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Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture | WIRED

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Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture | WIRED

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In 2012 a nongendered pronoun dropped into Swedish discourse. Today it's widely used-and it's nudging people to see the world a little differently.

For a question with so much riding on it-does using politically correct language actually make a person less of a jerk?-the test was deceptively simple.

Here's what you do: Show people a sketch of a cartoon person-circle-for-head, ovals for arms and body-with a dotted line linking it to an equally cartoony thing, a balloon-animal dog. Over the person's head loom two thought bubbles, a round one containing three question marks and a jagged one with three exclamation points. That's it. And the test is, describe what's happening.

Importantly, the people being tested, upwards of 2,000 of them, were all native speakers of Swedish, an old language that has learned a new trick. Like English, Swedish used two pronouns to indicate the gender of a person, hon (she) and han (he). But in 2012, a new word dropped into Swedish discourse: hen, a nongendered pronoun that could replace either or both.

So this was the real test. Would native-speaker Swedes, seven years after getting a new pronoun plugged into their language, be more likely to assume this androgynous cartoon was a man? A woman? Either, or neither? Now that they had a word for it, a nonbinary option, would they think to use it?

And they did. Not only did the Swedish speakers use the nonbinary option to describe the, let's face it, nonbinary human, but in other surveys they deployed hen (as well as han, but the feminine hon, too) to describe people in stories when their genders weren't specified. Now, it's true the researchers don't have comparable tests from before 2012, before hen. So this result is, as UCLA political psychologist Efrén Pérez says, merely suggestive. Still, though, "this word has no biological associations. It's from scratch. And it's performing the way some proponents argued it would," says Pérez, coauthor of a paper describing these tests in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "These language changes can nudge people in directions some folks find normatively worthy."

This is the implicit promise of letting people choose their pronouns, and of having some of those pronouns be disconnected from gender. Sure, it's good to find language that accommodates people's identities, especially if that identity doesn't fit the binary masculine/feminine split. But more than that, new words (and maybe old words with new uses, like singular they/them, but more on that in a bit) can incept that new idea into everyone -the binary isn't the end of the story, masculine isn't the default, and people should be able to decouple action and concepts from gender. "Most people don't have ready-made attitudes on most things we think are important. If your language nudges you in some direction, it should have some nontrivial effect on your opinion," says Pérez. "You could boil it down to, how does the language you speak affect how you see the world?"

Languages handle pronouns and gender in different ways. Some avoid gender altogether, some gender just the pronouns, others inflect the nouns, too. Certain languages even use masculine words or forms as plurals or generics-like "all mankind," for example, as a stand-in for all people. That's called androcentrism, the idea that men also represent everyone. And over the years, linguists and other social scientists have come up with a few ideas to combat it-to neutralize androcentric terminology and concepts. You can pare down pairs of masculine and feminine words with the same meaning to just one-aviator and aviatrix to pilot, waiter and waitress to waiter, author and authoress to author. You could make up new words and terms-firefighter, mail carrier, police officer. In pronoun land, that'd be ideas like ze or e. Or you could do what English seems to be trending toward, which is to take a nongendered, plural, third-person pronoun- they -and repurpose it as singular.

The Swedes went big. In 2012 Jesper Lundquist wrote a children's book, Kivi and the Monster Dog, that referred to the main character with, as others had proposed, the neologized pronoun hen, essentially borrowed from neighboring Finland's nongendered pronoun hän. Lundquist, his publisher, and a linguist working on gender followed up with an editorial in a big newspaper saying that life should imitate art. Drama ensued; people argued. What-about-the-children got deployed. A newspaper banned hen. An entertainment magazine mandated it. The Swedish Language Council, the quasi-final authority on Swedish, came out against. Finally, two years after the kids' book came out, the Swedish Language Council reversed itself. Hen was now, for real, Swedish.

Now the word has snuggled into Swedish society. It's common in the media. People report knowing about it and using it. It still has opposition-from people who don't believe humans can have a nonbinary gender identity, and from grammatical originalists (with a soupçon of folks who wish nonbinary people could have their own pronoun in addition to a nongendered pronoun for everyone else). But their numbers are declining.

But, OMG, just because a language metabolizes a new word doesn't mean it changes how people think or feel. So that's what Pérez and his partner, Margit Tavits at Washington University in St. Louis, wanted to check. After years of henning and hawing, had people changed their ways? The hypothesis is that having hen would help people build a more equitable society. So when Tavits and Pérez got their results, they hypothesized that the newly available pronoun had, in their parlance, decreased the mental bias toward men and enhanced the salience of women, LGBTQ, and nonbinary people. It also lent support to an old, controversial idea in linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic determinism-the words you have at your disposal frame how you see the world. "One possibility, and it's speculative, is that it'd be sort of like encouraging people in the US to use 'they' as gender-neutral," Pérez says. "It would be weird at first, but if we integrated it into our grammatical toolkit, the novelty wears off. That's part of what I think is happening in Sweden."

It's almost certainly true that time sands the edges off of new syntax and grammar. When William Safire wrote an "On Language" column for The New York Times about the still-nascent honorific Ms. in 1984, he was grudging at best. Marvel Comics had introduced Ms. (now Captain) Marvel, and there was even a feminist magazine called Ms. The influential Safire still groused, but he had an insurmountable problem. Geraldine Ferraro was running for vice president, and the Times' inviolable house style insisted on an honorific. But it couldn't be Miss. Ferraro was married. But she'd kept her own last name, so she couldn't be Mrs. Ferraro. So Safire capitulated under duress. By 2009, when the new "On Language" columnist Ben Zimmer returned to the subject, the ruling on usage wasn't even a question. Zimmer traced its origins back to 1901, acknowledged that it was part of the landscape of American English, and didn't even bother subtweeting Safire.

In surveys about resistance to nongendered language, people often say they can't get past how weird the new usages or words seem, no matter how old the precedents might be. Just as happened with Ms., if they becomes the nonbinary pronoun of choice in English, eventually its quirks-bound to happen when you try to make a plural singular-will lose their apparent quirkiness. We'll get used to it.

Except even so, it turns out that they is no hen. Are no hen. Whatever. They might not perform up to hen's specs. Old terms bring some baggage. In one study-looking at English and Swedish words and speakers-68 percent of English-speaking respondents associated they with the masculine gender, compared to a 50-50 split with ze. "In Swedish, we saw that 'she/he,' writing them together, produced equivalent amounts of male and female perception, and 'hen' also did that," says Marie Gustafsson Sendén, a psychologist at Stockholm University who studies the new lingo. In English, though, they and even the seemingly neutral the person were associated with a masculine bias. "You can reframe a word if you do a lot of work with it," Sendén says. "But a smart new word might be more efficient."

Whether or not they or some newer term becomes English's mainstream nongendered pronoun, what all this research suggests is that deferring to people's preferred pronouns is more than mere "political correctness" or social-media performance. It's a way of giving people new, more inclusive ways of seeing the world. "The work we have here suggests that it's more likely that matters in subtle ways," Pérez says. "You perceive not different realities, but you place more or less emphasis on different things."

New language, then, can become a useful tool for changing how people deal with each other. Think of it as the opposite of censorship-instead of trying to delete ideas from culture, new words can contribute them. "I'm second-generation Mexican American. It's a very male-centered way of life, especially for the immigrants who came here. Culture dies hard sometimes," Pérez says. "How can you shift people's viewpoints on these red-meat issues? The answer can't be, wait 'til the culture dies out or wait for a new generation."

But if you recognize that one way culture entrains gender ideas is through language itself, that gives you a lever, among many, to nudge in the direction of change. "If you're trying to man all stations, this is one thing you can do," Pérez says.

"Wait," I say. "You mean 'staff all stations,' right?"

Pérez laughs. "That was second-generation me," he says.

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Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture

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In 2012 a nongendered pronoun dropped into Swedish discourse. Today it's widely used-and it's nudging people to see the world a little differently. For a question with so much riding on it-does using politically correct language actually make a person less of a jerk?-the test was deceptively simple.

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'Th' sound to vanish from English language by 2066 because of multiculturalism, say linguists

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'Th' sound to vanish from English language by 2066 because of multiculturalism, say linguists

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Visitors expecting to hear the Queen's English spoken on the streets of London in 50 years may need to "fink" again.

By 2066, linguists are predicting that the "th" sound will vanish completely in the capital because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants - the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

Already Estuary English - a hybrid of Cockney and received pronunciation (RP) which is prevalent in the South East - is being replaced by Multicultural London English (MLE) which is heavily influenced by Caribbean, West African and Asian Communities.

But within the next few decades immigration will have fundamentally altered the language, according to experts at the University of York.

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'Th' sound to vanish from English language by 2066 because of multiculturalism, say linguists

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Visitors expecting to hear the Queen's English spoken on the streets of London in 50 years may need to "fink" again. By 2066, linguists are predicting that the "th" sound will vanish completely in the capital because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants - the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

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Arabic and Hebrew Speakers Can Both Read This Script - WNYC News - WNYC

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Arabic and Hebrew Speakers Can Both Read This Script - WNYC News - WNYC

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Arabic and Hebrew Speakers Can Both Read This Script | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News

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A typeface designer in Israel has developed a new writing system that combines Arabic and Hebrew scripts in a way that allows speakers of both languages to read the same text.

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The Language of Gender Violence - Middlebury Magazine

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The Language of Gender Violence - Middlebury Magazine

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You could have heard a pin drop in Mead Chapel on Monday night as guest speaker Jackson Katz showed an audience of about 400 people-students, community members, faculty, and staff-how common language is perpetuating gender violence today.

Problems of gender violence, which include sexual violence, domestic violence, sexual abuse of children, and sexual harassment, are viewed by society as "women's issues that some good men help out with," rather than seen as men's issues.

Men and masculinity "have been rendered invisible in much of the discourse" around gender violence, Katz said. This is not surprising since "dominant groups often go unchallenged in society, and their power and privilege goes unexamined."

"[Gender violence issues] affect women at every level, but I am here to say that the very fact of just calling these issues 'women's issues' is in itself part of the problem."

The guest speaker, who is an educator, author, filmmaker, and cultural theorist with a PhD from UCLA, offered powerful examples to support his argument that language reinforces social norms that place women in jeopardy today.

"The first problem with using the term 'women's issues' when talking about gender violence is it gives men an excuse to not pay attention. A lot of men hear 'women's issues' and they tend to tune it out and think, 'Hey, I'm a guy,' and they literally don't get past the first sentence."

Another way that people discuss gender violence is through the use of the passive voice.

"We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenage girls in the state of Vermont got pregnant last year, rather than how many men and boys impregnated teenage girls.

"So you can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect. [It] shifts the focus off of men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term 'violence against women' is problematic. It's a passive construction; there's no active agent in the sentence. It's a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term 'violence against women,' nobody is doing it to them. It just happens to them...Men aren't even a part of it!"

Next, Katz used a whiteboard on the platform at Mead Chapel (giving credit to author Julia Penelope for the exercise that followed) and wrote:

The first sentence, Katz explained, "is a good English sentence: a subject, a verb, and an object." The second sentence is the first sentence written in the passive voice, and according to Katz "a whole lot has happened. The focus has shifted from John to Mary. John is now at the end of the sentence, which means that John is very close to dropping off the map of our psychic plane. So it's not just bad writing to use the passive voice, it's also political. And the political effect has been to shift the focus from John to Mary."

In the third sentence John is gone. In the fourth, the term "battered" is substituted for "beaten," and in the final sentence of the sequence "you can see that Mary has a new identity. She is now a battered woman and John is no longer part of the conversation."

How language holds victims accountable, rather than their perpetrators, is demonstrated by the way the word "accuser" has supplanted the term "alleged victim."

"This," Katz stated, "is a very big shift in the conversation about sexual violence. People who come forward to allege that they have been sexually assaulted are now referred to routinely as 'accusers.' There's a lot going on here with the use of this word. The public is generally positioned to identify sympathetically with the victims of sexual assault or other forms of abuse. So when you hear about a sexual assault you think, 'That's horrible. That's too bad. Or that could have been me or someone I care about.'"

But using the term 'accuser' reverses the process, because it turns the victim into an accuser. "So we as a public are now positioned to identify sympathetically with him as the victim of her accusation, rather than with her as the victim of his alleged perpetration. This is subtle but deep, isn't it? It's another instance where victims are being told to sit down, shut up, and don't come forward because if you come forward you are going to be an accuser, and then people are going to be questioning your motives...it's just another way that we in society keep people from coming forward."

The intensity of Katz's one-hour presentation-one "aha moment" after another about society's skewed language for the treatment of women-had his audience exhausted but inspired. But the creator of the Mentors in Violence Program, a gender-violence prevention system implemented by professional sports teams, NASCAR, and the U.S. Marine Corps, wasn't finished yet.

Katz took four or five questions from the audience, answered each one thoroughly, and then screened a clip from his film "Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity," and a segment from Byron Hurt's documentary "Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes." Katz spoke pointedly about the obligation men have to model the respectful treatment of women. And he closed with a quote from Frederick Douglass, the 19th century orator and activist, who said, "It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men."
Postscript: In addition to his talk in Mead Chapel, Jackson Katz also conducted a day-long workshop for members of the community. His appearances at Middlebury were sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Program, Office of the Dean of the College, Athletics Department, Parton Health and Counseling Center, Academic Enrichment Fund, WomenSafe, and the Addison Council Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.

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You could have heard a pin drop in Mead Chapel on Monday night as guest speaker Jackson Katz showed an audience of about 400 people-students, community members, faculty, and staff-how common language is perpetuating gender violence today.

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Afrikaans Language Monument – Paarl, South Africa - Atlas Obscura

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Afrikaans Language Monument – Paarl, South Africa - Atlas Obscura

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The Afrikaans language, spoken mainly in South Africa and Namibia, originated as a dialect of Dutch, brought to the Cape area by settlers from the Dutch East India Company in the late 17th century. "Afrikaans" is the Dutch word for "African," and the language was once called "Cape Dutch." This very paradox and the language's complex political history, is depicted in stone by the Afrikaans language monument in South Africa.

Over time, Afrikaans evolved into a distinct language with strong influences from other African languages, like Khoikhoi, Nguni, and Sotho, as well other European languages like French and Portuguese. The monument's design reflects this progression: The three columns become progressively shorter, representing the waning influence of the European languages like Dutch and French, and the three convex mounds grow in size to indicate the increasing role played by African tongues.

These connect to the soaring obelisk that forms the main part of the structure, inspired by writer C.J. Langenhoven, who called Afrikaans a "rapidly ascending curve." It is open at the top, signifying that the lexicon is alive and continues to grow. It is thought to be the only monument in the world dedicated to a language. Visible from miles away, it is imposing sight, watching over the region where it was born and is still a dominant force, the third most spoken language in South Africa.

The Afrikaans language became closely intertwined with South Africa's political history, especially after the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, when there was a strong push to establish English as the language of intellect. As a response against this, organizations were created to promote Afrikaans and the Afrikaner culture. In 1925, it was recognized as an official language with its own African identity, separate from its parent Dutch. However, the language's most famous word became "apartheid," meaning "apartness," after the racial segregation policy in the mid-20th century. Afrikaans itself came to be associated with white supremacy, and was tangled in controversy all through the later half of the century.

The monument designed by Jan van Wijk is a granite tribute to this tumultuous history. The sculptor won a competition to design the structure, which was opened in 1975, 50 years after the language was given official status.

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The Afrikaans language, spoken mainly in South Africa and Namibia, originated as a dialect of Dutch, brought to the Cape area by settlers from the Dutch East India Company in the late 17th century. "Afrikaans" is the Dutch word for "African," and the language was once called "Cape Dutch."

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Native American Hand Talkers Fight to Keep Sign Language Alive

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Native American Hand Talkers Fight to Keep Sign Language Alive

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In early September 1930, the Blackfeet Nation of Montana hosted a historic Indian Sign Language Grand Council, gathering leaders of a dozen North American Nations and language groups.

The three-day council held was organized by Hugh L. Scott, a 77-year-old U.S. Army General who had spent a good portion of his career in the American West, where he observed and learned what users called Hand Talk, and what is today more broadly known as Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL). With $5,000 in federal funding, Scott filmed the proceedings and hoped to produce a film dictionary of more than 1,300 signs. He died before he could finish the project.

Scott's films disappeared into the National Archives. Recently rediscovered, they are an important resource for those looking to revitalize PISL.

Among them is Ron Garritson, who identifies himself as being of Choctaw and European heritage. He was raised in Billings, Montana, near the Crow Nation.

"I learned how to speak Crow to a degree, and I was really interested in the sign language," he said. "I saw it being used by the Elders, and I thought it was a beautiful form of communication. And so I started asking questions."

Garritson studied Scott's films, along with works by other ethnographers and now has a vocabulary of about 1,700 signs. He conducts workshops and classes across Montana, in an effort to preserve and spread sign language and native history.
Lingua franca
Prior to contact with Europeans, North American Native peoples were not a unified culture, but hundreds of different cultures and tribes, each with its own political organization, belief system and language. When speakers of one language met those of another, whether in trade, councils or conflict, they communicated in the lingua franca of Hand Talk.

Scholars dispute exactly when, in their 30,000-year history in North America, tribes developed sign language. It was observed among Florida tribes by 16th Century Spanish colonizers.

"Coronado, as he documented in his journals in 1540, was in Texas and met the Comanche," said Garritson. "He documented that the Comanches made themselves so well-understood with the use of sign talk that there was almost no need for an interpreter. It was that easy to use and easy to understand."

While each tribe had its own dialect, tribes were able to communicate easily. Though universal in North America, Hand Talk was more prominent among the nomadic Plains Nations.

"There were fewer linguistic groups east of the Mississippi River," said Garritson. "They were mostly woodland tribes, living in permanent villages and were familiar with each other's languages. They still used sign language to an extent, but not like it was used out here."

Hand Talk was also the first language of deaf Natives.
Erasing a culture
By the late 1800s, tens of thousands of Native Americans still used Hand Talk. That changed when the federal government instituted a policy designed to "civilize" tribal people.

Children were removed from their families and sent to government-run boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their own languages or practice their own spiritual beliefs. Native Deaf children were sent to deaf residential schools, where they were taught to use American Sign Language (ASL).

Research has shown that Hand Talk is still being used by a small number of deaf and hearing descendants of the Plains Indian cultures.

"Hand Talk is endangered and dying quickly," said Melanie McKay-Cody, who identifies herself as Cherokee Deaf and is an expert in anthropological linguistics.

McKay-Cody is the first deaf researcher to specialize in North American Hand Talk and today works with tribes to help them preserve their signed languages. She is pushing for PISL to be incorporated into mainstream education of the deaf.
"Easier than hollering"
Lanny Real Bird, who is Crow, Arikara and Hidatsa, grew up in a household where PISL was used.

"My grandmother had hearing loss," he said. "I'd see my father signing with her in the Plains Indian Sign Language. I picked up basic sign language, enough to say, 'Yes' or 'No,' 'I'm hungry."

As a boy, he played with a young relative who was deaf, who helped expand his signing vocabulary.

Real Bird, a former instructor at Montana's Little Big Horn College, has worked for 20 years helping tribes preserve their languages, both spoken and signed, and has developed a 400 to 600-sign PISL course, which he teaches at community schools and workshops across the Plains states.

"Right now we're probably at the basic communications phase," he said. "So in order to expand, we have to go to another level, from listening to understanding to rudimentary communicating to fluency and literacy."

Real Bird said it took nearly a decade to convince school systems to incorporate PISL into general language instruction.

"Later this month, students of the of the Crow Reservation's Wyola Elementary School will be showcased at the annual Montana Indian Education Conference," he said.

There, they will demonstrate their Crow language skills, both spoken and signed.

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голос америки

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Native American Hand Talkers Fight to Keep Sign Language Alive

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Prior to contact with Europeans, North American Native peoples were not a unified culture but hundreds of different cultures and tribes, so when speakers of one language met those of another they communicated in the lingua franca of Hand Talk

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Ge'ez Revisited | College of Arts and Sciences - University of Washington

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Ge'ez Revisited | College of Arts and Sciences - University of Washington

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College of Arts and Sciences - University of Washington

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It's an important language for the study of late ancient Christianity and early Islam. It's the language of some of the earliest Judeo-Christian writings. Its vocabulary can be found throughout the Quran. Yet the classical language Ge'ez is little known beyond the Horn of Africa and taught at just two universities in the Western world. Make that three - the University of Washington offered Ge'ez 101 for the first time this spring.

Hamza Zafer, assistant professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, expected a handful of students to sign up when he offered this obscure classical language. Instead the class filled to capacity, with 30 students enrolled within days and more on the waiting list. Four graduate students with a scholarly interest in Ge'ez signed up, but the rest had more personal reasons for enrolling. "Most of the students are children of immigrants from the Horn of Africa - Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea," says Zafer. "Many of them grew up in Seattle exposed to Ge'ez in their communities, since Ge'ez is a living liturgical language in the Ethiopian and Eritrean orthodox churches, much like Latin was the liturgical language in Roman Catholic churches."

Those students include bioengineering major Jerusalem Kifelew, who grew up hearing Ge'ez in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and business pre-major Fethawit Musye, who heard it in the Eritrean Orthodox Church. "When my friends and I heard Ge'ez was being offered as a class at UW, we were really excited because we actually had a chance to learn more about the language we grew up hearing," says Musye.

Unlike his students, Zafer had no contact with Ge'ez early on. As a specialist in early Islamic history and thought, Zafer was formally trained in many late ancient literary languages - Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic - but not Ge'ez, despite its significance and centrality. "It's a very important language," he says, "but as a classical African language it has been largely ignored by the Western academy, which privileges the classical languages of Europe and Western Asia." Zafer taught himself Ge'ez while doing his doctorate, using old grammar texts from Germany. "I learn languages, dead and alive, like a treat for my brain," he laughs. "I know over two dozen languages this way. Ge'ez started out as a linguistic treat, but now it informs my research on early Islam and has become a much deeper intellectual interest."

Ge'ez dates back to at least the second century and belongs to the only part of Africa that was never colonized by a European power, a fact that Zafer points out in class. He also emphasizes the language's formative impact on Christianity and Islam. "The field of early Islamic studies has always been oriented towards Europe and Western Asia, which are seen as the cradle of Jewish and Christian thought," says Zafer. "Africa is never seen as part of the equation. But east African Judaism and Christianity had just as much, if not more, of a formative impact on early Islam. The fact that a lot of Christological vocabulary in the Quran is in Ge'ez tells us that the Christianity that the earliest Muslims encountered was an African Christianity."

Learning about the historical role of Ge'ez has been an eye-opener for many students. Kifelew says that understanding the language's historical importance has made her even more engaged with Ge'ez. She's also intrigued by its longevity. "The language has remained unchanged and in its original form," says Kifelew. "It's so common to see languages change over time due to different influences, and it's very interesting to see how and why Ge'ez has stayed constant."

Beyond what they learn in class, the students also benefit from the rare opportunity to be surrounded by classmates with a similar background. "Every day they come into class giddy," says Zafer. "This is probably the only time these American students will be in a classroom where most of their classmates share their African ancestry. They are one of many, rather than the exception. As a person of color myself, I realize how empowering such spaces and experiences can be, especially in the current climate."

Musye and Kifelew have certainly found that to be true. "This is the first class I've taken at the UW where I feel completely understood by my peers," says Kifelew. Adds Musye, "Being in this class with students who not only look like me but also come from a similar background has been enlightening, because we're able to make connections to our culture."

Zafer is pleased that his department chair recognizes Ge'ez's significance - both to historians and many Washingtonians - and helped get the course on the books. He believes that the language has been overlooked in academia for far too long.

"There has been an implicit hierarchy of what corpuses of writing or languages or intellectual traditions are important in the humanities," says Zafer. "Part of offering this class is to upend that, to point out that these hierarchies are embedded in a particularly Eurasia-centric understanding of high Classical learning. The class serves as a reminder that the West includes communities that have different hierarchies of knowledge and different visions of history."

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It's an important language for the study of late ancient Christianity and early Islam. It's the language of some of the earliest Judeo-Christian writings. Its vocabulary can be found throughout the Quran. Yet the classical language Ge'ez is little known beyond the Horn of Africa and taught at just two universities in the Western world.

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How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained - Atlas Obscura

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How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained - Atlas Obscura

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"Don't eat gabagool, Grandma," says Meadow Soprano on an early episode of The Sopranos, perhaps the most famous depiction of Jersey Italian culture in the past few decades. "It's nothing but fat and nitrates." The pronunciation of "gabagool," a mutation of the word "capicola," might surprise a casual viewer, although it and words like it should be familiar to viewers of other New Jersey-based shows like the now-defunct Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, where food often drives conversation. The casts are heavily Italian-American, but few of them can actually speak, in any real way, the Italian language. Regardless, when they talk about food, even food that's widely known by the non-Italian population, they often use a specific accent.

And it's a weird one. "Mozzarella" becomes something like "mutzadell." "Ricotta" becomes "ree-goat." "Prosciutto" becomes "pruh-zhoot." There is a mangling of the language in an instantly identifiable way: final syllables are deleted, certain consonants are swapped with others, certain vowels are mutated in certain places.

Most immigrant groups in the U.S. retain certain words and phrases from the old language even if the modern population can't speak it. But for people outside those groups, and even, often, inside them, it's next to impossible to pick out a specific regional accent in the way a Jewish American says "challah" or a Korean-American says "jjigae." How can someone who doesn't speak the language possibly have an regional accent?

Yet Italian-Americans do. It's even been parodied; on an episode of Kroll Show, comedian Nick Kroll's character Bobby Bottleservice, a Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino-type, describes his lunch in this thick accent, eliminating the final syllable of each item. "Cap-uh-coal," he says, pointing at capicola. "Mort-ah-dell," he says, as the camera pans over a thin, pale arrangement of mortadella. "Coca-coal," he finishes, as the camera moves over to a glass of Coke. "Capicola," made famous in its mutation by The Sopranos, gets even more mutated for comedic effect on The Office, where it becomes "gabagool."

I spoke to a few linguists and experts on Italian-American culture to figure out why a kid from Paterson, New Jersey, who doesn't speak Italian, would earnestly ask for a taste of "mutzadell." The answer takes us way back through history and deep into the completely chaotic world of Italian linguistics.

"One thing that I need to tell you, because this is something that is not clear even for linguists, let alone the layperson-the linguistic situation in Italy is quite complicated," says Mariapaola D'Imperio, a professor in the linguistics department at Aix-Marseille University who was born in Naples and studied in Ohio before moving to France. The situation is so complicated that the terms used to describe pockets of language are not widely agreed upon; some use "language," some use "dialect," some use "accent," and some use "variation." Linguists like to argue about the terminology of this kind of thing.

The basic story is this: Italy is a very young country made up of many very old kingdoms awkwardly stapled together to make a patchwork whole. Before 1861, these different kingdoms-Sardinia, Rome, Tuscany, Venice, Sicily (they were called different things at the time, but roughly correspond to those regions now)-those were, basically, different countries. Its citizens didn't speak the same language, didn't identify as countrymen, sometimes were even at war with each other. The country was unified over the period from around 1861 until World War I, and during that period, the wealthier northern parts of the newly-constructed Italy imposed unfair taxes and, basically, annexed the poorer southern parts. As a result, southern Italians, ranging from just south of Rome all the way down to Sicily, fled in huge numbers to other countries, including the U.S.

About 80 percent of Italian-Americans are of southern Italian descent, says Fred Gardaphe, a professor of Italian-American studies at Queens College. "Ships from Palermo went to New Orleans and the ships from Genoa and Naples went to New York," he says. They spread from there, but the richest pockets of Italian-Americans aren't far from New York City. They're clustered in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and in and around Philadelphia.

Yet those Italians, all from southern Italy and all recent immigrants in close proximity to each other in the US, wouldn't necessarily consider themselves countrymen. That's because each of the old Italian kingdoms had their own...well, D'Imperio, who is Italian, calls them "dialects." But others refer to them in different ways. Basically the old Italian kingdoms each spoke their own languages that largely came from the same family tree, slightly but not all that much closer than the Romance languages, like French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The general family name for these languages is Italo-Dalmatian (Dalmatian, it turns out, refers to Croatia. The dog is from there, too.). They were not all mutually comprehensible, and had their own external influences. Calabrian, for example, is heavily influenced by Greek, thanks to a long Greek occupation and interchange. In the northwest near the border with France, Piedmont, with its capital of Turin, spoke a language called Piedmontese, which is sort of French-ish. Sicilian, very close to North Africa, had a lot of Arabic-type stuff in it. I use the past tense for these because these languages are dying, quickly. "Dialects do still exist, but they're spoken mainly by old people," says D'Imperio. (Sicilian put up more of a fight than most.)

During unification, the northern Italian powers decided that having a country that speaks about a dozen different languages would pose a bit of a challenge to their efforts, so they picked one and called it "Standard Italian" and made everyone learn it. The one that they picked was Tuscan, and they probably picked it because it was the language of Dante, the most famous Italian writer. (You can see why calling these languages "dialects" is tricky; Standard Italian is just one more dialect, not the base language which Calabrian or Piedmontese riffs on, which is kind of the implication.)

Standard Italian has variations, like any other language, which we'll call accents. Someone from Sicily would have a Sicilian accent, but when speaking Standard Italian, a person from Milan will, hopefully, be able to understand them, because at a basic level, they'll be using a language with the same structure and a vocabulary that is mostly identical.

But this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of "Italians," such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn't have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian.

Linguists say that there are two trajectories for a language divorced from its place of origin. It sometimes dies out quickly; people assimilate, speak the most popular language wherever they live, stop teaching their children the old language. But sometimes, the language has a firmer hold on its speakers than most, and refuses to entirely let go. The Italian dialects are like that.

"I grew up speaking English and Italian dialects from my family's region of Puglia," says Gardaphe. "And when I went to Italy, very few people could understand me, even the people in my parents' region. They recognized that I was speaking as if I was a 70-year-old man, when I was only 26 years old." Italian-American Italian is not at all like Standard Italian; instead it's a construction of the frozen shards left over from languages that don't even really exist in Italy anymore with minimal intervention from modern Italian.

There's a spectrum to all this, of course. Somebody, even in their 70s or 80s, who was born in Italy and lived in the US can still be understood in Italy. But Italian has undergone huge standardization changes in the past few decades, and it'll be hard for modern Italian speakers to understand them, even harder than if somebody showed up in New York in 2015 speaking in 1920s New Yorker "Thoity-Thoid Street" slang and accent.

For whatever reason, foods and curse words linger longer in a disrupted language. I think of my own complete lack of knowledge of Yiddish, with my lousy vocabulary made up entirely of words like blintzes, kugel, kvetch, nudnik, and schmuck. If you can't eat them or yell them, foreign words don't often stick around.

Ann Marie Olivo-Shaw, who grew up on and studied the sociolinguistics of Long Island, thinks the various pockets of southern Italian immigrants could understand each other, sort of, a little. (Jersey Italians are not, linguistically, distinct from New York or Rhode Island or Philadelphia Italians when speaking Italian.) Generally being fairly close in proximity, even if they were only speaking similar languages, they would necessarily have some cultural similarities. Culinarily similarities also abound: less meat-heavy, more like Provence or Greece in the use of seafood, vegetables, and even, rare for western Europe, spice. (Capicola and mozzarella are, probably, creations of southern Italy, though there are versions elsewhere and Italians love to argue about who invented what.)

And they shared some qualities linguistically as well. Let's do a fun experiment and take three separate linguistic trends from southern Italian dialects and combine them all to show how one Standard Italian word can be so thoroughly mangled in the U.S.

First: "The features that you'll find across a lot of these dialects, and one that you still hear a lot in southern Italy today, is vowels at the ends of words are pronounced very very softly, and usually as more of an 'uh' vowel," says Olivo-Shaw. D'Imperio is a little more extreme, calling it "vowel deletion." Basically: if the final syllable is a vowel? You can get rid of it. Vowel deletion is common amongst many languages, and is done for the same reason that, sometimes, vowels are added: to make the flow from one word to another more seamless. It's easiest, in terms of muscle movement, to transition from a vowel to a consonant and vice versa. A vowel to a vowel is difficult; in English, that's why we have "a" versus "an" in phrases like "a potato" or "an apple." Some Italian words that would follow food words, like prepositions or articles, would start with a vowel, and it's easier to just remove it so you don't have to do the vowel-to-vowel transition.

The stereotypical Italian "It's a-me, Mario!" addition of a vowel is done for the same reason: Italian is a very fluid, musical language, and Italian speakers will try to eliminate the awkwardness of going consonant-to-consonant. So they'll just add in a generic vowel sound-"ah" or "uh"-between consonants, to make it flow better.

Second: "A lot of the 'o' sounds will be, as we call it in linguistics, raised, so it'll be pronounced more like 'ooh'," says Olivo-Shaw. Got it: O=Ooh.

And third: "A lot of what we call the voiceless consonants, like a 'k' sound, will be pronounced as a voiced consonant," says Olivo-Shaw. This is a tricky one to explain, but basically the difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant can be felt if you place your fingers over your Adam's apple and say as short of a sound with that consonant as you can. A voiced consonant will cause a vibration, and voiceless will not. So like, when you try to just make a "g" sound, it'll come out as "guh." But a "k" sound can be made without using your vocal cords at all, preventing a vibration. So "k" would be voiceless, and "g" would be voiced. Try it! It's fun.

Okay so, we've got three linguistic quirks common to most of the southern Italian ancient languages. Now try to pronounce "capicola."

The "c" sounds, which are really "k" sounds, become voiced, so they turn into "g". Do the same with the "p"; that's a voiceless consonant, and we want voiced ones, so change that to a "b". The second-to-last vowel, an "oh" sound, gets raised, so change that to an "ooh." And toss out the last syllable. It's just a vowel, who needs it? Now try again.

Yeah. Gabagool.

If you were to go to southern Italy, you wouldn't find people saying "gabagool." But some of the old quirks of the old languages survived into the accents of Standard Italian used there. In Sicily or Calabria, you might indeed find someone ordering "mutzadell." In their own weird way, Jersey (and New York and Rhode Island and Philadelphia) Italians are keeping the flame of their languages alive even better than Italian-Italians. There's something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn't even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub-language to order some cheese.

"Language is so much a part of how we identify," says Olivo-Shaw. "The way we speak is who we are. I think that for Italians, we have such a pride in our ancestry and such a pride in our culture that it's just kind of an unconscious way of expressing that."
Update, 11/5: An earlier version of the story had the wrong age for Fred Gardaphe.

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How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained

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"Don't eat gabagool, Grandma," says Meadow Soprano on an early episode of The Sopranos, perhaps the most famous depiction of Jersey Italian culture in the past few decades. "It's nothing but fat and nitrates."

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New Thoughts on the Origins of Human Speech - Archaeology Magazine

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New Thoughts on the Origins of Human Speech - Archaeology Magazine

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New Thoughts on the Origins of Human Speech - Archaeology Magazine

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A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America

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What's the Best Way to Teach English Grammar? - The Atlantic

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What's the Best Way to Teach English Grammar? - The Atlantic

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When she first set out to find a new way to engage the wide array of ages in her English classes at the Cambridge School-which also offers classes in French, German, and Portugese as a foreign language-Peake researched a number of different plans before adapting the murder mystery idea that caught her eye online. Her teenaged students responded to the approach, and Peake expanded the method to her other classes.
Some of the more imaginative "murder weapons" students have suggested: a wooden spoon, a harpoon gun, and a shark tank.
"The motives section lets them get really creative: We've had contributions like 'he hadn't done his homework,' 'he stole my girlfriend,' and 'she owed me lots of money.' It's also a great way to challenge their vocabulary when discussing things like the murder weapons," Peake said. Some of the more imaginative items students have suggested: a wooden spoon, a harpoon gun, and a shark tank.

"[The murder mystery lesson] was really different and surprising," said 24-year-old Ana Caterina Alves, one of Peake's students. "It led us into a hypothetical situation and we were part of the story because we became characters and detectives. The purpose was to find the murder weapon and the murderer, and with that goal, we developed our communication skills and learned new vocabulary. That will be useful in and out of class."

Versions of the murder mystery lesson plan have become well-liked across the globe. One take on the method has held rank for the last two years within the top 100 most accessed pages on Macmillan Education resource site OneStopEnglish, garnering more than 1,000 hits each month.
"One of the main benefits of this lesson is that it shows teachers how they can easily set up a role-play activity which helps students to practice English in a safe and comfortable environment."
"It's safe to say it's a popular one," said Sarah Milligan, commissioning editor at Macmillan. "One of the main benefits of this lesson is that it shows teachers how they can easily set up a role-play activity which helps students to practice English in a safe and comfortable environment. Additionally, this lesson combines various skills like reading and speaking with practice of specific grammar points."

While finding creative approaches to teaching grammar has been cheered in the past, Peake's murder mystery method might not jibe with education experts. For Janet Isserlis, program manager for adult learning at Brown University's Swearer Center for Public Service, using the concept of murder as the basis of a lesson is unnecessarily dark.

"It could be 'fun' but it feels very misguided. Why not create a lesson where something goes missing, where someone makes some mistake or spells or even steals-why murder?" Isserlis asked. "I'm not convinced that there aren't other contexts, situations and examples that can engage learners in using language and critical thoughts as effectively-if not more so."

But innovation in the classroom can be challenging, Milligan said. Educators continually face a difficult task in finding creative lesson plans that cater to all. "Teachers need more support and time to spend planning creative lessons," Milligan said. "A teacher who is expected to teach nonstop with little or no planning time or training could not be expected to come up with fresh new lesson ideas."

Peake said she's glad to have left the "comfort zone of the dreaded textbook," and plans to use the murder mystery framework for other lessons, too.

"I'm thinking about using the exercise to practice reported speech," she explained. "The students would have to write up the questions their characters asked and the answers they were given. There's always a lot of noise and laughter during these sessions, which I take as a good sign."

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When she first set out to find a new way to engage the wide array of ages in her English classes at the Cambridge School-which also offers classes in French, German, and Portugese as a foreign language-Peake researched a number of different plans before adapting the murder mystery idea that caught her eye online.

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BBC World Service - Newsday, Secrets of an Ethiopian language forgotten for 1000 years

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BBC World Service - Newsday, Secrets of an Ethiopian language forgotten for 1000 years

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secrets of an ethiopian language forgotten for 1000 years

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Secrets of an Ethiopian language forgotten for 1000 years, Newsday - BBC World Service

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A university course is teaching Ge'ez for the first time in a millennium

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They're Not 'Just Words': How Sexist Speech Impacts Stress and Self-Esteem - The Atlantic - The Atlantic

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They're Not 'Just Words': How Sexist Speech Impacts Stress and Self-Esteem - The Atlantic - The Atlantic

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When Donald Trump bragged about being able to do whatever he wants to women, he responded to the backlash by saying that those were "just words." As Atlantic writer Olga Khazan explains in this video, there are many ways that these kinds of words have a psychological impact on women. Discriminatory speech can have a range of negative effects, like stress and an increased risk of mental health issues. So, no, they're not "just words."

About This Series

Exploring the psychology behind everyday human habits and emotions

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They're Not 'Just Words': How Sexist Speech Impacts Stress and Self-Esteem

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When Donald Trump bragged about being able to do whatever he wants to women, he responded to the backlash by saying that those were "just words." As Atlantic writer Olga Khazan explains in this video, there are many ways that these kinds of words have a psychological impact on women.

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Women as Drivers of Language Evolution | Grammarly Blog

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Women as Drivers of Language Evolution | Grammarly Blog

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Why, you sound just like your mother! If a family friend makes this observation, they may be referring to more than the sound of your voice. Many people use the same words and expressions as their mothers. Female relatives, authors, teachers, and others may have also colored the way you speak. Have you considered how women have influenced English?

Vocal Fry

Vocal fry is a low vibration at the ends of words and sentences. Though men do it too, vocal fry is widely associated with young women. The phenomenon occurs when air passes through a tightly squeezed vocal cartridge, creating a unique sound. Dr. Reena Gupta, a doctor who specializes in voice care, says that "it is a [vocal cord] usage problem . . . and will result in damage." Despite the risk, some women intentionally create the speech pattern, sometimes in imitation of Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, or other celebrities.

Uptalk

How do you feel when someone asks you one question after another? You might have that feeling while conversing with a teenage girl, although she may not pose a single inquiry. To form questions in English, speakers use a higher inflection on the last word of a sentence. Uptalkers might use question inflection at any time, even in the middle of a statement. Critics think it makes women sound dumb, but linguists acknowledge that there might be some solid communicative function behind their lilting voices. The New York Times quotes Penny Eckert, a linguistics professor: "A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute. But they're not just using them because they're girls. They're using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end."

Gender-Neutral Labels

Who delivers your mail? Decades ago, you may not have hesitated before saying that the mailman dropped off your letters. However, times have changed. Now, you might use the terms mail carrier, mail person, or postal delivery worker. Feminists are at the forefront of the movement, pointing out that male-oriented titles exclude the women who work alongside men in the same roles.

Pronoun Equality

"She" doesn't seem like a rare word, but it was once much more scarce than "he." A group of researchers compared the frequency of male and female pronouns using publications in the Google Books archive. Prior to 1950, writers used male pronouns three and a half times more often than female pronouns. After World War II, until around 1965, male pronouns reached the height of their dominance at a proportion of 4.5:1. Again, feminists and female authors receive credit for changing the trend. By 2005, the ratio was one female pronoun for every two male pronouns. Do you think the usage is equal today?

Words Coined by Female Authors

In Dorothy Parker's short story "The Waltz," the narrator observes that the man who has asked her to dance is not a "scaredy-cat." Sylvia Plath described how vivid dreams are in her poem, "The Ghost's Leavetaking." Looking around you in a dream, you would see the dreamscape-places that are surreal and fantastical or so real that you don't know if you are asleep or awake.

Which words have you borrowed from the women in your life? Have you heard someone speaking in uptalk? Can you think of a better word to describe an easily frightened, ready-to-flee person than scaredy-cat? Women have had a strong impact on the way people speak English. And as languages do, English will continue to evolve. What do you think the women of your generation will contribute to the next generation of English speakers?

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Why, you sound just like your mother! If a family friend makes this observation, they may be referring to more than the sound of your voice. Many people use the same words and expressions as their mothers. Female relatives, authors, teachers, and others may have also colored the way you speak.

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The Persistent Perks of Speaking Latin – EIDOLON

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The Persistent Perks of Speaking Latin – EIDOLON

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Between a bes and a dodrans of my time goes to learning and helping others learn and teach Latin. Our main goals are to be able to read Latin texts; to interact with the products, practices, and perspectives of Latin-using people; and to reap some of the cognitive benefits of knowing multiple languages. I have found that speaking Latin plays a natural and effective part in all these pursuits. I'm far from the first to report this, even in the last decade (see this, this, this, this, and this [pp. 8ff]), but the recognized perks are piling up so high that their explorations should, too.

If you share any of the goals I listed, speaking Latin is a pretty normal thing to do, and not as scary or as hard to start as you might think. It could even make your life easier.

I say this with full knowledge that, for some, the biggest obstacle to speaking Latin is fear. This is true to such a degree that, at the Rusticationeswhere colleagues and I aim to provide "the safest introduction to spoken Latin on the planet," we have developed entire sessions and staff roles devoted to helping participants tame the terror. I can assure you that, whatever the fear - fear of making mistakes, fear of tactless correction, fear of sounding silly, fear of being exposed to yourself or others as a fraudulent Latinist, fear of reimagining your curriculum, fear of overwhelming your students, fear of not being able to express yourself - there is a long-lived, large, and swelling community of people with all sorts of experiences, all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of shared concerns eager to make the Latin-speaking journey together. Pretty much all of us began this adventure as adults, many deep into our careers, with far fewer opportunities for speaking Latin than there are today.

The most common reason people give for overcoming their fear and choosing to speak Latin is that they want to read Latin better. While the link may not be obvious, and reading comfortably comes largely from reading constantly, we should be surprised to find a deft reader who had not had a habit of interacting with others in the language.

When I say "read," I don't mean deciphering a text by accessing explicit knowledge about words, forms, syntax, and style. I mean "read" the way people normally use the term: seeing a sequence of words and simultaneously sensing the unfurling plot or point. Deciphering texts by means of conscious knowledge can yield meaning and pleasure, but the difference between this experience and implicit, real-time understanding is something like the difference between getting a joke only after it is explained and getting the joke right when it is told. (Some people get so fast at deciphering texts that they appear to be reading. This is cool, but still not like getting the joke when it is told. It's more like having the joke explained to you super-fast.)

Not everyone wants to read Latin the way I'm talking about. The chair of classics at a prestigious school recently told me that it would be tragic for a person to understand Latin in real time, because this would deprive the reader of the boons to mind and character of painstakingly piecing together the meaning. That seems to me like not wanting people to get a joke on the grounds that it would deny them the chance to figure out why it is funny.

But more and more Latinists I work with, at all levels, voice dismay at the fact that they can pick up an English, French, Dutch, or Polish text and understand and enjoy it on sight, but cannot do so with the language they teach and most love. For them and their students, the goal is reading Latin-as-Latin, in real time. This does not preclude analysis - on the contrary, it forms the foundation, along with cultural and other background knowledge, for doing more with a text: relishing its artistry, arguing about it, translating it, or relating it to other texts.

How do we get there? In other words, how do our brains change to be more like the brains of people who process the language intuitively? This matters a lot, because trying to read a language without our brains having undergone such a change is to be in conflict with ourselves: we are trying to do something with a brain that has not been fitted for that thing.

For my students and me, speaking Latin supplies four natural solutions.

1. Latin interaction has turned out to be the most efficient way, by far, to let my novice and intermediate students encounter the vast volume of level-appropriate Latin input required for growing a mental representation of the language. (I wrote about the need for such input, a point of agreement among otherwise disparate researchers, in " Teaching Latin to Humans.") This alone would convince me of the value of speaking Latin, but there's more.

2. The healthy human brain is in its element when dealing with speech - even for people who don't consider themselves auditory learners. Hearing and speaking a language are primary mental acts, in the sense that the human brain has parts and processes dedicated to them. Speech thus differs from reading, a relative newcomer among human activities that needs to conscript several brain processes focused on other things, such as spatial recognition, in order to link marks on a page or screen with meaning. This is not an argument against reading, whose complexity is part of what makes it gloriously human. But to bypass the speech processes so integrated with human biology and so central to human experience is, at best, to give up a potent teaching tool. At worst, it frustrates the very brains we often claim to be training.

What's more, the brain areas and activities we depend on for reading include ones associated with aspects of speech, such as phonological processing. What happens when a brain attempting to read Horace or Hildegard summons these parts and processes and gets no answer, because the oral-aural core of language has been ignored?

3. Regular interaction in Latin softens the distinction between easy and hard grammar and, with it, the thud of "advanced grammar." There really is no such thing as advanced grammar. There is only language one has met enough, in meaningful enough ways, for it to feel normal, and language one has not. Are gerunds and gerundives and jussive subjunctives and indirect questions really that much harder to process than personal pronouns? Not if you hear every day, "est tempus scribendi," "nunc est legendum," "quaeso finem faciatis," and "quis scit quota hora sit?" A fear clause isn't some sneaky switcheroo. It's just how you tell someone what you're afraid of. Sequence of tenses isn't a minefield of moods. It's just what emerges when you say what you mean.

Some syntax is supposedly so sticky that it can't be learned until late in a course or textbook. Unfortunately, this makes it the syntax to which students have had the least exposure before meeting the texts it is supposed to help them understand! There is no way around this if we limit ourselves to explicit instruction. We can't teach everything at once, and we can't constantly review. Infusing everyday interactions with a wide range of Latin phrases and usage is a practical and efficient strategy.

4. There is a big difference between taking occasional advantage of an already known language and treating Latin as though it makes sense only in terms of another language. Many students - and, alarmingly, many teachers - seem to think that Latin words mean English words, or that Latin constructions mean English ones. There's nothing wrong with using another language to illuminate a Latin word or an obscure passage. I often use English for this purpose. But the English serves only to approximate meaning, not create it; the Latin means something already. Speaking Latin makes this real and normal for participants in the conversation.

As my students and I interact in Latin, we build both brains and a community for which the expression of thought in Latin means something in real time. When my students read, they see preserved on a page what they already understand as sound. Do they meet new words and literary modes of expression? Yes, and these can be grand encounters. Do they need help with tricky texts? Of course. As in general literacy development, though, their Latin literacy starts as the recognition on a page of language that they would also understand as speech, and continues, in more artificial literary registers, as an affair with words, word-relationships, and styles that adorn or redeploy a language that students are already used to engaging on its own terms.

What I am describing is not cold, contextless symbol-processing. It gives life to our experience of the products, practices, and perspectives of the Romans and of those who have thought and written in Latin since. Yes, we learn about baths and brothels, slaves and circuses, weddings and wars - often in Latin. But regular input and interaction in Latin take us farther, tweaking our brains to be literally more like a Roman's.

I don't want to share Caesar's attitudes. But I do want to sense as suddenly as possible what he says of a druid, a traitor, or a moose. I don't covet Ovid's mind or life. But I want to crumble at nec iam pater. I don't wish Heloise's pain on anyone. But I want to squat in the soul that squeezed out

Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo praesidens mundo matrimonii honore dignaretur, totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in perpetuo possidendum, carius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix.

As God is my witness, if Augustus himself, master of the whole world, did me the honor of marriage and established the entire globe as my eternal possession, it would still seem dearer and more proper to me to be called your whore than his empress. (Heloise to Abelard, Ep. 2)

Even when it's not plunged into a literary sea, a Latinized mind can, I think, deepen one's understanding of, even empathy for, the people of other times and places.

Academic articles on the cognitive payoff of communicating in multiple languages abound. The reported benefits include heightened empathy, along with above-average ability to handle ambiguity, find multiple solutions to problems, toggle between tasks, pay attention, remember things, employ high-order reason, and, indeed, defy old age. Though the outcomes are sometimes sensationalized, we risk nothing by supposing them, as they are byproducts of communication in another language, germinating in cerebral soil we were going to water anyway.

For me, these benefits largely subsume, if not supersede, one I used to single out: logical thinking honed by grammatical analysis. My students think logically and analyze grammatically, but I've come to consider such analysis less and less definitive of a course in language and literature, and the desired results less and less contingent on grammatical analysis.

The way grammar is presented and organized in textbooks and reference works is not the way it seems to be represented in the heads of people who know a language. This has two major implications. First, even virtuosic knowledge of grammar as arrayed in textbooks does not cause the changes in the brain required to read Latin in the sense considered in this article, though it may help one explain aspects of Latin texts to oneself or others. This is something most present-day Latin teachers and learners, including some of the most respected of our time, have confirmed through experience.

The second implication is that we should be cautious about touting the benefits of training in discrete grammar points, or training in translation that relies on such points, as benefits of learning the Latin language. In fact, they are potential benefits of a particular way of organizing and analyzing data sets that happen to have been generated from Latin texts. Similar treatment of other data might yield similar benefits to mind or character, but the notion persists, partly because it can be deployed as a justification for studying Latin at all, and partly because it allows us to claim that we are killing two birds with one stone, training the brain while helping people read the classics.

I am no longer comfortable making this claim for grammatical analysis, because the type of brain-training being asserted comes not from actually learning Latin, but from a certain way of thinking about Latin - and that way of thinking about Latin has not proven generally successful in helping people read whatever Latin they wish to read. I would rather promote the ability to process Latin as Latin, with side effects linked to bilingualism, which overlap with the benefits claimed for grammatical analysis and are just as attractive.

Does this mean I never teach grammatical generalizations or terminology? Not at all. My own linguistic glee can be contagious, and can give learners yet another way to relish the language. Coupled with meaningful text or speech, a generalization can cue a click for this or that student - in some magical moments, for several at once. Conscious knowledge can help resolve ambiguities in texts above one's reading level. Comparative grammar helps address the Connections and Comparisons goals in many programs. I am careful, though, not to fall for or foster the idea that "not grasping the grammar in the textbook" is the same thing as, or even very similar to, "not being good at Latin."

There are plenty of objections to speaking Latin. I've answered a dozen here, including the concerns that speaking Latin is not the goal of our courses, that we might model mistakes for students, that some take Latin precisely to avoid speaking another language, and - wait for it - that speaking Latin is too fun. Often, though, what stands in the way of a would-be speaker is neither outright objection nor the fears catalogued earlier, but dread of what it might take to get good enough.

The sweat and tears by which Latinists have earned their chops could fill the Euxine Sea. We don't need another onus. And yet I see teachers brimming with vim at conferences and online (e.g., here, here, and here), craving ways to stretch themselves and serve their students. So I'm not suggesting that people do something instead of nothing; I'm claiming that training and habits that include hearing and speaking Latin provide some of the highest returns on investment.

In fact, I think teachers' lives would be easier and more enjoyable if much of the time and effort spent seeking yet another way to spin the supine were spent instead interacting in Latin and im bibing w isely chosen Latin texts- something pretty much all Latin teachers claim to want to do and want their students to do. Teachers could comfortably sprinkle their speech with supines and more, and would have a far deeper and broader knowledge of Latin literature, both of which would multiply their ability to help learners internalize the language and to select texts suited to students' interests and proficiencies.

Is the journey long? Yes, but it's less a marathon than a walkathon: every stride extends goodness. And this one winds through some of the best scenery there is, with some of the best company there can be.

While speaking Latin accords with and capitalizes on the nature of the brain, language, and reading in powerful ways, it is not a panacea. It is not even a method. It can serve a variety of approaches, and its success depends on a variety of factors, including the tasks with which it is combined, the supply of Extensive Reading, the trust between teacher and students and between students and each other, whether it amounts to oral drills or rises to actual communication, and the content of such communication.

Every bit helps, though, and you may find that, the more you and your students communicate in Latin, the more pedagogical problems dissolve. I've mentioned how we shed the weight of advanced grammar. Organic review happens as we use situationally appropriate language. Communicating in Latin vitalizes our classroom culture in ways that merit their own article. And the capacity of any healthy human brain to build a mental representation of a language under suitable circumstances means that students previously considered "bad at Latin" - by their teachers or themselves - can succeed at all levels. Besides advancing educational equity, the resulting rise in enrollment calms another fear that is too real for many Latinists: the reduction of their programs.

Fortunately, there is solid institutional support for negotiating meaning and investigating culture in Latin, and it's not that hard anymore to start or continue speaking Latin or to make it part of your classes on a small or large scale, even if you don't speak as comfortably as you'd like. Also, because reading, viewing, and listening to purposefully selected content (including many well-cached gems) can play a major role in boosting your proficiency, you can get a lot better at speaking Latin without even getting out of bed.

But I think you'll find a lot worth getting out of bed for.

Justin Slocum Bailey is a linguist by training, a learner by temperament, and a teacher by trade. When he's not reading something for the thirtieth time or combing the planet for new content in his languages, he operates Indwelling Language, a collection of resources and habits for boosting joy and success in language learning and teaching. He tweets languagy tips and tidbits as @IndwellingLang.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.

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The Persistent Perks of Speaking Latin - EIDOLON

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Between a bes and a dodrans of my time goes to learning and helping others learn and teach Latin. Our main goals are to be able to read Latin texts; to interact with the products, practices, and perspectives of Latin-using people; and to reap some of the cognitive benefits of knowing multiple languages.

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Medieval Matters: The 13th Warrior and Language Barriers | Tor.com

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Medieval Matters: The 13th Warrior and Language Barriers | Tor.com

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I remember excitedly sitting down in the theater to watch The 13th Warrior when it came out in 1999. As a medievalist I get pumped about most big-budget quasi-medieval films (and, yes, a lot of low-budget ones, too!), but this one had me more excited than usual.

First, it was directed by John McTiernan. Despite some occasional career blunders, he's helmed both Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt for Red October (1990). That's good for something.

Second, the movie was based on Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, a novel that was, in turn, based on both the great Old English epic Beowulf and the very real account of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan's embassy to the Volga Bulgars on behalf of the Caliph of Baghdad in the year 922. As a Muslim outsider, Ibn Fadlan recorded much of what he saw with what was, at times, a kind of horrified fascination. The resulting book (and thus the other source Crichton used) is called the Risala, and it's most famous for Ibn Fadlan's eyewitness account of the ship-burial of a king among the Rus-a band of Vikings who plied their trade along the Volga River and (fun fact alert!) ultimately gave their name to Russia.

As a conceit, Crichton's plot is a fun one. He accurately relates Ibn Fadlan's real account up to that famous burial, but then he smoothly shifts to fiction: the new leader of the Rus is a man named Buliwyf, and he immediately learns of a dark and ancient threat menacing a tribe to the north. An oracle suggests that thirteen men be sent in response, and that the thirteenth man cannot be a Viking. Ibn Fadlan goes along with the party, and an adventure begins-one that's a rewriting of the story of the hero Beowulf (Buliwyf, of course). For the record, this conceit is both terrifically clever and utterly impossible. To cite but one reason, our sole surviving copy of Beowulf was written at the end of the tenth century, which totally works for Crichton's re-imagining-but the story it relates takes place some five centuries earlier, which doesn't work at all.

Regardless, like I said, I went into the theater pretty excited.

Alas, the opening shot nearly wrecked my excitement. It's Vikings on a longship in a storm ...laughing.

Not chuckling in the sort-of gallows humor way that I could see a real person doing-"Haha, welp, we're all clearly gonna die now"-but full-on and deep-throated belly laughter in a way that no one but fake Vikings in movies ever do.

On a ship. In a storm.

The only man not engaged in uproarious merriment aboard the vessel is a miserable-looking Antonio ( "How do you say? Ah, yes") Banderas, who sits in the drenching rain, playing the role of a dejected puppy dog an Arab tag-along to this band of merry fellows who have apparently just heard the greatest joke ever told. In voiceover, he introduces himself as Ibn Fadlan and notes that "Things were not always thus."

And then, remarkably, the movie gets worse. We're thrust into a confusing flashback sequence relating how Ibn Fadlan was once a court poet in Baghdad who fell in love with another man's wife-which is a cool story for the few seconds of screen time it requires in order to serve as an overly complex reason for Ibn Fadlan to be sent away to serve as an ambassador to the land of the distant Volga Bulgars.

And here we get a helpful map overlay for the geographically disinclined.

Wait...does that map place the city of Baghdad between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, somewhere around modern-day Vladikavkaz in Russia? Sure does! That's around 700 miles north of its actual location in Iraq.

Turns out it isn't the audience who needs a damn map.

And then, even before this map of alt-fact Earth is done fading out, Ibn Fadlan's voiceover informs us that he next met some dangerous Tartars.

Wait...the Tartars were marauders of the 13th century, not the 10th. So, um ...

Ignoring my attempts to get this timeline to make sense, the movie presses on, and Ibn Fadlan's delegation is indeed beset by dangerous Tartars-which is cool for the few seconds of screen time it requires in order to serve as an overly complex reason for Ibn Fadlan to run toward a river where he and his company see a longship.

This leads Ibn Fadlan and his fellows to worry about whether the newly discovered Norsemen will kill them-which is a cool story for the few seconds of screen time it requires in order to have the delegation go just a bit further along the river to where they run into an encampment of the Volga Bulgars...

...which is where the damn movie needed to start, because literally the only thing that we need to know about all of the preceding is that Ibn Fadlan is a Muslim ambassador to these folks.

So, if you want to watch this movie-and you should, because I sorta guiltily love it-you've got to skip the first 3 minutes and 45 seconds of it.

Not a mistake there, by the way: they packed all that nonsense into less than four minutes of screen time. I'd say that's a record for hurting my poor medievalist sensibilities, but I'm still recovering from my ill-fated drinking game with quite possibly the worst Viking movie ever made.

Part of the reason you should nevertheless watch The 13th Warrior, though, is that there are moments like the next sequence, which is one of my favorites in the film because it shows awareness of a very real and important element that most movies ignore: language.

Ibn Fadlan speaks Arabic, you see. The fine Viking fellows he now meets in the main tent of the encampment-a tent filled (sigh) with seemingly constant uproarious laughter and drinking through beards-don't speak that language at all. (What they are actually speaking, in fact, is Norwegian, which is a descendant of Old Norse tongues and convenient for the filmmakers because it was the native language of many of the actors.)

Luckily for him, Ibn Fadlan has a companion with him named Melchisidek (played by the wonderful Omar Sharif) who begins trying some of the different languages he knows on various bearded fellows in the crowd. One of them hears him speaking Greek and so leads them to a Viking named Herger the Joyous. This character will proceed to totally and utterly steal this and every other scene he is in, and I hereby declare that the actor, Dennis Storhøi, is sadly underused by Hollywood.

Anyway, Melchisidek is trying to find their king so that he can present Ibn Fadlan to him, and their first conversation goes like this:

Ibn Fadlan (in English, here passing for the protagonist's Arabic): Try Greek.

Melchisidek (in Greek): Hegemona hymeteron? Basilea hymeteron?

Herger the Joyous: ::half-drunk stare::

Melchisidek (in Latin): Uestrum legem?

Herger (in Latin, after a beat): Noster Rex! Tabernaculo.

Melchisidek (in English): He says their king is out there in that tent.

Herger (in Latin): Non loquetur.

Melchisidek (in English): He says the king will not speak with us.

Herger (in Latin): Non loquetur, quia mortuus est!

Melchisidek (in English): Apparently, the king will not speak to us, because he is dead. This is his funeral.

Buliwyf (in Norwegian): Herger, hvem er den fremmede?

Herger (in Norwegian): Det er en Araber fra Baghdad.

No Common Tongue bullpucky here, folks! It's even got natural errors. Melchisidek's Greek, "ἡγεμόνα ὑμέτερον, βασιλέα ὑμέτερον," by which he is apparently trying to say "Your chief? Your king?", is incorrect grammar (this is not his native tongue, you see). And his Latin "Uestrum legem" doesn't mean "Your king' but instead "Your law," an easy mistake for "Your law-giver." This is the reason it takes Herger a moment to understand what he's asking, and the reason he corrects Melchisidek with correct Latin ("Noster Rex") when he does.

This kind of thing goes on until Ibn Fadlan heads off as the titular thirteenth warrior with Buliwyf and his Viking pals. Oh man. I love it.

But wait! There's more! Finding himself now without his translator Melchisidek, Ibn Fadlan next spends night after night watching and listening to his companions talking (and, of course, laughing) around the campfire until he learns enough to respond to one of their jokes at his expense.

Study abroad language immersion for the win, kids!

This sequence, too, is marvelous. Through cut scenes we watch as the men around the campfire go from all-Norwegian to mostly-Norwegian-but-a-little-English-McTiernan uses repeat cuts, zooming in on their mouths to show Ibn Fadlan's focus-to mostly-English to this moment when Ibn Fadlan reveals his new language abilities:

Skeld the Superstitious: Blow-hards the both of you. She probably was some smoke-colored camp-girl. (points at Ibn Fadlan) Looks like that one's mother!

Ibn Fadlan (speaking slowly in English, now passing for the protagonist's newfound Norwegian): My mother ...

Skeld: ::stares at him in shock::

Ibn Fadlan: ... was a pure woman ... from a noble family. And I, at least, know who my father is, you pig-eating son of a whore.

Oh maaaaaan. With the pork-prod at the end, too. Boom. Medieval mic drop. ( Watch it here.)

I know some reviewers gripe about this sequence, complaining that you can't learn a language so quickly. To that, I say that no, apparently you can't. But some folks over the course of a week of immersion really can pick up more than enough to get by. Plus, you know, at least the filmmakers are actually trying here. They're paying attention to the problem of language. And I love it.

As it happens, McTiernan also paid attention to these details in The Hunt for Red October, too. Get past Sean Connery's Scottish Russian and you'll see a great scene in which a KGB officer starts to question Connery's sub-captain-both of them speaking in Russian with subtitles. At one point the officer picks up a Bible that the captain has been reading, and he starts to read a verse from the Book of Revelation. The camera zooms in on his mouth as he speaks Russian ... right up until he hits the word "Armageddon." Then, without skipping a beat, the officer completes the verse in English as the camera zooms back out. Voilà, our Russians will now speak English (at least until the final scenes where they're joined by actual English speakers), and we have a movie that's easier to follow. That the filmmakers flipped it on "Armageddon," the word common to English and Russian and the threatening theme of the Cold War itself, is just perfection.

But back to the 5th/10th/13th century.

No. Scratch that. It's also the 16th century since one of the Viking warriors is wearing a Spanish conquistador helmet called a morion and another has a peascod breastplate. Aaaaaand there's also a Viking in what looks like an 18th-century walking kilt. One of them has a Roman gladiator helm that's iffy but at least sorta vaguely theoretically possible, and the whole horse-size thing is completely flipped around since the Arabs had the big horses and the Vikings had the wee ones, but, you know, I've got to set my historical brain aside at some point and just watch the film.

So, anyway, back to the 5th/10th/13th/16th/18th century.

Looking past all the historical mistakes (and the logistical insanity of that horse herd at the end), The 13th Warrior is actually a fun and well-done film. Even if the amazing language sequences weren't there, the filmmakers still made a movie with some great visual moments, a good score ( two of them, as it turns out), some tight battle sequences, a solid plot, and some truly enjoyable characters. The protagonist in particular undergoes a remarkable journey from a self-important man to one who, the moment before a dire battle, can earnestly make this prayer:

Ibn Fadlan: Merciful Father, I have squandered my days with plans of many things. This was not among them. But at this moment, I beg only to live the next few minutes well. For all we ought to have thought, and have not thought; all we ought to have said, and have not said; all we ought to have done, and have not done; I pray thee, God, for forgiveness.

Matching such moments, I think, is acting that is superb for this kind of film. Storhøi's Herger, as I said, steals every scene he's in. And Banderas, leaving aside the fact that his accent is Spanish, makes for a great outsider in Ibn Fadlan. One final sequence is (I think) perfect, as the men join in a traditional Norse prayer-with Ibn Fadlan now perfectly woven in:

Buliwyf: Lo, there do I see my father. Lo, there do I see...

Herger the Joyous: My mother, and my sisters, and my brothers.

Buliwyf: Lo, there do I see...

Herger: The line of my people...

Edgtho the Silent: Back to the beginning.

Weath the Musician: Lo, they do call to me.

Ibn Fadlan: They bid me take my place among them.

Buliwyf: In the halls of Valhalla...

Ibn Fadlan: Where the brave...

Herger: May live...

Ibn Fadlan: ...Forever.

That's good stuff, made even better by the fact that Ibn Fadlan, in the grander meta-fictional conceit of this, will be the man to write Buliwyf's story and set off the chain of tales that will leave him immortalized in Beowulf.

All in all, The 13th Warrior is definitely one of my go-to "medieval" films despite the many historical issues. Don't be surprised to see, when I get around to finishing it, that this film ranks very high on my list of the best film adaptations of Beowulf.

Michael Livingston is a Professor of Medieval Literature at The Citadel who has written extensively both on medieval history and on modern medievalism. His historical fantasy series set in Ancient Rome, The Shards of Heaven and its sequel The Gates of Hell, is available from Tor Books.

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Medieval Matters: The 13th Warrior and Language Barriers

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I remember excitedly sitting down in the theater to watch The 13th Warrior when it came out in 1999. As a medievalist I get pumped about most big-budget quasi-medieval films (and, yes, a lot of low-budget ones, too!), but this one had me more excited than usual.

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In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols - lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish - and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn't Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date.

Since then, thousands more of these tiny seals have been uncovered. Most of them feature one line of symbols at the top with a picture, usually of an animal, carved below. The animals pictured include bulls, rhinoceros, elephants, and puzzlingly, unicorns. They've been found in a swath of territory that covers present-day India and Pakistan and along trade routes, with seals being found as far as present-day Iraq. And the symbols, which range from geometric designs to representations of fish or jars, have also been found on signs, tablets, copper plates, tools, and pottery.

Though we now have thousands of examples of these symbols, we have very little idea what they mean. Over a century after Cunningham's discovery, the seals remain undeciphered, their messages lost to us. Are they the letters of an ancient language? Or are they just religious, familial, or political symbols? Those hotly contested questions have sparked infighting among scholars and exacerbated cultural rivalries over who can claim the script as their heritage. But new work from researchers using sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, and even cognitive science are finally helping push us to the edge of cracking the Indus script.

Spanning from 2600 to 1900 BC, the Indus Valley Civilization was larger than the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, encompassing over 1 million square kilometers that stretched over present-day India and Pakistan. It featured sophisticated infrastructure including advanced water management and drainage systems, well-organized cities with street planning, and some of the first known toilets. The Indus people also hosted a massive trade network, traveling as far as the Persian Gulf. In fact, the first traces of the Indus people were rediscovered in the mid-19th century, when construction workers tasked with connecting two cities in modern-day Pakistan came across a massive supply of bricks among some old ruins. The workers used them to construct nearly 100 miles of railroad tracks. It would be some time before archaeologists realized those bricks came from the Indus Valley Civilization.

Archeological digs revealed precious little: oddly and rather inconsistently with other Bronze Age civilizations, there is no evidence of powerful rulers or religious icons. We haven't found any palaces or large statues, nothing like the ziggurats of Mesopotamia or the pyramids in Egypt. And we have very little indication of warfare, save for some excavated spearheads and arrowheads.

In fact, we know almost nothing. "If you were to ask an archaeologist, they would not be able to tell you where the Indus Civilization came from with certainty, or how it ended, or what they were doing when they were around," says epigrapher Bryan Wells. To us, the Indus Civilization is as mysterious as its symbols.

The Indus symbols are part of a slowly shrinking list of undeciphered ancient scripts. Scholars are still working on a number of writing systems found all over the world including Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs (two scripts from ancient Greece), Proto-Elamite (writing from the oldest known Iranian civilization), a handful of Mesoamerican scripts, and the Rongorongo script of Easter Island. Some Neolithic symbols, with no known linguistic descendents, may never be deciphered. Other ancient scripts, such as Linear B, an early precursor to Greek, were eventually deciphered by charting out the signs, figuring out which marked the start of a phrase and which marked the end, how different syllables changed the meaning of a word, and how consonants and vowels were structured within a sentence. It's not unlike what's depicted in the alien sci-fi film Arrival - searching for patterns, testing out theories, and lots and lots of trial and error. Though there's slightly less pressure on Indus scholars than on Arrival 's linguist - people aren't quite as worried about ancient civilizations as they are about invading aliens.

"It's often called the most deciphered script because there are around 100 decipherments... but of course nobody likes any of them."

In the past, much of this work was done by hand. For Linear B, phonetic charts painstakingly eventually led to that language's decipherment. Similar approaches have been tried with the Indus script as well. In the 1930s, the scholar G.R. Hunter worked out sign clusters that enabled him to figure out some of the structure embedded in the script. But Hunter failed to unlock the code.

"There are several reasons why it's been too difficult to decipher this script," says Nisha Yadav, a researcher in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. "The first one is that the texts are really short." An average artifact only has five symbols. The longest example excavated so far has 17. Such short texts make uncovering the writing's structure difficult. "Complicating the problem is the fact that we don't know the underlying language," says Rajesh Rao, director of the National Science Foundation's Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. "We don't even know the language family that was spoken by people in that region at that time." And once the civilization ended, it appears that its culture and writing system did, too. "We do not have any continuing cultural tradition," says Yadav. Archaeologists have yet to find a multilingual text like the Rosetta Stone, which was key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

While our understanding of the Indus script remains minimal, it's certainly not for lack of trying. "It's often called the most deciphered script because there are around 100 decipherments," says Wells, "but of course nobody likes any of them." Many people have claimed to have cracked the script, often asserting it's a precursor to a later language, but none of the decodings have held up. "I suppose the wackiest one is a tantric guru who meditated and got in touch with the great beyond, which told him what the script said," says Wells.

In order to decipher the Indus script, it's important to ascertain what we're looking at - whether the symbols stand for a language, or, like totem poles or coats of arms, just representations of things like family names or gods. "Given the amount of data we have, we cannot make any firm statement regarding the content of the script," says Yadav. "I think what we've done is try to piece together whatever evidence we have to see if it leads us one way or the other," says Rao. "And I think, at least from the work we've done, it seems like it's more tailed towards the language hypothesis than not." Most scholars tend to agree.

In 2009, Rao published a study that examined the sequential structure of the Indus script, or how likely it is that particular symbols follow or precede other symbols. In most linguistic systems, words or symbols follow each other in a semi-predictable manner. There are certain dictating sentence structures, but also a fair amount of flexibility. Researchers call this semi-predictability "conditional entropy." Rao and his colleagues calculated how likely it was that one symbol followed another in an intentional order. "What we were interested in was if we could deduce some statistical regularities or structure," says Rao, "basically ruling out that these symbols were just juxtapositions of symbols and that there were actually some rules or patterns."

They compared the conditional entropy of the Indus script to known linguistic systems, like Vedic Sanskrit, and known nonlinguistic systems, like human DNA sequences, and found that the Indus script was much more similar to the linguistic systems. "So, it's not proof that the symbols are encoding a language but it's additional evidence hinting that these symbols are not just random juxtapositions of arbitrary symbols," says Rao, "and they follow patterns that are consistent with the those you would you expect to find if the symbols are encoding language."

Seals found in what is now Iraq have symbol sequences that tend to be different from others found in India and Pakistan

In a subsequent paper,Rao and his colleagues took all of Indus' known symbols and looked at where they fell within the inscriptions they were found in. This statistical technique, known as a Markov model, was able to pinpoint specifics like which symbols were most likely to begin a text, which were most likely to end it, which symbols were likely to repeat, which symbols often pair together, and which symbols tend to precede or follow a particular symbol. The Markov model is also useful when it comes to incomplete inscriptions. Many artifacts are found damaged, with parts of the inscription missing or unreadable, and a Markov model can help fill in those gaps. "You can try to complete missing symbols based on the statistics of other sequences that are complete," explains Rao.

Yadav performed a similar analysis using a different type of Markov model known as an n-gram analysis. An example of an n-gram at work is the Google search bar. As you start typing a query the search bar fills in suggestions based on what you've typed, and as you type more words the suggestions change to fit the entered text. Yadav and her colleagues looked at both the probability of a particular symbol given the symbol preceding it - a bigram - and the probability of a particular symbol given the two symbols preceding it - a trigram. The resulting patterns suggested the script had a syntax, supporting the idea that it's linguistic. And like the Markov model, it was also able to fill in probable symbols when inscriptions were missing portions of their text.

These two techniques also uncovered something unexpected: artifacts found in different regions depicted distinctly different symbol sequences. So seals found in what is now Iraq have symbol sequences that tend to be different from others found in India and Pakistan. "This suggests that maybe the same symbols were being used to encode the local language there," says Rao. "It's like they were experimenting with the script," says Yadav. "They were using the same script to write some other language or some other content maybe."

Providing anthropological and archaeological context to the artifacts we do have would also help further our understanding of the script. Gabriel Recchia, a research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge at the University of Cambridge, published a method that aimed to do just that. In previous cognitive science studies, he and his colleagues showed that you can estimate the distances between cities by how often they're mentioned together in writing. This was true for US cities based on their co-occurrences in national newspapers, Middle Eastern and Chinese cities based on Arabic and Chinese texts, and even cities in The Lord of the Rings. Recchia applied that idea to the Indus script, taking symbols from artifacts whose origins were known and using them to predict where artifacts of unknown origin with similar symbols came from. Recchia explains that a version of this method that takes into account much more detailed information could be very useful. "There are significant differences between artifacts that appear in different sublocations within a site and this is what is much more frequently unknown and in many cases, could provide more useful information," says Recchia. "Was this found in a garbage heap along with a number of other seals or was this something that was imported from elsewhere?"

Meanwhile, Ronojoy Adhikari, a physics professor at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India, and his research associate Satish Palaniappan are working on a program that can accurately extract symbols from a photo of an Indus artifact. "If an archaeologist goes to an Indus site and finds a new seal, it takes a lot of time for those seals to actually be mapped and added to a database if it's done manually," says Palaniappan. "In our case the ultimate aim is just with a photograph of a particular seal to be able to extract out the text regions automatically." He and Adhikari are working on building an app that archaeologists can bring to a site on a mobile device that will extract new inscriptions instantly.

But not everyone agrees that the script is a language. In 2004, a paper written by cultural neurobiologist and comparative historian Steve Farmer, computational theorist Richard Sproat, and philologist Michael Witzel claimed that the Indus script was not a language. The authors even went so far as to offer a $10,000 reward to anyone who finds a lengthy Indus inscription. "To view the Indus symbols as part of an 'undeciphered script' isn't a view anyone outside the highly politicized world of India believes," Farmer said in an email. After their position on the script was published, Sproat wrote two papers that examined the conditional entropy techniques used by Rao and colleagues as well as similar techniques used by a different group examining Pictish symbols, another ancient writing system. In them, Sproat concludes that the conditional entropy measure isn't a useful technique. "What does it tell you? It tells you that it's not completely rigid. It tells you that it's not completely random. We knew that already. It's just not informative," says Sproat. "It doesn't tell you anything."

"Just finding structure in a bunch of symbols certainly doesn't mean you've found evidence that those symbols encode language. Even heraldic symbols or astrological signs or strings of Boy Scout medals have structure in them," says Farmer. In response to Sproat's papers, both Rao and colleagues and the authors of the Pictish symbols study challenged by Sproat wrote replies that addressed his concerns. Sproat, in turn, wrote a response to the response.

Wells compares fact-checking Farmer to fact-checking Donald Trump

"You would be better off getting medical advice from your garbage man than you would getting ideas about the Indus script from listening to Steve Farmer," says Wells. "None of the three authors have a degree in archaeology, epigraphy, or anything to do with ancient writing. Their underlying subtext is, 'We're all so brilliant and we can't decipher it so it can't be writing.' It's ludicrous." Wells compares fact-checking Farmer to fact-checking Donald Trump. "You have to fact-check every single thing he says because it's mostly wrong."

And Wells' beef with Witzel goes all the way back to his PhD dissertation on the Indus script, which Witzel tried to block, according to Wells. Later, while escorting Witzel through India, Wells would show him a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Ten reasons you don't know what you're talking about" while in the back of a cab.

One thing Rao and Sproat do agree on is that if the Indus script turns out not to encode a language, that might end up being even more interesting. "We know a lot about ancient civilizations that had writing but we know a lot less about civilizations that lacked writing," says Sproat. "And if this was some kind of general nonlinguistic system, in a sense, that would be much more interesting than if it was just some kind of script."

\Rao also thinks there were some nuances of his work that were lost in the debate. "It was an interesting intellectual debate with them and hopefully we've now reached a truce," Rao says, laughing. "Hopefully it's not going to be a continued lifelong debate, but I think we've done our best so far on either side. I'm definitely an optimist and I think we will have a much better understanding of the Indus script one way or the other, linguistic or not."

Wells would show Witzel a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Ten reasons you don't know what you're talking about" while in the back of a cab

Outside of this debate, decipherment progress is also threatened by modern-day politics. Within India, different factions are fighting over whose language and culture descended from the Indus Valley Civilization. There's the Sanskrit region in the north, the Dravidian region in the south, and those speaking tribal languages in the middle. "They're arguing that whoever is descended from the people who wrote the Indus script are the true inheritors of India," says Wells. "So, they're arguing about this from a modern political point of view. I know people who have received death threats for saying it's not Sanskrit or saying it's not Dravidian." And because the Indus Valley Civilization spanned across present-day India and Pakistan, modern tensions between the two countries bleed into the Indus studies. The photographic collections of the Indus artifacts are published in two separate volumes - one for the artifacts found in India and another for those found in Pakistan.

Another challenge to the script's decipherment is a classic one: money. Wells believes that until universities and funding agencies make a concerted effort to foster the study of the Indus script, little headway will be made. "It has to be a cooperative effort, it has to be funded, and it has to have a home," says Wells. For his part in fostering a collaborative effort, Wells is hosting a second annual meeting on the Indus script to take place this March in British Columbia. And if nothing else, that $10,000 reward is on the table for as long as Farmer is alive.

We don't have a decipherment yet but Rao believes that until we find longer samples or a multilingual text, these statistical strategies are our best bet. And Wells says progress will hinge on cooperation. "I think all of the pieces to decipher the script are there," he says, "teamwork - interdisciplinary, multigenerational probably - the more we work on it the more progress we make." Wells and his colleagues have made some progress and plan to present it at the meeting this March. Their findings and other work presented at the meeting should be available to the public in April published as the Proceedings of the Second International Meeting on Indus Epigraphy. In the meantime, anyone working on the script is welcome to contribute to Wells' collaborative website, which features all of the known symbols and various analytical tools.

When asked about Arrival and whether being able to decipher scripts might one day save the world, Rao laughs. "Well," he says, "[it] depends on the situation."

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Machine learning could finally crack the 4,000-year-old Indus script

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In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols - lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish - and what looked like a bull etched underneath.

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Queens, New York has more languages than anywhere in the world: map - Business Insider

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Queens, New York has more languages than anywhere in the world: map - Business Insider

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From "Nonstop Metropolis" by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Cartography: Molly Roy; Photographs: Mirissa Neff

There are as many as 800 languages spoken in New York City, and nowhere in the world has more than Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA).

You can see many of the languages in the map above, which is featured in " Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas " by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. The map was created by Molly Roy with help from the ELA, and also shows libraries, museums, and other linguistic centers.

"The capital of linguistic diversity, not just for the five boroughs, but for the human species, is Queens," Solnit and Jelly-Schapiro write.

The five miles from Astoria to Forest Hills have a dense progression of languages: Greek, Filipino, Urdu, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and others, including more obscure ones like Chavacano, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau, and Bukharian. Here's a close-up:

From "Nonstop Metropolis" by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

One limit of the map is that every language shows up only once, when in fact many show up throughout the borough. Mandarin, for instance, is listed in Flushing, which is Queens' original Chinatown, but not in Elmhurst, which also has a prominent Chinese community.

Flushing also has pockets of Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taishanese, Sichuanese, and other dialects. Korean and Mongolian are nearby, too. A close-up:

From "Nonstop Metropolis" by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Solnit has also published atlases of San Francisco and New Orleans.

SEE ALSO: These diagrams reveal how to negotiate with people around the world

DON'T MISS: The only New York neighborhoods that voted for Trump

NOW WATCH: This vintage video shows what New York City's subway was like in the 1940s

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Queens has more languages than anywhere in the world - here's where they're found

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There are as many as 800 languages spoken in New York City, and nowhere in the world has more than Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA). You can see many of the languages in the map above, which is featured in " Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas " by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

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Four Things That Happen When a Language Dies | Smart News | Smithsonian

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Four Things That Happen When a Language Dies | Smart News | Smithsonian

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This World Mother Language Day, read about why many say we should be fighting to preserve linguistic diversity

smithsonian.com

1. We lose "The expression of a unique vision of what it means to be human"
Languages around the world are dying, and dying fast. Today is International Mother Language Day, started by UNESCO to promote the world's linguistic diversity.

The grimmest predictions have 90 percent of the world's languages dying out by the end of this century. Although this might not seem important in the day-to-day life of an English speaker with no personal ties to the culture in which they're spoken, language loss matters. Here's what we all lose:

That's what academic David Crystal told Paroma Basu for National Geographic in 2009. Basu was writing about India, a country with hundreds of languages, at least seven major language families and rapid language loss.
2. We lose memory of the planet's many histories and cultures.
The effects of that language loss could be "culturally devastating," Basu wrote. "Each language is a key that can unlock local knowledge about medicinal secrets, ecological wisdom, weather and climate patterns, spiritual attitudes and artistic and mythological histories."

Languages have naturally risen and fallen in prominence throughout history, she wrote. What makes this different in India as well as throughout the world is the rate at which it's happening and the number of languages disappearing.
3. We lose some of the best local resources for combatting environmental threats
The official language of Greenland, wrote Kate Yoder for Grist, is fascinating and unique. It's "made up of extremely long words that can be customized to any occasion," she writes. And there are as many of those words as there are sentences in English, one linguist who specializes in Greenlandic told her. Some of those, like words for different kinds of wind, are disappearing before linguists get the chance to explore them. And that disappearance has broader implications for the understanding of how humans process language, linguist Lenore Grenoble told Yoder. "There's a lot we don't know about how it works, or how the mind works when it does this," she said.

Yoder's article dealt with the effect of climate change on language loss. In sum: it hastens language loss as people migrate to more central, "safe" ground when their own land is threatened by intense storms, sea level rise, drought and other things caused by climate change. "When people settle in a new place, they begin a new life, complete with new surroundings, new traditions, and, yes, a new language," she wrote.

As Nancy Rivenburgh wrote for the International Association of Conference Interpreters, what's happening with today's language loss is actually quite different from anything that happened before. Languages in the past disappeared and were born anew, she writes, but "they did so in a state of what linguists call 'linguistic equilibrium.' In the last 500 years, however, the equilibrium that characterized much of human history is now gone. And the world's dominant languages-or what are often called 'metropolitan' languages-are all now rapidly expanding at the expense of 'peripheral' indigenous languages. Those peripheral languages are not being replaced."
4. Some people lose their mother tongue.
That means that out of the around 7000 languages that most reputable sources estimate are spoken globally, only the top 100 are widely spoken. And it isn't just our understanding of the human mind that's impaired, she writes. In many places, indigenous languages and their speakers are rich sources of information about the world around them and the plants and animals in the area where they live. In a time of mass extinction, that knowledge is especially precious.

"Medical science loses potential cures," she writes. "Resource planners and national governments lose accumulated wisdom regarding the management of marine and land resources in fragile ecosystems."

The real tragedy of all this might just be all of the people who find themselves unable to speak their first language, the language they learned how to describe the world in. Some find themselves in the unenviable position of being one of the few (or the only) speakers of their mother tongue. And some, like many of Canada's indigenous peoples, find their language in grave danger as the result of a campaign by government to stamp out their cultures.

This loss is something beyond all the other losses, linguist John Lipski told Lisa Duchene for Penn State News: "Imagine being told you can't use your language and you'll see what that undefinable 'more' is," he said.

What can you do about all this? Educate yourself, to start with. The Smithsonian's annual Mother Tongue Film Festival takes place every February in Washington, D.C. And projects like National Geographic's " Enduring Voices" are a great place to learn about endangered languages and their many speakers, and UNESCO's own website is another resource. There's still hope for some of these languages if we pay attention.

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smithsonian center for folklife and cultural heritage

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Four Things That Happen When a Language Dies

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smithsonian.com 1. We lose "The expression of a unique vision of what it means to be human" Languages around the world are dying, and dying fast. Today is International Mother Language Day, started by UNESCO to promote the world's linguistic diversity. The grimmest predictions have 90 percent of the world's languages dying out by the end of this century.

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In Philly, Sign Language Has Its Own Accent - The Atlantic

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In Philly, Sign Language Has Its Own Accent - The Atlantic

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In many ways, Philadelphia sign language is more French than ASL. As PRI reports, the first sign-language teacher in the United States, Laurent Clerc, was a Frenchman. ASL has evolved to a distinctive American sign language over time, but the Philadelphia version maintains more of its French roots.

Fisher and Tamminga want to figure out exactly why Philadelphia has such a strong accent, and so they're planning to interview 12 members of the Philadelphia deaf community, from several different generations. They'll annotate the interviews, a process that typically includes detailing sign start and end time codes, start and end hand-shape labels for each hand, and articulatory sign classifications, which takes around two hours for every minute of sign language recorded.

Their theory as to why Philadelphia has such a distinctive sign language could also explain why this accent is fading. Philadelphia opened a school for the deaf, headed by Clerc, in 1820, and many deaf students in Philadelphia were educated at the school until it closed in 1984.

For this period, Fisher believes much of the language stayed largely the same. She said:

"Philadelphia deaf community members tend to say put, and when that happens you don't have contact with other signing deaf, who are using what we now call American Sign Language, ASL. And when that happens, your language doesn't change that much."

By the mid-1980s, partly thanks to the increase of cochlear implants and education-policy changes, more deaf students were assimilated into mainstream public schools rather than attending boarding schools for the deaf. Fewer deaf teachers were also hired, and so students were more likely to see signing from an interpreter who was not native to Philadelphia's style of signing.

As well as studying the sign language, Fisher hopes to preserve it. "In the community, long before me, people have been saying we need to document this, we need to get these people on video," she said. "Some people are older and are passing away. We need to get this to preserve our language."
This article is from the archive of our partner Quartz.

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In Philly, Sign Language Has Its Own Accent

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In many ways, Philadelphia sign language is more French than ASL. As PRI reports, the first sign-language teacher in the United States, Laurent Clerc, was a Frenchman. ASL has evolved to a distinctive American sign language over time, but the Philadelphia version maintains more of its French roots.

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Ai-Media - Time to bust a few myths about sign language.

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Ai-Media - Time to bust a few myths about sign language.

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Time to bust a few myths about sign language.

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From Seaspeak to Singlish: celebrating other kinds of English | Media | The Guardian

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From Seaspeak to Singlish: celebrating other kinds of English | Media | The Guardian

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t was recently reported that the government is being urged to create opportunities for Britons to learn languages like Polish, Urdu and Punjabi, in order to effect more social cohesion. According to Cambridge professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett, language learning, and indeed social integration, should not be a one-way street; rather, the onus should also fall on British people to learn community languages.

For me, this idea of a two-way street taps into a wider question about linguistic influence and evolution. There is interest and joy to be had not only in learning the languages of other cultures, but also in appreciating the effect they might have had on English.

Part of that process is ceding British English to the prospect of change, noting the ways in which ethnically marked forms of English, such as Bangladeshi and African-Caribbean varieties, have played their part in shaping how new generations across the country will speak: take Multi-Cultural London English, the dialect that has almost completely replaced Cockney on the streets of the capital.

Outside the UK too, creoles and dialects have bent, broken and downright flipped the bird at the rules, offering not only musicality and freshness, but new ways of conceiving of language that staunch protectionism doesn't allow for.

Grammar rules have their place, of course, insofar as they offer a framework for precision and comprehension. But rules can be learned to be broken, leading to the formation of identities, cultural protests and unique means of expression.

Not persuaded? Then consider these examples of syntactic rule-bending and linguistic intermarriage that have taken English into intriguing and delightful new directions.

Irish English
Otherwise known as Hiberno-English, this refers to dialects spoken across the island of Ireland. Frank McCourt immortalised West and South-West Irish English in his memoir Angela's Ashes, with its liberal use of the definite article ("Do you like the Shakespeare, Frankie?"), and the unbidden musicality that comes with inverted word order ("Is it a millionaire you think I am?").

Some of my friends from Northern Ireland will plump for the past simple form of a verb where a past participle is usually required, saying things like: "They'd never have did it had they knew." Rule breaking at its most ballsy: and it's music to my ears.

Short for Colloquial Singaporean English, a creole language for which English is the lexifier (meaning it provides the basis for most of its vocabulary) plus words from Malay, Tamil and varieties of Chinese. The Singaporean government rallies against it at every turn with Speak Good English campaigns, to the detriment of some extremely interesting grammatical structures.

Take Singlish's being topic-prominent, for example: like in Mandarin, this means that Singlish sentences will sometimes start with a topic (or a known reference of the conversation), followed by a comment (or some new information). For example, "I go restaurant wait for you." Grammatically, it's worlds apart from "I'll be waiting for you at the restaurant," but it's evolved in a region where that kind of sentence structure is the order of the day.

Belizean creole (Belize Kriol)
Another English-based creole language, similar to Jamaican patois, which offers some compelling takes on tense. The present tense verb does not indicate number or person, while the past is indicated by putting the tense marker mi in front of the verb ("ai mi ron" - I ran), but this is optional and considered superfluous if a time marker like "yestudeh" (yesterday) is used.

Basic English
Basic English was invented by CK Ogden in 1930. Designed to allow language learners to acquire English quickly and communicate at a very basic level, Ogden managed to reduce the language to 850 words, including only eighteen verbs!

A controlled natural language (CNL) based on English that provides a lingua franca for sea captains to communicate. First conceived in 1985, the premise is simple, grammar-free phrases that facilitate comprehension in often fraught and dangerous situations. It has now been codified as Standard Marine Communication Phrases.

Ultimately, English grammar has always been in flux: both in its native land and abroad. When it comes to 'offshoots' of the language, whatever label we apply - be it dialect, patois, creole or CNL - each exists as a yardstick for linguistic evolution, and ought to be celebrated as such.

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From Seaspeak to Singlish: celebrating other kinds of English

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t was recently reported that the government is being urged to create opportunities for Britons to learn languages like Polish, Urdu and Punjabi, in order to effect more social cohesion. According to Cambridge professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett, language learning, and indeed social integration, should not be a one-way street; rather, the onus should also fall on British people to learn community languages.

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"No one ever exposed the nerves and fibres of his being in order to make up a language", wrote an early reviewer of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; "it is not only insane but unnecessary". And yet numerous brilliant minds have invented languages through the centuries.

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11 Animated Shorts in Mexico's Indigenous Languages

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11 Animated Shorts in Mexico's Indigenous Languages

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To residents of the Americas, Europe can seem like a tower of Babel with dozens upon dozens of languages crammed into a small geographical space and vying endlessly for dominance or survival. On this side of the world things are much simpler: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and a few Dutch speakers make communication generally much smoother across the continent, along with a few New World Patois thrown into the mix for good measure.

At least so the thinking goes. In reality, the American continent is a place of vast linguistic diversity, with more language families found solely in Mexico than in the entirety of the European continent. And with each language comes a particular vision of the world, an inimitable expressivity, a treasure trove of wisdom accrued over the centuries and codified in words and idioms.

Yet these languages struggle desperately for survival in the midst of a post-colonial landscape dominated by a small handful of European languages. Consciously or unconsciously, indigenous tongues are often viewed as backward and those who speak them stigmatized, relegated to the margins of official society for refusing to adapt to rules set by colonizers through violence and subjugation.

In Mexico, this problem is acutely felt. As one of the world's most linguistically diverse nations, Mexico is also ground zero for language extinction as grandparents and great-grandparents leave us, and younger generations bow to the necessity of cultural assimilation. Yet despite their precarious status, Mexico currently encompasses 364 indigenous dialects, belonging to 68 distinct languages which branch off from 11 language families - a legacy of Mesoamerica's pre-Columbian golden age as the center of indigenous civilization in North America.

And thankfully some people are working not only to preserve these languages for future generations, but to empower those who speak them right now. Sesenta y Ocho Voces, Sesenta y Ocho Corazones (also known as ), is a new initiative from Mexico's government Fund for The Culture and Arts (FONCA) that seeks to elevate Mexico's 68 indigenous languages by preserving their myths, legends, poems, and stories in the form of beautifully animated short films. Their goal is to foment pride amongst speakers of these languages, and respect among those who don't, under premise that "nadie puede amar lo que no conoce" (no one can love what they don't know.)

There are currently seven of these short animated films available, covering dialects of the Huasteco, Maya, Mixteco, Náhuatl, Totonaco, Yaqui and Zapoteco languages. Ranging from two to three minutes, each film employs a different designer to give powerful expression the wisdom contained in these indigenous languages. From reflections on life and death, to vividly recounted myths of the ancient times, these films give Mexico's indigenous languages their due place amongst the great treasures of human civilization. Check them out below (for English translations, look on their Vimeo page.)

[h/t: Global Voices]

Update 6/6/16: 68 voces published four new videos as part of the ongoing project. The Mayo, Ch'ol, Tseltal, and Ayapaneco languages represented in these animations are noteworthy for their small number of living speakers.

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These Gorgeous Animated Shorts Celebrate 11 of Mexico's Indigenous Languages

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To residents of the Americas, Europe can seem like a tower of Babel with dozens upon dozens of languages crammed into a small geographical space and vying endlessly for dominance or survival.

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Are 'Semester Abroad Accents' Real or Fake? | Atlas Obscura

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Are 'Semester Abroad Accents' Real or Fake? | Atlas Obscura

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When Lindsay Lohan appeared on camera in October speaking in some kind of pan-European accent, she was subjected to the same form of mockery that generations of American college students who study abroad have experienced. I myself, after attending college in Montreal, returned to the US saying things like "to-more-owe" and "sore-y" and "aboat." ( Not "aboot.")

The reaction of Americans to a fellow American who, upon returning from extended trips abroad, speaks with an altered accent, can be harsh. "People often don't react well when someone comes back with an accent, like they're putting on airs or trying to be somebody else," says Jennifer Nycz, a specialist in sociolinguists and phonetic and phonological variation at Georgetown.

But how conscious is this change in speech, really? How much is a natural shift in the way one speaks, and how much is a concerted effort to change one's accent?

Dialect or accent acquisition is not the most well-studied linguistic field, but for her dissertation, Nycz extensively studied Canadians who had moved to New York for subtle changes in their speech, trying to figure out how, how much, and why people change their accents. Having grown up in New Jersey and moved many times, the ways people change their speech has become a pet project for her.

It is not especially easy to consciously change an accent. Even for, say, newscasters, who are trained to change some of the most telling regionalisms in their accents, a close listen can usually pick out the subtler or less stereotyped regionalisms that remain unchanged. But for people who move around, or who spend a significant amount of time talking to people who speak in a different accent or dialect from their own, patterns of speech and pronunciation can prove strangely fluid. (Accent refers simply to the pronunciation of words; dialect can include changes in vocabulary or sentence structure. Changing "about" to "aboat" is accent, but adding "eh?" to the ends of sentences is dialect.)

What Nycz discovered is that accent acquisition is tremendously complex and hard to predict. "It's not always obvious, but we all make these little shifts depending on who we're talking to, what we're talking about, the way we feel about what we're talking about, and any number of other things," she says. At a very basic level, research indicates that we tend to like people more when they mirror us in certain ways: posture, facial expression, and accent. The idea is that someone who is more like you is a friendlier entity. And it can be one factor that triggers someone who is spending a lot of time in a different dialect zone to slightly change the way they speak.

One of the most important variables in how quickly a person can acquire a new accent is their age. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a linguist named Arvilla Payne studied families who had recently moved to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia best known today for having a gigantic mall. King of Prussia natives speak with a Philadelphia accent, one of the weirdest and best-studied accents in North America. (It's well-studied largely because the godfather of modern linguistics, a guy named Bill Labov, worked at the University of Pennsylvania. Also, because it's weird.)

Payne studied two elements of the Philadelphia accent. One is well-known, and is referred to as "oh-fronting." When Philadelphians say words like, well, "hoagie," that "oh" sound is made with the tongue further forward in the mouth, hence "fronting." It comes out sounding sort of like "eh-oh." That's a classic; if you know a single thing about the Philadelphia accent, it'll be oh-fronting. Payne found out that children who had recently moved to King of Prussia did indeed use those fronted "oh" sounds, indicating that they're adopting some of the local accent.

"But there are other changes which are much more complicated," says Nycz. "Philly has this very intense short 'a' system, which involves the sound 'agh' in words like 'cat.'" Sometimes Philadelphians will pronounce that "agh" sound in the same way as someone from Ohio or Nevada or wherever else, but other times it'll be more complex and sort of Midwest-y, sounding like "ey-yeah." The rules for when to use which short "a" sound are really difficult to parse: sometimes the sound will change based on what kind of consonant comes after it, but there are also plenty of exceptions. In other words, unlike oh-fronting, this is a non-stereotyped and difficult to reproduce accent quirk. You basically have to be born into it.

Payne found that the King of Prussia kids who had come from elsewhere were not reproducing the short "a" in the same way that a native Philadelphian would. Some of the kids would use it some of the time, but would use it for words a Philadelphian wouldn't. Some of the kids just didn't have this feature at all.

What this indicates is that accent acquisition is messy. It's not just a matter of wholesale adoption. People in a new accent area have to, on some level, understand the changes in order to acquire them, which indicates some sort of agency in the whole process.

Other studies, however, indicate the opposite. When examining the speech of Canadians who had moved to New York, Nycz set out what's known as a "minimal pairs task." Essentially, Nycz would have her subjects read many pairs of similar words, and tell her whether those words sounded the same or different. Further, she asked the Canadians whether New Yorkers would think those words sounded different.

The key difference between Canadian English and New York City English that Nycz used is called the cot-caught merger. In Canada, as well as in California, those two vowel sounds are the same, something like "ah." But in New York City, those words sound very different: "cot" has a flat "ah" sound, but "caught" has a rounder sound, more like "awwuh." (This is the source of the New York "cawwwfee" stereotype.) The Canadian "ah" sound is somewhere in between the New Yorker's "ah" and "awwuh."

She got a wide range of responses to her minimal pairs task; some Canadian New Yorkers could pick out the difference between a Canadian's "cot-caught" pronunciation from a New Yorker's, and some couldn't. Some got some of them right but not others. Some got nothing right.

Nycz also did some careful phonetic measurements to find out exactly how much their cot-caught speech had changed since moving to New York. Previous work, she says, had come to the conclusion that mergers like cot-caught aren't really ever split, but her work found otherwise: some of those Canadians she measured had begun to make some distinctions between the words that New Yorkers would pronounce with an "ah" and those they'd pronounce with an "awwuh."

What's weird is that she then compared how the Canadians did on the minimal pairs task with the results of the phonetic measurements. In other words: does someone with more knowledge of the differences between the New York and Canadian accents more or less likely to have adopted the New York accent?

She found no correlation at all between those two tasks. Her research indicates that what we know about an accent has no relationship at all to whether or not we adopt it. That implies that accent acquisition is pretty much an unconscious thing, something out of our control.

There are other factors that influence how we pick up a new accent. Nycz found that the subject of conversation can have a huge effect on which accent shows up. In her research, she found that when Canadians were talking about Canada, they had a more Canadian-like speech pattern, but when talking about New York, they had more New York-ish variants. That's simple enough, but it can get even more complicated based on the way a person feels about that subject.

One of Nycz's subjects was a Canadian from a small town in one of Canada's sparsely populated prairie provinces. Her accent didn't follow those patterns, at least not at first: when talking about her hometown, she used distinctly New York pronunciations. When talking about New York, same thing: New York pronunciations.

The only time she used notably Canadian speech was when talking not about her hometown, but about Toronto, where she'd lived for a few years. Further interviewing indicated that she didn't much like her hometown, couldn't wait to get out. But she loved Toronto.

Even though you'd expect an accent from the prairies to be stronger than an accent from huge, multicultural Toronto, this subject changed her accent depending on how she felt about each conversational topic. Not a fan of her hometown, not wanting to be associated with it, she spoke in a way that people from that town did not speak. But for Toronto and New York, places she loved, she used the local dialect from each. Perhaps speaking like a local indicates your emotions about that place. You love New York? You consider yourself a New Yorker? You'll speak like a New Yorker.

Lindsay Lohan told the Daily Mail that her odd new accent is a product of her attempts to learn multiple languages. "It's a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn," she said. "I've been learning different languages since I was a child. I'm fluent in English and French, can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian and Arabic."

What Lohan is saying is that her efforts to learn new languages have actually affected the way she speaks English, her native tongue. Is that possible or likely?

Turns out, maybe! In the mid-1990s, a linguist named James Flege attempted to answer that same question. He studied fluent bilingual speakers of French and English: both native English speakers now fluent in French, and native French speakers now fluent in English. One of his most important discoveries comes from measurements of a very wonky linguistic metric called "voice onset time," or VOT. (Nycz, before she explained VOT to me, excitedly described it as "very fun.")

VOT is what decides the differences between a few pairs of consonants, namely "p" and "b," "t" and "d," and "k" and "g." Those consonants are extremely similar; your mouth is doing basically the exact same thing in order to create each of those pairs. To make each of those consonants, a speaker has to build up air in the mouth and then suddenly release it. (The release of air is called "aspiration" in linguistics.)

In those pairs, you can measure the exact length of time between when a speaker releases that air and the moment the vocal cords vibrate for the vowel to follow. That amount of time is extremely short, but also very telling. Someone who only speaks English will pronounce "bah" with basically no VOT at all: the release of air from the "b" sound happens at the same time the vocal cords begin vibrating for the "ah" sound. But for "pah," there's a tiny tiny gap, maybe 40 milliseconds between the release of the air from the "p" sound until the vocal cords vibrate.

But for someone who speaks only French, well, it's all very different. A French speaker will actually begin vibrating their vocal cords before they expel the air to make a "b" sound, rather than at the same time. A monolingual French speaker's "p" sound is made more like an English speaker's "b" sound, with the air and the vibration happening at the same time. This incredibly subtle and basically inaudible difference means that a French speaker's pronunciation of "place" will sound like an English speaker's "blace."

What Flege found was that by learning another language fluently, the bilingual speakers ended up with VOTs somewhere in the middle between what a monolingual French and monolingual English speaker would have. But he found that effect in both the learned language and the native language. In other words, learning a new language does, even if in a very subtle way, have an effect on the way you speak your native language.

Of course, whether this applies to Lindsay Lohan is anyone's guess. "These are highly experienced bilingual speakers he was looking at," says Nycz. "Whether it applies to Lindsay Lohan taking a language class? ...Possibly?"

I had a few questions that Nycz couldn't really answer. How long does it take an acquired accent to wear off, once a speaker is back home amongst that speaker's native dialect? "That's hard to study for stupid practical reasons," says Nycz. Finding people before they leave, measuring the people they speak to both abroad and at home, and systematically measuring someone's speech after they return is a very tricky proposition, one potentially laden with variables that could throw off the entire study. "I don't know that we have systematic empirical data to speak to that," she says.

Nycz wasn't sure if the American attitude to an acquired non-American accent is different than it would be in other countries, but it's not an easy question to answer. Someone who comes back from a study abroad semester in London might feel that speaking in the US with London-inflected speech contributes to the identity they want to put forth. Worldly, maybe. But the reactions can vary. Some Americans might be more interested in someone with a slight British lilt. Others might view that person as, you know, a falsity, an inauthentic poser. But that attitude isn't necessarily reflected in the research. Adopting a new accent isn't entirely, or even mostly, a conscious choice. It's a natural impulse.

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We Asked a Linguist to Explain the 'Semester Abroad Accent'

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When Lindsay Lohan appeared on camera in October speaking in some kind of pan-European accent, she was subjected to the same form of mockery that generations of American college students who study abroad have experienced. I myself, after attending college in Montreal, returned to the US saying things like "to-more-owe" and "sore-y" and "aboat."

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What Language Do the Minions Speak? | Grammarly

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What Language Do the Minions Speak? | Grammarly

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What Language Do the Minions Speak? | Grammarly

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The Minions have their own movie now, but before 2015, they starred alongside the lovable villain Gru in the Despicable Me movie series. Like all top actors, the Minions deliver many quotes that fans love to repeat. However, the quotes you hear from Minion fans are likely to be things like "Ngaaahaaa! Patalaki patalaku Big Boss!" What does that mean? What language do the Minions speak?

To answer that, you have to turn to the creator of the language. Minionese is not a real world language. Directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda say that they borrowed cool vocabulary from existing world languages and combined them with funny sounds and gibberish to create Minionese.

Minion Words

Anyone who knows Minions knows that there's one word they love to say-banana! Some fans even call their language "banana language." When Minions say banana, they are usually talking about the fruit. However, there are plenty of other food words in their vocabulary. They sing a song that features banana and potato. They also reportedly say poulet tiki masala; poulet means chicken in French and tikka masala is the name of an Indian dish. They count to three in Korean and say thank you in intentionally mispronounced English. You can find fan-created Minion word sites on the Internet if you want to learn more.

How to Speak Minion

Speaking like a Minion isn't just a matter of making nonsensical sounds with foreign words thrown in here and there. Minions talk a lot like babies. Think of it-banana is reminiscent of baby babble-ba-na-na. They use a lot of Bs and Ps, some of the first sounds that babies master. And they talk in cute little voices that lilt upwards.

Will you see the next Minion film or rewatch one of the old ones? If you do, keep an ear open for the languages you know how to speak. You might hear a phrase you recognize. Report what you think the phrases mean below!

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The Minions have their own movie now, but before 2015, they starred alongside the lovable villain Gru in the Despicable Me movie series. Like all top actors, the Minions deliver many quotes that fans love to repeat. However, the quotes you hear from Minion fans are likely to be things like "Ngaaahaaa!

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What's Going On with the Way Canadians Say ‘About'? | Atlas Obscura

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What's Going On with the Way Canadians Say ‘About'? | Atlas Obscura

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Considering the geographical, cultural, and economic closeness of our two countries, it's almost perverse that Americans take so much pride in their ignorance about all things Canada. Drake? Dan Aykroyd? The new hot prime minister? Is that it? But everyone knows what Canadians are supposed to sound like: they are a people who pronounce "about" as "aboot" and add "eh" to the ends of sentences.

Unfortunately, that's wrong. Like, linguistically incorrect. Canadians do not say "aboot." What they do say is actually much weirder.

Canadian English, despite the gigantic size of the country, is nowhere near as diverse as American English; think of the vast differences between the accents of a Los Angeleno, a Bostonian, a Chicagoan, a Houstonian, and a New Yorker. In Canada, there are some weird pockets: Newfoundland and Labrador speak a sort of Irish-cockney-sounding dialect, and there are some unique characteristics in English-speaking Quebec. But otherwise, linguistically, the country is fairly consistent.

There are a few isolated quirks in Canadian English, like keeping the Britishism "zed" for the last letter of the alphabet, and keeping a hard "agh" sound where Americans would usually say "ah." (In Canada, "pasta" rhymes with "Mt. Shasta".) But aside from those quirks, there are two major defining trends in Canadian English: Canadian Raising and the Canadian Shift. The latter is known stateside as the California Shift, and it's what makes Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge sound so insane: a systematic migration of vowel sounds resulting in "kit" sounding like "ket," "dress" sounding like "drass," and "trap" sounding like "trop." The SoCal accent, basically, is being replicated almost entirely in Canada.

But the Canadian Shift is minor compared to Canadian Raising, a phenomenon describing the altered sounds of two notable vowel sounds, that has much bigger consequences for the country's identity, at least in the U.S. That's where we get all that "aboot" stuff.

First catalogued in the 1940s and named by Jack Chambers in 1973, Canadian Raising is a shift found in Canada and in pockets of the northern United States (and, sort of, in Scotland) affecting two vowel sounds. The first is the sound in the word "write," and the second is our old friend, "about."

"Canadian Raising has to do with two diphthongs," says Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain, a linguist at the University of Alberta who was raised in the U.S. but now sports a fully-functioning (but self-aware) Canadian accent. When we talk about accents in English, we're almost exclusively talking about vowels; with the exception of dropping "r" sounds at the end of words, English dialects pretty much stick to the same consonant sounds. A "k" is a "k" is a "k," you know? Not vowels. "These vowel sounds are very slippery and difficult to imitate," says Taylor Roberts, a Canadian linguist who maintains a popular page on the topic of the Canadian dialect. "Consonants are easy, but vowels are tricky."

Different vowels are produced by moving the tongue in different parts of the mouth, tapping and curling and poking, while the lips create circles and ovals of varying sizes. Linguists have a map for this, a sort of ungainly parallelogram, but it also helps to just repeat the word to yourself and feel carefully for where your tongue goes. (I have heard Canadians say the word "about" more times in the past week than in the entire four years I lived in Canada.)

This map features all of the basic vowels in English: "ah," "ee," "oh," "ooh," "eh," that kind of thing. Those are called monophthongs. When you combine them you end up with a whole new palette of sounds known as diphthongs, sort of a compound vowel. The vowel in the word "bike" is one of these, made up of either monophthongs "ah" and "ee," in the southern and western U.S., or "uh" and "ee," in the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada. This latter is an example of Canadian Raising.

For the word "about," we have a diphthong in the U.S., as well. That "ow" sound is made up of an "agh" sound moving to an "ooh" sound. That first sound, the "agh," is an extremely low vowel on that chart.

Canadians also have a diphthong there, but a much weirder one than ours. Instead of starting with "agh," they start with a vowel that's mapped in a mid-range place, but one that is, bizarrely, not represented in American linguistics, period. This is an exclusively Canadian sound, one that the vast majority of Americans not only don't use where Canadians use it, they don't use it at all. It's completely foreign.

The Canadian diphthong in "about" starts with something closer to "eh," and migrates to a blank space on the American linguistic map somewhere between "uh," "oh," and "ooh." That transition is actually easier on the mouth than the American version; our vowels go from low to high, and theirs from mid to high.

To say that Canadians are saying "aboot" is linguistically inaccurate; "ooh" is a monophthong and the proper Canadian dialect uses a diphthong. "A-boat" would actually be a bit closer, but still relies on a monophthong. Why can't Americans get their heads around the Canadian "about"?

"What's going on is a compound of pronunciation and perception," says Dailey-O'Cain. "The Canadians do pronounce it differently. Americans hear this and they know it's different-they're hearing a difference but they don't know exactly what that difference is." Americans do not have the Canadian diphthong present in the word "about," which makes it hard to understand. We know that the Canadians are doing something weird, but in fact it's so unlike our own dialect that we can't even really figure out what's weird about it.

Our best guess? Well, we can hear that the Canadians are raising that first vowel in the diphthong, even if we don't know what "raising" means. But in a true American disdain for subtlety, we choose to interpret that as the most extreme possible raised vowel sound: "ooh." It's like a beach artist caricature that exaggerates a feature beyond realism and into cartoon-land: we hear a difference, and boost that difference to a height that isn't actually correct anymore.

The big question is, well, why did this happen? What possible explanation can there be for the creation of this odd diphthong just north of the border?

Linguists do not generally attempt to answer questions of causality. "Why? I can't answer that," said Dailey-O'Cain when I asked. "You can look at ongoing changes sometimes if you have the right kind of data but it's very, very hard." But there are theories. One particularly fascinating explanation has to do with what's called the Great Vowel Shift. If you've ever wondered why English is such a legendarily horrible language to learn, a lot of the problems can be traced back to the Great Vowel Shift.

There is no firm date on the beginning and end of the Great Vowel Shift, but at most, we can say it happened between the 1100s and the 1700s, with probably the most important and biggest changes happening in the 1400s and 1500s. This coincides with the shift from Middle English to Modern English, and also with the standardization of spelling. The shift itself? Every single "long vowel"-"ey," "ee," "aye," "oh," "ooh"-changed. (Nobody knows why. Linguistics is turtles all the way down.)

Before the Great Vowel Shift, "bite" was pronounced more like "beet." "Meat" was more like "mate." Everything just kind of slipped one notch over. This happened in stages; that first word, "bite," started out as "beet," then became "bait," then "beyt," then "bite." You can hear a nice spoken-aloud rundown of those here.

If you're wondering what the difference between "bait" and "beyt" is, well, there you have one possible origin of Canadian Raising. "Beyt," one of the later but not the final stage of the Great Vowel Shift, is extremely similar to the Canadian Raised sound spoken today. There is a theory-not necessarily accepted by all-that Canadian Raised vowels are actually a preserved remnant of the Great Vowel Shift, an in-between vowel sound that was somehow stuck in amber in the Great White North.

Maybe a certain population of Englishmen from that particular time period, around 1600, landed in Canada and due to its isolation failed to observe the further changes happening in England. Maybe.

But I like this explanation. Canadians aren't weird; they're respecting the past. One very specific past, that everyone else skipped on by. It's an awfully nice-sounding diphthong.
Update (6/1): We originally misspelled Dan Aykroyd's surname. We're sorry. It has been corrected.

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The Linguistic Mystery of How Canadians Say 'About'

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Considering the geographical, cultural, and economic closeness of our two countries, it's almost perverse that Americans take so much pride in their ignorance about all things Canada. Drake? Dan Aykroyd? The new hot prime minister? Is that it?

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Monkeys Could Talk If Their Brains Were Wired For Language : Shots - Health News : NPR

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Monkeys Could Talk If Their Brains Were Wired For Language : Shots - Health News : NPR

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If you could change the way a monkey or an ape's brain is wired, that animal would be capable of producing perfectly intelligible speech.

That's the conclusion of a study that closely tracked the movements of a monkey's mouth and throat with X-rays, to understand the full potential of its vocal tract.

Researchers then used that information to create a computer model of what it would sound like if the monkey were able to say phrases such as "happy holidays."

The finding calls into question long-held assumptions about how humans developed their unique ability to use spoken language.

"What you'll find in the textbooks is that monkeys can't talk because they don't have the appropriate vocal tract to do so," says Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna. "That, I think, is a myth. My colleagues and I all get very tired of seeing this. But you see it in all the textbooks. Lots of popular books, and also scholarly books about the evolution of language, assume that in order to evolve speech we had to have massive changes in our vocal tract. "

In the past, scientists looked at dead animals to judge what their vocal tracts could do. But Fitch says that made people vastly underestimate the flexibility of nonhuman mammals.

He and his colleagues monitored a long-tailed macaque named Emiliano as he made a wide range of different gestures and sounds, including lip-smacks, yawns, chewing, coos and grunts. Their special equipment took a rapid series of X-rays that allowed them to capture the full range of movement in the monkey's vocal tract. Then they used computer models to explore its potential for generating speech.

Friday, in the journal Science Advances, his team reports that monkeys would be physically capable of producing five distinguishable vowels - the most common number of vowels found in the world's languages.

And human listeners could clearly understand phrases they created with their synthesized monkey speech, including a marriage proposal.

The bottom line, says Fitch, is that a monkey's speech limitations stem from the way its brain is organized.

"As soon as you had a brain that was ready to control the vocal tract," Fitch says, "the vocal tract of a monkey or nonhuman primate would be perfectly fine for producing lots and lots of words."

The real issue is that monkeys' brains do not have direct connections down to the neurons that control the larynx and the tongue, he says. What's more, monkeys don't have critical connections within the brain itself, between the auditory cortex and motor cortex, which makes them incapable of imitating what they hear in the way that humans do.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a science fiction movie from 2011, actually has the right idea, notes Fitch. In that film, after a lab chimp named Caesar undergoes brain changes, he eventually is able to speak words such as "No."

"The new Planet of the Apes is a pretty accurate representation of what we think is going on," says Fitch.

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Say, What? Monkey Mouths And Throats Are Equipped For Speech

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If you could change the way a monkey or an ape's brain is wired, that animal would be capable of producing perfectly intelligible speech. That's the conclusion of a study that closely tracked the movements of a monkey's mouth and throat with X-rays, to understand the full potential of its vocal tract.

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The 10 Oldest Languages Still Spoken In The World Today

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The 10 Oldest Languages Still Spoken In The World Today

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Hebrew

Hebrew is a funny case, since it essentially fell out of common usage around 400 CE and then remained preserved as a liturgical language for Jews across the world. However, along with the rise of Zionism in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hebrew went through a revival process to become the official language of Israel. While the modern version differs from the Biblical version, native speakers of Hebrew can fully comprehend what is written in the Old Testament and its connected texts. As the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew often had Yiddish as their native language, Modern Hebrew has in many ways been influenced by this other Jewish language.

Basque

The Basque language is the ultimate linguistic mystery. It is spoken natively by some of the Basque people who live in Spain and France, but it is completely unrelated to any Romance language (which French and Spanish are) or indeed any other language in the world. Linguists have postulated over the decades about what it could be related to, but none of the theories have been able to hold water. The only thing that's clear is that it existed in that area before the arrival of the Romance languages-that is, before the Romans got there with the Latin that would eventually develop into French and Spanish.

Tamil

Tamil, a language spoken by about 78 million people and recognized as an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, is the only classical language that has survived all the way through to the modern world. Forming part of the Dravidian language family, which includes a number of languages native mostly to southern and eastern India, it is also the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu. Researchers have found inscriptions in Tamil dating back to the 3rd century BCE, and it has been in continuous use ever since. Unlike Sanskrit, another ancient Indian language that fell out of common usage around 600 BCE and became mostly a liturgical language, Tamil has continued to develop and is now the 20th most commonly-spoken language in the world.

Lithuanian

The language family that most European languages belong to is Indo-European, but they started splitting apart from each other probably around 3500 BCE. They developed into dozens of other languages like German, Italian, and English, gradually losing the features that they had all shared. One language, however, up in the Baltic language branch of the Indo-European family, retained more of the feature of what linguists call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which is the language that they postulate was spoken around 3500 BCE. For whatever reason, Lithuanian has kept more of the sounds and grammar rules from PIE than any of its linguistic cousins, and can therefore be called one of the oldest languages in the world.

Farsi

In case you haven't heard of Farsi, it's a language spoken in modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, among other places. You've probably heard of Persian, and it's actually the same language, under a different name. Farsi is the direct descendant of Old Persian, which was the language of the Persian Empire. Modern Persian took form around 800 CE, and one of the things that differentiates it from many modern languages is that it has changed relatively little since then. Speakers of Persian today could pick up a piece of writing from 900 CE and read it with considerably less difficulty than an English speaker could read, say, Shakespeare.

You might also like: How The Iranian Horror Film Under the Shadow Scared a Bunch of Critics

Icelandic

Icelandic is another Indo-European language, this time from the North Germanic branch (just for comparison, English is also a Germanic language, but from the West Germanic branch). Many Germanic languages have streamlined themselves and lost some of the features that other Indo-European languages have (you've probably never heard of a case, for example, unless you've studied Latin or a Slavic language), but Icelandic has developed much more conservatively and retained many of these features. Danish governance of the country from the 14th to the 20th century also had very little effect on the Icelandic language, so it has mostly gone unchanged since Norse settlers brought it there when they came to the country, and Icelandic speakers can easily read the sagas written centuries ago.

Macedonian

The Slavic language family, which includes Russian, Polish, Czech, and Croatian, among others, is relatively young as far as languages go. They only started splitting off from their common ancestor, Common Slavic (or Proto-Slavic), when Cyril and Methodius standardized the language, creating what is now called Old Church Slavonic, and created an alphabet for it. They then took the language north with them in the 9th century as they went to convert the Slavs to Christianity. They came from somewhere just north of Greece, probably in what is now known as Macedonia (or the Republic of Macedonia or FYROM following Macedonian naming disputes), and Macedonian (together with its very close relative Bulgarian) is the language that is most closely related to Old Church Slavonic today.
Following the comments concerning the intricate historical relationship between Macedonia and Bulgaria, we at The Culture Trip would like indicate that, despite the complexities, the prevailing academic consensus outside of the region is that Bulgarian and the language known as Macedonian are distinct. If you don't believe us, read our article on the history of the Macedonian language.
Finnish

Finnish may not have been written down until the 16th century, but as with any language, it has a history that stretches back far earlier than that. It is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which also includes Estonian, Hungarian, and several smaller languages spoken by minority groups across Siberia. Despite that, Finnish includes many loan words, which were adopted into Finnish from other language families over the centuries. In many cases, Finnish has retained these loan words closer to their original form than the language that they came from. The word for mother, aiti, for example, comes from Gothic-which, of course, is no longer spoken. The word for king, kuningas, comes from the old Germanic word * kuningaz -which no longer exists in any Germanic language.

Georgian

The Caucasus region is a real hotbed for linguists who seek out difficult world languages. The main languages of the three south Caucasian countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, come from three entirely different language families-respectively Indo-European, Turkic, and Kartvelian. Georgian is the biggest Kartvelian language, and it is the only Caucasian language with an ancient literary tradition. Its beautiful and unique alphabet is also quite old-it is thought to have been adapted from Aramaic as far back as the third century AD. While not a language island in the same sense as Basque, there are only four Kartvelian languages, all spoken by minorities within Georgia, and they are all unrelated to any other languages in the world.

Irish Gaelic

Although Irish Gaelic is only spoken as a native language by a small majority of Irish people nowadays, it has a long history behind it. It is a member of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages, and it existed on the islands that are now Great Britain and Ireland well before the Germanic influences arrived. Irish Gaelic was the language from which Scottish Gaelic and Manx (which used to be spoken on the Isle of Man) arose, but the fact that really lands it on this list is that it has the oldest vernacular literature of any language in Western Europe. While the rest of Europe was speaking their own languages and writing in Latin, the Irish decided that they wanted to write in their own language instead.

If you enjoyed this article, why not check out the great pieces in our Explore Your World Through Language campaign. Or check out our article on other languages spoken in Russia or the endangered languages of Thailand.

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The 10 Oldest Languages Still Spoken in the World Today

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Hebrew is a funny case, since it essentially fell out of common usage around 400 CE and then remained preserved as a liturgical language for Jews across the world. However, along with the rise of Zionism in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hebrew went through a revival process to become the official language of Israel.

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Preserving Ireland's Ancient, Mysterious Tree-Based Alphabet | Atlas Obscura

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Preserving Ireland's Ancient, Mysterious Tree-Based Alphabet | Atlas Obscura

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As an archaeological linguist working in Dublin, Nora White has spent her fair share of time digging through archives and poring over manuscripts. But when she wants a real taste of Irish history, she skips the library altogether. She heads to a hilltop or a secluded field, and she looks for a weathered old rock with slashes cut into the sides.

White studies Ogham-a mysterious Irish alphabet found on hundreds of scattered stones all over the country. Also called the "Celtic Tree Alphabet" due to its unusual letter scheme, Ogham dates back to at least the 4th century, when Gaelic speakers created it in order to translate the unique sounds of their language into written form. Today, they're fonts of linguistic knowledge and scholarly mystery, and lightning rods for cross-millennial empathy. "There is no doubt that you get a feeling of connection with the past," says White. "You can't help but wonder about the person commemorated and the one commissioned to carve the stone."

There are about 400 known Ogham stones in the world-360 in Ireland, and the rest scattered between Wales, the Isle of Mann, and Scotland. Most are monuments or border markers, engraved with the evocative names and genealogies of their owners-" Belonging to the Three Sons of the Bald One," or " He Who Was Born Of The Raven." More are almost certainly lurking-hidden stones can (and do) pop up occasionally, built into churches , unearthed at construction sites , or hiding out disguised as decorative stonework .

On a purely linguistic level, Ogham isn't too hard to master . Each of its 20 characters, or "trees," is made out of a reference line, or "stem," crossed by one or more slashes, or "twigs." Depending on the number and direction of these twigs, the letter codes for a particular sound. To aid in memorization, each letter also has a name-often, though not always, a tree that starts with the sound the letter represents. The "B" sound, for example, has one twig sticking out on the right, and is called "Beithe," or birch tree.

When scholars memorized the letters, they'd group them by twig direction, and count up by twig number. The right-sided twigs go "Beighe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin" ("birch, herb, alder, willow, letters"). The horizontal slash-throughs go "Ailm, Onn, Ur, Edad, Idad" ("pine, ash, earth, wild cherry"). It's like the alphabet song, but with groups of trees instead of melodic clusters-not that difficult for those who like puzzles.

But Ogham's unique material structure makes it a little tougher than your average paper-bound alphabet. "Most inscriptions on stone are in the face of the stone," says White. "But with Ogham, it wraps around the angled edge of the stone." Because of this, Ogham provides a uniquely physical reading experience-after you've broken a sweat finding the right rock, proper analysis requires examining it on all sides. Inscriptions generally start on the lower left, sweep up along the top edge, and then go back down on the right.

This also presents particular challenges to archaeologists, says White. Although past scholars have come up with workarounds, the stones' multi-dimensional orientation means ordinary drawings and photographs don't get across the whole story. To fix this-and to preserve the inscriptions as the stones inevitably weather-White has spent the last couple of years making three-dimensional scans of all the ones she can get to, as part of the " Ogham in 3-D " project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies's School of Celtic Studies.

On scanning days, she and a surveyor from Ireland's Discovery Programme lug their materials out to whatever front yard, remote hilltop, or sheep field holds the stone they need. "They're very often in out-of-the-way places," she says."You have to make sure there's no livestock in the field." Because the 3-D scanner only works in completely blackness, they pitch a blackout tent over the stone, and let their equipment read it in the dark. If a stone is too big for the tent, they work at night.

Besides providing new linguistic insights and an accessible, complete corpus, White hopes their work may shed a little more light on Ogham's mysterious past. Various legends present dramatic accounts: One says it was conjured up by the Celtic god of eloquence, Ogmios, who dragged his followers along by golden chains coming out of his tongue. Another holds that it was made up by a Scythian king named Fenius as an new ideal composite language, after the fall of the Tower of Babel destroyed the world's existing ones.

Scholars have their own, slightly more grounded theories. Some speculate it was invented as a secret language, meant to be indecipherable by the neighboring Brits, who presented a constant threat of invasion and used the Latin alphabet. Others think it was created by Christian communities , who found it difficult to translate Gaelic sounds into Latin letters. White isn't sure about the secret-code claims-the language seems too easy to learn for that-but then again, she's not sure why Ogham exists at all. "If they had this Latin alphabet, why create a whole new one for Irish?" she asks.

The answer may lay with the language's new fans. Since the project launched, she's heard from dozens of people asking her to come examine their local big, beat-up stone, to see if it's got the right kind of slashes. There's a strong pull to a language like that, unique and mystical and literally embedded in the landscape. "Maybe they just wanted to keep their own identity," she says. "All we can do is speculate." And, of course, keep reading.

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Preserving Ireland's Ancient, Mysterious Tree-Based Alphabet

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As an archaeological linguist working in Dublin, Nora White has spent her fair share of time digging through archives and poring over manuscripts. But when she wants a real taste of Irish history, she skips the library altogether. She heads to a hilltop or a secluded field, and she looks for a weathered old rock with slashes cut into the sides.

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Despite all our smarts and scientific advancements, there is still a lot we don't know about the phenomenon of human language. We don't know what the first human language sounded like. We don't know exactly where, how, or when it came to be. We may never be able to find out-there's an overwhelming lack of data to work with. What we can say, however, is that once we figured out how to create language, we went ahead and created a bunch of them. And we're still doing it today.

Where There's a Need, There Is a Way

Two of the main senses for using language are speech, our ability to create sounds, and hearing, our ability to perceive sounds created by others. We can also give language a visual form by writing, but the visual element is important even in face-to-face communication. We send off and receive a number of non-verbal communication signs, such as facial expressions, postures, and gestures. A number of our fellow humans aren't able to communicate with all three senses, but doesn't stop them from finding effective ways of communication.

People who are deaf learn sign language-a language of hand gestures and signs that allows them to communicate with great fluency. But what happens in a community of deaf people who don't have a sign language they can use to communicate? They come up with their own. When a group of deaf children in Nicaragua was taught to lip-read and use American Sign Language, they shunned lip-reading and quickly developed a sign language of their own-behind the backs of their teachers. The result was a completely new language, developed in the 1980s by Nicaraguan kids. And just like that, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, or ISN, was born.

People who can't hear or see have an even bigger challenge-they can't rely on signs and gestures. In the United States, people who are deaf and blind have been developing a sign language that is based on American Sign Language but has a tactile twist to it. A person speaking in Pro-Tactile ASL, which is what the new language is called, uses her own hands and arms as well as the hands and arms of the person she's talking to create gestures and signs. It's a contact language that allows speakers to communicate nuances such as nodding and other gestures.

Other Reasons to Invent a Language

Constructed languages have been created with different agendas, apart from the basic human need to communicate. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, the creator of arguably the best-known constructed language in the world, Esperanto, wanted to make a language that was easy to learn, could be used as an international second language, and could help overcome cultural misunderstandings. Robot Interaction Language, or ROILA, is a language currently under development at the Eindhoven University of Technology's Department of Industrial Design. It is the first language created specially for use by talking robots. Loglan, created Dr. James Cooke Brown, is a language used by linguists to research linguistic relativity.

But new languages also pop up spontaneously when conditions are right. People living in Lajamanu, a small and isolated town in Australia, already had a heritage language they could speak, Walpiri. They also spoke both English and Kriol, an English-based creole. When parents spoke to their kids in a mixture of the three languages, the kids took the words they heard and married them with a syntax that wasn't present in any of the three parent languages, creating a new native language for about 350 of Lajamanu's residents. It's spoken only by people who are around thirty-five years old.

Artistic Languages That Entertain

Fantasy settings invite us to create new languages. Alien cultures, alternative histories, dystopian futures, worlds of magic and swordplay-these settings are often very different from the world we live in. So, it only makes sense to, at least from time to time, populate these strange worlds with their own languages. Occasionally, you'll get fantasy languages that really work (kind of). You might call them artistic languages, or artlangs.

If you're a fan of the Star Trek franchise, you probably know there are Trekkers who can speak Klingon, a language created for a Star Trek movie by the American linguist Marc Okrand. If you're familiar with the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, you're probably aware of Quenya and Sindarin, two Elvish languages of Middle Earth. Na'vi, created by Dr. Paul Frommer, is what the big blue aliens speak in James Cameron's movie Avatar. The Verdurian language was created by Mark Rosenfelder for a role-playing game, and it contains 400,000 words.

There's no end to human inventiveness when it comes to language. What new languages do you speak?

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Despite all our smarts and scientific advancements, there is still a lot we don't know about the phenomenon of human language. We don't know what the first human language sounded like. We don't know exactly where, how, or when it came to be.

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‘Star Wars’ actor Diego Luna did not hide his Mexican accent — and Latinos heard it loud - The Washington Post

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‘Star Wars’ actor Diego Luna did not hide his Mexican accent — and Latinos heard it loud - The Washington Post

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A Language for Idealists | Princeton Alumni Weekly

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A Language for Idealists | Princeton Alumni Weekly

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Professor Esther Schor takes a new look at Esperanto, invented to unite the world

THE SWEET-FACED TODDLER GAZES expectantly at the camera. "Kie estas via nazo?" asks an off-screen adult voice. "Nazo," the little boy repeats, planting a pudgy index finger on the side of his nose.

It's just another cute-baby video from YouTube, except that this one shows something remarkable: an American child on his way to becoming a native speaker of Esperanto, a language invented 130 years ago by a Polish Jewish eye doctor on an idealistic mission to repair a broken world.

Alternately embraced and mocked, persecuted and ignored, Esperanto has stubbornly survived, and today it is spoken by an international community whose members are estimated to number anywhere from the tens of thousands to 2 million. Esperantists open their homes to Esperanto-speaking travelers and mingle at conventions where they wear the Esperanto color (green), sing the Esperanto anthem ( "La Espero" - "The Hope"), buy Esperanto sex manuals and Shakespeare translations, and share the foods and cultures of their native lands. And a few of them raise denaskuloj ("from-birth-ers") - Esperanto-speaking children or grandchildren.

"You're in a room, and there's someone from Nepal and someone from Cuba and someone from China and someone from Japan and someone from Indonesia, and they're all speaking Esperanto and drinking mojitos," says Princeton English professor Esther Schor, whose history-cum-memoir, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, was published last fall. "It's just kind of an amazing feeling."

Esperanto was the brainchild of Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof (1859-1917), who was born in the multilingual city of Bialystok, in Russian-controlled Poland, where Jews, Poles, Germans, and Russians lived in mutual hostility. From his teenage years, the linguistically gifted Zamenhof dreamed of inventing a new language that would bridge ethnic and national differences - not by replacing native languages, but by becoming a universally shared second language for people around the world.

The project wasn't as quixotic as it sounds, says Princeton history professor Michael D. Gordin, whose 2015 book Scientific Babel examines how English displaced predecessors like Latin, French, German, and Russian to become the primary language of scientific publication. At the time Zamenhof was developing his ideas, scientists were beginning to worry that important discoveries might be overlooked if researchers couldn't understand the languages in which they were published. A neutral "constructed language," which would short-circuit European nations' jockeying for linguistic predominance, seemed like a viable solution.

"It wasn't a bunch of weirdos," Gordin says. "It was always a marginal movement, but it was a serious movement that serious people took seriously. It was grava, as Esperantists would say."

In 1887, Zamenhof - by then a trained ophthalmologist who would eventually practice among the impoverished Jewish citizens of Warsaw - unveiled his new language in a pamphlet published in Russian under the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto" ("Doctor Hopeful"). The founding document, which Esperantists call the Unua Libro (First Book), laid out 16 fundamental principles and listed 900 prefixes, suffixes, and word-roots, but it left most of the work of vocabulary-building up to the language's users.

To make his new language easy to master, Zamenhof eliminated the irregular verbs and arbitrarily gendered nouns that bedevil language learners. Esperanto's roots are drawn from German, English, Russian, and especially the Romance languages; most of its conjunctions and particles come from Latin and Greek. Every singular noun ends in "o," every plural noun ends in "oj" (pronounced like the English "oy"), every adjective ends in "a," and every adverb ends in "e." Many common adjectives like bona (good) can be transformed into their opposites by adding the prefix mal- ( malbona = bad), halving the vocabulary that learners must memorize. New words are coined by stringing together roots and affixes.

Spoken Esperanto sounds a bit like a Slavic-sprinkled Italian, and with no ethnic or national community to insist on a received pronunciation, every speaker invests the language with an individual accent derived from her own native tongue. Written Esperanto looks semifamiliar to an English speaker, even one with no prior knowledge of the language.

When Luke Massa '13, a Princeton philosophy major who now works as a software engineer, wanted a secret language he could speak with a friend at his suburban Philadelphia high school, Esperanto seemed the perfect choice. After four months of online study and conversation, the two friends were more proficient in Esperanto than in the German they had studied for years in school, Massa says.

As a vehicle for covert hallway gossip, however, Esperanto fell flat. "It really sort of failed as a secret language, because there are so many words in it that are cognates to English or French," Massa says. "People could figure it out."

Living amid the interethnic tensions of turn-of-the-20th-century Eastern Europe, Zamenhof had loftier goals for his project, which soon came to be known by his pseudonym. "He dreamed of a language as a tool for building something that he didn't have," says Carolyn Biltoft *10, a Princeton history Ph.D. whose forthcoming book on the interwar League of Nations includes a chapter on the language-reform and language-creation movements. "He thought that language might be a tool for achieving a transborder conception of a peaceful community."

In the decades after the publication of the Unua Libro, Esperanto gained adherents and suffered growing pains. Zamenhof's Jewishness repelled some early Esperantists, especially after he codified his universalist vision into a religious philosophy, eventually called Homaranismo ("Humanity-ism"), based on the ethical teachings of the Jewish sage Hillel. In 1907, Esperanto faced its most significant challenge when a conference that had convened to select an international auxiliary language from among some two dozen competitors passed over the leading contender, Zamenhof's Esperanto, in favor of a reformed Esperanto known as Ido. In the resulting uproar, perhaps a quarter of Esperanto's leaders, but a far smaller percentage of rank-and-file users, defected to the new language, which fizzled out in less than a decade.

As European nationalism devolved into world war and revolution, Esperanto's utopianism frequently inspired hostility, Schor's book shows. (An Esperanto history of the movement, forthcoming in English, is titled Dangerous Language.) Esperantists - who, as Gordin points out, were often involved in other forms of social or political activism, from vegetarianism to pacifism - were persecuted by Stalin and by the Nazis; all three of Zamenhof's adult children died in the Holocaust. Efforts to make Esperanto one of the official languages of the League of Nations foundered. During a 1922 debate, a Brazilian delegate called Esperanto a language of "ne'er-do-wells and communists."

At a moment when governments were deploying language as a tool of propaganda and warfare, Esperanto aimed "to undermine the power structures embedded in language," says Biltoft, an assistant professor of international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. "It was moving against the grain of power sources that were increasingly using communication technologies and standardizing languages in violent ways, to consolidate power."

In post-World War II Eastern Europe, embracing Esperanto provided a way for dissidents to forge links to the West, via Esperantists and their organizations, and to express "quiet resistance" to their regimes, Schor says. But Gordin notes that some communist regimes actively promoted Esperanto as well, seeing it as a way for their people to communicate with others in the Eastern bloc. Esperantists like to portray themselves as embattled dissidents, "because it gives a sort of heroism to the story," he says. "And there's plenty of heroism without having to make up reasons."

Whatever the European situation, at least one Cold War institution assuredly associated Esperanto with communism: the U.S. Army, which used Esperanto as the language of a fictional enemy known as "Aggressor" in a training exercise employed from 1947 to 1967. "Onto Zamenhof's language of peace, equality, and world harmony, the Army projected its terror of - and disgust for - communist aggression," Schor writes. (Ironically, during the same period, the American Esperanto movement was tearing itself apart in a McCarthyite effort to unmask supposed communist infiltrators.)

Although Esperantists like to think of themselves as politically neutral, the language's countercultural thrust is inherently political, Schor argues. Esperanto "symbolized an alternative to the given, and certainly an alternative to totalitarianism, an alternative to repression and bigotry and to war," she says. "It's not partisan, but I think it's deeply embedded in the political nature of human beings."

In its oppositional nature, Esperanto differs radically from English, which today serves as a de facto international language, performing some of the functions that Zamenhof once envisioned for Esperanto. English, which spread around the globe via the imperial might of Britain and the economic muscle of the United States, is far from the peaceful, neutral tool that Zamenhof imagined, Schor says.

"There's a power story behind it, and this is what Esperanto eschews," Schor says. "Esperanto is not a language that's promoted by power. It's a language promoted by conviction, by love, by idealism."

As a high school student in India, Avaneesh Narla '17 was attracted to Esperanto in part because of his annoyance at the postcolonial persistence of the language of British colonialists. "I hated the fact that everybody was learning English," says Narla, a physics major who speaks six languages but says he is no longer proficient in Esperanto, his seventh. "Why can't we just learn Esperanto? I liked the idea a lot."

In an English-centered world, native speakers have an edge over those who acquire English later - an inherent unfairness that bothers Alice Frederick '17, an anthropology major from Texas who is writing her senior thesis on the contemporary Esperantist community. "What I like about Esperanto is that it really removes my privilege as a native English speaker," says Frederick, who learned the language in order to attend international Esperanto conferences and consult the archives of the Netherlands-based Universal Esperanto Association. "It was like the tables were suddenly turned on me. I was obligated to learn this language if I wanted an 'in' in the community, and I'd never had that experience before."

The fact that virtually all Esperanto speakers start out as fledgling second-language learners - native-speaking denaskuloj remain a small minority, numbering perhaps 1,000 people, Gordin estimates - has helped forge Esperantists into a friendly, welcoming community. For decades, Esperantists have maintained the Pasporta Servo (Passport Service), a listing of Esperanto speakers around the world who are willing to host fellow Esperantists for a night or two. Massa, the 2013 Princeton graduate, has never used the service, but when he travels, he wears his Esperanto lapel pin - a green five-pointed star - to announce himself to any fellow Esperantist he might encounter (no luck so far). "It's something for me, to remind myself about what I think about languages and travel and the world," Massa says.

Schor joined the Esperanto community in 2007-08, not long after publishing a biography of the 19th-century American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus. As she cast around for a new project, she considered "other Jews who were thinking outside the box" and remembered hearing of Zamenhof.

In the course of her research, Schor took a three-week Esperanto immersion course in San Diego; attended Esperanto conferences in Turkey, Vietnam, Cuba, and Poland; browsed through an illustrated Hungarian-Esperanto sex guide; visited a school and foster home run by Esperantists in rural Brazil; and spent a chatty day in Uzbekistan with the Esperanto-speaking director of Samarkand's International Museum of Peace and Solidarity.

"Zamenhof's real insight, I think, is not the language itself, but it's that you can't have a language without a community of speakers," says Gordin, the Princeton history professor. "Building the language, he also built the community of speakers."

And of readers: Zamenhof himself translated Hamlet and the Hebrew Bible into Esperanto, and today it's possible to read Esperanto-language versions of everything from Dante's Inferno to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, as well as original works of prose and poetry. Schor, herself a published poet, tried translating Elizabeth Bishop into Esperanto (verdict: not easy).

Online, today's would-be Esperantists can study for free through the website lernu! ( www.lernu.net), which reports 200,000 registered users, or with the help of the language-learning app Duolingo, which claims 569,000 students of Esperanto. Esperantists can look up information on Vikipedio, meet in online forums to debate the most appropriate Esperanto coinage for terms like "smartphone" and "flash drive," or visit YouTube to watch clips of Esperanto rock bands and a full-length (albeit subtitled) version of one of the world's few all-Esperanto movies, the 1966 horror film Inkubo ( Incubus), starring a pre- Star Trek William Shatner.

Despite this flourishing culture, however, Esperanto has always encountered plenty of dismissiveness and ridicule. In 1908, Theodore W. Hunt, the first chairman of Princeton's English department, told a gathering of the Modern Language Association that constructed languages like Esperanto "can never rise to the plane of language as the expression of thought for the highest ends." (At least one of his Princeton colleagues disagreed: Some years earlier, retired biology professor George Macloskie had translated the Gospel of Matthew into Esperanto.) A century later, late-night TV host Stephen Colbert attended the 2014 Comic-Con costumed as Prince Hawkcat, supposedly the star of "the most popular human-animal fantasy hybrid franchise ever published" - wait for it - "in Esperanto."

Earlier this year, Frederick, the senior anthropology major, found herself bristling unexpectedly when a professor jokingly compared Esperanto to Klingon, the language of the extraterrestrial villains on Star Trek - a language invented to serve the purposes of commercial entertainment, not utopian idealism. "I immediately wanted to jump in," Frederick says. "I kept my mouth shut, but it struck me as something that Esperantists might call an indignity."

From time to time, Massa was forced to defend Esperanto from the criticism or mockery of fellow students who passed by the poorly attended mealtime Esperanto table he founded in Rockefeller College. Esperanto is "the thing I'm the most irrational about in my life," Massa says. "I will defend it forever, and I know that, and I am ready to do that at the drop of a hat."

Esperanto attracts scorn in part because of the very nature of the project. "There's a silly notion that because it's an invented language, it can't be a real one," says David Bellos, a professor in Princeton's comparative literature and French and Italian departments, who arranged daily Esperanto lessons for the Princeton students he taught during a six-week-long global seminar on multilingualism, held in Geneva, in the summer of 2014. "If you stop to think about it, most languages have been invented at some point. When they were invented isn't really relevant to whether or not they can be made to serve the functions that you want a language to serve."

Esperanto's earnest idealism also exposes it to attacks from the more cynical. Zamenhof wholeheartedly embraced the notion of an interna ideo (inner idea), a higher purpose to which his new language was dedicated, and even today, Esperantists call each other samideanoj: "same-idea-ers."

Exactly what that inner idea consists of seems up for grabs, however. Over the years, suggestions from scholars, movement leaders, and ordinary Esperantists have included not only Zamenhof's Homaranismo but also peace, social justice, language justice, interethnic harmony, anti-nationalism, and anti-fascism. Nor is it obvious that Esperantists must embrace any interna ideo at all. "It is possible to approach Esperanto and to make use of Esperanto without feeling that you have to be a vegan, long-haired, sandal-wearing peacenik," says Bellos. "It's about how you can ease the difficulties of the world by having a common interlanguage."

Narla, who has taught Esperanto mini-classes to local high school students and to fellow Princeton students during Wintersession, believes Esperanto's future may lie in its usefulness as a tool for promoting second-language acquisition. In Britain, a small program called Springboard to Languages claims that school-age children who first master Esperanto's transparent, regular grammar gain the confidence and structural grounding they need to tackle more complicated languages - just as learning the recorder prepares music students to play more complicated instruments. "French in the classroom is a bassoon," Springboard's creator, Tim Morley, argues in a 2012 TEDx talk. "Esperanto is a recorder."

Such modest goals seem a far cry from Zamenhof's vision of the finavenko (final victory) - an Esperanto-speaking world. These days, his ambition seems more distant than ever, and realizing it, were it possible, might not even be desirable, suggests Frederick, the senior anthropology major. "Esperanto is kind of in a bind in this way," she says. "It wants to be the second language for the world, but in order to do that, it would ultimately have to become so huge that people felt this sense of obligation to learn it, like if they didn't, they would be missing out. Esperanto would become invested with this power that it has really avoided trying to have. It can aspire to be like English, but I almost think it would lose some piece of itself if it did that."

In any case, Schor says, Esperantists no longer believe in that aspect of Zamenhof's dream. " Finavenkismo is finished, is over," she says. "No one thinks it's going to happen."

Not so fast, says Bellos, her Princeton colleague. Nowadays, English is firmly entrenched as the international language, he says, but once upon a time, so were Sumerian, Ancient Greek, Latin, and French.

"Over the course of human history, no central language has ever stayed central for more than a few centuries," Bellos says. "Something will change one day. Esperanto is a perfectly reasonable project, and people may come to it. I think it's utterly premature to say that it's missed the boat."

Deborah Yaffe is a freelance writer based in Princeton Junction, N.J. Her most recent book is Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom.

VIDEO: Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, by Esther Schor
Courtesy Henry Holt

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Professor Esther Schor takes a new look at Esperanto, invented to unite the world THE SWEET-FACED TODDLER GAZES expectantly at the camera. "Kie estas via nazo?" asks an off-screen adult voice. "Nazo," the little boy repeats, planting a pudgy index finger on the side of his nose.

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Unfortunately, in recent years the opportunities to teach Old English and other stages of English language history have declined rapidly in Germany. Several professorships devoted to historical linguistics have been dropped completely or have been modified to focus on more general or contemporary linguistics.

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"Whistled Languages" Reveal How the Brain Processes Information - Scientific American

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"Whistled Languages" Reveal How the Brain Processes Information - Scientific American

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One spring morning Panagiotıs Kefalas was in the tavern he owned in the tiny Greek village of Antia when he received a call from his friend Kyria Koula. Kefalas was planning to have breakfast at her home some 200 meters from his tavern. The call did not begin with the sounding of a mobile ring tone. Instead it reached directly from Koula's mouth to Kefalas's ears, arriving in the form of a series of high-pitched whistles.

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"Whistled Languages" Reveal How the Brain Processes Information

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One spring morning Panagiotıs Kefalas was in the tavern he owned in the tiny Greek village of Antia when he received a call from his friend Kyria Koula. Kefalas was planning to have breakfast at her home some 200 meters from his tavern. The call did not begin with the sounding of a mobile ring tone.

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DeafBlind Americans developed a language that doesn't involve sight or sound — Quartz

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DeafBlind Americans developed a language that doesn't involve sight or sound — Quartz

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When I first met neuroscientist Clifton Langdon and his research assistant Oscar Serna on a hot day in July at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, I quickly became acutely aware that despite the fact that we all understood English, we did not speak the same language.

Upon meeting, each took my hand enthusiastically to greet me. Then Langdon, who is Deaf, began signing fervently in American Sign Language (ASL). Serna, who is DeafBlind-meaning he can't see or hear-then placed his left hand loosely on top of Langdon's right and followed Langdon's hand movements as the latter signed. (The capitalization denotes identity, rather than ability.)

When Serna had something to add, he responded in pro-tactile ASL: he tapped and patted his interpreter (sitting next to him) anywhere from her shoulders to her knees. She translated those taps and pats by signing them in ASL, the most prominent form of sign language in the US with about 2 million users. A second interpreter translated that ASL into spoken English for me.

Being in the presence of any foreign language can be overwhelming. Despite the friendly nature of the conversation, it was anxiety-inducing. Being in the presence of any foreign language can be overwhelming: not only are you unable to understand what's being said, but you can't voice your own opinions or needs. With spoken word, you can get a sense of what's going on based on your knowledge of similar languages and conversational tone-and, of course, you can interject vocally if you really need to (even if you aren't actually speaking the language of those around you). And when communicating with someone who can see you, you can wave or gesture to indicate you don't follow-no matter what verbal language they speak.

But in front people speaking pro-tactile ASL, it's difficult to even figure out how to make your presence known.

Pro-tactile ASL is not widely-used or well-known, in large part because it's so new. "Prior to 2007, DeafBlind people rarely communicated directly with one another," said Terra Edwards, an anthropological linguist at Gallaudet, in a 2011 interview with the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

In America, there are between 45,000 and 50,000 DeafBlind people, according to Gallaudet. Since the 1980s, in order to interact, DeafBlind people relied on methods like Braille, fingerspelling-the way Helen Keller communicated-and physically tracking ASL, the way Serna did with Langdon.

From 2006 to 2011, Edwards spent significant time with the large DeafBlind community in Seattle-her research there was eventually published in a 2014 dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. Edwards found that though the Seattle DeafBlind community had a network of available interpreters, communicating through touch was seen as an extra accommodation for those who had completely lost their sight. For years, people who were DeafBlind with limited vision clung to ASL because they wanted to be perceived by as others as being able to see, to limit any potential discrimination.

In her dissertation Edwards writes that although there were resources for the DeafBlind community in Seattle, most relied on interpreters who needed to be booked in advance. Impromptu meetings were out of the question. Between 2006 and 2008, members of the community were constrained by the financial and logistical constraints of hiring interpreters, and simply began using using pro-tactile ASL on their own. As they did, the language grew organically, and the "pro-tactile" movement took hold. It "called for the cultivation of tactile dispositions regardless of sensory capacity," Edwards said in the 2011 interview.

Pro-tactile ASL borrows bits and pieces from ASL, adapting them to be useful for people who can't see. Pro-tactile ASL borrows bits and pieces from ASL, adapting them to be useful for people who can't see. Rather than having the using their own hands as a reference for communication, people who convey information with pro-tactile ASL use the perceiver's hands and body. The speaker will touch the perceiver's body and mover his or her hands; in doing so, the speaker takes advantage of the perceiver's proprioception, or sense of where his or her limbs are. "When we're talking about a particular shape, instead of showing the shape in space, you'd show [by moving] the perceiver's arm," said Serna.

Take, for example, the sentence "I climbed the tree." A person signing this sentence in ASL would move their own hands and arm. Instead, Serna communicated it to me by by taking my left forearm and using his right pointer and index fingers to "walk" from my elbow to my palm. My forearm represented the tree, and his fingers represented himself making his way up.

In other contexts, the forearm can be used to communicate other ideas-Serna showed me the sign for "lollipop" in which my forearm was the stick and he cupped his hand over my fist to represent the candy at the top. It all depends on the situation. After all, language is contextual-whether spoken, signed, or otherwise communicated. For example, when we process spoken words, says Langdon, "we're looking at word order, clusters of words, and all of those different components are happening at the same time." Somehow, we put together all the words, syntax, and semantics together-and then have to throw in nonverbal cues, too-to make sense of them.

We intuitively use all sorts of non-verbal signals like tone, nodding, or crossing our arms that give two people communicating with each other a sense of the one another's emotion or understanding of a situation. "There's something called 'backchanneling," says Langdon. It's what one person does to indicate how they're taking in the information being given to them, and it's important for both parties in a conversation. If you're speaking, you want to know that your audience is engaged and following along; if you're listening, you want to be able to show that you agree, disagree, or don't understand.

For affirmation, Langdon taps Serna's leg; laughing is gently scratching his leg or tapping his neck. In the hearing world, we get this through verbal validation-the "uh-huhs" and "mmhs" peppered in here and there-or via facial cues like a smile or furrowed eyebrows. In ASL, backchanneling is entirely visual, involving different facial expressions. And in pro-tactile ASL, it happens through touch. For affirmation, Langdon taps Serna's leg; laughing is gently scratching his leg or tapping his neck.

When all of this happens simultaneously, the flurry of motion works together like gears in a machine, a diverse array of small pieces combining into a unified communique. For those who are fluent, pro-tactile ASL can communicate an infinite number of ideas, with feedback connecting the speaker and perceiver-or group of perceivers, as the case may be.

Despite all its intricacies, Serna says protactile ASL isn't any harder to learn than other languages. "It's the same concept as learning any other language," he says. "It's just connecting with the group of people whose language you want to learn."

In this case, the connection is physical. There's something strikingly powerful about the language that comes from its required intimacy.

It's not very often in the hearing and seeing world you'd take the arm or pat the back or thigh of someone you've just met to tell them a story. Usually, touch is reserved for those we're closest too. But when pro-tactile users have to come closer together to speak, they're coming into each other's personal space. Immediately, respect and trust is required.

Pro-tactile ASL has created opportunities for richer communication for the DeafBlind community, and it continues to grow and move towards the mainstream. Langdon works with a group called called Tactile Communications, which studies and advocates for pro-tactile ASL; this summer, the group presented their work at the White House.

"[ASL] felt like old dial-up internet connection," Serna said. "I got limited information and it didn't come very fast. But with pro-tactile ASL, it feels like the world has opened up-I get the same information and the same speed as broadband internet.

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DeafBlind Americans developed a language that doesn't involve sight or sound

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Click here for a full transcript of the video above. When I first met neuroscientist Clifton Langdon and his research assistant Oscar Serna on a hot day in July at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, I quickly became acutely aware that despite the fact that we all understood English, we did not speak the same language....

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Multilingualism: Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? | The Economist

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Multilingualism: Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? | The Economist

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Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? by R.L.G. | BERLIN

LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the brain's ability to plan and prioritise), better defence against dementia in old age and-the obvious-the ability to speak a second language. One purported advantage was not mentioned, though. Many multilinguals report different personalities, or even different worldviews, when they speak their different languages.

It's an exciting notion, the idea that one's very self could be broadened by the mastery of two or more languages. In obvious ways (exposure to new friends, literature and so forth) the self really is broadened. Yet it is different to claim-as many people do-to have a different personality when using a different language. A former Economist colleague, for example, reported being ruder in Hebrew than in English. So what is going on here?

Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called "Whorfianism", this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist, which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought.

This influence is not necessarily linked to the vocabulary or grammar of a second language. Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages-and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. No wonder people feel different when speaking them. And no wonder they feel looser, more spontaneous, perhaps more assertive or funnier or blunter, in the language they were reared in from childhood.

What of "crib" bilinguals, raised in two languages? Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.

Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of "priming"-small unnoticed factors that can affect behaviour in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work.

So there are two very good reasons (asymmetrical ability, and priming) that make people feel different speaking their different languages. We are still left with a third kind of argument, though. An economist recently interviewed here at Prospero, Athanasia Chalari, said for example that:

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

Is there something intrinsic to the Greek language that encourages Greeks to interrupt? Consider Johnson sceptical. People seem to enjoy telling tales about their languages' inherent properties, and how they influence their speakers. A group of French intellectual worthies once proposed, rather self-flatteringly, that French be the sole legal language of the EU, because of its supposedly unmatchable rigour and precision. Some Germans believe that frequently putting the verb at the end of a sentence makes the language especially logical. But language myths are not always self-flattering: many speakers think their languages are unusually illogical or difficult-witness the plethora of books along the lines of "Only in English do you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway; English must be the craziest language in the world!" What such pop-Whorfian stories share is a (natural) tendency to exoticise languages. We also see some unsurprising overlap with national stereotypes and self-stereotypes: French, rigorous; German, logical; English, playful. Of course.

In this case, Ms Chalari, a scholar, at least proposed a specific and plausible line of causation from grammar to personality: in Greek, the verb comes first, and it carries a lot of information, hence easy interrupting. The problem is that many unrelated languages all around the world put the verb at the beginning of sentences. Many languages all around the world are heavily inflected, encoding lots of information in verbs. It would be a striking finding if all of these unrelated languages had speakers more prone to interrupting each other. Welsh, for example, is also both verb-first and about as heavily inflected as Greek, but the Welsh are not known as pushy conversationalists.

Neo-Whorfians continue to offer evidence and analysis that aims to prove that different languages push speakers to think differently. One such effort is forthcoming: "The Bilingual Mind" by Aneta Pavlenko, to be published in April. Ms Pavlenko speaks to François Grosjean here. Meanwhile, John McWhorter takes the opposite stance in "The Language Hoax", forthcoming in February. We'll return to this debate. But strong Whorfian arguments do not need to be valid for people to feel differently in their different languages.

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Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities?

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Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? by R.L.G. | BERLIN LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the brain's ability to plan and prioritise), better defence against dementia in old age and-the obvious-the ability to speak a second language.

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Multilingualism: Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? | The Economist

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Multilingualism: Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? | The Economist

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Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? by R.L.G. | BERLIN

LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the brain's ability to plan and prioritise), better defence against dementia in old age and-the obvious-the ability to speak a second language. One purported advantage was not mentioned, though. Many multilinguals report different personalities, or even different worldviews, when they speak their different languages.

It's an exciting notion, the idea that one's very self could be broadened by the mastery of two or more languages. In obvious ways (exposure to new friends, literature and so forth) the self really is broadened. Yet it is different to claim-as many people do-to have a different personality when using a different language. A former Economist colleague, for example, reported being ruder in Hebrew than in English. So what is going on here?

Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called "Whorfianism", this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist, which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought.

This influence is not necessarily linked to the vocabulary or grammar of a second language. Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages-and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. No wonder people feel different when speaking them. And no wonder they feel looser, more spontaneous, perhaps more assertive or funnier or blunter, in the language they were reared in from childhood.

What of "crib" bilinguals, raised in two languages? Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.

Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of "priming"-small unnoticed factors that can affect behaviour in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work.

So there are two very good reasons (asymmetrical ability, and priming) that make people feel different speaking their different languages. We are still left with a third kind of argument, though. An economist recently interviewed here at Prospero, Athanasia Chalari, said for example that:

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

Is there something intrinsic to the Greek language that encourages Greeks to interrupt? Consider Johnson sceptical. People seem to enjoy telling tales about their languages' inherent properties, and how they influence their speakers. A group of French intellectual worthies once proposed, rather self-flatteringly, that French be the sole legal language of the EU, because of its supposedly unmatchable rigour and precision. Some Germans believe that frequently putting the verb at the end of a sentence makes the language especially logical. But language myths are not always self-flattering: many speakers think their languages are unusually illogical or difficult-witness the plethora of books along the lines of "Only in English do you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway; English must be the craziest language in the world!" What such pop-Whorfian stories share is a (natural) tendency to exoticise languages. We also see some unsurprising overlap with national stereotypes and self-stereotypes: French, rigorous; German, logical; English, playful. Of course.

In this case, Ms Chalari, a scholar, at least proposed a specific and plausible line of causation from grammar to personality: in Greek, the verb comes first, and it carries a lot of information, hence easy interrupting. The problem is that many unrelated languages all around the world put the verb at the beginning of sentences. Many languages all around the world are heavily inflected, encoding lots of information in verbs. It would be a striking finding if all of these unrelated languages had speakers more prone to interrupting each other. Welsh, for example, is also both verb-first and about as heavily inflected as Greek, but the Welsh are not known as pushy conversationalists.

Neo-Whorfians continue to offer evidence and analysis that aims to prove that different languages push speakers to think differently. One such effort is forthcoming: "The Bilingual Mind" by Aneta Pavlenko, to be published in April. Ms Pavlenko speaks to François Grosjean here. Meanwhile, John McWhorter takes the opposite stance in "The Language Hoax", forthcoming in February. We'll return to this debate. But strong Whorfian arguments do not need to be valid for people to feel differently in their different languages.

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Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities?

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Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities? by R.L.G. | BERLIN LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the brain's ability to plan and prioritise), better defence against dementia in old age and-the obvious-the ability to speak a second language.

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Mapping the Non-English Languages of New York - CityLab

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Mapping the Non-English Languages of New York - CityLab

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Jill Hubley

From the French-creole communities in Brooklyn to the Laotian enclave in the Bronx.

If you want to hear someone speaking Persian in New York, try hanging around southeast Manhattan's Peter Cooper Village. If Urdu's more your thing, head to the neighborhoods around Forest Park in Queens, and for Tagalog and Serbo-Croatian visit Washington Heights and Astoria, respectively.

That's the lay of the linguistic land according to Jill Hubley, a Brooklyn web developer who's mapped New York's tree species and toxic spills. Hubley's latest project is a breakdown of the city's languages, ranging from the tongues of African nations to Korean to Yiddish. Although you can include English (light blue) and Spanish (dark blue) in the count, it makes things looks a little boring:

So the default option excludes these common languages, revealing a much more vibrant mix of parlance:

Hubley built the map using data from the 2014 American Community Survey of the U.S. Census, which asks people if they speak languages other than English at home. It collects this information partly to create programs for non-English speakers and ensure they're able to understand laws, voting procedures, and other things.

Even for native New Yorkers, some things might stand out, from the solitary Laotian-speaking community at the top of the Bronx to the Japanese enclave in eastern Staten Island to the appearance of Greek in all five boroughs. (If anyone can explain why Randall's Island is listed as Yiddish and Central Park as Vietnamese, you get a cookie.) There's also the sheer preponderance of French-creole speakers, who dominate in large sections of Queens and Brooklyn-there are nearly 106,000 of these folks in the city, according to WNYC.

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The Ultimate Map of New York's Non-English Languages

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From the French-creole communities in Brooklyn to the Laotian enclave in the Bronx. If you want to hear someone speaking Persian in New York, try hanging around southeast Manhattan's Peter Cooper Village. If Urdu's more your thing, head to the neighborhoods around Forest Park in Queens, and for Tagalog and Serbo-Croatian visit Washington Heights and Astoria, respectively.

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Why English Keeps On, Like, Totally Changing - The New York Times

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Why English Keeps On, Like, Totally Changing - The New York Times

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"But tell us about the lexicography," you cry. Well, I doubt there has ever been a better account of how a person with a capacious brain sits down with a cup of tea and a pile of cards and sets about creating authoritative definitions. Throughout the text, Simpson inserts potted word biographies (apprenticeship, deadline, inkling) that illustrate both the complexity and the "excitement" of the work. It is astonishing that anyone could have done this taxing job, without a break, for over 35 years, especially while being engaged in heaving and shoving the whole intractable project from its original state as a set of heavy (and instantly outdated) books toward being a lively interactive online tool. He is an absolute hero. Where Simpson's lexicographic practice has most notably differed from that of his illustrious predecessors is in the scope of sources used for word citations. In this matter above all he is justly proud. Basically, where Burchfield favored citations from literary authors (who are slow to use new expressions), Simpson got words from motorcycle magazines.

John McWhorter's "Words on the Move" is far more polemical in style; in fact it's a sort of master class in how to prove a point. McWhorter first staggers you with a glittering analogy, and then, once you are off-guard, he bombards you with so many (brilliant) examples that resistance is both useless and out of the question. I have to say, I loved "Words on the Move," but it's possible I am suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I keep saying to people who aren't particularly interested, "Let me list the five ways that new words are - and always have been - created out of old ones. First we must consider modal pragmatic markers."

Afterward, it can be hard to remember precisely where all McWhorter's killer examples fitted into the argument. How did he defend "the ask" (as in, "What's the ask?")? Oh, yes, he explained that words such as "walk" and "scratch" were verbs that became nouns in just the same way. How did he justify "irregardless"? By making us understand that it is human nature to worry whether words are strong enough to do the job at hand, so we unconsciously give them a bit of help. For example, I know someone who always says she will "double-check" something, when all that she means is "check." McWhorter tells us that "whelm" used to mean what "overwhelm" means now. Generally (he says), words change not because we're too ignorant to use them correctly, but because we are so anxious to communicate efficiently, which is encouraging to know. I personally appreciated the book's comprehensive and entertaining section on "backshift," when the emphasis on a word travels from, say, "hot-DOG" to "HOT-dog." In Britain, the history of backshift is a bit more complicated - but it enrages me when people in British historical dramas say "CIG-arette" when at the time they would have said "cigar-ETTE."

I mentioned McWhorter analogies. It's why I had the nerve to do the train thing. He is irrepressible. He invokes clouds, parades, moviemaking, medieval painting; he says, "changes in meaning are as natural to words as changes of pitch are to music"; and a new perspective is "something that needs to be pointed out, like showing someone that deer just over the hill fixing to bolt away." I liked best the idea of the English language as a long-running stage show that needs to be kept fresh. If all else fails, however, McWhorter just draws on his apparently effortless working knowledge of every bloody language on the planet ("I think of Mualang, a language spoken in Borneo") - at which point victory is his.

McWhorter clearly expects resistance from his readers, as he defiantly sets out to defend such terms as "totally" and "like." Why else would he, like, try so hard? Of course, in the end, resistance is what he meets, when he asks us to agree to Shakespeare translated into modern English (ooh, I don't think so) and to accept that "literally" doesn't cause genuine confusion (except that sometimes it does). But you have to be impressed by him, really. That train won't ever shake him off, will it? It is totally going nowhere without him.

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the word detective: searching for the meaning of it all at the oxford english dictionary (book)

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words on the move: why english won't -- and can't -- sit still (like  literally) (book)

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Why English Keeps On, Like, Totally Changing

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"But tell us about the lexicography," you cry. Well, I doubt there has ever been a better account of how a person with a capacious brain sits down with a cup of tea and a pile of cards and sets about creating authoritative definitions.

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Foucault That Noise: The Terror of Highbrow Mispronunciation - The Atlantic

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Foucault That Noise: The Terror of Highbrow Mispronunciation - The Atlantic

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From Anaïs to Zizek, a brief list of "shibboleth names"

Anna-Mari West/Shutterstock

In October 1937, the president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, devised a simple way to identify the Haitian immigrants living along the border of his country. Dominican soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley- perejil in Spanish-and ask people to identify it. Those who spoke Spanish would pronounce the word's central "r" with that language's characteristic trill; the Haitians, on the other hand, would bury the "r" sound in the throaty way of the French. To be on the receiving end of the parsley test would be to seal, either way, one's fate: The Spanish-speaking Dominicans were left to live, and the Haitians were slaughtered. It was a state-sponsored genocide that would be remembered, in one of history's greatest understatements, as the Parsley Massacre.

Today, thankfully, the stakes of the shibboleth-the term gets its name from the Biblical story-tend not to involve such horrific matters of life and death. On the contrary, they tend to involve matters that don't much matter at all. To a large extent, modern-day shibboleths are status signifiers, the kind of loaded terms that reveal their utterers to be on a single side of a stubbornly binary line. They are not mistakes (" noo-cular" instead of "nuclear," "mis- chee-vee-ous" instead of "mischievous") so much as they are keys: They afford a kind of aural entry into arbitrary echelons. You know you've made it, for better or for worse, when you know that it's pronounced pee-kuh-TEE.

I mention all that because the Tumblr 454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011-2157 has an extensive-and revealing (and occasionally, I'll admit, helpful)-list of "shibboleth words": words "by which," the post accurately notes, "the privileged judge their inferiors." The list consists mostly of names, most of which, in turn, belong to a Pikettyesque cadre of intellectual celebrities.

Like, for example:

There are many, many more here. High-five yourself, or hang your head, accordingly. Meanwhile, if you want to impress people and/or not embarrass yourself at an upcoming Oscar party? It's Ralph Fiennes ( raif), Lupita Nyong'o (~nnnnn-oh), and David Oyelowo (~ oh-yell-uh-whoah). You're welcome.

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Foucault That Noise: The Terror of Highbrow Mispronunciation

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From Anaïs to Zizek, a brief list of "shibboleth names" In October 1937, the president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, devised a simple way to identify the Haitian immigrants living along the border of his country. Dominican soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley- perejil in Spanish-and ask people to identify it.

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Metaphors Have Been There In English For Over 1,300-Years

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Metaphors Have Been There In English For Over 1,300-Years

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A fascinating project (made in 2015) entailing the first ever compiled 'Metaphor Map' has given some incredible insights into the evolution of English language and its assortment of metaphors that have seemingly changed over time. Created by a group of experts from the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, this map (based on the wealth of information in the Historical Thesaurus of English) is touted to utilize over four million pieces of data - that translates into a myriad metaphors that were grouped under a whopping 415 categories. Furthermore, the ambit for now has over 14,000 metaphorical connections between different categories of words, and some of them even date back to early 8th century AD.

Interestingly, many of the common modern metaphors had their old counterparts with the similar context. One good example would be the association of sheep to timidity. On the other hand, many old literal phrases have evolved into metaphors over time - like the simple example of 'comprehend', which in Latin means "to physically grasp an object." However, in spite of such detailed analysis, the researchers have still not on been able to determine the oldest metaphor in English, on account of its structure being derived from earlier languages (namely Germanic).

In any case, some of the 'broader strokes' that encompass many a metaphor can be found in the popular dichotomy of Light and Darkness. As Dr Wendy Anderson, the principle investigator on the this project, made it clear -

We use metaphors of Light to talk about Intelligence. For example, people are described as 'bright' or 'brilliant'. We also talk about someone being enlightened and even have the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. On the flip side of this metaphor, Darkness is represented as a lack of intelligence or knowledge - a person can be 'dim' or even 'unilluminated'.

In other words, the resultant Metaphor Map is not only limited to a linguistic scope. These figures of speech and their progression over a long period of history also pertains to how we perceive/perceived the world around, and then denote 'mental structures' to these parcels of information (extending to morality and even philosophy).
To have a full interactive view of the Metaphor Map of English, take a gander here. Source: University of Glasgow / Via: HistoryExtra

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Metaphors Have Been There In English For Over 1,300-Years

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A fascinating project (made in 2015) entailing the first ever compiled 'Metaphor Map' has given some incredible insights into the evolution of English language and its assortment of metaphors that have seemingly changed over time.

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Adlam: “The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing” - The Atlantic

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Adlam: “The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing” - The Atlantic

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As kids, two Guinean brothers invented a new script for their native language. Now they're trying to get it on every smartphone.

Michael Everson / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Twenty-six years ago, two brothers decided their native language needed a new alphabet. The scripts they'd been using to read and write their native Fulani, an African language spoken by at least 40 million people, weren't working well.

Fulani's sounds were rendered imprecisely by the Arabic alphabet, the script most often used to write it; the Latin alphabet presented similar problems. Neither the Arabic nor the Latin alphabets could accurately spell Fulani words that require producing a "b" or a "d" sound while gulping in air, for example, so Fulani speakers had modified both alphabets with new symbols-often in inconsistent ways.

"Why do Fulani people not have their own writing system?" Abdoulaye Barry remembers asking his father one day in elementary school. The variety of writing styles made it difficult for families and friends who lived in different countries to communicate easily. Abdoulaye's father, who learned Arabic in Koranic schools, often helped friends and family in Nzérékoré-Guinea's second-largest city-decipher letters they received, reading aloud the idiosyncratically modified Arabic scripts. As they grew older, Abdoulaye and his brother Ibrahima began to translate letters, too.

"Those letters were very difficult to read even if you were educated in Arabic," Abdoulaye said. "You could hardly make out what was written."

So, in 1990, the brothers started coming up with an alternative. Abdoulaye was 10 years old; Ibrahima was 14.

After school, they'd shut themselves in their rooms to draw, filling blank composition books they brought home from the classroom with the shapes that would make up their new alphabet. They'd take turns drawing letters, and together, assigned sounds to the shapes they came up with.

Six months later, they had a working script. Like Arabic, its 28 letters were written right to left. But unlike Arabic, whose short vowels are written as diacritical marks above and below letters, the script assigned its five vowels proper letters. It looked something like a cursive version of Ethiopic. Ibrahima and Abdoulaye's parents started taking their project seriously, and invited one of their father's relatives, who had an influential post in the local government, for a demonstration.

The visitor tested them: With Abdoulaye in the other room, Ibrahima would take dictation. When Abdoulaye returned, he read aloud what his brother had written. They switched and repeated the test. Over and over, the brothers consistently read out the right sounds, even those unique to Fulani. Crucially, they spelled the same complicated words in the same ways, independently of one another.

The visitor turned to their father. "Oh, yes, these kids are being serious," he said.

It's not every day that a new alphabet is born. The scripts in widest use today-Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari, Cyrillic-are all at least a thousand years old, and they each evolved from earlier alphabets. Creating a new script and getting it adopted widely is an enormous challenge.

The Cherokee alphabet is a notable success story. In the early 19th century, a man named Sequoyah created a script for writing his native Cherokee, which until then had only ever been spoken aloud. At first, many thought his scribbles were meaningless, and that he was playing tricks on people. But in a blind test not unlike the one Abdoulaye and Ibrahima would complete more than a century and a half later, Sequoyah and his daughter, who had also learned the alphabet, proved that the symbols they'd drawn actually represented words by reading what the other had written.

Sequoyah began to teach others to read and write, and his simple alphabet spread quickly among tribe members. In 1828, just seven years after Sequoyah invented the alphabet, the first-ever Cherokee-language printing press was used to publish the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper that was distributed for free to Cherokee speakers who didn't know English. The press helped standardize and simplify the script, and made it possible to quickly publish newspapers and books.

Today, the computer-age equivalent of casting metal type in the shape of a new alphabet is encoding an alphabet in the worldwide typography standard known as Unicode. The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization, develops standards for the way letters and numbers appear on computer screens. Since 1991, a group of technology companies have worked together to develop a universal character set-a system of coding letters, numbers, and symbols that allows computers to render any supported language in the world.

Cherokee was added to the Unicode standard in 1999, but it wasn't until 2003 that Apple created a Cherokee keyboard for Mac computers. The first Cherokee keyboard arrived on Windows several years later. Today, Cherokee keyboards exist on iPhones and Android devices, and Facebook, Gmail, and Google Search all support the language.

The Cherokee Nation has put a particular emphasis on language development: The language program has 13 full-time employees, many of whom worked with Google for two years to implement Android support for the alphabet. Even so, its progress toward digital inclusion has been slow.

"A script is not a biological entity," said Kamal Mansour, a specialist in non-Latin typography at Monotype who represents the company on the Unicode Consortium. "It doesn't live alone. It has to have acceptance from people."

"In Africa, there's been a spate of inventions from very clever people," he continued. "But many don't gain acceptance, and they just die off."

The Barry brothers had a long path ahead of them.

During the decade after that first big test in the brothers' house, their new alphabet-yet unnamed-spread at an astounding rate. Eventually, it would come to be called Adlam, after its first four letters: the equivalents of a, d, l, and m. The word is also an acronym for a phrase that translates to "the alphabet that will save a people from disappearing."

They started by teaching their friends and family, asking each student to teach three others. They transcribed school books-algebra, geometry, history-using their script, copying them into the very same blank composition books that were home to their first sketches.

In junior high school, they started visiting neighborhoods and markets to teach larger groups of people. Their big break came in 1993, when Abdoulaye-still a high schooler-traveled to Conakry, Guinea's capital city, during summer vacation. There, he tracked down a famous radio personality and got himself invited onto his show, where he demonstrated the script live on air, as the host described what he saw. "That's how the whole country learned about Adlam," Abdoulaye says.

By the mid-1990s, the brothers could walk into a market in a new part of Guinea and see people they'd never met reading and writing their alphabet. Many Fula people are nomadic farmers or traders, and the brothers credit their transitory nature with the writing system's quick propagation.

When Abdoulaye and Ibrahima moved to Conakry for college, in the late 1990s, their work on Adlam slowed, but Ibrahima dove back in with enthusiasm toward the end of his five-year civil engineering program. Others began getting involved in the development of Adlam through a student group called "Winden Jangen," Fulani for "reading and writing." The brothers transcribed more and more books, still by hand, with no help but a supply of carbon-copy paper they received as a gift from their relative in the government.

But the new alphabet wasn't sitting too well with others in power. During his last year in college, Ibrahima was arrested and put in prison for three months. He says he was never told exactly why he was imprisoned-officers raided a Winden Jangen meeting one day and hauled him away, he recalls-but he suspects that his work had made some people nervous. "Maybe they feared that he was trying to instigate something bigger because they did not understand the script," Abdoulaye said.

When Ibrahima was released, he was invigorated rather than discouraged. He set about writing with even more gusto, and started a Fulani-language newspaper, writing each issue by hand and distributing photocopies. He traveled to neighboring Senegal, where Fulani is also an official language, to try and spread Adlam-only to find that it had preceded him. Someone told him a palm-oil trader had been distributing his books in Senegal, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Ivory Coast.

The brothers soon realized that Adlam reached a crossroads. "We knew that the only way to spread Adlam faster and publish more books was to have it in computers," Abdoulaye told me.

To bring the script into the digital world, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye looked overseas.

They didn't know it yet, but the help the brothers would need was tucked away in a maze of an academic building at the University of California, Berkeley. That's where Deborah Anderson, a linguistics researcher, manages a program called the Script Encoding Initiative. Since its founding, in 2002, the program has played a role in getting more than 70 scripts added to the Unicode standard, by helping to write detailed proposals for the organization's technical committee and providing funding for the work.

With money from donors like Google, UNESCO, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Anderson's mission is to help encode scripts that might not otherwise end up in front of the Unicode committee.* That includes historic scripts-one of her current projects aims to drastically expand the set of supported Egyptian hieroglyphs, to help Egyptologists who can't currently use search functions or copy/paste in their research-and scripts used by linguistic or religious minorities.

Preserving those living scripts through type can promote ethnic pride and identification, Anderson said, and encourage literacy and education in native languages. "By not including such scripts, the web will be relegated to the more politically prominent scripts and the languages using them," she said in an email.

In Unicode's early years, there was little focus on minority or dead scripts. The original proposal for the system, written in 1988, makes clear that the body would prioritize modern languages over "preserving past antiquities." But the first Unicode standard, published in 1991, indicated that "less common and archaic scripts" could find their way into future versions. Indeed, Unicode 3.0, which was published in 1999, included Norse runes alongside modern non-Latin scripts like Cherokee and Ethiopic.**

Without Berkeley's script lab, many of the alphabets currently in Unicode may never have been encoded. Since a lot of funding for technology comes from hubs in the United States, Europe, and China, languages spoken in those areas are best supported on computers and phones, while others haven't gotten as much attention. Alphabets used to write languages spoken by communities without political clout are especially likely to be glossed over, potentially accelerating their demise as their speakers are forced to depend on technology that operates in English or French or Chinese instead of in their native tongue.

Being added to the Unicode standard is still only the first step in a script's path toward digital relevance. Next, technology companies have to be convinced to support the alphabet on their desktop and mobile operating systems, and social-networking platforms like Twitter have to translate their apps and websites to work with the script. For users to actually be able to type in the alphabet, developers have to create virtual keyboards for smartphones, and keyboard layouts for computers made to work with other scripts. The entire process can take years.

Ibrahima and Abdoulaye moved from West Coast to West Coast: Abdoulaye went first, traveling from Guinea to Portland, Oregon, with his American wife in 2003, and got a night job as a revenue auditor for Hilton Hotels and Resorts while he studied finance. Ibrahima joined him in Portland in 2007.

In between work and school, the brothers saved up enough to pay for the development of the first Adlam keyboard and font. They found a software company in Seattle that makes specialty fonts, and, in 2008, they were able to type in Adlam for the first time. It was a huge step, but it came with disappointment: Since Adlam was not yet supported by Unicode, if they sent a document written in Adlam to someone without the font installed, the recipient would see only a nonsensical jumble of random, disconnected Arabic letters. That's when the importance of being included in Unicode sank in.

For the next few years, development largely stalled. The brothers worked and studied, and continued supporting Adlam schools at home and in the United States. Ibrahima signed up for a calligraphy class in Portland, hoping to streamline the shapes of the letters he and his brother had first sketched on notebook paper decades ago.

At a calligraphy conference in Portland, he met an artist named Randall Hasson, who invited him to present Adlam at another event in Colorado Springs in 2013. (Hasson wrote about his first meeting with Ibrahima on his blog.)

In Colorado, an audience member asked Ibrahima what he wanted for his alphabet. "I said I want only one thing," Ibrahima told me. "I just want the script to be encoded. To be in Unicode. That is my main goal."

A type designer in attendance knew just who could make that happen. He introduced the brothers to Anderson, the linguist at Berkeley, who in turn put them in touch with Michael Everson, one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard and a prolific writer of script proposals. As a part of the Script Encoding Initiative, Everson had already written upward of 60 proposals that had been accepted by Unicode-and he said he was willing to take this one on, too.

I asked Everson if any of the alphabet's quirks presented challenges-the fact that it's written right to left, for example, or the fact that the letters are connected to one another-but he said it was nothing new. What was new was that the script wasn't yet set in stone.

"Mr. Barry had learnt calligraphy and was working really hard on optimizing stroke order and [duration]," Everson said. "I was saying, 'You have to stop tinkering with this.' If he wanted this to be stable he needed to stop altering it."

With partial funding from the Berkeley encoding lab-Everson says he volunteered his time and resources to cover the rest of the cost-he worked with the brothers and the Fulani community in the U.S. to create a proposal. "It's very well developed and well designed," Everson said of the script. "These guys should be really proud of themselves."

Abdoulaye and Ibrahima traveled to the 2014 meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee in Sunnyvale, California, to iron out the last kinks in their proposal. That same month, the committee voted to approve Adlam.

"I can't even describe the feeling," Abdoulaye said. He tried anyway: "When we got the email that we were officially encoded, we were very, very happy."

Open up the settings on any smartphone and scroll through the keyboard options. If you're holding an iPhone, you'll find Macedonian and Telugu and Catalan-but not Adlam. The alphabet was included in Unicode 9.0, which was published this summer, but technology companies haven't leapt at the chance to use it in apps and keyboards.

Like Cherokee during the four-year lull between its induction in Unicode 3.0 and the first official support for its alphabet on Macs, Adlam is in purgatory. Neither Windows, nor Apple, nor Google supports it on their operating systems yet, and although Facebook recently added an option to use the network in Fulani, it used the Latin script rather than Adlam.

Last month, some hope came in the form of an enormous font family called " Noto," the culmination of a five-year collaboration between Google and Monotype that aims to create a typeface that supports more than 800 languages, all in a unified style. It already covers more than 30 alphabets-every single one released in Unicode 6.1, including Cherokee-and in its next phase of development, Google says it will cover 100 percent of Unicode 9.0, which includes Adlam. The Google font is an important step, but it doesn't yet mean Adlam will be supported on an operating system anytime soon.

Instead of waiting for official support for Adlam to arrive, some Fulani speakers have gone ahead and created their own apps. Two Android apps already allow smartphone users to text each other in Adlam (as long as both have the "Adlam SMS" app installed) and learn the Adlam alphabet on their device.

For their part, the brothers-now 36 and 40 years old-have focused recently on expanding the alphabet's role in education. Adlam is now being taught in more than 10 countries in West and Central Africa, and it's making it easier for speakers of different dialects of Fulani, from Senegal to Sudan to Cameroon, to communicate with one another.

Ibrahima recently finished writing the first-ever Adlam grammar book, and he'd like to create a Fulani dictionary in Adlam. Both brothers want to open more schools in Guinea and in nearby countries, with the hope of augmenting the French-speaking education system with one that teaches kids in their native language. The formal education system is exclusionary, they say, because it considers people illiterate if they can't read and write French-the colonial language-rather than asking whether or not they can read or write their own native tongue.

"That's one of the things that's really hindering the progress in Africa and Guinea in particular," Ibrahima says. "We spend so many resources learning new languages, even though we already have languages that we can use to develop our countries."

Facebook is the next big tech target for the brothers. "Today, the world is connected through the different platforms," Abdoulaye said. "Until these platforms support our script, it won't be acceptable, especially to the young generation."

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook all declined to comment on whether they planned to support the script. Given how long it took to get Cherokee onto phones, tablets, and computers-and how many other languages still lack official support-Adlam may not fully inhabit the digital world for quite a while still.

I asked Roy Boney, the manager of the Cherokee Language Program, what advice he'd give the Barry brothers. He said the biggest hurdle his project faced was his own community's impatience. "It takes a while, especially for minority languages," Boney said, adding that "some people thought this wasn't necessary for the language."

Howard Gutowitz, the CEO of Eatoni, a company that makes apps in hundreds of different languages, was less hopeful. Five years ago, Gutowitz was involved in an effort to get N'Ko, an alphabet for writing another of Guinea's national languages, supported by cellphone manufacturers like Nokia. I called him up to see how it turned out.

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"After banging my head against that wall for many years, I decided not to bother anymore," Gutowitz told me. He thought he might have better luck with apps, and released a calculator app in 200 languages to see which would be most popular. The N'Ko version did pretty well, he said, as did a couple other surprising languages, like Tibetan. The app was a sort of market research, to see which communities are hungriest for localized software.

His advice for the Barrys isn't too upbeat. "Well, the first thing that comes to mind is, 'Give up,'" he sighed. "The less despairing remark is, 'Yeah, build an app; that's what we did.'"

If an app does well, he says, it can signal to tech companies that it's worth sinking resources into supporting a particular language. "The appeal to equity or rightness or preservation of languages, I think that's going to fall on deaf ears when it comes to manufacturers that care about market or money."

But take the long view and things might not seem quite so bleak. Mansour, the Monotype designer, has been involved in type development for decades. He says it's easy to forget how far things have come since the '90s, when the internet was dominated almost entirely by the basic Latin alphabet.

"You couldn't even type Baltic languages like Estonian or Lithuanian. You couldn't! You had to buy an Eastern European supplement [software package]," Mansour said. "Now, nobody thinks of that. We collectively forget the stages of development that have happened. Now, you could even type Icelandic on an Arabic system, if you wanted."

For speakers of Fulani, there's still no easy way to type the only alphabet designed for their language. The script's inventors-still its chief advocates-hauled their writing system all the way from hand-drawn shapes on school notebooks to the doorstep of tech companies, neatly packaged into a Unicode block. All that's left is to hammer on the door until it opens.
* This article originally stated that the Script Encoding Initiative is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; in fact, it's the National Endowment for the Humanities that contributes funding. We regret the error. ** This article originally stated that Syriac Aramaic is a dead language; in fact, modern Syriac dialects are spoken by small groups in several countries. We regret the error.

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The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing

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As kids, two Guinean brothers invented a new script for their native language. Now they're trying to get it on every smartphone. Twenty-six years ago, two brothers decided their native language needed a new alphabet. The scripts they'd been using to read and write their native Fulani, an African language spoken by at least 40 million people, weren't working well.

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Cuck: The Weird History of a Disgusting Word You’re Going to be Hearing a Lot More | The Public Medievalist

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Cuck: The Weird History of a Disgusting Word You’re Going to be Hearing a Lot More | The Public Medievalist

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A vile new slur has taken root in American politics. If you read internet comments sections, the political subsections of Reddit, or are politically active on Twitter, you may have encountered it: "". The rise of Trump and the mainstreaming of the American alt-right fringes has injected this bizarre, antiquated word into the political discourse (along with a derivative portmanteau " cuckservative "). It is crucial for us to understand the coded language used by hate groups-and now those in the halls of power-to attack those around them in case you encounter it in the wild: on the street, in your classrooms, by your Breitbart-reading uncle, or on TV.

Rising from relative obscurity, "cuck" and its derivatives have become a favorite way for alt-righters to insult anyone who does not fall in line with their ultra-reactionary ideologies. But before it became a staple on the neo-Nazi edges of 4chan, Reddit and the comments sections of Breitbart, it was a medieval word, conveying a very medieval idea.

The Vile Origins

Cuck, as you might expect, come from the word cuckold, an insulting word for a man whose wife is cheating on him. The Oxford English Dictionary places its first attested use in the mid-thirteenth century Middle English poem " The Owl and the Nightingale". The poem recounts a comic debate between an Owl and a Nightingale, and here the Owl is taking a remarkably forward-thinking stance on gender relations. He is discussing a common occurrence-a man loses interest in his wife, and pursues other women. He then begins to abuse his wife-in the original Middle English:

Al Þat heo deÞ him is unwille,
al Þat heo spekeÞ hit is him ille:
an oft hwan heo no ʒ heo haueÞ the fust in hire teÞ.
Þ[er] is nan mon Þat ne mai ibringe
his wif amis mid swucche Þinge:
me hire mai so ofte misbeode,
Þat heo do wule hire ahene neode.
La, Godd hit wot! heo nah iweld,
Þa[h] heo hine makie kukeweld.

Or, in Modern English:

Everything she does he objects to,
everything that she says irritates him,
and often, when she's not doing anything wrong,
she gets a punch in the mouth.
There's no man who can't lead
his wife astray with this kind of behaviour;
she can be ill-treated so often
that she resolves to satisfy her own needs.
God knows, she can't help it
if she makes him a cuckold.

In other words, if a woman is being abused by her philandering husband, it's no surprise that she would cheat on him too. Seems reasonable. But, when this idea was viewed through the lens of the toxic, patriarchal masculinity of the Middle Ages, it took a dark turn.

Men who were cuckolds may have only had themselves to blame (compounded by the medieval idea that women were more sexual than men). But he was shamed not because of his behavior, but because of hers. This generated intense anxiety in men, since one of the central aspects of being a man meant controlling the women in your life-an idea that had been enshrined into law. And court records show the results: as Derek Neal writes,

"fights, wife-beatings and even homicides could originate in men's anxiety that their wives had made them cuckolds, or in the use of the word cuckold as an insult between men."

This word cuckold and the idea of the shamed, cuckolded man, shows up in some of our most celebrated literature. From Chaucer's Miller's Tale:

This carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf,
Which that he lovede moore than his lyf;
Of eighteteene yeer she was of age.
Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage,
For she was wylde and yong, and he was old
And demed hymself been lik a cokewold.

This carpenter had recently wedded a wife,
Whom he loved more than his life;
She was eighteen years of age.
Jealous he was, and held her narrowly in confinement,
For she was wild and young, and he was old
And believed himself likely to be a cuckold.

to the Morte D'Arthur, to nearly half of Shakespeare's plays and poems, the anxiety about being cheated upon-and thus losing control of your woman-became pervasive. There is a gendered opposite, " cuckquean" first seen in 1546. But this did not catch on to nearly the same degree-women's infidelities aroused anxiety; men's infidelities elicited praise.

By the 20 th century, the word had faded enough into obscurity that the word was often defined in the margins of editions of Shakespeare or Chaucer. Part of this was likely due to changing gender and sexual norms-while few people like being cheated on, the invention of reliable birth control meant that infidelity less often resulted in children. The rise of feminism and the sexual revolution meant that, among progressive households, men and women saw each other increasingly as equal partners rather than property. In the past two decades, with the LGBTQ rights movement has come an acceptance of sexual partnerships that relax or do away with monogamy entirely-the rise of polyamory and what Dan Savage has termed "monogamish" relationships.

But then, the backlash.

Porn

The word cuckold, like so many things do, saw its rebirth in porn. The last decade's renaissance in free streaming video content online has resulted in an incredible diversification of the porn industry. The famous meme "rule 34 of the internet" states: "If it exists, there is porn of it-no exceptions ", and that holds true here; "cuckold porn" found a healthy niche market on the internet. Cuckold porn features, as you might expect, scenarios where a man is humiliated by his wife having sex with another man. And, putting America's racist id fully on display, often the man she is having sex with is black-apparently the ultimate humiliation and outrage for some consumers.

It has been assumed by the news outlets reporting on the lurid history of the word "cuck" that those men who consume cuckold porn are sexually submissive, aroused by putting themselves in the shoes of the man being cuckolded. But in light of the way cuck has been appropriated by the alt-right, it is clear there is another audience still: those who, even literally, get off watching a man be humiliated. This lays bare the power dynamic that was always inherent in the use of the word-in order for a man to be dragged down by it, there has to be another who feels it lifts them up.

And more, implicit in the idea of "cuck" and cuckold porn is that the husband in this scenario, either willingly or because of his inherent weakness, is giving up that which is rightfully his to a person who should be the enemy. There is a homosexual implication here-that the cuckolded man secretly (or not-so-secretly) desires the cuckolder. And because the racial dynamics within much of cuckold porn calls back to the earliest days of the Ku Klux Klan, where central to their mythology was the fear that liberals were giving their white women over to black men. All of this leads to an image of degradation and weakness that is loaded not just with sex, but the worst homophobic and racist politics.

Mainstreaming Cuck as a Crypto-slur

The word cuckold was perfect for the alt-right. Its meaning is tantalizingly filthy, its sound abrasive, and its relative obscurity fits well in a world where language is coded and cryptic (both to establish the in-group from the out and as a method of obfuscation). They took the word, shortened it to cuck (easier to tweet), and deployed it as their insult du jour. Anti-feminists steeped in the toxic masculinities of Reddit's /r/RedPill, 4chan's /pol/, or GamerGate used it to shame the men they despised.

During the 2016 presidential election, the term went mainstream. Those the alt-right found new purpose in their chosen candidate, Donald Trump-to them, he was the opposite of a cuck: masculine, authoritarian, extremist, and uncompromising. He flaunted his numerous sexual infidelities-always the cuckolder, never the cuck. The infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump bragged about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity, only solidified this in their eyes. Rush Limbaugh began using the term.

In July 2015, early in the campaign, the term mutated into "cuckservative". The neologism, as The Washington Post reported:

"...burned up Twitter as fans of Donald Trump's politicking warred with the movement conservatives who opposed it."

Soon, any conservative who opposed Donald Trump, whether opponents like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, or mainstream conservative pundits and commentators, was tarred with the term. And it is easy to see how Trump could be seen in the cuck paradigm-he was not just beating his opponents, but humiliating them, sliming their wives and families. It did not matter that none of it was true. What matters is that he forced them to watch as he violated their families.

It was at this point that the word cuck metastasized and took on new meanings, as it became a catch-all insult for any man they despised. In some circles, it has become synonymous with "race traitor", as the Southern Poverty Law Center describes:

"White supremacists have been more than happy to co-opt the terminology, even tailor its definition to further describe politicians who don't fall in line with the white nationalist cause."

The Anti-Defamation League has found it being used in anti-Semitic circles

"by white supremacists to describe a white Christian conservative who promotes the interests of Jews and non-whites over those of whites."

Unsurprisingly, but tellingly, the term began being used on Steve Bannon's website Breitbart (which I refuse to link to)-not just in the comments sections, but in headlines like "'Cuckservative' is a Gloriously Effective Insult", and "Don't Be a Cuck, Zuck! Accept My Debate Challenge".

It is easy for language such as this to go unnoticed by those who are not its target. If you find it used in your classrooms, your social circles, or by your political opponents, you now know what you are dealing with.

And, I will be frank. This literally medieval toxic masculinity will now occupy the White House-bringing with it the worst corners of the racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic right wing. I will be the first to argue that comparisons to the Middle Ages are overused within political discourses. But in this case, the term, and those who use it, should be confined to the dustbin of history.

&copy Copyright 2016 Paul B. Sturtevant, All rights Reserved. Written For: The Public Medievalist

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Cuck: The Weird History of a Disgusting Word You're Going to be Hearing a Lot More | The Public Medievalist

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A vile new slur has taken root in American politics. If you read internet comments sections, the political subsections of Reddit, or are politically active on Twitter, you may have encountered it: "". The rise of Trump and the mainstreaming of the American alt-right fringes has injected this bizarre, antiquated word into the political discourse (along with a derivative portmanteau " cuckservative ").

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Understanding the St. Louis Accent - CityLab

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Understanding the St. Louis Accent - CityLab

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Library of Congress

The following is an excerpt from How to Speak Midwestern , available now from Belt Publishing .

Given where it lies on the map, St. Louis should be a Midland-speaking city. After Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Indianapolis, it's the next major city on Interstate 70, and it's directly west of Cincinnati. However, because it was a major industrial city, and because it sits on a highway that connects it with Chicago, St. Louis has been seceding from the Midland dialect region, and joining the Inland North.

The most stereotypical St. Louis pronunciation is "farty" for "forty." St. Louisans swap an "ar" for an "or" sound, so they eat "carn on the cob" and wish each other "good marning." This is unique to St. Louis, but the city has other features in common with the Midlands. Older St. Louisans say "worsh" for "wash," "wants off" for "wants to get off," and "I waited on him" instead of "I waited for him."

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Founded by the French in 1764 as a sanctuary after the loss of the French and Indian War, St. Louis is older than any other Midland city but Pittsburgh. At the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, it was a hub of the nineteenth-century river trade. In 1904, the year it hosted the World's Fair and the Olympics, St. Louis was the nation's fourth-largest city, behind New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. It was a center of brewing, milling, and meat packing, and a magnet for Irish and Italian immigrants. That gave St. Louis, and its dialect, a more urban character than most other Midland cities. For example, older St. Louisans still say "youse" and substitute 'd ' for 'th .'

It was a highway, though, that cemented St. Louis's linguistic allegiance. In 1926, Route 66 was completed, linking St. Louis 41 and Chicago. The National Road, a major migration route for Midlanders, hadn't quite made it to St. Louis, stopping at Vandalia, Illinois. Route 66 became an avenue for the southwesterly spread of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, planting it in the mouths of speakers in Bloomington, Springfield, and St. Louis. When Interstate 55 bypassed the Illinois cities, Northern speech receded there. But St. Louis, a destination city, became more firmly allied with Inland North. According to the Atlas of North American English , "St. Louis is losing its traditional dialect, with a merger of are and or, in favor of the Northern Cities Shift of the Chicago area, and the corridor along Route I-55 shows the direction of influence." Lauren A. Friedman calls this a "dialect breach," and observes that the Northern Cities shift did not spread to Central Illinois communities on either side of the highway.

It's important to note here that when we talk about regional accents in the Midwest, we're talking about the speech of the white populace. Blacks did not settle in Midwestern cities in large numbers until World War I, when they were recruited to address the sudden shortage of workers in the munitions industries. Once they arrived, they were isolated geographically by restrictive covenants, socially by taboos against intermarriage, and economically by relegation to the dirtiest, lowest-paying jobs, preventing social or professional interaction with whites. As a result, blacks maintained the speech patterns they brought with them from the South, while developing their own distinctive vernacular. When I asked a rapper named C-Sharp about stereotypically St. Louis pronunciations such as "farty" ("forty") and "worsh" ("wash"), he responded, "That's the white folks. We understand what they're saying, but we don't talk that way ourselves. Like, we'll say 'y'all.'"

Since four of the five most segregated cities in the U.S. are in the Midwest, the region-in particular the heavily industrialized Inland North zone-has a wider divergence between white and black speech than anywhere in the country. However, while African American English was once consistent throughout the country, later generations have adopted some local pronunciations to form distinct "blaccents." For example, the Chicago rapper Common mixes the Southern tendency to drop the r in "liar" and "award" with the strongly fronted Inland North o in his stage name and "Oscar."

St. Louis feels more connected to Chicago than it does to the rest of Missouri, which it regards as a hillbilly backwater. A St. Louisan is far more likely to visit Chicago than Kansas City-or Branson, for Pete's sake. The baseball rivalry between the Cubs and the Cardinals unites the cities, rather than dividing them, as fans travel back and forth along I-55 to cheer in enemy territory.

"St. Louis is the only city outside the Great Lakes that participates in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift," says Randy Vines, who studies the St. Louis language as owner of StL Style, a boutique that sells T-shirts with such local sayings as "Highway Midland Farty" and "Where'd You Go to High School?"

"St. Louis has more in common with the northern and eastern cities than the rest of Missouri," says Vines. "You go 35 miles out, and there's a major difference."

St. Louis's transformation from Midland to Inland North can be heard by listening to two prominent natives born on either side of World War II: Mike Shannon, a Cardinals outfielder and broadcaster born in 1939, and the actor John Goodman, born in 1952. Shannon is a Southern-tinged Midland speaker. The Cardinals' National League rivals are the "Worshington Nationals," while a pitcher throws a "ninety-six mahl an ahr fastball." However, Shannon occasionally raises an 'a'-the first stirring of the Northern Cities Shift. As exurban Chicago working stiff Dan Conner on the sitcom Roseanne , Goodman delivered a completely authentic Inland North accent, calling his wife "Rose-ayen," and his sister-in-law "Jaya-ckie." It wasn't an act. In interviews, he says "hay-end" for "hand" and "shahht" for "shot." Goodman sounds far more like a Chicagoan than does a speaker from Vandalia, Illinois, a town 70 miles to the northeast where the Midland accent is beginning to take on southern characteristics.

From a generational and class perspective, neither man's speech is surprising. Shannon is a prewar baby whose father was a police officer. He never graduated from college and has spent his career in the all-male world of baseball. Goodman also came from a working-class background-his widowed mother worked as a waitress and took in laundry-but he attended college and then went to New York to pursue acting. Thomas E. Murray, the leading expert on St. Louis speech, found that [some] modern St. Louisans have consciously rejected speech that sounds "country" or unsophisticated in favor of urban, northern locutions. The "farty" pronunciation has been relegated to the same linguistic ash heap as "dahntahn" and "yinz" have in Pittsburgh, and for the same reason: it sounds "working class." (I didn't spend a lot of time in St. Louis while researching this book, but the only person I heard say "farty" was a waitress in a diner, who took an order by asking a couple, "What can I get youse?") In his essay "The Language of St. Louis," Murray wrote that "members of the upper class, females, and young informants tend to use Northern and North Midland speech; members of the lower class, males, and elderly informants, however, tend to use Southern and South Midland forms."

In no other Midwestern city have so many dialects intersected, but it's clear which one is winning.

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The following is an excerpt from How to Speak Midwestern , available now from Belt Publishing . Given where it lies on the map, St. Louis should be a Midland-speaking city. After Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Indianapolis, it's the next major city on Interstate 70, and it's directly west of Cincinnati.

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Linguist Marc van Oostendorp on international communication, beautiful and ugly sounds, and paradox of constructed languages

faq | August 22, 2016

For hundreds of years, people have been inventing their own languages, because they were dissatisfied with the thousands of languages humanity already has. Why did they do that? How successful were they? And what can we learn from their pursuit about language in general?

Constructed vs Natural

When is a language 'constructed'? Inherent in that word is the opposition to something else, what is typically called a 'natural' language. The idea behind natural languages is that they have somehow 'grown' naturally, whereas constructed languages are the result of some human actively being involved in creating the language. So what we call a 'constructed' language typically is a language where we can firstly pinpoint some individual or maybe some committee, who have actively designed something about the language.

The word 'constructed language' thus is typically about origin, namely that we know what this origin is. The issue is that you can make plans, design certain rules, but then the language has to be really used, and then there are always so many different kinds of aspects which immediately become the result of the group of people who use it, without necessarily really knowing why they are using it in this way or some other way. Many constructed languages never become anything else than a constructed language - they stay constructed forever, because there is just somebody sitting at home, having this great plan, never convincing anybody else to speak it. And if there is nobody else who speaks it, you cannot even really practice it yourself: so it never really becomes anything but a construction.

On the other hand, if a language steps out of the door and other people start using it - immediately things happen to the system, and it becomes something which is difficult to distinguish from a natural language. You may not be able to see it from the language on its own, if you do not know its history, that it is constructed.

Inversely, there are approximately 6000 languages in the world, out of those, let say, 300 may become codified as official languages somewhere. And as soon as a language becomes an official language, people start constructing parts of it. They are starting to makes rules for something, to say this is correct - that is wrong. They also start making decisions. So although the term 'constructed language' suggests opposition to something else (which is a natural language), in the real world, as always, things are more interesting, and the things are some kind of mixture. It's people - sometimes they make conscious decisions, sometimes they don't.

Typology of Constructed Languages

It is actually easy to explain types of constructed languages in a historical way. It's about why people make a language, why they construct it. Broadly speaking in the history there have been three different reasons in the Western world, because this is very much a European phenomenon. And they always relate to what people think about the language in general: what do we need language for? One might think, "I have an idea about that, I'm unhappy about the way in which existing languages perform this function, so now I would make a language that would do it better".

The first group is mostly placed in the 17th-18th Century; and the first reason was to make languages which would make us to think better. The idea is that the language is the instrument of thought, but there are many problems, and we can think things which can be wrong, we can make mistakes, we can lie, so we can say things which are wrong, and if you have a sentence, you cannot see from the form of a sentence on its own whether it's false or true.

Leibniz was a German philosopher, mathematician, diplomat. He was also very interested in this problem and tried to make a language in which it would be impossible to say a lie or if you would say a lie, people would recognize the lie from the form of the sentence. There's an anecdote where he says that his ideal is if two philosophers would ever disagree about anything, they wouldn't have to quarrel, they would just sit down and say, "Now we calculate". And then they would calculate the meaning of the sentence and from this calculation it would turn out whether the sentence was right or wrong.

This idea never became very successful, let say, just because if you have a language like that, it becomes so difficult to express yourself. A language that is completely logical - you express all logical relations, everything which is true has to be said in this sentence, you have to be so precise, quickly becomes unusable in everyday life.

Actually things have come out of this project nevertheless, things like formal logic, and computer languages arguably also are derived from those, or are building on similar kinds of ideas, so in certain domains we actually use the ideas that those Enlightenment philosophers introduced.

For everyday language it turns out that it is actually important that you can sometimes be a bit vague, maybe it's even important that you can sometimes say a lie, it's an important part of human communication that we don't necessarily say exactly the truth. But in some other domains these ideas still survive. This is what is called 'a priori languages', because you make a language all over again, it's not based on any existing language.

The second idea, this was mostly in the 19th century, was the idea that language is a means of communication. It's a way to express the ideas in one's head and to bring them to another's head. And the problem is that in the 19th century people start discovering that there are people across other sides of the language border. It becomes easier to travel because of trains, it becomes even easier to communicate because of telegraphy, telephone, and radio. But people all speak different languages. Let us solve that by making a language that is easy to learn for all!

The first kind of language, the 'a priori' one, has to make thinking better, and the second one is for solving the problem of the communication better, so that people could communicate across borders internationally. We'll make the language which is easiest to learn, which doesn't have all these problems, such as learning not just case system, but five different kinds of case, and six different kinds of gender, and irregular verbs and all those things which are easy to learn for a child, but not for an adult. To solve that problem we make the language easier. Esperanto is the most famous of those, but in the 19th century there were many of these kinds of projects. All of them share this idea that we need a language for communication, and they were also typically what is called 'a posteriori' languages, which means you took existing languages and simplified them. You take grammar of the language you don't know and then you start erasing everything about what you think, "Why do we need that?". Why do I need to learn five different forms of the verb 'to have'? We erase all of that, and then you get the grammar of all those languages, many of which were in the end very similar to each other.

The third is the more modern project, one of which we see many examples now; that is you make the language for fun, for beauty. Typically people invent a world for a movie or a book, and then inhabitants of that world need to have a language. Why won't you be happy with actors saying random stuff? No, it has to be a real language! Why do people do that? Just because it's fun, that's the art. Tolkien was probably one of the first of those. However, even in the Medieval times people were sometimes making small languages for fun as well, so the boundaries don't make complete sense, but this is what seems to be the right classification.

Beginning of a poem in Elvish Language created by J.R.R. Tolkien // Wikipedia

Art of Creation

What you need to know to create a language depends on what kind of language you want to make. If you want to make this first type of language where everything is completely logical and makes sense and it doesn't really look like any existing language, then what you want to do is to study logic. And you don't probably have to know any other language. If you want to make a language for international communication, what you want to make is a language which is easy to learn for everybody around the world. Then you have to know what languages around the world are like and also what it means to learn a foreign language, what is difficult in learning a foreign language and what's not. You could say you need to be a linguist.

Also in creating those languages for art you might need some kind of linguistic knowledge, because typically what they do is make a language for a certain civilization, for a certain kind of people: you make a language of the elves for a Tolkien world, or you make a language for a warrior people. If we make a language for a warrior people, what do we do? It has to sound warrior-like. What we know from linguistics is that people around the world they find sounds which you make in the front of your mouth more beautiful: 'je', 'pje', 'kje'. Whereas 'gha', 'ra', 'wra' - that's supposed to be more ugly. So if you want to make a language of the elves, you want to have many sounds like 'chje', 'pje', 'kje', and if you want to make a language of warriors, you want to have many 'wra', 'ra', 'gra'. But people might just feel that without knowing it explicitly.

What's more important than having a theoretical knowledge, is having some kind of feeling for language, to feel what works, what doesn't work. Creating a language is more like an art form, than a science. There is a book called The Art Of Language Invention by an American linguist David J. Peterson, who created the languages for the 'Game of Thrones' series. It is actually a very nice book, because it is an introduction to linguistics, but from the point of view of creating a language: suppose I want to create a language, I first have to think of what the sounds of my language are, then I have to think how people make words out of those sounds, how they make sentences of those words, how they use those sentences, how they use the language when being friendly to each other, etc. Peterson makes it almost into a scientific discipline, but I believe the most important thing still (probably also for him) is a kind of skill. I see most of those languages as a kind of art. If you are a painter, do you need to know chemistry? Maybe it helps a little bit, but it's not that necessary.
Volapük and Sounds
Volapük is an interesting example of a constructed language. It was invented just before Esperanto. Most of the words in Volapük are based on English, but, as the creator Johann Martin Schleyer thought, simplified. He had heard that the Chinese don't make a difference between 'l' and 'r', so the word 'world' ('Volapük' means 'world's speech') turns into 'vol' - he threw out the 'r' and left the 'l'. At the same time 'volapük' has this 'ü' vowel, which very few languages in the world have. But he was German, he thought, this sound is so beautiful, so we need to have it.

Motto of Volapük: "One Mankind, One Language" // Wikipedia // Charles E. Sprague, 1888

So, we might say: we want to do this better. We'll have only sounds which can be used in all languages of the world, which all the people around the world know. Then what you get is the vowels 'a', 'i', 'u', which is a good guess, but still there're some languages that are claimed to have only 'a'. So what we are left with is 'a' - the only vowel that all the people can say. For the consonants there's a similar story: there are 't' and 'm', maybe. So now we can say 'ta', 'tata', 'ma', 'mama'... These are the words which are very easy to pronounce for everybody, but what can we do? We can create extremely long words to combine 'ta' and 'ma' in all kinds of combinations. That language becomes impossible to remember or to understand, because all words sound the same. Eventually you have to make a bit of compromise, so we can add a few more vowels, like 'i', 'u', 'e', and 'o' - those are also very common in languages of the world. But again, it's kind of an art form. There's no scientific method for saying, "This is how it has to be done".
Interlingua and Words
There has been one language that has been established by a scientific committee, this was a language called Interlingua. This was in the 1950s. There was an eccentric old lady, who was also very rich, and who thought, "We're going to solve this problem now, once and for all, in a scientific way". She hired some young, but some of them very prominent, linguists, including the French linguist André Martinet, who was one of the greatest French linguists of the 20th century, to make a language scientifically. They were mostly concerned about words. They apparently wanted to make a European language, so they took the seven major European languages and for every word they looked at what this word in all those seven languages was, and then the majority would win. The result of that was the language that looks very much like Latin - it's basically a kind of simplified Latin. So even if somebody knows a few languages, maybe also understands a few concepts of linguistics, the main thing is still the art. It's really an art to make a good language.

Reviving Languages

In 1993 the Italian intellectual Umberto Eco wrote a book, which is called The Search for the Perfect Language. In that book he says that there were two quests in the 19th century: one of looking for the ancient language, from which other languages were derived (the proto-language), and the quest for the better language, which is not in the past but in the future. These two quests started from the same origin. The problem with reviving, say, the proto-Indo-European language would be that it was also a natural language with all those complications, on which you might say, "Why do we need them?" You have a language which is still complicated, which doesn't have any words for anything modern, where 'modern' means anything which was invented in the last 4000 years, so you have to make many new words anyway.

Reviving languages has been done. There is one clear case, this is Hebrew. It was never really dead, though: a 150 years ago Jews would know some Hebrew, but mostly so that they could recite the Bible - you couldn't buy anything in the shop talking Hebrew. But it is now again a living language, so it's apparently possible.

There are also some people trying to revive Latin. It doesn't really work. But then you can say all of these constructed languages never really took on either. Any constructed language like Esperanto contains a paradox. Many people would think that it's a good idea, and they'd be willing to learn it if it was spoken, if there was a large community to join. But there isn't! We only want to learn a language when there's already a completed unit. You don't need to spend too much time learning it, but you need to spend some time, and why would you do that, if there isn't anyone to talk to? But if everybody thinks like that - we're never going to solve this paradox. For Latin it is the same: why would you learn Latin now? But if many people spoke Latin, you would think it's a reasonable, let's learn it too.

'Globish' English

Our international English, Globish as it is sometimes called, is not a constructed language; for who would be the constructor? There is no specific person or a group of persons who have constructed it. But what is interesting about it is that it's becoming neutral. It's not a constructed language, but it has one property that typically all constructed languages also have - it doesn't have native speakers. This neutrality makes it quite suitable for international communication. There're of course native speakers of English, but you might say they are at disadvantage speaking international English, because they are used to all their idioms, and complicated constructions, and sounds, and they don't even know how difficult it is. If this international kind of English becomes even more prestigious, then you could say it can solve the problems those artificial languages were designed to solve - it gives you the language of international communication, which is more fair. It doesn't put certain people at an advantage. It's still not completely fair, it's a European language with clear European roots, it's still more difficult for a Chinese person than for a Dutch, or a Russian. But it definitely is an interesting new kind of language, it seems to be the kind of solution the world is heading to. And it's not bad in all ways.
Edited by Polina Sandler

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Linguist Marc van Oostendorp on international communication, beautiful and ugly sounds, and paradox of constructed languages For hundreds of years, people have been inventing their own languages, because they were dissatisfied with the thousands of languages humanity already has. Why did they do that? How successful were they?

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Why Everyone Should Care About Language Variation | Meghan Armstrong | TEDxHolyokeCC - YouTube

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Why Everyone Should Care About Language Variation | Meghan Armstrong | TEDxHolyokeCC - YouTube

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Why Everyone Should Care About Language Variation | Meghan Armstrong | TEDxHolyokeCC

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Native English speakers are the world's worst communicators - BBC

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amateurlanguager: When such misunderstandings happen, it's usually the native speakers who are to blame. Ironically, they are worse at delivering their message than people who speak English as a second or third language, according to Chong. "A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world's global language.

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How A Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood By Storm | Atlas Obscura

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How A Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood By Storm | Atlas Obscura

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If you've ever seen a movie made before 1950, you're familiar with the accent used by actors like Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman: a sort of high-pitched, indistinctly-accented way of speaking that also pops up in recordings of politicians like FDR and writers like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. It's easy to gloss over today, because movies have captured a few different accents that aren't really present today, like the Borscht Belt Jewish accent of Mel Brooks and the old New York "Toity-Toid Street" accent. Is it British? Is American? Is it just "rich"?

But the accent we're talking about here is among the weirdest ways of speaking in the history of the English language. It is not entirely natural, for one thing: the form of the accent was firmly guided by certain key figures, who created strict rules that were aggressively taught. And it also vanished quickly, within the span of perhaps a decade, which might be related to the fact that it isn't entirely natural.

Today this accent is sometimes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent, which is deeply offensive to those, like me, from the actual Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

What that name means in this case is that the accent can be placed somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between New England and England. Its popularity, though, in pop culture can be tied to one American woman, and a very strange set of books.

In the 1800s, once relationships with England began to normalize following the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, the cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and, especially, New York City quickly became the new country's most powerful. Financial and cultural elites began constructing their own kind of vaguely-British institutions, especially in the form of prestigious private schools. And those schools had elocution classes.

The entire concept of an elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the modern linguists I know; following the rise of super-linguist Bill Labov in the 1960s, the concept that one way of speaking is "better" or "worse" than another is basically anathema. But that wasn't at all the case for the rich kids of Westchester County, Beacon Hill, or the Main Line (those would be the home of the elites of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, respectively).

"There's a long history of dialect features of Southeast England in Eastern New England dialects, tracing back directly to the colonial era," writes James Stanford, a linguist at Dartmouth College, in an email. "European settlers throughout New England on the east side of Vermont's Green Mountains tended to stay in closer touch with Boston, which in turn stayed in touch with Southeast England through commerce and education."

The upper-class New England accent of that time shares some things with modern New England accents. The most obvious of those is non-rhoticity, which refers to dropping the "r" sounds in words like "hear" and "Charles."

But while parts of those accents are natural-some New Yorkers and many Bostonians still drop their "r" sounds today-the elite Northeastern accent was ramped up artificially by elocution teachers at boarding schools. Miss Porter's School in Connecticut (where Jackie Onassis was educated), the Groton School in Massachusetts (FDR), St. Paul's School (John Kerry), and others all decided to teach their well-heeled pupils to speak in a certain way, a vaguely British-y speech pattern meant to sound aristocratic, excessively proper, and, weirdly, not regionally specific. A similar impulse created the British Received Pronunciation, the literal Queen's English, though RP's roots arose a bit more gradually and naturally in Southeastern England.

The book that codified the elite Northeastern accent is one of the most fascinating and demanding books I've ever read, painstakingly written by one Edith Skinner. Skinner was an elocutionist who decided, with what must have been balls the size of Mars, to call this accent "Good Speech." Here's a quote from her 1942 book, Speak With Distinction:

"Good Speech is hard to define but easy to recognize when we hear it. Good Speech is a dialect of North American English that is free from regional characteristics; recognizably North American, yet suitable for classic texts; effortlessly articulated and easily understood in the last rows of a theater."

Skinner is now woefully outdated and many of her ideas are so contrary to the way modern linguists think that her books are no longer taught. (To find a copy of Speak With Distinction, I had to hunt through a performing arts library in New York City's Lincoln Center plaza.) She's what's known now as a linguistic prescriptivist, meaning that she believed that some variations of English are flat-out superior to others, and should be taught and valued as such. I mean, come on, she named this accent, "Good Speech."

Her influence was felt in filmmaking in a very roundabout way. Film began in New York, only moving en masse to Los Angeles in the mid-1910s. Skinner was born in New Brunswick, Canada, but studied linguistics at Columbia and taught drama for many years at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, and Juilliard, in New York City, all highly elite schools. It was in the Northeast that she created Speak With Distinction: an insanely thorough linguistic text, full of specific ways to pronounce thousands of different words, diagrams, lessons on the International Phonetic Alphabet, and exercises for drama students.

Yep, drama: by this point, movies with sound had begun to hit theaters, and then came the disastrous story of Clara Bow. Bow was one of the silent film era's biggest stars, a master of exaggerated expressions. When the talkies came along, audiences heard her voice for the first time and it was a nasal, honking Brooklyn accent. Though the idea that speaking roles killed her career in film is not entirely accurate (there were plenty of other factors, ranging from drug problems to insane pressures of film studios), it's certainly true that her career took a nosedive around the time audiences heard her voice, possibly creating a cautionary tale for newly heard actors.

It's now the 1930s, and Edith Skinner is Hollywood's go-to advisor for all things speech-related. And Edith Skinner has extremely strong opinions, bred in the elite universities of the Northeast, about exactly how people should speak. So she forced her own "Good Speech" accent on stars, and other voice coaches, and soon her accent became the most popular accent in Hollywood.

Speak With Distinction is incredibly dense, but it's also very thorough. You can see very clearly, right there on the beat-up pages, why Katharine Hepburn speaks the way she does. "In Good Speech, ALL vowel sounds are oral sounds, to be made with the soft palate raised. Thus the breath flows out through the mouth only, rather than through the mouth and nose," she writes. (She capitalizes things a lot.) "Each vowel sound is called a PURE SOUND, and the slightest movement or change in any of the organs of speech during the formation of a vowel will mar its purity, resulting in DIPHTHONGIZATION."

She demands that "r" sounds be dropped. She demands that the "agh" sound, as in "chance," should be halfway between the American "agh" and the British "ah." (Interestingly, this is very different than the typical New England accent today, which is highly "fronted," meaning that the vowel sound is made with the tongue very close to the teeth in words like "father." The British, and Mid-Atlantic, vowel is pronounced with the tongue much further back.) She requires that all "t" sounds be precisely enunciated: "butter" cannot sound like "budder," as it mostly does in the US. Words beginning in "wh" must be given a guttural hacking noise, so "what" sounds more like "ccccchhhhwhat." She bans all glottal stops-the cessation of air when you say "uh-oh"-even between words, as in this phrase, direct from her book: "Oh, Eaton! He'd even heave eels for Edith Healy!" Go ahead, try to say that without any glottal stops. It's enormously difficult.

She cracks down on the most obvious of regional cues, railing against what's now called the "pin-pen merger." Today, the pin-pen merger-in which the word "pen" sounds like "pin"-is a very easy indicator that a speaker is from the American South. Yech, the South. That will not do for Edith Skinner.

Because Skinner was so influential, and her "Good Speech" was so prominent in movies, it began to leak out into the drama world at large. Other teachers began teaching it. In fact, even up until just a few decades ago, this accent, now called "Mid-Atlantic," was being taught in drama schools. Jaybird Oberski, who teaches acting at Duke University, got his MFA at Carnegie Mellon in 1997, and he says the class was, amazingly, still being taught then. (He isn't a fan of the accent.) "The Mid-Atlantic accent is considered the neutralization of regionalization, to bleach out character so everybody sounded the same," he says.

Weirdly enough, this accent class was called a "neutralization technique" at Carnegie Mellon: theoretically, the idea is that it removes regional signifiers like the pin-pen merger. But there is no "neutral" or "accentless" accent; you can replace one accent with another, but the idea that there is some perfect, unaccented variety of English is a myth that's long been squashed.

This particular accent, too, is far from neutral. It's immediately recognizable and strange, a take on a clipped upper-class New England accent with even more Britishisms tossed in the mix. In her efforts to create a neutral accent, Skinner created one of the most non-neutral accents in the past few centuries.

The film craze of Mid-Atlantic English was short-lived. By the late 1960s, the New Hollywood movement, complete with innovative, gritty directors like Francis Ford Coppola and John Cassavetes, began to depict the world as it was, rather than the fantasy lives presented by earlier films. That goal necessitated the dropping of the Mid-Atlantic accent; there's no point in showing the grim realities of Vietnam War-era America if everyone is going to talk like they went to Choate Rosemary Hall, so the actors in those films just...didn't. And elocution classes at those schools began to be dropped as well. "The prestige of non-rhoticity and other British-related features began to change in the mid-20th century, and scholars suspect it may be due to the role of WWII and American national identity-a new identity on the world stage, no longer so closely tied to England for national identity," writes Stanford.

The accent vanished quickly, now only surviving as a weird hallmark of that era of filmmaking; the only time you hear it now, really, is if a movie is set in Hollywood, in the film industry, prior to 1960. The real Mid-Atlantic accent, the accent of Philadelphia and Baltimore, luckily, lives on.

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How A Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood By Storm

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If you've ever seen a movie made before 1950, you're familiar with the accent used by actors like Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman: a sort of high-pitched, indistinctly-accented way of speaking that also pops up in recordings of politicians like FDR and writers like Gore Vidal and William F.

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Opinion: Brexit and the importance of languages for Britain #5 | University of Cambridge

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Opinion: Brexit and the importance of languages for Britain #5 | University of Cambridge

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The Elizabethan teacher and translator John Florio wasn't the sort of person who sugar-coated his opinions. In 1578, he complained about the Englishmen he saw in the company of foreigners, 'who can neither speak, nor understand with them, but stands as one mute' - this poor monoglot Englishman is 'mocked of them, and despised of all'. 'What a shame is that?' asks Florio - 'what a reproach to his parents? what a loss to him? and what heart's grief to think thereon?' Florio's England is not ours, but his exasperation might sound familiar.

When I tell people that I study the history of foreign-language learning in England, they often ask whether the English ever learnt other languages at all. Our idea of the English as a monoglot nation, though, is a modern one - Florio lived in an era long before English was an international lingua franca, when anyone who wanted to trade or to travel had to become a language-learner. Even English merchants, he wrote, had no use for English when they were out of the country: 'it liketh them not, and they do not speak it'.

Do we, in post-Referendum Britain, have anything to learn from Florio's England? Well, I've just read a report about sixth-form colleges dropping modern foreign languages - like Florio's monoglot Englishmen, we risk not stepping up to the challenges of a multilingual world. If we think only English is enough, and we allow foreign languages to wither and die in all but the wealthiest and most exclusive schools, we impoverish ourselves - literally, by restricting our ability to speak and do business with the wider world, and more broadly, by closing our ears and our minds to the languages and literatures of other nations.

The arguments for language-learning after Brexit aren't simply economic. A few years after Florio's words were written, two men - the glassmaker Marcantonio Bassano and the weaver Valentine Wood - were walking near Aldgate in London. They passed by a group of soldiers who heard Marcantonio utter some words in Italian, and responded threateningly; they would later claim that they had taken his language for Spanish, and thought that his words were the insults of a Catholic enemy of the English state. A brawl broke out between the parties, and Marcantonio only narrowly escaped with his life.

Reading back over the documents of the investigation that followed, it's hard for me to shake the thought of how people have been assaulted in the street - here, in Britain, in 2016 - for speaking foreign languages. Migrants living in Britain have reported being unwilling to speak their native language when out and about, for fear of drawing the wrong kind of attention.

When, seven years ago, I started to research the history of language-learning in early modern England, I never thought of my work as politically relevant. Today, looking at how the teaching and learning of languages is under threat, how multilingualism can be stigmatised, and how Britain's place in the world is changing radically - and not necessarily for the better - I'm coming to see how the questions addressed by Florio and his contemporaries were central to a debate about what kind of country their England was. They challenge us, too: as Britain embarks into the unknown, do English-speakers want to 'stand as one mute', tongue-tied and embarrased, or to become language-learners again?

To say 'This is England, we speak English' has always been historically ignorant. What better way to show openness to the world, hope for the future, and solidarity with the people of an international Britain, than to learn to speak, listen, and communicate with a wider world?

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john gallagher john gallagher eu referendum

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school of the humanities and social sciences

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school of the humanities and social sciences

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Opinion: Brexit and the importance of languages for Britain #5

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The Elizabethan teacher and translator John Florio wasn't the sort of person who sugar-coated his opinions. In 1578, he complained about the Englishmen he saw in the company of foreigners, 'who can neither speak, nor understand with them, but stands as one mute' - this poor monoglot Englishman is 'mocked of them, and despised of all'.

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Chinese Characters Are Futuristic and the Alphabet Is Old News - The Atlantic

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Chinese Characters Are Futuristic and the Alphabet Is Old News - The Atlantic

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It didn't fly. "One of our early stage investors said, 'You are not going to change the letter arrangement on mobile keyboards,'" recalls Tegic cofounder William Valenti. "We had to accept a less efficient input system because we had to be in the constraints of the existing letter arrangement."

In China, it was easier to convince users to try something new-because there was no established default to fight. Chinese T9 is a stroke-based system, and different keys represented different strokes. With predictive text anticipating the next character, a typist on T9 averaged just 1.4 strokes per character, says Valenti. For reference, common Chinese characters are made up of nine strokes on average. This is a huge leap in efficiency. (Valenti, by the way, was a Chinese translator during the Vietnam war, listening in on four-digit telegraph codes and turning them in Chinese characters, so he's familiar with the awkward, pre-software phase of Chinese input systems, too.)

"In China," says Christina Xu, an independent design researcher and ethnographer, "the proliferation of mobile over the last ten years has meant an explosion of new users learning to type for the first time on a mobile device-they don't have any attachment or experience in QWERTY, so getting them to adopt new input methods is way easier." The input method families include stroke-based ones like T9, pronunciation-based typing on QWERTY keyboard, or writing on a touchscreen-with numerous variations therein.

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Chinese Characters Are Futuristic and the Alphabet Is Old News

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It didn't fly. "One of our early stage investors said, 'You are not going to change the letter arrangement on mobile keyboards,'" recalls Tegic cofounder William Valenti. "We had to accept a less efficient input system because we had to be in the constraints of the existing letter arrangement."

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English will not be an official EU language after Brexit, says senior MEP – POLITICO

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English will not be an official EU language after Brexit, says senior MEP – POLITICO

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English will not be an official EU language after Brexit, says senior MEP

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No other EU country has English as their official language and so it could lose its status.

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Hear What Scholars Think English Will Sound Like In 100 Years | Audible Range

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Hear What Scholars Think English Will Sound Like In 100 Years | Audible Range

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From Hmong to Sinhalese, more than 100 languages are represented in Anchorage schools - Alaska Dispatch News

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From Hmong to Sinhalese, more than 100 languages are represented in Anchorage schools - Alaska Dispatch News

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In an Anchorage School District classroom this month, teacher Bonnie Palach asked her 14 high school students where they were from. One by one they answered: Laos, Mexico, Guatemala, Ethiopia, China, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and so on.

The students were finishing lunch. A few scraped the remnants of applesauce from plastic containers. Others fiddled with their cellphones. A group of teenage boys in the front of the room talked in Spanish. American pop music played softly in the background.

The 14 students in Palach's class at the Newcomers' Center are some of the roughly 6,300 Anchorage students who are receiving support to learn the English language this year (also called "English-language learners"). That's about 13 percent of the total student body - slightly more than the national average.

For years, the district has recorded steady growth in its number of English-language learners. This school year is no different: The number of English learners was up 4 percent from last year and up 20 percent since the 2008-09 school year, according to district data.

This year, the Anchorage School District has tallied 107 languages either spoken by its English-language learners as their first language, or by the students' families. The list ranges from Spanish to Sinhalese, spoken in Sri Lanka, to Chichewa, spoken in parts of Africa.

The district calculates the number of languages in its schools by combining parents' answers on a one-time questionnaire about the first language their child learned and the language their family speaks at home.

While the resulting list of languages seems immense, researchers say it's not unusual for a district like Anchorage to have 90 or so languages spoken by its English-language learners.

What sets Anchorage apart, they say, is the district's top languages. Here, a majority of students learning English don't speak Spanish.

Nearly even split: Spanish, Hmong, Samoan

Conor Williams, a senior researcher at New America, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., said that Spanish speakers typically make up about 75 percent of schools' English-language learner populations.

But in Anchorage, only about one in five students learning English came from a Spanish-speaking background. The number of students who either spoke Spanish or whose family spoke Spanish (1,353 students) was close to the number of Samoan speakers (1,194 students) and Hmong speakers (1,109 students), according to district data.

"There's very few schools where it's far and away Spanish," said Philip Farson, director of the Anchorage School District's English Language Learner (ELL) Program. "Generally, any school that has up to 60 or 80 ELL students has at least 10, if not 15, languages."

Farson sits in a unique position in the Anchorage community. Each year, he can watch the cultural shifts of a specific sliver of the city's population - families with school-age children - by adding up the languages recorded on the district's parent questionnaires.

It's an imperfect count and the questionnaires are only filled out by parents once. The School District does not track what languages each student in the district currently speaks.

"There seems to be an increasing number of Polynesian families in Anchorage," Farson said from his office at School District headquarters, as he looked over language data. "And I think there's still some growth with the Hmong community."

Farson, who has worked at the district since 1997, said he has watched the composition of Anchorage schools' top-10 languages change over time, as people flee war-torn countries or as cultural communities establish a foothold in Anchorage, and their families move north to join them. Sometimes, it's hard to keep up, he said.

"When I was a teacher, we tried to get grants to get books in the languages of the groups that were coming in, but we found that by the time we got the grant, acquired the books, that group had almost moved on," he said. "And now we're dealing with the next wave of languages that weren't in our top 10."

For Palach, a teacher at the Newcomers' Center, the diversity of languages in Anchorage means she can't simply teach English by translation. She doesn't translate words into Spanish, because it's not fair to her entire class, she said. Instead, she makes it a point to speak English slowly and enunciate each syllable.

"I draw a lot of pictures," she said. "I mime. I act out the words."

The Newcomers' Center serves students new to the United States who need to learn English. It opened in 1997 with 11 newly immigrated students who all spoke Spanish, according to an Anchorage School District memorandum from 2000.

New languages quickly emerged as the number of students at the Newcomers' Center grew.

After not reporting any Hmong speakers for three years, the Anchorage School District said it had 95 students who spoke Hmong in the 1998-99 school year. By the next year, that number ballooned to 170, according to the memorandum.

That same sudden emergence appeared to occur within the Somali population, according to district data. Between the 2009-10 school year and the 2010-11 school year, the district went from zero Somali speakers to 42. Now there are 123 Somali speakers within the English-language learner community.

Farson said he observed with Somali speakers the same thing he saw with Hmong speakers: "You get a couple of families that form a nucleus here and then you get all of the family networks."

Over the years, Farson said, he has seen the number of Somali speakers "going up, up and up." He has also watched the number of African languages spoken here diversify. This year, the School District recorded a few speakers of a handful of languages from Africa including Wolof, Mandinka, Chichewa, Hausa and Yoruba.

About once every year, Farson said, he'll read a language listed on a parent questionnaire that he knows nothing about. That happened when he first read Triqui, an indigenous language from Mexico.

"We were puzzling over, 'Where in the world is Triqui from?' " Farson said. "And then we're wondering, 'What is their story behind coming here?' "

This school year, six parents have identified Triqui as the language in which they want to be contacted, according to district data. To communicate with parents, the School District has three main sources for interpreters, Farson said.

"We strongly discourage using your child as an interpreter because of the power issues that come in," he said.

The Anchorage School District employs some English-language learner staff members who are bilingual and who can serve as interpreters as needed for some languages, though that's not their main job. The district also has a contract with the local Language Interpreter Center at the Alaska Institute for Justice, a nonprofit agency that provides low-cost immigration legal assistance to immigrants and refugees. The third option is tapping into a national telephone bank of interpreters.

Katie Bisson, the School District's English-language learner parent liaison, said that among all three options, school staff can usually find an interpreter. Still, the district sometimes struggles with a few, like Triqui.

While the telephone interpreting service has a Triqui speaker, Farson said that person is not available 24 hours a day, which can pose problems.

In July, Farson said, the district had a family registering who spoke Triqui but the district couldn't find an interpreter. The mother, he said, spoke some Spanish, so that's the language they had to use.

"It was less than ideal," Farson said.

While current estimates put the Anchorage School District's English-language learner population at about 6,300 students, Farson said he estimates that roughly 4,000 additional students have some language other than English in their backgrounds, judging by answers on the parent questionnaires.

The language tally for those roughly 10,300 students also totals just more than 100. The main languages remain Spanish, Hmong, Samoan and Filipino.

Madeline Mavrogordato, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, said Anchorage's language count isn't necessarily unique. She typically sees a broad diversity of languages at school districts in or around major cities. Since Anchorage is the most metropolitan area in Alaska, she said, the number of languages spoken doesn't seem particularly unusual.

Comparably, at Portland Public Schools in Oregon, the district reported 96 student home languages this school year. Seattle Public Schools had more than 127 languages. At the Howard County Public School System in Maryland, students spoke 117 languages.

"When you look at school districts that are either in a major city or you look at districts that are in major systems around metro areas, it's pretty typical that you do have quite a diversity of languages," Mavrogordato said. "Cities bring a lot of people for different reasons."

Of Anchorage's 48,000 students this school year, about 200 are refugees, Farson said. (Individuals can maintain refugee status for up to five years, he said, and then they're eligible for citizenship.)

Mara Kimmel, a university professor, former immigration attorney and Anchorage's first lady, said when it comes to the drivers of Anchorage's diversity, she has observed people coming to the city for family and for work. Until recently, Alaska's economy has been more stable than in other places, she said.

"We've always been an incredibly diverse community," she said.

For years, the Anchorage School District has recorded dozens of languages spoken by its English-language learner students. Some 55 different languages were spoken as early as the 1987-88 school year. That number grew to 87 by 1998.

"If you just tilt your axis and the way you look at the world, we are more centrally located," Kimmel said. "People like to think about this as a remote outpost, but we're really not."

Contact Tegan Hanlon at thanlon@alaksadispatch.com.

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From Hmong to Sinhalese, over 100 languages are represented in Anchorage schools

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Anchorage School District has released a dizzying list of the more than 100 languages spoken by its students or their families. The most popular language is Spanish, followed quickly by Hmong and then Samoan, and Filipino.

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Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? - The Atlantic

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Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? - The Atlantic

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Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?

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And why do these two hunter-gatherer groups have so many?

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Why Donald Trump says “the” before “African Americans” and “Latinos” - Vox

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Why Donald Trump says “the” before “African Americans” and “Latinos” - Vox

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When Donald Trump talks about black and Latino people, he does something unusual - he uses the word "the" before the names of these racial and ethnic groups.

Here's what he said Wednesday night during the third and final presidential debate against Hillary Clinton (emphasis added):

We don't take care of our veterans. We take care of illegal immigrants better than we take care of our military. That can't happen. Our policemen and women are disrespected. We need law and order, but we need justice too. Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store. They have no education, they have no jobs. I will do more for African Americans and Latinos than she can ever do in ten lifetimes. All she has done is talk to the African Americans and to the Latinos."

It's fair to say this is intentional. He did the same thing in the second debate, on October 9:

"I'm going to help the African Americans. I'm going to help the Latinos, Hispanics. I am going to help the inner cities. [Clinton has] done a terrible job for the African Americans."

That night, viewers started using the hashtag #TheAfricanAmericans to mock the awkward phrasing and muse about what it might reflect about Trump's relationship to nonwhite people.

It turns out there's an official opinion on this. After the October 9 debate, linguist Lynne Murphy of the University of Sussex weighed in on Trump's use of "the" in a piece for Quartz. In her view, it might function as coded language that signals his separation from the groups of Americans he's talking about:

"The" makes the group seem like it's a large, uniform mass, rather than a diverse group of individuals. This is the key to "othering": treating people from another group as less human than one's own group. The Nazis did it when they talked about die Juden ("the Jews"). Homophobes do it when they talk about "the gays."

...I doubt it's an accident that Trump talks about ethnic groups in the same way that we talk about foreign governments and armies. If that "the" treats ethnic groups as some monolithic cabal, that might ring true with the conspiracy-theory mind-set that characterizes some of his core audience - the audience that Trump has been priming to see and make trouble at polling places "in certain areas."

Read Murphy's entire piece at Quartz and follow her tweets about linguistics at @lynneguist.

"Othering" could fit into a larger pattern: Trump talking about racial minorities for the benefit of a white audience

It's understandable that many have seized upon Trump's unusual speech patterns here, because voters don't have much other material to work with when it comes to his views about race in America. He has stated repeatedly that African Americans live in "the inner city," which he describes as a hellscape of violence, where education is across-the-board terrible or nonexistent. He's expressed his enthusiasm for the revival of s top and f risk, a policing program that illegally discriminated against black and Latino people. But he has not made any detailed policy proposals.

So if he's not actually proposing solutions for racial equality - and in fact supports a program that a federal court has said deprives nonwhite people of their rights - why does he keep insisting that he'll come to the rescue of people of color?

Murphy's theory about dog-whistling lines up with the fact that many of Trump's supporters are white, and many have expressed racial resentment. Vox's German Lopez summarized some of the polling in September:

The findings suggest a great majority of Trump supporters hold unfavorable views of Muslims and support a policy that bans Muslims from entering the US. Most of them support proposals that stifle immigration from Mexico, and they agree with Trump's comments that Mexican immigrants are criminals. And many - but not a majority - say that black people are less intelligent and more violent than their white peers

And the linguist is not the first to make the argument that when Trump talks about nonwhite people, he is actually talking to white people. Vox's Dara Lind wrote in August that the real audience for Trump's "black outreach" has always been wavering Republicans:

Donald Trump - and, particularly, some of his more enthusiastic supporters - isn't exactly a plausible messenger of post-racial harmony. Trump's used the ethnicity of a federal judge as a character flaw. His campaign routinely ejects nonwhite people, including supporters (and local Republican officials), from his rallies. David Duke is running for Senate because Donald Trump has made white supremacy great again. It's enough to make any Republican who believed that racism was over in America feel vaguely queasy.

Crucially, though, these are voters who believe that racism is a matter of intent - not effect. They don't necessarily need to see their party get more diverse to believe that it's doing the right thing. When Trump tells white voters that he is reaching out to black voters, that soothes their biggest concern: He's not trying to divide the country along politico-racial lines

...This is why Trump's "pitch" to black voters, which focuses on how terrible inner cities are ("You're living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed") is appealing to suburban Republicans. They may not all agree on whether African Americans are morally deserving of their high-crime surroundings and poor economic prospects, but they certainly tend to be united in blaming generations of Democratic political leadership for allowing those things to happen

With all that in mind, while only Trump can say for sure why he embraces this verbal tic, you can rest assured that you're not alone if it sounds wrong to your ear - in a way that goes beyond grammar.

Watch: Trump says, 'We have bad hombres here'

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Why Donald Trump says "the" before "African Americans" and "Latinos"

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When Donald Trump talks about black and Latino people, he does something unusual - he uses the word "the" before the names of these racial and ethnic groups. Here's what he said Wednesday night during the third and final presidential debate against Hillary Clinton (emphasis added): We don't take care of our veterans.

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Anglo-Norman is the name usually given to the kind of French brought over to England by the conquerors in 1066, then later exported to Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Initially it shared most of its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation with the medieval French of the mainland. Later, it began to develop characteristics of its own.

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Some English words secretly contain whole French phrases within them.

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Languages used in medieval documents - The University of Nottingham

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Languages used in medieval documents - The University of Nottingham

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Three different languages were in use in England in the later medieval period - Middle English, Anglo-Norman (or French) and Latin. Authors made choices about which one to use, and often used more than one language in the same document. Eventually English emerged as the standard literary medium, but it was not until the eighteenth century that Latin disappeared from legal documents.

Anglo-Norman

Anglo-Norman had emerged as a distinct dialect of French after the Norman Conquest in 1066 established a French-speaking aristocracy in English. It was still dominant in the mid-thirteenth century when Robert of Gretham wrote his advice on moral conduct, the Mirur. For Robert the appropriate language for lay education was French, but by the late fourteenth century his book had been translated into English.

Middle English

The earliest literary document in English in the University of Nottingham's collections is a fragment from the life of St Bridget, from the South English Legendary, composed in the late thirteenth century. The scribe uses the Anglo-Saxon letters 'yogh' for 'y' or 'g' (ȝ) and thorn for 'th' (þ). He leaves a wide gap between the first capital letter of each line and the rest of the word.

See the words 'This' ('Þ is') at the start of line 2, and 'begat' ('byȝat') in the middle of line 3.

The author of the Speculum Vitae ( The Mirror of Life), writing late in the fourteenth century, chose to use English and explained why.

In englysch tonge I schal you telle

Yif ye so longe with me wil dwelle

Ne latyn wil I speke ne waste

Bot englisch that men usen maste

For that is youre kynde langage

That ye have most here of usage

That kan eche man understonde

That is boren in engelonde

For that langage is most schewed

As wel among lered as lewed

Latyn as I trowe can nane

Bot thoo that have it at scole tane

Somme kan frensch and no latyn

That used have court and dwelled therin

And somme kan of latyn a party

That kan frensch ful febelly

And somme understonden englysch

That kan nouther latyn ne frensch

Bot lered and lewed olde and yonge

Alle understonden englysch tonge

I'll tell you in English

If you'll stay with me long enough.

I won't speak or waste Latin,

But I'll speak English, that people use most,

Since that is your native language

That you have most in use here,

Which each person can understand

Who was born in England.

For that language is most in evidence

Both among the educated and the uneducated.

I believe no-one knows Latin

Unless they've taken it at school.

Some know French and not Latin

Who have frequented the court and lived in it.

And some know a bit of Latin

Who know French very poorly.

Some understand English

Who know neither Latin nor French.

But educated and uneducated, old and young,

All understand the English tongue.

His explanation concludes that everybody, both the educated ('lered') and unschooled ('lewed'), old and young, can understand the English tongue. In contrast, Latin was only understood by those who learnt it at school, and French by those who attended court. These languages were used by particular communities and for specific purposes.

French

John Gower, a contemporary and friend of Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth century, wrote in all three languages. His ballades include the French poem Traitié pour les amantz marietz, promoting the virtues of married love. Shown here is a section headed by an introduction (rubricated in red ink) in which Gower apologises for any mistakes in his French. The introduction to the passage is in Latin, and reads 'Gower, qui Anglicus est, sua verba Gallica ... excusat' ('Gower, who is English, makes excuse for his French words'). This followed a familiar convention of bilingual presentation. Gower's great English work was known by its Latin title Confessio Amantis and included Latin running titles and section headings.

Although French remained familiar to Gower's contemporaries at court and in educated or wealthy circles, the great days of Anglo-Norman as a literary medium were over. A form of French, known as 'Law French', continued to be used by English lawyers in written form until the seventeenth century. It became fossilized and degraded, because after the fourteenth century, most of those using the language did not fully understand it. Many legal terms still in existence today derive from French, such as 'attorney', 'bailiff' and 'defendant'.

Title deeds in French are rare after the early fifteenth century. This agreement relating to dower, made in 1417 (Ne D 742), is in fact the very last French deed known to exist in the University of Nottingham's collection.

Latin

Latin was still the preferred language for many purposes. With its fixed grammar and spelling, it was easy to abbreviate without misunderstanding. It remained the medium for international scholarship until the seventeenth century.

The Catholic church used Latin in its services, so all liturgical books were written in this language until the Reformation in the sixteenth century. The theologian John Wycliffe began to translate the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century, but the Lollard movement with which he was associated was persecuted by the authorities, so late medieval Bibles in English are rare.

English was slow to take over as the language of government, law and bureaucracy, despite the fact that by a law passed in 1362 all legal pleadings had to be in English. This bill of complaint (Pa L 2) dates from the late fifteenth century and is indeed in English.

However, most other types of official document continued to be written in Latin, such as the manor court roll (MS 66/1) shown on the previous page of this unit. It was not until the mid-sixteenth century that English began to appear in manorial records, and even then it was often only used to record presentments spoken in that language at the meeting of the manor court. It was a similar situation in the records of the Nottingham Archdeaconry court. In depositions written in 1610, the words spoken by ordinary people are written in English, as they said them, but the rest of the document explaining the case is in Latin.

Rentals and accounts from landed estates are rare in English before the beginning of the sixteenth century. Most title deeds were also written in Latin until the sixteenth century and even later, although many fifteenth-century examples in English exist.

However, since Latin was not a living, spoken language, the scribes sometimes struggled to find suitable words and phrases to use. They often resorted to inserting English words where necessary, for instance a person's occupation in a title deed, or a description of a particular item in an inventory which could not be accurately identified using a Latin word.

Latin continued to be used as the language of some deeds and legal documents until the early eighteenth century. By Act of Parliament, 'Use of English Language in the Law Courts made Obligatory', 4 George II, c.26, 1731, it was enacted that English should be used to record all official information from 25 March 1733.

Conclusion

Researchers studying medieval documents must expect them to be in Latin or French. Even if they are in English, the medieval form of the language uses many words which are now obsolete or mean something different. However, many works of literature and some important parliamentary and governmental records have been translated into modern English and published. There are also plenty of books and websites to help researchers understand the medieval Latin used in title deeds and administrative records.

Next page: Authentication

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Three different languages were in use in England in the later medieval period - Middle English, Anglo-Norman (or French) and Latin. Authors made choices about which one to use, and often used more than one language in the same document.

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Animation Aptly Presents The History Of English In Just 10 Minutes

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Animation Aptly Presents The History Of English In Just 10 Minutes

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After numerous twists and turns (and loaning) for over 1400-years, English is without a doubt the global lingua franca of our modern era. In fact, it is easily the most widely spoken Germanic language, and as such an astronomical 359 million people spoke English as their first language - according to 2010 statistical figures. And these numbers only include the native English speakers, with English estimated to be the most commonly spoken language in the world including non-native (second language) speakers. Given such fascinating credentials, it is not surprising that the history of English is laden with incredible episodes and unique cultural connections. The Open University has concocted a nifty animated video that aptly presents this scope and evolution of English through the years (starting from 5th century AD) with dollops of 'British' humor.

Now since we are talking about history and English, there are some words in English that have particularly interesting history behind them. We have decided to compile a list of eight such words that might just tickle the historian inside you -

1) Algorithm -

The word algorithm has its origins in al-khwārizmī, which was the short name for the noted mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. In fact, the appellation of al-Khwārizmī means - 'from Khwarizm' (a region in western Central Asia, north of Persia). The Latinization of this name came to Algorismi, from which the term ' algorismus ' was finally derived by 13th century, and continued in usage till 19th century. The English variant 'algorithm' came into more popular usage after 19th century, and it still denoted the Arabic decimal system in its earlier usage patterns.

In an interesting note, the word 'algebra' also relates to Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. The 9th century mathematician wrote the compilation known as ' al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa al-muqābala' (in English, it can be translated as - "The Compendium on Calculation by Restoring and Balancing"). The phrase ' al-jabr ' pertained to equations, and hence its ultimate Latinization to 'algebra'.

2) Avatar -

The term originally stems from the Hindu concept of a deliberate descent of a deity or god to Earth. In simpler terms, it is roughly synonymous to 'incarnation' in English; but a more literal translation would pertain to 'manifestation' (thus making the movie's portrayal of altered meta-identities more accurate than you would think). As for the mythological relation, the Hindu God Vishnu (who forms one of the trinity of major gods within the religious system) is said to have ten avatars ( Dashavatara), with Matsya, Lord Rama, Krishna and even Buddha considered among the earthly incarnations.

There is also a bit of foretelling in these mythical traditions, with the final tenth avatar, Kalki ('Destroyer of Filth'), still to be born. This remorseless warrior riding a white horse, will supposedly cleanse the world of its decadence and filth with his blazing sword. In essence, he is depicted as the harbinger of our end times in the current epoch; and the world will once again be 'reset' to the Utopian first age.

3) Desperado -

Till now, we had talked about the etymological root of the words. However, with 'desperado' we will take route of history-fueled hypothesis as to what inspired the term. Before that once should know, the adjective '' comes from Old Spanish, and it pertains to a 'desperate man' (with no known usage as noun). However, the English (or rather mock-Spanish version), 'desperado', relates to a 'reckless criminal', and it has been in usage since at least 1560 AD. And quite incredibly, this pop-culturally famous version of the term might just have its historical origins in ancient Spain (Iberia), circa 3rd century BC. This passage from Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, sheds some light into the conjecture (as mentioned in ' Spanish Armies by Rafael Trevino ') -

There is a custom characteristic of the Iberians, but particularly of the Lusitans, that when they reach adulthood those men who stand out through their courage and daring provide themselves with weapons, and meet in the mountains. There they form large bands, to ride across Iberia gathering riches through robbery, and they do this with the most complete disdain towards all. For them the harshness of the mountains, and the hard life they lead there, are like their own home; and there they look for refuge...

Regrading the passage, one should observe how the account talks about a 'custom' of criminal activities (akin to the popular version of desperado), as opposed to just a 'desperate' man.

4) Father -

Perhaps one of the oldest words in existence, the common English term ' father' is directly derived from Old English ' fæder'. This in turn comes from Proto-Germanic fader, which is ultimately borrowed from the term pəter that meant 'father' in PIE (Proto-Indo-European language). Unsurprisingly, the cognates of this word come from various geographical locations of the world - like, Sanskrit pitar-, Greek pater, Latin pater, Old Persian pita, and even Old Irish athir "father". And, the now question remains - where did this 'original' PIE term come from? Well, most linguists have an easy hypothesis for the answer; the word simply came from 'pa', which was most probably how a baby (irrespective of nationality or race) uttered the sound when addressing his/her father.

5) Gun -

In our modern times, we have many powerful weapons names identified with women, with examples like Big Bertha, Mons Meg and Brown Bess. And, as it turns out, the derivation of the common weapon term ' gun' also comes from a woman's name Gunilda! Often known as Lady Gunilda (which probably comes from Middle English gonnilde), this particular contraption of war was a part of the arsenal of the Windsor Castle from at least 1330 AD. The weapon was basically a very powerful and big crossbow mechanism that was capable of hurling rocks, arrows and other missiles.

As for the term gonnilde, it came from Old Norse Gunnhildr - which was also a woman's name, while alluding to the combination of both war and battle. This ultimately had its origin in *gwhen-, which in PIE language meant 'to strike, kill'.

6) Kamikaze -

The Japanese term 'kamikaze' came into popular usage after World War II, when the desperate Japanese forces adopted the audacious tactic of suicide attacks on American warships. This frenzied tactical scope was officially known as Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (which translates to 'Special Attack Unit'), and by the end of the war, more than 3,860 pilots were killed with the hit rate of a mere 19 percent. However beyond saddening figures and statistics, the term kamikaze literally translates to 'divine wind' ( kami means god or divine, while kaze means wind). Quite fascinatingly, this was the folkloric name given to the chance typhoons that severely afflicted Kublai's Khan's huge Mongol fleets, when they tried to attack the Japanese mainland in both 1274 AD and 1281 AD.

From the perspective of history, the second (and larger) fleet of 1281 AD supposedly contained more than 4,000 vessels; and though this number was depleted during the said event (at Kyushu), the Japanese samurais were still badly outnumbered for the ensuing battle. In spite of this numerical disadvantage, it was 'divine' nature that came through for the Japanese forces when a massive typhoon damaged the Kyushu coastline for two days - that ultimately helped in destroying majority of the Mongol ships. So, in other words, the historical episode served as the symbolic veneer for the Japanese pilots who went on the suicide missions during the 'kamikaze' attacks.

7) Laconic -

The Laconic phrase implies a concise statement that still manages to drive home its point; and as such the scope entails the use of very few words (by a person or speech). This term itself comes from the geographical region of Laconia, which comprised of the city state of Sparta. In fact, the Spartans were known for their terse replies and pithy remarks, alongside their austerely disciplined lifestyles. Many of such concise yet blunt retorts can be seen in the otherwise historically inaccurate movie '300′, with the notable example being when Xerxes offered to spare 7,000 Greek soldiers who were defending the strategic mountain pass. However, the emperor's condition was that Leonidas' men had to willingly lay down their arms. In reply, Leonidas simply uttered ' Molon labe ' which translates to 'come and get them'.

In another interesting example, Philip II of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) sent a message to Sparta that read - "If I invade Laconia you will be destroyed, never to rise again.". The Spartan leader ( ephor) replied - "If".

8) Renegade -

Renegade roughly translates to 'apostate' in English, while the term is derived from Spanish renegado, which originally applied to 'Christians who had turned Muslims'. This was a pretty common occurrence during the times of Islamic Moorish kingdoms which held sway over much of Spain from late antiquity to 12th century AD. The Moors themselves were ruled by an Arab minority, while their thriving (and remarkably tolerant) society was an assortment of local Iberians (Spaniards), Berbers from North Africa, and a sizable minority of Jewish people. The Moors also continued with their traditional recruitment of slave soldiers, from both captured young Christian prisoners and Berber tribesmen. And, as we mentioned in of our previous articles, the so-called 'slaves' ( ghulam or mamluks) of medieval Muslim societies had a far more honorable status and even higher standard of living than that of ordinary folk.

Continuing with this societal trend, the renegados (and their descendants) gradually formed the military elite of Granada, which was the last surviving Moorish kingdom in the Spanish mainland by 15th century. However, the burgeoning and religiously-motivated Christian kingdoms from North were not fond of such renegados - so much so that during the latter part of the Reconquista, the captured Muslim-converts were treated with barbarity that was seldom seen in the history of 'civilized' Spanish middle ages before this epoch. One brutal example during the early part of Inquisition epitomized this cruel side of war when the prisoner renegados were used en-masse as acanaveados, or live targets for practicing the art of throwing cane-spears from horses.
Book References: Rome's Enemies: Spanish Armies (by Rafael Trevino) / Granada 1492: The Twilight of Moorish Spain (by David Nicolle) Video Source: YouTube (I Want You To Speak English)

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Animation Aptly Presents The History Of English In Just 10 Minutes

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After numerous twists and turns (and loaning) for over 1400-years, English is without a doubt the global lingua franca of our modern era. In fact, it is easily the most widely spoken Germanic language, and as such an astronomical 359 million people spoke English as their first language - according to 2010 statistical figures.

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The Linguistic Influence of the Norman Conquest (11th Century) on the English Language - Medievalists.net

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The Linguistic Influence of the Norman Conquest (11th Century) on the English Language - Medievalists.net

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The Linguistic Influence of the Norman Conquest (11th Century) on the English Language
By Azhar A. Alkazwini

International Journal of Linguistics, Vol.8:3 (2016)

Abstract: In this paper I present some historical facts that took place regarding the Norman Conquest in England, then, I discuss the different Linguistic influences on English which appears to lend support to the fact that the French Normans had a major effect on the English Language. Evidence of some changes that took place on English as a result of the Norman invasion is presented, and finally I shall conclude with the fact that some views may not be as convincing as they were once believed to be. The claim that the Normans did not have any influence on the structure of English is falsified by Lars R.'s. (1975) analysis that proves the opposite, and which is discussed later in this paper.

Introduction: Before the arrival of the Germanic tribes, Celtic and Roman influences were already found in Britain. The English language had been spoken by a few in a particular area, and spread to being spoken by a larger numbers of people in different geographic locations, according to Gelderen. Despite the Germanic origins of the English language, French, Scandinavian and Latin influences are considerable and they make up nearly half of the English words. According to Barber, the influence of French in Britain was already obvious in the higher positions of society even before the Norman Conquest happened.

The Norman French became the language of government in England as a result of the Conquest, when Anglo-Normans replaced the native English nobility, according to Algeo and Pyles. As a result of the Conquest, the influence of French on the English language was clear with many French words replacing English vocabulary. It was not only that the word stock was influenced, but in Middle English the areas of idiom and grammar were also affected.
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The Linguistic Influence of the Norman Conquest (11th Century) on the English Language - Medievalists.net

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In this paper I present some historical facts that took place regarding the Norman Conquest in England, then, I discuss the different Linguistic influences on English which appears to lend support to the fact that the French Normans had a major effect on the English Language.

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EEG recordings prove learning foreign languages can sharpen our minds -- ScienceDaily

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EEG recordings prove learning foreign languages can sharpen our minds -- ScienceDaily

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Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets | TED Talk | TED.com

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Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets | TED Talk | TED.com

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Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets

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From simple alphabets to secret symbolic languages, graphic designer Saki Mafundikwa celebrates the many forms of written communication across the continent of Africa. He highlights the history and legacy that are embodied in written words and symbols, and urges African designers to draw on these graphic forms for fresh inspiration.

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Americo Mendoza Mori on Quechua's Place in Today's World

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Americo Mendoza Mori on Quechua's Place in Today's World

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After years of studying Quechua, Américo Mendoza Mori moved to Cusco to fully immerse himself in the language. And while he enrolled in a course and worked with a tutor, he couldn't find anyone willing to speak the language with him outside of the classroom. "By then, I already knew a lot of grammar but spoke very little," he told us. "I couldn't really improve my Quechua skills because many people in Cusco didn't want to speak with me. Due to the stigmatization of the language, people would deny they knew Quechua."

It wasn't until he moved to a more remote area near Ausangate Mountain that he started using Quechua regularly. He volunteered at a public elementary school, where he only spoke in the language.

Fast forward a few years and Mendoza Mori found himself in New York City discussing the contributions of indigenous groups in urban societies at the United Nations. To commemorate the ninth anniversary of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, the UN held a series of events last week. The document - which countries like the United States and Canada first rejected - recognizes indigenous peoples' knowledge and existence. It's a necessary conversation, especially as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe - as well as other indigenous groups - fight for the right to clean water.

The Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People also talks about language, and that's where Mendoza Mori comes in. Américo started the Quechua Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Even though Quechua's the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas, there's a prevailing misconception that it's a thing of the past. At the press conference, he discussed the language's place in our society, as well as the importance of Quechua in scholastic spaces. We spoke with Mendoza Mori about his participation in the UN press conference and how indigenous languages are essential in our current immigration landscape.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Why is the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People so important, especially when it comes to language?
Having indigenous languages at universities is a way to say: we are here, we have a value. This message goes to everyone, including the indigenous languages speakers whom for a long time were told that their languages shouldn't exist. Language is linked to culture and knowledge. By building up language prestige - in this case with Quechua - we are also making a statement: This language has a value; therefore, their people do, too.
Events like this give indigenous languages a very necessary platform. But how do we dispel the myth that indigenous languages are a thing of the past?
This year at the United Nations, we actually spoke about how indigenous peoples contribute to urban societies. Indigenous peoples' relation with mother earth wasn't taken seriously until we found out that climate change and global warming is real. Their commitment to protect our planet happens thanks to their ancestral knowledge of the land. We need to recognize this as indigenous people's knowledge, instead of myths or stories. The western society was wrong about the use the natural resources. Therefore, we need to give [indigenous groups] the credit they deserve.

"Nobody questions the cultural value of English, Spanish or French."

Our current immigration court system is proof that indigenous languages are not a thing of the past. The influx of Central American refugees has brought more Quiché and Mam speakers to the US, but there's a shortage of Mayan-language interpreters. What can the government do to make the process easier for speakers of indigenous languages?
This is very true. In Philadelphia, I know one person who speaks Maya Quiché, and the couple times I was wrongly asked about Quiché, I provided his contact info. We should have a better procedure. This shouldn't happen.

In the meantime, some type of collaboration between Central American countries and the US government could help to bring interpreters. But for the long run, more academic programs should exist: Every year, the US State Department, under the Fulbright program, invites language fellows to spend one year at universities across the US. They offer many languages. However, none of them are indigenous languages of the Americas. How about having a Quiché fellow in the Los Angeles area? This would have a very concrete and positive impact, and also offers visibility to these cultures.
In the 60s, the approach to learning Quechua was strictly scholastic and utilitarian. How has this changed in recent years?
Nobody questions the cultural value of English, Spanish or French. It is clear for us that there's a (contemporary) cultural value of these languages. With Quechua, and other indigenous cultures, people might hesitate.

Some universities in the Andean Region and the United States are trying to change the narrative: They are giving Quechua and other languages a more suitable space. San Marcos University in Lima, the oldest university in South America, created a special professorship for Quechua five years ago. At UPenn, besides the classes, we organize cultural nights, academic conferences, Quechua students gatherings. We are aware that by being at an Ivy League institution, people are looking at what we are doing. At this platform, we are raising questions regarding the importance of incorporating indigenous languages into the Latin American studies curricula, while at the same time trying to respect and honor Andean culture.
What's the best way for someone who wants to learn Quechua to get started in the United States?
For college students: ask your advisor which Native-American languages are offered, sometimes they are hard to find among other courses. When classes are not available, some universities offer the possibility to look for a language partner you can meet in person or via Skype. Most of the times, they are free of charge!

For those who want to taste a bite of Quechua, you can download the free smartphone app, Quechua. This November in Philadelphia we are hosting the second edition of the Quechua Student Alliance Meeting. (Editor's note: It's open to everyone.) This is also a great and fun opportunity to approach to Quechua for the very first time.

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This Quechua Professor Wants to Dispel the Myth That Indigenous Languages Are a Thing of the Past

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After years of studying Quechua, Américo Mendoza Mori moved to Cusco to fully immerse himself in the language. And while he enrolled in a course and worked with a tutor, he couldn't find anyone willing to speak the language with him outside of the classroom.

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Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | TED Talk | TED.com

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Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | TED Talk | TED.com

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Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies

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Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

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WIKITONGUES: Christine speaking Shetlandic - YouTube

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WIKITONGUES: Christine speaking Shetlandic - YouTube

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Listen To The Rendition Of 6000-Year Old Proto-Indo-European Language

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Listen To The Rendition Of 6000-Year Old Proto-Indo-European Language

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Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language is the hypothetical reconstruction of the modern ancestor of Indo-European languages, thus possibly pertaining to the root of around 445 spoken languages including Spanish, English, Hindi and Russian. However given the lack of any written record of this 'mother' language, PIE has been reconstructed by using methods of historical linguistics. Now since we brought up history, while there is no general consensus, PIE was possibly spoken by a group of ancient people residing in the Pontic-Caspian steppe area, north of Black Sea. But again (possibly) due to series of historical episodes (like migrations), many of the speakers became isolated from each other, thus causing divergence in the languages they spoke. The hypothetical date of this divergence pertains to around 3500 BC.

Interestingly enough, while no direct evidence of the PIE exists, historians and experts are sure of some of the vocabulary that was in usage at least 6,000 years ago. As online editor of Archaeology Magazine Eric A. Powell, explained back in 2013 -

By the 19th century, linguists knew that all modern Indo-European languages descended from a single tongue. Called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, it was spoken by a people who lived from roughly 4500 to 2500 B.C., and left no written texts. The question became, what did PIE sound like? In 1868, German linguist August Schleicher used reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary to create a fable in order to hear some approximation of PIE. Called "The Sheep and the Horses," and also known today as Schleicher's Fable, the short parable tells the story of a shorn sheep who encounters a group of unpleasant horses. As linguists have continued to discover more about PIE (and archaeologists have learned more about the Bronze Age cultures that would have spoken it), this sonic experiment continues and the fable is periodically updated to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago. Since there is considerable disagreement among scholars about PIE, no single version can be considered definitive.

To that end, University of Kentucky linguist Andrew Byrd had recited his version of the Schleicher's Fable by using the 'precise' pronunciation derived from the latest studies and insights into the PIE (including the analysis linguist H. Craig Melchert) -

The English translation of this story ( The Sheep and the Horses) reads like this -

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

And in case you are interested in the PIE pronunciation of the short tale originally framed by August Schleicher, you can take a gander at the passage (in English transliteration) -

Avis akvāsas ka

Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram ā bhugat.

Byrd has also recited the recreation of yet another short tale known as The King and God in the following sound clip -

The English translation of The King and the God -

Once there was a king. He was childless. The king wanted a son. He asked his priest: "May a son be born to me!" The priest said to the king: "Pray to the god Werunos." The king approached the god Werunos to pray now to the god. "Hear me, father Werunos!" The god Werunos came down from heaven. "What do you want?" "I want a son." "Let this be so," said the bright god Werunos. The king's lady bore a son.

And here is the short story rendered in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European:

H3rḗḱs dei̯u̯ós-kwe [King and God]

H3rḗḱs h1est; só n̥putlós. H3rḗḱs súhxnum u̯l̥nh1to. Tósi̯o ǵʰéu̯torm̥ prēḱst: "Súhxnus moi̯ ǵn̥h1i̯etōd!" Ǵʰéu̯tōr tom h3rḗǵm̥ u̯eu̯ked: "h1i̯áǵesu̯o dei̯u̯óm U̯érunom". Úpo h3rḗḱs dei̯u̯óm U̯érunom sesole nú dei̯u̯óm h1i̯aǵeto. "ḱludʰí moi, pter U̯erune!" Dei̯u̯ós U̯érunos diu̯és km̥tá gʷah2t. "Kʷíd u̯ēlh1si?" "Súhxnum u̯ēlh1mi." "Tód h1estu", u̯éu̯ked leu̯kós dei̯u̯ós U̯érunos. Nu h3réḱs pótnih2 súhxnum ǵeǵonh1e.

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Listen To The Rendition Of 6000-Year Old Proto-Indo-European Language

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Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language is the hypothetical reconstruction of the modern ancestor of Indo-European languages, thus possibly pertaining to the root of around 445 spoken languages including Spanish, English, Hindi and Russian. However given the lack of any written record of this 'mother' language, PIE has been reconstructed by using methods of historical linguistics.

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Trump, the University of Chicago, and the Collapse of Public Language - The New Yorker

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Trump, the University of Chicago, and the Collapse of Public Language - The New Yorker

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A while back, I went to San Francisco to report a piece about some protests happening in town. The conflict, as narrated in the local papers, puzzled me. Although it supposedly centered on private buses for tech workers, the concerns had a more broadly political air. This was not surprising-San Francisco is the capital of broad politics-but I couldn't see where ideological disputes actually arose. Protesters painted themselves as grass-roots liberals, speaking up for poor, creative, or countercultural outsiders. The techies involved also considered themselves grass-roots liberals, creating apps to fight the Man, effect philanthropic efficacy, and support the same outsiders.

I stayed in the Bay Area awhile, interviewed forty or fifty people, watched protests, attended tech events and community meetings, and flew to New York City to tear out my hair. Writing long articles always involves muscle strain, but the parturition of this piece (which ran in the summer of 2014) was excruciating, because the material seemed to lack any conceptual edges. The ferment had been billed in the press as a "culture war." And yet the two sides of the conflict-in terms of beliefs, ideological lineage, and language-were almost entirely the same.

I worked over my notebooks like a Rubik's cube for days and weeks, trying to understand where the lines of dispute and interest arose. When some clarity came, I found myself looking past these post-hippie preoccupations. Today that article is nearer my heart than most, because of what it forced me to confront: a new relationship among language, identity, and public process, and a way that they were nullifying one another across public life.

In that piece and some previous Bay Area reporting, I pointed out a generational trend toward privatization in both a literal and an abstract sense. We had entered an era of the mainstream bespoke, it seemed to me: a time when technology helped individualize personal experience. It had become normal to scroll through an algorithmically curated feed while listening to our own music in a busy café. Social media made public self-definition instant and easy: I am X; I am Y. Personal meaning thrived. During the spring when I reported in San Francisco, Burger King switched its slogan from "Have it your way" to "Be your way"-a broadening from condiment preference to ontology which, as the chain told it, reflected a turn toward "self-expression" and a belief that "it's our differences that make us individuals instead of robots." No freethinker could disagree.

I began to wonder, though, about the effects of this individualization on public language and, as a result, political life. The trouble in San Francisco, I realized, wasn't that the warring tribes followed different doctrines. It was that they followed the same doctrine, abstractly stated, but had less and less of a way to gather and work from the abstract into the specific. Everyone was operating as a good San Francisco liberal, struggling against the establishment, outside the system, for the people. Ironically, this meant there was less and less system left, no common terms by which the whole community could move ahead. Public language, as I put it in the piece, was coming unmoored from public process. I wondered what the future would bring if the rhetoric of our best ideals kept moving in this direction-if people of a single political identity couldn't agree on the real sense of the words that, they were certain, gave voice to their values.

Fast-forward a couple of years. It's spring again, and I'm in Oberlin, Ohio, trying to report on another conflict I've been reading about but do not understand. A swell of activism has risen at college campuses across the country, and the students involved (liberal, diverse, sophisticated) are at odds with many of their teachers (liberal, diverse, sophisticated). Tempers are high; language is strong. What unnerves spectators is that values on both sides purport to be the same. Professors champion varied viewpoints, non-oppressive learning environments, and protected self-expression. Protesting activists want varied viewpoints, non-oppressive learning environments, and protected self-expression. Members of both groups believe that they're on the progressive flank of academe. The compass rose that helped me understand the Bay Area now fits the national map.

In writing about Oberlin, I tried to show that at least two camps are thinking rigorously and systemically about campus problems. The place where those camps meet, though-where translation happens, where theory gets hammered out into systemic action, where language matters most-is desolate, because the language of common values has lost common meaning. It doesn't help that some students disengage from people who aren't on their wavelengths. But the reason for that disengagement, some tell me, is that public conversation has begun to seem performative, incapable of producing results.

My work elsewhere has made me think that this isn't just an Oberlin, or liberal, thing. Self-defining language has grown easy to pass around but hard to translate into social results. "Diversity," we know, is crucial. Yet the word means disparate things to a housing activist, a tech executive, and an admissions dean, and they end up talking past one another. Most of us agree, admirably, that we are feminists, like Beyoncé, but we struggle to have Beyoncé-sized conversations on the subject, because our ideas of what, specifically, that declaration means are often irreconcilable-and the public road to sorting it out is rocky, full of jagged disputes and tricky questions to be smoothed out. Many of us quietly give up: our self-description becomes our identity, and our community is the people who appear to understand our language, more or less, the way we do. When we communicate across society, it's at the level of rhetorical belief-"taking a stand"-more than in detail. Privacy is something we support. We should fight Big Money. Black lives really do matter, a lot. It can be hard to find one another amid such abstracted ideals, but at least we know that, wherever we are, we're working under the same stars.

Another leap in time. It's summer now-the present. Media people are dizzy from the way that Donald Trump is using language. On August 9th, he famously insists that President Obama is "the founder of ISIS." (Eh?) On August 24th, he dismisses Hillary Clinton as "a bigot" by virtue of having ineffectual policies. The Trump campaign, since its inception, has traded in counterfactual hyperbole, praeteritio ("a lot of people say . . . I won't say"), and dubious innuendo. But using words as if they have no definition marks a shift.

Trump does not demur when it's suggested that abstract nouns such as "bigot" and "founder" have meanings he's transgressed. ("He's their Most Valuable Player," Trump said, of Obama, by way of clarification, three days after his ISIS remarks. "He was the founder.") Oddly, though, the outlandish words seem not to obscure his message. When he makes his ISIS-founder remark, there are immediate cheers. Those people catch the specific, politically valenced meaning of the Trumponym "founder," even if it baffles all the rest of us.

This way of dealing with the language has intensified. When newscasters quote Trump's statements back to his representatives, they reply, "That's not what Mr. Trump is saying"; his words aren't held to convey a fixed message. This obscurity comes to a head when Trump experiences his self-described "softening" on immigration, only to have his surrogates insist that there has been no change. "He hasn't changed his position on immigration," Katrina Pierson, a spokesperson, says on CNN. "He's changed the words that he is saying."

To know what Trump means, despite the words that he is saying, you have to understand-or think you understand-the message before he opens his mouth. That way of interpreting language is unassailable because it allows no persuasion, only self-revelation: the words don't convey information but, like candles and jasmine perfume, serve as aesthetic trappings, prompts that may lead listeners to locate certain passionate moods in themselves. That not everybody across a population finds candles and jasmine perfume romantic-that some people prefer the kinetics of the disco, say-becomes an unsolvable problem. One solution is to defer to the beliefs of people of a single mind. Within a population, this is only practical if no two groups' beliefs are ever at odds.

In a climate where common language is not held accountable to common meaning, "taking a stand" becomes a mostly theatrical exercise. Trump, the candidate, is all about "taking a stand," announcing values and setting trajectories. That little seems to be backed by fixed meaning or process isn't, as some observers claim, a quirk of his campaign. Believing oneself to stand for inexpressible values of American greatness is not actually very different from believing oneself to stand for inexpressible values of American counterculture, or populism, or freedom. Trumpism is successful because it leverages a disconnect among language, meaning, and process that's deep-set in our national life. He can say anything these days-because the rest of us can, too.

It is hard to talk about politics and language without mentioning George Orwell. I will say only that the problem I'm describing is not new as much as cyclical, and that, in grim moods, I'm disheartened that so many of us can be made to read a piece of writing and remain unalert to its lessons. Orwell wrote " Politics and the English Language " at a time of political upheaval and confusion. (It was the end of the Second World War.) His point was that, especially at such moments, imprecision and easy idiom in public language carry political stakes. He discouraged throwing around noble-sounding abstractions that had lost anchoring in what is challengeable, concrete, and broadly comprehensible:

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.

In recent years, in my reporting, I've come to uncool conclusions. For one thing, I've begun to think that instilling public purpose into private communities is the hardest thing in the world. Last week, the University of Chicago's college dean of students riled the Internet when he dispatched a welcome letter to freshmen that declared the university to be a space safe from safe spaces. "Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own," he wrote.

Aside from the irony in the seemingly well-intentioned letter-a freethinking community that bans certain new conceptual practices is probably not actually so freethinking, or, at least, not so intellectually supple-there may be some overconfidence in the university's stated values. The letter implies that the college's notion of "diversity of opinion and background" is comprehensive, self-consistent, and definitive. What became clear to me, at Oberlin and elsewhere, is that such clarity of concept rarely exists. Universities imagine themselves as microcosms, but they're only shards; their notions of diversity, intellectual and otherwise, aren't even wan reflections of the real diversity in the world. That's true of most private communities. The only truly public sphere is the public sphere itself.

As a result, I've increasingly found myself a supporter of messy public process: the legislation pushed through government slowly, in curtailed form; the interminable, fruitless-seeming town-hall meeting; many of the government's lumbering, error-prone efforts at regulation. These processes are cumbersome, often wasteful, and inevitably infuriating. But at their best they have the virtue of occurring in a common arena, the place where all parts of a population meet. They force us, if we hope to get anything done, to translate our values and thoughts into language that communicates broadly. The more I observe, the warier I grow of privatized efficiency: in time, it indulges clannish thought. Let's drive our language out of private circles, back toward the public sphere.

The so-called founders of the United States-another questionable use of the term, actually-thrilled to abstraction. Yet they seem to have realized that general ideas, however noble, couldn't exercise much useful influence on the everyday problems of civic life for a truly pluralistic population. We all agree that we value "equality," but what does that mean on the ground? (And, wait, isn't it often at odds with the practice of "freedom"?) Being Enlightenment people, they thought that many of the practical details and the contradictions in these values could be haggled out, rationally, using language. The system is set up to make that possible, if not inevitable (or painless). The only requirement is that our public language, the words we use to talk across communities, actually carry a message.

Custodianship of that meaning doesn't belong to any political ideology, ethnic background, or life style. Dissolution of meaning in public language isn't the fault of hipsters or college radicals or the "alt-right." As long as we share words, we share a vigilance for making sure that they are backed by gold, that they can convey thought-any precise thought-all the way across a population, and thus carry argument and change. It is sometimes said that the last decade was the age of Big Ideas. Let this one be the era of Small Process, done for real.

Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.
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Trump, the University of Chicago, and the Collapse of Public Language

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A while back, I went to San Francisco to report a piece about some protests happening in town. The conflict, as narrated in the local papers, puzzled me. Although it supposedly centered on private buses for tech workers, the concerns had a more broadly political air.

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On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power - Southern Cultures

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On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power - Southern Cultures

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I took my groceries from a buggy and put them in a cart. I (nearly) stopped calling my hat a toboggan. I forced my vowels into shape. It worked. I got into graduate school. I got a PhD. I learned to pass. But I lost my voice.

Yet while I was proud of my home, I was also learning that powerful stereotypes about Appalachia had arrived in places like Boston well before me and had influenced the way that even the most considerate people thought about me. The banjo lick from Deliverance backed many introductory conversations when I said where I was from. Instead of calling people out for their ignorance, I distanced myself from Haywood County. I laughed along. I waited longer and longer to reveal my background. I blended in. During this time, I applied to graduate school. In my visits to prestigious universities in Boston, I actively tried to "talk right" and hide my accent. One lingering linguistic marker caused me the most panic when I slipped. Long after I attached 'G's to my gerunds and bleached out the local color from my language, I stumbled over the word "on." When my mom told me to put my coat on, those words rhymed. She told me to call her when I was on the road. And those words rhymed. To my Appalachian tongue, "own" and "on" were pronounced exactly the same way. But not for the rest of the world, I learned. This reminder that I was not from around here meant, to me, that I might not belong in a Boston graduate school.

I learned to always use adverbs. I took my groceries from a buggy and put them in a cart. I (nearly) stopped calling my hat a toboggan. I forced my vowels into shape. It worked. I got into graduate school. I got a PhD. I learned to pass. But I lost my voice. With Granny's chiding in my ear-"You're talking uppity now that you live in Baaaaahston"-I developed a new way of speaking. And it wasn't until a decade later that I heard my own repressed voice echoed back to me in West Virginia.

Writer and activist Silas House spoke at a conference addressing the theme of "New Appalachia," urging his audience to bring LGBTQcivil rights issues into our classrooms, our scholarship, and our conversations in order to make Appalachia a safer place. New Appalachia, for House, was tied to Old Appalachian activism. As soon as he began speaking, I began to understand the new in light of the old. Combined with a quiet thoughtfulness, his manner of speaking awakened in me memories that I had long put to rest. In one moment, his voice cracked as he was overcome with emotion remembering the violence enacted upon queer youth in Appalachia. Throats tightened across the room. He paused and then said quietly, "And it will go on and on and on . . . " until we-teachers and writers and students in this room-commit to change. To an outsider, it might have sounded like he was saying "own and own and own," but when I heard Silas House repeat this word in this context, I felt the ground shift beneath me. Because while he talked about justice, I heard the timbre of my Pa. As he read his own poetry, I heard the cadence of my Aunt Betsy. As he addressed his audience, I heard my mom talking. I heard established scholars speak in accents and it did not change the content of what they were saying. It did not change the power of their intellect. Then I stood up to deliver my paper about the politics of representation in Appalachian film. My 'G's were intact. My vowels stood up straight. My "on" was not my "own." And I felt a powerful loss-of my own voice, my own accent.

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On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power - Southern Cultures

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I took my groceries from a buggy and put them in a cart. I (nearly) stopped calling my hat a toboggan. I forced my vowels into shape. It worked. I got into graduate school. I got a PhD. I learned to pass. But I lost my voice.

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Twitter and the Oxford English Dictionary – History Unleashed – Medium

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Twitter and the Oxford English Dictionary – History Unleashed – Medium

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Although Twitter (maximum 140 characters) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (over 3 50 million characters) may seem like strange bedfellows, the former has recently become an integral part of the latter: for the first time, the OED has included individual Twitter posts as part of its quotation evidence.

Twitter as historical evidence

In recent OED updates the Twitter-associated senses of tweet (as a verb and a noun) and the word have been added. (The separate Oxford Dictionaries site has more, including and .)

As with all OED entries, the definitions of these new words and senses were based on actual usage: the OED is commonly described as descriptive as opposed to prescriptive because its entries are based on the available evidence of how words are used, rather than on an editor's sense of how something should be used.

Moreover, the OED is historical in nature. Unlike many dictionaries, which record only current meanings, the OED traces back the history of a word in English as far back into the past as possible - sometimes for over one thousand years, but for tweet and hashtag less than ten. (The main difference between the OED and Oxford Dictionaries is that the former is historical and the latter current.)

In adding these new words and senses, then, OED editors then have tried to find the earliest evidence they can - which, unsurprisingly in this case, came from Twitter itself. So, as of the moment, the current earliest evidence for hashtag comes from this post:

I support the hash tag convention: http://tinyurl.com/2qttlb #hashtag #factoryjoe #twitter

- Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) August 25, 2007

For the verb of tweet, these tweets are the current earliest evidence for its transitive (with object) and intransitive (no object) senses:

is happy that he'll be able to tweet more often with Twitterrific. ☺

- Louie (@mantia) January 15, 2007

And, for the noun:

Digital decay

You'll notice that for two of the four tweets above I was able to link to the original tweets directly; for the other two I have had to use screenshots from the OED' s quotation paragraphs because, as far as I can tell, the Twitter posts have apparently been deleted since the entries were edited.

This exemplifies a significant problem with using web-based sources as evidence: there is no guarantee that what is online one day will still be online the next (hence the concept of link rot).

This is why the quotations above are marked 'OED Archive': antiquated as it may seem, we still store printouts of all such quotations to make sure that the evidence on which the OED is built is not lost over time. (Projects such as the Library of Congress's Twitter collection may at some point obviate this issue for Twitter.)

Despite this problem, in some ways Twitter posts are a good potential source of evidence for the OED. Unlike other sources on the web, Tweets cannot be edited after they are posted, and they are also permanently timestamped: as a historical dictionary, it is important that we can reliably know that a particular usage occurred at a specific time.

With other websites, blogs, etc., dating can be more of a problem. Publication dates are often unavailable or unverifiable, and edits can conceivably be made silently at any time, which does not make for reliable evidence. (Archival sites like the Wayback Machine are useful, but not a complete solution.)

Young media

What is also notable about the quotations above is that they are very self-referential: they are evidence for terms relating to Twitter, taken from Twitter itself. However, in OED terms Twitter is still a very young medium, having launched only in 2006, so it seems likely that as time goes on more early uses of words will be found on the site, independent of the site itself.

Twitter is by no means the only digital source of OED quotations. Usenet newsgroups provide the earliest evidence for such well-known terms as email address, computer geek, and bum cleavage, and quotations from blogs and other web pages are the first for entries such as blog and selfie.

There is even an instance of an email forming the earliest evidence for something: the first quotation at lashed (meaning 'drunk') is from a 1996 email sent by one OED editor to another, pointing out this new sense they've heard is popular with students.

The informal or spontaneous language used by people on Twitter, and online generally, is something very different from the more formal, mediated version of English typically used in books and newspapers: as such, it is a welcome addition to the .

For more language articles by the Oxford Dictionaries team, please visit the OxfordWords blog.

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Twitter and the Oxford English Dictionary - History Unleashed - Medium

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Although Twitter (maximum 140 characters) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (over 3 50 million characters) may seem like strange bedfellows, the former has recently become an integral part of the latter: for the first time, the OED has included individual Twitter posts as part of its quotation evidence.

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Anne Curzan: What makes a word "real"? | TED Talk | TED.com

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Anne Curzan: What makes a word "real"? | TED Talk | TED.com

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One could argue that slang words like 'hangry,' 'defriend' and 'adorkable' fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they don't appear in the dictionary. After all, who actually decides which words make it into those pages? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries, and the choices they make.

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How technology and education can help preserve aboriginal languages | TVO.org

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How technology and education can help preserve aboriginal languages | TVO.org

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What if you woke up one day and your language was gone?

Sure, you could speak another language, one that all your friends and co-workers could also speak. But your mother tongue, all the words that connected you to your culture, was gone, written down nowhere, vanished.

For many people who speak indigenous languages across the globe, this is not simply a "what if" question. According to National Geographic, one language goes extinct every 14 days, and nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages currently spoken will disappear in the coming decades. This is a particularly challenging problem in the case of languages which have only an oral tradition, no books or even an alphabet.

The issue of language extinction in Canada is one that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission examined as part of its mandate. The report released in late 2015 includes a number of call-to-action recommendations related to preserving indigenous languages including that the federal government provide sufficient funds for aboriginal language revitalization and preservation, and that the work should reflect the full range of aboriginal languages and be managed by aboriginal people and communities.

Fortunately, the process of preserving several Canadian aboriginal languages is already underway. One such venture is taking place in the Ojibwe communities of the Rainy River district in northwestern Ontario. It's a collaboration between the Seven Generations Education Institute, a 30-year-old educational entity governed by the 10 First Nations in the Fort Frances and Kenora area, and Say It First, a company that uses "technology and community participation to modernize, expand, revitalize and localize aboriginal languages in Canada, and to help our First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities produce more language speakers tomorrow, than exist today."

Anishinaabemowin, the language of the Ojibwe, is a language without a written tradition. So, one of the challenges that Brent Tookenay, CEO of Seven Generations Education Institute, and Mike Parkhill, founder of Say It First, faced was to develop a functional and acceptable way of writing words in Anishinaabemowin. They decided to take a phonetic approach and, after some initial resistance, they received tremendous support from the Ojibwe community.

Among the projects on which Parkhill and Tookenay have collaborated is a series of children's books where the cover image can be captured by an iPhone to trigger a link to a spoken version of the story.

It's this link between new technology and ancestral knowledge that Tookenay believes is key to the success of this program. As he tells Nam Kiwanuka on The Agenda in the Summer, "First Nations students are no different from other students." Using technology to create a bridge to the Ojibwe language meets students where they want to learn.

Kootenay says, "Part of the success of this is that the First Nations communities and elders are helping drive this, so they have ownership of it. I think one of the things that's missed in the education system over the years is a lot of our First Nations communities and indigenous people weren't part of the solution. They weren't part of what goes on in designing curriculum."

The books are being produced in four indigenous languages; Maliseet, Mi'kmaw, Ojibwe and Cree.

Kiwanuka asks: What gets lost when language dies? "Basically, the culture is gone. Basically they're no longer the people they are," Tookenay says. "Their ancestors really don't exist anymore. If the language is lost then you're just assimilated into the English language and there is no more culture. And that's a scary thought."

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How technology and education can help preserve aboriginal languages

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What if you woke up one day and your language was gone? Sure, you could speak another language, one that all your friends and co-workers could also speak. But your mother tongue, all the words that connected you to your culture, was gone, written down nowhere, vanished.

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Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents? | Atlas Obscura

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Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents? | Atlas Obscura

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If you want to anger a linguist, try bringing up a speech pattern called General American. "General American is a concept for which I've struggled to find a satisfying definition," writes Ben Trawick-Smith of Dialect Blog. Dennis Preston, a dialectologist and sociolinguist at Oklahoma State University, goes even further. "General American doesn't exist," Preston says, "He was demoted to private or sergeant a long, long time ago."

But the concept persists: we believe that, for example, newscasters, maybe some actors, and certainly some people, somewhere, speak an unaccented variety of American English. For instance, when Stephen Colbert explained his vocal patterns to 60 Minutes, he said:

"At a very young age, I decided I was not gonna have a Southern accent. Because people, when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand that someone was stupid, you gave the character a Southern accent. And that's not true. Southern people are not stupid. But I didn't wanna seem stupid. I wanted to seem smart. And so I thought, 'Well, you can't tell where newsmen are from.'"

The name of this accentless accent varies; sometimes it's called Standard American, or Broadcast English, or Network English, or, as it was created by two independent linguists in the 1920s and 1930s, General American. It is a neutral accent, one without distinguishing features.

But where does General American come from? Is there a place where people, young and old, speak like newscasters?

George Philip Krapp was the first major scholar to use the term "General American." In his 1925 book, The English Language in America, he roughly described the concept as the variant of English spoken by the majority of the country. Essentially, he said that New England has a regional dialect, the South has a regional dialect, and then everybody else, and sometimes people in New England and the South, spoke General American.

John Kenyon quickly followed up on this theory, writing in 1930 that 90 million Americans spoke General American in another book, American Pronunciation. Kenyon actually laid out some linguistic and geographical guidelines for General American. The concept caught on outside the linguistic community. Accent coaches and acting coaches still to this day train in General American, which is sometimes phrased as "losing an accent," as Colbert says he did, rather than adopting General American. "Some irresponsible speech pathologists actually engage in this, for money," Preston said (practically yelled). "Us linguists, of course, hold them in nothing but contempt."

Kenyon grew up in Northeastern Ohio and stayed in the region to teach; his specific linguistic maps of sounds for General American was heavily influenced by the way he spoke, which is to say, how upper-middle-class non-recent-immigrant white people from Northeastern Ohio spoke. I'm using the past tense here for a reason, which is that by the early 1960s, linguists began noticing something very different in that region. The entire vowel system of the parts of the country along the Great Lakes, stretching from New York cities like Rochester and Buffalo straight through to Chicago and Detroit, began to dramatically change.

This change was dubbed by Bill Labov, the godfather of American linguistics, as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. The classic Midwestern accent is exclusively a result of that shift. Some examples: the vowel sound in the word "bag," before the Shift, was pronounced with the tongue fairly low in the mouth. After the Shift, that vowel sound was, as linguists say, raised: the tongue begins much higher in the mouth. And that's not all the tongue is doing for Midwesterners: it's also forming what's called a "centering diphthong."

A diphthong is a compound vowel, made up of two simpler vowels, which are called monophthongs. The vowel in the word "coin" is a diphthong: it starts as "oh" and moves to "ee." For Midwesterners before the Shift, and basically everyone else (besides Canadians) both before and after, the vowel in the word "bag" is a monophthong. But Midwesterners, in addition to raising that initial sound, also move their tongues toward the center of their mouths. So "bag" becomes something closer to "byeg."

"Byeg" is not part of General American by any definition, not Kenyon's (because it happened after his time) and not in any modern accent coach's (because it's so instantly identifiable with the Great Lakes area). So right away, if we wanted to simply peg General American to the place where the guy who basically created it was born and raised, we're already out of luck: people in Northeastern Ohio do not speak that way anymore, if they ever did.

Within the linguistic community, the idea that General American had any relation to any actual geographical place was quickly destroyed. The field of American linguistics advanced very quickly in the mid-20th century, and by 1950 numerous studies were released that found that even within Northeastern Ohio, there were multiple distinctive accents and dialects, and that certainly Kenyon's rules for General American did not apply to the vast part of the country he claimed. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift work further combusted any idea that General American described the way people talk in the Midwest.

But the vaguely Midwestern basis for General American has stuck around in surprising ways. Most Americans do not really believe they have an accent; this is a reasonable, if inaccurate, thought, as most people are surrounded by others who speak the same way they do. But the Midwest is a particularly bizarre place, and Preston knows that better than anyone.

Preston is a pioneer in the study of perceptual dialectology, the study of how normal people think about dialects: where they come from, where they are, what they consist of. A 1996 study of Michiganders' beliefs about their own accents asked them to rank states based on how "correct" their accents are, and found that by far, Michiganders ranked the English of Michigan as the "most correct." The "least correct," according to Michiganders, was Alabama, and the only states that sounded near to as correct as Michigan? The states immediately nearby-except for Illinois. The study is a good indication that, generally, Americans tend to believe that the accent they're most familiar with is the most correct.

But Preston also gave this test to Southerners, specifically to respondents at Auburn University in Alabama. Here's where things get weird: the Alabamans did not rank their own speech as particularly correct. In fact, the only states the Alabamans considered worse than Alabama were nearby states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The Alabamans ranked highest the Mid-Atlantic area: Maryland, Delaware, Virginia. The pride that Midwesterners have in their own accent, and their contention that Midwestern English is very correct, is nationally unusual.

Even crazier: Midwesterners tend to not actually hear the very things that distinguish them to the rest of the country. Another study told Michigan speakers to listen to a Detroit speaker say the word "last," which a Midwesterner will often pronounce with a notable Shift-influenced diphthong as "lee-est." Then the respondents were given three synthesized other recordings: these had been altered so that that accent was dialed up or down. The respondents were told to match up the original pronunciation with the most similar synthesized one. Not a single one could do so; instead, every correspondent picked an accent that was lessened, closer to the way the word is pronounced outside the Midwest. Michiganders, apparently, have trouble hearing their own accents-which begs the question, how can you know your accent is correct, when you can't even really identify it?

This is all to say that when we talk about an accent-less newscaster way of speaking, we have to acknowledge that we are extremely bad at actually hearing accents. This is motivated by all kinds of things; Preston's theory is that we instinctively associate the way some groups speak with the way we feel about those groups. So a New York City accent sounds aggressive and impatient; a Southern Californian accent is slow and ditzy; a Southern accent is dumb and uneducated. (Let us not even discuss what white Americans think about African-American Vernacular English.) These associations have, of course, no basis in reality, but they're the reason why Colbert wanted to sound less like a Southerner. An actor or a newscaster does not want to be associated with any of those groups or those preconceptions about those groups, so they don't want to speak like them, either. But what they think those groups sound like is not usually all that accurate.

All accents are semi-consistent groups of sounds. (Syntax is a bit more strict; all dialects have their own rules which are not usually broken, but the way words sound is more fluid.) And Americans have a very weak understanding of which distinctive sounds actually make up a regional accent. Based on what we're taught and what we see in the media, we come up with a too-short list of identifying features that can tell us where a speaker is from.

A Bostonian drops his or her final R's. A New Yorker exaggerates the first vowel in "coffee," turning it into "cwaauughfee." A Southerner changes some diphthongs into monophthongs, as in the word "guide": In the North, that's a diphthong, moving from "ah" to "ee," but in the South, the vowel doesn't shift, instead sounding more like "gad." A Southern Californian pronounces "think" as "theenk" and "milk" as "melk."

Each of those regional accents includes dozens of other signifiers, and then there are many accents that are unique but simply not well-known in the rest of the country: think of the Philadelphia accent, or the New Orleans accent.

Any attempt to sound accent-less would therefore vary wildly based on where the speaker is from, whom the speaker is addressing, and what those people recognize as an accent signifier. A Midwesterner trying to sound accent-less will speak differently than a Southerner trying to sound accent-less. And that fact, that the newscaster accent isn't consistent, makes it less a single accent than a broad spectrum of related accents.

As an experiment, try listening to some news broadcasts around the country. These newscasters all supposedly speak in the accent-less General American way, so they should all sound pretty much the same, right? "I can take any handful of broadcasters you want, and unless you cheat and get them all from the same area, I can show you acoustically and probably by ear pretty convincingly that they still have for the most part the same acoustic system they had growing up," says Preston. I wasn't sure I believed it, but, well, look. Or rather, listen:

Madison, Wisconsin:

Listen around 0:17 when the newscaster introduces Abby-or as she says, Eeyehbby.

Columbus, Georgia:

Georgians, like most of the rest of the South, do not distinguish between the vowel sound in "pin" and "pen." Listen to the way this newscaster says "news at 10" at 0:19. Sounds an awful lot like "news at tin," doesn't it?

San Diego, California:

Go to 0:35 and listen to the way the correspondent says "first aid kit." Southern California English is most characterized by the California Shift, in which a series of vowels change: dress becomes drass, trap becomes trop, and, in the classic example, kit becomes ket.

These are minor things, but the point is that they are audible differences, noticeable quirks that can identify even a supposedly accent-less broadcaster as a native of somewhere specific. Newscasters and anyone else trying to sound accent-less will change the most obvious things, but not everything, and the way they speak is not consistent across the country.

One thing that is consistent, and is not exactly an accent but is related, is in their enunciation. "They don't really change their language, as such; they change their articulatory precision," says Preston. This is probably a remnant from the way performance worked live; to reach the entire crowd and make sure you're speaking comprehensibly to everyone, it was important to enunciate very precisely. Very precise enunciation can actually change the way someone sounds; it may be an effort to be more proper, but it can also shift you to that theoretical General American zone.

One example: the letter "w". When Americans pronounce the name of this letter, it's almost always shortened in some way. Most stereotypically, those from the South will shorten it to "dubya." But nobody says "double-you." Even in the North and West, the name is typically shortened to something more like "dubba-you." Go ahead, ask someone to spell the word "white." They'll compress it, somehow. Newscasters, in the interest of proper enunciation, will say "double-you." Another example: most Americans will do something called palatization in a phrase like "did you," turning it into "did joo." Newscasters will not, for precision's sake.

This kind of stuff can add to the feeling of nowhereness, because English really isn't spoken that way anywhere.

So now that we know that there is really no accent-less, standard, broadcaster-type accent, we're left with a grab-bag of different accents in which everything is enunciated excessively precisely and which does not include a varying selection of accent quirks that a particular audience will identify. And given Preston's theory that we associate accents with specific groups about which we have opinions, that means that if we want to find the most accent-less place, we have to look for the place about which we know the least.

Let's take, for example, Colorado, or Wyoming, or Nebraska. These places do, of course, have accents, both inasmuch as everyone has an accent and inasmuch as these accents have traceable, studied elements: the caught/cot merger, the pin/pen merger, use of the "positive anymore" (a use of the word "anymore" which means something like "these days," as in "I really love eating anchovies anymore."), various flattening or fronting or gliding of vowels.

But these are relatively unpopulated states, without major cities. Nationally, most Americans don't really know that much about the people who live in those states, which means we also haven't constructed elaborate and unreliable legends about the ways people in those states speak. And because the way we see people is the primary factor in the way we hear them speak, if we don't know much about a population? We don't hear much of an accent, either.

As it turns out, the search for an accent-less accent is more about our own perception and lack of understanding of linguistics than any objective, observable pattern. In other words, we are hearing what we want to hear, not what people are actually saying.

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Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents?

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Newscasters and Stephen Colbert seem to think so.

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Foreign Language Study Can Benefit Students With Autism | Teaching Tolerance - Diversity, Equity and Justice

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Foreign Language Study Can Benefit Students With Autism | Teaching Tolerance - Diversity, Equity and Justice

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When my daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, entered high school, her special education teachers were not sure that her taking French was a good idea. After all, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is primarily a communication disorder, so wouldn't taking a foreign language be the last thing someone with ASD would want to do? Many students with ASD process language slowly and receive speech and language services, so studying a foreign language would seem to fly in the face of common sense.

My daughter, however, really wanted to learn a foreign language, so against the advice of her teachers, we signed her up.

"It will be OK," I reassured her teachers. "She's got this language stuff down."

And she did. Six years later, my daughter has almost finished her minor in French at her university. She took another full year of a second foreign language, Spanish, at the university level and will be taking linguistics this fall. She loves studying foreign languages, and she's good at it. A conventional understanding of ASD might label my daughter's ability as quirky or exceptional. But I don't think so.

As a person with ASD, my daughter tends to focus on the details rather than the big picture, and foreign language study, especially at the elementary level, is extremely detail-oriented. The meanings of individual vocabulary words must be learned. Spellings and the placement of accents must be memorized. The genders of nouns and their appropriate articles must be remembered. Details, details and more details! In addition, studying a foreign language at the elementary level is a very concrete, black-and-white process, which can be comforting for someone with ASD who has difficulty with judgments and interpretations. When you study a foreign language, there are grammar rules; right and wrong ways of conjugating verbs and ordering sentence elements; and very few occasions for inferences, interpretations or judgments.

But more than being an academic area in which students with ASD might excel, foreign language study can also have psychological benefits for students on the autism spectrum. Research suggests, for example, that it can increase any person's ability to focus.¹ Because people on the spectrum have difficulty filtering out images and sounds-the many sensory perceptions we all experience every moment of every day-they often find concentration more difficult than neurotypical learners. Studying a second language can make overall concentration an easier task, however, because of the way foreign language study trains the brain to attend to auditory stimuli. A big part of learning a second language is listening to how sounds are put together and analyzing how the sounds produced in one language are different from those produced in another language. In a 2013 study, researchers in Scotland found that people who know two languages are better at ignoring irrelevant auditory stimuli-something that students with ASD often have difficulty with-perhaps because they have trained their brains to focus on minute discriminations in language sounds.²

Another way that studying a foreign language might benefit students on the autism spectrum is that it can make the brain more flexible; that is, it can make the brain better at shifting from one task to another or even focusing on more than one task at a time.³ This is because people who speak more than one language must shift between the vocabulary and grammar of one language and those of another language. Doing so can be good for students on the spectrum because many have trouble transitioning, whether it's from summer vacation to the academic school year or from art class to math. But when you study a foreign language, this kind of "brain shifting" happens all the time. Making the brain juggle between two languages may help students on the spectrum become better at juggling between other aspects of their lives.

When my daughter was writing a college research paper on the benefits of studying foreign languages, she said to me something like, "Mom, the research shows that people who know more than one language are better able to concentrate and to multitask, but I still have a lot of problems doing those things, even though I speak French and Spanish."

"You still have some problems focusing and multitasking," I replied, "but think of how much easier these skills have become for you since you began foreign language study."

Studying a foreign language may not be right for every student on the autism spectrum, especially when we consider the complexity of ASD and the uniqueness of every human being. Foreign language study may also not create noticeable educational and psychological benefits in the short term. Many students with autism, however, may benefit academically, personally, socially and psychologically, so let's not assume they can't do foreign language because we have a misguided and simplistic understanding of autism. Instead, let's keep an open mind.

For my daughter, studying French was not only one of the few classes she had no trouble with, but the subtle and incremental psychological changes that have accrued were worth the effort-even if she can't always see them at this point. For her, the benefits will last a lifetime.
Wendorff is a professor of English, ethnic studies and women and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
1. See Viorica Marian and Anthony Shook, "Cerebrum." The Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual. The Dana Foundation, 2012.

2. See Christopher Wanjek, "Learning a New Language at Any Age Helps the Brain." Livescience. June 2014.

3. See Jeffrey Kluger, "The Power of the Bilingual Brain." Time 182:5 (2013): 42.

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Foreign Language Study Can Benefit Students With Autism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When my daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, entered high school, her special education teachers were not sure that her taking French was a good idea. After all, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is primarily a communication disorder, so wouldn't taking a foreign language be the last thing someone with ASD would want to do?

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Khelsilem embraces indigenous languages as a way to decolonize young minds | Georgia Straight Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly

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Khelsilem embraces indigenous languages as a way to decolonize young minds | Georgia Straight Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly

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Georgia Straight Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Khelsilem, a 27-year-old member of the Squamish Nation, has been many things in his young life. His first appearance in the Georgia Straight came in 2009 when he was advocating for better broadband access for indigenous communities.

He's also been an environmental activist, artist, and fierce opponent of colonialism. In a recent interview, Khelsilem told the Straight that he has been inspired by his great-grandfather, Andy Paull. Paull trained as a lawyer but was barred from the profession because of his indigenous status.

"He ended up fighting a lot of legal cases pro bono for indigenous people and was a founder of various indigenous-rights organizations, like the Allied Tribes of B.C. and the North American Indian Brotherhood," Khelsilem said.

Paull spoke four languages and published two newspapers. "In the same way that he could be trailblazing, I can be trailblazing too," Khelsilem added. "And I'm going to do it in a completely different area than him."

Khelsilem's deepest passion is indigenous languages, and his name-pronounced "Kul-SAY-lum"-was passed down from his elders.

He learned the Squamish language in young adulthood. This year, he helped design an immersion program in the Squamish language, which will begin next month at SFU.

Khelsilem cites his great-grandfather, Andy Paull, as a major inspiration.
Thosh Collins

He's also building a coalition to pressure the federal government to enshrine indigenous-language rights. According to Khelsilem, First Nations languages are not disappearing because nobody wants to learn them or because they're too difficult to understand.

"Indigenous languages are dying in Canada because the current government policy doesn't actually support indigenous languages," he insisted. "The law needs to change."

He pointed to New Zealand, where government investment has resulted in far greater promotion of indigenous languages. Khelsilem himself learned the Squamish language in an immersion program-something that could be readily available to indigenous people across the country were there sufficient political will to do this.

Khelsilem also cited studies showing how behaviour can change when people speak different languages. And he believes that aboriginal people's minds can be decolonized to a certain extent through learning an indigenous dialect.

"In my experience, the language creates a behaviour of respectfulness and reciprocity and carefulness and kindness," Khelsilem said. "It's not as bombastic as English or as interrupting and overriding as English can be."

He maintained that his indigenous language promotes appreciation of the land, community, and relationships in a different manner.

"I really feel that when you are able to become a language speaker, or you are raised with a language, you have a different way of both looking at the world and also a different way of behaving when you operate from the mindset of that language," he said. "That's the decolonization that can happen from language reclamation."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Khelsilem embraces indigenous languages as a way to decolonize young minds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Khelsilem, a 27-year-old member of the Squamish Nation, has been many things in his young life. His first appearance in the Georgia Straight came in 2009 when he was advocating for better broadband access for indigenous communities. He's also been an environmental activist, artist, and fierce opponent of colonialism.

# data[].attributes.headline
Khelsilem embraces indigenous languages as a way to decolonize young minds | Georgia Straight Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly

# data[].attributes.subject
Khelsilem embraces indigenous languages as a way to decolonize young minds | Georgia Straight Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Georgia Straight Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Khelsilem, a 27-year-old member of the Squamish Nation, has been many things in his young life. His first appearance in the Georgia Straight came in 2009 when he was advocating for better broadband access for indigenous communities.

He's also been an environmental activist, artist, and fierce opponent of colonialism. In a recent interview, Khelsilem told the Straight that he has been inspired by his great-grandfather, Andy Paull. Paull trained as a lawyer but was barred from the profession because of his indigenous status.

"He ended up fighting a lot of legal cases pro bono for indigenous people and was a founder of various indigenous-rights organizations, like the Allied Tribes of B.C. and the North American Indian Brotherhood," Khelsilem said.

Paull spoke four languages and published two newspapers. "In the same way that he could be trailblazing, I can be trailblazing too," Khelsilem added. "And I'm going to do it in a completely different area than him."

Khelsilem's deepest passion is indigenous languages, and his name-pronounced "Kul-SAY-lum"-was passed down from his elders.

He learned the Squamish language in young adulthood. This year, he helped design an immersion program in the Squamish language, which will begin next month at SFU.

Khelsilem cites his great-grandfather, Andy Paull, as a major inspiration.
Thosh Collins

He's also building a coalition to pressure the federal government to enshrine indigenous-language rights. According to Khelsilem, First Nations languages are not disappearing because nobody wants to learn them or because they're too difficult to understand.

"Indigenous languages are dying in Canada because the current government policy doesn't actually support indigenous languages," he insisted. "The law needs to change."

He pointed to New Zealand, where government investment has resulted in far greater promotion of indigenous languages. Khelsilem himself learned the Squamish language in an immersion program-something that could be readily available to indigenous people across the country were there sufficient political will to do this.

Khelsilem also cited studies showing how behaviour can change when people speak different languages. And he believes that aboriginal people's minds can be decolonized to a certain extent through learning an indigenous dialect.

"In my experience, the language creates a behaviour of respectfulness and reciprocity and carefulness and kindness," Khelsilem said. "It's not as bombastic as English or as interrupting and overriding as English can be."

He maintained that his indigenous language promotes appreciation of the land, community, and relationships in a different manner.

"I really feel that when you are able to become a language speaker, or you are raised with a language, you have a different way of both looking at the world and also a different way of behaving when you operate from the mindset of that language," he said. "That's the decolonization that can happen from language reclamation."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Khelsilem embraces indigenous languages as a way to decolonize young minds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Khelsilem, a 27-year-old member of the Squamish Nation, has been many things in his young life. His first appearance in the Georgia Straight came in 2009 when he was advocating for better broadband access for indigenous communities. He's also been an environmental activist, artist, and fierce opponent of colonialism.

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The ellipsis in medieval manuscripts: How subpuncting in the Middle Ages give the modern era its strangest punctuation mark.

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The ellipsis in medieval manuscripts: How subpuncting in the Middle Ages give the modern era its strangest punctuation mark.

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Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The punctuation mark of the ellipsis is perhaps the most unusual mark in the English language, for punctuation marks are designed to convey meaning by indicating relationships between ideas, but the ellipsis does the exact opposite. It simply indicates that something has been omitted. Sometimes, this omission is poignant, as in J. Alfred Prufrock's lament "I grow old...I grow old..." which invites the reader to imagine what has happened to the him in the spaces between him growing old. Sometimes, it is simply a placeholder, as happens when a fellow messager is typing on the other end of the line. (Personally, my favorite example of the ellipsis is Seinfeld 's infamous "yada yada yada," but I digress.)

But where did the ellipsis come from and how did it end up being so unusual? The Guardian's article on the history of the ellipsis draws on Anne Toner's fascinating book Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission to explore ellipses all the way back to the drama of the 16 th century. Both the article and the book do an excellent job of analyzing these earliest print records of the modern ellipsis.

But that story may not be the whole story, for the dot dot dot of an ellipsis was no stranger to English texts before the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson. It might have just been serving a slightly different function.

In medieval manuscripts, we find a mark-sometimes called subpuncting or underdotting-that is used to indicate the omission of a word or phrase, usually when that word or phrase has been copied erroneously. This omission mark involves placing a series of dots under the word that is to be omitted. The image below shows an erroneous word, blotted out and subpuncted:

The British Library Board, Harley MS 6258 fol. 45r

A scholar of medieval manuscripts, David Wakelin, conducted a study on how popular various methods of omission and correction were based on a sample of 9,000 manuscripts at the Huntington Library. He found that "crossing out, subpuncting, or erasure" accounted for 25% of the corrections he found. He does not provide a percentage of subpuncting alone, but it does occur in a variety of manuscripts, particularly those in the 14 th and 15 th centuries. Wakelin notes that subpuncting begins to die out in the early 16 th century, and Toner picks up on the rise of the ellipsis in the late 16 th century.

Could the two be related?

It is possible that the omission mark of subpuncting and the modern ellipsis stem from two different sources, with them serendipitously looking similar and subpuncting coincidentally fading away in manuscripts around the same time that the ellipsis is introduced in print. But it is also possible that the medieval practice of subpuncting provided a ready-made punctuation mark for new printers. One reason that no scholar has yet to answer this question is that there is a sharp divide between the two periods and mediums in the field. By and large, medieval scholars focus only on manuscripts (things written by hand), up through the first half of the 16 th century, when manuscript writing decreased (but by no means disappeared). Similarly, early modern scholars generally focus only on printed materials, from the second half of the 16 th century onward, when printing began increasing rapidly. Wakelin's and Toner's books are an examples of this division: Wakelin explicitly sets his own date range in his book's title, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510 and focuses only on manuscripts, while Toner begins her research in the late 16 th century and only on printed texts. It is important to note that such omissions on either's part are by no means a fault, though, as both are analyzing thousands of extant texts already. To complete something even more comprehensive would be extremely daunting. But, regardless, there is a gap between these two studies, an ellipsis in the scholarship, if you will.

But even if we do not know exactly if and how subpuncting and the ellipsis are related, they share a similarity in their functions. In both cases, they are used to omit meaning.

The word's origins in the Greek ἔλλειψις mean "falling short, defect," but the ellipsis also becomes associated with omission fairly early in its history. For instance, Quintillian, with the linguistic confidence only a Roman could exude, says that an ellipsis marks "the omission of words that can be recovered verbatim by means of contextual information." Quintillian envisions the ellipsis more as an abbreviation than a defect. However, the Oxford English Dictionary 's more modern definition highlights the mark's inherent instability: An ellipsis implies "the omission of one or more words in a sentence, which would be needed to complete the grammatical construction or fully to express the sense." In this sense, the ellipsis is defective, or falls short, because it inherently brings a gap in meaning.

Both subpuncting and the ellipsis indicate a falling short or a defect in the text, but they do so in slightly different ways. Subpuncting tends to preserve the original erroneous word, similar to how strikethrough works in modern typographical settings. In both medieval manuscripts and on modern computers, deleting the erroneous word is an option; however, subpuncting and strikethrough allow for the word to simultaneously remain and yet be omitted. Grammatically, it allows you to have your cake and omit it too.

Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 fol. 50v

But the ellipsis omits meaning by removing words entirely, with no way of knowing what is absent. For an analogy, an ellipsis in a sentence is like a hole in a mathematical equation. In fact, ellipses are used in mathematics to indicate missing terms, such as in a sequence (1+ 2+ 3...+100) or in matrices, math's paragraphs. But sometimes an ellipsis omits meaning that was never there in the first place. This occurs when the mark is used at the end of a sentence to signal a forced or intended silence (called aposiopesis). In Toner's words, the sentence "lapses into silence."

The British Library Board, C.34.k.17; King Lear 1st quarto 1608

But numbers lapse into silence, too, and in mathematical notation, an ellipsis is also used to indicate that the decimals of an irrational number will trail off to infinity, with no discernible pattern. For instance, if one were to write out the number pi, it would end in an ellipsis: 3.1415.... In this case, the ellipsis indicates an omission of both some known terms (we know the digits of pi far beyond .1415) and unknown terms (since the sequence proceeds to infinity, we cannot know all of its digits).

Thus the ellipsis has been used to indicate anything from the erroneous to the irrational, and its intrigue lies in resistance to meaning. As long as we have things to say, we will have things to omit. Or, in other words, yada yada yada.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Mysterious History of the Ellipsis, From Medieval Subpuncting to Irrational Numbers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The punctuation mark of the ellipsis is perhaps the most unusual mark in the English language, for punctuation marks are designed to convey meaning by indicating relationships between ideas, but the ellipsis does the exact opposite. It simply indicates that something has been omitted. Sometimes, this omission is poignant, as in J.

# data[].attributes.headline
The ellipsis in medieval manuscripts: How subpuncting in the Middle Ages give the modern era its strangest punctuation mark.

# data[].attributes.subject
The ellipsis in medieval manuscripts: How subpuncting in the Middle Ages give the modern era its strangest punctuation mark.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The punctuation mark of the ellipsis is perhaps the most unusual mark in the English language, for punctuation marks are designed to convey meaning by indicating relationships between ideas, but the ellipsis does the exact opposite. It simply indicates that something has been omitted. Sometimes, this omission is poignant, as in J. Alfred Prufrock's lament "I grow old...I grow old..." which invites the reader to imagine what has happened to the him in the spaces between him growing old. Sometimes, it is simply a placeholder, as happens when a fellow messager is typing on the other end of the line. (Personally, my favorite example of the ellipsis is Seinfeld 's infamous "yada yada yada," but I digress.)

But where did the ellipsis come from and how did it end up being so unusual? The Guardian's article on the history of the ellipsis draws on Anne Toner's fascinating book Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission to explore ellipses all the way back to the drama of the 16 th century. Both the article and the book do an excellent job of analyzing these earliest print records of the modern ellipsis.

But that story may not be the whole story, for the dot dot dot of an ellipsis was no stranger to English texts before the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson. It might have just been serving a slightly different function.

In medieval manuscripts, we find a mark-sometimes called subpuncting or underdotting-that is used to indicate the omission of a word or phrase, usually when that word or phrase has been copied erroneously. This omission mark involves placing a series of dots under the word that is to be omitted. The image below shows an erroneous word, blotted out and subpuncted:

The British Library Board, Harley MS 6258 fol. 45r

A scholar of medieval manuscripts, David Wakelin, conducted a study on how popular various methods of omission and correction were based on a sample of 9,000 manuscripts at the Huntington Library. He found that "crossing out, subpuncting, or erasure" accounted for 25% of the corrections he found. He does not provide a percentage of subpuncting alone, but it does occur in a variety of manuscripts, particularly those in the 14 th and 15 th centuries. Wakelin notes that subpuncting begins to die out in the early 16 th century, and Toner picks up on the rise of the ellipsis in the late 16 th century.

Could the two be related?

It is possible that the omission mark of subpuncting and the modern ellipsis stem from two different sources, with them serendipitously looking similar and subpuncting coincidentally fading away in manuscripts around the same time that the ellipsis is introduced in print. But it is also possible that the medieval practice of subpuncting provided a ready-made punctuation mark for new printers. One reason that no scholar has yet to answer this question is that there is a sharp divide between the two periods and mediums in the field. By and large, medieval scholars focus only on manuscripts (things written by hand), up through the first half of the 16 th century, when manuscript writing decreased (but by no means disappeared). Similarly, early modern scholars generally focus only on printed materials, from the second half of the 16 th century onward, when printing began increasing rapidly. Wakelin's and Toner's books are an examples of this division: Wakelin explicitly sets his own date range in his book's title, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510 and focuses only on manuscripts, while Toner begins her research in the late 16 th century and only on printed texts. It is important to note that such omissions on either's part are by no means a fault, though, as both are analyzing thousands of extant texts already. To complete something even more comprehensive would be extremely daunting. But, regardless, there is a gap between these two studies, an ellipsis in the scholarship, if you will.

But even if we do not know exactly if and how subpuncting and the ellipsis are related, they share a similarity in their functions. In both cases, they are used to omit meaning.

The word's origins in the Greek ἔλλειψις mean "falling short, defect," but the ellipsis also becomes associated with omission fairly early in its history. For instance, Quintillian, with the linguistic confidence only a Roman could exude, says that an ellipsis marks "the omission of words that can be recovered verbatim by means of contextual information." Quintillian envisions the ellipsis more as an abbreviation than a defect. However, the Oxford English Dictionary 's more modern definition highlights the mark's inherent instability: An ellipsis implies "the omission of one or more words in a sentence, which would be needed to complete the grammatical construction or fully to express the sense." In this sense, the ellipsis is defective, or falls short, because it inherently brings a gap in meaning.

Both subpuncting and the ellipsis indicate a falling short or a defect in the text, but they do so in slightly different ways. Subpuncting tends to preserve the original erroneous word, similar to how strikethrough works in modern typographical settings. In both medieval manuscripts and on modern computers, deleting the erroneous word is an option; however, subpuncting and strikethrough allow for the word to simultaneously remain and yet be omitted. Grammatically, it allows you to have your cake and omit it too.

Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 fol. 50v

But the ellipsis omits meaning by removing words entirely, with no way of knowing what is absent. For an analogy, an ellipsis in a sentence is like a hole in a mathematical equation. In fact, ellipses are used in mathematics to indicate missing terms, such as in a sequence (1+ 2+ 3...+100) or in matrices, math's paragraphs. But sometimes an ellipsis omits meaning that was never there in the first place. This occurs when the mark is used at the end of a sentence to signal a forced or intended silence (called aposiopesis). In Toner's words, the sentence "lapses into silence."

The British Library Board, C.34.k.17; King Lear 1st quarto 1608

But numbers lapse into silence, too, and in mathematical notation, an ellipsis is also used to indicate that the decimals of an irrational number will trail off to infinity, with no discernible pattern. For instance, if one were to write out the number pi, it would end in an ellipsis: 3.1415.... In this case, the ellipsis indicates an omission of both some known terms (we know the digits of pi far beyond .1415) and unknown terms (since the sequence proceeds to infinity, we cannot know all of its digits).

Thus the ellipsis has been used to indicate anything from the erroneous to the irrational, and its intrigue lies in resistance to meaning. As long as we have things to say, we will have things to omit. Or, in other words, yada yada yada.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Mysterious History of the Ellipsis, From Medieval Subpuncting to Irrational Numbers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The punctuation mark of the ellipsis is perhaps the most unusual mark in the English language, for punctuation marks are designed to convey meaning by indicating relationships between ideas, but the ellipsis does the exact opposite. It simply indicates that something has been omitted. Sometimes, this omission is poignant, as in J.

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"Arrival" trailer: Finally, a Hollywood sci-fi alien movie with a linguist as the hero — Quartz

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"Arrival" trailer: Finally, a Hollywood sci-fi alien movie with a linguist as the hero — Quartz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Congratulations, linguists: You're finally getting your big moment.

On Tuesday (Aug. 16), Paramount Pictures released the first full trailer for Arrival, a science-fiction film about a linguist (played by Amy Adams) trying to communicate with aliens who have mysteriously arrived (😉 ) on Earth. The film is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who helmed Prisoners and Sicario (both excellent) and is currently working on the Blade Runner sequel. Watch Amy Adams try to decipher an alien language below:

It's a miracle that Arrival and a movie like Independence Day: Resurgence can come out only months apart. While both are about aliens, that's pretty much where the similarities end. Resurgence is the ultimate Hollywood movie: a big-budget, explosion-filled, FX-driven apocalyptic blockbuster made 10 years after its predecessor, which makes it both a reboot and a sequel that few people asked for.

Arrival is neither sequel nor reboot nor remake, though it is based on the beloved short story by Ted Chiang, "Story of Your Life." The film originally had the same name, but it was changed in June to the more marketable and ominous-sounding Arrival. Paramount Pictures gave the movie a mid-November release date, indicating that the studio sees it as an awards contender.

Thankfully, the usual slew of big-budget sci-fi action retreads like Resurgence has not prevented Hollywood from also investing in smaller, smarter movies about science and technology. (Some would say the retreads are actually what allow studios to finance brainier movies like Arrival.)

Films like Moon, Ex Machina, and Looper show it's possible to make great, high-concept sci-fi movies with relatively small budgets (their budgets were $5 million, $15 million, and $30 million, respectively, compared with a bloated $165 million for Resurgence).

Arrival seems most similar to 2009's Oscar-nominated District 9, which followed a race of aliens who arrive in Johannesburg and are immediately relegated to a slum, an obvious metaphor for apartheid. There are a few explosions and action sequences, but District 9 is an alien film that's not actually about aliens at all (and its budget was a reasonable $30 million).

With a $50 million budget, Arrival lands somewhere between District 9 and Resurgence. To be sure, it's still very much a Hollywood production, with an emerging director and famous actors (Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker star alongside Adams), but those expecting an action-packed battle between humans and aliens are likely to be surprised by what they get instead.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Finally, a sci-fi alien movie with a linguist as the hero

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Congratulations, linguists: You're finally getting your big moment. On Tuesday (Aug. 16), Paramount Pictures released the first full trailer for Arrival, a science-fiction film about a linguist (played by Amy Adams) trying to communicate with aliens who have mysteriously arrived (😉 ) on Earth.

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Defining every English word used between the years 600 and 1150 AD | University Affairs

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Defining every English word used between the years 600 and 1150 AD | University Affairs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Twenty-five years and just over 60 percent complete, the Dictionary of Old English is a labour of love for U of T scholars.

On a scorching summer day two years ago, his first day on the job as a drafting editor at the Dictionary of Old English, Stephen Pelle was tackling heaven - or more accurately, was trying to define heofon, its Old English equivalent. Hunched over a table, he laboured like a medieval monk reviewing every citation of heofon in the corpus of Old English texts. An assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies - where he also earned his PhD - Dr. Pelle already had years of experience proofing Old English words. Yet his job that day was not so heavenly (or heofonlic, as it would have been spelled 1,200 years ago).

The newly hired drafting editor had sorted scads of Post-it notes and more than 4,000 slips of paper into precarious piles. Each slip contained a different citation of heofon and each pile represented a different sense or meaning of the word. Dr. Pelle's goal was to create a hierarchy for these meanings. He knew that defining every sense of heofon would be a challenge, but at that moment his most pressing concern was that someone might fly past the table and inadvertently blow away the carefully ordered slips. What had he gotten himself into?

The team behind the Dictionary of Old English, an ambitious, long-term project based at the Centre for Medieval Studies, has set out to define every known English word used between the years 600 and 1150. In a sense, it's a project that will catalogue the very DNA of our language. Now 46 years in, the project involves six staff and an army of students. Along the way, generations of dedicated scholars have rediscovered medieval ways of thinking and re-assessed the meaning of texts from the Middle Ages.

When finished, it will be more comprehensive than any dictionary of English - more detailed than the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionaries of 1898 and 1921, and more exhaustive than the venerable 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. The new dictionary resurrects long-dead words and unearths the ancestors of many words we still use today. It also includes the number of times a word appears in Old English texts - from gospels and poetry to legal documents and royal records.

Eight volumes - the letters A to G, with a separate volume for the letter Æ - took about 25 years to complete. The Old English alphabet has 22 letters in total and the finished dictionary should have between 33,000 and 35,000 individual entries. Despite it being a work in progress, hundreds of universities around the world have already subscribed to this digital, online dictionary (no print version is envisioned).

The letter H was started about nine years ago. In that time, dictionary staff have made several technological advances, including an upgraded search engine, and added hyperlinks to other dictionaries and images of related manuscripts. Letters I to Y (the last letter of the Old English alphabet) may take a few years or a few decades. The timeline depends on funding, which comes mainly from subscription sales, private donations and contributions from foundations in Canada and the United States. Among the agencies that have provided long-term funding are the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.

After eight weeks of work that first summer, Dr. Pelle summarized heofon into 10 main definitions, which, along with citations, filled 70 single-spaced pages. The meanings fell into two broad categories: heofon as a part of the sky and heofon as the abode of God. However, in some cases the word also referred specifically to God's power and, in one poem, was possibly miswritten for the word h-eof (lamentation). Scribes made mistakes in those days, when most literature was hand-copied by monks.

" Heofon was actually a baptism by fire," says Dr. Pelle. "I'd written a few academic papers about what the Anglo-Saxons thought heofon and hell looked like, concretely, but the word itself was hard, and H will probably be the most difficult to define of all the letters." After words beginning with the letter S, Old English words beginning with H are the next most numerous, at about 3,000. Words beginning with H are also some of the most complex and most popular, including "she" ( h-eo), "he" ( h-e), "it" ( hit) and their plural forms.

Back then, the computers were as big as closets

The passion for antiquated words at U of T began with Angus Cameron, a professor of medieval studies who founded the Dictionary of Old English in 1970. The project's first tasks were to count and categorize all surviving Old English texts, then to input them into an electronic database. Staff assistant Elaine Quanz spent nearly six years typing out Old English texts using a special IBM Selectric font that could be scanned into a mainframe computer. Work began on the dictionary entries themselves in 1982, while the digitizing continued. Back then, the computers were as big as closets.

Dr. Pelle and colleague Robert Getz, who also has a PhD in medieval studies from U of T, were both hired in 2014 as the dictionary's interim directors. (The project expects to appoint a new permanent director later this year.) They replaced David and Ian McDougall, twins who had worked as the project's drafting editors for 30 years. Drs. Pelle and Getz each had held a research assistantship at the DOE as doctoral students and had worked under former directors Toni Healey and Roy Liuzza. While Dr. Pelle grappled with heofon, Dr. Getz dove into hell on his first day on the job.

The dictionary's labyrinthine offices contain nearly a hundred black filing cabinets overflowing with folders. An editor usually starts tackling a word as Dr. Pelle did by consulting a folder stuffed with slips of paper containing citations from medieval texts. But Dr. Getz's first day was different. The slips for hell were missing.

"hell turned out to be a lot of fun"

Instead, Dr. Getz began his journey through hell by searching every use and spelling of the word in every surviving Old English text, everything from sermons to contracts. His colleague would print each citation and Dr. Getz would sort the paper slips into different contextual senses using rubber bands, paperclips and shoeboxes, just as Dr. Pelle was doing with piles and Post-it notes for heofon.

Dr. Getz found 900 citations of hell in the dictionary's storehouse of digitized manuscripts and nailed down its various definitions in six weeks. Like today, its original meaning was a kind of limbo for the dead or an underworld for the damned. The metaphorical use of the word to mean a personal nightmare became common only many centuries later. In the end, " hell turned out to be a lot of fun," he says.

The word appears in curses at the end of Old English contracts or charters, a common ending similar to our disclaimers at the end of corporate emails. Dr. Getz reads an example: "If anyone through any presumption or the instigation of the devil will violate this privilege, then after his accursed death, let him lie forever in the bottomless pit of hell and burn in the eternal fire with the devil and the accursed spirits that dwell with him, forever without end." But the curses weren't all fire and brimstone. "Often there was an out in the curse, such as, 'Let him burn in the frying pans of hell, unless he makes amends or repents beforehand,'" Dr. Getz explains.

Ideas may have changed, but basic human nature has not

The medieval period was an age steeped in religion, but also much more. Medical texts, for example, would calculate the best days for bloodletting, or would describe the best remedies for ailments such as the "half-dead disease" (probably hemiplegia). One remedy involved melting and mixing wax, pitch, pepper and oil and sticking the goo on the half-dead patient.

Anglo-Saxon manuscripts also contained charms to protect livestock, to prevent demonic possession and to cure diseases caused by an elf's arrow or spear. This was an era when magic and miracles were as real as Vikings and dwarves.

But basic human nature appears to have been much the same as today. One of the dictionary's researchers, Catherine Monahan, offers an example: "I remember reading this text, and it was a charter or a will, one of these texts that are not commonly read. But the amazing thing was how typically human it showed the Anglo-Saxons to be. There were two brothers. One had a piece of land. And clearly, there was bad blood between the brothers, because the landowner was practically willing to give it away to any passerby before he gave it to his brother. You could see that in the charter.  And I thought: things really haven't changed in more than a thousand years."

Author J. R. R. Tolkien knew this, and the richness of his books emanates in part from their basis on Anglo-Saxon civilization and culture. He was a professor of Old English and drew heavily from the language for The Hobbit and his other works, starting in the 1930s. For a time, he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and was well known as a perceptive reader and textual critic of Old English poetry, including the epic Beowulf, the most famous text from Anglo-Saxon England. He also made up his own languages, including Elvish tongues, Black Speech and others for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and he borrowed names, riddles, anecdotes, themes and literary styles from Beowulf and Old English in general. For example, Beowulf is a king who defends his people from a fire-breathing dragon who's angry over a missing goblet, much like the plot found in The Hobbit, Dr. Getz explains.

There are currently only two words left to finish out of the roughly 3,000 that belong to volume H: gehealdan (to hold) and hwæt, which may be untranslatable, says Dr. Getz, who has been tasked with both words. Hwæt is the first word in Beowulf and has often been taken as an interjection meaning "lo" or "listen."

"But it may not mean that at all," says Dr. Getz. "It may be a kind of adverb for which we don't have an equivalent in modern English, something like 'how!' as in 'How beautiful the sky is today!' or 'How he was going on and on!'"

Dr. Getz, for his part, does not have the luxury to go on and on. A past dictionary editor told him that the hardest part of the job would be trying not to fall in love with a word. "You have to be brutally efficient, define each word, move on to the next," he says. The goal is to finish H in 2016, then continue to the next letter. Nevertheless, Dr. Getz says hwæt, from his favourite Old English poem, may well be among his favourites. It may even prove to be more fun than hell.

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Defining every English word used between 600 and 1150 AD | University Affairs

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Twenty-five years and just over 60 percent complete, the Dictionary of Old English is a labour of love for U of T scholars. On a scorching summer day two years ago, his first day on the job as a drafting editor at the Dictionary of Old English , Stephen Pelle was tackling heaven - or more accurately, was trying to define heofon, its Old English equivalent.

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"Damn your blood": Swearing in early modern English | History Extra

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"Damn your blood": Swearing in early modern English | History Extra

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This article was first published in the July 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine

In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare's Hotspur turns on his prissy wife: "Heart! You swear like a comfit-maker's wife. 'Not you in good sooth!' and 'as true as I live!'". Instead Hotspur demanded a good mouth-filling oath. Something like his own "By God's heart" was more suited to a lady of rank.

The oaths of the Tudor and Stuart centuries, the era of Shakespeare (1564-1616), still jump out at modern readers from plays, courtroom testimonies and countless other sources. And they strike us as very different from our own bad language. Swearing - solemn or profane - was a religious issue: an oath called on God to guarantee the truth of a statement, just as profane swearing took God's name in vain.
"Some swear by God's nails, his heart, and his body
And some swear by his flesh, his blood, and his foot
And some by his guts, his life, and heart root,
Some other would seem all swearing to refrain
And they invent idle oaths, such is their idle brain:
By cock and by pie, and by the goose wing
By the cross of the mouse foot and by Saint Chicken
And some swear by the Devil, such is their blindness".
Swearing supposedly ran along the lines of social status and gender. And swearing was always something of a performance. If you wanted to be believed by your neighbours, swearing a solemn oath with one hand on the Bible was the best option. The legal system was built on that promise to tell the truth, so help me God. But this was an invocation that spilled over into other arenas. As John Bunyan (d1688) complained, vain swearers "tell their jestings, tales, and lies, and then swear by God that they are true". And the phrase 'by God' was just a beginning. Oaths sworn in the 16th century were many and various. A poetical Protestant preacher reported in 1550:

Tales of London low-life in the Elizabethan period (1558-1603) resound to 'Mercy God' and by the 'Mary Mass'. A century later "some, indeed, swear by idols, as by the mass, by our Lady, by saints, beasts, birds, and other creatures; but the usual way of our profane ones in England is to swear by God, Christ, faith and the like".

Then as now, some individuals sought to shock by transgressing against the pieties of the age. To swear was to parade one's worldliness and social standing. Samuel Pepys (d1703) was thrilled to hear a gallant, just arrived from France, swear when disturbed in a croquet shot. Here was a real-life model for all those Frenchified fops and libertines on the Restoration stage, such as the Monsieur de Paris, a character in a play by William Wycherley (d1716) who constantly swore and vowed in English and in French. The gallants who filled their speech with oaths and a French dressing of profanity were young, dissolute and obnoxious.

They came drunk and screaming into the playhouse, stood on the benches, and cried: "Damn me this is a damn'd play. Prithee, let's to a whore, Jack". Humbler folk were just as prone to profane swearing and they too may have been resisting the pressure to fit in with the respectable and devout.

Swearing was a litmus test: the pious recoiled whenever they heard the Lord's name taken in vain. In Jacobean Essex, Margaret Jones was prosecuted as "a swearer using most cursed oaths, as namely, God's wounds, God's heart". When chided by her vicar, she had retorted "God's heart she should swear in spite of his teeth; as she used much swearing, so she laid violent hands and smote the vicar... and followed him swearing most devilishly, from one end of the town to the other". At North Walsham in 1664, Daniel Durrant, a labourer, was prosecuted because he had "grossly abused by words and struck and dazzled Mary Bawcock and tore her waistcoat and pursued her with the slings, swearing he would knock her on the head and that only because she had seriously reproved him for swearing".

Swearing could also unite people. Wherever men were gathered together, at work, trade or play, in the army or at university, profane swearing was likely. "Several volleys of execrable oaths oftentime resounded from all sides of the room", complained Thomas Turner in 1760 after a typical meeting of East Hoathly vestry. It was said that Thames bargemen had only ever heard the name of their saviour as part of a profane oath. Ale certainly loosened tongues and inhibitions. In court Richard Macham of Leyton in Essex was pathetically described as "a drunkard, a swearer and a slanderer; sometimes he is overseen with drink and by provocation he doth use unlawful oaths".
Those who didn't mind their manners could face harsh punishments Statutes passed between the reigns of James I (1603-1625) and George III (1760-1820) criminalised swearing. These laws drew careful distinctions between swearing and cursing, imposed fines or the stocks, and banded the penalties according to social rank. So when John King of Colne Engaine in Essex "did swear by God's blood" that he would be avenged on the church¬wardens "and bade a pox on them", he swore a profane oath, but he cursed the church-wardens. And when the sailor Robert Abbot was fined one pound and four shillings, it was for six oaths "by God" and six curses "damn your blood".Yet legislation could not hope to cover every form of swearing. The 1650s law reformer William Sheppard observed that there was "no proportionable and certain punishment by law, appointed for swearing by creatures, as the sun, light, bread, drink, money; or by idols, as by the cross, mass, rood; or by saints, as our Lady, or Saint Mary; or by faith and troth, etc, or for cursing, pox, plague, or the devil rot thee, and the like; it being doubted whether these be within the law about swearing, or not".At the end of the century, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners faced similar difficulties. Swearing could be prosecuted only when "God, Lord, Jesus or Christ are used plainly and lightly and in the sense of an affirmation or negation", but a curse was more easily prosecuted since it was "punishable as well without the aforesaid words as with them". So the curse 'a plague take ye' was open to prosecution, as was the oath 'God's wounds' but not the phrase 'by my soul'.Public opinion against swearing could also be effective. In 1654 MP Henry Glapthorne swore "by God's wounds, by God's blood, by Jesus Christ, by the eternal God, God confound me body and soul, God damn me, the Devil fetch me, God refuse me".Some 400 of the MP's constituents successfully petitioned for his removal since such a "common curser and swearer" was "not fit to be a law-maker or parliament man for them".
Swearing, cursing and the law

One would naturally expect such widespread swearing to be echoed in the historical records and in contemporary literature. But the reason we hear so much is probably because contemporaries found it so threatening. Moralists saw the rising tide of profane swearing as a sure sign of the declining respect for solemn oaths. Profane swearing dishonours God and endangers society, warned the authorities: "For from a custom of swearing men easily slide into perjury, and how can it be consistent with reason that a man who hourly invokes God by rash and vain swearing, should boggle at a false oath, whenever his lust, his covetousness, his revenge and his ambition prompt him to it?"

Judges, clergy and commentators all stressed the dangers to society of such swearing. This was a sin that ran the length of the community. Children learned to swear from their parents, apprentices from their masters, common folk from their betters. Swearing was an infection, a contagion, or a flood. It was a sin that would damn the swearer's soul and might well provoke more immediate punishment from on high: every preacher seemed to know personally some unfortunate wretch who had been struck dead with a profane oath on their lips. Clergy urged their congregations not only to avoid the bold oaths of the libertines, but also to be wary of "the more petty oaths of faith and troth; take heed also of cursing, and taking God's Name in vain, remembering that the Lord will not hold such guiltless".

Language will always betray the tensions of a changing society. Swearing was one of the key concerns of the long English Reformation. Protestants had clear theological reasons for uprooting oaths invoking the mass, the Virgin and Saints, or the body of Christ, and they took the persistence of such oaths as a sign of resistance or backsliding to Catholicism. In 1601 swearing was "of all other sins most rife in the land", complained Arthur Dent, and he listed Catholic oaths as especially worrying, while in 1652 a Lancashire minister was concerned to hear a woman swear by our lady.

Swearing also became a marker to distinguish between those who were intent on a godly lifestyle and those who refused to be railroaded into a new linguistic austerity. Godly English Protestants became increasingly intolerant of any form of swearing outside the law courts, and some, Baptists and Quakers most notably, even refused to swear in court.

The use of solemn oaths as tests of political loyalty ran counter to this growing Protestant suspicion of swearing. From 1534 onwards the state imposed a number of oaths of obedience, loyalty and allegiance on the population. Such state oaths were designed to winkle out those who could not abandon earlier commitments and were thus seen as politically unreliable. The proliferation of these 'bitter pills', their inconsistency, and the hypocrisy they fostered among those who swallowed them whole to gain or retain office, were blamed for undermining the sanctity of oath taking.
John Spurr is professor of history at Swansea University.
Slowly but surely attitudes change. The frisson of a profane oath in early modern England depended upon the parallel reverence for the solemn oath. As the two drifted apart, and as reverence for oaths dwindled, society's tolerance of swearing grew, and the nature of swearing changed. What now counts as swearing is very different from what outraged people 400 years ago. Modern public opinion surveys report that religious expletives and terms, such as 'damn', 'God' or 'Christ', are generally considered to be acceptable. Racial and sexual terms are now seen as most offensive, whereas sexual language was hardly at issue in Tudor or Stuart England.

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"Damn your blood": Swearing in early modern English

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This article was first published in the July 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare's Hotspur turns on his prissy wife: "Heart! You swear like a comfit-maker's wife. 'Not you in good sooth!' and 'as true as I live!'". Instead Hotspur demanded a good mouth-filling oath.

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How Unrecognizable Was The English Language Just 300 Years Ago? | The Literacy Site Blog

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How Unrecognizable Was The English Language Just 300 Years Ago? | The Literacy Site Blog

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When we accuse teenagers of mutilating English to an unrecognizable form, we sometimes forget that in the grand scheme of things, the version of English we hold near and dear to our hearts has only been around for a short time.

A language is an ever-changing entity, a tool that gets slowly reinvented throughout the ages to be appropriate for its increasingly modern users. The ability for it to transform itself with time seems to be the key to its survival.

Today many of us find it difficult to understand the language of Shakespeare, who wrote barely 400 years ago. Step back another 600 years, and English is almost unrecognizable.

This video travels through time, exploring the evolution of the sound and vocabulary of the English language. How far back do you think you could recognize and understand the English language? We bet you'll be surprised!

Proper LIT literacysite_abovevideo

The Literacy Site is a place where people can come together to help children gain access to a good education. In addition to signing petitions, shopping for the cause, and staying informed about literacy and education, visitors can take just a moment each day to click on an orange button to provide books for children in need. Visit The Literacy Site and click today - it's free!

Proper LIT literacysite_belowcontent

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How Unrecognizable Was The English Language Just 300 Years Ago?

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When we accuse teenagers of mutilating English to an unrecognizable form, we sometimes forget that in the grand scheme of things, the version of English we hold near and dear to our hearts has only been around for a short time.

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How Unrecognizable Was The English Language Just 300 Years Ago? | The Literacy Site Blog

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How Unrecognizable Was The English Language Just 300 Years Ago? | The Literacy Site Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When we accuse teenagers of mutilating English to an unrecognizable form, we sometimes forget that in the grand scheme of things, the version of English we hold near and dear to our hearts has only been around for a short time.

A language is an ever-changing entity, a tool that gets slowly reinvented throughout the ages to be appropriate for its increasingly modern users. The ability for it to transform itself with time seems to be the key to its survival.

Today many of us find it difficult to understand the language of Shakespeare, who wrote barely 400 years ago. Step back another 600 years, and English is almost unrecognizable.

This video travels through time, exploring the evolution of the sound and vocabulary of the English language. How far back do you think you could recognize and understand the English language? We bet you'll be surprised!

Proper LIT literacysite_abovevideo

The Literacy Site is a place where people can come together to help children gain access to a good education. In addition to signing petitions, shopping for the cause, and staying informed about literacy and education, visitors can take just a moment each day to click on an orange button to provide books for children in need. Visit The Literacy Site and click today - it's free!

Proper LIT literacysite_belowcontent

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How Unrecognizable Was The English Language Just 300 Years Ago?

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When we accuse teenagers of mutilating English to an unrecognizable form, we sometimes forget that in the grand scheme of things, the version of English we hold near and dear to our hearts has only been around for a short time.

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Once all but left for dead, is cursive handwriting making a comeback? - The Washington Post

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Once all but left for dead, is cursive handwriting making a comeback? - The Washington Post

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Ban on Latin abbreviations, eg etc and ie | News | The Times & The Sunday Times

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Ban on Latin abbreviations, eg etc and ie | News | The Times & The Sunday Times

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Latin abbreviations are to be barred from government websites because they may confuse people whose first language is not English.

The terms can also confuse voice technology programmes for blind and partially sighted people - "eg", short for exempli gratia, often being misread as "egg".

Officials who write material for Whitehall websites have been instructed to use alternatives. Eventually all Latin abbreviations will be edited out.

It will be a big task. The term eg appears more than 4,000 times on pages published on the gov.uk portal. It will be replaced by "like", "such as" or "including".

Also facing a purge are "ie", from the Latin id est, and "etc", an abbreviation of etcetera.

Persis Howe, from the Government Digital Service, wrote in a blog...

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Ban on Latin abbreviations, eg etc and ie

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Latin abbreviations are to be barred from government websites because they may confuse people whose first language is not English. The terms can also confuse voice technology programmes for blind and partially sighted people - "eg", short for exempli gratia, often being misread as "egg".

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The BFG reminds us that wordplay is part of learning and mastering language

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The BFG reminds us that wordplay is part of learning and mastering language

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Now that Roald Dahl's 1982 novel The BFG has finally been transformed into a big screen feature film courtesy of Disney and director Steven Spielberg, one aspect of the book that has delighted children and adults alike will be made more obvious: the Big Friendly Giant's tendency to gobblefunk, the BFG's own term for the malapropisms, spoonerisms and nonsense words that litter his speech.

But while the BFG's words are judged errors by the human beans that he meets, Dahl shows how his confusion is often due to the ambiguity of a language where one word may have multiple meanings, or different words the same pronunciation. As the BFG offers in his defence: "I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right."

The BFG's gobblefunking belongs to a tradition of language play and nonsense writing best known from the works of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Lear's poetry, limericks and prose writing bubble over with nonsense words: perhaps best-known is the runcible spoon with which the Owl and the Pussycat dined on their mince and slices of quince.

Carroll's books, poems, diaries, and letters to children are littered with enigmas, charades, acrostics, palindromes, conundrums, cyphers and riddles, testifying to his love of word play. His coining of nonsense words is densest in the poem, Jabberwocky, encountered by Alice when she passes through the looking-glass.

John Tenniel

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

Some of the strangest of these are decrypted for Alice by Humpty Dumpty, although his explanations - brillig means four o'clock in the afternoon when you begin broiling things for dinner - are not always convincing.

Readers of The BFG must fall back on their own ingenuity to explain his neologisms, many of which draw upon genuine techniques of word formation, which offer real insights into how words are formed and their meanings decoded. The BFG's language includes words coined for their sounds, drawing upon both onomatopoeia - where the word imitates the sound it describes - and phonaesthesia - where clusters of sounds become associated with specific meanings.

Phonaesthemes in English include sl-: slug, slurry, slimy, all of which carry a sense of greasiness and unpleasantness. To these the BFG adds slopgroggled, to describe a sticky situation. Words like ucky-mucky and thingalingaling play on the reduplication of vowel sounds, while others tap into the connotations of certain syllables. Although we may never have encountered words like, for example, grobswitchy, rotsome, bogrotting, muckfrumping and grizzling, we can be sure that they signal something unpleasant. In contrast, we are sure to enjoy anything that can be described as phizz-whizzing, squiffling or wondercrump. Other words, like whoopsey-splunkers, fizzwiggler and fluckgungled play on the way children enjoy rolling unusual and amusing sounds around their mouths.

Other words the BFG coins are from errors. For example, in spoonerisms snapperwhipper, dory-hunky and catasterous disastrophe, the initial syllables have been swapped. Others, like biffsquiggled, are compounds of genuine English words that can be understood by analysing the component parts. Other words still are formed by blending two standard English words, such as "delicious" and "scrumptious" to form delumptious. One example, the BFG's scrumdiddlyumptious, is a word that, despite its unwieldy length, has passed into general usage.

Play leads to mastery

These processes of associating sounds and senses, and disassembling and recombining word elements to recover their meanings, are valuable ways of promoting a child's understanding of word structure - what linguists call morphology. Studies of child psychology and education have shown the importance of play in putting a child's developing linguistic skills into practice. Children have a natural propensity to play with language from an early age, as seen in the nonsense rhymes that accompany playground games, an enjoyment of riddles, puns, knock-knock jokes and so on.

Despite the prophecies of doom about the impact that the abbreviations, clippings, initialisms and emoticons used in "txt spk" and electronic messaging will have on child literacy, research has shown the opposite effect. Playing with language is an important means of developing metalinguistic awareness - an understanding of not just how to use language, but of how it works. It offers a chance to step back and consider a language's structure and properties. As the linguist David Crystal puts it: "Language play actually helps you learn your language."

Recent controversies about the emphasis of teaching of English grammar, spelling and punctuation and the associated tests suggest that we're in danger of losing sight of the pleasure in learning about language in primary classrooms. We need to rediscover the joy of gobblefunking.

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The BFG reminds us that wordplay is part of learning and mastering language

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Now that Roald Dahl's 1982 novel The BFG has finally been transformed into a big screen feature film courtesy of Disney and director Steven Spielberg, one aspect of the book that has delighted children and adults alike will be made more obvious: the Big Friendly Giant's tendency to gobblefunk, the BFG's own term for the malapropisms, spoonerisms and nonsense words that litter his speech.

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Meet the People Who Make Up Alien Languages | Nerdist

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Meet the People Who Make Up Alien Languages | Nerdist

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When you watch a movie or TV show that has a fictional culture in it, and they speak to each other in a language you've never heard, someone had to create that language. Now, it'd be very easy to just make up some gobbledygook and call it "Martian" or whatever, but for a culture to have authenticity, even when it is not itself authentic, you need to spend some time and actually, you know, create the language, from every guttural noise to every predicate noise. This is where people credited as "ConLangers" in movies and TV shows come into play, and their work is amazingly intricate and requires some serious skill.

The above video produced by the Motion Picture Academy highlights three of these ConLangers who have contributed three of the most complex and popular languages in modern films. First, Paul Frommer who created the Na'vi language for James Cameron's , David Peterson who created Dothraki for Game of Thrones and the Dark Elven language for Thor: The Dark World, and perhaps the most famous of all, Marc Okrand who cemented and filled-out the Klingon language beginning in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. All of these languages are amazingly different, and all of them had to basically be built from the ground up, with the exception of a few words here and there.

It's astonishing how complex each of the languages are. Books have been written filling out words and phrases not used in any movie or TV episode; classes can be taken to learn to speak them, and societies exist for people who have become fluent and demand more things to say. It's a whole cottage industry, but as Okrand says in the video, "It's not bringing to life something that I've created, it's bring to better life something somebody else has created."

Do you speak any of these fictional (although now quite real) languages? How about any of those ones Tolkien made up? Let us know in the comments below which, and write it in that language please.

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Image: Paramount Pictures Kyle Anderson is the Weekend Editor and a film and TV critic for Nerdist.com. Follow him on Twitter!

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Meet the People Who Make Up Alien Languages | Nerdist

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When you watch a movie or TV show that has a fictional culture in it, and they speak to each other in a language you've never heard, someone had to create that language.

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Visualizing the Global Network of Languages - Scientific American Blog Network

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Visualizing the Global Network of Languages - Scientific American Blog Network

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Advertisement

In the world of complex data graphics, interactive nodal network diagrams can offer some of the richest data exploration opportunities. This week, the Macro Connections Group at MIT Media Lab released Global Language Network, an interactive visualization of the world's many languages and their relationships to each other.

This colorful web of information represents an ideal use of the nodal diagram as a means of visual communication. Before you even glance down to see the legend or hover over the circles to view the associated data, a primary message emerges effortlessly: English stands at the center among the most popular languages, and shows that it has the most abundant and strongest connections with other languages. Meanwhile, circle colors suggest categories of related tongues, providing some intuitive context for the connection patterns.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this visualization is the range of data sources involved. The connection lines are based on how frequently texts are translated from one language to another, but users can choose to view data from books, Twitter, or Wikipedia. The visual results are remarkably distinct in each case.

Intrigued? In addition to exploring the visualization, you can read the associated paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. And for more on world languages and their connections, see Michael Balter's story on the ancient spread of Proto-Indo-European tongues, from the May 2016 issue of Scientific American. (Subscribers: for full article content, including the associated graphic, click on the "download" link.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Amanda Montañez

Amanda Montañez is an associate graphics editor at Scientific American.

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Visualizing the Global Network of Languages

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In the world of complex data graphics, interactive nodal network diagrams can offer some of the richest data exploration opportunities. This week, the Macro Connections Group at MIT Media Lab released Global Language Network, an interactive visualization of the world's many languages and their relationships to each other.

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Dialect A game about language and how it dies Order Now

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The sounds of languages that died thousands of years ago have been brought to life again through technology that uses statistics in a revolutionary new way.

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How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton foregrounds the pleasure and power of words.

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How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton foregrounds the pleasure and power of words.

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Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Sure, the musical Hamilton has racked up a record number of Tony nominations, gets props from the first family, and helped keep the "ten-dollar founding father" on the ten-dollar bill. But among the endless accolades, there was one moment that was particularly sweet for those involved in the production: when 1,300 high schoolers from low-income areas of New York City descended on the Richard Rodgers Theatre last month for the first in a series of student matinees.

In the morning, students from the 12 participating high schools took the stage to perform their own takes on historical figures from the revolutionary and founding eras, using a curriculum especially designed by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The show's playwright and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, served as emcee along with Christopher Jackson, who plays George Washington, and they were visibly gleeful as the student performers spun their own verbal creations in the form of raps, songs, and poems.

After a Q&A with the cast, the students got to watch a performance that is by far the hottest ticket on Broadway (but only cost them $10 each, thanks to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation). Now it was the students' turn to be gleeful. One thing was clear from their genuine elation: The students felt a visceral connection to the play, and particularly to the language of the play.

Hamilton is, as Jackson told the students, "all about the words." There are more than 20,000 of them over the course of the play, delivered at a dizzying pace of 144 words per minute, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. As I observed in the Wall Street Journal, that includes some challenging vocabulary, like polymath, obfuscate, protean, and intransigent. The play also quotes directly from primary sources, such as Washington's Farewell Address. But for the students at the matinee, the language of Hamilton was no stumbling block. Quite the contrary, the attendees I talked to seemed to revel in the play's verbosity, seeing it as a kind of time machine taking them from their own vernacular to the language of the Founding Fathers more than two centuries ago.

What follows are some glimpses of Hamilton through the lens of language, based on my conversations with some of the people closest to the production, including author and historical consultant Ron Chernow, producer Jeffrey Seller, and cast member Daveed Diggs.
Freestyle Rap Meets Sondheim
The language of Hamilton swings vertiginously from literary to colloquial, from high-flying to down-and-dirty. But at its root, it reflects Lin-Manuel Miranda's lifelong fascination with the power of words in two seemingly disparate cultures: musical theater and hip-hop.

To get a sense of how Miranda effortlessly bridges these performance styles, it's worth listening to his podcast conversation with Public Forum director Jeremy McCarter from June 2013, two years before Hamilton's debut. At the time, Miranda had seen success with his first musical, In the Heights, and when he wasn't busy hatching Hamilton, he was performing with the hip-hop improv troupe Freestyle Love Supreme, a crew that included his future Gen. Washington, Christopher Jackson. Miranda breaks down in fascinating detail how he can come up with freestyle rhymes on the fly-a dizzying talent that he would later show off for a national audience on The Tonight Show and in the White House Rose Garden.

When McCarter asks him which came first, his love of hip-hop or his love of theater, Miranda responds, "They were one and the same to me. ... If you love wordplay, why wouldn't you love both of these things?" Tellingly, on his list of favorite rappers he makes room for Harold Hill, the patter-slinging con artist from The Music Man. And as he tells McCarter, he has provided something of a rap education to fellow wordplay lover Stephen Sondheim, sharing songs with him that are heavy on verbal pyrotechnics, like Aesop Rock's " No Regrets."

Sondheim was clearly on board with Miranda's vision in 2011 when he published the book Look, I Made a Hat. "Of all the forms of contemporary pop music, rap is the closest to traditional musical theater (its roots are in vaudeville), both in its vamp-heavy rhythmic drive and in its verbal playfulness," Sondheim wrote. He lauded Miranda for melding the two forms in In the Heights. "Rap is a natural language for him and he is a master of the form, but enough of a traditionalist to know the way he can utilize its theatrical potential." Sondheim saw that potential coming to fruition in Miranda's next project: "a piece about Alexander Hamilton."
Hamilton, the Man of Words
As is already Hamilton lore, Miranda was inspired to create a hip-hop-infused telling of the life of Alexander Hamilton after reading Ron Chernow's biography on vacation in Mexico in 2008. When Chernow saw In the Heights later that year, he went backstage and learned of Miranda's Hamiltonian obsession. Soon they were talking over all things Hamilton at Chernow's home in Brooklyn Heights.

"My earliest conversations with Lin really revolved around language," Chernow told me. Miranda viewed Hamilton's life as a "classic hip-hop narrative": He was like a rapper who used the power of words to lift his way out of poverty and obscurity and into fame. Miranda "saw Hamilton's rise as inseparable from his command of language," Chernow said. Hamilton, the "bastard orphan" immigrant from St. Croix, rose to power on the strength of his words, but his verbal ingenuity was a double-edged sword that also precipitated his downfall.

While Chernow did not initially appreciate how the idiom of hip-hop could be a vehicle for Hamilton's story, Miranda set about educating him as he had done for Sondheim. Chernow learned two things right away. First, "with hip-hop, you can pack an enormous amount of information into the lyrics," he said. And second, hip-hop's reliance on rhyme, both rhymed endings and internal rhymes, allows for all manner of wordplay to delight audiences. Chernow realized that what Miranda was constructing was no less than a return to the verse dramas of an earlier age, when people would "sit all evening listening to rhymed couplets and quatrains," immersed in the pleasure of language.

Chernow recalls Miranda sitting on the couch, snapping his fingers and performing the first fruits of his labor, a rap he called "The Hamilton Mixtape," which with a few changes would become the opening number of the show. "It was the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard," Chernow said. "He was creating a unique idiom that was a blend of standard 18 th-century speech and 21 st-century slang."

Chernow was struck immediately by the heightened language in the first stanza introducing Hamilton's story: "by providence, impoverished, in squalor." And then the second stanza takes a turn for the colloquial, with the "ten-dollar founding father without a father, who got a lot farther by working a lot harder." "It's delightful how the language keeps shifting back and forth," Chernow remarked.

When Miranda unveiled "The Hamilton Mixtape" at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009, he put Hamilton's linguistic derring-do front and center. "I think he embodies the word's ability to make a difference," he said by way of introduction. Of course, Miranda's own words would prove equally captivating.
An Ingenuitive Performance
As Hamilton morphed into a full-fledged musical, hip-hop ended up being one of many elements in its eclectic mix of performance styles. But it has a pride of place: The characters who are the most quick-witted, such as Hamilton himself and his sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler, spit rapid-fire rhymes that would make the most precocious rapper proud. As Hamilton boasts in "Non-Stop," "I'll be Socrates/ Throwing verbal rocks at these mediocrities"-a line that manages to highlight Hamilton's classical education while echoing similar rhymes from both and the Wu-Tang Clan. (See Forrest Wickman's thorough catalog for more of the musical's allusions to hip-hop and R&B.)

Hamilton often engages in expert wordplay, as when he punnishly turns the words of loyalist Samuel Seabury against him in " Farmer Refuted." Seabury's staid message against the Revolution is upended by Hamilton's counterpoint by means of homophony and assonance: Seabury's " Heed not the rabble ..." is met with Hamilton's " He'd have you all un ravel ..." In the recently published companion book, Hamilton: The Revolution (known as the Hamiltome to fans), Miranda notes that this kind of linguistic dismantling "felt like the kind of superpower Hamilton could deploy to impress his friends."

The word from the play that best describes Hamilton is one that you'd be hard-pressed to find in any dictionary: ingenuitive. The Marquis de Lafayette, played by Daveed Diggs, praises Hamilton as "ingenuitive and fluent in French" in the musical's fastest-paced number (at 6.3 words per second), "Guns and Ships." In the companion book, Miranda reveals, "I thought everyone knew this word, yet I don't know where I've heard it." He and his collaborators argued before deciding to keep it in. "It's apparently a super-archaic word," Miranda writes. "I really don't know where I met it, but it was there for me when I needed it." It turns out it's not all that archaic, dating only to the turn of the 20th century in the written record, but there is no doubt it is le mot juste, as Lafayette might say.

And it is fitting that Diggs-as-Lafayette is the one who gets to use the word. When we first meet Lafayette in "My Shot" at the beginning of Act One, he stumbles over pronouncing the word anarchy, but by the time of "Guns and Ships," he is, as Miranda puts it, "a speed demon." His newfound fluency is intended to demonstrate how the character has come into his own as a war hero. "Doesn't hurt that Daveed is one of the most technically gifted rappers I've ever met, so I knew I could build him tapestries," Miranda writes in the Hamiltome.

Diggs, who also plays Thomas Jefferson in the second act, told me that he connected with the language of the play immediately because of his background in hip-hop. (He is a member of the Los Angeles-based rap trio Clipping and also joined with Miranda and Jackson in Freestyle Love Supreme.) "One of the things that hip-hop does really well is it gets the most out of contemporary vernacular. Rappers compress a lot of information into short amounts of time," he said.

The verbal gymnastics can also convey character development, Diggs observes. Just as Lafayette undergoes a transformation in the first act, Jefferson's rapping grows more sophisticated in the second. Jefferson is initially bested by Hamilton in two Cabinet confrontations done in the style of rap battles. Eventually, though, he triumphs through the power of words in the song " Washington on Your Side," culminating with his resignation as secretary of state: "If Washington isn't gon' listen to disciplined dissidents, this is the difference: This kid is out!" Diggs identifies that line as "when we get a real virtuosic rap moment from him."
Bringing the Language to Students
The plan for student matinees was hatched before Hamilton moved to Broadway, soon after it opened at the Public Theater in early 2015. At one show, Chernow, who attended many performances, spotted Lesley Herrmann, executive director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. When he asked what she thought, Herrmann exulted that "this is the greatest opportunity in our lifetime to interest schoolchildren in American history, and we have to take advantage of it," Chernow recalled.

Chernow introduced Herrmann to Hamilton's producer, Jeffrey Seller, who was immediately on board with the idea of having the Gilder Lehrman Institute design a curriculum for New York City high school students and getting as many as 20,000 of them to attend matinees. Seller told me he had developed a similar matinee program when he produced Rent, in which students presented performance pieces onstage based on the play's themes. "It was always my goal to share Hamilton with students," he said, and he found kindred spirits at Gilder Lehrman, which endeavors to make American history come alive by using primary-source documents.

Seller hoped that Hamilton could serve as a linguistic bridge to reach a diverse audience of young people. "It's a marvelous barrier breaker, because the language of the play gives us the information we want and need," he said, adding that it gives students a foundation that allows them to go back to primary sources without being intimidated by antiquated verbiage.

In the lead-up to the first student matinee last month, I got to spend time with teachers and students at Brooklyn's Fort Hamilton High School, one of the 12 participating schools. (And no, they weren't selected simply because of their Hamiltonian name.) Using the Gilder Lehrman curriculum, students had come up with performance pieces based on historical figures, fusing linguistic styles on the model of Hamilton but applying their own idiosyncratic stamp.

One Advanced Placement U.S. History student, Hannah Almontaser, delivered a rap as King George III with Kanye-like swagger. Three of her classmates added a dose of Beyoncé to their "Women Formation," in which they portrayed Abigail Adams, the black poet Phillis Wheatley, and Hamilton's wife, Eliza, as proto-feminists.*

At the matinee, 160 students from Fort Hamilton joined with more than 1,000 others from around the city, and the excitement was palpable. Chernow was in attendance and got something of the rock-star treatment from students who asked him to sign their programs, T-shirts, and Hamiltomes.

Afterward, Chernow marveled at how enthusiastically the students engaged with the show and its language. "It was absolutely fascinating to watch what the students responded to," he said, especially the humor, the romance, and of course the rap battles. The wordiness was hardly an impediment, he noted. "It's a very sophisticated and erudite show, but I felt they were picking up everything. It didn't go over the heads." A vital link had been forged through the power of language: Words can indeed make a difference.

*Correction, May 10, 2016: This post originally misspelled Phillis Wheatley's first name.

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How Hamilton Centers the Power and Pleasure of Language

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Sure, the musical Hamilton has racked up a record number of Tony nominations, gets props from the first family, and helped keep the "ten-dollar founding father" on the ten-dollar bill.

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‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Indian’ to Be Scrubbed From All Federal Laws

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‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Indian’ to Be Scrubbed From All Federal Laws

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As the country begins to reconcile its sometimes inglorious past, as with Confederate statues and heroes being swept into the dustbin of history, President Barack Obama signed a bill taking racially offensive words such as "negro" and "Oriental" out of all Federal laws, reports Mediaite.

Sponsored by Congresswoman Grace Meng and co-sponsored by all 51 members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, bill H.R.4238 will strike words such as "Negro, American Indian, Eskimo, Oriental, or Aleut or a Spanish speaking individual of Spanish descent" and replace them with "Asian American, Native Hawaiian, a Pacific Islander, African American, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Native American, or an Alaska Native."

There has been a lot of controversy lately about how "ethnic" groups in the U.S. are referred to, especially with racially-charged words such as "r-skins," the "n-word" and "Oriental," and so this bill is just one more way that people of color can and will define themselves with words they find acceptable.

Rep. Meng, who is Chinese-American and from Queens, N.Y., said that she is especially happy that the word Oriental is going the way of the covered wagon.

"Many Americans may not be aware that the word 'Oriental' is derogatory," says Meng. "But it is an insulting term that needed to be removed from the books, and I am extremely pleased that my legislation to do that is now the law of the land."
Read more at Mediaite.

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'Negro,' 'Oriental' and 'Indian' to Be Scrubbed From All Federal Laws

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As the country begins to reconcile its sometimes inglorious past, as with Confederate statues and heroes being swept into the dustbin of history, President Barack Obama signed a bill taking racially offensive words such as "negro" and "Oriental" out of all Federal laws, reports Mediaite.

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Modern Distribution of Celtic Languages In The 21st Century - Brilliant Maps

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Modern Distribution of Celtic Languages In The 21st Century - Brilliant Maps

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Map showing the Modern Distribution of Celtic Languages In The 21st Century by reddit user targumures

The map above shows the distribution of Celtic language speakers in Europe in the early 21st century.

In order of the number of speakers they are:

Welsh: 562,000 speakers (2011) - 19.0% of Wales population

Breton: 210,000 speakers (2007) - 6.7% of Brittany's population

Irish (Irish Gaelic): 94,000 regular speakers (2011) - 1.5% of Ireland (including NI) population. Note while Irish is the National Language in the Republic of Ireland, it is the second most widely spoken language there. However, around 1,000,000 people can speak Irish as a second language in the Republic.

Scottish Gaelic: 57,000 speakers (2011) - 1.1% of Scotland's population

Manx: Extinct (1975) - 1,650 revival speakers - 1.9% of Isle of Man's population

Cornish: Extinct (1800) - few hundred revival sepakers - less than 1% of Cornwall's population

To learn more about Celtic languages and the Celts have a look at:

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Modern Distribution of Celtic Languages In The 21st Century

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Map showing the Modern Distribution of Celtic Languages In The 21st Century by reddit user targumures The map above shows the distribution of Celtic language speakers in Europe in the early 21st century. In order of the number of speakers they are: Welsh: 562,000 speakers (2011) -

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How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures | Aeon Ideas

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How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures | Aeon Ideas

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A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines are packed with fixed epithets and clichés. The bard is not concerned with originality, but with intonation and delivery: he or she is perfectly attuned to the circumstances of the day, and to the mood and expectations of his or her listeners.

If this were happening 6,000-plus years ago, the poet's words would in no way have been anchored in visible signs, in text. For the vast majority of the time that human beings have been on Earth, words have had no worldly reality other than the sound made when they are spoken.

As the theorist Walter J Ong pointed out in Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word (1982), it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, now to imagine how differently language would have been experienced in a culture of 'primary orality'. There would be nowhere to 'look up a word', no authoritative source telling us the shape the word 'actually' takes. There would be no way to affirm the word's existence at all except by speaking it - and this necessary condition of survival is important for understanding the relatively repetitive nature of epic poetry. Say it over and over again, or it will slip away. In the absence of fixed, textual anchors for words, there would be a sharp sense that language is charged with power, almost magic: the idea that words, when spoken, can bring about new states of affairs in the world. They do not so much describe, as invoke.

As a consequence of the development of writing, first in the ancient Near East and soon after in Greece, old habits of thought began to die out, and certain other, previously latent, mental faculties began to express themselves. Words were now anchored and, though spellings could change from one generation to another, or one region to another, there were now physical traces that endured, which could be transmitted, consulted and pointed to in settling questions about the use or authority of spoken language.

Writing rapidly turned customs into laws, agreements into contracts, genealogical lore into history. In each case, what had once been fundamentally temporal and singular was transformed into something eternal (as in, 'outside of time') and general. Even the simple act of making everyday lists of common objects - an act impossible in a primary oral culture - was already a triumph of abstraction and systematisation. From here it was just one small step to what we now call 'philosophy'.

Homer's epic poetry, which originates in the same oral epic traditions as those of the Balkans or of West Africa, was written down, frozen, fixed, and from this it became 'literature'. There are no arguments in the Iliad: much of what is said arises from metrical exigencies, the need to fill in a line with the right number of syllables, or from epithets whose function is largely mnemonic (and thus unnecessary when transferred into writing). Yet Homer would become an authority for early philosophers nonetheless: revealing truths about humanity not by argument or debate, but by declamation, now frozen into text.

Plato would express extreme concern about the role, if any, that poets should play in society. But he was not talking about poets as we think of them: he had in mind reciters, bards who incite emotions with living performances, invocations and channellings of absent persons and beings.

It is not orality that philosophy rejects, necessarily: Socrates himself rejected writing, identifying instead with a form of oral culture. Plato would also ensure the philosophical canonisation of his own mentor by writing down (how faithfully, we don't know) what Socrates would have preferred to merely say, and so would have preferred to have lost to the wind. Arguably, it is in virtue of Plato's recording that we might say, today, that Socrates was a philosopher.

Plato and Aristotle, both, were willing to learn from Homer, once he had been written down. And Socrates, though Plato still felt he had to write him down, was already engaged in a sort of activity very different from poetic recitation. This was dialectic: the structured, working-through of a question towards an end that has not been predetermined - even if this practice emerged indirectly from forms of reasoning only actualised with the advent of writing.

The freezing in text of dialectical reasoning, with a heavy admixture (however impure or problematic) of poetry, aphorism and myth, became the model for what, in the European tradition, was thought of as 'philosophy' for the next few millennia.

Why are these historical reflections important today? Because what is at stake is nothing less than our understanding of the scope and nature of philosophical enquiry.

The Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico wrote in his Scienza Nuova (1725): 'the order of ideas must follow the order of institutions'. This order was, namely: 'First the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers.' It is implicit for Vico that the philosophers in these academies are not illiterate. The order of ideas is the order of the emergence of the technology of writing.

Within academic philosophy today, there is significant concern arising from how to make philosophy more 'inclusive', but no interest at all in questioning Vico's order, in going back and recuperating what forms of thought might have been left behind in the woods and fields.

The groups ordinarily targeted by philosophy's 'inclusivity drive' already dwell in the cities and share in literacy, even if discriminatory measures often block their full cultivation of it. No arguments are being made for the inclusion of people belonging to cultures that value other forms of knowledge: there are no efforts to recruit philosophers from among Inuit hunters or Hmong peasants.

The practical obstacles to such recruitment from a true cross-section of humanity are obvious. Were it to happen, the simple process of moving from traditional ways of life into academic institutions would at the same time dilute and transform the perspectives that are deserving of more attention. Irrespective of such unhappy outcomes, there is already substantial scholarship on these forms of thought accumulated in philosophy's neighbouring disciplines - notably history, anthropology, and world literatures - to which philosophers already have access. It's a literature that could serve as a corrective to the foundational bias, present since the emergence of philosophy as a distinct activity.

As it happens, there are few members of primary oral cultures left in the world. And yet from a historical perspective the great bulk of human experience resides with them. There are, moreover, members of literate cultures, and subcultures, whose primary experience of language is oral, based in storytelling, not argumentation, and that is living and charged, not fixed and frozen. Plato saw these people as representing a lower, and more dangerous, use of language than the one worthy of philosophers.

Philosophers still tend to disdain, or at least to conceive as categorically different from their own speciality, the use of language deployed by bards and poets, whether from Siberia or the South Bronx. Again, this disdain leaves out the bulk of human experience. Until it is eradicated, the present talk of the ideal of inclusion will remain mere lip-service.

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How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures - Justin E H Smith | Aeon Ideas

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A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines are packed with fixed epithets and clichés. The bard is not concerned wit...

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Square foot plots of land for sale in Ireland and tree planting to offset carbon footprint

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Literary Characters and Their Modern-Day Tabloid Counterparts – Flavorwire

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Literary Characters and Their Modern-Day Tabloid Counterparts – Flavorwire

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Between gossip blogs and the weekly glossies, watching high profile people play out their personal indiscretions and humiliations in public has become a staple of modern culture. We witch hunt mistresses, follow divorces like sporting matches, and feast on depraved behavior.

What if your favorite literary characters were subjected to the same level of scrutiny? We have compiled a list of fictional characters that in today's day and age would be tabloid sensations for their turbulent romances and dramatic downward spirals. Lindsay Lohan and Jon Gosselin step aside, here are the top ten literary characters that the tabloids of today would be crazy for.

Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby

Jay Gatsby's reputation precedes him in The Great Gatsby-the lavish Jazz Age parties and extravagant lifestyle stir everyone's curiosity as he never seems present at his own soirees. The reality is more interesting than the rumors: bootlegging liquor, ties to the mob, and his goal to steal Daisy away from her husband. Modern day tabloid equivalent? P Diddy.
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina's insatiable need to attach meaning to her life through love leads her down a path of adultery with Vronsky. As she succumbs to her emotions and dispenses with rational thinking her behavior becomes increasingly erratic, ending with her demise on the railroad tracks. The public loves to feast on people who love too intensely. Modern day tabloid equivalent? Britney Spears.

Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter

Puritanical Boston mastered the art of public shaming long before the blogs and weeklies made a business of it. Hester Prynne is shunned for adultery and having an illegitimate child. Refusing to name the father of her kid, she shoulders the full burden of blame. Hester Prynne's quiet resolve further enrages the townspeople who want to see public remorse. Modern day tabloid equivalent? Padma Lakshmi, the smokin' hot Top Chef host who still hasn't disclosed the name of her baby daddy.

Emma Bovary from Madame Bovary

Here is a woman made for reality television. Emma Bovary's social climbing, extramarital affairs, and living outside her means in an attempt to place herself among those in the upper echelons of society that she is desperate to be counted among. Despite her intense desire to rise in society, she bungles all opportunities presented to her with poor etiquette and establishing herself as an outsider. Modern day equivalent? A stint on The Bachelor followed by a season on The Bad Girl's Club. Or social rattlesnake Kelly Bensimon from The Real Housewives of New York.

The Wife of Bath from Canterbury Tales

The Wife of Bath presents herself as an expert on marriage; as she should with five marriages under her belt. She readily admits to using her feminine wiles to control her husbands-touting sexual power as currency in her relationships. Crass and brash, she states at the start of her prologue that a good husband is old, rich, and submissive. Modern day tabloid equivalent? Each and every one of the Bravo Real Housewives.

Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair

Becky Sharp is a social climber extraordinaire who leeches on to her best friend from finishing school, the wealthy Amelia Sedley. After a bungled attempt to ensnare Amelia's brother, Becky moves on to another eligible and monied bachelor-who is promptly disowned and dropped from the family will after they elope. Becky then has a flirtation with Amelia's husband and finally a marquess, which winds up being a social bomb. Forced to slink out of the UK, Becky winds up in Germany in the company of con artists and loan sharks. Modern day tabloid equivalent? Anna Nicole Smith.

Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice

The quintessentially appealing unattainable man: aloof, handsome and the most eligible bachelor around. He had his pick of any woman and chose our heroine with no connections or fortune to speak of. We can only imagine how his engagement to Elizabeth Bennett would have been received by the busybodies of their day. Modern day tabloid equivalent? George Clooney, the eternal bachelor.

Countess Ellen Olenska from The Age of Innocence

New York 1870's high society is scandalized by the arrival of the freshly divorced Countess Ellen Olenska. The Countess' former husband was abusive, adulterous, and squandered her fortune. Accordingly, the Countess is shunned by society for her divorce, foreign clothing, and disregard for the rules. Adding insult to injury, she falls in love with her cousin's fiance-Newland Archer. Modern day tabloid equivalent? Princess Diana.

The non-fictional tale of Abelard and Heloise will crush your soul. Abelard is studying under the tutelage of Heloise's uncle, who upon learning of their romantic entanglement immediately separates them. A snapshot of how things unravel from here: a baby is born, marriage is proposed, the proposal is reluctantly accepted but meant to stay secret, the mean uncle tells the world, Heloise goes to a convent, and Abelard is castrated by Heloise's uncle. The two communicate through letters for the rest of their lives and never see each other again. Modern day tabloid equivalent? Thankfully, no one... that we know of.

Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote captured the 'young woman about town in New York City' theme long before the Tinsley Mortimers and Olivia Palermos of the world (now with reality shows, natch) were permanent fixtures on Page Six. Holly Golightly is no heiress though, and staying afloat on her own requires resourcefulness. Modern day tabloid equivalent? Take your pick.

Who would you add to the list? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Literary Characters and Their Modern-Day Tabloid Counterparts

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Between gossip blogs and the weekly glossies, watching high profile people play out their personal indiscretions and humiliations in public has become a staple of modern culture. We witch hunt mistresses, follow divorces like sporting matches, and feast on depraved behavior. What if your favorite literary characters were subjected to the same level of scrutiny?

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The Story of Lincos, the Math-Based Language Created to Communicate With Extraterrestrials - The Atlantic

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The Story of Lincos, the Math-Based Language Created to Communicate With Extraterrestrials - The Atlantic

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There's no evidence that Freudenthal ever began work on this second volume, but the fact that Lincos is technically an uncompleted work has failed to temper its enduring legacy within the SETI community. In 1999, his mathematical language was given new life by Dutil and his colleague Stéphane Dumas when the two astrophysicists used Lincos as a starting point for a series of messages they sent out into the cosmos from a radio telescope in Ukraine. Known as the Evaptoria Messages, these transmissions were the third to ever be sent out to potential alien civilizations, and the first to draw from Freudenthal's Lincos protocols.

"Lincos was the starting point of our language and to my knowledge, there are not many messages that have been sent using that approach," said Dumas. "Most messages sent to the stars are series of pictures describing simple ideas, similar to the Arecibo message in 1974."

Unlike the Arecibo message, which was the first message intentionally sent into the cosmos for the purpose of communication, Dutil and Dumas' goal was to send an encyclopedic message, one containing as much information about life on Earth as possible. The duo designed a simple character alphabet that would allow for the maximum amount of information to be transmitted during their limited use of the Ukrainian radar transmitter. In keeping with Freudenthal's dictum that interstellar messages should begin with topics that would conceivably be known to any intelligence in the universe, the 1999 message began by teaching the recipient how to count, before moving on to more complex subjects such as physics and biology. The final message consisted of 23 pages (one page was 127x127 pixels) and was sent to its targets three times each to ensure sufficient redundancy.

Importantly, the message also included a formal request for a reply.

The targets for the message these messages were selected from SETI's long list of potential solar systems that might harbor intelligent life. The candidates, all somewhere between 50 and 70 light-years away, were chosen based on a number of criteria, such as the age of the star and its position in the galaxy. The first message can be expected to arrive at its cosmic address (Hip4872 in Cassiopeia) sometime around 2035.

In more recent years, the SETI community has refined Lincos to develop more advanced options for interstellar communication. For example, the language CosmicOS was designed by MIT's Paul Fitz as a computer program that could be run by extraterrestrials once they had received the message. Then there's a second-generation lingua cosmica designed by the Dutch mathematician Alexander Ollongren (described by Dutil as "the only human to master Freudenthal") which largely relies on constructive logic to compose the message.

While a standard language for interstellar communication doesn't yet exist within the SETI community, CosmicOS and the second generation of Lincos neatly encapsulate the two ends of the spectrum: On one end is CosmicOS, which has the capability to transmit more information, but also has more logistical problems as a result; on the other is the new version of Lincos, with a smaller data package and a more limited amount of information that can be sent.

Yet according to Duntil and Dumas, these two disparate approaches to cosmic communications need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, they see them as two potential steps in a much larger program, where interstellar communication begin with a more simple message of greeting in one language and then proceeds to send increasingly complex messages in another. Yet regardless of the package, the duo agrees that any messages sent or received by extraterrestrial civilizations are going to be strongly rooted in mathematics.

"The creation of any language to communicate with an alien civilization is very difficult, because you need something called a metalanguage to make the bridge between the artificial language and the alien's language," said Dumas. "The metalanguage par excellence is mathematics because it is the base of science, and any civilization that has built a device to listen to radio waves knows science."

According to Dutil and Dumas, some more recent language designed for interstellar communication have incorporated more artistic elements such as music into the message-but at their core, most are still using Lincos as a starting point, at least in part.

Regardless of whether Lincos is totally abandoned in the future or continues to be a source of inspiration for our cosmic messages, Freudenthal's tome will always be remembered among SETI scientists as a manual for uniting species light-years apart, species that will in all probability have little but mathematics in common. It was a Dutch mathematician's attempt to make the alien familiar by rendering the most profound human emotions in mathematical equations.

Indeed, as Dumas was quick to point out, in many ways, Lincos was written more for Earthlings than ET.

"The creation of an interstellar language to communicate with an alien civilization is interesting, but in the end not very practical since the communication would occur over decades," said Dumas. "The exercise of creating a message is more of a benefit to us than the alien because it shows how we want to portray ourselves. What do we want to give ET - the truth, or a beautiful image? Will the message contain our history of war, famine, and ecological disaster, or only the nice things? Ultimately, an interstellar message is a reflection of humankind to itself."

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How to Build a Language to Communicate With Extraterrestrials

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There's no evidence that Freudenthal ever began work on this second volume, but the fact that Lincos is technically an uncompleted work has failed to temper its enduring legacy within the SETI community.

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'All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost' - ancient Elvish verse of prophecy. Shutterstock/Serhii Bobyk

The success of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies brought the languages that JRR Tolkien invented for the Elves to the attention of a much wider public. There are now numerous books and websites that allow devotees to learn Quenya and Sindarin. The origins of Quenya in Finnish and the Welsh inspirations of Sindarin have fascinated Tolkien fans, with many learning and expanding on the tongues that were created by the author the best part of 100 years ago.

Though enchanting, language invention has also baffled readers and critics alike. Bewildered critic Robert Reilly exclaimed in 1963: "No one ever exposed the nerves and fibres of his being in order to make up a language; it is not only insane but unnecessary." But that's where he was completely wrong.

Language invention for works of fiction has a long history, from Thomas More's Utopia and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, all the way to Tolkien's immediate predecessors, such as Percy Gray and Edward Bulwer Lytton.

Tolkien himself began composing his Middle-earth mythology at a time when the vogue for artificial languages was at its zenith. At the turn of the 20th century Esperanto was taking the world by storm, and it competed with more than 100 other artificial languages, including Volapuk, Ido and Novial. It is also worth remembering too that this same period was a time of language experimentation. Russian zaum, the Dada movement and Modernism (among others) were attempting to break language and make it afresh.

Tolkien's vice

In A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, edited by myself and Andrew Higgins, we present Tolkien's own reflections on his language invention. In particular, the full publication of A Secret Vice, a paper Tolkien gave in 1931 at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he talked about his engagement with Esperanto and his contribution to nursery languages (codes children use, often for playful communication). Tolkien went on to unveil his many experiments in inventing new languages that would be aesthetically pleasing, including a sketch of a previously unknown imaginary language, published for the first time in the new book. He also commented on the "coeval and congenital" art of creating a world and characters that would speak these languages - the first seeds of the vast secondary world of Middle-earth.

The book also includes a hitherto unpublished new essay on phonetic symbolism, in which Tolkien muses on the idea that the sounds of words may fit their meanings. Tolkien's drafts and notes for both essays are also included. Some of these notes make mention of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein - hardly the literary company one expects Tolkien to be seen alongside.

Contemporary popular culture has witnessed a renewed interest in fictional languages. Perhaps the best-known recent examples are Dothraki and High Valyrian, the languages invented by linguist David J. Petterson for HBO's Game of Thrones. But they are by no means the only ones. Even non-fans of the Star Trek franchise will have at least heard of Klingon, and James Cameron's Avatar also includes an invented language: Na'avi.

Whether intentional or not, Tolkien's language creation has been highly influential for this new generation of inventors. In A Secret Vice, Tolkien outlined several rules for constructing imaginary languages, which later inventors appear to have followed.

First, invented names and words should be coherent and consistent. Their sounds should both be aesthetically pleasing and fit the nature of the people who speak them. For example, the phonetic make-up of Klingon befits its militaristic speakers (who else would recite Shakespeare's "To be, or not to be" as "taH pagh taHbe"?)

Second, fictional languages should have a grammatical structure behind them. In Living Language Dothraki, Peterson gives all the grammatical rules you need to form questions such as "hash yer dothrae chek asshekh?" ("do you ride well today?").

And finally, invented languages should be an integral, indeed vital, part of myth-making - as Tolkien said: "Your language construction will breed a mythology". There are far too many examples to list here, but what may have astounded Tolkien is the central position that language invention has achieved in the building of new entertainment franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, and Game of Thrones.

Like Tolkien himself, many inventors of today's fictional languages have been linguists and communicators: Marc Okrand, the inventor of Klingon, has a PhD in linguistics from Berkeley; Paul Frommer, creator of Na'avi, is professor emeritus of clinical management communication at the University of Southern California. Tolkien's legacy also lives on in the many thousands of constructed languages (con-langs) which are invented just for fun and discovery through groups like The Language Construction Society.

What is rarer, and shows Tolkien's genius, is that the complex interweaving of myth-making and language invention that make Middle-earth feel real was the achievement of a single man. And that is a tough act to follow.

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The success of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies brought the languages that JRR Tolkien invented for the Elves to the attention of a much wider public. There are now numerous books and websites that allow devotees to learn Quenya and Sindarin.