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The Linguists on PBSTomorrow night (February 26th, 10pm EST), PBS will air a documentary called The Linguists, which follows ethnographers David Harrison and Greg Anderson as they travel the world attempting to preserve dying languages by documenting them. Seed Magazine talks about the documentary, and posts recordings of a few of the endangered languages being documented by the team; NPR also has a story and a clip from the film. (SUZANNE) Tags: endangered languages
Ireland’s most notorious driver: a little plastic cardA startling (and language-related!) discovery in Ireland, from BBC News: believe it or not, a serial traffic offender, wanted by the Irish police, turned out to simply be a language misunderstanding. And yes, this story is pretty hilarious.... More Tags: Ireland, Polish
WikipediaWikipedia offers you a great way to push the boundaries of your comprehension-in-context skills. There are millions of articles in English; hundreds of thousands in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, and Dutch; and anywhere from a few hundred to over a hundred thousand articles in several other languages. ... More Tags: language learning, newsletter, translation, vocabulary, Wikipedia
Did you declare ALL of your personal items?I had just returned to Bahrain from a holiday in the UK. I was taking a taxi through the causeway connecting Bahrain and Saudi Arabia when, at the Bahraini end of the causeway, I was stopped by a customs official. After examining my passport, he asked me to step out of the taxi. ... More Tags: customs, newsletter, pronunciation, travel story
Those three magic wordsYes, Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but we all still like to hear how much others care, don’t we? So let’s go with a fun classic for this month’s article: how to say I love you in eleven different (and exciting!) languages:... More Tags: foreign language, I love you, newsletter, Valentine's Day
Presidential Language: How A Few Words Can Open DoorsThe new President of the United States has had much said about him in the news over the past few months: about his fiscal plans, about his foreign policy, even about his bowling skills. But I was most fascinated to pick up on a few discussions of the language of Barack Obama. Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, and Language Log decided to look into whether or not the President speaks any Indonesian as a result of his time spent living there. In the course of their investigation, they unearthed this video, which shows the President exchanging pleasantries in Indonesian (“How are you?” “Fine, thanks.”). This could be proof of “visitor’s Indonesian,” or the retention of key phrases he would have used on a day-to-day basis, and while it’s not necessarily a prerequisite for a leader of a country to speak another language, it’s interesting nonetheless to witness how speaking a few words in another language can open up the comfort levels of communication slightly wider. I imagine it’s the role of any world leader to learn a few polite courtesy expressions before speaking to the leader of another country, if only to show some form of respect. For Obama, I think the issue is not how well he speaks Indonesian, but rather that he is willing to. (Similarly, the previous President, Mr. Bush, endeared himself to many in the Latino-American community with his willingness to conduct business in Spanish.) I think it’s fair to say if you learn how to be polite in a language, you will find far more people willing to stop and help you. A simple “hello,” “how are you,” “yes,” “no,” “thank you,” and “please” will win many people over, or at least show them that you took the time to learn a thing or two about them before visiting their country. Even if they laugh at your accent, it’s an icebreaker. It even worked once with my dentist; after I offered up a few pleasantries in Tagalog, she seemed to be much gentler with the water pick. (SUZANNE)
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