguous. It most commonly refers to the numeral system widely used in Europe and the Americas. Arabic numerals is the conventional name for the entire family of related systems of Arabic and Indian numerals. It may also be intended to mean the numerals used by Arabs, in which case it generally refers to the Eastern Arabic numerals.”