Whistle, click and live in the present!

In order to become an interpreter, it is necessary to choose between a small amount of our world's languages and so I ended up stydying German, English and Russian. Without a doubt, each of these languages is fascinating, but there are some others that caught my interest from the very first moment I heard of them.

Whistle!

How you do it

Whistle like you've never whistled before, so that people on the other side of the valley, the river or
even the gorge can hear you. Do it like the inhabitants of La Gomera, which is one of the smaller islands in the Canaries. They speak Silbo Gomero, a whistled language. Fine... but... how does it work?
The speakers of this language try to imitate the articulation of a Spanish dialect through whistling. They distinguish between four vowels and eight consonants and differentiate them through the pitch, the intensity, the quality, the volume and the continuity.

A short introduction into the language and its importance for the inhabitants of La Gomera from the perspective of the speakers: It is worth checking out.

Click!

Xhosa people

Let's continue our journey around the world. Next stop: South Africa. Xhosa, the language supported by click consonants, is spoken by a large amount of people living in the far south of Africa. As a member of the Bantu language family, Xhosa is a tonal language, with a few exceptions. The letters "c", "x" and "q" are clicked, each of them produced in a different part of the mouth. The letter "c" combines six dental clicks: You need to click your tonuge right behind your teeth, as if you said something like "tsk". The "x" clicks are produced on the sides of the tonuge and the "q" clicks are made at the roof of the mouth by the tip of your tongue.

Of course you can try it yourself with a little help from a native speaker. :)

Maici River, the Pirahã definitely live in paradise

Live in the present!

Last, but definitely not least, I want to introduce you to the Pirahã language which is spoken by people living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon. 
Every relative of the language family Pirahã belongs to, is extinct. That's the reason for its uniqueness. I'll try to give you an overview of the most unusual features:

Phonology: The Pirahã's language consists of only three vowels. There are a few more consonants but by far not as much as in any European language. It is quite easy to imitate the sound of Pirahã because the phones are much the same as in German, there are only less of them.

Kinship terms: Pirahã do not differentiate between mother and father. They are simply parents. With kinship terms they only go as far as biological siblings, not like Europeans who are proud to be the great-great-grandson/daughter of someone.

Numbers: In my opinion, this is a very complicated topic because Pirahã do not know any number above "two". As a result, the whole system of handling them is different. To give you an example: You have ten nails and ask a Pirahã how many you have, the answer is "many". If you now took four of them away, they would of course use a different word because there are less nails. The strange thing is, though, that they use a completely different word if you had two nails and put another two down. In both situations there are four nails in the end, but for a Pirahã that would be two different "numbers". On the right, you see the resulting table of an experiment. If you understand every aspect about this table, please let me know...

Colors: There are words for "light" and "dark". If they want to name a specific color they describe it through a thing they know, for example, "like grass" for "green".

Tenses: Pirahã live in the present, so they do not know any words or forms to express something that happened in the future or in the past. That is, in my opinion, the most amazing feature of this unusual language.

It is necessary to say, even though most of you probably know it, that the Pirahã could use color terms, numbers and tenses if they wanted to. They just do not need them in any way, as they are happy without them.

Finally, a video, recorded by Daniel Everett who lived with the Pirahã, learned to speak their language, analysed it and translated it into English. 

Sources: 
El Silbo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Silbo
http://www.gomeralive.com/el-silbo/
http://silbo-gomero.com/silbohome.html
Xhosa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/xhosa.htm
Pirahã: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001387.html
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/piraha.php
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language

Can you hear me playing?

 The title might sound a bit confusing, but you may guess that this blog post will be about people who pretend to play instruments, to be more precise, the guitar. Sounds strange, but there actually is more to it than anyone, including me, would have reckoned.

To give you a short introduction, the last "Annual Air Guitar World Championship Contest" Winner,   Eric "Mean Melin" Melin:

 What do you think?

I actually play the guitar myself and I love listening to music played with guitars, maybe I even sometimes play air guitar, but why would I ever want to go up stage with my invisible skills?!

Come on, take one!

One big reason for the success of playing air guitar professionally may be that it's absolutely free. You need yourself and a lot of imagination.

And it's fun.

Anyway, obvious questions probably crossed everyone's mind when watching the video above: How and where did they qualify for a World Championship? Who judges them and how do they judge them?

To qualify for the World Championship, you have to succeed in a national one (and a lot of countries have nationals, for instance, Germany does, Austria not).
The juries usually consist of B-list musicians, comedians, music critics and so on.
The scoring system is the same as in figure skating, which means there is a maximum of 6.0 points and there are four different criteria the jury judges on.
In two rounds, each round one minute, the participants have to show what they are capable of.

I really like the criteria because they sound that serious and professional:
1) Technique: The air guitar player has to play the song correctly as if he played on a real guitar, including riffs, solos, chords, etc. That's why a lot of them actually know how to play in real.
2) Mime: The illusion that they hold a real guitar while doing all the rock moves must be kept up.
3) Stage presence: The candidates have to drive the listeners. They have to be rock stars and entertain the audience!
4) Art: The performance has to be art, not just simulating to play the guitar. That one's rather subjective...

Maybe it's best to watch the video of Melin again. With all this new knowledge you may look at it from a different perspective, observing his technique and the rock moves.

If you want to check out the official website of the World Championships or this infographic.


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_guitar
http://usairguitar.com/

What good bloggers do

New semester, new challenges. One of them is, at least for me, the blogging.

In the last few days I tried to find out how I could raise my motivation when it comes to writing new posts. So I looked at various successful blogs of other students and realized that there are many ways to improve my own.

First of all, the choice of the topic seems to be very important. The right topic is one you are passionate about so that the readers get infected with the enthusiasm. It doesn't matter if it's a sad, funny, informative or maybe even crazy subject, as long as you are interested in it. And that's one of the biggest mistakes I've made. I've written about things that didn't sound bad to me, but I actually wasn't really captivated by them. Now I changed my way of picking issues to write about and my mind is exploding because it's filled with too many ideas. I look forward to making all of these ideas into hopefully good blog posts!

Another big point of blogging is that people want to read about people. They want to know what the bloggers opinion is, share their experiences and thoughts. Keyword: Authenticity. I always had the opinion that I can't write freely because the whole world is able to read my blog. That surely is true, but I write about interesting stuff and my opinion of it, not a diary.

 
That leads me to my next point. Be funny or be yourself if you are a jolly person and at least try to be funny if you are a grouch. No information is useful to readers that probably check out your blog in the middle of the night when there is nothing else to do, unless it is presented in a humorous way. Who doesn't like to have a laugh when learning something new?

There is one last thing I'd like to mention: I am terrible at organizing. I can barely manage to structure my thoughts, and spend hours in front of my computer, trying to create a logical structured text. Doesn't quite work yet, but I'm still trying.

Anyway, in the end you have to bring a bit of a writing talent with you because even the most beautiful layout, the funniest pictures and videos can't make a blog successful, as long as the texts are boring and/or confusing. I will do my best packing information, my style, humour as well as seriousness into concise, well-written texts.