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Me
Marshall (USA born) - English Dominant bilingual (Spanish)

Parents

Thomas (Half French, USA born) - English monolingual

Karen (Polish, German, USA born) - English monolingual

Paternal Grandparents

Woodson (USA born) - English monolingual

Annette (Cajun French, USA immigrant) -  English monolingual

Maternal Grandparents

Frank(German, USA born) - English monolingual

Catherine (Polish, USA born) - English monolingual

Notes:

1. Annette: Her parents spoke a little French

2.  Catherine: First language was Polish, was forced to learn English in school at age 6 and forgot nearly all her Polish.

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Diego Luna and Conan talk Spanish in US and slang

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Diego Luna and Conan talk Spanish in US and slang

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Este video es de la programa Conan y es un entrevista con Diego Luna de la película Elysium. Hablan del hecho de que el número de hispanohablantes ha estado aumentando por un rato y que eventualmente Los Ángeles, como en la película Elysium, todos van a hablar en español.

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Diego Luna Teaches Conan Survival Spanish

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CONAN Highlight: The Spanish-speaking population is increasing, so the "Elysium" star gives Conan un poco de ayuda. More CONAN @ http://teamcoco.com/video Team Coco is the official YouTube channel of late night host Conan O'Brien, CONAN on TBS & TeamCoco.com.

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Will Spanish help you reach the US Hispanic market? It depends

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Will Spanish help you reach the US Hispanic market? It depends

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En este artículo del Harvard Business Review, el autor se mete en la tema de si una empresa debe utilizar el español o no para alcanzar el mercado hispánico en los Estados Unidos. Básicamente ella da el consejo que si una empresa decide usar español, hay que hacerlo bien.  Por ejemplo, los hispanohablantes suelen a visitar sitios de web en ingles porque los del español a menudo tienen errores o no son muy culturalmente relevantes.

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The Hispanic market will represent $1.5 trillion in purchasing power by 2015 and 30% of the U.S. population by 2050. Business leaders who are contemplating how to reach such an enormous market segment, especially through their digital presence, often ask me the same question: "Do we really need Spanish, or can we get by with just English?"

A study from the Pew Hispanic Center shows that 82% of Latino adults in the U.S. speak Spanish, and 95% believe it's important for future generations to continue to do so. Likewise, the National Hispanic Consumer Study found that advertising in Spanish can boost both advertising effectiveness and customer loyalty.

In contrast, AOL's Hispanic Cyberstudy found that Spanish-dominant Hispanics gravitate toward sites that are in English, not Spanish. Why? For one thing, English sites are simply what's on the web for the U.S. audience. Another factor is that Spanish-language sites targeting U.S. Hispanics are often riddled with poor translations and a user experience that is not culturally relevant.

If you want to market to online Hispanics effectively, you want to do it right. Here are a few ideas on good strategies:

1. Create a customized domain for Hispanics. Increasingly, companies are registering domain names that are distinct from their English sites to ensure an authentic look and feel. For example, McDonald's has a separate site for Hispanics, www.meencanta.com, a play on its "I'm lovin' it" phrase that still sounds memorable and positive in Spanish. Avoid simply using a subdomain, or you may be sending the message that the Spanish site is less important than the top-level domain from which it stems.

2. Don't just translate, "transcreate." On the McDonald's Hispanic site, the content is completely customized for its target market, integrating games, songs, Hispanic celebrities, and themes that are more relevant for this group. Because creating brand new content can be expensive, many companies take a hybrid approach, leveraging translations of some of their English content while also using transcreation to generate content that is unique and culturally relevant. Wherever possible, you should avoid just translating your English-language content into Spanish without having a Spanish-speaking editor or other expert review that copy.

3. Offer bilingual versions of the transcreated content. Develop your Hispanic web content in a bilingual and bicultural way that represents your business. Provide the culturally relevant content in both languages. Allowing users to toggle back and forth also facilitates multi-generational purchasing.

4. If all you have is a translated site, don't neglect it. Perhaps you don't have time or budget right now to develop custom content for Hispanics. Even so, that's no excuse for leaving the "Copyright 2013" notice sitting on your site for all of 2014, or for failing to test your links on the Spanish site. These kinds of errors are surprisingly common even for major brands, but they send a clear and unfortunate message to Spanish-site visitors: "You don't matter." And machine-driven translations rarely offer a good quality product. Get your content professionally translated and reviewed. If you offer parallel sites in English and Spanish, make sure to treat your Spanish site with the same careful attention as your English site. Equal respect for your customers means equal respect for the content directed at them, no matter the language.

Remember, the payoff for offering in-language content is huge, especially in online settings. As a study from Common Sense Advisory found, 72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language. Similarly, 72.4% of consumers say they are more likely to make a purchase if information is available in their own language. Translating or adapting content to reach a new market makes your initial investment in the original content go even farther.

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Will Spanish Help You Reach the U.S. Hispanic Market? It Depends

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The Hispanic market will represent $1.5 trillion in purchasing power by 2015 and 30% of the U.S. population by 2050. Business leaders who are contemplating how to reach such an enormous market segment, especially through their digital presence, often ask me the same question: "Do we really need Spanish, or can we get by with just English?"

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Kids as translators have so much to lose

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Kids as translators have so much to lose

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Si vas a algún banco, clínico, escuela, o mercado en california, vas a encontrar este escenario: los niños trasladando para sus padres. Aunque parezca un benigno gesto cuando los muchachos interceden por sus padres en el mercado para preguntar dónde está un alimento, en realidad esto tiene implicaciones perjudiciales.

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Go to any bank, clinic, school or grocery store in California and you'll run into this more often than not-kids translating for their non-English-speaking parents. While it may seem a benign gesture for kids to step in and help their parents ask where a certain food item is located in the grocery store, the practice has far-reaching implications that are often overlooked for the sake of convenience.

Patients at a hospital or clinic have a basic right to interpreters so that they may receive care in a language they understand and so that they may be active participants in the decisions being made about their treatment. While health care providers strive to provide adequate interpretation services, many times it falls on the young kids to speak for their parents. Put yourself in the position of being a child or teenager with the responsibility for communicating life and death information to your parents. How would it impact you to have to explain to your mother that she has cancer? Or perhaps inform your father that his insurance won't cover a much-needed procedure. How do you broach the subject of sexual practices with your parents when the doctor or nurse is taking their medical history? What kind of pressure would you feel knowing that not finding the right word or phrase with which to interpret could lead to misdiagnosis or worse?

It's too much to expect from children, regardless of the age. Yet every day children of immigrants are thrown into these situations and are forced to grow up all too quickly.

While many of us might have enjoyed our childhood years without the worries our parents dealt with on a daily basis, this is not the case for children of immigrants. These children are the cornerstone of most decisions made in the household. They're the ones translating all financial, immigration and medical documents as well as interpreting most interactions their parents have with the outside world. Consequently, they are privy to everything that is going on-from financial struggles and looming home foreclosures to possible evictions and employment disciplinary actions. Every worry, stress and decision most parents try to shield their kids from is funneled through these kids' young minds.

With all the stress and anxiety caused by these experiences and their accelerated maturing, how will these kids be impacted in school, in social interactions or even in interactions with authority figures with whom they've seen their parents have negative interactions? What about the role reversal that occurs when parents become dependent on their children? This is not an attempt to justify negative outcomes. It's merely an attempt to understand how a young mind may be impacted and shaped by being placed in these circumstances and what long-term effects that might have.

And while some kids may find the opportunity to interpret or translate for their parents at school a benefit, particularly when it comes to selecting what details to share with their parents about behavior or grade issues, it also has long-term negative effects. How likely is it that children will translate all the details about them goofing off in class or not turning in their homework? Ultimately, the parents do not get the information and understanding they need to work with their child and the children don't receive the help they need to be successful in school.

Is there a solution? Some would simply say "learn English," but that's not a realistic solution, particularly for recent immigrants. Immigrants' children do in fact effectively acculturate and learn English...which is why they're the ones translating. Perhaps service providers, be it health care, financial services, government agencies or other applicable services, should strive to better meet the needs of immigrant populations. This means having materials available that are written in the right languages, having interpreters available who can help out, and, by all means, if you see that a child will be interpreting sensitive information for his or her parents, step in. If you can interpret in their stead, please do so. If you can't, then stress the need to find a suitable interpreter. Encourage providers to be prepared to offer those needed services. And above all else, let kids be kids.

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Lost in Translation: Kids as Translators have so Much to Lose - Latino Leadership Council

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Go to any bank, clinic, school or grocery store in California and you'll run into this more often than not-kids translating for their non-English-speaking parents. While it may seem a benign gesture for kids to step in and help their parents ask where a certain food item is located in the grocery store, the practice has far-reaching implications that are often overlooked for the sake of convenience.

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El articulo habla sobre los beneficios de una nación multilingüística. Según el autor, el caso para multilingüismo es atractiva: una nación con una variedad de lenguas habladas es útil para los negocios globalizados, para le seguridad nacional, y para una gente más empática a los demás. Todavía existe una resistencia a esta aceptación de español, proviniendo de ellos como Sarah Palin que cree que todos deben “speak American”.

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It's hard to argue against that answer to the first question: It's clearly better for immigrants to speak the language of their adopted country. They will be more competitive for jobs and feel more connected to society. But the shortsightedness implied by the second question is troubling: a population that speaks several languages is helpful, not harmful, to America's economy and national security.

The conversation among conservatives about undocumented immigrants and what they perceive as a threat to American identity has indeed been ongoing. These days, it's tied to a virulent, anti-immigrant sentiment -- focused on "brown people"-- and apparently aimed at using "the other" to galvanize the base, especially during the campaign.

In this context, language is an easy target; it's the way foreign origins are most obviously expressed. We hear an accent, or English that's difficult to understand, and tag the speaker as an outsider, someone whose allegiances might not be clear.

This is why Donald Trump criticized fellow presidential candidate Jeb Bush for answering questions on the campaign trai l posed to him in Spanish in that same language; Trump turned what some might consider an admirable and politically useful skill into a mark of snobbery or out-of-touchness with "real" America.

And it's why some viewers took Vanessa Ruiz, a Hispanic news anchor in a heavily Hispanic state (Arizona), to task -- not for mangling Spanish-language words, but for pronouncing them correctly -- i.e. in a manner "Americans" could not understand.

Our nation of immigrants has plenty of words borrowed from other languages -- did you eat a taco today, or maybe have a latte? -- but our ethos of assimilation means even those words have to sound "right" to us, which often means they in fact sound wrong.

Taking things one step further, Trump ally Sarah Palin asserted recently that people who don't want to "speak American" in America have no business living here. And at Wednesday's earlier, second-tier CNN debate, Sen. Lindsay Graham said immigrants must "learn our language" to be allowed to stay in the country.

This blunt instrument line of reasoning is against our country's long-term interests. We need more, not fewer, multilingual people to settle in America -- and keep their native languages along with English -- if we want to be competitive in a globalized economy.

Yes, English is the world's lingua franca now, especially for business, diplomacy, and technology (which has greatly helped our nation's businesses to outsource to places like India), but mastering a foreign language has many layers of usefulness: it opens a window into how other people think and what they value, including how they feel about money (seen often through idioms). This is important knowledge for doing business with foreign entities.

Speaking multiple languages -- yes, Spanish among them -- simply creates more opportunities, more influence and potentially more profit as well.

It is surprising that Donald Trump has made linguistic ignorance one of his proud calling cards, given how heavily his businesses invest abroad, and how many foreign investors have a stake in his American-based enterprises.

The case for multilingualism can also be made for national security, an area Republicans deeply care about. Beyond the obvious benefits in espionage and other kinds of intelligence work, having new Americans who are able to keep their native languages -- Arabic, for example -- and not let them lapse, opens up the possibility of having a deep pool of interpreters for our involvements abroad.

If they are lucky, countries have nationals in service with fluency in the right languages, but it's common for armed services to have to utilize local people, indeed raising issues of trust as well as cost and logistics. This is one reason modern empires welcomed multilingualism and in fact invested in language schools for their personnel on the ground.

A multilingual America can only help the United States military, now that many operations abroad make heavy use of counterinsurgency warfare, with its higher and more diversified contact with the local population. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States had to depend heavily on local interpreters, and we are still involved in managing the difficult aftereffects of that engagement: interpreters our country hired and then left behind, and who are now subject to retaliation.

According to a 2009 report by the United Nations High Committee on Refugees, cited by Ben Anderson in his Vice News report "The Interpreters", one interpreter was being killed every 36 hours. Although the U.S State Department subsequently implemented a special immigrant visa program for Iraqi and Afghan translators and interpreters, the creation of this class of refugees is a testament to the power of language politics, and an example of the fallout from American insufficiencies in this area.

Isolationist tendencies have a long history in America, and desires like those professed by Palin, Graham, and Trump to hear only English around them come under this category. There is little question that people living in America should know how to speak English. But that is only part of a larger reality.

The world has changed. The ongoing refugee crisis and its extension into the heart of Europe shows that you cannot just shut out what you don't want to see and hear. It's not in our economic or national security interest to build walls around us, even of the linguistic kind.

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why it's good to speak spanish in america - cnn

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Why it's good to speak Spanish in America - CNN

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It's hard to argue against that answer to the first question: It's clearly better for immigrants to speak the language of their adopted country. They will be more competitive for jobs and feel more connected to society. But the shortsightedness implied by the second question is troubling: a population that speaks several languages is helpful, not harmful, to America's economy and national security.

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Se entrevistan con diferentes personas de España y les pregunta que acento de castellano elegirían para que se hable en España. También les preguntan cuál es la peor.  Las respuestas varían mucho como cada uno de un región piensa que el acento de otro es peor. �����l��y

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Este blog post indica algunas observaciones que a mí me fijé cuando estaba en Madrid. Los más evidentes para mí, aparte de lo obvio de la zeta con c y z,  fueron que el g y j eran totalmente uvular, como un “kh”, que el s es casi una “sh”, y que el ch, por lo menos en Madrid, se pronuncia como un “ts”. ���v��y

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If you're like me, you've probably learned Spanish as it's spoken throughout Latin America. Now, I know there is no one single standard Latin American accent, but there are a few things I've noticed when listening to Spaniards speak that distinguish them from Spanish speakers in, for example, Nicaragua or Argentina. Since living here for the greater part of a year, I've both consciously resisted and unconsciously picked up on many features of the typical Spanish accent. After thinking about it for a while, I've decided there are around five characteristics that most distinguish the Spanish of Spain from the Spanish of the Americas. These five sounds, when spoken in the Castilian way, will bring you much closer to sounding native.

1) Pronounce C before E & I and Z like TH

In the Americas you'll hear the words ciudad ("city"), cereza ("cherry"), and zorro ("fox") pronounced as "see-oo-DAHD" [sjuˈðað], "say-RAY-sah" [seˈɾe.sa], and "SOE-rroe" [ˈso.ro]. However, in Spain, you'll pick up on something a bit different-"thee-oo-DAHD" [θjuˈðað], "thay-RAY-thah" [θeˈɾe.θa], and "THOE-rroe" [ˈθo.ro]. This is because in most of Spain, instead of using the "S" sound /s/ for C when it comes before E or I and for Z, they use the "TH" sound /θ/ as in the English word "thin." It's a really long story as to why they do it that way, but it's safe to say this dialect feature is neither a lisp (since they still can make the "S" sound, see #3), nor an imitation of some medieval king's speech impediment.

2) Pronounce G before E & I and J like KH

I think this is probably my favorite thing about the Castilian accent because it's just so fun to say. For the "KH" sound /χ/, visualize a huge loogie in the back of your throat that you get when you have a bad cold, and now imagine the sound you make when you inevitably have to HACK it up (into the sink, please and thank you). That right there is the sound you're looking for. In theory, the Spanish sound /x/ found in words like jamón ("ham"), judío ("Jew"), and gemela ("twin") is similar to the sound represented by CH in German (e.g., Ich Ba ch) and Scottish Gaelic (e.g., loch "lake"). Or, a cat hiss. In the Americas, it's often simplified to a simple, breathy "H" sound /h/, but in Spain, this sound is pushed much further back in the throat to a loud and salivary "KH" sound. Thus, "khah-MOEN" [χaˈmon] instead of "hah-MOEN" [haˈmon].

3) Pronounce S as a whistle-ly SH

Now I know what you're thinking, how could you possibly pronounce S any other way? Well, I'll tell you. In the majority of Spain, they use a sound that is ever-so-slightly whistle-ly, about halfway between the English "S" /s/ and "SH" /ʃ/ ones. Think of a stereotypical old-time Southern accent, or the way Ian McKellan says, "Bilbo, the ring i s still in your pocket s" in The Fellowship of the Ring. This is a very subtle, small difference but it is crucial for sounding Spanish. There's a lot of variation in the way the S is whistled-Prime Minister Rajoy has a very thick, SH-like S, whereas others I've heard have a crisp, icy S-so just start playing around with it to see what sticks.

4) Pronounce CH like TS

I feel like this is supposed to be a recent phenomenon, but more and more Spanish people are pronouncing their CHs something like a "TS" sound. I know it's hard for some English speakers to make this sound, at least at the beginning of words, but think of the last two consonants in the words "pits" or "it's" and there you go. So the word coche ("car") or the place-name Chamartín are a little bit like "KOE-tsay" [ˈko.tse] and "tsah-mahr-TEEN" [tsa.marˈtin].

5) Pronounce LL like LY

If #4 is something that has recently come into fashion, then #5 is slowly disappearing from the peninsula. We don't have this sound in English, except for the way some people say the two Ls in the word "million." This same sound-the "LL" sound /ʎ/-is also found in Italian words like imbroglio ("a mess") and aglio ("garlic"). When learning Spanish, most of us were probably taught to say words like ella ("she") and calle ("street") like "AY-yah" [ˈe.ja] and "CAH-yay" [ˈka.je]. But, at the very least, in the northern half of the country they say those words more like "AY-lya" [ˈe.ʎa] and "CAH-lyay" [ˈka.ʎe]. Instead of merging it with the Y, as many other Spanish dialects do, the typical "standard" dialect in Spain keeps the LL distinct, making it sound like an L that's been squished up against the roof of your mouth sound.

Updates: Word-final Ds and Rs

Since writing this post I've become aware of two more distinct features of the Castilian accent. First, when Ds come at the ends of words, instead of being pronounced like the "TH" sound in the English word " that" /ð/, it sounds like the "TH" sound in the word "thin" /θ/. Because of this, a fun way to spell the city of Madrid-as pronounced by madrileños-is Madriz with a Z at the end to more accurately represent how locals say "Madrid."

In addition, Spaniards seem all too happy to trill their Rs even when unnecessary, like at the ends of words. Verbs like correr ("run"), lavar ("wash"), and decir ("say") might sound like correRRR, lavaRRR, and deciRRR in Spain, while words like calor ("heat") could be pronounced like caloRRR.

Don't forget that in the Andalusian accent they completely chop off Ds and Rs at the ends of words... ¡no pasa ná!

Caveat

If you're traveling or living in Spain for any amount of time you do not have to adapt your accent to this list. But if you do want to sound more Spanish-if it's your personal goal to integrate to the Castilian accent-then go all the way and ask for a thay-RAY-thah at the bar, directions to the ah-TOE-tsah train station in Madrid, or what the village's best shay-MAH-nah SHAN-tah float is.

How have you tried to get a better Castilian Spanish accent? Or do you even care at all about assimilating to the Spanish dialect? Talk about it in the comments below!

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If you're like me, you've probably learned Spanish as it's spoken throughout Latin America. Now, I know there is no one single standard Latin American accent, but there are a few things I've noticed when listening to Spaniards speak that distinguish them from Spanish speakers in, for example, Nicaragua or Argentina.

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Es un video del primer ministro de Espana Mariano Rajoy. Se nota muy bien este “whistley s” que parece casi como un “sh”. Al final de palabras a mí me parece lo más fuerte como un “sh”. Por ejemplo, en (0:46) dice “hay además de usted..” y suena como “hay ademash de usted”. Rajoy es de Galicia entonces puede ser que es mas fuerte porque es gallego.

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Rajoy ridiculiza el discurso de Pablo Iglesias

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El presidente del Gobierno en funciones ha hecho una dura réplica a Pablo Iglesias, le ha criticado que se apodere del voto de la "gente" y ha ridiculizado su discurso de superioridad moral. Suscríbete a nuestro canal: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=libertaddigital Más información en http://www.libertaddigital.com/, http://www.libertaddigital.tv/ y http://www.esradio.fm/

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Aquí es un juego difícil si no conoce bien España. Puede escuchar una persona hablando castellano y dando una pista para que adivines que región de España vive cada persona. Para mí era bien difícil. Pensé que  ya que pasé 6 meses en España podría adivinar más o menos bien pero no.

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Un juego para descubrir cómo suena en cada país la lengua castellana

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7th set of entries - Variación lingüística de español 

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7th set of entries - Variación lingüística de español 

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Este video divertido habla de las diferencias semánticas entre países diferentes. Una palabra en un dialecto de español puede ser una palabrota en otro. Por ejemplo, la palabra “straw” tiene 20 diferentes nombres, cada uno significando algo mal en otro dialecto español.

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10 (Accidental) Spanish Curse Words - Joanna Rants

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YES!!! Joanna Rants & Flama merch is finally HERE: Flama store: https://www.teepublic.com/user/TheFlama Joanna Rants shirt: https://www.teepublic.com//t-shirt/248561-joanna-rants "You say potato and I say...penis." Watch what you say in Spanish because what can mean something innocent in one country can mean something...very very dirty in another.

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Translation mistakes can cause big problems

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Translation mistakes can cause big problems

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Presenta una lista de unos errores de translación que causó muchos problemas. Todos tienen que ver con la diferencia semántica entre palabras en un idioma y otro. Algunos de los errores costaron millones de dólares o grandes malentendidos entre países y gobiernos.

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Knowing how to speak two languages is not the same thing as knowing how to translate. Translation is a special skill that professionals work hard to develop. In their book Found in Translation, professional translators Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche give a spirited tour of the world of translation, full of fascinating stories about everything from volunteer text message translators during the Haitian earthquake rescue effort, to the challenges of translation at the Olympics and the World Cup, to the personal friendships celebrities like Yao Ming and Marlee Matlin have with their translators.

The importance of good translation is most obvious when things go wrong. Here are nine examples from the book that show just how high-stakes the job of translation can be.

1. The seventy-one-million-dollar word

In 1980, 18-year-old Willie Ramirez was admitted to a Florida hospital in a comatose state. His friends and family tried to describe his condition to the paramedics and doctors who treated him, but they only spoke Spanish. Translation was provided by a bilingual staff member who translated "intoxicado" as "intoxicated." A professional interpreter would have known that "intoxicado" is closer to "poisoned" and doesn't carry the same connotations of drug or alcohol use that "intoxicated" does. Ramirez's family believed he was suffering from food poisoning. He was actually suffering from an intracerebral hemorrhage, but the doctors proceeded as if he were suffering from an intentional drug overdose, which can lead to some of the symptoms he displayed. Because of the delay in treatment, Ramirez was left quadriplegic. He received a malpractice settlement of $71 million.

2. Your lusts for the future

When President Carter traveled to Poland in 1977, the State Department hired a Russian interpreter who knew Polish, but was not used to interpreting professionally in that language. Through the interpreter, Carter ended up saying things in Polish like "when I abandoned the United States" (for "when I left the United States") and "your lusts for the future" (for "your desires for the future"), mistakes that the media in both countries very much enjoyed.

3. We will bury you

At the height of the cold war, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech in which he uttered a phrase that interpreted from Russian as "we will bury you." It was taken as chilling threat to bury the U.S. with a nuclear attack and escalated the tension between the U.S. and Russia. However, the translation was a bit too literal. The sense of the Russian phrase was more that "we will live to see you buried" or "we will outlast you." Still not exactly friendly, but not quite so threatening.

4. Do nothing

In 2009, HSBC bank had to launch a $10 million rebranding campaign to repair the damage done when its catchphrase "Assume Nothing" was mistranslated as "Do Nothing" in various countries.

5. Markets tumble

A panic in the world's foreign exchange market led the U.S. dollar to plunge in value after a poor English translation of an article by Guan Xiangdong of the China News Service zoomed around the Internet. The original article was a casual, speculative overview of some financial reports, but the English translation sounded much more authoritative and concrete.

6. What's that on Moses's head?

St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, studied Hebrew so he could translate the Old Testament into Latin from the original, instead of from the third century Greek version that everyone else had used. The resulting Latin version, which became the basis for hundreds of subsequent translations, contained a famous mistake. When Moses comes down from Mount Sinai his head has "radiance" or, in Hebrew, "karan." But Hebrew is written without the vowels, and St. Jerome had read "karan" as "keren," or "horned." From this error came centuries of paintings and sculptures of Moses with horns and the odd offensive stereotype of the horned Jew.

7. Chocolates for him

In the 50s, when chocolate companies began encouraging people to celebrate Valentine's Day in Japan, a mistranslation from one company gave people the idea that it was customary for women to give chocolate to men on the holiday. And that's what they do to this day. On February 14, the women of Japan shower their men with chocolate hearts and truffles, and on March 14 the men return the favor. An all around win for the chocolate companies!

8. You must defeat Sheng Long

In the Japanese video game Street Fighter II a character says, "if you cannot overcome the Rising Dragon Punch, you cannot win!" When this was translated from Japanese into English, the characters for "rising dragon" were interpreted as "Sheng Long." The same characters can have different readings in Japanese, and the translator, working on a list of phrases and unaware of the context, thought a new person was being introduced to the game. Gamers went crazy trying to figure out who this Sheng Long was and how they could defeat him. In 1992, as an April Fools Day joke, Electronic Gaming Monthly published elaborate and difficult to execute instructions for how to find Sheng Long. It wasn't revealed as a hoax until that December, after countless hours had no doubt been wasted.

9. Trouble at Waitangi

In 1840, the British government made a deal with the Maori chiefs in New Zealand. The Maori wanted protection from marauding convicts, sailors, and traders running roughshod through their villages, and the British wanted to expand their colonial holdings. The Treaty of Waitangi was drawn up and both sides signed it. But they were signing different documents. In the English version, the Maori were to "cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty." In the Maori translation, composed by a British missionary, they were not to give up sovereignty, but governance. They thought they were getting a legal system, but keeping their right to rule themselves. That's not how it turned out, and generations later the issues around the meaning of this treaty are still being worked out.

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9 Little Translation Mistakes That Caused Big Problems

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Knowing how to speak two languages is not the same thing as knowing how to translate. Translation is a special skill that professionals work hard to develop.

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15 words that don't mean what they used to

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15 words that don't mean what they used to

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Estas palabras en inglés han cambiado significado totalmente, y algunos raramente ya se escuchan. Uno de los más raros es que “to defecate” significaba “to purify” or “inmate” significaba “housemate or tenant”. El significado original para algunos han cambiado muy recientemente. Por ejemplo, “bully”, usado por Theodore Roosevelt en describir la presidencia como “bully pulpit”, significaba “superb, wonderful”.

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From mouth-watering gourmet chocolate to gear for outdoor adventures, these Mother's Day gifts are perfect for all Mom's interests.

When this herb-scented candle is finished burning, the container can serve as a rustic planter for a mini herb garden. Included is a plantable paper disc containing oregano, basil, and parsley seeds. All you need is dirt.

These dice are perfect for days when mom needs a little inspiration for dinner. The nine dice are engraved with options for protein, grains/carbs, vegetables, and more. With 186,000 possible combinations, it should take care of planning family meals for a while.

These whimsical Neapolitan-colored ice cream cone dishes are perfect for enjoying high-end gelato or a little Ben & Jerry's.

MarieBelle New York specializes in ganaches decorated with edible artwork. This eight-piece set of handmade chocolates is packaged in a tote bag-shaped gift box.

Double up: This glass hexagon dish will upgrade any bedside table, while also storing jewelry, car keys, or change.

Find It: Urban Outfitters

Show her how much you appreciate her Rosie outlook with this ceramic mug inspired by the iconic cultural icon. The cup is available in standard 11-ounce size, a tall 12-ounce container, or a 15-ounce travel mug.

Help Mom get into a Zen state of mind with this bath gift set from Lollia, which includes lavender and honey-scented bar soap, hand cream, and a candle with a crystal charm.

She'll love the sweets in this box from top luxury chocolatier Recchiuti, where every piece is made by hand. Featured ingredients for this box of beautifully-designed truffles include hazelnuts from Italy, peppermint from Willamette Valley, and coffee from Hawaii.

Find It: Recchiuti Confections

For the mom who can never get enough coffee: This fragrant handmade vegan soap is made from a strong pot of organic java. Plus, the coffee grounds act as natural exfoliants.

Mom will feel very distinguished in this luxurious Monet silk scarf from the gift shop of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's printed with Claude Monet's Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil.

Find It: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Store

Tasting boards aren't only for beer. This tray-made from acacia wood and slate-can hold up to four glasses. Soapstone chalk included.

When mom pours her wine into the interior chamber of this glass, she can watch it become perfectly aerated. This set of two is made of dishwasher-safe pyrex glass.

Regular ice cubes can water down a glass of wine, but these wine twirls (made of food-safe resin) act as a brilliant substitute: Pop them in the freezer and then into your glass and you'll have chilled wine that won't get diluted. This set comes with two twirls and two stemless wine glasses.

Give Mom the spa-treatment with this toxin-free loofah dipped in fragrant soap. The loofah is sourced from a gourd plant, so it's eco-friendly, while the soap features moisturizing coconut oil.

Want to make your mom breakfast in bed on Mother's Day, but can't cook? This complete brunch gift basket from Harry & David has everything: triple cheese and caramelized onion quiche, Canadian bacon, English muffins, maple syrup butter, and lemon poppyseed Bundt cake.

Buying for a shoe-loving mom who's both sporty and chic? Look no further than Forsake's Alma wedge bootie. Made of waterproof leather and sporting "peak-to-pavement" traction, these shoes are comfortable right out of the box-we walked 5 miles in the pair Forsake sent us to test and our feet didn't hurt a bit.

This 28-liter nylon bag-which can be used as either a backpack or a tote-is perfect for the mom needs to lug clothes and shoes to the gym, bring groceries back from the store, or take a weekend trip. (Mystery Ranch gave us a bag to test, and we used it for all three.) In addition to its roomy main compartment, there's a front compartment, a zippered exterior pocket, and exterior access to a compartment that will fit a 15-inch laptop.

These work pants are tailor-made for ladies to wear while they're outdoors getting stuff done like a boss, from gardening to chopping wood. Made of cotton canvas duck cloth, they have reinforcements in the front legs and seat, a high-cut back for maximum coverage, and three pockets designed for a pencil, notebook, and knife.

Moms with green thumbs will love The Sill's Mother's Day bundles. Get a bird's nest fern and a "plant mom" tote for $65; a trio of tiny succulents for $67.50; three air plants and a "plant mom" pin for $66; or a hedgehog aloe and tote for $66. All plants come in The Sill's pots (except for the airplants; those come on little metal stands).

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15 Words That Don't Mean What They Used To

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From mouth-watering gourmet chocolate to gear for outdoor adventures, these Mother's Day gifts are perfect for all Mom's interests. When this herb-scented candle is finished burning, the container can serve as a rustic planter for a mini herb garden. Included is a plantable paper disc containing oregano, basil, and parsley seeds.

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Phono semantic matching in corporate branding

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Phono semantic matching in corporate branding

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El concepto de phono-semantic matching es una mezcla de la fonética y la semántica. Basicamente, es un equilibrio entre los dos. Muchas empresas multinacionales están practicando el phono-semantic matching para atraer la mayor cantidad posible de clientes a su productoen países extranjeros. El mayor problema para estas empresas se encuentra en China, con un idioma formado por los tonos y escrita con caracteres individuos.

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When Coca-Cola was first sold in China, some called it " bite the wax tadpole." To others, it was " female horse fastened with wax," or "wax-flattened mare." These inscrutable names were the unfortunate result of shopkeepers' makeshift translations-they used any set of Chinese characters that sounded vaguely like "Coca-Cola."

Coca-Cola quickly regained control over their brand and publicized a new, official translation: Kĕ kŏu kĕ lè in Pinyin, the official Romanization system for Standard Chinese (可口可乐 in Chinese simplified characters). The name is often heralded as the perfect brand translation: the sounds recapitulate the English name, and the meaning-roughly, "tasty fun"-reflects positively on the brand. In linguistics, this translation is called a phono-semantic match: it preserves both the phonetics (sound) and semantics (meaning) associated with a brand. With increasing globalization, phono-semantic matching can be an indispensable tool for introducing foreign concepts to other languages.

Phono-semantic matches can occur in any language, but it's rare in English. Among the few examples is chaise-lounge, a phono-semantic match for the French chaise-longue (long sofa), or the phrase "What gives," thought to be a phono-semantic match for German " Was gibt's" (what's happening"). There are so few examples because in English, clusters of sounds don't have inherent meaning, so it's hard to borrow words from other languages that preserve sound and meaning. As a result, English mostly borrows words wholesale from other languages, like fjord, or champagne.

But some languages, like Chinese, lend themselves to phono-semantic matches. In Chinese, each individual syllable, like the "ke," "kou," and "la" sounds used in the makeshift Coca-Cola translations, has multiple meanings. This is because Chinese is a tonal language; the Mandarin dialect, for instance, has four tones, while Cantonese has six. A single sound like "la" can be pronounced with these different tones, each of which represents a different word, or sometimes even multiple words. While "la" means nothing in English on its own, it can mean lots of different things in Chinese, depending on its tone: to pull; to slash; scabies; spicy; bald; and, as seen in the strange Coca-Cola translations, wax.

"You're looking for sounds that are beautiful, harmonious, attractive, romantic."

This presents many opportunities for Chinese to create translated brand names that mimic the sounds of other languages while also preserving the original meaning. "Phono-semantic matching by commercial brand names is like singing," says Ghi'lad Zuckermann, the professor of linguistics at the University of Adelaide who coined the phrase. "You're looking for sounds that are beautiful, harmonious, attractive, romantic-but you don't care about the [Mandarin] tones."

As more Western businesses expand into China in hopes of attracting the country's growing middle class, they're embracing Chinese phono-semantic translations. Some, like Coca-Cola, have switched their brand names to be phono-semantic matches. For instance, Polaroid switched their name from a phonetic translation-Băo lì lái (宝丽来), characters that mean "precious," "beautiful," and "to come"-to a phono-semantic match-Pāi lì de (拍立得), meaning '"to instantly take," like the picture itself. One survey of 100 foreign companies in China found that phono-semantic matching is the most popular method of translating brand names-about half of businesses used the method.

Others matched the phonetics of the English brand name-for example, McDonald's is Mài dàng láo (麦当劳) in China, which translates to the gibberish phrase "wheat be labor," and Pizza Hut is Bì shèng kè (必胜客), which translates to "must win customers," making the brand sound desperate or even vaguely threatening. A third method companies use is to translate the semantics of the brand. This can result in similarly out of touch or confusing results, like Microsoft, which went with Wēi ruǎn (微软), or literally "tiny, soft."

Pizza Hut is Bì shèng kè (必胜客), which translates to "must win customers"

Phono-semantic matches offer benefits that matching just phonetics or semantics doesn't. For one, consumers may be more likely to remember brands with phono-semantic matches, since the names also represent specific concepts. Phono-semantic matches are also an opportunity for companies to connect with consumers' local cultural values. Some brands use phono-semantic matches that evoke qualities attributed to powerful animals in Chinese lore: BMW goes by Bǎo mǎ (宝马) or "treasure horse," Citroen calls itself Xuě tiě lóng (雪铁龙), or "snow iron dragon," and Yahoo! is Yǎ hǔ (雅虎), or "elegant tiger."

Others companies use phono-semantic matches that evoke positive concepts like luck, happiness, or prosperity, or attributes of the product itself. One particularly clever example is Lègāo (乐 高), the Chinese phono-semantic match for Lego, which translates to "happy and tall." With this simple, short name, Lego evokes positive feelings and imagery of the tall towers children will build with the product.

But relying on generically positive words can also result in unoriginal brand names. For instance, Měi lè (美乐), or Miller Beer, which means "beautiful, happy," and Dá měi lè (达美乐), or Domino's Pizza, meaning "distinguished, beautiful, happy" evoke an overlapping set of positive ideas. But their nearly identical sounding names may confuse consumers, and dilute the name recognition of both brands.

There are also some characters "used so much in brand or product names that they're almost understood to be associated with just brand names," says Tait Lawton, who co-founded the Nanjing Marketing Group, which consults with companies to help branding efforts in China. "Some characters are used so often to represent sounds, that they are simply understood to be sounds." For instance, sī (斯) is used in brand names like Tesla (Tè sī lā 特斯拉), Adidas (Ā dí dá sī 阿迪达斯), Levi's (Li wéi sī 李维斯), and Mercedes-Benz (Méi sài dé sī bēn chí 梅赛德斯奔驰). Because of its frequent use in foreign brand name translations, names with that character are typically perceived as foreign.

When a company is unsure of what cultural values sounds or words hold, or how best to represent the brand's values in a foreign language, consultants like Nanjing Marketing Group can help. For each client, Lawton and his team generates around 40 potential names, then whittles down their list to four or five top contenders, which they field test with native speakers through surveys or focus groups. And because Chinese has many dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible, they also test for how those names translate in roughly 40 dialects.

The word 'beauty' was related to decadent bourgeois aesthetics.

Designing for a specific audience is a critical aspect of creating a phono-semantic match. China is a big country; different regions have different cultural values or political backgrounds for companies to consider. UK soap brand Lux's efforts to expand into China in the 1980s serves as a cautionary tale: Lux's Western logo always displayed a beautiful young woman, and the company attempted to use two different phono-semantic matches to project this image, both pronounced lì shí: in mainland China, it went by力士, or "strong man," but in Taiwan, it was 丽士, or "beauty." Marketing scholar Ying Fan unspools why that was such a marketing disaster in a 2002 paper:

"An explanation can be found in the ideological differences existing in the two parts of China. While 'beauty' would be an acceptable name in the PRC [mainland China] today, it was certainly a problem back in the 1980s. Under the orthodox communist doctrine, 'beauty' was related to decadent bourgeois aesthetics."

Alienism can be an asset in some cases-upscale brands like Apple and Hermès remain untranslated to retain an air of exclusivity-but most companies want to blend into a country's cultural fabric, and good phono-semantic matches are an effective tool to do so.

Chief among their concerns is preventing foreign loanwords from "polluting" traditional Icelandic Phono-semantic matches go beyond global marketing; they can also appear in languages' everyday words especially in countries grappling with political or economic change. Consider Iceland, where the government mandates that children must have Icelandic names, and founded the Icelandic Language Institute as a way of preserving its home language. Chief among their concerns is preventing foreign loanwords from "polluting" traditional Icelandic; with English becoming the lingua franca on other continents, many countries fear that their home languages will become perverted by the encroachment of English words.

Yet, phono-semantic matching has allowed foreign influence to sneak in without being noticed. The word for AIDS in Icelandic is eyðni, pronounced "aid-ni," from the root eyða, meaning "to destroy," and the English word yuppie has been incorporated into the language as uppi, from the root upp, meaning "up," a nod to yuppies' upward mobility. Similarly, Arabic has created phono-semantic matches for modern concepts like technology and mitochondria by mimicking the sounds of those English words, but using Arabic roots that relate conceptually. For example, mitochondria is mutaqaddirah, from a root that means "power"-an allusion to the role of mitochondria as the "powerhouse" of cells.

Zuckermann calls phono-semantic matching "a mechanism of cultural interaction"-they allow languages to coin words for new international concepts like yuppies and AIDS while masking foreign influence. There's linguistic evidence that this phenomenon has been a key part of cultural exchange long before the present day. The Turkish okul (school) was a phono-semantic match created from the French école. Over the centuries, the word artichoke has been passed between Romance languages like Spanish and Italian to English and then to Arabic as a phono-semantic match أرضي شوكي (pronounced "ardy-shuky"), a merging of roots أرضي ("ardy"), meaning "earthly, terrestrial, of ground" and شوكي ("shuky"), meaning "thorny, prickly." Phono-semantic matches were also common in Japan at the end of the 19 th century, as the country was accelerating industrialization and increasing contact with Western countries: the Japanese word for business suit, Sabiro (背広), is named for the posh Savile Row district of London.

As globalization speeds cultural exchange, we can expect to see more linguistic sharing-and, most likely, more phono-semantic matches. Zuckermann says that in China, at least, there has been an uptick in phono-semantic matches as the country has "opened to America" since its Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s. "[Phono-semantic matches] are a beautiful way of flirting with the West without losing your own roots," says Zuckermann. And as English words spread through international business, research collaborations, and travel, phono-semantic matching gives languages a way of introducing new concepts in the best kind of cultural exchange: melding new ideas through finding common ground.

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The genius and stupidity of corporate America are on display when companies rebrand for new countries

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When Coca-Cola was first sold in China, some called it "bite the wax tadpole." To others, it was "female horse fastened with wax," or "wax-flattened mare." These inscrutable names were the unfortunate result of shopkeepers' makeshift translations-they used any set of Chinese characters that sounded vaguely like "Coca-Cola."

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Este chico nota destaca palabras  que usamos que provienen principalmente de náhuatl, una lengua indígena. Unas palabras son chocolate, aguacate, tomate, coyote. Lo más interesante es que el nombre de chocolate, una comida conocida por todo el mundo, viene de náhuatl.

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7 Mexican words you use  El Nahuatl en el mundo

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7 Mexican words you use El Nahuatl en el mundo In Mexico people don't speak only Spanish. About two million people speak Náhuatl, a Mexican indigenous language; and this is only one of the dozens of Mexican indigenous languages. These tongues have not just influenced Spanish, but also many other languages through food and animals.

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Este articulo enseña cómo hablar como un romano. Aunque no podamos estar seguro de la pronunciación, en latín es probable que el <v> se pronunciaba como w, basado en el evolución de ciertas palabras latín como vinum a wine en íngles o wins en gótica.

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Cuál es la origen del famoso “lisp” del castellano en Espana? No, no empezó por un rey con un lisp actual. Sino, este lisp, o theta [θ] probablemente evolucionó naturalmente de los sonidos ts, para c, y dz, para z.  Sin embargo, este cambio no sucedió en Andalucía. next=:�=�H�

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Un video bien breve que muestra las similitudes entre el árabe y español. Ciertas palabras muy comunes de hecho vienen del árabe. Algunos parecen similares a nuestras palabras en inglés como pantalones y música. Esto no es coincidencia, pero los ingleses no recibieron estas palabras a través de los árabes, sino probablemente a través del francés u otro idioma romántico.

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Arabic vs.Spanish vocabulary | How spanish words sound in arabic ?

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Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history. Many words of Arabic origin are found in ancient languages like Latin and Greek. Arabic influence is seen mainly in Spanish and Portuguese languages. There are spanish words that sound the same way as in arabic language.

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Order force: the old grammar rule we all obey without realizing

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Order force: the old grammar rule we all obey without realizing

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Aparentemente tenemos una regla en ingles de que ninguno de nosotros ha oído. Se conoce como el orden de los adjetivos y la regla es así: si estás usando más de un adjetivo antes de un sustantivo, son sujetos a una jerarquía. La jerarquía es la siguiente: opinión, tamaño, edad, forma, color, origen, material, y propósito.

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regularly have cause to recall a scene from a novel called Madder Music, by Peter de Vries, in which the main character, a writer who specialises in polo, hears a match announcer telling newcomers to the ground that, contrary to popular belief, the ball is struck with the side of the mallet, rather than the end. The writer, having never realised this before, feels obliged to abandon his life's work on the spot.

It's a chillingly familiar feeling, although my side-of-the-mallet moments tend to be about writing itself, or at least about language. I was well into my second decade of journalism before I found out that "enormity" is a synonym for monstrosity or wickedness - not hugeness. In practice, you can almost always pretend you meant monstrosity, since huge things are often also monstrous. But that didn't stop my ears going hot when it was first pointed out to me.

Last week it happened again, when a paragraph from a book called The Elements of Eloquence went viral on social media. The paragraph concerned the order of adjectives - if you're using more than one adjective before a noun, they are subject to a certain hierarchy. You know it's proper to say "silly old fool" and wrong to say "old silly fool", but you might never have thought about why - or if you did you probably imagined it was just some time-honoured convention you picked up by rote. But it isn't. There's a rule.

The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can't say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots. And yet until last week, I had no idea such a rule existed.

In this case my ignorance does not constitute a professional emergency, since I doubt I've ever put adjectives in the wrong order. If you're a native speaker, the hierarchy is ingrained in you. Only people trying to learn English actually need to know the rule. But I've duly ordered a copy of the book, just in case there's anything else in there I didn't know.

In a piece for the BBC, The Elements of Eloquence author Mark Forsyth examines a rare exception to the adjectival hierarchy: the Big Bad Wolf. Bad is opinion, and should therefore come first. However, as Forsyth points out, this phrase is too busy obeying another rule I'd never heard of: the rule of ablaut reduplication.

Other examples of the rule in action include chit-chat, singsong, flipflop and hip-hop. When you shift vowel sounds for effect this way, the vowels always follow a specific order: I, then A, then O. You'd think it was more complicated, that it depended on mood or context, but no, it's that simple - bosh bash bish.

The Dictionary of American Regional English is trying to encourage podcasters to employ endangered American words and expressions in the hope of preserving them. A list including "fleech" (to wheedle or flatter) and "to spin street yarn" (to gossip) has been drawn up. The problem with endangered words is that no one knows what they mean any more. You can't chuck them into a conversation without stopping it.

This news comes as the Oxford English Dictionary welcomes the word yolo, among others, into its quarterly update. This strikes me as a little bit hasty - I don't really fancy yolo's chances in the long term. We put up with the expression "you only live once" for a long time without anybody deciding it required a dedicated acronym. It was never a terribly profound sentiment, and making it shorter doesn't help much, unless you need to tattoo it on your knuckles. I think you'd regret the decision in any case - the days when yolo stops a conversation because nobody knows what you're talking about are coming sooner than you think.

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Order force: the old grammar rule we all obey without realising | Tim Dowling

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regularly have cause to recall a scene from a novel called Madder Music, by Peter de Vries, in which the main character, a writer who specialises in polo, hears a match announcer telling newcomers to the ground that, contrary to popular belief, the ball is struck with the side of the mallet, rather than the end.

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Una tribu en Brasil que se llama la Pirahã tiene un idioma que falta el rasgo de recursión, según Dan Everett. Noam Chomsky ha afirmado que todos idiomas del mundo tienen este rasgo, pero Dan Everett ha descubierto algo diferente. Ya que la visión del mundo de la tribu es limitada, también su sintaxis es limitada. Según él, sus oraciones tienen una largura finita.

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Is language innate to humans? Are we born "pre-wired" to spontaneously speak whichever language we hear in the first months of our lives? That is, are our brains equipped - at least metaphorically - with some sort of language organ, the hardware on which the software of our parents' and tribe's language runs? Noam Chomsky, who introduced the notion of pre-wiring in 1957, claims that a Martian linguist would consider all 6,000 of Earth's languages to be variations on a single "universal grammar." Deep down, says Chomsky, all languages work the same because we come into the world with a similar capacity for language built into our genes. (See "Noam Chomsky: Copernicus of Linguistics," July 30, 2009.)

Or is language a human invention? Is it like stone axes or huts? "The discovery that humans are better at building human houses than porpoises tells us nothing about whether the architecture of human houses is innate," wrote Dan Everett, who leads the charge against Chomsky's thesis.

Everett, a loyal Chomskyite until 2000, is an unlikely antagonist. He went as a missionary to live with the Pirahã, a tribe of 300 or so hunter-gatherers in the Brazilian rainforest on the Maici River. His original intention in 1977 was to convert them to Christianity but they had no interest in being "saved." Years of observing their joy-filled, live-for-the-day attitude converted him to atheism. Meanwhile, he struggled to learn their esoteric language (three vowels, eight consonants, present tense only, no number or color words and 65,000 possible verb forms). Today he is probably the only outsider fluent in Pirahã.

Everett claims that the Pirahã language lacks recursion, a trait that Chomsky maintained, in a paper he co-wrote for Science in 2002, is "the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language." Recursion is what we do when we embed one thought inside another using subordinate or relative clauses like Russian nesting dolls. "I saw the guy you said wore the same hat you bought from the shop we went to yesterday next to the market where ...". Recursion implies that there's no limit to the potential length of a sentence.

Because the tribe's worldview is limited, so is the syntax of their language, in Everett's view. Anything outside the members' immediate experience - i.e. that they haven't either seen for themselves or heard from an eyewitness - is simply not worth discussing, thus limiting their range of conversation topics, thereby eliminating the need for recursion; their sentences have finite length. To use Everett's example, you can't say "John's brother's house" in Pirahã. Instead, you say (sentence one) "John has a brother," and, (sentence two) "this brother has a house." If true, it threatens not only Chomsky's claim that every language has recursion, but the entire edifice of universal grammar.

Sound arcane? This is the stuff and substance of the high-octane language wars that have raged for decades. Chomsky is on record calling his erstwhile acolyte a charlatan - essentially accusing Everett of faking his data. (Read Everett's stranger-than-fiction book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes to judge for yourself.) If you harbor a romantic view of science as a rational, fact-driven process in which human emotions are secondary to the nobler ideals of Truth and Integrity, check out the Chomsky versus Everett saga. Possibly as a result of Everett's Pirahã challenge, Chomsky modified his bedrock requirement for "recursion," diluting it somewhat and renaming it "merge."

The recursion/merge debate and Chomsky's hypothesis of universal grammar are muddier than ever. Or maybe it's fading from relevance as a new generation of linguists accepts that language acquisition is possible without genetic grammar capacity. In the words of Ted Gibson, professor of both cognitive sciences and linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "It's crazy to say [universal grammar] is dead. It was never alive."

Barry Evans ( barryevans9@yahoo.com) is still looking for his brain's language organ.

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Is language innate to humans? Are we born "pre-wired" to spontaneously speak whichever language we hear in the first months of our lives? That is, are our brains equipped - at least metaphorically - with some sort of language organ, the hardware on which the software of our parents' and tribe's language runs?

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Once your kids can read easy books, start reading them hard ones

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Once your kids can read easy books, start reading them hard ones

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Trata del trabajo de Doug Lemov, un autor, basado en lo cual afirma que es importante animar a tus niños a leer libros más complejos  una vez han dominado los fáciles. Es que los libros difíciles utilizan la sintaxis compleja, y cuando los niños no entienden un pasaje, frecuentemente es que una oración complicada les confunden. Entonces les sirve a los niños oír o leer libros complejos.

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In the annals of great parenting moments, the one where the kids clamber onto the couch by themselves with their very own longish-book is an awesome one. They've mastered the de-coding, they've got the sounds, and they can follow a simple plot. Time to kick back and watch them lose themselves in literature, right?

Wrong.

Doug Lemov, author of Teach like a Champion and co-author of Reading Reconsidered argues that's just the moment to read to them more-and to choose challenging texts, far above their reading level. He writes:

Yes, encourage your kids to practise decoding and fluency on accessible texts. But also realise that being read to from books that are more complex than they can read on their own prepares them for the gatekeeper task: understanding difficult ideas and complex texts.

There are multiple benefits to reading kids hard books, he argues. Some are obvious, like exposing them to more complex vocabulary. Some are less so, such as exposing them to more complicated sentences and more elaborate plot lines, which better prepares them for when they encounter those on their own further down the road.

Books use words we don't. Lemov read his second-grader Island of the Blue Dolphins, a sixth-grade text, and found "befall", "glisten", "pelt", and "decree". Most of us don't talk like that, so the only way to learn words like that is to read them or have them read to you.

Hard books also use complex syntax, or complicated sentences. He's found that when kids don't understand a passage it's often because an intricate sentence tripped them up.

He offers this example: "She stepped forward quickly to help, only to find that her muscles, her tendons, would not obey." The point of the passage is that she did not help. But it is easy to misunderstand it, and take away just the opposite.

"Hearing complex syntax read aloud builds an affinity for a different kind of vocabulary. Call it the vocabulary of syntax," he writes in Tes, a British forum for educators.

Finally, introducing hard books means grappling with complicated plots with a grown-up there to help you decipher them. As as we know, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or House of Cards, while complicated, can be gloriously rewarding.

Kids should pick books they love, and read what they want on their own. Agency is key. But there is a popular perception that to get kids to love to read, we should make it easy. That way they can make it through, build confidence, and ideally, start to love reading on their own.

Lemov has more faith in kids, as long as they can harness the help of parents or other caregivers to help them along. "Because challenge is far more engaging in the long run than pandering," he writes.

Considering how much time we spend reading useless banter on Twitter, or scrolling through Instagram to revel in someone else's perfect holiday, it's worth thinking if this might be a better use of half an hour.

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Once your kids can read easy books, start reading them hard ones

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In the annals of great parenting moments, the one where the kids clamber onto the couch by themselves with their very own longish-book is an awesome one. They've mastered the de-coding, they've got the sounds, and they can follow a simple plot. Time to kick back and watch them lose themselves in literature, right?

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Este video analiza el lenguaje del Donald Trump y cómo usa la sintaxis en el lenguaje. La manera en que Trump construye sus oraciones se enfocan en destacar algunas palabras, a menudo al final de la oración. También la mayoría de las oraciones son oraciones simples, no complejas.

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Científicos grabaron audio de geladas, un tipo de primate, haciendo vocalizaciones que significa algo para ellos. La grabación presenta varios sonidos usados para atraer hembras. _

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Study examines different calls, analyzing the structure and placement

Call combinations may describe nature of a threat, and degree of danger

Calls may have their own regular meanings independent from the others

And, they might change depending on the environment, researchers say

Linguists and primatologists have joined forces to create the groundwork for 'primate linguistics,' helping to decipher the meanings behind monkey speech.

The comprehensive study examines the calls of different species, analyzing the structure and placement of these vocalizations, and explains what individual calls and sequences mean.

While the language of primates may not be as complex as our own, researchers say these animals demonstrate linguistic capabilities that are both 'exciting and sometimes challenging.'

The study, led by an international team of researchers, was published recently in the journals Natural Language & linguistic Theory, and builds on earlier research.

'We can now study the form and meaning of monkey calls using methods from theoretical linguistics,' explains Philippe Schlenker, a senior researcher at institute Jean-Nicod within France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.

'Using this approach, we can compare one monkey species to another and see, for instance, that some of their calls have been preserved over three million years.'

Researchers say there is evidence of primate morphology, the structure of calls, in Africa's Campbell's monkeys.

These monkeys differentiate between roots - in particular, the researchers note, 'hok' and 'krak' - and suffixes, including 'oo.'

The way these calls are combined allows Campbell's monkeys to describe the nature of a threat, and the degree of danger.

Saying 'hok' will indicate a serious aerial threat, like an eagle, while 'hok-oo' is more general.

For these monkeys, the term 'krak' is often related to a leopard sighting, but can act as a general alert call when there is no leopard around.

The researchers also examined the syntax of primate calls - how they form sentences.

In 'primate semantics,' Campbell's monkeys used 'boom' calls.

These often come in pairs, but typically appear at the beginning of a call sequence.

For Putty-nosed monkeys, however, 'pyows' are a general alert call, while 'hacks' are related to an eagle sighting.

When combined, with a small number of 'pyows' followed by a small number of 'hacks,' the monkey will essentially say 'let's move.'

Previous studies have compared these types of sequences to idioms in the human language, but the new research suggests this may not be the case.

Instead, the researchers say there may be some degree of regularity in the 'pyow-hack' sequences.

Similar issues can be seen when examining the call sequences of the South American Titi monkeys.

These monkeys used two types of calls - A and B - to alert others of predator type and location.

According to the researchers, 'raptor in the canopy,' (e.g. AAAA...), 'raptor on the ground,' (e.g. AAA...BBBB...), 'cat in the canopy,' (e.g. ABBBB...), and 'cat on the ground' (e.g. BBBBB...) allow for four distinct sequence types.

These calls may have their own regular meanings independent from the others, and might change depending on the environment.

An 'A' call may signal serious danger overhead, while a 'B' call may say 'there is an alert.'

The researchers note that it's important to analyze monkey languages separately from the concepts of human languages, and simple meanings and structures should usually be assigned.

But when it comes to a linguistic tool called 'implicature,' the researchers say they've found 'illuminating' evidence.

This tool is seen when the meaning of a word is 'enriched' when competing with a more informing alternative.

In the Titi monkeys, a general alert call ('B') may compete with another, more specific call ('A'), meaning 'serious danger up.'

If the threat lines up better with the specific call, as in the instance of a predatory bird overhead, the monkeys prefer this alternative over the general version.

The researchers also say that the comparisons of speech between different species can reveal information on the family tree stretching back millions of years.

The Campbell's 'boom' calls can be seen among several species that diverged millions of years ago, for example, and plotting those which do and do not use this pattern suggests the most recent common ancestor used these as well.

According the researchers, this study provides the stepping stones for 'evolutionary monkey linguistics,' and could help to explain how their communication evolved over millions of years.

'The findings show that methods from linguistics can illuminate communication systems beyond human language,' Schlenker says, 'and in the future they might find further domains of applications beyond primates.'

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Researchers reveal the first 'primate linguistics' guide

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Study examines different calls, analyzing the structure and placement Call combinations may describe nature of a threat, and degree of danger Calls may have their own regular meanings independent from the others And, they might change depending on the environment, researchers say Linguists and primatologists have joined forces to create the groundwork for 'primate linguistics,' helping to decipher the meanings behind monkey speech.

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David J. Peterson ha inventado nuevas lenguas para varias programas de televisión. Una de ellas se usa en Game of Thrones. Utiliza las técnicas de lingüísticas como morfología para crear un sistema entera de lenguaje.  Ahora está empleado completamente por su habilidad como creador de lengua.

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The Man Who Invented High Valyrian and Dothraki

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How one linguist creates obsessively detailed-and fully functional-languages for Game of Thrones and other shows

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Linguists team up with primatologists to crack the meaning of monkey calls

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Linguists team up with primatologists to crack the meaning of monkey calls

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Por mucho tiempo se ha sabido que los monos transmiten información por llamadas de alarma, pero ahora un equipo de lingüistas y primatólogas han aplicado contemporáneos métodos de la lingüística a la morfología de los monos.  Los autores de la investigación enfatizan que la lengua mono no tiene la complejidad de la lengua humana, pero todavía los monos exhiben propiedades de comunicación muy fascinantes.   *:N���oC��

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It has long been known that monkeys convey information through alarm calls, but now a combined team of linguists and primatologists has laid the groundwork for a systematic 'primate linguistics.'

In a series of five articles published in multiple linguistics journals, the authors have brought the general methods of contemporary linguistics to bear on monkey morphology (pertaining to the structure of calls), syntax (how the calls are put together into sequences), and semantics (what calls and call sequences mean), building on several earlier studies conducted within primatology.

"We can now study the form and meaning of monkey calls using methods from theoretical linguistics," explains Philippe Schlenker, a senior researcher at Institut Jean-Nicod within France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. "Using this approach, we can compare one monkey species to another and see, for instance, that some of their calls have been preserved over three million years."

The research, which Schlenker co-authored with Emmanuel Chemla, a research scientist at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), and Klaus Zuberbühler, a professor at Switzerland's University of Neuchâtel, appears in the journals Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Lingua and Theoretical Linguistics and follows an earlier study in Linguistics & Philosophy. The team of authors includes several other primatologists and linguists, as well as a statistician.

The authors emphasize that monkey languages in no way have the complexity of human language, but that they still display exciting and sometimes challenging formal properties.

With respect to primate morphology, Campbell's monkeys, found in Africa, make a distinction between roots (especially "hok" and "krak") and suffixes ("-oo"), and their combination allows the monkeys to describe both the nature of a threat and its degree of danger. For instance, "hok" warns of serious aerial threats -- usually eagles -- whereas "hok-oo" can be used for a variety of general aerial disturbances; in effect, the suffix "-oo" serves as a kind of attenuator. The same monkeys display a limited amount of dialectal variation in the meaning of a call, "krak," which has a leopard-related meaning in one site and a 'general alert' meaning in another, from which leopards are absent (this was the topic of the first article in the series, published in 2014).

But calls are also combined in interesting ways -- a possible instance of elementary 'primate syntax,' which raises questions about how the meanings of monkey calls are combined ('primate semantics'). Campbell's monkeys have "boom" calls, which usually come in pairs -- but these are constrained to appear at the beginning of call sequences. In Putty-nosed monkeys, "pyows" are used as general calls ('there is an alert'), while "hacks" are usually raptor-related (e.g. 'there is an eagle'). But a small number of "pyows" followed by a small number of "hacks" have a distinguished status and trigger group movement ('let's move!').

This raises a question for 'primate semantics,' the researchers observe: Can the meaning of these 'pyow-hack sequences' be derived from the meaning of the calls they contain? 'No,' answered earlier researchers, who went on to compare 'pyow-hack' sequences to 'idioms' in human language: although 'kick the bucket' contains the words 'kick' and 'bucket,' the expression has a meaning, namely 'die,' which involves no kicking and no bucket. More sophisticated methods used in the present analyses suggest that there might in fact be more regularity than meets the eye in 'pyow-hack' sequences, and that in the end these might not have to be analyzed as idioms.

The same general issues arise in remarkable call sequences produced by Titi monkeys (South America): with just two calls (A and B), they encode information about both predator type and predator location, so that 'raptor in the canopy' (e.g. AAAA...), 'raptor on the ground' (e.g. AAA...BBBB...), 'cat in the canopy,' (e.g. ABBBB...), and 'cat on the ground' (e.g. BBBBB...) give rise to four distinct sequence types. While these might seem to display a complex grammatical organization, the authors argue instead for a deflationary analysis in which the complexity of the sequence reflects, in part, changes in the environmental context, with each call having its own regular meaning independently from the others (A = 'there is a serious danger up,' B = 'there is an alert').

The authors insist that monkey languages should be analyzed on their own terms, without arbitrarily importing concepts from human language -- and in most cases they assign a simple meaning and structure to them. But one tool of contemporary linguistics, called 'implicatures,' has proven illuminating.

An implicature arises when the meaning of a word is enriched because it competes with a more informative alternative -- for instance, "possible" competes with "certain," which is more informative, and for this reason "possible" usually comes to mean "possible but not certain" (for instance: "It's possible that John is the culprit" -- which implies that this is not a certainty). The authors note that in many cases a general call -- for instance the Titi B-call, for 'general alerts' -- competes with a more specific call -- for instance the Titi A-call, for 'serious danger up.' If a threat licenses the specific call (for instance the A-call because a raptor appeared), monkeys don't normally start sequences with the general call (e.g. B), and thus they seem to prefer the more informative alternative -- a version of 'monkey implicatures.'

Besides offering a precise typology of the properties of several monkey languages, the authors suggest that extraordinary time depth can be obtained by comparing the calls of related species. Thus the Campbell's "boom" calls exist in several species that diverged millions of years ago. Plotting the species that do and don't have "booms" on a 'phylogenetic tree' (a family tree of related monkey species) obtained with chronologically precise DNA methods, one can see that entire, coherent subfamilies have "booms," which strongly suggests that their most recent common ancestor had them as well millions of years ago. This paves a way for an 'evolutionary monkey linguistics' that could explain how monkey communication evolved over millions of years.

"These findings show that methods from linguistics can illuminate communication systems beyond human language," notes Schlenker, "and in the future they might find further domains of application beyond primates."

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monkeys; animals; endangered animals; mammals; nature; new species; evolutionary biology; cats

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Linguists team up with primatologists to crack the meaning of monkey calls

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It has long been known that monkeys convey information through alarm calls, but now a combined team of linguists and primatologists has laid the groundwork for a systematic 'primate linguistics.'

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Book explores how our voices shape the rules of grammar

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Book explores how our voices shape the rules of grammar

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Norvin Richards, un profesor de la lingüística en MIT, desarrolló su teoría de contigüidad que postula que los sonidos de los idiomas han influido su sintaxis. Cree que hay que incorporar la fonología y morfología con estudio de sintaxis. Afirma que las diferencias del orden de palabras se plantean delas diferencias en prosodia y la posición del acento en la palabra. Eso explica porque algunas lenguas como Ingles tienen un “it” antes de los verbos al principio de una oración y el español no.

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Book explores how our voices shape the rules of grammar

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In English, declarative sentences do not usually begin with a verb. Let us suppose you are struggling in a language class, and complain about it to a friend.

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Este breve video demuestra las semejanzas entre el arabe y espanol. Fijense en la variedad de palabras y las menores diferencias entre la palabra en arabe y la palabra en espanol.

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Linguistic study proves more than 6,000 languages use similar sounds for common words

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Linguistic study proves more than 6,000 languages use similar sounds for common words

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Esta investigación descubrió que más de dos tercios de los idiomas del mundo usan los mismos sonidos para las mismas palabras. El estudio se enfocó en palabras básicas en cada idioma que describen los más común conceptos de los cuales la gente habla. Las investigadores encontraron que un porción significante de las cien palabras más básicas tienen un fuerte asociación con ciertos tipos de los sonidos de habla humana.

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Brain’s hippocampus helps fill in the blanks of language

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Brain’s hippocampus helps fill in the blanks of language

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Un nuevo experimento conducido por la Universidad de California, Berkeley, psicólogos, demuestra que la memoria y el lenguaje son de hecho, profundamente relacionado, vía el hipocampo. El hipocampo, localizado en el centre del cerebro, funciona como un router para lanzar memorias relacionadas.

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A new study shows that when you finish your spouse's sentences or answer a fill-in-the-blank question, you're engaging the brain's relay station for memories, an area that until now was largely neglected by scientists studying language.

It seems obvious that speaking and understanding language draw upon our memories - of words, context, people, etc. - but psychologists have typically studied language and memory as separate functions of the brain, essentially ignoring any interconnection.

A new experiment conducted by University of California, Berkeley, psychologists shows that memory and language are in fact deeply linked, via the hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory associations.

The hippocampus, nestled in the center of the brain, acts like a router to link related memories - the color, shape, feel, scent and taste of an orange, for example - so that we are able to make associations. The brain region's new role in relating incoming words to stored semantic knowledge is necessary in understanding and generating sentence meaning, the researchers say.

Interestingly, researchers recently reported patients with hippocampal damage who had exactly the sort of symptoms one would expect if the hippocampus were involved in language associations: problems relating word meanings to each other and extracting contextual information from sentences and discourse.

"The link between language and the hippocampus could be an explanation for some of the language deficits we see in patients who don't have damage to the language areas of the brain," said former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Vitória Piai, now a senior researcher at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. "I think that once we start studying language as it happens in real life, we will find that the hippocampus is doing more in the service of language than we thought before."

Intracranial recordings

The researchers recorded neuronal activity using electrodes inserted into the hippocampus of 12 people as they heard fill-in-the-blank sentences with an obvious answer: "He swept the floor with a ________," for example. In most of the subjects, the hippocampus showed highly synchronized activity as they homed in on the right answer while hearing the sentences but before a picture of the answer was displayed, a sign that the region was making associations throughout the brain to come up with the right word: in this case, broom.

According to Piai, deep-brain recording captures millisecond by millisecond neuron firings, showing precisely how the brain deals with language in real time. Language studies most often employ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures oxgyen flow in the brain, a slow process that doesn't allow researchers to measure activities that take place in a fraction of a second.

"Studies with fMRI show where things could be connected but it doesn't tell you how the brain is putting these things together," Piai said. "I think you can only get to the 'how' question once you start using electrophysiology, which has a more direct relationship to neural activity in the signal than deoxygenated blood has. This experiment is so exciting because of the possibility that we will start to understand language and memory in a more integrated way, start examining it as it really happens."

The study, co-authored with Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and former head of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, was published Sept. 19 in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Language and memory

"Language is something that has classically been viewed as evolving and occurring in the cortex, which is why we have language and rats don't," Knight said. "Despite the fact that the hippocampal area of the medial part of the temporal lobe is well known to be linked to spatial and verbal memory in humans, the two fields have been like ships running in the fog, unaware that the other ship is there."

In the new study, conducted in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial electrode studies at the UC Irvine Medical Center and Stanford University Medical Center to locate the source of their abnormal brain activity, Piai took advantage of a well-known behavioral effect to explore the involvement of the hippocampus in language. She recorded only from the non-epileptic hemisphere of the brain.

Previous studies of language have shown that people fill in the blank more quickly when a sentence has only one obvious answer - "She locked the door with the ________," for example - than when the sentence has many possible answers, such as "She came in here with the ________." In the new study, subjects heard six-syllable sentences, followed by a pause and then a brief flash of a picture of the answer. Subjects were asked to name the picture.

In 10 of the 12 subjects, only constrained sentences - those with a single obvious answer - caused a burst of synchronized theta waves in the hippocampus, activity characteristic of the hippocampus when it makes a memory association.

"Vitória showed that when you record directly from the human hippocampal region, as the sentence becomes more constraining, the hippocampus becomes more active, basically predicting what is going to happen," Knight said. "The hippocampus started building up rhythmic theta activity that is linked to memory access and memory processing."

Over the years, Knight and others have studied brain activity using electrodes on the brain surface, so-called electrocortiocography, or inserted into the brain, called intracranial recording, and shown that memory neurons vibrate between 1 and 80 cycles per second. Neurons representing associated memories, however, vibrate with a "theta" rhythm in the range of 4-8 cycles per second.

One theory is that when one of these associated neurons is triggered, all those vibrating with the same frequency fire simultaneously, giving us recall of related memories. The smell of an orange triggers a picture in the mind, the taste and smell of an orange, and any positive or negative emotions connected with oranges.

Similarly, a constrained sentence would gradually build up synchronized vibrations among related memories. For the sentence "He swept the floor with a ________," "swept" and "floor" trigger synchronized vibrations in different sets of neurons encoding related memories, overlapping with the only word tightly related to both: "broom."

Piai suspects that when we hear unconstrained sentences, the words do not bring up any related or overlapping associations.

The new findings could open up a whole new area of study with intracranial recordings to probe details of the connection between language and memory, Knight said.

"This study shows that memory contributes as a sentence is evolving in time; it is a real-time part of our language system, not a slave to the language system," he said.

Other co-authors are Kristopher Anderson and Callum Dewar of UC Berkeley, neurologists Jack Lin of UC Irvine Medical Center and Josef Parvizi of Stanford University Medical Center, and neuropsychologist Nina Dronkers of UC Davis and the Veterans Administration hospital in Martinez.

The research is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Sciences Research and Development Program, Stanford NeuroVentures Program, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Science Foundation and the Nielsen Corporation.
RELATED INFORMATION

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brain's hippocampus helps fill in the blanks of language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new study shows that when you finish your spouse's sentences or answer a fill-in-the-blank question, you're engaging the brain's relay station for memories, an area that until now was largely neglected by scientists studying language. It seems obvious that speaking and understanding language draw upon our memories - of words, context, people, etc.

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"From the Chickasaw Nation to Congo, tribes try new tech to keep their ancient tongues alive"

Este artículo se trata de un hombre Chickasaw, quien, al nacimiento de su primer hijo, se dio cuenta de que no tenía nada de su cultura Chickasaw para dar a su hijo. Quería que su hijo sea parte de la cultura Chickasaw. Uno de las mejores maneras de lograr esto es aprender la lengua de la cultura, entonces él partió en una jornada de aprender la lengua de su gente. Para realizarlo, y para ayudar a otros a aprender Chickasaw también, creó un app que puede ayudar a la gente en el proceso.

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Joshua Hinson's first biological son was born in 2000. His son's birth marked the start of the sixth generation that would grow up speaking English instead of Chickasaw, which was the primary language his ancestors had spoken for hundreds of years. Hinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Texas. Other than a small handful of words, he knew almost nothing about his ancestral language-formally known as Chikashshanompa'. Hinson had a few pangs of sadness over the years about what was lost, but it didn't really affect him-until his son was born.

As he counted the 10 tiny fingers and 10 tiny toes of his firstborn child, Hinson realized he had nothing to teach his son about his Native American roots. The only thing he had to pass on was his tribal citizenship card. Hinson wanted to bequeath more than just a piece of paper; he wanted his son to be a part of Chickasaw culture. He recognized that the most direct way to understand his culture was to speak the language. But to make that happen, Hinson had to start with himself.

"I had family stories, but not the lived experience of being an Indian," says Hinson. "I wanted to become a better Indian, and what better way than learning the language."

As Hinson began to learn the Chickasaw language, he found that native speakers were in perilously short supply. In December 2013, the last person on the planet who spoke only Chickasaw, Emily Johnson Dickerson, died at the age of 93 in her home in central Oklahoma. Less than 100 tribal members remained fluent in Chickasaw, although they could also speak English. All of these individuals were over the age of 60, and no one under 35 could speak conversational Chickasaw. None of the rest of the tribe's 62,000 members knew more than a few words of Chickasaw. After months of searching, Hinson apprenticed himself to a fluent speaker of Chickasaw, ultimately leaving Texas to move back to the center of tribal life in Oklahoma in 2004. By 2007, tribal leaders had appointed him to direct a project to revitalize the Chickasaw language.

"My goal was to get more people proficient in Chickasaw as quickly as possible," Hinson says.

Hinson wasn't just fighting to preserve a fading language, he was also racing against time. To keep Chickasaw alive, Hinson not only had to teach children how to speak the language-he also had to convince them that it was worth speaking.

"Once parents stop teaching the language to their children, it becomes an extracurricular activity, particularly for youth," Hinson says. "Language is up against softball and basketball and football."

Languages also have to compete with technology. Digital media is becoming an integral part of Chickasaw life, just as it is in nearly every corner of the globe. But rather than pointing to technology as contributing to language loss, as some linguists have done for decades, Hinson decided to embrace technology as an opportunity. As someone who relies on the internet, he saw it as a potential route to success, not a barrier.

With the tribe's backing, he began to build an online presence for his tribe-all in Chickasaw. Hinson's efforts to revitalize the Chickasaw language are also reflected in a larger movement wherein speakers of endangered Indigenous languages are turning to digital technology to preserve their past and adapt to an ever-changing world. The latest technology may just provide a way to help save some of the world's most threatened languages.

Languages have always cycled through their own stages of birth, change, and disappearance. As cultures move and evolve, interacting with the world around them, so do their languages. That languages shift and dominate other tongues isn't necessarily a bad thing, explains Bernard Perley, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. What worries linguists and anthropologists isn't simply that Indigenous languages are fading to silence but that so many are doing so at such a rapid rate. UNESCO, the U.N. division that works to protect the world's culture and heritage, now estimates that half of the world's 6,000 or more languages will no longer be spoken by 2100 if action isn't taken to reverse this trend.

A language provides more than a way to communicate-it offers a unique worldview. It's almost impossible to fully appreciate a group of people without understanding their language. When a language falls silent, both wisdom and basic information are often lost, such as knowledge about healing plants and natural disaster risks. (For example, even today, Navajo healers hunt among the towering buttes and rust-colored arroyos of the desert Southwest for a pop of bright purple from the tsédédééh, a flower used to treat mouth sores.) Language loss can also lead to the disappearance of more abstract concepts like Ilooibaa-áyya'shahminattook, the lyrical Chickasaw word meaning, "We used to gather together regularly, a long time ago." Such losses cut a culture from its roots, setting its people adrift in a strange world.

Beginning in the late 1700s, policies enacted by the U.S. government attempted to do just that by actively seeking to eradicate the languages and cultures of Native Americans, who were deemed to be little more than "savages." But even in the face of annihilation, as the Chickasaw Nation saw their numbers plummet due to disease and then were force-marched from their homeland in the Southeast to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, their language remained strong. It wasn't until Native children were forced into boarding schools and forbidden to use their ancestral language that Chickasaw began to decline in earnest. This severing happened to Hinson's great-grandparents in the 1920s.

"This had a terrible effect on Native American languages," says Pamela Munro, an expert in Indigenous languages of the Americas at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Some parents became reluctant to pass on their language to their children."

It is this history that has led to the dire circumstances many Indigenous languages in the U.S. face. Researchers are aware that speakers of Indigenous languages are dying out much more quickly than new speakers are being born, creating one of the classic scenarios of an endangered language. The professional call to arms occurred in 1992 when a series of papers published by the Linguistic Society of America brought international attention to the extent of worldwide language loss. As a result, professional linguists joined a global movement that used traditional ways of preserving languages while simultaneously searching for new methods. From a scholarly standpoint, the tactic made sense, but this approach wasn't always what speakers themselves wanted or needed.

"Linguists are trained to write academic papers that tend to be quite technical and often don't have applied uses," says Lenore Grenoble, a linguist at the University of Chicago. "Even if you write a grammar of a language, it's often too technical for speakers to use."

Several Indigenous communities have cultivated linguists from their own groups and have begun to claim more power and authority over preserving their own languages. As a result, the larger global movement to save Indigenous languages has increasingly relied on community-based efforts. Hinson wasn't a professional linguist, but he had a strong vision for how he wanted to rebuild a community of Chickasaw speakers. After nearly a decade of work, he knew enough Chickasaw to hold conversations as well as to read and write. He had made so much progress that he began working on a new, full-time project to help save his tribe's language.

The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, founded in 2007, took a two-pronged approach, pairing novice speakers with older speakers who were fluent in the Chickasaw language, and using technology to reach a wider audience. Language learners were paired with expert speakers in a master/apprentice program for immersive lessons that lasted several hours a day, five days a week. Hinson credits his ability to learn so much of the language in just a few years to this type of approach and to his own dogged determination. Under Hinson's direction, the tribe also built an online television network with six different channels that include language lessons, cultural events, and oral histories. The movement rapidly gathered a strong social media following on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Television and social media worked wonders for sparking interest in learning Chickasaw, but they didn't always help with the day-in, day-out needs of students like Hinson who were trying to incorporate the language into their daily lives. In most cases, this is where the master/apprentice course would take over. However, given the small number of fluent Chickasaw speakers, many of whom were aging, Hinson knew that over time the master/apprentice program alone wouldn't be enough to reach a sufficient proportion of the Chickasaw Nation's members to help the language endure.

In contrast to some stereotypes non-Natives hold about tribal peoples, tribes have modernized-mobile phones and the internet are just as popular on reservations as they are in the rest of American culture. A substantial proportion of the Chickasaw own smartphones and have internet access at home, and these numbers are even higher among young people, just as elsewhere in the world.

To Hinson, this technological access offered promise for reaching the people who were most likely to keep the language going. Inspired by the success of the Chickasaw TV and social media efforts, Hinson decided to build a smartphone app to help reach even more people.

Working with third-party developers, Hinson created an app for iOS and a website for Android phones and other computers to give new speakers a foundation in Chickasaw. Besides teaching the alphabet, essential words and phrases, and methods for constructing a sentence, the app also contains recordings of native speakers to model pronunciation and cadence. Tribal leaders supported the app, which was launched in 2009, but Hinson had no idea if it would translate into more people learning the language.

The app was an instant hit. As young people began showing more interest in learning to speak Chickasaw, they sparked their parents' interest too. Hinson's eldest biological son, now 16, as well as his younger children have all benefited from the app and from having a father who is a proficient Chickasaw speaker. Hinson observed that some families began labeling household items with their Chickasaw names to encourage everyone to use their heritage language, even if just in passing.

"People have to find the language useful. Language is a tool, and you can put it aside and forget how to use it," says Salikoko S. Mufwene, a linguist at the University of Chicago. Mufwene grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo speaking Kiyansi, a Bantu language, until he left home for college.

"Even though Kiyansi is one of the first languages I spoke, I'm now least fluent in my own mother tongue," says Mufwene, because he currently uses the language so infrequently. By contrast, new Chickasaw language users have more opportunity to practice the language, and the smartphone app is helping to transform Chickasaw into something new and useful. To University of British Columbia anthropologist Mark Turin, giving an endangered language a new sense of purpose is perhaps the most important aspect of digital efforts to preserve and teach endangered languages.

"These things help leverage and engage people," Turin says. "They provide new domains of use and help to bring people together around a common language, even those who don't live together."

Other Indigenous tribes are also using digital technologies to save languages that are thousands of years old.

The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages- a nonprofit that connects linguists with Indigenous language speakers and activists in order to save endangered languages-has created multimedia toolkits to allow people to use video, audio, and other technologies to preserve their language. Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison is working with tribes in Papua New Guinea to build talking dictionaries as part of an effort to teach these native languages to the next generation, and, with that, to preserve and pass on ancient knowledge about plants, animals, and the world.

The Miami tribe of Oklahoma, together with Miami University of Ohio, has launched a pioneering language-revitalization program. The Myaamiaki Project, founded in 2001 and now called the Myaamia Center, pairs research into the Miami tribe's language and culture with practical, on-the-ground revitalization efforts. In Canada, Perley (the University of Wisconsin linguist), who is also a member of the Maliseet Nation from the Tobique First Nation of New Brunswick, has helped revitalize a variety of tribal languages through similar efforts and has observed other tribes taking comparable steps.

Specifically, Perley has worked with a variety of Native American tribes to help them develop lessons and other programming. Early on, one of the teachers he spoke with wasn't sure his students would use Tuscarora, the Indigenous language of a Native American tribe along the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada, outside of the classroom. As soon as class was over, everyone seemed to switch back to speaking English. However, when the teacher listened more closely to a group of kids playing cards at a picnic table during recess, his perspective changed. The boys were playing a game that involved a lot of counting, but instead of using English for the numbers, they were counting in Tuscarora. All on their own, they had begun using their tribal language in their everyday lives.

"It's this emergent vitality, these creative uses that make language more relevant," Perley says.

And these successes build on themselves. The more languages are seen as useful and important, the more they are put into use, explains Grenoble, the University of Chicago linguist. "We don't want these languages to be museum pieces, we want them to be a part of life."

Anthropologists at the Living Tongues Institute are working with Indigenous communities around the world to put endangered languages back into regular usage. Besides simply documenting these languages, researchers and speakers are collaborating to create talking dictionaries and other technologies that help the languages thrive again.

"People around the world will be able to go online and hear someone speaking their language," says Anna Luisa Daigneault, a development officer at the Living Tongues Institute.

Still, Mufwene cautions, technology alone won't save a language. Many languages in Africa have continued to thrive despite ongoing colonialism, in part because opportunities to speak them remain. These languages are spoken on the job, within families, in primary schools, and in religious ceremonies. Teaching children to speak a language will only help if they are also provided with ample opportunities to use that language. In other words, some of the work of saving endangered languages has less to do with linguistics and more to do with economics.

"If you revitalize a language, you need policy and political structure to maintain it," Mufwene notes.

Hinson agrees that the app and programs he and the Chickasaw tribe have created aren't a cure-all. Instead, he sees them as a spark to help light the fire to maintain the traditional language. His vision doesn't require that every single Chickasaw citizen become fluent in Chickasaw, but it does require that large numbers of them value the language and provide resources to maintain the apps and other technologies.

"An app won't make you a proficient speaker, but it can help you learn the language," Hinson says.

These high-tech solutions have also influenced the way many speakers view their own language. Before, some speakers of Indigenous languages perceived their mother tongue as a relic of a bygone era. The insertion of the language into new technologies and contexts, however, makes it seem shiny and new-like something relevant to the technological era. This will likely help today's children pass the language on to their own children. A language's transmission is key to keeping it alive, many linguists say.

For his part, Hinson continues to develop other language technologies for the Chickasaw to use. Recently, the tribe partnered with the popular language-learning software company Rosetta Stone to create a series of 80 Chickasaw lessons. Rosetta Stone has already created similar lessons for the Navajo and Mohawk communities.

"It's a constant process of creating new speakers," says Hinson. "When this generation has its own kids, then we'll know if it's working." His children are soaking up their language and its surrounding culture. Hinson says it's their intention to teach their own children Chickasaw someday.

"My dream is that as an old man, people will come up to me and say they've decided to teach their children Chickasaw."
This article is reproduced with permission from www.sapiens.org. The article was first published on September 7, 2016.

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Joshua Hinson's first biological son was born in 2000. His son's birth marked the start of the sixth generation that would grow up speaking English instead of Chickasaw, which was the primary language his ancestors had spoken for hundreds of years. Hinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Texas.

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Video interesante que investiga los pros y cons de la difusion de ingles como idoma global y su impacto en la cultura y diversidad. Como adoptar ingles las sociedades no ingleses y como les cuesta?

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Subscribe to our channel http://bit.ly/AJSubscribe We look at the pros and cons of the spread of English as a global language and its impact on cultures and diversity. At Al Jazeera English, we focus on people and events that affect people's lives.

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Linguistic evidence of assassination threats

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Linguistic evidence of assassination threats

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Analiza los comentarios de Donald Trump de que los partidarios del 2nd amendment pueden hacer algo para que Hilary Clinton no tomen sus armas. Muchos inteprataron este como un llamamiento sutil a asasinacion, y la evidencia linguistica apoya eso.

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The media have been blandly paraphrasing Donald Trump's hint about the use of firearms without close reading of the text, and obediently quoting utterly disingenuous spin from supporters as if it were fit to be taken seriously. Four linguistic points are crucially relevant. Three were touched on in a recent Language Log post. Let me review all four somewhat more carefully.

What Trump said in his speech at the rally in Wilmington, N.C., was this (the line breaks roughly correspond with his oddly stertorous phrasing):

Hillary wants to abolish
- essentially abolish -
the Second Amendment and by the way,
if she gets to pick - [shrugs while the audience jeers]
if she gets to pick her judges... [pause]
Nothing you can do, folks. [pause; turns head rightward]
Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.

Trump's constitutional illiteracy is plangent (the president has no role at all in proposing or repealing amendments to the constitution, and needs the consent of the Senate to appoint a judge), but it's not relevant here. I'm concerned solely with the four pieces of linguistic evidence that he did indeed hint at assassination.

1. The conditional adjunct If she gets to pick her judges is a present-tense conditional adjunct. It's not a counterfactual like if Hillary were president, which locates us in an alternative universe; it's like if Hillary wins: It speaks of a condition possibly met in a future state of this world. As Wolf Blitzer recently pointed out in a TV interview with Rep. Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, it clearly references a time after January 20, 2017, when she has won the presidency and is selecting judiciary candidates. Once the world is in a state where the condition "she gets to pick her judges" is satisfied, questions of voting are beside the point.

2. The phrase "Second Amendment people" Who does the phrase "the Second Amendment people" refer to? Gun owners? Or just voters who believe in defending our constitutional freedoms? Well, unarmed defenders of constitutional freedoms will be as powerless as anyone else to stop a future President Clinton proposing judges once she has been elected. NRA membership, bumper stickers, signs on lawns ... all irrelevant. Senators could filibuster to stop a Supreme Court nomination coming to a vote, of course; but Trump didn't say "Senators," he said "Second Amendment people." He means people with guns. Other interpretations just don't fit.

3. The modal adjunct "maybe" The adverb maybe functions as a modal qualification of clause meaning: It signals that its clause expresses merely a possible truth, not an actual one. So he's saying it's only a possibility that something could be done, not a certainty. But that tells us, again, that he cannot possibly be talking about campaigning or voting against Mrs. Clinton. He knows people could do that. He's talking about people using their firearms, a much more uncertain proposition (because of the armed secret service).

4. The "I don't know" tag Trump trails off with a rhetorical "I don't know," thereby giving us a third indication that he's not talking about voting. He knows they could vote. He's attempting to create deniability about his adumbration concerning what "the Second Amendment people" might do with their guns. Just putting it out there for them to think about. Planting the seeds of action by others, like King Henry II railing against Archbishop Becket (nothing I can do about that troublesome priest, folks; although some of you knights, maybe there is, I don't know). Or, as Thomas Friedman reminds us, like the right-wingers who created the prelude to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination (if this traitor gets to sell us out by talking with Palestinians ... nothing you can do, folks; although some of you loyal Israelis, maybe there is, I don't know).

The linguistic evidence tells us, much more unambiguously than the newspapers reveal, that Trump couldn't have been talking about campaigning or voting or the political strength of the NRA and the other unified pro-gun lobbying forces. He was directly suggesting that free citizens, while they still have their weapons, could do something about the threat that the future President Clinton might appoint judges who would weaken the Second Amendment. They could shoot her.

Behind Trump as he spoke, to the right of his image on the video, a white-haired man can clearly be seen reacting with disbelief at what Trump just said. I think he says "Ouch!"; he turns to look at his wife, who is laughing. But it doesn't matter whether Trump intended his remark as a laugh line or not. Joking about what happened to Jack Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and came within inches of happening to Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, is worse than unacceptable. It's truly appalling. It's adequate grounds for deciding that Trump is not a fit and proper person to be considered for any powerful executive role.

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The Linguistics of Assassination Threats

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The media have been blandly paraphrasing Donald Trump's hint about the use of firearms without close reading of the text, and obediently quoting utterly disingenuous spin from supporters as if it were fit to be taken seriously. Four linguistic points are crucially relevant. Three were touched on in a recent Language Log post.

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50 word opinion on Chapter 1 of textbook

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50 word opinion on Chapter 1 of textbook

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Para mi lo interesante del capitulo 1 es que toda lengua constituye una sistema dinamica en que encontramos nuestro identidad y validez. Ademas de eso, el tema de los afasias me interesa mucho porque explica el aspecto neurologico de la lengua que controla nuestra habilidad de hablar.

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The need for second language education in America

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The need for second language education in America

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Este articulo habla de los beneficios de requirir el aprendizaje de una lengua secundaria en la sistema de educacion estadounidense, como la de Europa. Nota que el bilingualismo tiene muchos efectos positivos en las vidas personales y profesionales de la gente

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There are plenty of reasons why Americans should be learning a second language-and almost as many reasons why they're not.

About 60 million Americans speak a language other than English at home, according to the 2015 U.S. census-almost the size of the UK's entire population. But the same nation that once saw knowledge of foreign languages as essential for global power has failed to prioritize it in recent years, especially at the elementary-school level.

This not only has implications for Americans abroad, but also at home. Research has shown bilingualism can have far-reaching positive effects on people's personal and professional lives.

Employers look to hire people with language skills "even if they think they don't need them," says Rebecca Callahan, author of The Bilingual Advantage and an associate professor of bilingual and bicultural education at the University of Texas at Austin. "At the same time, there's been a devaluing of our educational system and the importance of foreign language."

Lost in translation

First introduced on a large scale in elementary schools in the 1960s, language classes were long seen as a way make US residents globally competitive. In 1958, the US National Defense Education Act funded university foreign language programs to ensure that Americans would fare well against the Russians, who launched the Sputnik 1 satellite just a year before. The measure also funded summer institutes for teachers, who then brought their polished language skills and tech-focused teaching methods to US classrooms.

Nancy Rhodes, a senior world language consultant at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C., remembers elementary school during the early 1960s, when students looked on starry-eyed as the teacher used a TV to teach lines of French and Spanish. "It was cutting-edge at the time," she recalls.

Foreign languages was one of those add-ons to begin with, and it's one of those things that is easy to cut.

Curriculum was reformed again in the 1980s, with the emphasis shifting to more conversational lessons and age-targeted textbooks. Widely successful dual-language immersion programs also started to emerge, and instructors began teaching subjects like math or social studies using the target language.

Over the past decade, these programs are thought to have quadrupled, says Bill Rivers, executive director of the Joint National Committee for Languages and the National Council for Language and International Studies. However, they usually only serve a single classroom-few schools have managed to administer such programs to their entire student body. "The danger is saying that, 'Hey, we put an immersion program in, so we can check off that language box,'" Rivers says.

Callahan says traditional foreign language classes started to drop off in American elementary and secondary schools around 2002, when No Child Left Behind came into effect. The act narrowed curriculums to focus on standardized test scores, ushering in an era when foreign languages became luxuries. Schools secured funding through high scores in math and english, so they made room for test prep by cutting "extras" like languages. A 2008 report by the Center for Applied Linguistics stated that language programs in one third of its surveyed elementary and secondary schools consequently suffered.

"If it's not assessed, we don't fund it," Callahan said. "Foreign languages was one of those add-ons to begin with, and it's one of those things that is easy to cut."

Falling behind

As a result of all these changes, and the decreasing emphasis placed on its importance, US language education just doesn't stack up against the rest of the world.

The average American high school graduate has taken two years of foreign language class, and college language course enrollment is down almost 14% from 1960. The number of students enrolled in a language course at American colleges and universities decreased by more than 100,000 between 2009 and 2013. Meanwhile, most European countries demand that students learn at least one foreign language, according to Pew Research. Many mandate two.

"The US is definitely behind [compared] to what other countries are doing," Rhodes said. "In Europe, it's not that there's any pedagogical or methodological secret. It's just that they make them take it."

Having a biliterate population doesn't just help with foreign diplomacy. It also has positive social and economic impacts.

College graduates who can speak and read in a second language earn an estimated 2 to 3% more money per year, on average-for someone making $50,000, that's $1,000 extra. Between 2014 and 2015, interest in hiring foreign-language majors among job recruiters and HR managers increased by 11%, according to a Michigan State University survey.

Studies also suggest that bilingual people are more creative and have better visual-spatial skills, which are essential for reading, math, sports performance, and navigation. Speaking two languages may also make minds more resilient to dementia, a 2013 study showed.

"It really expands your cognitive skills," says Rhodes. "But I would say the greatest benefit is being able to communicate with people you otherwise would never be able to talk to, and learning how they think."

About a quarter of Europeans can have a conversation in two foreign languages, while 54% of Europeans can hold a conversation in at least one. Just 25% of Americans can do the same, according to a 2006 survey by University of California Berkeley.

One hurdle: It's almost impossible for the US to enforce foreign-language education in kindergarten through 12th grade on a federal level, Rivers says. There are too many cooks in the kitchen.

"We're engaged diplomatically and militarily all over the world. It's a significant implication for our need to have a language capacity."

Europe is able to standardize language learning "because they have centralized language bureaucracies," Rivers explains. Meanwhile, America's educational system is divided into 55 state and territorial education agencies, plus charter schools. The National Defense Education Act, for instance, was actually focused on higher education-its summer training institutes were a positive add-on for grades K through 12, not a federally mandated standard.

Even countries long regarded as "behind" in foreign-language education are rapidly changing their curriculum. Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and others Latin American nations have rolled out serious reforms to prioritize English in recent years, according to the 2015 English Proficiency Index.

"[It's] recognizing the value of biliteracy and having a competitive advantage for the kids," Rivers says. "It's certainly something that marks a good school system."

Although 600 million people are studying English around the world, few of them will actually reach professional-level proficiency, according to Rivers. Americans might want to check their privilege and open themselves to start seeing the value of non-English learning once again. To enforce foreign-language education in schools, Rivers says state politicians must either support the cause, or state colleges must add language classes to their application requirements.

"We're engaged diplomatically and militarily all over the world," Rivers says. "Whatever you might think of that, it's a significant implication for our need to have a language capacity."

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One change in US education could dramatically improve America's relationship with the world

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There are plenty of reasons why Americans should be learning a second language-and almost as many reasons why they're not. About 60 million Americans speak a language other than English at home, according to the 2015 U.S. census-almost the size of the UK's entire population. But the same nation that once saw knowledge of foreign...

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The wonder of speech, according to Andrew Moro

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The wonder of speech, according to Andrew Moro

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Este comentario del nuevo libro de Andrew Moro, "I speak therefore I am", tiene varias ideas interesantes del libro como que la lengua es el mejor poder evolucinario. Tambien menciona que en Genesis, Adam les nombra a los animales, no Dios. Significa el poder del hombre de crear por nombrar. Ademas el autor destaca que los origines evolucinarios de la lengua todavia siguen desconocidos.

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I SPEAK, THEREFORE I AM By Andrea Moro
A neuroscientist and a professor of general linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Pavia, Italy, Moro has few peers in neurolinguistics. He specializes in the relationship between the brain and syntax-the rules that govern the structure of a sentence, including word order. And, naturally, Moro can talk the talk, writing highly technical, specialist-oriented articles about the effect of negation on premotor cortex activity and the electrophysiological representation of inner speech.

But not here. There is intricate argument in I Speak, a slim volume of commentary on 17 linguistic insights from previous writers, but there's whimsy, too, and, most appealingly, the sense of wonder at human speech that must originally have drawn Moro to his life's work. Moro thinks language is our greatest innate power, the human equivalent of the strength, speed, claws and teeth of our evolutionary competitors-and that humans have always sensed that truth. He begins with one of the more arresting passages in the Book of Genesis: it was Adam, not God, who named the animals. In Moro's reading, that was the ancient author's way of showing exactly how humans were made "in the image of God." The power to speak is the power to name is the power to create, the mortal aspect that most closely approximates what we consider divine.

With the rest of his predecessors, Moro is far more lighthearted. He mocks Bertrand Russell for fulminating about how "disgraceful" it is that the verb "to be" has so many meanings-showing, incidentally, that Bill Clinton, in his attempt to define away his affair with Monica Lewinsky, wasn't the only man to struggle with the meaning of "is." And Moro pokes fun at Martin Joos, a mid-20th-century linguistics heavyweight, for declaring that human grammar was capable of limitless variation, in the very year Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar proved it wasn't. Toddlers do not entirely learn language from their mothers-we are born with a linguistic template in our brains.

And that is where Moro's meandering road was always meant to take readers: Chomsky's insight aside, pretty much everything some of humanity's greatest thinkers have concluded about language was wrong. Even now, linguists are at a loss to explain the arrival, in brains that are the product of millions of years of evolution, of a capacity for complicated syntax that seems to have no possible precursor. It's conceivable, a cheerful Moro allows, that we will never come up with a theory to explain the mystery of the most human-defining quality we possess.

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The wonder of speech, according to a top neurolinguist

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I SPEAK, THEREFORE I AM By Andrea Moro A neuroscientist and a professor of general linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Pavia, Italy, Moro has few peers in neurolinguistics. He specializes in the relationship between the brain and syntax-the rules that govern the structure of a sentence, including word order.