English optional

I never posted about the programme for TG4 called "No Béarla" at the beginning of the year when I first discovered it on a tip from wwidsith. Back then, only a few selections were available online, but meanwhile the production company has put the entire series on YouTube. (Buíochas le goodboi for the tip! Unfortunately, there are no subtitles for the first episode so most of you will want to start with Programme Two; also, Programme Four seems to have been pulled due to a copyright dispute, but half a series is better than none.)

The show features a geeky native Irish-speaker (experienced travel correspondent Manchán Magan, bearing something of a resemblance to our own zompist) trying to make his way around all corners of the island without ever having to resort to English. Yes, there are gimmicky bits, but he's generally got the charm to pull them off. Moreover, the project is redeemed by some of the amazing reactions he gets, from being thrown out of shops and government offices(!) in Dublin to being besieged by Irish-speaking schoolchildren in Ráth Cairn eager for their fifty seconds of fame.

In a similar vein, by the way, a reporter for BBC Mundo is right now undertaking a similar project: Driving from San Agustín to LA using only Spanish. I'm not sure if there's a programme in the works (frankly, I'd be surprised if there wasn't), but he is blogging the journey--in Spanish, naturalmente. (Today, he's in Houston.) All I can find in English is a brief summary of the project, but if more becomes available, I'll post about it here.

O is for Okinawan

This week's entry is dedicated to aadroma. Not just because he's perhaps the only other human I know who can fully share my glee about the topic, but also because he's very much in my thoughts right now.

Okinawan-English dictionary Sakihara, Mitsugi. (Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, 2006)

This is a book that I've been waiting my whole life for someone to publish without really expecting they ever would. I first got interested in finding materials on the native language of the Ryukyus back in college. At the time, I was interested in fleshing out an Orient-inspired role-playing setting that had, essentially, two Japans in it and I thought it would only be logical to make the common language of one of them Okinawan.

That's when I ran up against the same wall I'd hit trying to find material on other minor languages of East Asia: A lack of sources in English. Just as everything on Manchu was in Chinese or Russian (neither of which I really read), most everything on Ainu and Okinawan was in Japanese, which--as I've pointed out many times--I've never had much interest in learning to read. So so much for that clever idea!

How things have changed! I pounced on this lovely little volume the moment I found it--I think it may have been at the downtown Borders, of all unlikely places. The meat of it is an Okinawan-English that runs to 225 pages, but there's also an extensive English-Okinawan glossary that doesn't feel as tacked on as many of these do. My only real complaint is the introduction, which includes some notes on the grammar, but nothing approaching a full grammatical sketch, or even a complete set of morphological tables. (Guess now I'll simply have to wait patiently for UH to publish an English-language Okinawan grammar!)

But far be it from me to bitch that the magical carp I caught has scales of silver rather than pure gold. This is still a book I'd never thought I'd see. I figured at best I might get some basic glossary awkwardly translated from the Japanese, but this work contains such juicy entries as:

min·nu-ku An inedible food offering used to lure malevolent spirits away from stealing edible food offered to ancestral spirits.

There you go: in-between "tinnitus" and "sash-cloth", a window onto traditional Ryukyuan culture. It's almost enough to make me want to revive that old fantasy setting just to Okinawaise everything.