A Berlin radio station will broadcast its morning show entirely in Latin on September 26 to mark the European day of languages, the station said yesterday. Trailers, news and weather will be translated into Latin for the Kiss FM show, listened to by around 4.2 million people daily, to raise awareness of the tragedy of dead languages.
“We are particularly looking forward to a member of staff who has written a Latin rap song,” station spokesman Michael Weiland said.
(Source: Reuters)
on Sep 20th, 2008 at 10:17
I hope that the “European Day of Languages” will encourage many people to learn a new language. Especially in the United Kingdom where the interest in learning languages,including Latin, seems to be declining.
You may not know that four schools in Britain have introduced Esperanto, the neutral international language, in order to test its propaedeutic values?
The pilot project is being monitored by the University of Manchester, and I believe the project deserves academic appraisal.
An interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
on Sep 21st, 2008 at 05:43
some of us might have to spend a bit more time learning English before moving on to other languages. “Propaedeutic” seems to mean “preparatory study”…so I guess they’re teaching Esperanto to see whether it helps with learning other languages…
on Sep 22nd, 2008 at 10:11
Does this station have a web site with streamed audio so that those of us not in Berlin can listen?
on Sep 22nd, 2008 at 13:06
Surely: http://www.kissfm.de
I’m fascinated by all this attention abroad (not just Reuters, I also see reports on French, Czech, Polish, Romanian and Russian websites). It’s fascinating because here in Germany nobody cares. Not a single report to trace. How different perceptions can be.
Btw, all the UK readers here might find it interesting that this station broadcasts on the former BFBS frequency in Berlin. Btw2, the 4.2 million figure refers to people living in the area served by the 98.8 MHz outlet. The current number of daily listeners is 176,000, which means a market share of 3.5 percent, cf.
http://www.rbb-online.de/_/unternehmen/mediendaten/radio_jsp/key=7145299.html
on Sep 23rd, 2008 at 04:38
Kai, I’m sorry that you have to depend on foreign media to find out what’s going on in you own country
Do you think Latin programming will help to increase that market share?
on Sep 23rd, 2008 at 14:56
Thanks, Kai - when I did a search for \
on Sep 23rd, 2008 at 14:57
Thanks, Kai - when I did a search for Kiss FM it came up with lots of stations of that name, and not being able to speak German (typical Englishman!) I didn’t know which was the right one!