Estonian minister announces language beauty contest

[Stan & Sandy Anonby]

Sounds fun, but not too scientific!

Stan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Harold Schiffman" <hfsclpp at gmail.com>
To: "lp" <lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 11:01 AM
Subject: Estonian minister announces language beauty contest


> Estonian minister announces language beauty contest
> 1 day ago
>
> TALLINN (AFP) — Estonia is planning a beauty contest with a difference
> to mark its 90th birthday, according to a report Monday: the winner
> will be the world's prettiest language. Education Minister Tonis Lukas
> wants his counterparts from around the world to get school pupils to
> enter recordings of sentences of up to seven words for the contest,
> the Baltic News Service (BNS) agency reported.
> "There's a story that a world championship of beautiful languages was
> once held in which Estonian took second place after Italian with the
> sentence 'soida tasa ule silla', or 'go slowly over the bridge,'"
> Lukas said Monday.
>
> "As part of the events for the anniversary of the republic, we're
> pleased to turn to other nations with a friendly call to check how our
> language sounds to others now," he added. Estonian is a member of the
> Finno-Ugric group of languages and unrelated to most other European
> tongues. It is spoken by only about 1.1 million people worldwide.
> Around 950,000 of them live in Estonia itself and many of the rest in
> neighbouring Finland and Russia, as well as Sweden, Germany, North
> America and Australia.
>
> Preserving their language was a crucial part of Estonian opposition to
> foreign rule from the 19th century onwards, and remains an important
> plank of government policy. Estonia is due to celebrate the 90th
> anniversary of its first period of independence from Russia on
> February 24 next year. The country was taken over again by the Soviet
> Union during World War II, and became independent once more as the
> Moscow-ruled bloc crumbled in 1991.
>
> Estonian is now an official language of the 27-nation European Union,
> which the country joined in 2004.
>
> http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i2MtyJZSeEWNwHls0ZevOINjaWHQ
>
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