I didn’t get a response to my previous request, so I’ll be clearer. I’ll transfer 100 Euros to a native Romanian speaker who records the following as Ogg Vorbis or MP3, in a clear slow voice, and provides the text for it, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. Please mention it in my blog comments so that you can know if you are competing with other people. This offer will be valid until April 30th 2006. It should have the following:

• Some simple greetings for different times of the day.
• Declination of the common verbs in the present tense: To be, to have, to do, to make, to need, to want, to give, to take, to see, to stay, to go, to pay, to work. For instance, “eu sunt”, “tu eÅŸti”, “el este”, “ea este”, “noi suntem”, “voi sunteÅ£i”, “ei sunt”, “ele sunt”. I know that eu, tu, etc are often ommitted, but this would help the learner at first.
• For “a trebui” and “a vrea”, you might also decline stuff such as “el vrea să aibă”, to show the use of “să”, and to show the special “fiu”/”fii”,”fie”,”fim”,”fiti”,fie” form of To Be.
• Simple directions: On the left, on the right, straight ahead, here, there, over there, behind, in front.
• The numbers from 1 to 30, plus 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100.
• I guess it would be nice to have some English announcing the next verb or phrase, but I can add that in later.

This is really basic stuff, and not a recommended way to learn a language, but it would help people to get used to the unusual sounds and spellings, and nothing better exists yet. If it works then I’ll ask for more, such as the past and future tenses and useful phrases. Wikitravel has a list of Romanian phrases that would be good. Unfortunately its pronunciation audio files are missing.

According to this week’s Economist the average monthly wage in Romania is about 230 dollars, so this should be a worthwhile afternoon’s work for someone. Plus your name would be associated with something unique and valuable on the web.

I’m sure there’s some good software for Ogg Vorbis audio editing on Linux. Maybe someone can suggest something in the comments.

Update: Zsolt Czimbalmos from Miercurea Ciuc did exactly what I asked and the result is already online. The audio could be clearer, but it’s slow enough for me to hear the sounds well.

I’ll be visiting Romania this summer for maybe three weeks. First stop will be the Temesoara/Temeschburg area in the Banat. My girlfriend and her ethnic-German family lived there (“Gross Sankt Peter” and Bogarosch villages) until they emigrated/escaped mostly en masse from Ceacescu’s paradise in the 80s. Lots of good stories there. Hopefully we’ll also get to visit Bucharest and the mountains. She speaks Romanian quite well already, but I’d like to learn a little.

So I wish there was some creative-commons-licensed Romanian language audio somewhere. I’d pay a few Euros if a native speaker could record some simple stuff such as everyday phrases and declination of the basic verbs (To be, to have, to do, to make, to want, to give, to take, to see, to pay) in slow clear speech, with a text transcription of the recording.

Update: I already have the Teach Yourself Romanian CDs, but I need something more like Pimsleurs. Just the simple stuff above would be useful if it was slow and clear and on a loop on my audio player.

Glom tries to always show dates with 4-digit years, in your locale’s appropriate format. Nobody needs the option for it to only show 2 digits years. It just works.

I had been using C++’s insanely complex std::time_put and std::time_get thingies to do this, but for some reason the en_GB locale wants to use 2-digit years for the strftime() ‘x’ format, and there’s no way to generically specify a sane date format for the current locale. That even makes it impossible to parse any dates after 1999, because time_get parses _only_ that ‘x’ format.

That’s broken, and of no conceivable benefit to anyone, six years after Y2K. I worked around it by allowing translators to change the display format if necessary, and always using the Glib::Date fallback for parsing when they’ve done that.

I never read Linux Journal so I’d never heard of Don Marti until Jeff pointed out that his old nagazine has abandoned its future by giving the crayons to Nicholas Petreley (repellently irritating like a very stupid, spoilt, hyperactive child). But I’m glad to have discovered this Don Marti guy. What a sensible, constructive guy, and an insightful blog too. I’m too late to read the magazine, but at least I have that.