Parrot Time

Parrot Time
The Thinking of Speaking
C on s tru cted Lan g u ag es
Wh at are th ey are wh y are th ey

m ad e?
Issue #9 May / June 201 4
Laln onuaadgFees iChoinhftl fiocrts

g n l m s fg
Wa l o
d o m i n a n ce i n B e l g i u m
Ro h o n c C o d e x
An oth er m ys teri ou s d ocu m en t

th at h as s ch ol ars s tu m ped
At t h e C i n e m a
I l C o m a n d a n te e l a C i c o g n a
" G ari bal d i ' s Lovers "
Word s i n You r M ou th
Wh ere d o we g et th e
word s for " s au s ag e" ?
Look beyond
wha t you know
Parrot Time is your connection to languages, linguistics

and culture from the Parleremo community.
Expand your understanding.
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Contents
Parrot Time
Parrot Time is a magazine
covering language, linguistics
and culture of the world around
us.
It is published by Scriveremo
Publishing, a division of
Parleremo, the language learning
community.
Join Parleremo today. Learn a
language, make friends, have fun.
Editor: Erik Zidowecki

Email: editor@parrottime.com
Published by Scriveremo Publishing, a division of Parleremo.

This issue is available online from
http://www.parrottime.com
The editor reserves the right to
edit all material submitted. Views
expressed in Parrot Time are not
necessarily the official views of
Parleremo. All rights of reproduction, translation and adaptation reserved for all countries, except
where noted otherwise. All copyright material posted in the publication retains all its rights from the
original owner. Parrot Time, Parleremo, officers and administration accept no responsibility
collectively or individually for the
service of agencies or persons advertised or announced in the
pages of this publication.
Features
6 Constructed Languages - Making It All Up
Artificially made languages, called "constructed languages", or

conlangs, are a large part of the language world, having their
own purposes. They also sometimes bring out strong emotions
in people.
1 2 Language Conflicts: Flemish vs. Walloon
When two languages fight for dominance in the same country,

the outcome is usually either violence or separation. For now,
Belgium is managing to avoid those, but just barely.
1 8 Rohonc Codex - Hungarian Enigma
The Voynich Manuscript isn't the only volume of text and images
that hasn't been translated. The Rohonc Codex is another
mystery, although not as well known.
Departments
05 Letter From The Editor
2 6 At the Cinema - Il Comandante e la Cicogna
30 Where Are You?
32 Words in Your Mouth - Sausages
Cover: Toledo sits majestically
above the the Tagus River and

represents one of the most
visited sites in all of Spain.
38 Book Look
42 GlobTech - Using Locale
Parrot Time
| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4
Learnakae lfarinegnudasg, e,
Mave fun!
H
Pwaparlr elreor.oe m o
w w.
em rg
Letter From The Editor
Tracing Words
When we study a language, we are learning thousands of words. They

make up a kind of ngerprint for a language; we can often guess what
a language is just by seeing a few of its words. The vocabulary of a
language gives the language a unique identity.
Languages also evolve over time, usually coming from an older language and becoming mixed with and being inuenced by neighbouring
languages of the region where the language is spoken. All this information helps us trace the origins of a language. We can categorize each
language into a family, branch and group of a large tree structure.
But where do these individual words come from? Why do we use one
particular string of letters and sounds to represent an object or
concept over another? What is the signicance of names? Why are
some things given long names while others receive short labels?
Just as there is a study of languages, there is also a study of words.
Etymology seeks to discover the history of words, their origins, and
how their meanings and forms have changed from the original to the
modern. Not only is each word part of a ngerprint, but the words
have ngerprints of their own!
The immediate benet of this tracing is to categorize languages into related families. You have probably
done this yourself a number of times without even thinking about it. For example, if we take the English
word water, we can look at how it is translated. We can easily recognize it as being the identical word
in Afrikaans, Dutch and Low Saxon. The Frisian wetter and German Wasser are also close enough, so
we can guess they are related. This suggests all these languages have a related ancestry, so we put them
in the same family, which we call Germanic.
But then we nd other forms that are a bit more removed: voda (also spelled in Cyrillic) for Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croation, Czech, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian and more. This suggest another language
family, Slavic.
A third family, Italic is born to accommodate these versions: acqua (Italian, Corsican), aghe (Friulan),
agua (Spanish), aiga (Occitan), aigua (Catalan), aqua (Latin), auga (Galician) and gua (Portuguese).
Making these distinctions cannot be done on just a single word, however. The French word for water is
eau, yet French is in the Italic family. That is because of other inuences upon the French language
which caused a greater change from the original Latin aqua.
Once the languages can be grouped together, etymologist can then use further comparative methods to
infer the vocabulary and structure of the language which they all derived from. In this case, even though
the three families of Germanic, Slavic and Romance differ, they are still similar enough to suggest they
are all related to a larger, older root language, referred to as Indo-European, which no longer exists.
We will be using etymology to look at the origins and connections of various basic words for foods and liquids in a new column called Words in Your Mouth, starting this month with sausage. We hope you
have as much fun exploring these word histories as we do!
Erik Zidowecki
ERIK ZIDOWECKI
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Parrot Time
Esperanto books at the World Esperanto Congress, Rotterdam 2008
Constructed Languages
Making It A ll
Up
here are over six thousand natural languages in the world, with only a relatively
small number of those being used and learned
by the majority of people in the world. The rest
are used by smaller groups of people in villages
and tribes.
Despite this huge number of languages, and
in some cases because of it, some people have
created their own languages, forming their own
syntax, grammar and vocabulary. These are
called constructed languages or simply conlangs. These are not to be confused with pidgin
languages, which arise when two or more languages collide with each other, causing the
people involved to merge them into a new language as a necessity to communication. Nor are
these creoles, which are what happens when a
pidgin becomes spoken as a primary language
instead of a helping or auxiliary one.
A conlang is an entirely new entity. It is
likely to borrow some aspects of other languages, for the creators will have previous language experience to use. They are developed for
a number of different reasons, the rst one being, rather ironically, to ease the problem with
there being so many languages.
History of Auxiliary Languages
This particular kind of conlang is known as an

international auxiliary language, also referred to
as an IAL or auxlang. The most well known is
Esperanto. These are created as a means of
communication between the people of different
countries that share no other common languages. These are not meant to replace the native language, but simply to offer a secondary
shared language.
You can see how this could be useful when
two world leaders meet and want to discuss issues without using an interpreter. If one person
speaks German and the other Swahili, an auxiliary language that both know could be used instead. Such IALs could certainly be useful in
simplifying the interpretation and translation
nightmare that exists in organizations like the
United Nations. Of course, it means that everyone needs to know the auxiliary language.
So why create another language when there
are so many natural ones that could be used instead? Essentially, learning languages is not
easy for most people, and while an IAL would
still take time and effort to learn, they are designed to be much easier to learn.
One of the rst IALs was Volapk, created
around 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer. It got
a lot of attention and was used in a few conventions, but was eventually abandoned and a
newer and easier language was wanted.
Constructed Languages - Making It All Up

Interlingua is an IAL based
upon Latin, developed in the
rst half of the 20th century. It
is a naturalistic IAL, meaning its
basic components (vocabulary,
grammar, etc.) are based upon
natural languages. The design
was to combine the most common elements from a large number of languages to make it
easier to learn for everyone. This
is different from Volapk which
adopted most of its vocabulary
from English and most of its
grammar from European languages.
Esperanto
Esperanto was created by L. L.

Zamenhof in the 1870s and was
rst published in 1887. It is also
a naturalistic IAL, and gained a
large following, especially among
language learners.
A major strength with Esperanto is that while it has a
vocabulary that can be at least
partially recognized rather easily
by speakers of many languages,
given that is where the words
were derived, the grammar and
verb structures are also greatly
simplied. There are no irregular
verbs in Esperanto, so a learner
does not need to memorize all
the different exceptions. That
alone is often a major obstacle to
learning natural languages.
But while being learned by
hundreds of thousands of people
in numerous countries
throughout the world, it never
really became adopted as an international language, at least it
the way it was originally intended. While people use it to communicate, the same as with a
natural language, it is not used
in the geopolitical arena and no
world leaders or major world organizations are using it as their
primary means of communications.
Why have we never fully adopted an IAL, such as Esperanto
or Interlingua? I think the main
reason is that the average per-
8 Parrot Time
7th Esperanto congress, Antwerp, Belgium, August 1911
son is resistant to learning a

second language. In some countries, language education is
heavily promoted, and in some
specic instances, becoming bilingual is quite normal. But
when a person learns a language, they do so because it is
part of their daily life or has a
practical usage. Being taught a
language that has no daily practicality seems pointless to most.
In order for an IAL to really be
useful, everyone would have to
learn the same one. Even if that
language is easier than most to
learn, a person that does not
want to learn another language
might resent being told they
have to, while a person that does
learn other languages might resent being told they have to
learn that specic one. English
and French have become more
of the internationally used languages, and they are both natural languages. So why do not
people rebel against them (more
than they already do, at least)?
Perhaps because learning one of
those gives the learner access to
another culture instantly, while
there is no culture based around
an IAL (although Esperanto has
made great strides in creating its
own community and culture).
Many language learners
have fully adopted Esperanto
and love to use it with others.

They will extol its numerous virtues and encourage you to learn
it, perhaps even more than is
done for a natural language. I
feel in that capacity, it loses its
auxiliary status and becomes a
regular conlang.
Logical Languages
A more recent creation is Lojban,

created in 1987 by The Logical
Language Group (LLG). It was
based upon Loglan, which was
invented by James Cooke Brown
in 1955 and developed by The
Loglan Institute. Unlike Esperanto and Volapk, Loglan was
not solely created as an IAL. Its
original purpose was to test the
Whorf-Sapir hypothesis of the
inuence of language on the way
a person thinks. That is, they
wanted to make a language so
unique that it would force people
to think in an entirely new way.
It was the rst logical language.
Compared to the enthusiasm for Esperanto, I have met
only a few people that even know
or care about Loglan or Lojban. I
think they fail to capture the romance of languages the way the
IALs do.
Potential Conlangs
There are a few historical arti-

facts that have unknown scripts
and languages which have not
yet been successfully translated.
One of these is the Voynich
Manuscript, a series of pages
with many drawings and diagrams along with a script which
seems to have many characteristics of a natural language.
Since it unlike any other recognized language, the general consensus is that it is either a
complete hoax or a created language.
also had a number of conlangs

to be easy to learn, Klingon was
created. Besides Esperanto,
designed specically to be comKlingon, created for the Star
pletely alien, literally. Its main
Trek universe, is probably the
developer, Marc Orkland, remost popular conlang. It is
fused to even include common
denitely the most famous alien elements of other languages, like
language. Many people not only the sound ah or the verb to
have learned it but created their be.
own materials like courses and
Not only have numerous
stories for it. There was even a
books on and in Klingon been
man in the news that was teach- published, an actual Klingon
ing his baby son Klingon, hoping Language Institute has been
to make it bilingual with it. That established. This organization
kind of fanaticism upset a lot of has had many major works,
people, however, and some even such as Hamlet and books
Why are they made?
dubbed it child abuse.
from the Bible, translated into
While auxiliary languages have a
Klingon presents an interKlingon.
specic place in the world, they esting counterpoint to that IALs,
While many languages
are basically tied, at least in the- in that while Esperanto and In- learners like these mainstream
ory, to geopolitical issues. Conterlingua were made specically creations, the real bulk of artistructed languages are generally
created for other reasons,
however.
One popular reason for creating a conlang is to enhance a
ctional world. Authors have
created many articial tongues
to make their characters and
stories seem more tangible.
J.R.R. Tolkien created some of
the most well known in his
Middle Earth world used in his
books like The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings. The characters use these languages and in
some cases, they even become a
part of the plot, where a characters knowledge of another language becomes crucial.
Tolkien is often categorized
as a linguist due to his prolic
contributions to the area of ctional languages. Exactly how
many he created is unknown
even now, for not all of his linguistic related works have been
published. It is estimated,
though, that he created over
twenty, some of them very complete, some only in a limited capacity, but all with their own
unique vocabulary and grammar. His stories contain not only
characters using the languages
but also poems and songs composed for them.
Page from the Voynich Script, which may contain a constructed language. No one has been
Television and lms have
able to translate it.
Parrot Time
torical aspects. To them, they

are not just playing around with
words: they are creating a whole
new world.
Just as people take pride in
their nations and languages,
conlangers also have a great deal
of pride caught up in their activities, and they will ght just as
ercely, if not more, to promote
and defend them. I have seen
many discussions turn nasty
Elven language and script from Tolkien's Middle Earth
when the subject of Esperanto is
cial language creation comes
included alongside natural lanbrought up, but the discussion
from the polyglots that want to
guages. One project I enover other conlangs can be even
make their own languages for
countered was even devoted to
worse. Of course, it is normal to
fun. The temptation to make
creating a whole new world com- see a few conlangers showing off
your own is very strong for some prised of nations with governtheir babies and taking an inpeople, partially because it is
ments and societies based
terest in others creations. There
also a way to develop your own
around members conlangs; liter- are even some conlangs that are
ideas of a culture and world.
ally, a conplanet!
collaborations of a few people
People have always loved explorworking together. They vote on
ing new worlds through books,
Getting Serious
grammar and syntax elements,
sometimes for fun and somerole-playing games and lm, so I Here is a major warning to the
think this is an extension of
reader: do not treat the creation times in the creation of a new
that, giving them a chance to
of conlangs lightly, for those in- IAL. It is an entire subculture
make their own.
volved with them take them very that you are essentially part of
seriously. While they are having or not.
To me, the conlang community is like a smaller rival
fun making them, it is not a
tribe of natural language
trivial matter to them. They
The Cons of Cons
learners. There are many webspend a huge amount of time
Just like any subculture, there
and effort in forming the syntax, is a good deal of friction between
sites, organizations and wikis
devoted to their promotion and
structure and vocabulary. Many conlangers and natural language
creation. I have met many people create new writing systems as
learners. While there is nothing
that had were developing their
well as related aspects beyond
that says the two groups can not
overlap, like a natural learner
own conlangs and wanted them language, like cultural and his-
10 Parrot Time
Klingon alphabet of the Klingon race of

StarTrek
Right: A group of Klingons
might also love conlangs, I have

noticed there is often a strong
backlash against conlangs.
I mentioned earlier how
there are several thousand natural living languages. To me and
others, this raises the question
of why would someone create a
new language when there are so
many out there that could be
learned and, perhaps more importantly, be learned to help preserve them. Indeed, with there
being a large number of endangered languages, how can
one justify creating a fake one
over saving a real one?
Many people learn languages as part of understanding another culture

or as something to use in
their daily lives. To them, a
conlang helps them with
neither of those things.
Of course, logically, there is

no real connection. A conlang is
not going to be the thing that
kills an endangered language; it
is other natural languages that
have done that. Most conlangers
are lucky if they can get even a
few people using what they
make while real languages
have clashed over the centuries,
driving lesser languages into
early and often almost overnight
deaths. But logic has nothing to
do with passion.
Another reason for the fric-
tion is due to what I said before

with the warning. Conlangs can
easily be dismissed as
something trivial, like a person
creating or studying one is not
really into languages. Considering the work that goes into developing a conlang, the creators
might feel the same about those
that do not create their own.
After all, they view themselves as
so serious that they are building
one from scratch!
Many people learn languages as part of understanding
another culture or as something
to use in their daily lives. To
them, a conlang helps them with
neither of those things. Few conlangs are actively used by anyone except the original speakers
and they have no culture attached to them. Others feel that
the makers of constructed languages are doing so as a way of
establishing a way to mock others. They develop their secret
language that no one else can
understand.
Not everyone has a real
strong feeling on the issue of
articial languages and for some
people, their feeling is based
upon how aggressively the other
side is. If a conlanger starts trying to push their creation onto
Parrot Time
others, the natural language

learner will push back. This is
similar to the way people often
view religion: you are welcome to
what you do, just do not force it
on me. Indeed, that seems to be
what really pushes a simple discussion into a heated debate;
the attitude by one side that the
other is doing something wrong
and they should do like they
themselves do. This is about as
useless as telling someone that
you are learning Polish so everyone else should be as well, or
declaring that French is terrible
and should never be used.
Conclusion
Whether you like natural languages, constructed languages,

or auxillary languages, they all
have followers, learners and
reasons for existing. They can
even help each other; a natural
language can provide the inspiration and guidance in creating a
constructed one, while a conlang
can help give insight into how
natural languages work. Rather
than arguing over which is right
and wrong, we should come to
see the benets of each and embrace them all as cousins in our
wonderful language universe!
PT
11
Buildings on the streets of

Belgium. You can't tell by
looking at them that they
are caught up in a
linguistic civil war.
Walloon
vs.
Flemish
Special Feature - Language Conflicts: Flemish vs. Walloon

any of us who study languages do so in the hopes
of crossing the bridge of understanding into other cultures.
Through learning another language, we can learn another way
of life. But what happens when
cultures clash because of language differences? These conicts can range from simple
distrust and anger to outright
war and destruction.
Belgium is a country that is
torn by language, although it is
on the lesser extreme of the conict spectrum. The country is a
convergence point of both Latin
and Germanic cultures, having
been ravished by many greater
nations over the centuries. The
Spanish, Austrians, French and
Dutch, each one marching into
Belgium, battling with other naMap of Belgian municipalities with language facilities for speakers of the minority language.
tions, and plundering the land,
has ruled it.
both, and so they loosely aligned territory which made up Belgium
themselves with one or the oth- was incorporated into it.
History
er. The southern part of this re- However, this put the FrenchAt the end of the Middle Ages, a gion became divided politically
speaking population of Belgium
region of Europe emerged called and linguistically, but not along under the control of the Dutch,
the Low Countries. Most of
the same borders. This caused
and the Belgians resented the
these Low Countries were
some of these new efdoms
Dutch dominance. This led to a
coastal regions bounded by the
(property under the control of an revolution in 1830, which gave
North Sea or the English Chan- overlord for the sake of service
Belgium its independence. They
nel, giving them good potential
and protection) to have both
chose an uncle of Queen Victoria
as ports. Those neighbouring
Franco and Germanic speaking (of the United Kingdom of Great
countries without access to the
regions. This did not bother the Britain and Ireland), Leopold I,
sea aligned themselves both
rulers, who were at this time
as their rst King. However, the
politically and economically to
primarily the French and the
countrys troubles were far from
those with access, forming a
Dutch, and did not normally
over.
union. These territories would
speak the language of the popuBelgium wasnt even
eventually become modern Belgi- lation.
known by that name. Instead, its
um, Netherlands and LuxemDuring the 1800s, as these
regions were named by the mabourg.
efdoms became stronger, devel- jor count ruled counties and
It was in this region that
oping into their own states,
duke ruled duchies, such as
early northern towns were built, power struggles became very
Hainaut, Brabant, and Flanders.
and they quickly developed a
heated. The French replaced
The name Belgium comes from
dense population similar to that them with departments that
the Roman named Belgii tribes
of northern Italy. Figurehead
more closely followed linguistic
of northeast Gaul.
rulers, along with guilds and
borders. There were two the excouncils, governed these cities,
ceptions, Dyle and Forts, which Modern Day
and all these regions depended
went on to become the provinces Despite having been under the
mainly on free trade for their
of the United Kingdom of the
rule of the Dutch, French was
continual survival.
Netherlands and, eventually, of the only ofcial language of BelWith the rise of the Kingdom Belgium. The United Kingdom of gium until 1898. The governof France and the decline of the the Netherlands was primarily
ment refused to acknowledge
Holy Roman Empire, the Low
formed to prevent further expan- Dutch as an ofcial language,
Countries felt the domination of sion of France, and in 1815, the which led to hostilities between
Parrot Time
13

the linguistic groups. The 1898
Equality Law made Dutch an
ofcial language of Belgium, but
French remains the language of
the aristocracy.
Now, Belgium is divided
mainly along its Latin and Germanic heritage. The Latinevolved language of French has
prominence in the region known
as Wallonia, and the dialect of
French spoken there is called
Walloon. The Germanic-based
language form of Dutch has its
place in the northern areas, and
its dialect is called Flemish.
There is also a rising German
presence along the borders of
Germany, just to make things
more interesting.
The language areas of Belgium were established in 1963,
and these divisions were included into the Belgian Constitution in 1970. They roughly
assigned Flanders to the Dutch
language area, Wallonia to the

French language area, and
Brussels to the bilingual language area. There is a fourth region on the eastern border
between Wallonia and Germany
where German is spoken.
These linguistic lines are
very obvious throughout most of
the country. In some areas, you
can literally cross the street and
go from a Flemish to a Walloon
neighbourhood. Everything
changes between those: the
spoken language, signs, billboards, etc. Even while driving
along the highways, you can see
the names of the locations on
the signs changing, depending
which section you are in. This
can be very confusing to just
about everyone.
Each region has its own administration and government.
Public libraries, re houses, unions, even churches are all du-
A bilingual French-Dutch traffic sign in Brussels
14 Parrot Time
plicated between the Flemish

and Walloon languages. The
countries capital Brussels is in
the Flemish northern half, and
is supposed to remain bilingual,
but is predominately French.
Dual-language signs do exist,
but they are often the targets of
grafti, which is used to deface
one of the two languages.
The conict between the two
sides has been expanding over
recent events, including the introduction of French-speaking
cable TV and a festival of French
lms, the latter of which was
cancelled due to a demonstration of a Flemish group in the
school the festival was to be
held.
Perhaps the biggest issue is
economics. The economy is
struggling, and the countrys
debt is one of the largest in
Europe, lower only than the
debts of Greece and Italy. Wallo-

nia is mired in the countries old
industrial structure, which has
made it difcult to compete in
the modern marketplace, and
the defenders of it argue that
Flanders should show more
solidarity by helping it. Meanwhile Flanders, which has been
actively modernizing its microelectronics industry and rivals
the US Silicon Valley, regards
Wallonia as lacking strength and
character.
Belgian nationalism
This doesnt mean that some efforts havent been made to unify
the country. Belgian nationalism
began to emerge in the late 19th
century as an effort to overcome
the ethnic and linguistic divide
and create a national culture.
Critics argue that the attempts
to forge a national identity and
culture have been unable to prevent rivalries.
Both sides, Flemish and
Walloon, want to become the
dominant one in controlling the

country. Compromises have continued to keep the balance in
check without leading to violence or division, but how long
that remains is unknown. PT
Parrot Time
Demonstration in Brussels, Sunday,

November 18th 2007, for the United Belgium
(against the separation of Belgium)
15
Rohonc Codex - Hungarian Enigma
18 Parrot Time
Small train station in modern day Rechnitz,

Austria. Rechnitz used to be Rohonc, where
the codex seems to have originated.
Ro h o nc C o de x
Hungari an Eni gma

he Voynich Manuscript, a
booklet full of hand drawn
images and undeciphered text, is
probably the most famous of
strange language documents,
but it is not the only one. The
Rohonc Codex is another work
that has deed translation for
centuries, despite the examination by many scholars and the
many theories around its meaning.
History
The codex got its name from the

city of Rohonc, in what was
Western Hungary, now Rechnitz,
Austria. It had been kept there
until 1838, at which time it was
donated to the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences by Gusztv
Batthyny, a Hungarian count,
along with the rest of his library.
The Codex seems to be

of medieval origin, with
hand-written glyphs and
crude black-and-white
illustrations.
It is unknown how the

Count acquired the document.
The only possible earlier evidence of it was in a 1743 catalogue of the Batthynys family
library. There is an entry for
Magyar imdsgok, volumen I.
in 12., (Hungarian prayers in
one volume, size duodecimo).
The size matches the codex, but
that doesnt prove that this item
and the codex are the same.
After its entry into the
Academy, it was examined by a
number of people, rst by the

Hungarian scholar Ferenc Toldy
in 1840 and then by Hungarian
linguist and ethnographer Pl
Hunfalvy. Neither of them were
able to explain the contents.
Austrian paleography expert Dr.
Mahl was also unable to make
sense of the codex after studying
it. Between 1884 and 1885,
Prague university professors
Josef Jirecek and his son, Konstantin Josef Jirecek, studied 32
pages of the codex without nding answers. German researcher, Bernhard Jlg, a professor at
Innsbruck University, analysed
it in 1885 and Mihly Munkcsy, a Hungarian painter, took
the codex with him to Paris for
study from 1890 to 1892. The
mystery of the codex eluded
them as well.
The Codex seems to be of
medieval origin, with hand-written glyphs and crude black-andwhite illustrations. It has its origins in Hungarian history and
might possibly be related to
Hungarian. The paper upon
which it is written contains the
watermark of an anchor in a
circle with a star with six rays
(more like an extra limbed
starsh than a geometrical star),
which is known to have been
manufactured in northern Italy
around 1530. This is confusing,
since the codex itself looks like
something from before 1000 AD,
and it has been suggested the
codex is a copy of an older document which has been completely
lost to time, but it also might
Parrot Time
that it is a fake, especially since

there is no evidence of it at all
before the 1743 entry.
Possible Hoax?
Many academics believe the Rohonc Codex to be a fake because

of a man named Smuel Literti
Nemes, a Hungarian antiquarian
of the same time period as the
donation to the Academy. While
there is no known direct link
between Nemes and the codex,
he was infamous for several forgeries which deceived even the
most renowned Hungarian
scholars. He would mix these
fakes in with legitimate antiques, either for monetary or
personal gains. Because of the
matching time periods, modern
Hungarian historiographers
generally consider it one of
Nemes forgeries.
Translation Attempts
Even with the possibility of it

being a fake, scholars and lin-
Count Gusztv Batthyny
19

guists have made several attempts to decode the Rohonc Codex.
Physically, the codex is composed of 448 paper pages, each
about 12x10 cm in size, with
between 9 and 14 rows of symbols or glyphs. There are also 87
drawings that include religious,
non-religious, and military
scenes. With the inclusion of a
mix of religious symbols, it has
been suggested it was written in
the concept of a situation with
Christian, pagan and Muslim religions coexisting. The glyphs
seem to read from right to left
because of the right justication.
It is thought to be related to
Hungarian not only because of
its discovery location but also
because the glyphs bear a resemblance to Old Hungarian
script; both are written right to
left and they have a similar mix
of straight-lined, rune-like characters and rounded characters.
While it contains over two
hundred characters, several
times more than any known alphabet, it is possible that since
most of them are used rarely,
Pages of the codex with an image on the right page.
the codex might be using a syllabary, in which the rare characters represent specic names or
common words. Most alphabets
have between twenty to forty
characters while syllabaries have
eighty to a hundred. Logosyllabic
writing systems, like Chinese,
have thousands.
The rst strictly methodical
study of the symbols was done
by Ott Gyrk. He examined sequences which were repeated in
order to nd the direction of
writing, claiming the codex reads

from right-to-left, top-to-bottom
based on the way the repeated
parts appeared when broken up
between two lines.
In the mid-1990s, Mikls
Locsmndi did some computerbased research on the text, in
which he conrmed the published ndings of Gyrk. He also
found no evidence of case endings, which are normally part of
Hungarian, suggesting the text
was probably not in a language
closely related to Hungarian. His
analysis could not prove the codex a hoax because there were
too many regularities in the text
for it to be just random.
Hungarian-Sumerian
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences where the Rohonc Codex was first examined.
20 Parrot Time
One possible translation attempt

was made by Attila Nyri of Hungary. His solution came after
studying only two pages of the
codex, and it was to turn the
pages upside down. After doing
this, he identied what he
claimed was a Sumerian ligature
(a symbol formed when two letters are combined), then he assigned Latin letters to the rest of
the characters based on their
resemblance. This was problematic, however, because he would
sometimes transliterate the
same symbol as a different letter
(i.e., translate a character one
time as an a, another time as

an o). He also sometimes associated a Latin letter to two different symbols. In other words, the
associations were more pragmatic in order to force some meaning, rather than systematic. He
even rearranged them sometimes to force sense into the
text. For these reasons, Nyris
proposal was immediately denounced by Ott Gyrk, who
noted that by using such a loose
deciphering method, anything
could have been extrapolated
from the codex.
Brahmi-Hindi
It was suggested by Indian Mahesh Kumar Singh that the codex was actually meant to be
written left-to-right, top-to-bottom in an undocumented variant
of the Brahmi script. He created
a transliterated version of the
rst 24 pages of the codex into a
Pages of the codex with an image on the right page.
Hindi text, which he then translated to Hungarian. He alleged it

to be an unknown gospel with a
narrative of Jesus. With the
complete lack of evidence on the
Brahmi script he used and
method of conversion, his solu-
Parrot Time
tion was considered a hoax itself.
Dacia
Another attempt at decoding the

codex was made by Romanian
philologist Viorica Enachiuc,
21

who claimed that text was written in the Vulgar Latin dialect of
Dacia. She said the direction of
writing was right-to-left but from
bottom-to-top, and that the text
is an 11-12th century history of
the Vlachs people and their
struggle against the Hungarians
and Pechnegs.
While Enachiuc offered up a
chunk of translation, it was criticized for not logically matching
the patterns of the codex. Symbols that would appear in the
same context throughout the codex were regularly transliterated
with different letters, meaning
More text of the mysterious writing.
different meanings were afxed
to the same groups, losing the
to decoded the Rohonc Codex
tempts have been proven true.
pattern of the original text.
today, using both old-fashioned Like the more famous Voynich
and modern techniques. While a Manuscript, it may be a hoax,
Continuing Attempts
few have claimed to nally deand if it is a real language, it
There are still people attempted ciphered it, none of these atmay remain untranslated. PT
22 Parrot Time
Parrot Time
23
Once the travel bug

bites there is no
known antidote, and
I know that I shall
be happily infected
until the end of my
life.
-
Michael Palin
At the Cinema - Il Comandante e la Cicogna (Garibaldi's Lovers)
At the C inema
I l C o m a nd a nt e e l a C i c o g na
(G aribal d i' s Lo ve rs )
Il Comandante e la
Cicogna
1 08 min
Comedy
1 8 October 201 2 (Italy)
Country: Italy / Switzerland
/ France
Language: Italian
It is a single love
story and
comedy between
a widowed
plumber and a
struggling artist.
26 Parrot Time
espite the English title,

Garibaldis Lovers is not a
steamy, torrid lm full of sex scenes
and love stories. It is a single love
story and comedy between a widowed
plumber and a struggling artist (why
are the artists always struggling?
Havent they seen enough lms yet to
tell them that perhaps art is not the
most lucrative occupation?).
The story takes place in Genoa,
Italy, where there is a square containing a statue of the great Italian hero,
Giuseppe Garibaldi. We hear
Garibaldis thoughts on the poor state
of modern society as he looks out over
the activities of the citizens. He also
argues with another statue, this one of
the still living Gian Mario Cazzaniga.
We hear from a few other statues
briey during the lm, but the main
narration comes from Garibaldi.
While the lm has the inanimate
objects that have voices, it also has a
living creature that doesnt in the form
of a stork named Agostina who is
subtly and surprisingly crucial to the
story. It is no wonder than that the
original Italian name of the lm is Il
Comandante e la Cicogna (The Commander and the Stork).
The primary characters are Leo,
he plumber we mentioned and the
artist, Diana. Leo is raising his 13
year old son, Elia, and his growingup-too-soon daughter, Maddalena,
alone, and is becoming overwhelmed
by the responsibility of it. Although
his wife, Teresa, is dead (we never
learn how), she talks to him during

the lm, although it is unclear as to
whether she is really a ghost that
keeps appearing to smell the coffee
(the one thing she truly misses about
being alive) or is just in his imagination, and she wishes that Leo would
nd another woman to ll his life.
Diana is a modern artist of sculpture and painting, but her work
doesnt seem to be well received, so
she is in debt. When we rst see her,
she is trying to collect money owed to
her for a piece of art, only to watch the
buyer being arrested. Apparently, he
owes a lot of people money, and she is
directed towards an attorney rm who
is handling the mans nancials.
When she pushes her way through
that, the attorney informs her that the
money will be tied up for several
months. But there is hope; he loved
the fresco she had done for the arrested man, and hires her to paint one in
the ofce.
Elia and Agostina in a grassy area,

meeting in secret
At the Cinema - Il Comandante e la Cicogna (Garibaldi's Lovers)

German, he turns to
Amanzio for help.
Amanzio uses his language skills to discover that Agostina has
been hurt and is
Switzerland, so he and
Elia take off to rescue
her. Meanwhile, Leo
nds out that Maddalenas newest boyfriend is not who he
pretends to be, and
that he was used in
Leo and Diana, posing as husband and wife, to fool a realtor
an illegal scheme. Before he can fully deal
Meanwhile, Elia has been getting into trouble, with that, however, he must race off to save Elia,
rst for bringing a bag of sh heads to school,
who he believes has been kidnapped by a manithen for stealing frozen frogs from a grocery store. ac.
He is evicted from the store with another shopliftSurprisingly, the lm has some special tidbits
er, Amanzio Zosulich, who claims he was helping
for language learners. As previously mentioned,
the store by reclaiming expired foods, which they Amanzio is learning languages. We see him sitting
shouldnt be selling. Amanzio is an eccentric who
on his bed with a large radio hanging down from
is studying several languages at once, loves to
the ceiling, playing an audio tape. From the respout famous quotes at people, and wont hesitate cording, we hear a man giving a phrase, then
to question the way other people are conducting
telling the language that it should be repeated in.
their business (which gets him into trouble). He
Amanzio tries to repeat the proper phrase, but we
and Elia become friends, and Elia introduces him can tell he isnt very good at it. He may not be as
to Agostina, a wild stork who has befriended Elia
bad as he appears, however, for he and Elia manand for whom he has been getting the sh and
age to piece together enough Swiss German to
frogs for.
learn the fate and location of Agostina.
Connections get made, for Amanzio is Dianas
Leo also has a Chinese partner in his job
landlord, to whom she owes money, and Leo, seek- named Fiorenzo who rattles off in Chinese at his
ing legal help to aid his daughter after a sex video wife who is sure that Fiorenzo is cheating on her.
of her gets released to the internet by her slimy
She even hires an investigator who places a listenboyfriend, meets with the attorney for which Diana ing device on their vehicle to catch him in the act.
is doing the fresco. The attorney, Malafanno, talks
Garibaldis Lovers is a fun and enjoyable lm
Leo into participating in a property purchase
and is directed by Silvio Soldini, who also did
transaction, which puts Diana and Leo into the
Bread and Tulips, which I reviewed here before. It
role of husband and wife to convince the realtor.
is done in much the same manner, touching on
When Elia receives a strange phone call in
the smaller quirks, interactions and coincidences
of life that bring people together. PT
Amanzio, in his apartment, listening to a cassette to practise

languages
Leo and the ghost of his wife, Teresa, talking about their kids
Parrot Time
27
Parleremo Ebook series presents
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12 categories
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Where Are You?
Wh ere Are You ?
This site was the seat of a great empire that flourished for approximately seven centuries. It was the
largest preindustrial city in the world, having an infrastructure that encompassed over 1,000 square
kilometres, surpassing even the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala. The mighty empire was ruled by a
self-declared "universal monarch" and "god-king", but it fell after a rebellion and invasion which caused
the city to be destroyed and the population to migrate south.
The city got its name from an ancient word for "city", although now it is mainly a series of ruins among
forests and farmland. The remnants of over a thousand temples now cover the region. Some are merely
piles of rubble while others still stand or have been restored after a millennium. The greatest is said to be
the world's largest single religious monument and together they are protected as a UNESCO World
Heritage Site, with two million tourists visiting it annually.
The temples were created at different times by various rulers. The largest temple was created by one of
the kings who, according to an ancient inscription, defeated a rival prince in battle by leaping onto his
rival's war elephant and slaying the man.
Another symbol of the might of the city were its massive reservoirs. One of these was built by a king who
was referred to as "a lion-man"; he tore his enemies with the claws and teeth of his grandeur. The
significance of the reservoirs is not clear, with some scholars arguing that they were used to irrigate the
fields while others claim they played a larger role as religious and mythological symbols of oceans
surrounding the mountain of the gods.
While this city was destroyed by an invasion, it is believed to been in decline for over a century, though
no one can agree on the cause of this. When it was abandoned, only the largest shrine remained occupied
as a Buddhist shrine, which helped preserve it to the modern day.
Last month's answer: Mahabalipuram, India
Can you name this city and country?
30
Parrot Time
| Issue #6 | June 201 3
Tahiti
Ordinary sausage making in Hungary. The

meat is coarsely ground and salted, then
stuffed into natural casings in 1-foot links,
usually using the small intestine of the pig.
The sausage is then hung overnight so the
flavors can meld and some of the grease to
drip out.
Words in Your Mouth - Sausages
Words in Your Mouth
Sa u sa g e
Looking at a very meaty topic this

month... sausages.
erwurst with grieben [roasted pigs fat]), and

Bierschinken (blutwurst with boiled ham). Small
sausages are called with the diminutive, Wrstost of us, with the likely exceptions of
chen. Having similar words are the other Western
Buddhists and vegetarians, have probably Germanic languages, such as Afrikaans (wors),
eaten a sausage at one time or another. A
Dutch (worst), Frisian (woarst), and Luxemboursausage is, in general terms, a seasoned minced
gish (Wurscht).
meat, usually pork or beef, traditionally stuffed in
The origins of wurst/worst are not clear, but
casings of prepared animal tissue, such as intest- three possibilities are:
ine, bladder or stomach.
it belongs to the word group wirren in the
In American English, sausages come in two
sense of something mixed
basic forms. One is the breakfast sausage, which
it belongs to the word group Werk in the sense
is what we normally mean when we say sausage. of something produced
This is the grey meat packed in a skin and served
it belongs to the word group werden in the
up for our morning meal, normally with something sense of something turned
like eggs in some form, or pancakes. The much
In German is the slang phrase Das ist mir
more common sausage of the US is the hot dog.
Wurst/Wurscht, which means I dont care, or
This is the brownish sausage that is normally
es geht um die Wurst, meaning something is
eaten in a roll, or bun, along with condiments
very important, crucial.
like relish, mustard, and catsup/ketchup.
The Northern Germanic languages have a difThe hot dog forms a staple of many Americans ferent word, however. The Danish
diets. Another name used for it is Frankfurter,
(plse/plser/poelse), Faeroese (pylsa), and Norreferring to the German city Frankfurt am Main, wegian (plse/plser) obviously dont share the
where this type of sausage originated from. Of
same origins as their West Germanic neighbors.
course, the Germans dont call it a frankfurter. To However, the etymology of this word is unknown.
them, it is a Wiener, which refers in turn to
The word sausage has its roots in Latin. The
Wienerwurst, or Vienna Sausage. Wiener is
late Latin salsica is a noun use of the neuter
also used in American English to refer to the saus- Plate of sausages,
age (i.e. the Oscar Meyer Wiener), but since it has
sauerkraut, and
come to take on a slang sexual connotation, its
potatoes
probably best not to refer to a sausage in the US in
this way.
The word Wurst is the German word for
sausage in general. From this, we get various
forms of sausages: Bockwurst (large frankfurter),
Bierwurst (beer sausage), Bratwurst (fried sausage), Rotwurst (blood sausage). Leberwurt (liver
sausage), Lyoner (king-size frankfurter, taken from
the city of Lyons), Mettwurst (made of smoked but
otherwise raw meat and spread onto bread for eating), Hartwurst (salami), Griebenwurst (kind of liv-
Parrot Time
33

plural salscius, meaning made by salting. This
goes back even further to the Latin salsus salted,
which is a derivative of sl salt. From these Latin
roots, the Italic languages get their words: Italian
(salsiccia), French (saucisse), Spanish (salchicha),
Portuguese (salsicha), etc.
Among the Slavic languages, even with their
different writing systems, the similarities are strikingly similar. The southern Slavic languages such
as Serbian ( / kobasica), and Croatian
(kobasica); the western Slavic languages such as
Czech (klobsa / salm), Polish (kiebasa), and
Slovak (klobsa); the eastern Slavics languages
such as Belorussian ( / ), Russian
(), and Ukrainian (). The origins for
these can most likely be traced back to Turkic kl
bast (grilled cutlet). kl means coals or ashes,
and bast means pressed. So, literally, its
pressed on the ashes.
The Finno-Ugric family has a rather odd mix.
Hungarian has kolbsz, a slavic loanword, while
Estonians vorst was borrowed from West Germanic Wurst.
Finnish, however, seems to have its own word,
makkara, whose etymology I dont know. Finnish
also uses the word nakki for small sausages,
which was adapted from the Swedish knackkorv.
The Greek (lukaniko) comes from
the Latin Lucanicum, referring to the city of Lucca,
Italy, in which it was made.
I was unable to track down an etymology for
the Celtic words or the Swedish korv, and I left
the other languages for readers to explore on their
own.
Bratwurst sausage with mustard in a roll
Sausages on sale outside of a Japanese shop
Slang
As was mentioned earlier, slang terms have developed around this popular meat. The term hot
dog may have developed from the reference
sausage dog for a dachshund in the 1930s. The
dog, with its long body and short legs, was said to
resemble a sausage. Hot Dog is also slang in
English for someone who is skilled or procient in
some eld, now more often used when someone is
considered to be showing off: While he is a skilled
skier, some of his critics think he is too much of a
hot-dog.
A slang term for a sausage in British slang is
banger, as in bangers and mash (sausages with
mashed potatoes). Another British term is not a
sausage, which is a way of saying nothing at all.
For example, answering a query like See anyone?
would be Not a sausage. I remember in the British radio program The Goon Show, the character
Bluebottle comically announced his entrance
with Waits for audience applause... not a sausage.
The word wiener in English can also refer to
a part of a males anatomy, which resembles a
sausage. The bun in which a hot dog is often
placed in is also a reference to human anatomy: a
persons backside. Shes got nice buns! would be
a males way of expressing his appreciation for a
womans bottom. Needless to say, any number of
references can then be created relating to placing
wieners in buns.
Other Notes
I have been asked a few times about whether hot
dog refers to just the sausage, or to the sausage
and bun with condiments. I would say that depends on your region, upbringing, and context. If
we use the meat in dish, then it is called a hot
dog. However, if someone states simply We are
having hot dogs for lunch, you can be pretty sure
34 Parrot Time

they mean the sausage with buns and xings. This
is similar to how we use spaghetti. Spaghetti is
the name of the pasta, but if someone says they
are eating spaghetti for a meal, they will, at least
in the US, most likely be referring to the pasta,
sauce, and grated cheese. When I was asked the
question about hot dogs while in Italy, I was also
told that in Russia they would eat the hot dog with
French fries in a bulky roll [both the fries and
sausage in the roll], and call it a UFO, but I have
been unable to conrm this.
I also found a direct adoption of the term into
Spanish: perro caliente.
Conclusion
Whether your sausage is something mixed,
made by salting, or pressed on the ashes, it has
become a staple of many cultures cuisines, and is
enjoyed all over the world. If you have further
comments or additions on this subject, please
send them to editor@parrottime.com. PT
Clockwise, from top left: Hot Dog stand in an amusement park;
Hot Dog pushcart in New York; Dachshund, also called a
weiner dog; Various sausages on sale in a delicatessen;
Frankfurt, Germany, home of the frankfurter; Bangers mash on
old China plate on wooden table
Parrot Time
35

GERMANIC
Western
Afrikaans:
wors
Dutch:
worst
English:
sausage
Frisian:
woarst
German:
Wurst
Luxembourgish: Zoossiss / Wurscht
Northern
Danish:
plser
Faeroese:
pylsa
Icelandic:
pylsa
Norwegian:
plser
Swedish:
korv
Calabrese:
Catalan:
French:
Italian:
Portuguese:
Romagnolo:
Romanian:
Sardinian:
Spanish:
Valencian:
Venetian:
Zeneize:
ITALIC
[dialect of Liguria]
Estonian:
Finnish:
Hungarian:
Greek:
Lithuanian:
Czech:
Polish:
Slovak:
Bulgarian:
Croatian:
Serbian:
Slovenian:
Belorussian:
Russian:
Ukrainian:
sazizza
botifarra/salsitxa
saucisson / saucisse
salsiccia / salame
salsicha / chourio
zuzzezza
crnatul / crnat
campidanesu sartizzu
salchichn / salchicha
salchicha
salsicia / luganega
ssissa / lugnega
FINNO-UGRIC
vorst
Breton:
Irish:
Scots-Gaelic:
Welsh:
silzigenn
ispn
isbean
selsig
MALAYO-POLYNESIAN
Bahasa Indonesian : sosis

Filipino:
langgonisa / batutay /
soriso
Malagasy:
saosisy
Tetum:
xourisu
ALTAIC
Turkish:
Chinese:
sucuk / sosis
SINO-TIBETAN
Korean:
Japanese:
Esperanto:
GREEK
BALTIC
dera
SLAVIC
West
klobsa
kiebasa
klobsa
South
/
kobasica
(kobasica)
klobasa
East
xingchng
- which literally means

fragrant ( ) intestines ( )
Arabic:
Hebrew:
makkara
kolbsz
36 Parrot Time
CELTIC
SEMITIC
sogoq
MISCELLANEOUS
sso-sse-i-je / sun-dae
(soosaaji)
CONSTRUCTED
kolbaso
Book Look
B ook Look
Native Tongues by Charles Berlitz
Language: English
Item Rating:
ISBN-1 0: 078581 8278
*****
ISBN-1 3: 978078581 8274
One of my primary interests in languages is how

much they reflect society and cultures. We've all
heard the anecdote of how the Eskimos have a
vast number of words for types of snow. That is
the type of material that this book covers. "Native
Tongues"
The author is Charles Berlitz, well known linguist
and grandson of Maximillan Berlitz, the founder of
the world renowned Berlitz School of Languages,
and to whom this book is dedicated. Mr. Berlitz
breaks down this volume of facts into 39 categories, including "How Languages Spread and Decline," "Same Sounds, Different Meanings," "Our
Mysterious Alphabet," "Languages Lost and
Found Again," and even some unexpected ones,
like "Languages in Space" and "There Were Others
Before Columbus."
Many of the items are

surprising, and some are
downright ironic. For example, this anecdote
about the Irish language
(pg. 82):
During a "speak Irish"
campaign, signboards throughout the Irish Republic proclaimed "Cut the last tie with England,
the language! Use Irish!" (But the signs were written in English.)
The book is not a scholarly write-up on language
development or linguistic issues. It's not meant to
be. It is a very easy to read volume of language lore
and facts that are fascinating. As I read this, my
mind started racing, because one could easy take
any of these categories and explore just that in
depth. My compulsive nature had to be kept in
check, because I already wanted to start addressing so much of the material.
The moment I opened this book at random, and

started reading, I couldn't stop. The range and
quality of the facts are astounding. I was, for example, surprised to learn that during the American Revolutionary War, the national language of the
new United States of America was almost German, If you can get your hands on a copy, I encourage
save for one vote.
you to do so. You will not be disappointed. PT
The Atlas of Languages
editors Stephen Matthews, Maria Polinsky, Bernard Comrie

Language: English
Item Rating:
ISBN-1 0: 081 6036454 ISBN-1 3: 978081 6036455
****
I will start off by saying I like this book. It's large,

colourful, entertaining, and fun to read. You can
flip through the book and see charts on language
families, maps of language locations, sidebars of
language information, and tons of fantastic
coloured pictures from places all over the world.
The visual stimulation of the book is superb, and
definitely worth seeing.
38 Parrot Time
However, on a serious
level, the book fails in a
few ways. First, the title
itself is misleading.
Anyone that has opened
an atlas knows it to be
filled with maps, charts,
and facts. This book has
many maps, but they are all simplistic and often
Book Look
inaccurate. And the statistical information, what
little there is, is equally suspect. The maps and
charts are also intermingled among text and
images, so it is much harder to find any
information the book might reveal. That would be
fine - if they didn't call it an "Atlas." This is more of
a simple overview of languages rather than a
serious reference book.
My major complaint about the book is the amount
of extra material that is included, but has no real
bearing upon languages. At the same time, it also
contains a lot of extra material that is relevant to
languages, but more as interesting side notes, so I
guess it depends on how relevant the material is.
I feel the book is aimed at people that are
interested in languages, but not ready to get into
depth with them. Flipping randomly, I find a
passage referring to Bantu languages, and it
focuses on Ndebele. There are a few paragraphs on
Nbdebel, a few tidbits, then the short section ends
with "[] In other Bantu languages the
corresponding forms are often different." And
that's it: no looking at others, no further
discussion. The reader is just left wondering what
those "different forms" are. This is the typical
handling of material in the book.

Of course, the claim to be an "Atlas" on world
languages would be a hefty one, considering the
number of world languages still alive is over 6000,
but if a book claims to be an Atlas of them, it
should deal more with the languages and less with
trivia and pictures that, while entertaining, are of
little real use to a serious language student.
My copy of the book is paperback, but there is also
a hardcover version. This would more likely be
called a coffee table book: the kind that is large,
full of nice pictures, and looks attractive on a table
while making the owner appear very
knowledgeable, which is the reason I like the book.
You can sit down and leaf through it and look at
the nice pictures. However, if you want a serious
book on languages of the world, this isn't the book
for you. I would give it a 4/5. PT
Parrot Time
| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4 3 9
GlobTech - Using Locale
GlobTech
Using Locale
ne of the annoying issues when dealing in a global environment like the internet is trying to
present people in multiple countries with data in their regional format. There are different ways of
displaying time (AM/PM vs 24 hour), dates (month / day / year or day / month / year), numbers
(what the roles of periods and commas are) and language for days and months.
The last of these can become the most difcult on a multilingual website. If you are trying to display a
calendar or a date that contains the names of the days and months rather than just numbers, you are
faced with the need to create those terms in many languages.
For example, if the date is Tuesday, May 20th, how would you display that for someone who speaks
Italian (given that you know to give the page to them in Italian). You could store all the days of the week
for Italian (gennaio, febbraio, marzo, aprile, maggio, giugno, luglio, agosto, settembre, ottobre, novembre,
dicembre) and the months (luned, marted, mercoled, gioved, venerd, sabato, domenica) so they could
be displayed properly. You would then have to do this for every other language you want the site to be
in.
This can become more frustrating if you are printing a small calendar and need the shorter versions of
these words, or just want to use the condensed forms normally. For example, in English, we would use
Tue, Mar 30th. It isnt always just using the rst few letters, so we cant simply truncate our words.
There is a solution when using PHP to deliver this information. Rather than storing all these words and
versions in arrays, then gure out how to put them in properly when we call the strftime() function
(which returns the date and time in a number of formats). We can use the PHP setlocale function.
Essentially, you set the locale to affect a specic kind of information that PHP might retrieve for you, like
the date or time, and the language you want it in. The language is passed using a particular encoding
scheme, usually a two character code for a language, an underscore, and a two character code for the
country it is spoken in.
The country part is necessary because there might be different formats used for the same language. For
example, English could be encoded using en_US, en_GB, or en_CA, with those being for the United
States, Great Britain, and Canada, respectively. Similarly, German could use de_DE, de_CH, de_AT, or
de_LU (Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg). The extension .utf8 should be used to
accommodate for any non-latin based characters.
You can determine what will be affected by the language selection by using these constants:
LC_ALL for all of the below
LC_COLLATE for string comparison
LC_CTYPE for character classication and conversion, like strtoupper()
LC_MONETARY for localeconv()
LC_NUMERIC for decimal separator (also localeconv())
LC_TIME for date and time formatting with strftime()
40 Parrot Time

So, if for example you wish to set the date to output in Swiss German, you would use
setlocale(LC_TIME, de_CH.utf8)
Then
print strftime(%A, %B %e, %Y,time());
Gives us
Dienstag, Mai 20, 2014
Changing the codes, with it_IT.utf8 we get marted, maggio 20, 2014
and with ja_JP.utf8, we get
You can nd a list of many of these language codes here:
http://red-route.org/code/php-international-language-and-locale-codes-demonstration
And there you are! A quick way to properly display dates for many languages. You can experiment
with the other settings, like string conversions and currency on your own. Have fun!
Parrot Time
41
Credits
Letter From the Editor
Writer: Erik Zidowecki
Images:
Petey: Waterfall

Images:
Ziko: Esperanto Congress Bookstore, 2008

CBS Studios Inc.: Klingons
New Line Cinema: Elves (Lord of the Rings)
Petey: Esperanto Congress 1 911 ; Voynich Manuscript; Elvish writing; Klingon alphabet;
Sources:
The STAR TREK trademark, images and logos are owned by CBS Studios Inc.
The LORD OF THE RINGS images owned by New Line Cinema
Language Conflicts: Flemish vs. Walloon

Images:
Willy / Pastranec / gpvos: Map of Belgian municipalities with languages

tillwe: Bilingual French-Dutch traffic sign in Brussels
Didier Misson: Demonstration in Brussels
PD: Buildings
Sources:
"Fleming and Walloon" Encyclopdia Britannica <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/209945/Fleming-and-Walloon>

"Walloon language" Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walloon_language>
"Flemish people" Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_people>
"Flemish" Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_language>
"The language divide at the heart of a split that is tearing Belgium apart" Ian Traynor, The Guardian
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/201 0/may/09/belgium-flanders-wallonia-french-dutch>
"A nation divided - Belgium's identity crisis" Bruno Waterfield, The Telegraph
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1 563466/A-nation-divided-Belgiums-identity-crisis.html>
"Partition of Belgium" Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Belgium>
"No Love Lost: Is Belgium About to Break in Two?" Leo Cendrowicz, Time
<http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,200051 7,00.html>

Writer: Lucille Martin
Images:
Steindy: Rechnitz Station (splash page)

I, Daniel Csrfly (from Budapest, Hungary): Budapest Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Petey: Gustavus Batthyny; Images of Rohonc Codex
Sources:
"Rohonc Codex" Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohonc_Codex>

"The Rohonc Codex" Passing Strangeness <http://passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/the-rohonc-codex/>
At The Cinema - Il Comandante e la Cicogna - Garibaldi's Lovers

Sources:
"Il Comandante e la Cicogna" Internet Movie Database <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1 904929/>

All images are copyright Lumire & Company, Ventura Film, RSI-Radiotelevisione Svizzera
42 Parrot Time
Credits
Where Are You?
Writer: Sonja Krger
Images:
Petey: Mystery image
Words in Your Mouth - Sausage

Images:
wallyir: Hot Dog stand in an amusement park

dantada: Hot Dog pushcart in New York
Seemann: Various sausages on sale in a delicatessen; meat bin
Petey: Ordinary sausage making in Hungary. (splash page); sausages hanging in shop (title); Plate of sausages, sauerkraut, and
potatoes; Bratwurst sausage with mustard in a roll; Sausages on sale outside of a Japanese shop; Bangers mash on old China
plate on wooden table; Dachshund, also called a weiner dog
Book Look

Images:
Petey: world map
All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for
Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.
Parrot Time
43
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The Thinking of Speaking

C on s tru cted Lan g u ag es

Wh at are th ey are wh y are th ey

Issue #9 May / June 201 4

Laln onuaadgFees iChoinhftl fiocrts

An oth er m ys teri ou s d ocu m en t

Parrot Time is your connection to languages, linguistics

Editor: Erik Zidowecki

Published by Scriveremo Publishing, a division of Parleremo.

Artificially made languages, called "constructed languages", or

1 2 Language Conflicts: Flemish vs. Walloon

When two languages fight for dominance in the same country,

1 8 Rohonc Codex - Hungarian Enigma

Cover: Toledo sits majestically

above the the Tagus River and

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

Letter From The Editor

When we study a language, we are learning thousands of words. They

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

Esperanto books at the World Esperanto Congress, Rotterdam 2008

History of Auxiliary Languages

This particular kind of conlang is known as an

Constructed Languages - Making It All Up

Esperanto was created by L. L.

7th Esperanto congress, Antwerp, Belgium, August 1911

son is resistant to learning a

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

and love to use it with others.

A more recent creation is Lojban,

There are a few historical arti-

Constructed Languages - Making It All Up

also had a number of conlangs

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

Constructed Languages - Making It All Up

torical aspects. To them, they

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

Constructed Languages - Making It All Up

Klingon alphabet of the Klingon race of

might also love conlangs, I have

Many people learn languages as part of understanding another culture

Of course, logically, there is

tion is due to what I said before

others, the natural language

Whether you like natural languages, constructed languages,

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

Buildings on the streets of

Special Feature - Language Conflicts: Flemish vs. Walloon

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

Special Feature - Language Conflicts: Flemish vs. Walloon

language area, Wallonia to the

A bilingual French-Dutch traffic sign in Brussels

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

plicated between the Flemish

Special Feature - Language Conflicts: Flemish vs. Walloon

dominant one in controlling the

Demonstration in Brussels, Sunday,

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4

Rohonc Codex - Hungarian Enigma

| Issue #9 | May / June 201 4