Showing posts with label languages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label languages. Show all posts

September 27 - French Community Holiday Belgium

 Posted on September 27, 2021


This post is an updated version of my post published on September 27, 2010:




This holiday is celebrated only by the French Community of Belgium. This is mostly made up of people living in the southern half of Belgium (an area known as Walloon Region) plus many living in bilingual Brussels. The people of this community are Belgian, not French, but they speak French as their primary language.


French speakers in Belgium tend to live in the south
or in bilingual Brussels, the capital city.


The date for the French Community Holiday commemorates an important battle in the Belgian Revolution—a battle of French-speaking Belgians against the Dutch army. Interestingly, the Flemish Community of Belgium has a parallel holiday (July 11) that commemorates a battle victory of Dutch-speaking Belgians against the French army!


(By the way, note that there is a third region of Belgium, the German-speaking Community. It is tiny. These three “communities” are official institutions with their own governments.)


Can you see why French, Dutch (spoken in the Netherlands)
and German are the language communities of Belgium?


On this the French Community Holiday, French Community schools are closed, and there are many free concerts plus plays and sporting events.







Did you know...?

  • Belgium is host of the European Union—in other words, most of the EU's institutions are located there. The headquarters of NATO are also located in Belgium.



  • Because both Dutch and French are quite closely related to English, and many Belgians from both language regions learn to speak English in schools, young Flemings and Walloons often chat with each other in English! That means that English is Belgium's lingua franca (a French term, adopted by the English language, that means “common language”)....

    The only time I've been to Belgium, way back in 2002, I stayed with a French-speaking family in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, near Antwerp. And back then  I ran into a lot of people who didn't seem to speak much English.


  • Belgium is 321 times smaller than the U.S., but it has the same population as Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska COMBINED!

  • There are many castles in Belgium. Check out Bruno's website to see some.





Belgian Food Fun Facts


Belgium is known for chocolate. It produces about 600,000 tons of chocolate per year. According to my sources, the world's biggest chocolate seller is the airport in Brussels, Belgium, which sells more than 2 tons of chocolate per DAY!




Belgians claim to have invented the fried-potato treat that are called French fries by Americans and chips by Brits. I love the fresh, hot fries/chips sold out of street carts in Belgium—partly because of all the yummy sauces we could dip them into! (I think there were 30 or 40 sauces offered by a typical friterie.)




A few of the sauces included mayonnaise, curry, tartare, barbecue, Andalusian, "Samurai" (not Japanese, but Belgian - it contains harissa), sweet and savory pickle sauce, herb-y Hawaiian sauce, spicy Dallas sauce, and something called American sauce (Amerikaanse saus) that turned out to be catsup!


With such delicious fresh fries so easily available, it's no wonder that Belgians eat (on average) 165 pounds per year! 



Belgium is also known for its waffles and rice tarts and other bakery treats.



 



Also on this date:










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October 13 - Anniversary of the First Known Conversation in Modern Hebrew

Posted October 13, 2020

The first known conversation in a language???

How is it possible to know the date of the first conversation in a particular language? Aren't languages ancient, and don't they develop slowly over generations? 

Well, modern Hebrew is the only example of a language that was deliberately revived as an everyday language - going from zero native speakers to several million native speaker within a single generation.



You see, Hebrew, like other languages, developed long ago, slowly evolving from the tenth century BCE to around 70 CE. At that point, the Roman army captured the city of Jerusalem and destroyed most of the city, and its Temple. Many Jews fled their homeland and scattered over Europe and Asia. 

Living all over, Jewish people began to speak the languages of their new homes - Arabic, Russian, German, whatever - for everyday concerns. But
Hebrew was still very much alive as a religious language. Rabbis and scholars and practicing Jews used Hebrew for verses of the Torah, the teachings of the Talmud, and for prayers.

That means that for centuries, Hebrew was only a holy language, or liturgical language. Nobody spoke it as their first language. It's like Latin - nobody speaks Latin as their native tongue, but it is used in some Roman Catholic masses.

Starting in 1880, two separate things began to happen:

(1) Jews began to return to Palestine, but they didn't share an everyday language with other newly- arriving Jews, nor with the Jews who had basically stayed put (who mostly spoke Arabic). Since they DID share the holy language of Hebrew, they began the process of reviving it as a natural language that could be used to talk about everyday (non-religious) topics. 

(2) Some Jewish writers living in Europe thought that Hebrew deserved fine literature and began to translate works such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - and of course began to write original works in Hebrew. 

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is often considered "the reviver of the Hebrew language" because he
invented many new words for things that weren't around during ancient times. This includes New World foods such as tomato and maize, plus scientific terms such as electricity.

It was Ben-Yehuda and some of his friends who had that "first known conversation" in modern Hebrew on October 13, 1881. 




Also on this date:


















































 (Second Tuesday in October)


Plan ahead:

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February 27 – Marathi Language Day

Posted on February 27, 2019

Today is the birthday of Vishnu Vāman Shirwādkar. Sure, you may not have heard of him - but what about his pen name?:


Kusumagraj

Still no recognition? Yeah, me neither.

However, this Indian writer (born on this date in 1912) is very famous in India. He wrote:



16 volumes of poetry
3 novels
8 volumes of short stories
7 volumes of essays
18 plays
6 one-act plays

He won lots of awards - but the most important thing about this writer may be that he inspired his generation into the Indian freedom movement!

Because this writer was so important to India and Indians, the language in which he wrote, Marathi, is celebrated on his birthday in the Indian states of Goa and Maharashtra.

From one source, I read that there are 22 major languages spoken in India. And this fact makes me shudder: the various languages use 13 different scripts (alphabets / lettering systems). Yikes! There are more than 720 dialects. 


But from another source, I read that there are 122 major languages and 1,599 other, less-spoken languages! Yikes-ety! 

Of course, facts about languages so much depend on the definitions of "major language" and "dialect."

Even though there is no one national language of India, the language spoken by the most people (about 420 million speakers), Hindi, is the official language. Also, because of the colonial history of India, English is widely spoken in India, mostly as a second language, and it has become a  "subsidiary official" language. 

Here's a bit of knowledge about the Indian states of Maharashtra and Goa:


Maharashtra is the wealthiest state, the second-most populous, and the third largest in size. 

For comparison, it's not quite as large as New Mexico, in the U.S., but it has about a third of the population of the entire United States! So...that's a difference of 950 people per square mile in Maharashtra and 17 people per square mile in New Mexico!!!

Maharashtra's capital, Mumbai, is the largest city in India.

Mumbai is filled with many wonderful sights, like the Maharaj
Terminus, above; but there is a lot of inequality in the city (see below)





Goa is the smallest state in India - smaller, even, than Rhode Island in the U.S. Even though it isn't as wealthy or industrial as the much larger state of Maharashtra, it seems to be the top in the "per capita" (per person) category, and it is the Indian state with the "best quality of life" ranking.

Goa is known as a biodiversity hotspot, a tourist destination, and a place with UNESCO World-Heritage-level architecture.

The first Europeans to settle in Goa (which of course was already
settled with many Indian people!) were Portuguese.





 
By the way, in case you were wondering, India has 29 states plus 7 union territories.




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