This is just fascinating to me. Apparently there is a species of monkey called Campbell’s Monkey and there are 6 different calls or sounds that it makes. Researchers have discovered that by using different combinations of these sounds they can communicate different things to their peers. So for instance… the sound they’ve labeled as “krak” means a leopard approaches, but they can add the suffix -oo to it for krak-oo as a more general “word” for predator when they hear the sounds of a predator but do not see it.

boom boom would mean gather together but boom boom followed by krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo might indicate a tree falling. Hok Hok Hok is the sound made to warn of the presence of crowned eagles. Really fascinating stuff… more research I’m sure is coming.

I’ve recently got a new mp3 player and so as a result I have been searching out podcasts right and left. One that I recently found is about learning French from non other than Radio France international. The rss feed is linked to below. If you use Firefox with the down-them-all plugin you can quickly and easily pull in all the episodes and update it if/when new ones are added. It’s interesting to note that it’s available in a couple of different starting languages. The first link below is English….

http://www.rfi.fr/radiofr/podcast/Podcast_EN_COFFRET.xml English – learning French.

If instead, you want to learn French via your knowledge of Spanish….

http://www.rfi.fr/radiofr/podcast/Podcast_ES_COFFRET.xml – Spanish – learning French.

Or even learn French by way of your knowledge of German?

http://www.rfi.fr/radiofr/podcast/Podcast_DE_COFFRET.xml – German – Learning French.

Essentially it’s a detective story and you wind up learning some French as you go!

American Sign Language can be a bit more of a challenge to learn than traditional languages. Most languages lend themselves well to written or computerized flash cards. ASL is a bit more difficult in this way because you would have to make up the images (or video/animation) yourself. Fortunately there are some good choices out there. In fact, there is one large flash card set (500) at a reasonable price that has come out since the last time I was looking for ASL flash cards.

This is put out by Barron’s and looks like a good thorough collection. From what I can see, there are some areas that aren’t addressed in the set (colors, family relationships, foods and clothing) but outside of that it seems to be fairly well reviewed. Add to that the fact that it’s 500 flash cards for under $20 and it looks like one of the best values out there right now.

I was looking for an easy arrangement of silent night for some piano students when I stumbled across a site dedicated to the famous Christmas Hymn. silentnight.web.za boasts a catalog of 201 versions of the hymn in 135 different languages. I am not sure but, it may be one of the most widely translated hymns in history.

Anyway, the site has just about everything you ever may have wanted to know about the hymn silent night and I hope you enjoy digging through the many different translations of it.

Since language is about communication then certainly one should agree that symbols and pictograms should be included as a type of communication and indeed a way of expressing language in writing. Unfortunately symbols can be difficult to index and reference.

I have run across a very good online resource for Western Symbols at Symbols.com (they have an online reference and a book.) Great resource that I could spend hours lost in and browsing!

Another interesting note is that thanks to unicode there are now many symbols as well as non latin character sets supported by modern computers. It may be as simple as a keystroke combination and then enter the unicode for a character. (In gnome on linux for instance ctrl-shift-u starts the unicode input mode. Then you can follow it with the unicode character number df for instance gives the sharp s from German ß ) For other operating systems you’ll need to check the support for your computer. Also, unicode.org has indexes of all the supported characters. Just because a character or symbol is supported by unicode does not mean that it will display on your computer. The font you use must support that character by having a “glyph” for it. Most operating systems also let you copy and paste from a character map program.

In addition to non-latin character sets there are many included characters such as those listed at this page. Which include ☀ ★ ☏ and dozens of other symbols. (I was excited to see music symbols in unicode making it easier to enter. Again – your operating system not only needs to support that version of unicode, but your font must also have glyphs for those symbols.

In some cases Sindarin is referred to as Elvish due to its origins in the fiction works of J.R.R. Tolkein.

Elvish Phrases

101 Sindarin Phrases

The Sindarin Phrasebook

Lingua Franca Nova has a wikipedia available online and that is available from the following link.

Sindarin is an invented language that was used by J.R.R. Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings trilogy of books as well as the Silmarillion. The language has received quite a bit of interest from hobbiests and scholars and the following pages will link to resources related to the Sindarin language.

• Sindarin Language Resources Online

Lingua Franca Nova is an invented language that is designed to b used as an international auxiliary language. It was devised using the Romance languages as donors for vocabulary and has some simplified grammatical structures making it easy to learn.

The following pages will link to and include information about Lingua Franca Nova.

• Lingua Franca Nova Resources Online

Believe it or not, there is spoken latin available online. This came as a surprise to me at first, but the Finnish broadcasting company provides the following site:

http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii/ which provides news and current events in Latin. Their podcast (mp3 audio) can be more directly found from this page.