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One of the funniest things when I was living in Indonesia: because Malay and Indonesian are so similar, I kept saying things to the motorbike taxi drivers that to me were just things like ‘hello’ and ‘I’ and ‘brother’. I was wondering why everyone kept giving me their phone number. Those words, very neutral in Malay, were actually total come-ons and flirty language in Jakarta.

Don’t say ‘aku’ and ‘abang’ to strangers in Jakarta.

#TootSea #Malaysia #Indonesia #Languages


Austronesian directions are trippy, producing the same words for different things.
"Timur/timog" means east in Malay, but in my language, Tagalog, it means south. In others, it means wind or rain. Turns out, they all have roots meaning southeast monsoon. It checks out because here at the north, those winds appear from the south while at the south, they would appear from the east.
What's weird is in Masbate, it means north. Wonder what happened there?

#tootSEA #languages #linguistics #tagalog


Updated this article with an extra para on the #Malaysian school system & realise how confusing it is. I speak 4 languages only because I had the luck of growing up in certain areas & studying in schools where Malay, English and Chinese are used often. These days, it's not unusual to find graduates who can only speak ONE language. In #Malaysia, this can be limiting, especially if you cannot speak Bahasa Malaysia, the national language.

#Languages #Mandarin

https://elizabethtai.com/2024/01/02/why-i-am-learning-mandarin-in-2024/


In just under an hour our monthly #CommunityCall will focus on translations and translators! What are the top and most exotic languages that our app is used in? How can we improve the process & quality? Who are the (other) folks making our software accessible to non-English speakers?

Feel free to join us if any of this interests you!
https://antennapod.org/events/community-meeting

#localisation #l10n #translations #languages


Just dropped on the App Store: #RHVoice for #iOS. For now only #Macedonian and #Albanian languages are supported but it's worth bookmarking/installing this now to follow updates. Again, new linguistic communities have been included to the #Apple ecosystem with high-quality, free-of-charge voices. https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/rhvoice/id6444378148?l=pl #Accessibility #Blind #SpeechSynthesis #TextToSpeech #Languages


Recently I have been playing with various GUI's for the Whisper transcription software. Buzz has definitely won the showdown. Almost completely keyboard accessible, give or take the toolbar which needs exploring through object navigation of NVDA or an equivallent in your screen reader of choice; handles the downloading of models, FFMPEG conversion and everything that otherwise would have required operation in the command line, works with Whisper.CPP as far as I can tell and can be localized to other languages.
Now I can finally listen to podcasts in all the languages I can't speak. I love it when technology enhances my access to knowledge and helps me do my work even better for those who benefit from it.
https://github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz
#Accessibility #Audio #Languages #OpenSource


Currently pouring over a sample exam sheet set for Finnish highschool students in German as foreign language in 2020 to assess the accessibility of the exam solution. It's got everything an accessible test needs: a table of contents, a good heading structure, native HTML 5 media player with almost perfect accessibility, native controls such as radio buttons and edit fields to give the answers.
The students were to pass the test by connecting their computers with an Ethernet cable to the examination machine running a special OS, presumably a fork of Debian. The test was taken by tunneling into the examination machine through the web browser and handling the exam in an accessible HTML from there.
Sadly, the audio recordings for the listening part do not seem to be available. Pity, as they reference Whatsapp voice messages. Would be fun to check for their authenticity based on the sound quality.
On that note: Do language exams in your countries reference modern communication methods or is it still a telephone? When I took my final in German, "Social media: pros and cons" was just a subject of the mini essay I had to put together as part of the writing assignment.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200121222502/https://digabi.github.io/exam-engine/SC/fi-FI/koe.html
#Accessibility #Blind #Finland #Education #Languages #German


Content warning: #Accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar: day 2 #Switzerland - open the content warning to discover the interesting fact for the day


Content warning: meta Some useful tips and tricks for Mastodon