Estonian minister announces language beauty contest

[Harold Schiffman]

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

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************