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Encontré este pagina en Facebook y me interesó muchísimo porque nunca sabia que algo como esto existía. Es una pagina que te ayuda crear un anuncio en Facebook, especialmente por los hispanos en los estados unidos. Tiene herramientas para presentar a tu anuncio a la gente que tu quieres a través de Facebook con settings como “ensenar a…” “Spanish speakers”, “bilingual”, “english dominant” o “spanish dominant”.

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82.8% return to Facebook daily

Over index on all key engagement metrics (e.g., comments, messages, likes, etc.) vs. all other US audiences

The US Hispanic cluster is not designed to identify people who are ethnically Hispanic. It is based on actual users who are interested in or will respond well to Hispanic content, based on how they use Facebook and what they share on Facebook.

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How to reach the US Hispanic audience using Facebook Ads

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82.8% return to Facebook daily Over index on all key engagement metrics (e.g., comments, messages, likes, etc.) vs. all other US audiences The US Hispanic cluster is not designed to identify people who are ethnically Hispanic.

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Why the Spanish Language Isn't 'Foreign' in the United States

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Why the Spanish Language Isn't 'Foreign' in the United States

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Encontré este articulo en Huffington Post y me interesó mucho porque tiene muchas estadísticas y hechos que nunca sabía. Por ejemplo, no sabía que en los estados unidos hay mas gente que habla español de que en España. También habla de cómo español no es extranjero a los estados unidos, mas bien es algo natural en los estados unidos.

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Anyone who's ever enrolled in a Spanish class knows that schools generally refer to it as a "foreign language." Most of us repeat the phrase uncritically, as if it were actually true. But is it?

Take a look around. Spanish isn't "foreign" to the United States, at all. The names of many of our states and cities are Spanish - a testament to the fact that Spanish-speakers colonized many areas that later became part of the United States before English-speakers. Many of us use Spanish words when speaking English, often without being aware of what we're doing. According to a 2013 Pew report, Spanish is the second-most spoken language in the country and many people, both immigrant and native-born, were raised speaking it.

When you really think about it, Spanish is no more "foreign" to the United States than English. Still not convinced? Allow us to break it down for you a bit. Here are nine reasons why Spanish is really is not a foreign language in the U.S.

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Here's Why Spanish Isn't Really A Foreign Language In The U.S.

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Anyone who's ever enrolled in a Spanish class knows that schools generally refer to it as a "foreign language." Most of us repeat the phrase uncritically, as if it were actually true. But is it? Take a look around. Spanish isn't "foreign" to the United States, at all.

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Will Spanish Thrive or Decline in the U.S?

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Will Spanish Thrive or Decline in the U.S?

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Encontré este articulo y me interesó mucho porque habla del impacto de español en los medios de comunicación. Habla del impacto de Univision y Telemundo tiene en la población de hispanos en los estados unidos y del impacto de cómo están integrando gente que no hablen muy bien el español en sus programas.

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Vin Diesel speaks lousy Spanish. No surprise, that. So why then was he invited to hand out a music award at the Premios Billboard and why did he say Sí to the invitation when it seems that's about all he can say in Spanish?

Vin's Spanish-language shout-outs - "mi gente" and "mi pueblo" - feel forced. Throw in long stretches of English and a string of profanities that were editedout and the performance becomes a bit cringe-worthy. But he's not alone in bringing English and poorly-spoken Spanish to Spanish-language television. (The award ceremony was aired on Telemundo.)

Watch enough of the programming produced in the U.S. by Telemundo or Univision and you will hear snippets of English spoken by guests who lack the vocabulary or knowledge of grammar to provide a complete answer in Spanish. Here is Univision network news anchor Jorge Ramos talking to the Washington Post about his interview with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

"She asked me, 'If I have a problem with my Spanish, please help me with my translation,'" Ramos recalls one recent afternoon in his spare corner office at the Univision studios in the Miami suburb of Doral.

"Sotomayor, she's fantastic, but she struggles with Spanish," Ramos says. "She spoke Spanish very slow."

"And, indeed, just minutes into the interview about her memoir, Sotomayor - who speaks good, but somewhat labored Spanish - was groping for a word. Rather than wait for a cue, she simply said it in English - "strengths" - and moved on."

The Premios Billboard had two active Twitter feeds during the music awards ceremony, one in Spanish and the other in English. The two feeds reflect an acknowledgment and a hope. The acknowledgment is that many Latinos born or raised in the U-S struggle to read, speak and write Spanish. The hope, as far as Telemundo is concerned, is that Latinos can be interested in Latin music and watch Spanish-language television without themselves being fully able to communicate in Spanish. (See Maria Hinojosa's report on retro-acculturation for more.)

The need for the two Twitter feeds reflects a generational shift and illustrates the cultural question of the moment for Latinos: Will Spanish survive as a language widely spoken by Latinos in the United States?

The question may seem far-fetched and the answer obvious. After all, the number of Latinos in the U.S. is growing and with it the number of Spanish-speakers, right? Except that the Latino birth rate is no longer primarily driven by immigrants. Instead, much of it is driven by the U.S.-born - the children and grandchildren of immigrants. Many of the Latino parents now having the babies are not native speakers of Spanish.

University of California at Irvine Professor Rubén Rumbaut succinctly summarized the arc of language loss across generations of immigrants in a 2011 interview with Morning Edition host Renee Montagne:

"The first adult generation of immigrants ended up speaking survival-level English with an accent. You know, maybe think of Desi Arnaz in 'I Love Lucy.' The second generation, they remain bilingual, albeit their proficiency faded over time. And finally, the third generation, grandchildren, grew up speaking English only, perhaps with a few quaint vestiges - muchas gracias.

"You know, and the overarching story remains essentially that which we have seen throughout American history; a three generational story of language death, which unfortunately is what has given the United States a reputation as a language graveyard."

And yet, 95 percent of Latinos believe "it is important for future generations of Hispanics in the U.S. to be able to speak Spanish," according to the Pew Hispanic Center. That's an astonishingly high number. You don't see many poll results where 95 percent of any group agree on anything. Curiously, the same survey found a lower percentage of Latino adults (82 percent) say they "can carry on a conversation in Spanish 'very well' or 'pretty well.' Nearly as many (78%) say they can read a newspaper or book in Spanish either 'very well' or 'pretty well.'" By the third-generation those sets of numbers drop under 50 percent.

Those figures are probably inflated since they rely on self-reporting. The numbers who actually speak or read Spanish may be lower.

Yet, it is possible that Spanish in the U.S. won't go the way of German or Italian before it.

Certainly, there are thousands and thousands of Latino parents who are working hard to ensure the language of Cervantes thrives in the United States. Just check out @spanglishbaby on Twitter for a glimpse.

And there are any number of Anglo parents and Asian-American parents and African-American parents who are married to Latinos and pushing to ensure their children speak Spanish. Maybe Vin Diesel is one of those parents. Mexican model Paloma Jiménez is the mother of his young daughter. And maybe his daughter will learn to speak Spanish as well as English.

Heck, she can't do any worse than her father.

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Will Spanish Thrive Or Decline In The U.S.?

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Vin Diesel speaks lousy Spanish. No surprise, that. So why then was he invited to hand out a music award at the Premios Billboard and why did he say Sí to the invitation when it seems that's about all he can say in Spanish? Vin's Spanish-language shout-outs - "mi gente" and "mi pueblo" - feel forced.

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'Invisible' Children: Raised In The U.S. Now Struggling in Mexico

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'Invisible' Children: Raised In The U.S. Now Struggling in Mexico

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Encontré este articulo y me interesó mucho porque hable sobre la tema de educación y lengua. Habla de cómo los niños de familias que fueron deportados a México están batallando con escuela porque sus idiomas no están “suficientemente formados”. En los estados unidos su ingles no era en un “nivel suficiente” y en México nunca aprendieron como escribir o leer en español.

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Children and teenagers of Mexican descent make up one of the fastest-growing populations in the nation's public schools.

That's a well-known statistic, but less known is that, in the last eight years, nearly 500,000 of these children have returned to Mexico with their families. Nine out of 10 are U.S. citizens because they were born in the U.S. That's according to Mexican and U.S. government figures compiled by researchers with the University of California system, and the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

These families have returned to Mexico because of the economic downturn in the U.S. Many others were deported and had no choice but to take their U.S.-born children with them.

Whatever the reason, Mexican schools have been caught off guard, totally unprepared to receive them. Researchers with the U-C Mexico Initiative say these students will in all likelihood travel back and forth between both countries so schools on both sides of the border need to work together to make sure they get a quality education.

In Mexican schools, the single-biggest problem these U.S.-born children and teenagers face is that they can't read or write in Spanish. In the U.S. schools they previously attended, many lacked the academic English they needed to do well. They're often labeled "English Language Learners" or ELLs.

Patricia Gandara, co-chair of the Civil Rights Project, has been tracking these students in both countries. She says both the U.S. and Mexico struggle with these transient students, and she says Mexican schools can learn a lot from educators who work with these kids in this country.

Gandara and others call these children Los Invisibles: the Invisible Ones.

She organized a bi-national symposium in Mexico City recently to discuss the latest research about these children and how best to educate them.

You say this has become an urgent issue for both the U.S. and Mexico. Why?
The fact that most of these students can't read or write in Spanish is just one hurdle. Their parents don't know how to navigate Mexico's education system. Mexican schools often don't accept transcripts from U.S. schools. They don't evaluate U.S.-born children in English, their primary language. At least that's what you and your fellow researchers have documented. At the bi-national conference you helped organize in Mexico City, researchers talked about best practices and what both the U.S. and Mexico can learn from each other in addressing the needs of these transient students. But aren't there big differences in how each country approaches language minority students? But your research points to a bigger problem that makes it hard for U.S. born Mexican students to receive the help they need.
First of all, people on both sides of the border don't realize this many children have returned to Mexico from the U.S. Massive deportations and the economic downturn from 2007 to 2009 were big contributors to this.Jobs just dried up, so families went back with their kids. About 450,000 have enrolled in schools in Mexico that we know of. We don't know how many are not enrolled because not all have access to schools.

Mexico, not unlike the U.S, also has very segregated schooling and segregated communities. Most indigenous children, for example, grow up [in isolated communities] where the government is not trying to integrate them into the mainstream. The humiliation they experience in school is part of the humiliation indigenous people experience in other walks of life in Mexico. [Now,] there's discrimination targeting Mexican kids who've returned from the U.S., because they don't speak Spanish.
Finally, you worry that schools in Mexico have been too slow in developing new programs and policies to help these students. So what are you and your bi-national group of researchers recommending that Mexican schools do?
One big difference in terms of how schools in the U.S. and Mexico deal with language minorities seems pretty glaring. In Mexican schools, the goal is to transition children as quickly as possible to Spanish fluency - because it's the only language that matters. We've tried to estimate the percentage of classroom teachers in Mexico who speak English at a level that they can communicate with these [U.S.-born] kids, and found that fewer than 5 percent in public schools across [Mexico] can communicate with these children.

In the U.S., we don't accept the idea that children come to us as blank slates. [Immigrant] children know a lot, but they know it in their primary language, not English. We want to build on their primary language and not start from zero.

Also, in the U.S., the English-only, "sink or swim" approach has slowly given way to dual-language programs and bilingual education. Parents today see the value of teaching children to speak, read and write in Spanish and English. But only if it's done right. Poor quality programs can do more damage than good.

Number One: Schools need to welcome parents and help them understand how the [Mexican] system works and how they can support their children. Many of these families arrive with tremendous needs that hinder parents' ability to support their children. Second, schools need to fully assess what children know in their primary language. Too often, a child's knowledge is discarded because its in another language. Educators in both Mexico and the U.S. have to understand that young people who've been educated in both countries can be our future. Whether your primary language is English or Spanish or you live in Mexico or the U.S., we can't afford to lose these children. Its a social and economic loss.

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'Invisible' Children: Raised In The U.S., Now Struggling In Mexico

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Children and teenagers of Mexican descent make up one of the fastest-growing populations in the nation's public schools. That's a well-known statistic, but less known is that, in the last eight years, nearly 500,000 of these children have returned to Mexico with their families. Nine out of 10 are U.S.

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Me:
Beca Cruz- English Dominant Bilingual (Spanish and English)

Parents:
Cesar- (Mexico, American Immigrant) Spanish Dominant Bilingual (Spanish and English)
Sofia- (Mexico, American Immigrant) Spanish Dominant Bilingual (Spanish and English)

Maternal Grandparents:
Enrique- (Mexico) Spanish monolingual
Sofia- (Mexico) Spanish Dominant Bilingual (Spanish and english)

Paternal Grandparents:
Eduardo- (Mexico) Spanish Monolingual
Martha- (Mexico) Spanish Monolingual

Notes:
Sofia (maternal grandmother)- parents immigrated to Mexico from Greece but never taught her how to speak Greek. Sent her to boarding schools in Texas where she learned english.
Beca- parents talk to her in spanish but she and her siblings respond in english

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Capitulo 8: Espanol en los Estados Unidos

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Capitulo 8: Espanol en los Estados Unidos

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Linguistic Variations in the Spanish-speaking world

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Linguistic Variations in the Spanish-speaking world

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Encontré este articulo en el internet y me interesó mucho porque no solo habla de las variaciones lingüísticas, pero también de cómo las variaciones se formaron de la colonización. Habla de cómo se formó la forma dominante de español y de cómo se cambió a través de los siglos y geografía.

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What are the differences between Spanish in Latin America and Spain?

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What are the differences between Spanish in Latin America and Spain?

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Este video habla de las diferencias entre español de España y el español del Latinoamérica.  Enseña una persona de España diciendo un frase y luego gente de diferentes países en Latinoamérica repitiendo esa frase para ver como suenan diferentes. También da ejemplos de las diferentes palabras que usan para decir la misma cosa y de las diferencias lingüísticas entre los variaciones.

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Are There Differences Between Spanish In Latin America And Spain?

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Encontré ese articulo en NPR y me interesó mucho porque habla de cómo no solamente tenemos acentos cuando hablamos, pero también cuando escribimos. Habla de un estudio que hizo un profesor de un universidad que comparó tweets que hicieron gente en diferente regiones del EE.UU. El profesor encontró que gente en california por ejemplo usaban ‘coo’ en vez de ‘cool’ y en el norte la gente usaba ‘sumthin’ en vez de ‘something’.

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Think all regions tweet alike? They don't, according to Jacob Eisenstein, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. When it comes to the language of Twitter - with its 140-character limit - there are regional dialects.

Eisenstein and his team studied one week's worth of data from Twitter - more than 380,000 tweets from 9,500 users.

They found that while in Southern California something might be "coo," a Northern Californian who's making the very same brief, trenchant observation is calling it "koo."

And instead of typing "something," a New Yorker is more likely to tweet the word "suttin."

"It's a nice example of a phenomena that we see in a couple of different places on Twitter," Eisenstein tells NPR's Robert Siegel. The standard form - something - is used throughout the U.S. Then there are phoneticized versions spelled more like it sounds - like the word "sumthin." And then there's "suttin," Eisenstein says, which is almost never used outside the immediate area around New York City.

Eisenstein says researchers were surprised to discover that these kinds of regional differences in tweets are almost completely unconnected from spoken language. For example, he says, there are a lot of ways to say that something is funny on the Internet: "LOL" is a standard term used throughout the U.S., but, he says, there are other forms that are regionally distinct.

"Unfortunately, most of these forms are things that you can't say on the radio," he says. Moreover, he says, they'd never find their way into a spoken conversation.

With its improvised shorthand and creative misspellings, studying Twitter will help researchers see whether social media is making written language more like spoken language.

"There was no way to identify that kind of regional variation until now," Eisenstein says. "And now, through social media, we have written communication being used in a very conversational, informal way, and we're starting to see all the same richness and diversity that we see in spoken language ... in written language, too."

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Think all regions tweet alike? They don't, according to Jacob Eisenstein, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. When it comes to the language of Twitter, there are regional dialects. For example, Southern Californians tweet "coo" for cool, while in Northern California, it's "koo."

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Este articulo explique muy bien las características de español en diferentes países como España, Colombia, México y Chile. Habla de que aprendimos en clase sobre los /bdg/ y los /s/ y como se pronuncian en diferentes lugares. También tiene grabaciones de los acentos de los lugares para que puedes aprender del acento y escuchar lo al mismo tiempo.

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Capitulo 7: Variacion linguistica en Espanol

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Capitulo 7: Variacion linguistica en Espanol

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Stop talking about 'accidents', start talking about 'collisions'

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Stop talking about 'accidents', start talking about 'collisions'

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Este articulo habla sobre la importancia de las palabras que se usan cuando describiendo cosas fatales o muy importantes. Habla de cómo los organizaciones de la seguridad de autos están pidiendo a la gente usar la palabra “collision” en vez de “accident”. Hablan de cómo la palabra “accident” implique que nadie tenia la culpa, que era el deseo de dios, en vez de algo que se podría evitar, como en los casos del manejo borracho

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Despite all the empty rhetoric you might hear on the campaign trail, words still mean things. Some auto safety activists want people to start using the words "collision" and "crash" rather than "accident" to ensure that everyone understands the nature of those events.

The distinction might seem semantic--and obviously, it is--but it's an important one with a long history. The use of "accident" began in the early part of the 20th century, when industrialists wanted to spin reports of employees killed or hurt on the job. Describing someone mangled by a piece of machinery as "accidentally injured" helped shift blame to the worker, vindicating the workplace.

ALSO SEE: Crash-test results mixed for Mustang, Camaro, Challenger

Automakers followed that same PR plan to ensure that consumers viewed cars as safe. In the press, they encouraged the use of "accident" over "collision" to imply that the events were preventable, subtly blaming reckless motorists or even pedestrians in the process.

The effect of those efforts lingers today. As Mark Rosenkind of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently explained:

"In our society, language can be everything. How we describe this-- I'll just tell you, in my agency, crash is not an accident. When you use the word "accident," it's like God made it happen. For us, 32,675 lives lost on our roads in 2014. All those crashes, all those lives lost, were 100% preventable. The language you use is important."

And he has a point. Around one-third of traffic fatalities in the U.S. are linked to alcohol. Few if any of the the drunk drivers involved in those cases meant to kill themselves or someone else, so you might be inclined to say that the deaths were accidental. But drinking and driving is no accident: it's a lapse in judgment and it's preventable. Calling a collision an "accident" absolves the driver of responsibility.

Rosenkind and NHTSA aren't alone in this way of thinking. To date, several states and as many as 28 state Departments of Transportation have stopped referring to "accidents" when talking about collisions. Even the Associated Press has updated its guidelines for journalists.

Our take? We understand that some collisions truly are accidental, with no one driver to blame. However, we also understand the importance of using the word "accident" very carefully. Since it's not always apparent when traffic incidents are accidental and when they're not, we do our best to use neutral terms like "collision" and "crash" whenever possible. Still, old habits can be hard to break.

For more on this topic, check out this brief segment from NPR or visit the blog " Drop the A-Word".

(c) 2016, High Gear Media.

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national highway traffic safety administration (nhtsa)

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Stop talking about 'accidents', start talking about 'collisions'

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Despite all the empty rhetoric you might hear on the campaign trail, words still mean things. Some auto safety activists want people to start using the words "collision" and "crash" rather than "accident" to ensure that everyone understands the nature of those events.

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Delinquent. Dropout. At-risk. When Words Become Labels

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Delinquent. Dropout. At-risk. When Words Become Labels

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Encontré este articulo y me interesó mucho porque habla sobre como lo que nombramos ciertas grupos de gente importa y los adjetivos que usamos impacta la imagen del grupo. Habla de que la sociedad nombra a los niños que no van a la escuela por razones fináncial o razones personales, y como esa nombre impacta los fundos y dinero gubernamental que reciben esos niños.

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Much of our recent reporting, especially from New Orleans, has focused on young people who are neither in school nor working. There are an estimated 5 1/2 million of them, ages 16 to 24, in the United States.

But what do we call them? The nomenclature has fluctuated widely over the decades. And each generation's preferred term is packed with assumptions- economic, social, cultural, and educational - about the best way to frame the issue. Essentially, each name contains an argument about who's at fault, and where to find solutions.

"I think the name matters," says Andrew Mason, the executive director of Open Meadow, an alternative school in Portland, Ore. "If we're using disparaging names, people are going to have a hard time thinking that you're there to help kids."

Mason has worked in alternative education for more than 23 years and has seen these terms evolve over time.

To delve deeper into just how much the taxonomy has changed, I used Google's Ngram Viewer tool to track mentions of some of the most popular phrases in published books. I started at the year 1940. Back then, the prevailing term was:
Juvenile Delinquent
This is among the oldest terms used to describe this category of young people. It was originally identified with a reformist, progressive view that sought special treatment for them, outside of adult prisons. It lumped together youths who broke a law, "wayward" girls who got pregnant or young people who were simply homeless.

The New York House of Refuge, founded in 1825, has been called the first institution designated exclusively to serve such youth. An 1860 article in The New York Times described its mission as "the reformation of juvenile delinquents."

This was the beginning of the "reform school," aka "industrial school" movement. The primary response to young people in these situations was to institutionalize them, sometimes for years, with varying levels of access to food, shelter, work and education. Meanwhile, the first designated juvenile court was established in 1899 in Cook County, Ill.

The Ngram graph shows rising interest in "juvenile delinquents" throughout the 1950s and 1960s - reflected in pop culture images like West Side Story and Rebel Without A Cause. A series of Supreme Court cases in the late '60s and early '70s established that courts could not have carte blanche in institutionalizing young defendants; their rights should be similar to those of adults.

Nell Bernstein, a journalist who has written several books about juvenile justice, points out that the term "juvenile" is more commonly used to refer to animals than people. "I have two teenage children, but I don't call them juveniles," she says. "It's dehumanizing."
Dropout
The concept of a high school dropout was nonsensical through the early 20th century. That's because so few people graduated from high school in the first place. There was a concerted government effort to increase high school enrollment through the Great Depression. But graduation rates topped 50 percent of the population only by 1940.

As we can see here, the drumbeat about a "dropout crisis" rose steeply in the 1960s and reached a peak in the early 1970s. Part of that was due to demographics. The baby boom had subsided into a "birth dearth," and enrollment was flattening for the first time in U.S. history. In the meantime, the economic benefits of an education continued to grow.

Bernstein says that in her experience, the rise in use of the term dropout was tied to psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary's famous slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

This image of dropping out as a cultural or social choice has persisted, she says. "When I did research on homeless youth, there was a strong misconception that they were '60s-style dropouts who had left in pursuit of freedom and because they couldn't do as many drugs at home."

Bernstein favors also using the term "pushout," which, she says, "opens up the possibility that the onus isn't entirely on the dropout" and "looks at root causes." In our New Orleans reporting we often found people talking about students getting "pushed out" of school.

Concern about dropouts soared again in the 1990s. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush set a a national goal of cutting the dropout rate to 10 percent.

However, says Russell Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, high school graduation rates kept declining, to a modern-day low of 69 percent by 2002.

It has since rebounded to an all-time high.

But, he says, "I worry about emphasis on this one statistic, because it masks variations that are quite important." He cites a Brookings Institution study that says that to raise your chances of becoming middle class by age 40, it's necessary to avoid jail, avoid becoming pregnant as a teen and pass high school with at least a 2.5 GPA.
At-Risk Youth
The term "at-risk youth" gained currency in the wake of the 1983 publication of the policy report A Nation At Risk. The report cautioned that America's way of life was threatened by a "rising tide of mediocrity" within the school system. The term "at risk" suggests a focus on prevention and intervention, in the form of social services, tutoring and related programs. According to the Ngram, it seems to have risen in popularity just as "juvenile delinquent" declined.

"Delinquent" conjures up a state of being, while "at risk" suggests a vulnerable person in need of help. A scholarly paper by Margaret Placier at the University of Missouri, Columbia argues that "at risk" became a buzzword because it was vague enough to be defined broadly or narrowly, depending on the purpose. But Bernstein and Mason both point out that "at risk" also focuses on the negative.
Superpredator
A 1995 article by John J. Dilulio Jr., a professor and author with appointments at Princeton University, the Brookings Institution and the Manhattan Institute, was titled, "The Coming of the Super-Predators." It predicted a rising tide of youth violence: a burgeoning generation of homicidal thugs without a conscience, "elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches," found "in black inner-city neighborhoods." The culprits, Dilulio wrote, were drugs, child abuse and other types of "moral poverty."

The concept caught on in the media and among politicians. In the 1990s, as part of a broader "tough on crime" trend, almost every state passed laws that raised the number of young people being tried as adults. But the promised boom in youth crime never arrived - in fact, by the '90s, juvenile offenses had begun to level off, and today they are at their lowest rates ever.

When Gina Womack founded Families And Friends Of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, an advocacy group, 17 years ago, she had to contend with the image of the aggressive, incorrigible "superpredator." Gradually, she says, it faded. "Kids were thought of, and talked about, as children, and not so much as these horrible monsters."

Bernstein calls the superpredator stereotype "absurd and devastating ... an insult you can't take back." She points out that, like juvenile, it compares people to animals. As the Ngram chart shows, the word never really went away.
Opportunity Youth
Opportunity youth is a phrase of such recent vintage, it doesn't show up in a Google book search.

John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises, a public-policy firm in Washington, D.C., coined the term in a 2012 report. It was created with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which funds education coverage among other areas at NPR). Bridgeland had previously authored a national survey and report on dropouts, titled "The Silent Epidemic."

"I'm not one to paper over reality or hardship," he says. "I don't like buzz terms or jargon." But in talking with young people in these situations, he says, he saw "Extraordinary untapped potential. ... They saw the benefits of finishing school and getting a decent job. They were extremely hopeful, notwithstanding their challenges. My bottom line was, if they can be hopeful, why can't we?"

Bridgeland's "opportunity" had a second meaning. He commissioned economic calculations of the social costs of these young people, as measured in lost wages and increased use of social services. "They cost the economy and our society $93 billion every year," he says. "If you're not compelled by the moral, individual argument, maybe the economic argument will wake you up."

The Aspen Institute, among others, has funded "opportunity youth" initiatives that seek to bring together schools, community groups, foster care programs, family court and the juvenile justice system to help young people find their way back.

"Some folks who do this work like it. Some don't," Melissa Sawyer, whose Youth Empowerment Project serves this population in New Orleans, says of the "opportunity youth" catchphrase. It can be seen as empowering, she says, or condescending. "At one level, it's semantics."

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Delinquent. Dropout. At-Risk. When Words Become Labels

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Much of our recent reporting, especially from New Orleans, has focused on young people who are neither in school nor working. There are an estimated 5 1/2 million of them, ages 16 to 24, in the United States. But what do we call them? The nomenclature has fluctuated widely over the decades.

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The New Semantics of Visual Language- In The Company of Huskies

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The New Semantics of Visual Language- In The Company of Huskies

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Encontré este articulo en el internet y me interesó mucho porque habla sobre el uso de los emojis y de sus varios significados. Habla de cómo hoy en tiempo, mucho más gente usa emojis y que la gente les usan tanto que las empresas están empezando a comercializar con ellos. Habla de los diferentes significados tienen los emojis para diferente grupos de gente, y como diferentes comunitarios los usan.

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Hear our views on industry news, get a taste for some of our projects and learn about our approaches to problem solving in the Huskies blog.

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Collision with China: The semantics: U.S. and China Look for a Way To Say 'Sorry'

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Collision with China: The semantics: U.S. and China Look for a Way To Say 'Sorry'

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Encontré este articulo en el New York Times, y me interesó mucho porque es sobre los translaciones y como para la palabra “sorry” en ingles, hay 3 variaciones de la misma palabra en Chino. Este diferencia se puede realizar en un gran problema a veces, especialmente a través de las relaciones internacionales.

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Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and later President Bush, made finessing the situation doubly more difficult by declaring that the United States had no apology to give. Though General Powell used the word ''sorry'' for the first time today, Washington has stuck mostly to expressions of ''regret'' for the incident. The word was translated as ''yihan'' in Chinese, a term that carries no acknowledgment of guilt.

So the two sides, in full view of their increasingly aggrieved publics, have drawn their semantic lines in the sand, leaving a gap that diplomatic wordsmiths are now trying to bridge.

Linguistic ambiguities already cloud China's view of the United States. Many Chinese, for instance, are wary of Washington's stated strategic policy of ''deterrence.'' While that conveys a prudent defensive posture in English, the Chinese translation, ''weishe,'' carries the connotation of threats, coercion and bullying that reinforces Beijing's oft-repeated characterization of the United States as a hegemonic power.

But just as subtle differences in translations can create misunderstandings, they can create opportunities, too, allowing diplomats to leave a fuzzy middle between words that is palatable to both sides.

''That's what they are talking about when they say they are trying to hammer out language for an agreement,'' said Monte Bullard, the former commandant of the United States Army's Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., who is now working to establish a joint Chinese-American translation center in Shanghai.

''The Chinese are really pros at doing that, and I'm confident they will succeed,'' he said.

In fact, China's ambassador to the United States, Yang Jiechi, was once a translator in the Foreign Ministry who worked on the intentionally ambiguous language of the three joint communiqués that define the United States-China relationship.

The question is how much time it will take. China is well known for drawing out negotiations to win incremental concessions, as it is trying to do in its marathon talks to join the World Trade Organization.

A retired senior translator from China's Foreign Ministry said it took months to settle on the formulations that describe how the United States regards the relationship between China and Taiwan, first enshrined in the Shanghai communiqué signed by President Nixon in 1972.

One result, repeated in various diplomatic documents since then, is that the United States ''acknowledges'' that Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.

Washington did not use the term ''recognizes,'' as China had wished, but the Chinese version used ''chengren,'' which can be translated as either recognize or acknowledge.

China is pressing hard to fix its position in the current tussle. Both Deputy Prime Minister Qian Qiqian, the country's senior foreign policy official, and Gen. Chi Haotian, the country's defense minister, have repeated President Jiang's demands for an apology.

On the Internet, 22 major Chinese Web sites have begun a joint campaign called ''Tell the Bush Administration,'' encouraging people to express their opinions on the incident by posting messages on an on-line bulletin board at an official news Web site, 21dnn.com. More than 13,552 messages have been posted, almost all demanding an apology or saying expressions of regret are not enough.

The state-run press has also taken up the cause, with newspapers and television interviews of people around the country calling unanimously for an American apology instead of a mere expression of regret. The wife of the Chinese pilot missing since the midair collision with the American surveillance plane has even written a widely publicized letter to Mr. Bush accusing him of being ''too cowardly'' to apologize.

Chinese linguists say the way out may rest on a consonant: the United States could use the term ''bao qian,'' a more apologetic term tha ''yihan'' but less rigid than ''dao qian.''

According to the ''Modern Chinese Dictionary,'' compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Science's language institute in 1985, ''yihan'' refers to ''internal remorse.'' A person on his deathbed, for instance, would use the word to say he had no regrets. The dictionary also notes that in diplomatic documents ''yihan'' is usually used to express discontent.

''Bao,'' means ''to hold'' and refers to the traditional Chinese gesture of apology in which a person clasps his hands in front of his face and bows slightly.

''Dao,'' in the more formal ''dao qian,'' is a classical Chinese word that means ''to say.'' ''Qian'' means ''sorry.''

'' 'Bao qian,' which can still be translated in English as 'regret,' is much better, because it's a vernacular expression of apology,'' said the retired Foreign Ministry translator in Beijing.

The shades of meaning between various words are already being debated in the Chinese press.

An article published last week in on-line edition of People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, said: ''In English there is a distinction between 'regret' (bao qian) and 'apologize' (dao qian), and there is also a distinction in Chinese. But this distinction is just a matter of a step or half a step, and they basically belong to the same level.''

The distinction, it said, ''rests in the speaker's intended meaning and the listener's understanding.''

That may make it easier for the Bush administration.

''This term doesn't indicate that the person who says 'bao qian' has made an error,'' said a man who served as interpreter for Mao. That nuance may be lost on many people, he said, though ''educated Chinese know the difference.''

There are still other possibilities that are less apologetic than ''bao qian,'' yet more heartfelt than ''yihan.''

''The point is to avoid repeating the word 'yihan,' '' which has already been seen as falling short by the Chinese,'' Mao's former interpreter said.

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COLLISION WITH CHINA: THE SEMANTICS; U.S. and China Look for a Way To Say 'Sorry'

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Chinese and American officials struggle to find sentences in English and Chinese that are close enough to be considered single statement about how Washington regards airplane incident yet distant enough to allow subtly different interpretations in each country; sticking point is China's public demand for apology; this reflects psychic thin

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Este TedTalk video habla sobre como las lenguas llegaron a ser lo con soy hoy y de sus origines comunes. Habla de cómo la gente empezó a ir por todas partes del mundo para encontrar comida y tierra, y cuando encontraron nuevos sitios para vivir, su lengua cambió a parte de su nuevo ambiente. También habla de cómo unas palabras son prestadas de otras lenguas por rutas de cambio o proximidad al otro y de cómo las lingüistas identificaron cuales palabras eran original  en una lengua y cuales eran prestadas.

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How Can We Know What Language Used to Look Like? Historical Reconstruction

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How Can We Know What Language Used to Look Like? Historical Reconstruction

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Este video que encontró en YouTube habla de cómo las lingüistas podían reconstruir

“protos” o idiomas antiguas de las nuevas lenguas sin haber visto nada escrito en este “proto” lengua. Habla de cómo las lingüistas grupean a lenguas que originaron en las mismas lugares y comparan las palabras originales de una lengua a otra. Las palabras que las idiomas tienen en común se conviertan a palabras  en este “antigua protolengua”.

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Uncanny Science of Linguistic Reconstruction

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How Can We Know What Language Used to Look Like? Historical Reconstruction

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What did our languages sound like before we had written records? How can we work that out? In this week's episode, we talk about historical reconstruction of languages: what methods we can use to rebuild long-dead systems, what groupings of languages we can put together using these techniques, and if there's a limit to how far back we can go.

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The Arabic Influence on the Spanish Language

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The Arabic Influence on the Spanish Language

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Encontré este articulo en el internet y me interesó mucho porque habla de los similares entre Árabe y Español. El articulo explique la historia de los Árabes en el sur de España y nos da ejemplos de palabras en español que tienen origen en Árabe como ojala, aceite y usted.

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In 711 C.E., Arab armies began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. With the conquest, the , or Moors, brought with them their Arabic architecture, art, and of course, language. Over time, Arabic expressions mixed with old Spanish vocabulary to become the Spanish dialect that most Spanish-speaking countries use today: , or Castilian Spanish.

Even after ( the Catholic king and queen) Ferdinand and Isabel expelled the Arab empire from the Spanish kingdom in 1492, Castilian Spanish has retained approximately 8,000 words with Arabic origin to this day. After Latin, Arabic has made the greatest contribution to the Spanish language.

Traveling through Spain, it is almost impossible to avoid the name of a place or region that is derived from Arabic. To name just a few:

Something interesting to note about this map is that the majority of the Spanish locations derived from Arabic are limited to the central and southern regions of the country, representative of how deep the Arab culture had set its roots into the culture of the peninsula. The Arabic influence on the Spanish language extends past the names of modern cities and regions. Perhaps the easiest way to see this influence in Spanish is in the simple words spoken every day. Here's a list of some of our favorite Spanish words with Arabic origin:

One of the most well-known words to come from Arabic, means hopefully in English and comes from the Arabic expression: "ma sha allah" which means should God will it. Remember that is a conjunction that can often, but doesn't need to be, used with .

This next word, , is interesting because the word itself is derived from the Spanish expression , but in fact is phonetically similar to the Arabic word for doctor/professor: "ustadh". In Spanish, is a pronoun that denotes formality and is typically used when we are addressing someone in formal situations.

Meaning until in English, comes from the Arabic word "hata", which is a preposition with essentially the same meaning as hasta.

Definitely the sweetest word on this list, , meaning sugar in English followed along the silk road and originates directly from the Arabic word "as-sukkar".

From the Arabic word, "zayt", aceite translates to oil in English - not the fossil fuel, but the delicious liquid that comes from olives, almonds, and more.

Meaning pillow in English, originates from the Andalusian Arabic word "mijadda", which became "al-mujadda" in Andalusian Arabic (the Arabic of the Iberian Peninsula) and means "cushion" or "pillow". The Arabic root of this word is "jadd", which can mean ( side) or ( cheek) in Arabic.

, which translates to neighborhood in English, comes from the Arabic word, "barri", which refers to the outer limits of a city. If you visit certain Spanish cities like , , or , you'll immediately notice a , or city wall, that separates the inner city from the neighborhoods on the outskirts. The hispanomusulmanes were meticulous about urban planning and specifically designed their cities to have specific barrios for the various religious and cultural communities living within them.

, or chess, is a popular game that was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors when they arrived in the year 711. is a sport that has its roots embedded deep in the ancient Asian cultures, and the word came to the hispanomusulmanes through the Medieval Persian word "ash-shantranj". When it was first adopted into Castilian Spanish, it was actually spelled , and over time the and became j and , respectively.

, meaning assassin in English, has a surprising etymology. The word originally comes from one addicted to hashish, as a term derived by the Christians during the Crusades to demonize a certain Muslim sect that would, according to the Crusaders, become intoxicated from hashish and murder Christian leaders. Our English word, assassin, has the same etymology, although it came into our language from old French.

Over the centuries, the Arab culture has made invaluable contributions to the advancement of human civilization. Giant leaps of thinking in medicine, astronomy, and mathematics were made by early Muslim scientists and mathematicians. It's no wonder, then, that many of the Spanish words in these fields are derived from . , or algebra in English, is no exception. This word comes from the Arabic "al-jebr", literally, the reunion of broken parts, a term coined in the book, "Rules of Reintegration and Reduction" by the famed Muslim mathematician and astronomer, Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

As you can see, each word of Arabic origin has a rich history that sheds light on how los hispanomusulmanes shaped the Spanish culture and language. Below you'll find a list of even more Spanish words that have their origins in Arabic.

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Spanish Words of Arabic Origin | SpanishDict

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In 711 C.E., Arab armies began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. With the conquest, the , or Moors, brought with them their Arabic architecture, art, and of course, language. Over time, Arabic expressions mixed with old Spanish vocabulary to become the Spanish dialect that most Spanish-speaking countries use today: , or Castilian Spanish.

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Mysterious, Encrypted Medieval Manuscript Set To Be Published In Replica

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Mysterious, Encrypted Medieval Manuscript Set To Be Published In Replica

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Encontré este articulo y me interesó mucho porque habla de un documento que nadie puede traducir. Lo encontraron en el norte de Espana, y se piensa que fue escrito por ocho “scribes” para un emperador Romano. Nadie lo puede traducir, la primera persona que pudo era Indiana Jones en un libro, y la primera persona que lo encontró pensó que era escrito en una idioma inventada.  Los profesores en Yale crean que es quizás una forma antigua de Román pero no saben por seguro, todavía es un misterio.

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The Voynich Manuscript is a singular mystery. But thanks to a small publishing house in Spain, the one-of-a-kind text will soon be more like one-in-900.

The 15th-century document is written in an unknown, apparently encrypted language that has defied every code breaker's efforts. It's illustrated with unknown or imaginary plants and never-seen constellations. The only copy is locked away at Yale University to protect the book; scans online are the closest most mortals can get to viewing its pages.

The Spanish publishing house Siloe specializes in replicas - very small runs of carefully re-created manuscripts, such as the 16th-century Bestiary of John of Austria and 10th-century Beato Emilianense. For 10 years, Siloe appealed to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, asking for access to the Voynich, Agence France-Presse reports.

The library - which tightly controls who can view the original, in order to protect it - granted permission for Siloe to examine the book, AFP writes. Now the publishing house is in the process of re-creating the volume - "every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment," the news service says.

Siloe will release 898 volumes (their standard, palindromic publishing run) and sell them for 7,000 to 8,000 euros, or about $8,000 to $9,000, AFP reports. Nearly 300 people have put in preorders.

In an annual bulletin, Juanjo Garcia and Pablo Molinero of Siloe said in Spanish that they were proud to have been chosen for the "fabulous adventure" of replicating the Voynich.

"What mysteries are hidden behind this monumental enigma?" they asked, wondering who was "the genius or the sadist" who created the book.

Maybe a few hundred precise copies of the book will help the world's code breakers answer those questions. But don't bet on it: Countless cryptographers - including some of the world's most brilliant code breakers - have dedicated themselves to trying to solve the puzzle.

High-resolution scans and active Internet-enabled collaboration have not led to any big breakthroughs.

Writer Reed Johnson spent three years of his life as a Voynich obsessive. He spoke to NPR in 2013 about the enticing mysteries of the book, named after the Polish-American book dealer who bought it in 1912.

" 'It doesn't match any other language that's been seen in any other book,' Johnson tells Rachel Martin, host of Weekend Edition Sunday.

"The drawings often have labels, which would seem to offer a route to deciphering the code. But that hope has proved to be an illusion, he says. ...

" 'The history of this manuscript is littered with ... all these people who have spent years and years trying to decipher this manuscript,' Johnson says."

In fact, over all the decades of dedicated pursuit, there's only one documented success story.

"The only person to have made any headway is Indiana Jones," the AFP writes. "The fictitious archaeologist manages to crack it in a novel."

The Siloe team is working on crafting the reproductions now; it will take at least a year and a half for the first ones to be finished.

If you can't wait that long - or, you know, are looking for a price with fewer digits - Yale University Press has a printed facsimile coming to print this fall.

In the meantime, the digitized version is available through the Beinecke library's website, where it's described as a "scientific or magical text in an unidentified language, in cipher."

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Mysterious, Encrypted Medieval Manuscript Set To Be Published In Replica

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The Voynich Manuscript is a singular mystery. But thanks to a small publishing house in Spain, the one-of-a-kind text will soon be more like one-in-900. The 15th-century document is written in an unknown, apparently encrypted language that has defied every code breaker's efforts. It's illustrated with unknown or imaginary plants and never-seen constellations.

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Shall I compare thee to an Algorithim? Turing Test gets a creative Twist

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Shall I compare thee to an Algorithim? Turing Test gets a creative Twist

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Encontré este articulo y me interesó mucho porque habla sobre una nueva programa que están creando que va a poder formar poesía y oraciones mas como seres humanos. Este me interesó mucho porque típicamente los robots “hablan” con gramática y sintaxis súper correcta, y si se nota que un robot no “habla” como los humanos hablan. Pero si este programa sucede, significa que científicas encontraron a una(s) característica(s) que aclara lo que es poder asignar definiciones y sentidos a palabras.

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A machine with superhuman intelligence is a staple of science fiction. But what about a machine with just ordinary human intelligence? A machine that's so humanlike in its behavior that you can't tell if it's a computer acting like a human, or a real human?

That's what a Turing Test is designed to explore. The test is named for the British computer scientist Alan Turing, who first proposed it. (He's the guy the movie The Imitation Game was about.) Essentially, it involves making a program that does something a human might do - in a way that's indistinguishable from what an actual human would produce.

Writing a computer program than can pass a Turing Test doesn't just involve writing clever computer code: It means picking apart human behavior so you understand its essence.

"It might actually tell you a lot more about what it's like to be human than ... about what it's like to be a machine trying to be a human," says Dan Rockmore, director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College.

Rockmore and some of his colleagues have established three competitions that will test programmers' ability to distill the human essence into computer code:

DigiLit: Create a computer program that can write a short story.

PoetiX: Create a program that can generate a sonnet.

AlgoRhythms: Create a program that can combine music into a dance mix.

The result should be more than regurgitated syntax or strung-together hits; it should capture what human beings bring to prose, poetry and music. But Rockmore is not looking for a program that can write a sonnet worthy of Shakespeare or a story that could have been written by Alice Walker.

"I'm hoping a machine can generate an average short story," he says. "I'm not looking for experimental short fiction. And similarly for a sonnet, I wouldn't be looking for a random collection of things that had the right meter and the right rhyme scheme, which ... from some postmodern point of view might appear to be a great sonnet."

Similarly, the point of AlgoRhythms is to make as good a tape as an average dance DJ could, maybe better.

Rockmore admits he has a bit of a hidden agenda: getting people who have never thought about sonnets or short stories to take a serious look at those art forms.

He's sneaking in art, by way of computer science. "I always feel like I was a humanities guy who made a wrong turn," he says.

People planning to enter the competition have until March 2016 to get their submissions in. The details are here.

And next spring, when the submissions are in, the work of the finalists will be posted on the Internet - so you can judge for yourself whether the programs competitors create have passed the Turing Test.

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Shall I Compare Thee To An Algorithm? Turing Test Gets A Creative Twist

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A machine with superhuman intelligence is a staple of science fiction. But what about a machine with just ordinary human intelligence? A machine that's so humanlike in its behavior that you can't tell if it's a computer acting like a human, or a real human? That's what a Turing Test is designed to explore.

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Cut it out!  Grammar, usage, syntax and not the same

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Cut it out!  Grammar, usage, syntax and not the same

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Encontré este articulo por el internet, y es un muy buena referencia para tratar de entender el diferencia entre la gramática y la sintaxis. La sintaxis es mas como las sentidas de las palabras cuando están juntos en una oración y la gramática es mas de las reglas necesarias para crear una oración.

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People love to write about writing. I edit such articles frequently.

All too often, these pieces are titled "10 essential grammar tips" or the like, and the author proceeds to talk about common errors in writing that aren't actually grammatical in nature, or he or she compares anvils and oranges.

My friend and cohort Mignon Fogarty once said to me, "I'm not really Grammar Girl; I'm more like Usage Girl." It's true; she devotes much of her time and energy to offering advice on word choices and meanings. The alliteration of Grammar Girl is catchy, and she's terrific, so why argue with success?

With that in mind, let's differentiate the various elements of writing-with the goal of preventing writing "experts" from calling a common typo or misused hyphen a "ubiquitous grammatical error."

Typos

Yes, technically they are misspellings, but they usually involve dropped, extraneous, or transposed letters resulting from either fat fingers or fast fingers. (Case in point, I typed fasat fingers just now.) Some examples: avergae instead of average; you when your is meant; that when than is intended; wither in lieu of either. (These are all from my personal vault; your typos may vary.)

Misspellings

Homonyms/homophones are a prime culprit here: to/two/too, they're/there/their, you're/your, and so on. Other misspellings seem born out of simply not knowing how to spell a given word: guerilla instead of guerrilla (spell-check didn't even flag the former-how sad); milenial instead of millennial; embarassment in place of embarrassment. Of course, the -ible and -able endings frequently wreak havoc.

Certain misspellings arise from mishearing: Those who have always heard melted sugar called carmel will spell it that way, rather than the correct-and far more delectable- caramel. (This is a regional thing, it seems, and it makes me nuts. Then again, nuts and caramel are delicious together.)

This is to say nothing of made-up words, such as supposably -as in the following sentence, "Phil, if you say 'supposably' again, I'll slug you."

Punctuation

This is a lesson for another day, Grasshopper. Certainly bad punctuation can muck up one's writing, even skewing the grammatical structure of a sentence. However, if you're setting out to give a primer on grammatical pitfalls, it's better to set aside your homily on whether commas and periods belong inside or outside quotation marks.
Usage
This is about applying words for their proper meaning. Many writers seem to think that employing a less-common form of a word somehow adds emphasis: penultimate, incredulous. Penultimate means next-to-last, not exceedingly ultimate (whatever that might be), and incredulous means disbelieving, not extra incredible (ditto). [Author's note: Some dictionaries have included vernacular uses and misuses of these and other words as secondary and tertiary entries. I don't care. Please sound better informed than that. Thanks.]

Other favorites:

During means for the duration of. "During the eulogy, Aloysius wiped a tear from his eye." Must've been one helluva tear; old Aloysius spoke for 45 minutes.

Momentarily means for a moment, not in a moment. Remember it this way: There will be a momentary delay. The delay will last a moment.

Grammar

It's understandable why "grammar" has become the catch-all for verbal issues and elements. Grammatical rules provide the framework for our understanding the message: "Dog bites man," versus, "Man bites dog." Subject, verb, object. Without specific noun cases, such as German has, our word order makes all the difference.

It's impossible to cover every aspect of such a broad topic, but I would be remiss in not noting an increasingly common flaw in today's writing-the lack of subject/verb agreement, usually with a compound subject. Take this: "Humor and compassion is essential to success as a stonecutter." Nope. The plural subject, Humor and compassion, demands a plural verb form: are. Similarly, one I just stumbled upon: " Here's the lessons I learned." Are. Here are ...

Syntax

This might be the trickiest aspect to understand and/or convey. If grammar is the basic structure, syntax is the nuanced juxtaposition of words and phrases.

"Not all birds are eagles," is different from, "All birds are not eagles." (The latter's not quite true, is it?)

"The senator said last month that she'd introduced the legislation," or, "The senator said that she'd introduced the legislation last month." (The time element is specified on either the saying or the introducing.)

"Maurice says he wants to paint only the kitchen," or, "Maurice says he wants only to paint the kitchen," or, " Only Maurice says he wants to paint the kitchen." (Here the emphasis is on [1] what will be painted, [2] a limit on the work to be done, and [3] who's willing do to the job.) Then again, "Maurice only says he wants to paint the kitchen." (Come on, he'll weasel out of it.)

The word where too often is used in instances that call for when or in which.

"I had a blog post yesterday where I explained..." This has the aforementioned wrong type of modifier, but it's also badly located. How about this: "Yesterday I had a blog post in which I explained..."

Better still: "In yesterday's blog post, I explained..."

Style/consistency

This applies to whether you write omelette or omelet, whether you call him President Obama or President Barack Obama on first reference, whether you use % or percent or per cent, whether you prefer toward over towards, and whether you use the Oxford comma in every series.
Accuracy
This is another topic that could occupy an entire article, but let's render this in one simple example: If you want to say $100 billion and you write $100 million instead, you've booted the accuracy quotient-and probably some credibility.

In closing

Let me stress that in this article I'm aiming simply to delineate these elements, not to provide a comprehensive treatise on verbal stink bombs. Let's hear from you, though, dear readers. Do you see articles that blur the lines between these elements? Please sound off in the comments section.

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Cut it out! Grammar, usage, syntax are not the same

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People love to write about writing. I edit such articles frequently. All too often, these pieces are titled "10 essential grammar tips" or the like, and the author proceeds to talk about common errors in writing that aren't actually grammatical in nature, or he or she compares anvils and oranges.

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Este video habló sobre lo que se llama  “trace evidence” en el sintaxis. Habló de cómo si quieres hablar de algo indirectamente, puedes referirlo con un articulo de le/les o la/lo después de que el subjetivo ya esta determinado. Este video también nos ensena como formamos nuestras oraciones y porque todas las lenguas tengan su propia variación de sintaxis.

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Este articulo habla sobre el alfabeto Latin y como a los investigadores les parecían difícil encontrar los sentidos de las palabras sin el sintaxis. El sintaxis es que nos indica el subjetivo, el verbal, el accion y el tiempo  y sin el es casi imposible crear sentidos para palabras.

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On the second floor of an old Bavarian palace in Munich, Germany, there's a library with high ceilings, a distinctly bookish smell and one of the world's most extensive collections of Latin texts. About 20 researchers from all over the world work in small offices around the room.

They're laboring on a comprehensive Latin dictionary that's been in progress since 1894. The most recently published volume contained all the words beginning with the letter P. That was back in 2010.

And they're not as far along as that may lead you to believe. They skipped over N years ago because it has so many long words, and now they've had to go back to that one. They're also working on R at the same time. That should take care of the rest of this decade.

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae was one of many big, scholarly projects taken on by the German government in the late 19th century.

Through two World Wars and German reunification, generations of Latin scholars have been chipping away at the same goal: documenting every use of every Latin word from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the 6th century BC up until around 200 AD, when it was in decline as a spoken language. Befitting the comprehensive nature of the project, the scholars will also include some words up to the 6th century AD.

That means poetry and history and speeches. But it also means every gravestone and street sign. It means architectural works, medical and legal texts, books about animals or cooking.

"If a word is just on a toilet in Pompeii in graffiti, you'll find it with us," says Marijke Ottink, who is Dutch. She's been working on the Thesaurus for 19 years as a researcher and an editor, ever since she came to Munich.

The scholars work out of the palace that houses the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and gets funding from the German Akademienprogramm as well as academic groups around the world that support fellows working on the project, which they refer to as both a dictionary and a thesaurus.

Right now, Ottink is focused on the article for the word res, which roughly translates to "thing." Just like "thing" in English, it is a very common word in Latin. And here's the thing - its meaning hard to pin down, because it appears in all kind of idioms.

Ottink did not volunteer for this word.

"No one volunteers for res," she says, a little ruefully.

Still, she's been plugging away at it, on and off, since 2009.

On her desk, there are 16 small, brown boxes. Inside each are 1,100 slips of paper. They're yellowed with age and covered in neat, black, handwritten Latin.

More than 100 years ago, scholars painstakingly paged through every Latin book and engraving they could find, sorting out repeats and relationships. Then, they copied out passages onto these slips - one slip for each word in each passage. The slips were then sorted into boxes - usually one box for each word. Or in the case of res, 16 boxes.

Ottink and her colleagues are still using the slips today. Each one has scholarly notations about the relationships between passages and texts - information that you can't easily get by just searching for a word on a computer database.

Every slip of paper on Ottink's desk is a unique instance of the word "thing" in recorded ancient Latin, close to 20,000 references in all. It's her job to go through each example, read through the original text it came from, figure out the precise inflection of its meaning in each case and then wrestle all of the definitions into a descriptive article - written in Latin.

This is especially challenging for a slippery word like "thing."

"You don't get a grip of the real thing," Ottink explains, then catches herself. "Ha! Real thing!"

Ottink finally has a rough draft of the res article ready. In the meantime, she's taken breaks, writing or editing articles for words with fewer references, like relego, which means to reread.

Her colleague, Nigel Holmes, a Thesaurus editor, wrote the article for nam, or "for."

"I have sometimes joked that I still have nightmares from when I was in nam," he admits. "But it was actually, it was easier than I thought."

They both talk, though, about going over material again and again. The process of writing an article involves putting words in chronological order, but also creating branching, sub-dividing trees of syntax and semantics.

Each time a word takes on a slightly different shade of meaning, it needs to be divided off into a new branch. And sometimes, halfway through a stack of slips, a new interpretation will occur to the researcher, and then they have to go back through all the slips again to make sure it didn't appear earlier.

In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato ( Thesaurus scholars have to be well versed in ancient Greek as well) talks about a creature, the ouroboros. It's a circular monster that's always going back to eat its own tail.

The Thesaurus can look like a bit of an ouroboros, even to those working on it.

It's meant to be the most painstakingly thorough reference work available. After all, there are perfectly suitable ones already, like the Oxford Latin Dictionary. The Thesaurus is meant to be just a little more definitive.

But, as Nigel Holmes says, "Even when one tries to have a completely comprehensive dictionary, there's still work for other people to do afterwards. That is, there will still be aspects of a use of a word that haven't been discovered."

Every time he looks back on his nam article, for example, he says, "I see things where I wish I had done something slightly differently."

Worse, the earliest articles, written around the beginning of the 20th century, read more like lists of words than the more complete analyses being produced today, because the methodology of the dictionary has changed over the years. And new inscriptions are turning up all the time, new instances of words from A through P that aren't noted in the dictionary.

So eventually, ideally, the scholars will go right back to the beginning again and retool articles. Or they would, Holmes says, "if anyone was willing to pay to revise earlier volumes."

The task of finishing is momentous enough. Upcoming volumes, like R and Q, are full of question words and conditionals that have thousands and thousands of instances. The Thesaurus' projected finish date is 2050, but Holmes worries that they might not make that deadline.

For now, though, their funding is secure. And for those working at the Thesaurus, the project is infinitely worthwhile.

Marijke Ottink talks about the pleasure of reading through old architectural and legal texts, learning something new and strange every day. Years ago, Nigel Holmes quit a job as a computer programmer because he didn't feel he could be happy if he was not working with Latin. And both agree that the work of teasing out the chronological histories of words is important.

Still, Holmes feels a sense of hesitation, sometimes.

"It's a question, perhaps: Is that enough?" he asks.

He explains that there are several hundred people who use the Thesaurus for scholarly Latin, and draw from its definitions to inform books and articles. "But is that enough for something that's so expensive, that's been going on for so long and still isn't finished?"

After a short pause, he says, "I don't know."

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The Ultimate Latin Dictionary: After 122 Years, Still At Work On The Letter 'N'

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On the second floor of an old Bavarian palace in Munich, Germany, there's a library with high ceilings, a distinctly bookish smell and one of the world's most extensive collections of Latin texts. About 20 researchers from all over the world work in small offices around the room.

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Este video habla sobre la sistema de morfemas y como cambian de lenguaje a lenguaje. Dice que las morfemas para las oraciones son como las materiales para construir una casas, hay varias formas de construir y usarlas. Las morfemas pueden ser singulares y solo indicar un tiempo o modelada, pero también hay morfemas y sufijos que tienen varias significados y pueden decirte del tiempo y genero del verbo. También habla de en diferentes lenguas los sufijos pueden ser antes, después de, o quizás en la mitad de palabras. Por ejemplo, en Árabe, los sufijos van al medio de las palabras y pueden indicar genero y tiempo. Este video me ayuda mucho en entender lo que es morfología, y me enseño muchas cosas de la lengua en general.

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How do different languages arrange their meaningful pieces? How many meanings can they let one piece have? In this week's episode, we look at morphological typologies: how different languages link up their morphemes (or don't!), how they connect one or more meanings to a given sound, and how they can mix and match between different morpheme options.

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Do You Speak Na'vi? Giving Voice to Avatar Aliens

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Do You Speak Na'vi? Giving Voice to Avatar Aliens

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Este articulo que encontré me intereso mucho porque habla de la lengua que creyó Paul Frommer, un profesor de lingüística, para la película Avatar. Creyó una lengua que se llama Na’vi, que tiene su propia sintaxis y morfología, para una película. Me impresiono mucho porque el profesor solo tardo un par de años en creando una nueva lenguaje que funciona perfectamente. En el articulo, habló de como los actores tuvieron que escuchar grabaciones de le lengua toda la día y de como el profesor les ayudaba con la pronunciación de las palabras. También habló de cómo gente puede aprender este idioma, y lo compararon  con “Klingon”, el idioma de Star Trek que gente han gustado tanto que ya tienen películas y operas en escritos en “Klingon”.

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Avatar, James Cameron's first movie since Titanic, opens Dec. 18, and for it, he's created a new world known as Pandora - and a race of tall blue aliens, too. The expensive visual effects, many of them using technology developed by Cameron specifically for Avatar, have gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks.

But the director also commissioned an entire language for the Na'vi. Paul Frommer, a professor at the University of Southern California, is the linguist who built it for him - and he says the bar Cameron set was pretty high.

"He wanted a complete language, with a totally consistent sound system, morphology, syntax," Frommer says. And "he wanted it to sound good - he wanted it to be pleasant, he wanted it to be appealing to the audience."

Frommer spent years working on the Na'vi language, eventually teaching it to all of the principal actors who have to speak it, and making recordings for them to listen to on their iPods.

Later, he worked on the set during shooting, coaching actors on pronunciation between takes, and even writing the occasional extra line when Cameron decided a scene needed tweaking.

And though he invented the language, says Frommer, that last part wasn't always a snap.

"Sometimes I could come up with it right away, and sometimes I'd have to say, 'Give me five minutes, OK?' "

He recalls one memorable example: "Jim Cameron and Sam Worthington came up to me and said, 'We've decided that the character Jake is going to be recounting an incident he had where he was bitten in his big blue butt - so how do you say 'big blue butt?' ... I had 'big' and I had 'blue,' but I didn't have 'butt.' "
A Language Of His Own, And No One To Speak It With
The actors in Avatar worked hard to learn the dialogue on the page, but none of them actually mastered the Na'vi language, with all its internally consistent rules of grammar and syntax.

Frommer coaches Renee Montagne through a simple greeting:

"At this point, I'm pretty much the only one who knows the grammar," Frommer admits. "Maybe that'll change as time goes on. ... Who knows?"

You know your alien language has taken off when a German guy translates rap songs into it:

In fact, Frommer says, he's been "pleased to see that there's some interest" from fans who've expressed curiosity about how and where to learn the language, even before the film's release.

It wouldn't be the first time.

"Klingon is an incredible language," Frommer says, pointing to the dense and complicated tongue invented by linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek movies.

"It's really taken on a life of its own," Frommer says admiringly, with fans participating in everything from Klingon karaoke to full-on, dead-serious Klingon opera.

"There's a translation of Hamlet into Klingon," says Frommer. "So if Na'vi ever achieved anything close to that, I'd be absolutely delighted."

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Do You Speak Na'vi? Giving Voice To 'Avatar' Aliens

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Avatar, James Cameron's first movie since Titanic, opens Friday, and for it, he's created a new world known as Pandora - and a race of tall blue aliens, too. The expensive visual effects have gotten a lot of attention, but Cameron also commissioned an entire language for the Na'vi.

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Este video que encontré en YouTube, habla sobre las morfemas y como la gente memoriza y adquiere lenguaje. Habla de cómo la gente, cuando están aprendiendo una idioma, no simplemente memorizan una lista de palabras. Memorizamos las morfemas de nuestra lengua y reconocemos los diferentes sentidos de diferentes combinaciones de letras. También habla de un experimento que hicieron unas lingüistas donde inventaron una palabra que se llamaba “Wug” y preguntaban a niños como se conjugara. Los niños podían conjugar la sin problema, y demostró que la gramática no es algo que se simplemente memoriza, sino algo que se los seres humanos entiendan y puedan utilizar en diferentes situaciones.

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What do we have to memorize for our language? How can we know if kids learn the same things as adults? In this week's episode, we talk about the wug test: why it's important, how it works, and what it shows us. This is Topic #21! This week's tag language: Sesotho!

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For Rare Languages Social Media Provides Hope

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For Rare Languages Social Media Provides Hope

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Este articulo me pareció muy interesante porque habló de cómo los redes sociales están aumentado el uso de lenguajes arcaicos. Habló de cómo aunque en los redes sociales como Facebook y twitter la gente usa muchas abreviaciones como “lol”, “gtg” y “tqm”, la gente también están escribiendo mucho mas en su lengua nativa. Gente, a través de redes sociales están hablando y texteando en su lengua nativa y son los redes sociales que están apoyando este movimiento. Por ejemplo, Facebook tiene una nueva instalación que permite a la gente mandar un mensaje a Facebook si quieren incluir una nueva lenguaje en su diccionario.

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At a time when social media users, for no particularly good reason, are trading in fully formed words for abbreviations ("defs" instead of "definitely"), it may seem that some languages are under threat of deterioration - literally.

But social media may actually be beneficial for languages.

Of the estimated 7,000 languages that are spoken around the world, UNESCO projects half will disappear by the end of the century. But social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter are in a position to revitalize and preserve indigenous, minority and endangered languages, linguists and language-preservation activists say.

One of the reasons some indigenous languages are endangered is that increased connectivity through the Internet and social media have strengthened dominant languages such as English, Russian and Chinese, says Anna Luisa Daigneault of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.

Endangered languages stand a greater chance of survival when they are used online.

"Having a Web presence for those languages is super important for their survival. Social media are just another connection point for people who want to stay connected to their language," says Daigneault, Latin America projects coordinator and development officer at the institute.

Today, Facebook - the world's most popular social networking site - is available in over 70 official languages. The list includes indigenous languages like Cherokee and Quechua. This year, Facebook says it launched 13 news languages, including Azerbaijani, Javanese, Macedonian, Galician and Sinhala.

Facebook users can request a new language through the website; if there is enough demand, the language will then appear in the translations application and the Facebook community can begin translating the interface.

Jaqi-Aru, a community of 16 volunteers in Bolivia, is working on translating the Facebook interface in Aymara, one of the three official languages in Bolivia.

Elias Quispe Chura, the group's Facebook translation manager, says the effort involves young Aymara people from different Bolivian provinces. "We promote use of our mother tongue on the Internet through translation projects and content creation," he says. "With that, we want to contribute and enrich the content of our language in cyberspace."

He says Aymara native speakers in Peru, Chile, and Argentina are waiting anxiously to see their language as an option on Facebook. The group started the project in 2012 and is more than halfway done translating 24,000 words, phrases and sentences.

But the task hasn't been free of challenges.

"There are many words that there aren't in Aymara, for example: mobile phone - 'jawsaña,' password - 'chimpu,' message - 'apaya,' event - 'wakichäwi,' journalist - 'yatiyiri,' user - 'apnaqiri' and so on," Chura says. "In some cases, we had to create new words taking into account the context, the situation, function and their meanings. And in others, we had to go to the derivational morphology."

Facebook provides some support to the volunteer translators, offering stylistic guidelines on its Language Style Guides page.

The website can be used to revitalize and preserve indigenous, minority and endangered languages in more ways than one.

Pamela Munro, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, has created a Facebook page to post words, phrases and songs in Tongva, a language formerly spoken in the Los Angeles area.

Munro, a consultant to the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, says the language hasn't been spoken by a native speaker in about 50 years. She hopes to reach people who are interested in learning about the language through the Facebook page.

"We have readers all over the world ... people post on the page from all over and ask questions like, 'I found this word in a book. Can you tell me about it?' A lot of the people that interact with the page are ethnically Tongva but a lot of the people are not," she says.

The creators and contributors of Ojibwe.net - a website that seeks to preserve Anishinaabemowin, an endangered Native American language from Michigan - use Facebook in a similar manner.

Ojibwe.net contributor Margaret Noodin is an assistant professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The language has 8,000-10,000 speakers, she says. But most of the native speakers are over 70 years old, placing the language under threat.

"That's the most dangerous thing. There are very few young kids that are growing up in a fluent environment," Noodin says.

Although the group doesn't rely solely on social media to disseminate content, Noodin says that having a presence on websites like Facebook gives the group a chance to reach younger generations.

"It's how kids communicate now. It's little moments here and there. And that adds up ... . If we don't use the language creatively into the future then what we're doing is documenting a language that's dying ... . Our language is alive and it's staying alive," she says.

Other social networking websites such as Twitter can also be used in similar ways. The website is currently available in just under 40 languages.

Kevin Scannell, a professor at Saint Louis University, has consulted for Twitter on how to make the website friendlier to speakers of minority languages.

Scannell is also the creator of Indigenoustweets.com, a site that tracks tweets in indigenous languages. It can help people who want to find others who are using their language online.

"Having endangered languages on the Internet has a really strong impact on the youth because it shows that their language is still relevant today," says Daigneault of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. "When people use their language it shows that they're proud of speaking ... it."

At a time when companies like Facebook are trying to grow in the developing world, having the interface available in other languages can be a great benefit.

"Just even making the website itself available in other languages in a huge part of reaching the next billion users," Scannell says.

John Hobson, the director of Graduate Indigenous Education Programs at the University of Sydney, agrees.

"It is ... essential that as new technologies are integrated into majority societies and communication, they should be equally integrated into minority ones," he says.

But Hobson says the best results will come when the conversation continues outside of social media.

"They are not magical devices that will do the learning or communicating for folk," he says. "Living languages are those used for meaningful communication between real people ... . So, tweet and Facebook in your language ... . But make sure you keep speaking the language when you put the device down."
Lydia Emmanouilidou is an intern with NPR News.

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For Rare Languages, Social Media Provide New Hope

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At a time when social media users, for no particularly good reason, are trading in fully formed words for abbreviations ("defs" instead of "definitely"), it may seem that some languages are under threat of deterioration - literally. But social media may actually be beneficial for languages.

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Phonetic Clues Hint Language is Africa -Born

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Phonetic Clues Hint Language is Africa -Born

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Este articulo me intereso mucho porque habló sobre como lingüistas hicieron investigaciones y crearon un hipótesis de que la lengua empezó en el sur de África. Los lingüistas crean esto porque los lenguajes de África tienen las mas fonemas (cerca de cien) y los lenguajes de Hawái, solamente tienen aproximadamente como trece. Esa decreciente de fonemas concorde con la ruta de migración de los humanos y nos da una visión mas clara de cómo nació las lenguas del mundo.

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This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, "but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible," said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences. These efforts have been regarded with suspicion by some linguists.

In 2003 Dr. Atkinson and Russell Gray, another biologist at the University of Auckland, reconstructed the tree of Indo-European languages with a DNA tree-drawing method called Bayesian phylogeny. The tree indicated that Indo-European was much older than historical linguists had estimated and hence favored the theory that the language family had diversified with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion by steppe people some 6,000 years ago, the idea favored by most historical linguists.

"We're uneasy about mathematical modeling that we don't understand juxtaposed to philological modeling that we do understand," Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University, said about the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. Atkinson's new article because it does not conflict with any established area of linguistic scholarship.

"I think we ought to take this seriously, although there are some who will dismiss it out of hand," Dr. Joseph said.

Another linguist, Donald A. Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania, said, "It's too early to tell if Atkinson's idea is correct, but if so, it's one of the most interesting articles in historical linguistics that I've seen in a decade."

Dr. Atkinson's finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson's calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language "is not something my method can speak to," Dr. Atkinson said.

His study was prompted by a recent finding that the number of phonemes in a language increases with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that phoneme diversity would increase as a population grew, but would fall again when a small group split off and migrated away from the parent group.

Such a continual budding process, which is the way the first modern humans expanded around the world, is known to produce what biologists call a serial founder effect. Each time a smaller group moves away, there is a reduction in its genetic diversity. The reduction in phonemic diversity over increasing distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic diversity already recorded by biologists.

For either kind of reduction in diversity to occur, the population budding process must be rapid, or diversity will build up again. This implies that the human expansion out of Africa was very rapid at each stage. The acquisition of modern language, or the technology it made possible, may have prompted the expansion, Dr. Atkinson said.

"What's so remarkable about this work is that it shows language doesn't change all that fast - it retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years," said Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in England who advised Dr. Atkinson.

Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human expansion across the globe.

"Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species," he said.

In the wake of modern human expansion, archaic human species like the Neanderthals were wiped out and large species of game, fossil evidence shows, fell into extinction on every continent shortly after the arrival of modern humans.

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Languages Grew From a Seed in Africa, a Study Says

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This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

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Linguist Wins Symbolic Victory for "Labiodental Flap"

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Linguist Wins Symbolic Victory for "Labiodental Flap"

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Este articulo me intereso mucho porque habló sobre como un símbolo fonético se convierte en parte de alfabético fonético internacional. El hombre que NPR entrevistó convenció al asociación internacional de Fonética agregar un nuevo símbolo para “labiodental flap”, algo que se usa mucho en las lenguas en el central de África.

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Linguist Ken Olson convinced the International Phonetic Association to assign a phonetic symbol to a wordless sound: a trill of the lips called the "labiodental flap," common to more than 70 Central African languages.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

Until recently, central African languages such as Mongo, which is spoken in Congo, have had no internationally recognized phonetic representation for a very common sound. It's called the labiodental flap, and it appears in the Mongo words for rainbow...

Mr. KEN OLSON (Linguist): (Mongo spoken)

SIMON: ...hyena...

Mr. OLSON: (Mongo spoken)

SIMON: ...and rubber.

Mr. OLSON: (Mongo spoken)

SIMON: That's linguist Ken Olson helping us out. He's convinced the International Phonetic Association to finally give the labiodental flap its own letter in the official alphabet of phonetic symbols. Mr. Olson joins us from Dallas.

Thanks very much for being with us.

Mr. OLSON: It's a pleasure to be here.

SIMON: And what is the sound exactly?

Mr. OLSON: It involves taking the lower lip and bringing it back into the mouth and then bringing it forward quickly, flapping against the upper teeth as it passes the upper teeth.

SIMON: So just that sound alone would sound like what?

Mr. OLSON: A-la. Like that.

SIMON: A-la.

Mr. OLSON: With your lower lip, not your tongue.

SIMON: Oh, this is hard. Oh, God. Oh, well, I'll leave it to the experts.

Mr. OLSON: OK. Well, it's just kind of fun to try.

SIMON: What does this new symbol look like?

Mr. OLSON: The symbol looks like a V, but it has a right hook on it on the right ascender.

SIMON: And how difficult is it to get the International Phonetic Association to add a symbol to their alphabet?

Mr. OLSON: Well, in the case of the labiodental flap, it's been quite some time. The sound was first documented back in 1907, so it's taken almost 100 years for it to actually to get into the IPA.

SIMON: Are there any other sounds that you know of that, as far as you're concerned, crave recognition with their own phonetic symbol?

Mr. OLSON: The evidence is better for some than for others. One example is what's called a bilabial trill--(makes sound of bilabial trill)--something like that. There's a language in eastern Congo called Mangbetu where you have both a voice bilabial trill--(makes sound of voice bilabial trill)--and a voiceless bilabial trill--(makes sound of voiceless bilabial trill). You hear the difference between those?

SIMON: Yeah. It's subtle, but yes.

Mr. OLSON: Uh-huh. The voiceless bilabial trill does not have a symbol, and so the fact that it's a significant speech sound in Mangbetu, that would argue that it should have its own symbol.

SIMON: I don't mean to put you on the spot, but you have the potential to do a great Donald Duck impersonation.

Mr. OLSON: Oh, yeah, I can do Donald Duck: (impersonates Donald Duck). I also have some good friends of mine have a daughter who's six months old, and she makes bilabiall trills all the time when she's talking to her...

SIMON: Oh, my word.

Mr. OLSON: So...

SIMON: I do believe you're the funniest linguist we've had on this program.

Mr. OLSON: Oh, really?

SIMON: Yes.

Mr. OLSON: Oh, OK. Well, great.

SIMON: Absolutely. Absolutely. Certainly the first one to do Donald Duck.

Mr. OLSON: Wow, that's great. OK.

SIMON: Mr. Olson, thank you very much. And may we wish you many labio trills and flaps this holiday season.

Mr. OLSON: Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

SIMON: Linguist Ken Olson speaking with us from Dallas.

Twenty-two minutes before the hour.

Copyright © 2005 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Linguist Wins Symbolic Victory for 'Labiodental Flap'

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Linguist Ken Olson convinced the International Phonetic Association to assign a phonetic symbol to a wordless sound: a trill of the lips called the "labiodental flap," common to more than 70 Central African languages. SCOTT SIMON, host: Until recently, central African languages such as Mongo, which is spoken in Congo, have had no internationally recognized phonetic representation for a very common sound.

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Did the Language You Speak Evolve because of the Heat

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Did the Language You Speak Evolve because of the Heat

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Encontré este articulo en NPR y me intereso muchísimo. En este articulo, están hablando sobre el hipótesis de cómo nuestro medio ambiente impacta cuantos consonantes y vocales usamos. Los investigadores se fijaron en como los pájaros en regiones con selva tropical o con muchas arboles cantaron sin consonantes porque los consonantes no se pueden escuchar muy bien a través de todos los arboles o en el ambiente en general. Los investigadores usaron esos resultados y lo aplicaron a lenguas humanos, y encontraron que lenguas en áreas mas seco y árido usan mas consonantes y lenguas en áreas mas tropicales o boscosa usan mas vocales.

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English bursts with consonants. We have words that string one after another, like angst, diphthong and catchphrase. But other languages keep more vowels and open sounds. And that variability might be because they evolved in different habitats.

Consonant-heavy syllables don't carry very well in places like windy mountain ranges or dense rainforests, researchers say. "If you have a lot of tree cover, for example, [sound] will reflect off the surface of leaves and trunks. That will break up the coherence of the transmitted sound," says Ian Maddieson, a linguist at the University of New Mexico.

That can be a real problem for complicated consonant-rich sounds like "spl" in "splice" because of the series of high-frequency noises. In this case, there's a hiss, a sudden stop and then a pop. Where a simple, steady vowel sound like "e" or "a" can cut through thick foliage or the cacophony of wildlife, these consonant-heavy sounds tend to get scrambled.

Hot climates might wreck a word's coherence as well, since sunny days create pockets of warm air that can punch into a sound wave. "You disrupt the way it was originally produced, and it becomes much harder to recognize what sound it was," Maddieson says. "In a more open, temperate landscape, prairies in the Midwest of the United States [or in Georgia] for example, you wouldn't have that. So the sound would be transmitted with fewer modifications."

Other scientists have noticed that habitats can affect the way different bird species sing. "Say you're a bird in a forest, and some guy's going 'Stree! Stree! Stree!' But because of the environment, what you hear is 'Ree! Ree! Ree!' " says Tecumseh Fitch, a linguist at the University of Vienna in Austria who was not involved in the study. "Well, because you're learning the song, you'll sing 'Ree! Ree! Ree!' "

Since bird species living in rain forests tend to sing songs with fewer consonant-like sounds, Maddieson thought maybe the same would apply to human languages. Over time, people living in different climates would adapt their speech to communicate more efficiently.

In a presentation on Wednesday at the Acoustical Society of America fall meeting, Maddieson showed that consonant-thick languages like Georgian are more likely to develop in open, temperate environments. Meanwhile, consonant-light languages like Hawaiian are more likely to be found in lush, hot ecologies.

Fitch says it's a tantalizing hypothesis, but still unproven. People who live nearby are usually related, so their languages could be too. Hawaiian and Maori are light on consonants and developed in hot, tropical climates, but they also both came from an ancestor Eastern Polynesian language. That could confound the results of Maddieson's study. Until that's sorted out, Fitch says, it's hard to know how strong the data are.

And the environmental effect only accounts for some of the variation in birdsongs. That's probably true for our tongues too. "There are many reasons why some languages have more vowels or more consonants, and this is just one of them," Fitch says.

Other researchers say this is just the beginning of a line of research into how nature rules our speech. "This is the first of its kind, and there are several others coming now. It's becoming increasingly clear that the way we speak is shaped by external forces," says Sean Roberts, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study.

In his own work, Roberts found that arid, desertlike places are less likely to have tonal languages like Mandarin or Vietnamese. And he once analyzed a decades' worth of Larry King transcripts. "I carried the proportion of consonants to vowels that he was using and matched that to the actual humidity on the day he recorded those things," Roberts says. The longtime TV pundit used a few more consonants on dry days.

And the language you're reading now evolved in a cold, gloomy climate prone to light mist and drizzle. Fitch says: "English is quite a consonant-heavy language, and of course it didn't develop in a rain forest."

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Did The Language You Speak Evolve Because Of The Heat?

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English bursts with consonants. We have words that string one after another, like angst, diphthong and catchphrase. But other languages keep more vowels and open sounds. And that variability might be because they evolved in different habitats. Consonant-heavy syllables don't carry very well in places like windy mountain ranges or dense rainforests, researchers say.

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American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift

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American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift

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Encontré este articulo, y me pareció súper interesante porque habló sobre la diferencia en los dialectos de ingles en los Estados Unidos y como hay un nuevo dialecto de ciudades en el norte. También habló sobre la tema de cómo aunque comunicación entre los diferentes regiones de los estados unidos sigue creciendo, los dialectos de regiones no están cambiando. Los dialectos no están mezclando y formando un dialecto nuevo de los Estados Unidos, en vez los dialectos de los regiones están mas diferentes en este generación de en el pasado. Este articulo también habló sobre los diferentes pronunciaciones en los ciudades en el norte con palabras que tienen un vocal largo como dew vs do, block vs black, y cot vs caught.

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MICHELE NORRIS, Host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.

ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:

And I'm Robert Siegel.

P: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. He calls it a snapshot of our rapidly changing language, mergers of sounds that used to be different, splits of sounds that used to be the same.

Now, you might think that our regional differences are being eroded by national broadcasts and our personal mobility. Not so, says Professor Labov.

WILLIAM LABOV: The opposite is true. Whatever the influence of the mass media are, it doesn't affect the way we speak everyday. And the regional dialects of this country are getting more and more different, so that people in Buffalo, St. Louis and Los Angeles are now speaking much more differently from each other than they ever did.

SIEGEL: The way in which we can hear that online at your Atlas, is by clicking on a location and hearing the way a particular word is pronounced in that place. I was clicking on man in many different places.

LABOV: Yeah. Well, man has been raised from man to men to men in many parts of the country; and it's not the item that makes us so different. In some parts of the country, only the words that end in M and N sounded like that. So understand, animal, [unintelligible] ad version, Spanish. But in the inland north that we've investigated so closely, every single word spelled with the letter A goes up. So we not only have man, but we have mat, and that, and attitude, and athletic.

SIEGEL: Going up?

LABOV: Well, say up, because it means that the point of the tongue that helps form the vowel is higher up in the mouth. But the difference between man and man or man. The short vowels in English, pit, pet, pat, have been standing still for a thousand years, while the long vowels did their merry chase. It's called the great vowel shift. But long about 1950, the short vowels in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, began to move. It's called the northern city shift.

SIEGEL: The northern city shift.

LABOV: Yeah. It's new and it's extraordinary, and now the people in that region talk more differently from the rest of the country than ever before.

SIEGEL: Really? That is the great difference, to be either from the north or the rest of the country.

LABOV: Well, the inland north, the area of those big cities, about 34 million people are doing this. I could just play an example I happen to have here. In these experiments we carried out in Chicago, Atlanta and Birmingham, we played individual words for people such as this one.

COMPUTER VOICE: Black, black.

LABOV: And we asked people to write down what they heard. And almost everybody writes down b-l-a-c-k. And then we would play for them...

VOICE: Living on one block.

LABOV: And then the full sentence.

VOICE: Old senior citizens living on one block.

LABOV: And suddenly they realize that these people are pronouncing the word, block, the way they pronounce black. There's another example...

VOICE: Bosses...

LABOV: You play that word and everybody talks about bosses, and then they hear...

VOICE: The bosses with the antennas.

LABOV: And they're wondering who are these bosses with the antennas? And then they hear...

VOICE: I can remember, vaguely, when we had the busses with the antennas on the top.

LABOV: And they realized that this person is saying the word bus the way they say boss. So that's just a few little samples of this great rotation of vowels, which means that when people come to Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, or Rochester, they think they understand everything they hear, but there will be a lot of misunderstandings.

SIEGEL: You once pointed out to me some years ago a troubling fact, which is that if one doesn't make a distinction in one's own speech, one may not hear it in other people's speech.

LABOV: Half of this country has a merger of the word classes, cot, caught, don, dawn, hock, hawk. You can hear the difference as I'm saying it.

SIEGEL: I can hear the differences, yes.

LABOV: But if you came from Los Angeles or Pittsburgh, those words sound pretty much the same. There are lots and lots of mergers that are taking place. Some of them are almost finished. For example, which and witch used to be different in two-thirds of the country. Now, there's only in a few people who make that difference. I'll exaggerate it. The voiceless one sounds like, which. It's like blowing out a candle. When. And the other W, or the way we pronounce it mostly today is, when.

SIEGEL: These are called mergers, where sounds that used to be discreet and different are now pronounced pretty much the same.

LABOV: Yeah, and it's a one-way deal. That is, the area that has the merger is going to expand at the expense of the area that has the difference.

SIEGEL: One interesting merger I'd like you to talk about is the merger between do, I do, one says at the altar, and the dew on the grass in the morning.

LABOV: The d-e-w word used to have a little glide, dew; and that's largely disappeared. But the difference in the vowel remained. So people used to say dew and do. When I worked in New York City, I used to ask people, can you say, I do? And they would say, yes. Can you say, I do? And they would say, yes. And I would say, can you talk about the dew on the grass? And they would say, yes. But what about the do on the grass? And they would start to laugh because that could only mean a dog's leavings. So that little difference was there.

SIEGEL: We, of course, encounter a version of that every hour here, which is when we have to say that now you're going to hear the news.

LABOV: But if you think about that sound of news or dew, it's astonishing to discover that throughout all of North America, a sound is moving forward towards the French sound of ieu. So that a ghost used to say, boo, but today, everywhere in North America, the ghost says, boo. Can you hear the difference?

SIEGEL: Why do you think this happens? Why do you think that after some years of most people pronouncing the word one way, there's shift towards pronouncing a simple word another way?

LABOV: We have certain theories about the mechanical factors that do this, and then sometimes it turns out that there's a social value that people put on certain sounds. In the case of these mergers, most people don't notice them, and they just happen without a single person realizing that the merger is going on. Language is not very stable.

SIEGEL: Now, for all of the mergers that you report on, there's at least one split you teach us about, and that's the split of the short A sound, which at one time would be very different when it appeared in ham and, I guess, man. It was very different at one time. No longer.

LABOV: In New York City and all the cities of the mid-Atlantic states, there is this curious split which we chase back ultimately to its origins in the 13th century in England. But today, New York City has its system, and Philadelphia has its system, and they're quite different. In New York, we say, cab, mad, flag. But in Philadelphia it's cab, and flag. And only three words before D of that sound, mad, bad, glad, as against, sad, dad, fad. So it's like a lock and key system. And you can easily recognize a speaker from those cities by the fact that they have that intricate pattern.

And I don't mean to suggest that all the dialects, older dialects, are changing and developing. The small ones are going to the wall and disappearing. If you have a city of a couple hundred thousand, the chances are its local dialect will disappear. But it won't go into the direction of standard English. Rather it will merge with the regional dialect and strengthen along with it.

SIEGEL: Well, William Labov, thank you very much for talking with us today.

LABOV: Good talking to you.

SIEGEL: William Labov is one of the authors of The Atlas of North American English Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change.

Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift

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Professor William Labov, a University of Pennsylvania linguist and author of the new book Atlas of North American English Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change, says there is a shift of vowel sounds in the inland northern cities. He calls it the "northern city shift."

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Introduction to Articulatory Phonetics (Vowels)

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John Holm, 72, Dies; Opened Linguistics to Creole and Pidgin Tongues

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John Holm, 72, Dies; Opened Linguistics to Creole and Pidgin Tongues

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Este artículo habla sobre el hombre que fue uno de los primeros eruditos de conocer lo que es Creole y Pidgin lenguas. Este artículo me interesó mucho porque me sorprenda cuantas lenguas y idiomas se puede crear en este mundo y como se realiza las palabras y gramática en idiomas. El hombre de este articulo también tiene un punto de vista sobre las lenguas creoles y pidgins súper interesante, porque en contra de que muchos de los otros eruditos crean, el crea que esos dialectos se forman mas por parte de los idiomas non-europeos. El era uno de los primeros que realizó que las lenguajes pidgins y creoles eran especial y únicos, y que no eran menos que los lenguajes europeas; eran algo que se formaron por algo únicamente humano y por un mezcla de culturas y historias.

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After compiling the first dictionary of Bahamian English, Mr. Holm produced a landmark study, the two-volume "Pidgins and Creoles," which traced the socio-historical evolution of pidgins and creoles, explained their structures and described more than 100 varieties.

"Pidgin and creole studies had generally been dismissed, largely because creole languages in particular were thought to be spoken almost exclusively by poor people of color and were considered to be bastardized versions of the European languages that contributed their vocabularies," said Sarah Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan and an associate editor of The Journal of Historical Linguistics.

"By publishing careful empirical studies of creole and semi-creole language structures, and by publicizing these languages in 'Pidgins and Creoles,' John helped create one of the most exciting subfields of linguistics," she added.

John Alexander Holm was born on May 16, 1943, in Jackson, Mich. He studied German, Spanish and Russian in high school. As a student at the University of Michigan, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in English in 1965, he studied French at the Sorbonne during his junior year and picked up Italian at the same time. After graduation, he taught English at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where he became fluent in Spanish.

At Columbia University's Teachers College, he earned a master's degree in teaching English as a foreign language. He taught English in Zurich and at the Detroit Institute of Technology, where his students included Indians from Gujarat and black Americans from poor neighborhoods in Detroit. His interest in black speech led him to study African-American English at the State University of New York at Cortland.

In 1978, he was awarded a doctorate in linguistics from University College, London. His dissertation was a history, descriptive grammar and dictionary of the "pirate English" he had encountered along the Miskito Coast.

His early work as a scholar focused on the creole languages of the Caribbean and their structural links to the Niger-Congo languages spoken by the region's slaves. While still in graduate school, he presented an influential paper proposing a historical relationship between Gullah and Jamaican creoles and informal African-American speech, known to linguists as black vernacular. Among other things, he noted that all three drop verbs in certain contexts, turning a statement like "He is angry," for example, into "He angry."

In linguistic terms, Mr. Holm was a substratist - someone who emphasizes the contributions of non-European languages to creoles - as opposed to a superstratist, who considers creoles to be reduced forms of European languages, with minimal contributions from non-European sources.

He also insisted that pidgins and creoles be regarded as languages in their own right, not debased versions of source languages. "They are new languages, shaped by many of the same linguistic forces that shaped English and other 'proper' languages," he later wrote in "An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles" (2000).

While lecturing at the College of the Bahamas, he began writing down examples of creole usage that blossomed into the first dictionary of Bahamian English, written with Alison Watt Shilling and published in 1982.

In 1980, he began teaching English and linguistics at Hunter College in New York, continuing to work on Caribbean and Central American English. He edited "Central American English" (1982) and, with Manfred Görlach, "Focus on the Caribbean" (1986) before completing "Pidgins and Creoles," which was published in 1988 and 1989.

After teaching in the doctoral linguistics program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he accepted a post in 1998 as chairman of English linguistics at the University of Coimbra in Coimbra, Portugal, where he created a department of creole linguistics.

His other works include "Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole Grammars" (2007), which he edited with Peter Patrick, and "Contact Languages: Critical Concepts in Language Studies," a five-volume series he edited with Susanne Michaelis.

In addition to his husband, Mr. Holm, who lived near Miranda do Corvo, Portugal, is survived by a brother, James.

Correction: January 5, 2016

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John Holm, 72, Dies; Opened Linguistics to Creole and Pidgin Tongues

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After compiling the first dictionary of Bahamian English, Mr. Holm produced a landmark study, the two-volume "Pidgins and Creoles," which traced the socio-historical evolution of pidgins and creoles, explained their structures and described more than 100 varieties.

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Ciencia Cognitiva

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"Hearing Bilingual- How Babies Sort Out Language"

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"Hearing Bilingual- How Babies Sort Out Language"

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Una cosa que me interese mucho es como los bebes aprendan dos idiomas al mismo tiempo y como puedan distinguir y comprender los dos. Me interesa mucho porque cuando yo era una bebe, mis papas normalmente me hablaban en español, pero a veces mi papa me hablaba en ingles para practicar su ingles. Entonces crecí escuchando dos idiomas y ahora me interesa mucho como los bebes respondan a esto y como sus cerebros procesan los idiomas. Este artículo me interesó mucho porque habla de cómo los bebes que crezcan con dos idiomas usan diferentes partes de sus cerebros y como normalmente los bebes que son bilingües son mas capaz de funciones cognitivos. Este articulo también hable de cómo los bebes solo pueden aprender y distinguir sonidos de lenguas diferentes por contacto humano y no por programas de televisión o radió. Esto me interesa muchísimo porque nos enseña  que el lenguaje es algo únicamente humano que solo se pueda aprender por contacto

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Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

The researchers suggested that this represents a process of "neural commitment," in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.

In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older - 10 to 12 months - they were able to discriminate sounds in both.

"What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies' experience keeps them open," said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. "They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It's another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain."

The learning of language - and the effects on the brain of the language we hear - may begin even earlier than 6 months of age.

Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies perceive language and how that shapes their learning. Even in the womb, she said, babies are exposed to the rhythms and sounds of language, and newborns have been shown to prefer languages rhythmically similar to the one they've heard during fetal development.

In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others - but are also able to register that the two languages are different.

In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.

In a study of older infants shown silent videotapes of adults speaking, 4-month-olds could distinguish different languages visually by watching mouth and facial motions and responded with interest when the language changed. By 8 months, though, the monolingual infants were no longer responding to the difference in languages in these silent movies, while the bilingual infants continued to be engaged.

"For a baby who's growing up bilingual, it's like, 'Hey, this is important information,' " Dr. Werker said.

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain's so-called executive function.

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. "Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function," Dr. Bialystok said.

Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies "more cognitively flexible" than monolingual infants. Her research group is examining infant brains with an even newer imaging device, magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which combines an M.R.I. scan with a recording of magnetic field changes as the brain transmits information.

Dr. Kuhl describes the device as looking like a "hair dryer from Mars," and she hopes that it will help explore the question of why babies learn language from people, but not from screens.

Previous research by her group showed that exposing English-language infants in Seattle to someone speaking to them in Mandarin helped those babies preserve the ability to discriminate Chinese language sounds, but when the same "dose" of Mandarin was delivered by a television program or an audiotape, the babies learned nothing.

"This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting," Dr. Kuhl said. "They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way."

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Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Tell Languages Apart

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Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

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Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English

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Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English

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Otra cosa que me impresionó este capítulo era como los dialectos de una lengua impacta como la gente ve el mundo y como una pidgin lengua se creé. En este Ted Talk, Jamila habla sobre los dialectos de inglés y como no hay una forma correcta de hablar en inglés porque todos los lenguas se formaron por una historia. Jamila habla de cómo puede hablar tres diferentes idiomas, una para la escuela, una para la casa y otra para sus amigos. Ella explica como creció con tres diferentes dialectos, y como el ebonics de inglés no es peor que el inglés americano, son simplemente diferente porque se formaron en diferentes lugares de historia y del mundo. Nos explique que hay que respetar todas las formas de hablar porque todos son correctos y todos son parte de nuestro gran historia como seres humanos.

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Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English

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Jamila Lyiscott is a "tri-tongued orator;" in her powerful spoken-word essay "Broken English," she celebrates - and challenges - the three distinct flavors of English she speaks with her friends, in the classroom and with her parents. As she explores the complicated history and present-day identity that each language represents, she unpacks what it means to be "articulate."

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Una cosa que me impresionó de este capitulo era como los niños aprendan su lengua nativa y como empiezan a distinguir y vocalizar los sonidos. En este Ted Talk, Dr. Deb Roy habla de cosas que faciliten el adquisición de lengua para los niños y hizo un estudio en que puso cameras y grabadores en cada cuarto de su casa para estudiar como su hijo, recién nacido, empezó a aprender ingles. Hizo este estudio por cinco anos, y descubrió como el complexidad de lenguaje hablado cerca del bebe y como el intimidad que tienes con el bebe cuando lo hables afecta como el bebe aprenda. Descubrió que bebes aprendan una palabra cuando el complexidad de lengua que escucha esta muy simple. Es casi como los adultos, de modo subconsciente, bajen su nivel de lengua para llegar casi al mismo nivel que el bebe, para que el bebe puede entender y aprender una nueva palabra. También descubrió que los bebes retienen más las palabras que escuchen cuando los papas están cercas de ellos de cuando los papas los están hablando de lejos. Este Ted Talk me impresionó mucho porque demostró que tan intricado y complejo lo adquisición de la lenguaje es.

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MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water."

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Capitulo 8: Espanol en los Estados Unidos

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Capitulo 8: Espanol en los Estados Unidos

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Espanol en los Estados Unidos

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Capitulo 8: Espanol en los Estados Unidos 

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Capitulo 8: Espanol en los Estados Unidos 