The final of the Eurovision Song Contest takes place today in Baku.
This year Russia participates with a song that is sung in Udmurt and English.
Well, most of the songs are sung in English. But what is Udmurt?
Udmurt is a Finnic language spoken deep in Russia apart from other Finnic languages. Rather than being related to Russian, it’s related to languages, such as Finnish and Estonian.
Check this page to see how the verb ‘to sing’ is conjugated in Udmurt: Sing conjugated in Udmurt.
One thing is common, though. They all use chinese characters: hanzi (Chinese) or kanji (Japanese) or hanja (Korean). In Korean chinese characters are used less frequently.
Japanese verb conjugation is quite simple, because most verbs are regular.
The regular verbs are divided in Ichidan and Godan verbs.
Ichidan verbs end in -eru and -iru. The Godan verbs end in a consonant or vowel and -u.
There are two irregular verbs:
Suru is one of the most used verbs in Japanese, because it is used to form compound verbs, such as benkyousuru （勉強する）’to study’ and dansusuru （ダンスする）’to dance’. From the latter example you can see that suru is used to make new verbs from loan words, too.
While the verb conjugation itself is easy, the use of the verbs is not. But that’s another story.
What is common to these persons: Tevfic Esenç, Red Thundercloud, Laura Somersal, Ned Maddrell and Dolly Pentreath?
They are the last speakers of a language. When these persons passed away, also a language ceased to exists in our world.
Google Maps is one of my favorite tools that I use when surfing in the Internet.
Today I zoomed to islands outside the Estonian coast, and guess what? I found an island with the following names of villages: Borrby, Rälby, Diby, Norrby, Söderby, Hosby, Sviby, Bussby, Förby, and Saxby. All these names are typical Swedish names.
Looking back in the history, there’s a good reason for the Swedish place names; during most of its history, the island has been inhabited by Estonian Swedes (“rannarootslased” in Estonian or “coastal Swedes” in English), whose population reached 3,000 before World War II. During the war, nearly all of Vormsi’s population, along with other Swedes living in Estonia, were evacuated, or fled, to Sweden. The island’s current population is approximately 240 inhabitants.
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