“How Great Are His Signs” featuring the Portsmouth Gospel Choir from the album “How Great Are His Signs” recorded and produced by Joffy Girling

Suffering this week with a touch of “man flu” so just a short blog – however the video is 1 hour 43 mins and 24 secs long!

So many, many thanks to Katherine Olivia Hobbs for translating Risen! The Musical into Mandarin and to Alex-Emanuel Şerban for creating the subtitles.

In addition to Mandarin Risen! The Musical also has subtitles in Romanian and Spanish. This made me wonder which language is the most used in the world.  A bit of googling came up with this:

Determining what are the most spoken languages in the world is a more difficult task than you might imagine. We can say with some confidence that Mandarin, English, Spanish and Arabic will make an appearance (and roughly in what order) but there are some surprises, too! Would you have guessed that Bengali is in the Top 10 most spoken languages?

The number of native speakers of Mandarin is almost 1.2 billion native speakers. If we were only to look at native speakers, Spanish has its nose in front of English with about 400 million speakers. There are 360 million-odd native English speakers and half a billion people who speak it as a second language.

Of course there is also the Chinese language of Cantonese – what is the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese? Again a bit of googling resulted in:

Mandarin is the official state language of China and is the lingua franca of the country. In much of the country, it is the primary spoken language, including Beijing and Shanghai, although many provinces still retain their own local dialect. Mandarin is also the main dialect in Taiwan and Singapore.

Cantonese is spoken by the people of Hong Kong, Macau and the wider Guangdong province, including Guangzhou (previously Canton in English). Most foreign Chinese communities, such as those in London and San Francisco, also speak Cantonese because historically Chinese immigrants hailed from Guangdong.

Quote of the week

What matters in not the years in your life but the life in your years