Words R Us

From my personal blog

A very short article on how The Saith Seren Welsh centre in Wrexham has become the first location in Wales chosen to be a "bilingual town" in a scheme to promote the use of the Welsh language.

Americans lean toward speaking English and it shows in our society today. We come off as lazy as we rely on the people from other countries to learn our language so that they can communicate with us. But compared to the rest of the world, are monolingualists a minority ?

The importance of FOXP2, and how it affects language.

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.

A feral child is a human child who has lived away from human contact from a very young age, and has little or no experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language.

"Psychology researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham wanted to know whether the voice that reads in our heads matches the voice that we read aloud in. In other words, does your internal monologue have an accent? ... you can't just ask people how they pronounce words in their heads. ... In order to get around that problem, the Nottingham researchers had subjects read limericks while carefully monitoring their eye movements. ... The subjects read the limericks silently to themselves. But when they got to rhymes that didn't make sense with their spoken accent, there was a distinct disruption in eye movement. ... what we know about he author of the piece can influence how we read it. ... 'For example, it has been demonstrated that knowledge of the presumed author's speaking speed can influence how quickly people read aloud a passage of text.'" Full study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0025782

"A council in France has abolished the word 'Mademoiselle' from all official documents because it is 'condescending and sexist'. The Paris suburb of Fontenay-sous-Bois said the term - the French equivalent of 'miss' - discriminates against women by asking them to reveal if they are married. ... Julie Muret of campaign group Osez Le Feminisme, meaning Dare Feminism, said in September that the equivalent word for men of 'Damoiseau' - meaning squire - was abolished decades ago."

"Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end. ... Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students. 'It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation' [said K David Harrison] ... 'Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.'"

This article discusses the importance of body language, especially between patients and doctors.

I knew there was a reason I love goats so much!

Yet another short article on Native Languages and their gradual course to extinction. However, the web is playing a pivotal role in Alaska in saving the native Alutiiq language.

Language Specialists are attempting to save the Native American Language before it becomes extinct.

"The more he uses technology, the less he uses Braille ... technology is making the nearly 200-year-old writing system more accessible than ever. She shows off an electronic reader that's about the size of a paperback. Instead of having to lug around massive volumes of printed braille, this reader allows Deden to just sweep her fingers over little plastic nubs that rise and fall with each line of text. ... The federation estimates that today only 1 in 10 blind people can read Braille. That's down dramatically from the early 1900s."

If any of you like History Channel, this would be an interesting video to watch. This film explains why American citizens have different accents and how their take on the American language has affected the shapes of our states. Note: This video does not contain great quality in terms of sound or picture but is still a cool video to watch if you have time :)

This is from a Japanese television show (sort of like America's Got Talent). Sorry, there's no subtitles...but basically, this guy can sing with his mouth closed, and still produce a deep, full, and open sound. And what's even more amazing is he isn't singing in his own voice...he's imitating voices of famous Japanese singers. I thought this video was interesting because we just read an article on how humans produce sounds. I bet you phoneticians would like to study how his vocal tract works...

"Of the Dickens citations in the OED, 258 citations are the earliest recorded by the dictionary for a particular word, and 1,586 are the earliest for a particular sense of a word. Dickens was certainly an innovative writer, but these examples are not necessarily his own coinages. ... Very often the words that Dickens ushered in were from the earthy slang associated with the working class, the theatre, or the criminal underworld, and Dickens did much to make these once "vulgar" words mainstream. Dickens's very first novel, The Pickwick Papers from 1837, introduced such slang terms as butter-fingers ("a clumsy person"), flummox ("bewilder"), sawbones ("surgeon"), and whizz-bang ("sound of a gunshot"). ... One way that Dickens devised new words was by adding suffixes to old ones. He made good use of the -y suffix to make adjectives (mildewy, bulgy, swishy, soupy, waxy, trembly) and -iness to make nouns (messiness, cheesiness, fluffiness, seediness). ... Finally, no discussion of Dickensian language would be complete without mentioning the richly evocative names of his characters."