The language guideThis language guide presents an overview of the languages you can study at Leiden University. Of course, some languages can be studied in greater detail than others. A language like Russian, for instance, is taught in a very thorough 3-year programme with language acquisition courses in each year. When you finish the programme you will have an excellent command of Russian. Alongside these "main" languages, the various departments harbour a host of other languages you can get acquainted with. When you decide to study one of these, you will typically follow a course of one or two semesters, after which you will, depending on the goal of the course, speak or read the language quite reasonably. Fairly often, lecturers offer extensions of such courses. On the language's information page you can easily see in which of the two categories the language falls by looking at the duration and intensity of the courses. When you click on "language list", you will find the languages, alphabetically ordered by their English name. For completeness sake, we also present the name of the language in the language itself (whenever that is possible). Through this list you can access the data pages for the various languages. A description of what you can see on these pages can be found here. There is a second way in which you can reach these data pages: through the world map. On this map, the languages you can study in Leiden are shown with red dots. When you move the mouse pointer over such a dot, the name of the corresponding language will be shown in a yellow info block. Moreover, the name will also appear at the bottom left of the map window, along with the location of the main area in which the language is spoken. For languages that are spoken in a large area the location mentioned is often the capital of a country, or the geographical centre of the area in which the language is spoken. No language communities other than that in the country from which the language originates are indicated. You can find a dot for Spanish only in Madrid, not in Lima, Guatemala City, etc. Click on one of the red dots to go to the data page of the corresponding language. Finally, you can go to this page from anywhere in the guide by selecting "directions" in the menu. Of course, you can also go back to the homepage by clicking "home". Clicking on the top left logo will lead you to the university homepage, while clicking on "Humanities" will take you to the faculty homepage. A tour of the data on the information pagesThe data on the language page is structured identically for all the languages in the guide. It is impossible to present all possible data for all languages. For instance, there are no speakers of Akkadian left, so a button on which you can click to listen to a speech sample will be quite useless. Below, you will find an overview of the data you may find on the ideal language page (one for which all data are available):
Rendering of "exotic" scripts.One of the biggest difficulties in creating a website on languages is making sure texts from those languages that do not use our regular alphabet are represented correctly. Fortunately, some visionary people have initiated the development of an alternative for Ascii quite a while ago. This alternative, called Unicode, will encompass a lot more symbols than Ascii does. (ASCII is the encoding that makes sure an e-mail typed on a Mac transfers correctly to a PC or UNIX machine, without the letters being garbled, so a t is always a t because it is Ascii encoded, and all computers use Ascii for the encoding. Unfortunately Ascii encodes only 254 symbols, the letters of your typewriter, plus some special symbols.) Unicode (see www.unicode.org) reserves much more space for characters. It encodes no less than 65.536 symbols, and quite a few of the exotic scripts from languages taught at this university have already been incorporated. Since there is no doubt that Unicode will replace Ascii in the near future, we have decided to use it on this website. There are 2 consequences of this decision. First of all you need a unicode font to actually see some of the symbols on the language data pages. The website uses Arial Unicode MS, a widely distributed font that many people already have. It was included in Windows 2000 and Office 2000, and Windows XP installs it when you allow foreign language support. In Windows 95 and 98, the font will work, but you'll need to download it and copy it to your font folder (it is easy to find; use Google and you're bound to stumble across it). Secondly, Macintosh did not (fully) support Unicode until OSX appeared, and now there are not enough Mac fonts yet to accommodate all the characters we need. Therefore, we created an alternative site that uses pictures instead of fonts to which Mac users are automatically redirected. It is this alternative we have used for the English version as well. If you want to see the Unicode version in action. Click here (Dutch only!). Websites with more information |
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