Ugric Peoples AD 1500

The Ugric or Ugrian languages belong to the Uralic language family. There are three subgroups in the language family: Hungarian, Khanty, and Mansi. AD 1500 the Hungarian languages was already spoken in today’s Hungary. But guess what? The language was spoken on other locations, too. Follow the link to see where.

Links:

 

To Translate a Verb You Need to Know the Infinitive

KielitietoinenA book teaching Finnish for school children tells on page 11: “It is important to know the infinitive, if you need to look up the word in a dictionary. You can get help in this at verbix.com that recognizes the conjugated verb form and returns the infinitive”.

ImportantToKnowInfinitive

The feature of finding the infinitive is available for many languages. More than this, you don’t even need to know the language of the entered verb form but Verbix will find it out.

Links:

German ß and ss in Verbs

There was a spelling reform in the German language in 1996.

Among other changes, the ortography underwent a change, where ‘ß’ sometimes started to be written as ‘ss’.

As a rule of thumb:

  • ‘ß’ continues to be written in the same way when it’s preceded by a long vowel or diptongue;
  • and elsewhere it’s substituted by ‘ss’.

A good sample verb is essen ‘to eat’. In present the preceding vowel is short and therefore written ‘ss’. In past the vowel is long and therefore written ‘ß’.

Verbix supports both ways of writing German, check the link below to see more.

Links:

Only 23 Irregular Verbs

Today I read about Hungarian language and its verbs. Just like Finnish, a very remote “sister” language, the Hungarian has only a few irregular verbs.

In fact the number of irregular languages is 23. The 23 irregular verbs are now listed on Verbix website’s Hungarian verb conjugator page.

Links:

German Language Spoken Here

We know that German is spoken in Germany, Europe. Some of us know that it’s spoken in Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, as well.

But German dialects are spoken elsewhere too. Or perhaps the spoken German is so different in Papua New Guinea and Pennsylvania that it could be considered another language? See the verbs at Verbix language drafts.

New Words in Swedish in 2015

Happy new year 2016! And time to see the verbs that got official in the Swedish language year 2015. Click any of the new verbs to conjugate them in Swedish. As you will see, all new verbs are totally regular.

  • Avinvestera To disinvest, normally by selling shares in companies involved in industries viewed as unsustainable or unethical .
  • Dumpstra To dumpster dive, or retrieve useable food and other objects from what others throw away.
  • Haffa Rough, to hit someone.
  • Klittra Mastrurbate (like a woman).
  • Rattsurfa From ‘ratt’ steering wheel and ‘surfa’ to surf. Means to use cell phone or similar when driving, decreasing the concentration on driving the car.
  • Svajpa From English ‘Swype’, to steer a computer or phone by sliding a finger or stylus on the screen.
  • Svischa To transfer money to a friend or shop using the Swedish phone payment system Swish.
  • Vejpa To ‘vape’ or smoke an e-cig.

Julotta or to Awake Early in the Morning

In Swedish language there is the specific work for the Church worship held early in the Christmas day’s morning. The word is julotta.

The word julotta consists etymologically of two words:

  • jul Christmas
  • otta archaic word for the earliest time of the day, the hours before dawn that are related to activities such as work or other. More generally it refers to early morning.

So the word otta has nothing to do with number 8 ‘åtta’, but because the meaning of the word otta is not known commonly, people have thought that julotta is the Christmas Day’s worship at 8 o’clock. And yes, the word is commonly misspelled julåtta.

On the contrary the etymology of otta goes back to the ancient Sanskrit word aktú, which means darkness or ray.

And finally some Swedish speaking finns have adopted the word as a verb meaning ‘to wake up early in the Christmas day’s morning  (to clean up the living room)’.

Links:

  • Conjugate the Swedish verb julotta.
  • Wikipedia article about julotta.
  • Swedish (Finland) definition of julotta, including the verb julotta as used in Åboland, Finland.

 

Verbtable with Awesome Layout

Years ago there was the possibility to print out high-quality verb tables from Verbix for Windows.

This was in the ages when there was a very limited number of supported languages in Verbix; designing state-of-the-art layouts was tedious and time-consuming, and therefore the Verbix for Windows started to use HTML as the “layout engine”.

In early days of the HTML layout the internal webbrowser used by Verbix was very limited. Therefore the verbtables didn’t look so nice. Little by little the design has been improved, yet the printouts still don’t look like a “book page”.

Now with the latest version of Verbix for Windows, there is the possibility to export Spanish verb tables as PDF.
And these verbtables are again like “book pages”.

Links:

Ancient Alphabets Made Easy

I was developing years ago verb conjugation for Ancient Scandinavian, Runic Swedish, and Gothic languages.

All these ancient — now extinct — languages were written in a an ancient script more that a thousand years ago. Although the grammar books transliterated the texts to modern alphabet, I wanted to also write the verbs forms in the original script.

The Gothic alphabet as it appears in the Gothic Bible of Wulfila
Runic inscriptions on a stone

Years ago that was hard. Either there was no font that supported Runic or Gothic scripts. Or there was no standard for encoding them.

Fortunately things have changed, and modern webbrowsers make use of such standards as webfonts and Unicode. Thanks to that I get the Runic and Gothic texts written as they should.

Read mode:

I Prefer Writing in Karelian over Russian…

… because one SMS (text message) can contain 160 characters in Karelian and only 70 characters in Russian. (the reason being that Karelian is written in latin characters and Russian is written in cyrillic characters).

Old houses in Karelia
Old houses in Karelia. Endless forests and lakes is typical for this sparsely populated region.

I spotted the abovementioned comment from a newspaper and the opinion was made by an older woman, whose native language is Karelian. The news article can be found News article about Karelian language.

The Karelian language (karjala, karjal or kariela) is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland and some Finnish linguists even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish. The language is spoken in Karelia, the part of Russia that lies closest to the Finnish border.

The language is in danger of dying; many children (not all) learn the language but most if not all become more fluent in Russian and largely stop using the language later in life. The reason is that Russian is de facto language in the communities of Karelia, yet the writing of SMS:s seem to be the exception in this.