The top ten search queries for ለካቲት (February) 2010

I’m a week late with this post, but nonetheless here it is…

1 woman
2 what
3 future
4 glad
5 realize
6 yes
7 brother
8 compassion
9 school
10 union

“How to play the Kirar” tutorial videos

I stumbled onto these two vids while scanning the net.

Kirar Tutorial Part One
Kirar Tutorial Part Two

Cool, eh? I’m gonna whip out my old krar and try to learn some techniques.

h/t: luwam_t

***Additional Edit***
Kirar Tutorial Part Three

The top ten search queries for ጥሪ (January) 2010

1 love
2 hello
3 name
4 read
5 grandmother
6 grandfather
7 write
8 good
9 how
10 disable

Woke up this morning…

…and it snowed last night. A lot. Damn.

Memhr.org stats for 2009

Hey everyone; here are a few statistics and facts for the entire Memhr.org website collected in the year of 2009:

Total visits: 21,954
Absolute unique visitors: 13,414
Average page views per visit: 6.12
Average time on the site: 0:05:12
Busiest month: October – with 1698 visits
Quietest month: March – with only 898 visits

Top Ten Countries of the visitors:
1. United States 6,590
2. Canada 2,628
3. United Kingdom 2,009
4. Germany 1,859
5. Sweden 1,498
6. Switzerland 1,131
7. Norway 801
8. Ethiopia 652
9. Netherlands 590
10. Israel 590
*Notable mention:
17. Eritrea 126

Top ten Google search queries that led to this site:

1. tigrigna dictionary

793
2. tigrinya dictionary

388
3. tigrinya alphabet

330
4. www.eritrea.wikipedia.com in tigrina

253
5. tigrigna

191
6. dehai wongel

161
7. memhr.org

159
8. memhr

157
9. learn tigrigna

144
10. english tigrigna dictionary

121

That’s it for 2009; new year, new stats.

Fixing…

Happy New Year everyone.

I spent the good part of last December fixing up parts of this website that have stopped working. The sound in the fidel section is now working properly, as well as the search function in the dictionary section. It appears that the sound wasn’t working for firefox users and the search function wasn’t working for IE users. Both are now good, and everything seems to be running smoothly.

2010; here I come.

The top ten search queries for ታሕሳስ (December)

1 woman
2 apple
3 fight
4 football
5 roll
6 sap
7 you
8 honourable
9 browse
10 Tuesday

A linguist on communication

Here’s a link to a New York Times piece on French linguist Claude Hagège (author of On the Death and Life of Languages) and a few questions about his thoughts on the future of communication. It’s an interesting read.

Simona’s nature adventures in Eritrea

I found a nice little cache of animated children’s stories and workbooks that have been translated to Tigrinya. I urge everyone to give them a quick look, each story also has an option to switch to the English translation.

Simona’s Nature Adventures in Eritrea, East Africa
Lucy Lava
Light Magic
What is a tree?

Workbooks:
Human body – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Plants – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

And, as a bonus, a small song about the senses.

The “ምግቢ ቢራሚድ”?

Maybe the writer meant “ምግቢ ፒራሚድ,” but now I can’t get the image of some sort of food/beer/pyramid thing out of my head……ah well.

To get right to the point, I made this post to give you another English/Tigrinya pamphlet link. This one is about the food pyramid and it has the Tigrinya translation directly below the English paragraphs. This way you can closely follow the food pyramid in both languages and compare them.

H/T: I found this link from a random thread in redsea1.com’s message board (here).

Two Years!

It’s been two wonderful years of Tigrigna lexicography bliss, as this December marks the second anniversary of memhr.org

In the beginning this website started as just a weird hobby of mine and today it continues as such; I can’t stress this enough, telling myself that this is “just a hobby” is the one rule in my life that keeps me 1) sane 2) from dropping hours-upon-hours of work on it. Like Adam Savage from TV’s “Mythbusters” demonstrates: personal obsessions can yield profuse amounts of productivity, but reasonably managing them is a required art form.

Now, while I don’t take this “labour of love” anymore seriously then of a simple side-project, I try to improve things whenever I have the time; and I did make a few changes since last December. The biggest would be the addition of a separate dictionary section to the website. However, I still consider it a work in progress, possibly, never destined to be “completely finished” as there is always more work needed to be done on improving it. As Adam Savage says in the top link, completing an obsession doesn’t sound very satisfying.

Cheers.

The top ten search queries for ሕዳር (November)

1 cat
2 be
3 God
4 see
5 time
6 enjoy
7 ring
8 ሰላማዊ
9 hello
10 man

Right place, right time… (Olympic torch change)

I was walking up Robie St. today when I saw a large crowd gathering and a man dressed up in all white with a large stick in his hand. As it turned out he was there to receive the flame for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

So, I stopped and took a small video (sorry about the shakiness. I’m not a good photographer).

Trying to make a dollar out of 15¢…

Here is a funny clip of two things:
1) a man showing you how to make $3.75 out of $1
2) a professor giving his students a quick (and costly) lesson on the game theory of political lobbying.

If you liked learning about “the prisoner’s dilemma” and other zero-sum thought experiments in school, you’ll love this example.

and finally here is link to the professor’s own words and explanation of this lesson.

H/T: Marginal Revolution

First snowfall

I got a big surprise this morning…

Goodbye nice weather, I’ll see you again in six months…