An exercise in the international phonetic alphabet (IPA). Here's a quote from the magnificent Margaret Atwood book, "The Handmaid's Tale": "Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles. There is more than one …

I have been learning Esperanto lately (see here). One of the really cool features of the language is affixes. Basically, you can create new words using some simple morphological rules, e.g.: bona (good) → bonulo (good person) juna (young) → junulo (young person) vorto (word) → vortaro (group of words = dictionary/vocabulary …

Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language designed to be simple and easy to learn. It achieves this by having a small vocabulary and very regular grammar. It's quite influenced by Indo-European (particularly Romance) languages, so knowing some of those helps a lot. This post is not intended to be …

Today is St. Patrick's day, which means there's a lot of this online: Lá Féile Pádraig shona duit or this: Lá Fhéile Phádraig sona duit or basically any variation of: Lá F(h)éile P(h)ádraig s(h)ona duit which all roughly mean 'Happy St. Patrick's Day' in …

The Korean alphabet (Hangul) is - so far - my favourite writing system. It is logical and efficient. It pleases my sense of style. Since starting this post over a month ago I took up learning Mandarin so my feelings towards Hanzi are liable to threaten Hangul's dominance in the future, but …