Watch Your Language Blog

Yupik Eskimos and their Whistled Language

We just stumbled across a story on NPR from a while back about a community in Alaska where the inhabitants whistle to communicate across long distances. More about whistled languages here.

Tags: alaska, whistled languages, yupik eskimos
July 1, 2008

 

Gell-Mann on the Ancestry of Language

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann expresses his opinion on theories of modern language ancestry at TED.com.

Tags: linguistics
June 25, 2008

 

I say “kukuriku,” you say “cock-a-doodle-doo”

And who’s right? Well, no rooster would understand either of us, so let’s call the whole thing off. The words we use to refer to animal sounds are only vaguely imitative, and therefore, can differ quite a bit from language to language. If you’d like to explore these interesting and, sometimes, amusing differences, check out the links below provided here via Visual Thesaurus. Note the first link in particular, where the words for animal sounds in several different languages are recorded by the best voice talent available for the job—little children.

[ZVIEZDANA]

Tags: animal sounds, onomatopoeia
June 12, 2008

 

How do you tawk?

On our team here at Living Language, even though not everyone is a native speaker of English, we tend to spend a lot of our time discussing (okay, making fun of) regional differences in the speech of those of us who are Americans. I’m the favorite target, frankly, having been raised in that state right across the Hudson River from our offices in Manhattan. But, I like to argue that a variety of English that makes a sharp distinction between talk and tock, hawk and hock, and Dawn and Don is richer and more interesting, right? I can only feel sorry for my phonologically impoverished colleagues.... More

Tags: American English, dialects, regional accents, varieties
June 6, 2008

 

Simpsons fun

Language play accounts for a good portion of laughs you get from “The Simpsons.” In case you ever wanted a taxonomy of Simpsons language jokes, linguist Heidi Harley has been putting it together in her blog for four years, going back to 2005.

Tags: humor, linguistics, Simpsons
June 6, 2008

 

Even Dummies Can Learn With Living Language!

Well, maybe not, actually. At Living Language we’re always on the lookout for success stories about people who use our programs to learn new languages. So we were delighted to find this video, in which a dummy — or I suppose the term they prefer is puppet — learns Japanese with one of our courses. He starts out pretty well, but, unfortunately, we saw that we can’t quite put this one in the win column. Still, we’d like to congratulate Kearsley Malarkey for trying, and thank him for choosing Living Language. But, ahem, please choose one of our competitors for your next language. (CHRIS)

Tags: Complete Basic Course, Japanese, puppet
June 4, 2008

 

Guernésiais stamps

To honor the history of Guernsey’s native language, Guernésiais, stamps have been released featuring commonly used phrases such as “L’affaire va-t-alle?” and “À la perchôine.” Click here to read more about the language.(ELHAM)

Tags: language, stamps
May 16, 2008

 

Ken Lee Tulibu Dibu Douchoo

We’ve all struggled with getting the song lyrics right before, and things are just so much harder when you’re trying to figure them out in a language that you don’t speak well. Remember the endless rewinding? And can you ever hit the right spot?! Teenage life became so much more bearable when cassettes were replaced by CDs, but any reason for drama positively disappeared with the internet and iPods. ... More

Tags: mariah carey, song lyrics
May 9, 2008

 

The difficulties of typesetting Arabic

Something we’re all too familiar with: The difficulties of typesetting Arabic. (via languagehat) The technical problem is this: Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words, like a script typeface in English. And though the Arabic alphabet has only 28 letters, most letters have four forms, depending on whether they occur at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or stand alone. Furthermore, each combination of letters is unique, creating a typographic challenge greater than Chinese. Because all letters connect dynamically with the preceding one, and most also with the following one, the number of unique combinations is almost astronomical. (SUZANNE)

Tags: Arabic
May 2, 2008

 

America’s Next Top Language Learner

Today at Living Language, we spiral into the world of television gossip to report that in last week’s episode of America’s Next Top Model, the girls were “forced” to speak Italian. What was most interesting to me in watching the episode was to see how the models interpreted the “phonetics” that were given to them on cue cards. Those who read the phonetics straight from the page seemed to be speaking gibberish, whereas the models who used mimicry — interpreting the script with an over the top Italian accent to match the film crew eagerly feeding them lines — tended to get it more or less right. I never thought I’d use a televised modeling competition as a jumping off point for a language learning tip, but if that isn’t proof of the benefits of “listen and repeat” right there, then, well, then I must be a top model. (SUZANNE)

Tags: Italian
April 25, 2008

 

Learning English, the CRAZY way

The New Yorker has a great article on Li Yang and his method of learning English through shouting. There’s still some debate about whether his methods are linguistically sound, but without a doubt, he is quite an interesting language teacher.

China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li has been brought in by the Beijing Organizing Committee to make that happen. He is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement.

... More

Tags: English, language learning
April 24, 2008

 

Getting Started in Trading

The New York Times has a graphic on the hand gestures used by traders on the floor of the stock exchange, a spectacle that has always fascinated and baffled me (Question No. 1: Who are they gesturing to?). And now it mystifies me slightly less. (SUZANNE)

Tags: sign language
April 9, 2008

 

Semantic Antics

Sol Steinmetz, author of SEMANTIC ANTICS, was on NPR last weekend talking about how and why words develop new meanings. Many times, a change in meaning is due to the influence of foreign models. For example: ... More


April 7, 2008

 

The Colorful French Tongue

While searching through videos for yesterday’s little leg pull (which I’m sure most if not all of you figured out before you even got to the video - the Association for Preventing Redundancy In Languages and Finding Original Orthographic Linguistic Sources? It took three of us to come up with that…) we came across something that tickled us pink: a spoof of our language courses from The Leslie Uggams Show in the late sixties. (Yes, we’ve been around since long before French maid costumes were considered comedy.) I couldn’t wait another day to share it with you, so you get two videos in a row this week. (SUZANNE)


April 2, 2008

 

Amazonian tribeswoman speaks language similar to English

Anthropologists and linguists are baffled by the recent discovery of an Amazonian tribe of women who speak a language remarkably similar to American English. In order to investigate this linguistic anomaly more closely, they have flown one of the women back to the United States to conduct more experiments in the sound studios at MIT’s Association for Preventing Redundancy In Languages and Finding Original Orthographic Linguistic Sources. Click below to see the scientists’ footage of the tribeswoman and her remarkable language. ... More


April 1, 2008

 

We’re Talking About Language

I sometimes fear that when we get started talking about language, this is what we sound like to our co-workers.
(SUZANNE)

Tags: linguistics
March 10, 2008

 

Cow dialectology?!

Not likely if you ask LanguageLog and linguists. But scientific facts cannot stop some PR people and BBC journalists. Check out how and why the false idea that cows speak/moo in dialects has made the news all around the globe. Here’s my favorite “news bit” cited by LanguageLog.

—I think this cow is from Buenos Aires. —You are mistaken; although it walks rapidly as if it were late for work, its moo is typical of cows from Santa Fe. Don’t worry, this dialog is fictitious, but according to the most recent theories of language specialists, this conversation could easily be real, because cows, just like humans, seem to have regional accents.
[Zviezdana]


February 25, 2008

 

A very foreign language film

Linguists, the least likely Hollywood stars, are getting some major attention at the Sundance Festival this year. The Linguists details David Harrison’s and Gregory Anderson’s race to catalogue endangered languages such as Kallawaya and Chulym. I think an “Indiana Joneses of language hunters” kind of film definitely deserves a top spot in my Netflix queue. (ELHAM)

Tags: endangered languages
January 24, 2008

 

Arabic Lessons: “It gets easier.”

Robert F. Worth looks at the complexities of learning Arabic for the New York Times.... More

Tags: Arabic
January 22, 2008

 

Texting in Amharic

Texting in Ge’ez is now possible in Ethiopia, thanks to a new brand of cellphones by Nokia. It must have been quite a task; Ge’ez characters with all their variants number up to nearly 300. ... More

Tags: Amharic, texting
January 14, 2008

 

Mapping Language: Europe, 1730

The folks at Strange Maps today feature an ethnolinguistic map of Europe from 1730. The alphabets circling the map are of particular interest, as is the apparent color-coding of different linguistic regions. The map also uses the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer (a common starting point for documenting and comparing European languages at the time) to denote each region. (SUZANNE)

Tags: ethnolinguistics, European languages
January 8, 2008

 

Let’s eat some wikipedia

Apparently in Beijing, some restaurant menus offer stir-fried wikipedia, with wikipedia being another name for flat, crispy mushrooms. You can even order it with pimientos and it’s quite delicious. I don’t know about you, but I’d be up for some wikipedia with steamed eggs, html, and salmon. (ELHAM)

Tags: language, where food and web 2.0 collide, wikipedia
December 7, 2007

 

For Egyptian hieroglyphs enthusiasts

The Times has a great article on deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, with a link to the hieroglyphic “alphabet.” There’s even a quiz you can take, and if you want to go a step further, UPenn has a form that will allow you to inscribe your name in hieroglyphs. Mine’s a combination of an owl, an arm, a sphinx, and something that looks like the @ symbol, which made me look up the history of @. I never imagined the symbol went back all the way back to the Italian Renaissance. (ELHAM)


November 19, 2007

 

Whomever: a made-up word used to trick students

Language Log posts a clip of the whoever vs. whomever debate from last week’s episode of The Office, along with links to the serious debate that followed. (SUZANNE)


October 25, 2007

 

The Talented Multilingual Clock

Verbarius is a great solution for those having trouble learning how to tell time in a foreign language; it has the ability to write out time, for example: “Mitternacht” instead of 12:00 a.m. (Link via Swissmiss.) You can upload any language your PC supports, even Xhosa and Zulu.... More


September 14, 2007

 

Translation telephony

Remember that kids game telephone? You can now play it here with translations, sans people. (Via Wired.) I just had fun plugging in: “I am a funky monkey,” which after being translated into Japanese, back to English, Chinese, English again, and then French, churned up: “J’évente le singe essentiel de matin de caractère.” Translate that back into English, and the machine comes up with “ventilating essential monkeys” and their morning character. ... More


September 7, 2007

 

Spam in Esperanto

Spammers, in an effort to get around e-mail spam filters, have begun using Esperanto translations of Russian science fiction for the subject lines of their e-mails. Language Log discovers that this technique actually works.... More


August 22, 2007

 

Vive Le Gyro

Language Hat and Language Log explore why Canadians refer to gyro as “doner” or “donair.” Here at the offices of Living Language, we just spent a few minutes discussing how we say the word “gyro,” and the pronunciations range from “JYE-roe” to “JEE-roe.” Some of us even order the “HEE-roe.”... More


August 14, 2007

 

Bonjour, mon petit bureau de change!

French Lessons, Flight of the Conchords style.... More


August 6, 2007

 

Birds of a feather hawk together

In our offices we’re constantly debating the proper pronunciation of the word “hawk.” We’re well aware that there are many different possible pronunciations depending on what part of the country you come from, but it’s eternally amusing to hear that the way I say “hawk” reminds other people of something a bit more unpleasant than a bird of prey. ... More


August 2, 2007

 

Ennywun can lern simpl spelling, yo

I’m not degenerating into my fourteen-year-old self chatting on AIM, but using a spelling glossary recommended by the Simplified Spelling Society. ... More


July 27, 2007

 

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori

It’s Māori language week in New Zealand, and to get into the spirit, I’ve been spending some quality time over at the interactive quizzes and conversation sections of the Kōrero Māori website. (The fact that my inner Flash geek is amazed at the design and interactivity of the games has nothing to do with it, really.) ... More


July 25, 2007

 

How does one translate “The Deathly Hallows”?

Harri Putter: That’s what the famous Harry Potter is jokingly called in India. (A literal translation would mean “Green Son.”) In Arabic, he’s known as “Hari Butor.”... More


July 20, 2007

 

Celebrations

So we completely missed celebrating Bastille Day this past Saturday. It’s possible I might have uttered a French phrase or two on the day, and I’m pretty sure I had a glass of Chardonnay, but I didn’t catch the fireworks. ... More


July 16, 2007

 

Awa-oh

Advertising is a clever game — often a language game (I certainly pause every time I hear Devo in a dust cloth commercial). ... More


July 13, 2007

 

Aakhri Khattaat

Scott Carney recently wrote about the dying art of Urdu calligraphy, and detailed how a small group of khattaat (calligraphers) who run one of the few handwritten papers in the world, face extinction because of widespread use of the Urdu typeface.... More


July 10, 2007

 

A bird is a bird is a bird

Sometimes even we forget that writing systems are built of the same lines and curves, only in different configurations. We need something like this toy block set to come along and remind us of that fact.

Someone needs to do a multi-alphabetic version — Hindi, Russian, Chinese, Latin, Greek, Thai, Arabic, etc. Or maybe that would just be called “string.” (SUZANNE)


July 9, 2007

 

Da Zhen! (a.k.a. Touchdown!)

From now on, when in China, please refer to American football as “Mei shi gan lan qiu.” Or its translation: “American-style olive-shaped ball.” To make things even more confusing, it could also mean “American-style rugby.”... More


July 3, 2007

 

Multilingual Dog Training

Someone please add this to the list of, umm, bizarre ways to learn commands in a foreign language. If Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, and Hungarian aren’t enough, you can also train your dog in Icelandic. (ELHAM)


June 28, 2007

 

Mick Jagger speaks Catalan

Well, “better than average” anyway. Here’s a YouTube clip of his effort in Catalan. Mick, you know what the next step is; you have to start singing in Catalan. (ELHAM)


June 22, 2007

 

Tony Soprano’s Shish Kebab

This might very well be the only post on the internet right now about “The Sopranos” that has nothing to do with the ending. ... More


June 11, 2007

 

oh hai, i has parsed ur sentencez

A linguistic appreciation of LOLcode, inspired by the LOLcat phenomenon. (via Language Log) (SUZANNE)


June 1, 2007

 

Sont des langues qui vont très bien ensemble

The Guardian Arts Blog asks readers for their favorite multi-lingual songs. We did a quick poll around the office, and came up with a list of our own (mostly French-English) favorites:... More


May 10, 2007

 

But is he any good at the piano?

This man can write Arabic numerals using all 10 fingers at once. (SUZANNE)


April 27, 2007

 

Not so much to do with language, but…

A praying mantis: Literally. (Via Boing Boing) (ELHAM)


April 26, 2007

 

Wear your pun on your sleeve

“War and peas” tees. (via Largehearted Boy) (SUZANNE)


April 17, 2007

 

How stuff works: Universal Translators

What we want to know is, will you sound like a speak ‘n spell when you say “Buenos días”? (Link) (SUZANNE)


March 10, 2007