Saturday, September 19, 2015

Learn Tuvan with Songs

Great website! It's appealing even if you're not trying to learn Tuvan, but would just like to look at some lyrics and translations to famous throat-singing numbers.

Tuesday, September 08, 2015

A well-known Jysk tongue-twister, a æ u å æ ø i æ å, means “I am on the island in the stream” and contains no consonants.

A Guide to Endangered Languages

Thursday, August 06, 2015

Abyaneh, the red village (great photos in the link!): 

At the foot of the hill, the fort of Hanjan is enthroned above the here already dry wadi. A veritable Fort of the Tatar Steppe: it has awaited the enemy for two thousand years, but the enemy has not come. The invaders forgot the valley hidden among the mountains in the middle of the desert. While the seventh-century Arab conquerors forced their religion and language onto almost all Persia, the inhabitants of the valley remained Zoroastrians until the 16th century, when the central power of the Safavid dynasty was established, and they still speak the Middle Persian language of the pre-conquest Sasanian empire.

Wednesday, July 08, 2015

Goannas are the best burrowers! Also, a conclusion that heartily pleases me:

....these new finds have shown that living reptiles.... are doing some incredibly complex things. Co-operatively built family burrows (McAlpin et al. 2011), warrens formed of numerous individual burrows, and – now – deep, deep, spiralling corkscrew-like burrows. The expectation that complex structures of this sort can only be attributed to mammals.... ha, it’s dead.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Cambrai was divided in two equal parts and each half installed in either the right or left side of the choir of the church. An entry in the capitulary acts of February 4, 1473, shows that on only three days of the year did the singers come together to perform in the middle of the aisle: Maundy Thursday, Holy Saturday, and Pentecost…On all other days, they sang from either side, each half grouped around its own lectern, and performing from its own music book. A bizarre confirmation of the existing space between the two sides comes from an entry of September 9, 1493, that reprimands the lesser vicars for throwing meat and bones from one side of the choir to the other during the divine service

Emphasis mine. Via Unquiet Thoughts (whose music as the duet Mignarda I highly recommend).

Friday, March 13, 2015