This interactive timeline allows you to explore the evolution of English language and literature, from the 11th century to the present day. Scroll through decade by decade to investigate the richness and diversity of our poetry and prose, as well as the many social, cultural and political strands from which our language has been woven.
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English Timeline - 1 views
Anne Curzan: What makes a word "real"? | Talk Video | TED.com - 0 views
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One could argue that slang words like ‘hangry,’ ‘defriend’ and ‘adorkable’ fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they don't appear in the dictionary. After all, who actually decides which words make it into those pages? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries, and the choices they make.
The world's languages, in 7 maps and charts - The Washington Post - 1 views
Language and Empire - 0 views
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Why we shun Asian words... for now
Dual-Language Programs Are on the Rise, Even for Native English Speakers - The New York... - 1 views
Corrupting the Chinese Language - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr's blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”
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Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.
A Picture Of Language: The Fading Art Of Diagramming Sentences - 0 views
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When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words - not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a little zany. But the practice has a long - and controversial - history in U.S. schools.
BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views
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"Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
BBC - Culture - Eleven untranslatable words - 1 views
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There is one clear difference, though: Iyer has not invented them. The definitions she illustrates – 60 so far, from 30 different languages – match The Meaning of Liff for absurdity, but all of them are real. There is komorebi, Japanese for ‘the sort of scattered dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through trees’; or rire dans sa barbe, a French expression meaning ‘to laugh in your beard quietly while thinking about something that happened in the past’.
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Iyer’s Found in Translation project will be published as a book later in 2014. She has been a polyglot since childhood. “My parents come from different parts of India, so I grew up learning five languages,” she says. “I’d always loved the word Fernweh, which is German for ‘longing for a place you’ve never been to’, and then one day I started collecting more.”Some are humorous, while others have definitions that read like poetry. “I love the German word Waldeinsamkeit, ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’. “It captures a sense of solitude and at the same time that feeling of oneness with nature.” Her favourite is the Inuit word Iktsuarpok, which means ‘the frustration of waiting for someone to turn up’, because “it holds so much meaning. It’s waiting, whether you are waiting for the bus to show up or for the love of your life. It perfectly describes that inner anguish associated with waiting.”
The Interpreter - The New Yorker - 2 views
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Everett, who this past fall became the chairman of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultures at Illinois State University, has been publishing academic books and papers on the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) for more than twenty-five years. But his work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability. Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, calls Everett’s paper “a bomb thrown into the party.”
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Piraha tribe in Brazil studied by linguists and anthropologists
Eight words that reveal the sexism at the heart of the English language | David Shariat... - 0 views
The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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It’s an intuitive claim, but also a profound one. It asserts that the benefits of bilingualism extend well beyond the realm of language, and into skills that we use in every aspect of our lives. This view is now widespread, heralded by a large community of scientists, promoted in books and magazines, and pushed by advocacy organizations.
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But a growing number of psychologists say that this mountain of evidence is actually a house of cards, built upon flimsy foundations.
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Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, was one of them. In two large studies, involving 360 and 504 children respectively, he found no evidence that Basque kids, raised on Basque and Spanish at home and at school, had better mental control than monolingual Spanish children.
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The World's Most Efficient Languages - The Atlantic - 1 views
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"How much do you really need to say to put a sentence together? "
This is how old languages add new words - 0 views
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