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Monday, April 18, 2016 TORONTO - Like a modern twist on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, two Swiss friends have designed the ultimate t-shirt for travellers featuring universal icons that help overcome language barriers around the world.

This genius item of clothing is printed with nearly 40 icons that travelers can use to try to get their message across if they don't know the language. Inspired by a communications breakdown on the road, the shirt is part of a range of items created by a team of Swiss guys who've formed a company, Iconspeak.

A T-shirt that is printed with 40 universal symbols so that people may point at symbols when they can't understand each other

"IT IS A SPECTATOR SPORT to look at someone else's books, if not an act of voyeurism or armchair psychology," wrote Henry Petroski in " The Book on the Bookshelf." Yet when the books don't belong to an individual, but rather to a hotel or a bar, it is not armchair psychology - it is an invitation to a chance encounter.

"Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth ... may disappear." National Geographic wants to help by "identifying language hotspots ... and documenting the languages and cultures within them."

In the village of Antia in Greece, there is a whistled language called Sfyria. Sfyria is a whistled version of the Greek language, with different whistled tones representing Greek letters and sounds. The main benefit of Sfyria is communication over long distances. Sound from whistling travels ten times farther than from shouting. Sfyria is one of the most endangered languages in the world. Only six people can still speak and understand it.

Such a fascinating article about an obscure language, Sean! The article also notes that Sfyria is also not the only whistled language--worldwide, there are 70 other whistled languages in the world. Wild.

Words like potlatch, saltchuck, kanaka, skookum, sticks, muckamuck, tyee and cultus hail from a near-forgotten language, Chinook Wawa, once spoken by more than 100,000 people, from Alaska to the California border, for almost 200 years. Known as Chinook Jargon or Chinook Wawa ('wawa' meaning talk), this was a trade, or pidgin, language that combined simplified words from the First Nations languages of Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Chinook and others, as well as from French and English. It was used so extensively that it was the language of courts and newspapers in the Pacific Northwest from about 1800 to 1905. Chinook Wawa was developed to ease trade in a place where there was no common language. On the Pacific Coast at the time, there were dozens of First Nations languages, including Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Haisla, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka'wakw, Salishan and Chinook. After European contact, which included Captain Cook's arrival in 1778, English, French, Spanish, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese were gradually added to the mix. While pidgin languages usually draw most of their vocabulary from the prestige language, or colonising culture, unusually, in the case of Chinook Wawa, two thirds of the language is Chinook and Nuu-chah-nulth with the rest being made up mostly of English and French.

Euskara is Europe's oldest language, yet is teetering on the brink of extinction. Spoken in the autonomous communities of Navarre in northern Spain and the Basque Country across northern Spain and south-western France, Euskara is a linguistic mystery: it has no known origin or relation to any other language, an anomaly that has stumped linguistic experts for ages. The distinct language is a point of pride for Basques. An estimated 700,000 of them, or 35% of the Basque population, speak it today. Euskara has been shaped over time by the Basques' close contact with nature. The language contains varied vocabulary for landscapes, animals, the wind, the sea ‒ and about 100 ways to say 'butterfly'. The language may still be around, in part, because its early speakers were geographically secluded from the rest of the world by the Pyrenees.

Next time you're headed Down Under, don't be a bogan. Pack your togs, thongs and esky lid, and save any tea bags for a mug of hot water. Australia's beach culture has transformed the English used there.

For centuries, Central America's Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people have kept the culture's oral history alive through their ancestors' native language. But decades of modernization, haphazard native-language training in Garifuna schools, intermarriage between cultures, and the ridicule of young people who speak the language, collectively led to Garifuna being listed on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages in 2001. Today, linguists estimate that about 100,000 speakers remain. The threat of language extinction isn't new. Some linguists estimate a language dies every two weeks, as some languages become dominant tools for social and economic exchange, while others are pushed to the margins. But there are ways to save at-risk languages, as well. The key is that the language needs to be thought of less as preserved, "but indeed part of their present and their future," says Liliana Sánchez, a linguist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That's exactly what the Garinagu (Garifuna people) are doing. For the past two decades, Garifuna artists have used a cultural cornerstone-spirited dance music-to inspire young Garinagu to learn and share their native language. Now, with a new Garifuna Tourism Trail project in Belize, travelers can experience and support the cultural renaissance, too. Elements of the Garifuna culture-including music, dance, and language-were listed as a UNESCO Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Around that same time, Garifuna musicians and cultural activists hatched a plan: Create irresistible melodies, sung entirely in Garifuna, to rally young Garinagu to embrace the culture and learn the language. Will music save the Garifuna language? Time will tell. Garifuna remains on UNESCO's endangered-language list, last updated in 2010. And, as the Hawaiians learned from revitalizing their own language post colonization, this kind of revival is a long, multi-generational road.

Imagine traveling to the next state, or even the next town, and not being able to converse with others. This is how it was for the deaf until ASL (American Sign Language) was formed in 1841. This tells of the history of ASL.

A Linguist Reads the Menu Hardcover, 246 pages | The words we use for everyday foods contain clues to their origins and hint at their ancient travels across the globe as they merge, fuse and sometimes take on different forms altogether.

The king and queen of Spain flew to the former colony of Puerto Rico to help launch on Tuesday what is considered the world's most important event involving the Spanish language. The royal couple joined more than 200 writers, academics and experts who traveled to the U.S. territory to...

When my relationship unraveled nearly two years ago, I decided to suspend my career as an actuary in Boston and take a long vacation in Costa Rica, where I planned to learn how to surf and do yoga. Yes, it was the most clichéd response possible for a heartbroken 32-year-old Westerner like me.

Nineb Lamassu, a researcher at England's Cambridge University, travels among the Assyrian diaspora, recording the traditional epic poetry of the Assyrian ethnic minority and capturing at least the memory of an ancient people whose presence in their homeland is gradually fading.

"Talking or texting on a phone while walking can make it difficult to stay on course and may interfere with memory recall ... Moreover, participants who were texting while walking veered off course demonstrating a 61 percent increase in lateral deviation and 13 percent increase in distance traveled."

Being able to speak two languages isn't just useful for traveling to other countries -- it could actually help keep your brain in tip-top shape in older age, a new study suggests.

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.

Why do women like deep voices and men prefer high ones?

Some terms of endearment can be used in many languages - "baby", "angel" and "sweetheart" for example. But some don't travel as well as you might think. If you call a French person "honey" ("miel") he or she may take it as a unflattering comparison with a sticky mess. And how would you react if someone called you a cauliflower, a flea, or a baby elephant? Here is a quick guide to the language of love around the world - dominated by metaphors from cookery and the animal kingdom - with contributions by language coach Paul Noble.

"For years, the Web's lingua franca was English. ... For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has [now] become a lifeline. ... Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. ... Though most of the world's languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells of traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck driver who devised his own system for writing the endangered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. ... Africa is the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices. ... for hundreds of heritage languages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery and motherboard is the future of the past."