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Este articulo discute el dialecto regional de ingles se habla en el sur de Florida conocido como ‘inglés Miami’. Este dialecto tiene rasgos que no aparecen en ninguna otra área de los Estados Unidos, como la pronunciación de la letra ‘l’ en la palabra ‘salmon’ (‘sall-mon’ en ingles miami). Esta pronunciación se viene de la palabra española para este pescado: salmón. Además, la influencia de español es vista en el sistema vocálico del dialecto. En inglés Miami, los hablantes ignoran la tendencia encontrada en otros partes de la costa atlántica de los EE. UU. a mover los vocales puestos en el fondo de la boca más adelante. También, ingles Miami tiene muchas frases prestados, se llaman ‘claques’, los cuales son esencialmente las traducciones directas de frases y modismos españoles. Por ejemplo, a decir “you get out of a car” en Miami, tú dices “down from the car”. Esto es a causa de la influencia de español en la región como esta frase es una traducción del español, bajar del carro. Los rasgos únicos de inglés Miami es debido a la historia y la geografía del sur de Florida. A deferencia del demás del sur de los Estados Unidos, el sur de Florida era poblado principalmente en el siglo XX y por las personas que venían del norte de los EE. UU. e inmigrantes del caribe y América Latina. Por lo tanto, el dialecto es distinto de cualquier dialecto de inglés en el sur de los EE. UU. El inglés Miami convive al mismo tiempo con el español, ‘Spanglish’, e ‘inglés común’ en la región.

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That much probably goes without saying; in its flora and fauna, its cultural history, its politics, its singularly bizarre criminal elements, and its natural ecosystems, there is nowhere else like it. So it should come as no surprise that, though it theoretically is part of the American South, pretty much any discussion of Southern linguistics comes with a caveat: "Well, except South Florida."

South Floridians do not have the pin-pen merger, which makes the word "ten" sound like "tin." They do not "front their O," which turns a word like "boat" into "beh-oht." They do not turn simple sounds into complex ones, like "friend" into "free-ay-ind" (this is also known as a Southern drawl). These are standards throughout the American South, and they are almost completely absent from South Florida.

So, well, what do South Floridians sound like? And how did this weirdness happen?

South Florida is not any one thing-how could it be, with a mix of Cubans, whites, Haitians, Colombians, Jews, Nicaraguans, Jamaicans, Bahamians, Barbadians, Puerto Ricans, and about a dozen others-but it's actually always been like that.

"Even in the pre-Columbian sense, South Florida is in the Caribbean, whether people want to admit that or not," says Phillip Carter, a linguistics professor at Florida International University and one of the foremost experts on the dialect of Miami and South Florida. As far back as we can reach, the tip of the Floridian peninsula has been a site of interchange: even the most famous of Florida indigenous groups, the Seminoles, was a heterogeneous conglomeration of tribes that didn't even get to Florida until the early 1700s.

Links between South Florida and the islands of the Caribbean before Europeans arrived are fiercely debated, but as soon as the Spanish showed up with their nice ships and drive for exploration (and other less good things), Florida became inextricably part of the Caribbean. Pirates, treasure hunters, slaves. But South Florida remained extremely sparsely populated until the 20th century.

Miami is a young city; in 1900, fewer than 2,000 people lived there. South Florida, unlike North Florida and the rest of the South, never really had enough people in it to become part of the rich tapestry of its region. South Florida was, mostly, a swamp, seen as an unforgiving backwater, suited maybe for some farms but not much else. That couldn't, and didn't, last: by 1930, buoyed by cheap land prices, people from North Florida and Georgia began moving down to the Miami area, increasing the city's population to over 100,000.

By 1950, that population had more than doubled, to about 250,000, but the new Miamians weren't, for the most part, Southerners. The promise of endless sunshine coupled with the new invention of air conditioning finally reached the North, and migrants from the Rust Belt and Northeast began coming down in droves. Italian-Americans and Jews from the New York area took their place alongside Southerners.

But that all changed soon. White flight, the movement of Anglo whites from cities, began in the 1950s and 1960s. The populations of, for example, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, all took huge hits. But Miami's didn't: it kept growing. That's all thanks to Cuba.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 found a young Fidel Castro taking over the island nation so near to Miami. Cuba's wealthy elite, newly targeted, fled en masse. In 1960, only 4 percent of Miami was Cuban; by 1970 it was 24 percent and by 1980 it was 36 percent. The success of Cubans in Miami, as well as Miami's familiar climate and substantial numbers of Spanish speakers, made it a hub for people fleeing Latin America: Colombians, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, and others chose Miami as their city as well.

The same thing happened with non-Spanish-speaking Caribbeans: there was already a base from the old slave systems, but Haitians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Bahamians, and Trinidadians came over as well. Today Miami is 70 percent Latino, about 20 percent black (mostly those Afro-Caribbeans), and only 12 percent white.

The fact that this happened so quickly has made Miami unusual, linguistically. The Miami dialect is not a second-language accent, like you'd hear from a Cuban immigrant whose first language is Spanish. It is an American English dialect like New York City English, Southern American English, or any other dialect in this country: spoken by native-born Americans who speak English either as a first language or fluently along with the language of their parents. Which doesn't stop the accent from seeming foreign to others: Carter says that his students will sometimes find themselves in a neighboring county, only to be asked what country they're from.

There's a whole bunch of things that set Miami English apart from other dialects. Much of it comes from Spanish: words or sounds that are pronounced in a certain way in Spanish will eventually show up in English. An easy one is the word "salmon," which in Miami is pronounced with the L: "sall-mon." That comes directly from the Spanish word for the fish, which is, well, salmón. (In Spanish, all consonants make one sound and one sound only.*)

But that letter L gets even weirder. It turns out Spanish and English have different pronunciations of the letter, which are referred to as "light L" and "dark L." English actually has both of them: a light L is found in words starting with L, like the word "light." A dark L is found sometimes at the ends of words, as in the word "feel." Say that out loud: can you hear how, in "feel," it sounds almost like "fee-yul"? That "ull-" sound as the first part of the L sound, that's a dark L, and it's made with a slightly different shape of your tongue in your mouth. In Miami, all L sounds are dark, so a word like "literally" sounds more like "ull-iterally."

Vowels also show some impact from Spanish. Elsewhere in the country, English speakers have a tendency to "front" some vowels. "Front" and "back" refers to the position of your tongue in your mouth, so "ee" is a front vowel, whereas "oh" and "ooh" are back vowels. In the South and Mid-Atlantic, English speakers will move their back vowels a little to the front, so "boat" sounds like "behh-oht." But in Spanish, that's absolutely not done, and that carries over to Miami English. Keeping "oh" in the back isn't unique to Miami, but it is unique to Miami within the Southern U.S.

Another vowel thing: much of the U.S. does this weird thing with the "ah" sound in words like "hand." When that vowel comes before a nasal consonant-M or N-it becomes kind of nasal and more complex, turning into more like "hay-and." Miamians, though, don't do that, so "hand" has the exact same vowel as "cat." Try saying it out loud. It feels strange, right? Almost British-y.

Miami English also has lots and lots of calques, which are loan phrases: essentially direct translations of Spanish phrases. In Atlanta, New York, and Seattle-actually, basically anywhere besides Miami-you get out of a car. In Miami, you get down from a car, because "down from the car" is a direct translation from the Spanish, bajar del carro. There are dozens of these: in Miami you don't get in line or wait in line, you make a line. You don't get married to somebody, you get married with them. When talking about money, you don't say "five ninety-nine" for $5.99; you say "five with ninety-nine." If you're not up to anything much, you might say "I'm eating shit," the basic equivalent of "I'm not doing shit." "Some of those English calques are based on Cuban Spanish, and my strong suspicion is that kids are learning the local variety of English unaware of the sources of the loan words," says Carter.

The verbs "come" and "go" are also different in English and Spanish, and thus different in Miami English. "In English, the verbs 'come' and 'go' are really peculiar," says Carter. "If you invite me to your house, I'll say 'I'm coming over now,' even though what I meant to say is 'I'm going over now.'" These words are based on "deiksis," the relationship between the speaker and listener. Theoretically, "come" should mean heading toward the speaker or listener, and "go" should mean heading away from the speaker or listener. Come to where I am, go to this other location. But in English, it's not that simple; we often get those totally wrong. Spanish speakers, and Miami English speakers, never get those wrong. An invitation to a birthday party in Miami might say, "Go celebrate Maria's 10th birthday party at the zoo." Sounds weird, but is actually correct: neither the sender nor the receiver of the invitation is at the zoo, so it should be "go."

One of the hardest to nail down is in the actual rhythm of speech. Spanish is syllable-timed, meaning that each syllable is spoken for the same length of time. English is not; it is stress-timed, so certain syllables, especially one-syllable words, are shorter than others. (Think about "for," "and," and pronouns like "he" and "she.") Miami English isn't exactly syllable-timed, but it's more regular than other English dialects, which makes it sound...different, somehow. "I have heard parodies of Latinos, or Latino characters who are putting on being Latino, where you'll find them speaking in a very fast way which gives that impression," says Carter. It's not that Spanish-speakers speak more quickly, just that their timing is different than English. We don't quite know how it's different, but speaking very quickly can sort of trigger our conception of Spanish rhythms.

Miami English is not, though, the same as other Spanish-influenced dialects of English, like Chicano English in Southern California. Some of those calques, for example, are specific to Cuba or the Caribbean and not found in Mexico. One of the most telling examples of a Southern Californian accent is turning "ing" and "ink" endings into "eeng" and "eenk," so "thinking" becomes "theenkeeng." These are not found at all in Miami.

Miami English isn't only spoken by Miami Latinos, though they are the predominant group that has this dialect. Carter has found that many Anglo whites in Miami will use this dialect-but not always. Miami English coexists with Spanglish and flat-out Spanish in Miami, and speakers will often switch between those depending on who they're speaking to. A white teenager might use the Miami English dialect with friends, and a Northeast-like accent with parents-after all, there's a good chance the teen's parents hail from the North.

A major part of what makes Miami English special is how quickly and thoroughly immigrant groups have come to dominate the city. In, say, New York, even the biggest immigrant groups-Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese-are still comparatively minor parts of the whole. But Cubans, and then other Spanish-speakers, became the dominant force in Miami so quickly that, essentially, stranger calques and pronunciations and rhythms have been free to become the norm.

Typically, a small population of immigrants surrounded by people from elsewhere would have stuff like that ironed out. "But here, basically because of the numerical profile, nobody is here to say 'No, it's get married to someone, not with,'" says Carter. The norms reinforce each other. If everyone around you speaks in a certain way, it won't be "corrected." Miami English has been permitted to live on its own weird little linguistic island, evolving in its own utterly charming way.
*Correction: This story originally said that Spanish has no silent letters. That's not true!

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'Miami English' and the Linguistic Oddness of South Florida

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That much probably goes without saying; in its flora and fauna, its cultural history, its politics, its singularly bizarre criminal elements, and its natural ecosystems, there is nowhere else like it. So it should come as no surprise that, though it theoretically is part of the American South, pretty much any discussion of Southern linguistics comes with a caveat: "Well, except South Florida."

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En este artículo, el autor ofrece su opinión sobre el valor de una educación bilingüe. Hoy en día, muchos distritos escolares están adoptando los currículos bilingües, y algunos distritos han implementado los programas en inmersión lingüística. En años recientes, la educación bilingüe ha evolucionado de un currículo principalmente para los estudiantes inmigrantes a un programa que es apoyado también por los miembros de la clase media y la clase alta quien hablan inglés como su primera lengua. Según varios investigadores, una educación bilingüe proviene beneficios cognitivos y académicos para los jóvenes. Pero, el factor más importante en este cambio en el rol de un currículo bilingüe es que muchos políticos y padres de ‘la clase profesional’ quieren sus hijos a ser competitivos en el merado de trabajo y la fuerza laboral mundial. Un ejemplo de esto desarrollo es el estado de Utah, un estado racial y étnicamente homogéneo, el cual, sin embargo, ha invertido mucho dinero a crear los programas de inmersión en varias lenguas. En 2013, el gobernador del estado, Gary Herbert, dijo que el meta principal de estos programas es a atraer el comercio a Utah y que el foco de estos programas es “realmente es sobre nuestra supervivencia económica futura.” El autor no rechaza el sentimiento que la educación bilingüe es tan importante en el entorno de negocio, el cual es expresado por gobernador Herbert y otros.  Sin embargo, el autor cree que es necesario que los políticos entiendan la educación bilingüe no es solamente para un propósito económico, especialmente para los estudiantes minoritarios.

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States including Utah and Montana are aggressively pushing for programs that give native English speakers a competitive edge.

Garland Independent School District, a fast-growing suburb northeast of Dallas, has undergone a dramatic demographic shift. Like districts across Texas, Garland schools are blacker, browner, and more racially diverse than a generation ago. The multicultural panorama in Garland schools is reflected in its academic offerings. Still, in a school district with a Hispanic majority, and a state where more than a third of residents are Spanish speakers, Garland chose Mandarin Chinese as the focus of its newly launched language-immersion program at Weaver Elementary School. Increasing Garland students' marketability in a global economy was the rationale. "It's preparing students for the future and hopefully, lots of possibilities as they get older," the school's principal, Jennifer Miley, told the Dallas Morning News.

In a break with tradition, more schools are adopting language-immersion programs, in which English and another language are integrated into the curriculum and instruction. The Center for Applied Linguistics, a D.C.-based nonprofit, found an exponential growth in foreign-language immersion in a comprehensive survey of public schools and some private schools. Over a 40-year span language-immersion schools grew steadily, with the largest increase in the decade that started in 2001. Spanish remains the most popular for immersion programs at 45 percent, followed by French (22 percent) and Mandarin (13 percent), with a wide array of languages rounding out the list of 22 selections-from Hawaiian and Cantonese to Japanese and Arabic.

As two-way immersion grows, the variety of language options now available marks a turning point in the evolution of bilingual education. Once the mainstay of immigrant children, bilingual instruction has a new band of converts: English-speaking parents, lawmakers, and advocacy groups. Research shows that students gain cognitive and academic benefits from bilingualism. Yet an overarching reason for the heightened interest is giving U.S. students a jump on the competition in a global workforce. And some activists find even with this flurry of attention, equal access to dual-immersion remains a thorny issue and persistent challenge.

While many states, including Montana and Oregon, have fully embraced two-way immersion, seemingly none has adopted the approach with the intensity of Utah. In a fairly racially and ethnically homogeneous state, Utah invested millions in language immersion teaching Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Governor Gary Herbert set a target in 2010 for the development of 100 programs in intensive dual-language serving 25,000 students by 2015. Utah met that goal two years ago, and the brisk pace continues with the launch of additional programs.

Utah's expansion of dual-immersion is designed with one major purpose: to make the state's future workers attractive to global companies. Herbert boasted that Utah was responsible for one third of all Mandarin Chinese classes taught in America's schools in February 2013 testimony to the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee. His remarks highlighted the link between dual-immersion programs producing multilingual students and a workforce that attracts business to the state. Gregg Roberts, who oversees Utah's dual-language initiative, expressed this same viewpoint to The Salt Lake Tribune: "The reason why we're doing this during hard economic times is this is all about Utah's future. We're going to have a generation of kids to come that will really put Utah on the map and bring businesses here because it really is about [our] future economic survival."

Utah's goal is a critical issue nationwide. In an interconnected and rapidly changing world, many believe that America's prosperity and economic strength depends on its students mastering a language other than English. Marty Abbott, the executive director of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, says the U.S. is still far behind other developed countries in producing a multilingual workforce, due to "the Anglophone factor and Americans believing that English is good enough to get along." Strides are being made, though, to close the gap. In the nation's largest school system, New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña revealed plans in January to develop 40 new language-immersion programs this school year, citing the "global advantages of speaking more than one language" and her own experience as a bilingual adult. In promoting the study of foreign languages, Abbott finds parents who travel abroad for business and those who speak a language other than English, including heritage languages in the home, are the most vocal dual-language supporters. Advocates also received a high-profile endorsement in September when President Obama unveiled the " 1 Million Strong" initiative with the aim of 1 million American students learning Mandarin Chinese by 2020; with 200,000 students now studying Mandarin, the commitment represents a fivefold increase.

A lingering concern as this trend takes hold, however, is how to ensure all students reap the benefits of foreign-language instruction, with bilingual skills sold as a win-win that bolsters academic and career outcomes. This is the driving force behind the D.C. Language Immersion Project, a grassroots group with hundreds of parents, educators, and community members working to expand immersion programs throughout the district, especially in Wards 7 and 8, which are home to some of the region's highest poverty rates.
Once the mainstay of immigrant children, bilingual instruction has a new band of converts.
Vanessa Bertelli, the project's executive director, points to an elementary-school bilingual-immersion program in Ward 7 approved for 2016 and "immersion ... now mentioned by candidates for upcoming local elections" as signs of progress but "it is nowhere close to satisfying the demand," she says. For every child matched with a seat in an existing immersion program in the District, there are five more children waiting for a seat, according to her group. "The jobs expected to grow most in the next 10 years are heavily related to languages-hospitality, tourism, marketing, and healthcare," says Bertelli. "There needs to be more urgency around a long term strategy that will ensure that our D.C. kids can fill those positions."

With the national attention on school segregation, language immersion is also viewed as a tool to entice more white, affluent parents to public schools. Incoming acting Secretary of Education John King was recently quoted endorsing language immersion with this objective in mind. "The diversity that exists in neighborhoods does not translate to the neighborhood schools," Bertelli said. "The high desirability [of immersion programs] can act as a draw for families to give their neighborhood school a try."

Notwithstanding the many positives of immersion instruction, factors such as race and class can also unwittingly pit relatively well-off English-speakers against students from historically marginalized communities. The resulting imbalance led Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon, an assistant professor of bilingual education at University of Texas at Austin, to take a closer look at these educational efforts. One of the critiques of traditional foreign-language education programs is that they don't offer students enough opportunities to practice the target language in a more natural setting, she says, explaining that an important advantage of dual-immersion programs is giving English speakers the opportunity to interact with native speakers in authentic ways. These children's linguistic strengths and cultural assets become important resources for English speakers to practice and develop their second language, which can lead to unintended consequences.

"When I started to visit classrooms, I was surprised by what I observed: Latino children from Spanish-dominant homes tended to be strikingly more quiet and subdued than their white English-dominant peers-who often and sometimes forcefully dominated classroom discourse," says Cervantes-Soon. "Also, although language minority students generally did better academically in two-way immersion than in regular mainstream classrooms, their white English-dominant peers continued to outperform them."

Cervantes-Soon cautions that the mutual goals of two-way immersion-bilingualism, bilteracy, academic achievement, and cross-cultural competencies-can mask the differences in the students served, who come to these programs with distinct needs, priorities, and access to resources. A key takeaway from her research is the need to make social justice a central goal of these programs, creating a space where students not only expand their linguistic skills but also learn to interrogate and examine ethnicity, social status, and other overlapping issues.

"When language is used simply as a marketable resource that the dominant group can acquire to increase global competitiveness, all while language minority students are pushed into English assimilation, an entire history of civil rights struggles is undermined and we may lose sight of the opportunity for a truly emancipatory education."

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Bilingual Education's New Brand of Converts

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States including Utah and Montana are aggressively pushing for programs that give native English speakers a competitive edge. Garland Independent School District, a fast-growing suburb northeast of Dallas, has undergone a dramatic demographic shift. Like districts across Texas, Garland schools are blacker, browner, and more racially diverse than a generation ago.

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Este articulo discute el problema de la falta de infraestructura a servir los inmigrantes de la América central quien hablan una lengua indígena. El articulo sigue Elisa, una estudiante quien vino recientemente a los EE. UU. de Oaxaca, México. Cuando ella y su padre llegaron, ellos solamente hablaban Mixteco, por lo tanto, haciéndolo difícil para ella a aprender y para los maestros a ensenarle, como su escuela no tiene ninguna persona quien puede comunicar con ella en su primera lengua. Mientras sus maestras eran capaces de ensenarle con mucha atención adicional ambos español e inglés, las escuelas todavía luchan a alojar los estudiantes como Elisa. Según el artículo, varias escuelas han alistado los lingüísticos y académicos de las universidades cercanas a ayudar los maestros a enseñar estos estudiantes.

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Looking back on her first day of high school in New York, Elisa, 18, can now laugh about it. But on that day, she was nervous. She and her dad navigated the New York subway to get her to class, but they could barely read the maps and were unable to ask anyone for help. Once she got to her first-period class, English, she could not understand the teacher. Elisa could only speak Mixteco.

"How can I connect with other people? How can they help me?" she remembers thinking. "That was so hard for me because I didn't know how to talk to other people."

Elisa has since learned Spanish and English and is now trilingual. She is using a pseudonym due to sensitivity about immigration and is about to graduate from high school and plans to go to college to study nursing.

Elisa's high school experience is a success story, but immigrant students like her, who speak primarily indigenous languages, often slip through cracks in the US school system.

In many communities, even in New York City, there are few, if any, translators available. Those who come from Central America are often unaccompanied minors. In addition to isolation, the stigma of speaking an indigenous language follows them from their home countries. As a result, it is not uncommon for these students to end up in special education classrooms, whether they have learning disabilities or not.

Placing students who are learning English into special education classrooms is an issue that has been around for a long time, according to Julie Sugarman, a senior policy analyst at the Washington-based thinktank Migration Policy Institute. This is usually due to a lack of infrastructure in the school.

"It can be that this is the best option, the best thing we think we can do for these children," Sugarman said. "But of course it's not legal, it's not a good idea."

Norma Gaytán, a special education teacher at Elisa's school, says placing these students in the right classroom is complicated - and not just because they don't speak English or Spanish. Many also had interrupted educations in their home countries, putting them behind their peers when they arrive in the US. She has taught students like these, some of whom have legitimate learning disabilities and others who don't.

"They're the kids who do not speak Spanish, don't know how to write," Gaytán said. "And the same thing in English. So it's like pretty much starting with the books that we read as kids."

Not all students catch up as quickly as Elisa did. The Manhattan public school where Gaytán teaches enrolls only newly arrived immigrants, including an increasing number of unaccompanied minors. These students are particularly vulnerable to dropping out. Some live in shelters, and others pay several hundred dollars a month in rent to stay with distant relatives who are essentially strangers.

"They're not here for education," Gaytán said. "They're here to work and they're here to send money back home. They're aware of this."

For students like Elisa, who want to stay in school, one of the best ways to help is to find out what language they speak and incorporate it into the classroom. Tatyana Kleyn, a professor and director of the bilingual education program at the City College of New York, says the first step for teachers is to acknowledge multilingualism.

"You don't have to learn the whole language or everything, but you can ask them how to say this, how to say that," Kleyn said.

Out of desperation, Gaytán has gone a step further. In April, she won a grant to go to Oaxaca to learn Mixteco so she can communicate with her students who speak that language. Even if she returns with a basic grasp of Mixteco, however, she may still not be able to communicate. There are more than 50 variants of Mixteco, according to the Endangered Language Alliance, and speakers of one variant cannot always understand speakers of another.

New York City's melting pot may actually make the challenge of teaching these students more difficult. There are likely to be more languages spoken in schools, with more variants within those languages. Smaller cities and rural areas in the US are also home to migrants who speak indigenous languages, but they are more likely to come from the same area and speak the same language and variant.

The twin cities of Champaign and Urbana in Illinois are home to an estimated 550 native speakers of Q'anjob'al, an indigenous language from Guatemala. Ryan Shosted, a linguistics professor at the local university, learned about the language after a member of the Q'anjob'al community approached him asking for help in a literacy project. Soon after he got involved, teachers in the community began to ask him for help in the classroom.

Since then, Shosted has been involved with creating alphabet books and short stories in Q'anjob'al and simple dictionaries. The awareness of the language has transformed the school environment for these students.

"The work has really been about promoting literacy in Q'anjob'al and promoting pride in the printed medium of their language," Shosted said. "Because it is a big step to recognize, like if you tell somebody your language can't be written or just doesn't deserve to be written, that takes a toll."

In New York the City University of New York, Columbia University and New York University formed an indigenous language consortium to teach students and members of the community indigenous languages, including Mixteco, Nahuatl and Quechua.

Often, however, the stigma of speaking an indigenous language persists. Elisa only speaks Mixteco with her father at home and on the phone with her mother, who still lives in Mexico. She had one friend at school who spoke Mixteco, but she asked her to speak only English. Nonetheless, she says she's still proud she can speak Mixteco.

"I'm not embarrassed to speak it because this is my first language," Elisa said.
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Why migrants who speak indigenous languages slip through cracks in US schools

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Looking back on her first day of high school in New York, Elisa, 18, can now laugh about it. But on that day, she was nervous. She and her dad navigated the New York subway to get her to class, but they could barely read the maps and were unable to ask anyone for help.

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Este articulo discute si es importante para los latinos en los EE. UU. a votar para un candidato quien hablar español con fluidez. En los años recientes, muchos políticos han hecho un esfuerzo a incorporar el español en sus discursos públicos. Este fenómeno es vista especialmente en el debate presidencial democrático pasado donde muchos candidatos como Beto O’Rourke, Julián Castro, y Cory Booker, intentan a demonstrar su competencia en la lengua. Según Julián Castro, él, como un candidato hispánico, siente presión adicional a hablar español. A pesar de que Castro no aprendió español en su juventud a causa de su estigmatización en el pasado y solamente empezó su estudia de la lengua no hace mucho tiempo, a veces parece que es una expectación para los políticos hispánicos a ser fluidez en el español. Pero, en realidad, de acuerdo con las encuestas recientes, el capaz de un candidato a hablar español no es un considera un tema principal de la comunidad hispánica en los EE. UU. También, para la comunidad latina, según estos sondeos, el capaz a hablar español no es aun considera el principal aspecto de su cultura. Pero, el uso de español puede ayudar los candidatos en algunas situaciones si es usado correctamente. Recientemente, el alcalde de Nueva York y candidato democrático Bill de Blasio cometió un error cuando él citó la frase de Che Guevara “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” en un discurso en el aeropuerto de Miami.

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A recent poll by a Latino advocacy group showed that a candidate's ability to speak Spanish was last on a list of Latino voters' priorities. Credit Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

MIAMI - In his months on the campaign trail, Beto O'Rourke has wanted to make one thing explicitly clear: He is not a pendejo.

Never mind whether anyone in the audience understands the vulgar Spanish slang for idiot, it is now a standard part of his stump speech: "We don't want our kids looking back at us 40 years from now and saying, 'Who were those pendejos?'"

During the first Democratic presidential debate, Mr. O'Rourke eagerly brought his Spanish to prime time.

"Necesitamos incluir cada persona en nuestro democracia," he said, responding to a question about taxes with a riff on inclusion, roughly translated as: "We must include every person in our democracy."

Senator Cory Booker jumped in to show that he, too, could communicate in Spanish, which he had picked up mainly from language classes in Mexico and Ecuador. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has made it known he speaks not just Norwegian, but Spanish as well, conducting bilingual interviews on Telemundo.

Then there is Julián Castro. He ended the debate last week by declaring: "Me llamo Julián Castro, y estoy postulando por presidente de los Estados Unidos."

With imperfect grammar, Mr. Castro reminded Spanish speakers exactly who he is: the grandson of a Mexican immigrant who was raised speaking English in a Latino-majority city.

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Julián Castro, left, and Senator Cory Booker both spoke Spanish during the first Democratic presidential debate in Miami last month. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

At campaign events, Mr. Castro often leaves out Spanish. His relationship with the language, he has said, is somewhat fraught. He has taken lessons, but he can still appear uncomfortable speaking Spanish in large crowds or off the cuff.

In this way, he's representative of many Latino voters. Only 13 percent of Latinos who are currently registered to vote in the United States speak Spanish as their primary language, according to the Pew Research Center.

So, then, who is all this campaign-trail Spanish for?

More than 40 million people in the United States speak Spanish, making it the second-most spoken language in the country behind English. But the history of Spanish in the United States, and who feels comfortable speaking it publicly, is complicated. Mr. Castro's biography illustrates some of the complexity.

As a child, he often accompanied his mother, a prominent Chicana activist, to political meetings and protests. She told him stories of how she had been shamed and forcefully told not to speak Spanish. While he heard the language on television and from his grandparents, he rarely spoke it. When Mr. Castro was elected to the San Antonio City Council, he sought out a private tutor.

"There is an irony," he said in an interview. "There's a greater expectation, because I'm Latino, of speaking Spanish. Many folks outside of second or third generation Latino communities are not aware of the history of the attempts to eradicate the Spanish language from families."

Even as the Latino population in the United States continues to grow, and a majority of those who are parents now speak Spanish to their children, Latinos tell pollsters that they don't view Spanish as essential to the culture.

About 28 percent say Spanish skills are a requirement for someone who identifies as Latino, according to Pew. A recent poll by UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy group, showed that a candidate's ability to speak Spanish was last on a list of Latino voters' priorities, well below "values diversity" and "willing to work with both parties."

None of that has stopped Mr. O'Rourke. Even when it is unclear a crowd has any Spanish speakers, he toggles between English and Spanish.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has made it known he speaks not just Norwegian, but Spanish as well, conducting bilingual interviews on Telemundo. Credit Audra Melton for The New York Times

During a recent trip through South Carolina, Mr. O'Rourke displayed his Spanish at nearly every campaign stop, which did resonate with some voters. After a forum in Sumter, where Hispanics make up about 3 percent of the 40,000 residents, one woman rushed over to thank him. She said he was the first politician she had heard speak Spanish since she immigrated from Mexico nearly 20 years ago.

Though he was born Robert, for most of his life Mr. O'Rourke has gone by Beto, a common Spanish nickname for Roberto. He said that when he was growing up in El Paso, his public school offered Spanish lessons a couple of times a week and that he had taken a Spanish literature class as a student at Columbia University. There had been a handful of private lessons when he returned to El Paso and more work on his skills before running for City Council.

"I think Latinos in this country, including those who speak Spanish, have been marginalized and forgotten, if they were ever remembered or known," he said during an interview. "So I think it's really important that everyone knows that they're not just welcome, but that we're counting on them."

Both Mr. O'Rourke and Mr. Castro are Texas natives who have made immigration and their experiences along the Mexican border central aspects of their campaigns. Their relationships with Spanish have also shaped their political identities and the ways they appeal to voters.

Mr. O'Rourke can casually speak Spanish in a manner that people at his events find charming. Mr. Castro is often under greater scrutiny, frequently asked why he is not fluent. He has also been careful not to portray himself as a candidate who caters to only Hispanic voters.

Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Booker sharpened their Spanish skills with local media as mayors, and often prepared for interviews by asking staff members to scribble down Spanish translations for words such as "contraception" or "generational change."

"I find there's a tremendous amount of appreciation, if you show that you put in the work," Mr. Booker said in an interview. "There's gratitude and this incredible generosity."

Native Spanish speakers do, of course, evaluate the candidates' efforts. After the debates, The Miami Herald assigned a grade to everyone who tried. Mr. O'Rourke received the highest: B.

During a recent trip through South Carolina, Beto O'Rourke spoke Spanish at nearly every campaign stop. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times

"If you are going to butcher the language, you are better off sticking to English," said Arturo Vargas, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. The group hosted a presidential forum in Miami in June in which eight candidates spoke to several hundred people.

Privately, Mr. Castro has seethed over the scrutiny of his Spanish. In 2016, he strongly denied a report in The New York Post's gossip pages that he was "cramming with Rosetta Stone," while Hillary Clinton was mulling her potential running mate. Ultimately, she chose Senator Tim Kaine, who is bilingual.

During the 2016 Republican primary campaign, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are both Cuban-American, sparred over who really knew the language. Donald Trump attacked Jeb Bush for using Spanish, echoing an argument made by Tom Tancredo, a Republican who ran for president in 2007. At the time, Mr. Tancredo boycotted a Spanish-language debate for Republican presidential candidates, saying it had no place in the presidential race because naturalized citizens must know English.

Spanish is most significant, among the early voting states, in Nevada, where nearly 20 percent of Democratic caucus attendees in 2016 were Hispanic.

"It's very different to be able to tell your story without a translator," said Astrid Silva, an immigration activist in the Las Vegas area. "You're able to connect."

Mr. Buttigieg said his formal Spanish instruction ended after two years of high school and he is "very far from being fluent." Still, he has not hesitated to accept invitations to be interviewed in Spanish. "The point is not to impress people, as much as to make people feel included," he said.

After the debates last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City showed up at the Miami airport to support workers on strike there. Holding a microphone, he enthusiastically shouted one of the best-known sayings in Latin American history: "Hasta la victoria siempre!"

It's a phrase popularized by Che Guevara, an Argentine guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro lead a communist revolution in Cuba. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the regime, many to South Florida - where few historical figures are more despised than Castro and Guevara.

Responding to the instant backlash, Mr. de Blasio issued an apology within hours, saying he did not know the history and only meant the words literally: "Until victory always."

Jonathan Martin contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spanish Surges on the Campaign Trail. ¿Por Qué?. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Do Latino Voters Really Care if the 2020 Candidates Speak Spanish?

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MIAMI - In his months on the campaign trail, Beto O'Rourke has wanted to make one thing explicitly clear: He is not a pendejo.

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Este video provine un ejemplo de errores en el principio de la cooperación. En este sketch comedia famoso, dos personas encuentran las dificultades en su comunicación porque ambos violan la máxima de cantidad y la máxima de manera en su habla. La persona quien preguntó la cuestión inicial de “Who’s on first?” no trata a clarificar su objeto en el discurso para la otra persona bastante y continua peguntando otros cuestiones y, por lo tanto, viola la máxima de cantidad. El contestador, en adición, no es claro en sus respuestas y no evite la oscuridad de expresión, y, por consiguiente, viola la máxima de manera.

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Este articulo discute el libro famoso 1984 por George Orwell. El libro de Orwell continua a ser considerado relevante a causa de que su comentario político, especialmente su discusión de como los regímenes totalitarios tratan a influir la semántica del lenguaje. En el mundo distópico de 1984, los personajes deben comunicar diariamente en una lengua estandarizada por el gobierno. Esta lengua, se llama ‘Newspeak’, es una forma de ingles el cual era drásticamente alterada a remover muchas palabras expresivas y añadir nuevas palabras eufemísticos y vagas. Esto era hecho a limitar la libertad de pensamiento y la identidad personal de los ciudadanos para que ellos no podrían oponer el régimen. En este artículo, el autor da su opinión que nosotros debemos detener usando las palabras eufemísticos y confusos en nuestra comunicación típica y no replicar los rasgos de ‘Newspeak’ en nuestras vidas diarias.

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Of course Big Brother isn't just watching us anymore - he's listening to our cell phone and FaceTime conversations, friending us on Facebook, following us on Instagram (just as we are often following Him). He's introducing us to our next partner or spouse on dating and "hook-up" apps, bombarding us with spurious and inaccurate information through jargon and euphemism ("border control" as a code for family separation, or "climate change" as a substitute for "climate collapse"), and instructing us - even from as far away as other continents - about who we should vote for and, more important, who we shouldn't. Big Brother is no longer simply a set of shadowy, avuncular, half-smiling eyes on living-room posters and street-side billboards; he now reserves a virtual space at all our family gatherings, and tells us what to do and buy long before we had the inclination to do or buy anything.

Good ol' Big Brother. He got a lot of bad press over the decades - but that was before we found out he was already one of us.

While times have changed, the things that worried George Orwell haven't changed at all. The most important thing to know about "future-thinking" "utopian" and/or "dystopian" novels is that they are never really about the future at all; instead these novels are about the world that surrounded the author. That is why one of the unproven rumors about "1984" - as explored in Dorian Lynskey's "The Ministry of Truth," a respectful and intelligent "biography" of a novel - is that the title was merely a transposition of its publication date, 1948. In other words, in Orwell's eyes, "1984" was well already well-established four decades before it got here.

Born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 - he only adopted the now iconic professional pseudonym of Orwell in 1933 - the writer was the son of politically mixed parents: His half-French mother "mixed with suffragettes and Fabians," and his father was a relatively bland mid-level civil servant. Orwell went on to become a consistently radical critic of his world who always appreciated the conventional pleasures of middle-class and working-class life; his novels and essays are thick with appreciations for everything from drinking tea and smoking cigarettes to the novels of Dickens and Kipling - and the "naughty" seaside postcards of Donald McGill. After skidding along unillustriously as a "scholarship" boy at Eton College, he joined the Imperial Police in Burma, where he quickly learned what it felt like to wear a uniform - and how it could make you think and feel things you might consider repugnant when you weren't wearing it. (Check out his great personal essays about that period, "A Hanging" or "Shooting an Elephant" - for Orwell, the horror of totalitarianism was not that someone would impose it on you, but rather that you might be all-too-prepared to submit.) Eventually, he went to London, where he wrote productively for the left-wing press - while never missing an opportunity to criticize its failures - and after a brief adventure fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, secured a full-time job working for the BBC, a monolithically imposing cultural force that Orwell later satirized as "The Ministry of Truth."

In many ways, Orwell's genius was best exemplified by his essays and journalism - and the success of his most famous novels (it may be impossible to avoid either "1984" or "Animal Farm" in most high school curricula) has often obscured the impact of the things he said. For example, he wasn't - as students are often mis-taught - concerned simply with the oppressive forces of Stalin or "socialism," but rather with almost every "ism" that manipulated truth through the misuse of language and political propaganda. Even more confusing, "1984's" message has often been appropriated by the very types of organizations that Orwell despised, thus becoming, as Lynskey writes, "a book that almost any political faction could claim." It has been held up as a warning about the perils of imperialism, capitalism, socialism and fascism; it has been lauded by both the John Birch Society - who used the numbers 1-9-8-4 as the last four digits of its phone number - and the Black Panthers, who taught Orwell in their Oakland Community School.

(CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images)

The novel has inspired at least one mediocre Hollywood production (starring the weirdly miscast Edmund O'Brien in 1956), several BBC adaptations, and the more interesting Michael Redford film starring John Hurt and released, appropriately enough, in 1984. And it has gone on to live a life far beyond its title in Terry Gilliam's comic nightmare 1985 film "Brazil" - "I hadn't read 1984," Gilliam said, "but we all know what it is" - and as a successful product-branding Ridley Scott television commercial for Apple in 1983, wherein a woman in a tank-top saves the world from conformity with a hammer. The word "1984" has even entered our own contemporary version of "Newspeak" as a shorthand term that simply means - "bad future." And who can disagree with the idea that we should all avoid living in it?

Orwell's "1984" has been applauded by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Lee Harvey Oswald - and regarded suspiciously by Stalinists and J. Edgar Hoover and Christopher Hitchens alike - and the novel has not lost any of its power today. Many things have changed since Orwell wrote this terrifying, beautifully written and, yes, extremely funny book. But Orwell's world where "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength" - sounding much like a cable news panel filled with angry pundits - rings truer now more than ever.

::
"The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's '1984'"
Dorian Lynskey

Doubleday; 355 pp., $28.95
Bradfield is a writer whose novels include "The History of Luminous Motion" and "Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog."

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Why '1984' is still relevant today - but not for the reason you may expect

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Of course Big Brother isn't just watching us anymore - he's listening to our cell phone and FaceTime conversations, friending us on Facebook, following us on Instagram (just as we are often following Him).

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Este video producido por los cómicos John Stewart y John Oliver se burlara de, y proviene un comentario en, como los políticos a menudo tratan a manipular la semántica en sus discusiones de póliza. Esta estrategia fue especialmente usada durante los primeros anos de la guerra en Iraq. En este tiempo, la administración rechaza a llamar las acciones militares de los estados unidos en el país una ‘guerra’ porque ellos temen que el significado fuerte y emocional de la palabra ‘guerra’ podría decrecer el apoyo para su póliza extranjera. En su lugar, la administración usó palabras inconcretas y vagas como ‘conflicto sectario’ o ‘acción policía’ a describir la situación en Iraq.

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Civil War Semantics - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Video Clip) | Comedy Central

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Senior Analyst John Oliver thinks that it is not a civil war in Iraq, but rather an ongoing scuffle.

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Este video discute los desarrollos recientes en la estudia de como el lenguaje es procesado y reproducido en el cerebro. Antes de estas nuevas investigaciones, muchos científicos creen que el lenguaje era restringido a partes particulares del cerebro, como el lóbulo temporal. Sin embargo, con los avanzas en la neurología, los investigadores descubren que la actividad cerebral asociada con el lenguaje ocurre por todo el cerebro y en ambos hemisferios. En adición, los investigadores, por analizando el flujo sanguíneo a partes diferentes del cerebro como una persona escucha a varias palabras, se dan cuenta que hay patrones en la manera los personas responden a los significados de palabras, o la semántica, en sus cerebros. Los investigadores descubren que las personas agrupan las palabras los cuales tienen significados similares, o discuten ideas similares, en partes similares del cerebro. Por ejemplo, las palabras asocian con los familiares o la vida familiar usualmente activan un área del cerebro conocido como la confluencia derecha temporoparietal. Sin embargo, mientras los cerebros humanos siguen un patrón general, todas de las personas responden de forma distinta al lenguaje como cada individual ´puede hacer asociaciones diferentes con algunas palabras dependiendo de su experiencia y su biología.

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See how our brains group words by meaning in surprisingly complex semantic maps | Aeon Videos

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A groundbreaking new study from the Gallant Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley is transforming how scientists understand language organisation in the brain. Published in Nature on 28 April 2016, the paper 'Natural Speech Reveals the Semantic Maps That Tile Human Cerebral Cortex' reveals that we use our entire brain - and not just the temporal lobe, as once believed - to group words by meaning.

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Este video muestra una de las canciones de las Cantigas de Santa María, la obra de poesía atribuida a Alfonso X el Sabio. Esta canción es en la lengua galaicoportugués, el antepasado medieval lingüístico de las lenguas gallega y portugués. Las Cantigas de Santa María son una colección de 420 poemas. La mayoría de estos discuten varios milagros legendarios y eventos de la reconquista. Durante el reino de Alfonso X, fue de moda a escribir poesía en la lengua galaicoportugués. Mientras Alfonso X intentó a levantar la lengua castellana como un idioma de la elite, el galaicoportugués retenía su puesto como una lengua literaria en el reino de Castilla durante esta época. Alfonso X pasó su juventud en la región de Galicia y probablemente fue fluidez en ambos castellano y galaicoportugués, reflejar la diversidad de las lenguas se usó en la península ibérica durante la edad media.

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Cantiga 1 - Des oge mais quer' eu trobar

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Este articulo discute la gran obra de historia escribida en parte por el rey de castilla Alfonso X el Sabio, se llama el Estoria de España, durante su reino entre 1252-1284. La obra intenta a contar toda la historia de la península ibérica desde la época bíblica al reino de su padre Fernando III. Fue la primera obra de historia escribida en la lengua castellana antigua y fue compilada con la ayuda de muchos escolares mozárabes y judaicos. La obra fue parte del programa de Alfonso a estandarizar la lengua española durante su reino. Estos grupos llevaron al norte de España mucho del conocimiento del pasado desde los territorios antiguos de los reinos islámicas los cuales recientemente fueron conquistados por el reino de castilla. La obra incorpora una combinación de historia y leyenda a construir una identidad mítica de España. Los temáticos principales de la Estoria de España son la necesidad y los beneficios de la centralización de poder político en la península ibérica y la convivencia entre las tres culturas de la península: los cristianos, los judíos, y los musulmanes. Mientras la obra no es basada completamente en hechos, es muy útil para entender como Alfonso X veía si mismo y la sociedad él quería crear durante esta época.

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Exposición El hallazgo del pasado Alfonso El Sabio y la Estoria de España | BNE

La Biblioteca Nacional presenta hasta el 16 de abril la exposición El hallazgo del pasado. Alfonso El Sabio y la Estoria de España, una muestra de la selección de piezas manuscritas e impresas ligadas a la labor histórica del monarca Alfonso X, y en particular a una obra de referencia inexcusable para la literatura hispánica medieval: la Estoria de España.

Centrada en el pasado de los pueblos que dominaron la Península desde el principio del mundo hasta la época del propio monarca, la composición de la Estoria expone la selección de manuscritos e impresos que cubren varios aspectos concernientes a la Estoria de España: sus fuentes, su relación con la General estoria, la existencia de tres versiones del texto, la proliferación de crónicas generales postalfonsíes o las ediciones impresas de la obra. Entre otras piezas, podrán observarse varias de las alrededor de veinte copias de la Estoria que posee la Biblioteca Nacional, y que van del s. XIV al XVIII.

La muestra coincide, además, con el lanzamiento de la edición digital de la obra, a cargo de un equipo dirigido por el profesor Aengus Ward desde la Universidad de Birmingham: "Se trata de la crónica más importante del medievo español, la historia desde sus orígenes legendarios hasta la muerte de Fernando III en 1252. Toda la obra en su contexto, (General Estoria y Estoria de España), supone una contribución imprescindible al patrimonio cultural no solo en español, sino también europeo".

Visita virtual desde casa

Para la ocasión, se ha preparado asimismo una exposición digital con la que los visitantes podrán acceder a través de sus dispositivos móviles o bien desde su casa. En esta exhibición digital se amplían los contenidos de la muestra presencial con textos, imágenes, audios y actividades relacionadas con la figura y el legado de Alfonso el Sabio, y con la Estoria de España en particular.

La amplitud, diversidad y profundidad de los conocimientos reunidos, elaborados y transmitidos por iniciativa de Alfonso X (1221-1284) constituyen en sí mismos una contribución incuestionable al patrimonio intelectual de la humanidad. Acompañado de intelectuales, diplomáticos y artistas plásticos extranjeros, los cuáles eran recibidos y empleados en su corte, hizo que su obra contribuyese a fomentar la cultura no sólo en español, sino también en las corrientes europeas. En el contexto hispánico, su legado es uno de los fundamentos básicos de la tradición escrita en español, hasta el punto de que la actividad llevada a cabo en su entorno supone una verdadera edad de oro de la cultura española de todos los tiempos.

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La 'Estoria' de España contada por Alfonso El Sabio

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La Biblioteca Nacional presenta hasta el 16 de abril la exposición El hallazgo del pasado. Alfonso El Sabio y la Estoria de España, una muestra de la selección de piezas manuscritas e impresas ligadas a la labor histórica del monarca Alfonso X, y en particular a una obra de referencia inexcusable para la literatura hispánica medieval: la Estoria de España .

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Este video discute como los académicos modernos saben cómo el latín clásico era pronunciado por sus hablantes antiguos. A pesar de la realidad que nosotros no tenemos grabaciones de como el latín sonaba durante la antigüedad, los lingüísticos todavía tienen una buena concepción de la pronunciación de la lengua. Esto es porque hay muchas pistas que pueden encontrada en los textos escribidos en latín de esta época. Una de las fuentes más útiles para los escolares modernos es la escritura de Quintillano, un maestro de retorico y gramática de la provincia de Hispania. Desde su escritura, los académicos pueden decir que la letra ‘c’ en el latín clásico era pronunciada como un duro /k/ sonido y nunca como un dulce /s/ sonido. Otra pista es que el alfabeto latino es más o menos fonético. Nosotros sabemos esto porque cuando los romanos escribían palabras con letras vocales similares o consonantes dobles, estas palabras tenían significados diferentes, el cual indica que la pronunciación de estas palabras era diferente también. También, el ritmo poético de la poesía latina nos da una idea de cuales silabas eran largas o cortas. Por lo tanto, podemos decir cuales de las vocales eran largas o cortas en su pronunciación. También, la manera de como otras culturas, como las tribus germánicas, adoptaron palabras latinas nos da una concepción del sonido de la lengua latina. Finalmente, los gramáticos romanos provienen ejemplos de cómo el latín clásico comparaba al latín común, o latín vulgar. Por usar estas comparaciones, los académicos pueden extrapolar los sonidos originales. Pero, todavía hay controversia entre los escolares modernos sobre algunas pronunciaciones, por ejemplo, la letra ‘r’.

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What Latin Sounded Like - and how we know

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Este video proviene un ejemplo de una canción de la liturgia mozárabe o visigodo. Específicamente, la canción en este video es una versión mozárabe de la oración “padre nuestro” o “Lord’s Prayer”.  La liturgia mozárabe es la colección de ceremonias y tradiciones religiosas de los cristianos de la península ibérica los cuales estaban viviendo bajo regla islámica. La liturgia originalmente era desarrollada durante la época visigodo y, a causa de la tolerancia relativa en Al-Ándalus, los cristianos eran permitidos a preservar sus costumbres religiosos después de los moros conquistaron la mayoría de la península en el siglo VIII. Esta canción, como toda la liturgia mozárabe, era cantada en la lengua latina. Pero, esta versión de latín no es exactamente como latín clásico. El latín cantado usado por los mozárabes contiene algunos elementos únicos de la península ibérica, especialmente en la pronunciación de las palabras. La pronunciación de latín en la liturgia mozárabe fue influida por el latín vulgar de la época visogoda y, más tarde, el dialecto nativo de la lengua romance se habla en Al-Ándalus, conocido como la lengua mozárabe. Otra característica única de la liturgia mozárabe es la presencia de características de la iglesia oriental (ortodoxo) en su música. Esto es posiblemente a causa de la breve presencia de los bizantinos en el sur de la península ibérica durante los siglos VI y VII. Siguiente la conclusión de la reconquista, la iglesia católica y el gobierno castellano trataron a reemplazar la liturgia mozárabe con el rito romano, en un intento a estandarizar los prácticos religiosos en el reino de Castilla. Pero, la liturgia ha sobrevivido en el presente, y es preformada todavía en la ciudad de Toledo.

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Este video y articulo discute como el lingüístico David Peterson creaba las lenguas inventadas de la serie famosa Juego de Tronos. En 2009, Peterson ganó un contesto a crear el idioma ficcional se llama 'Dothraki' para el programa. A inventar esta lengua, Peterson tuvo solamente un mes y medio. También, Peterson poseía poco material a trabajar de, con unos pocos frases y palabras escribidos por George R.R. Martin, el creador original del Juego de Tronos historia. Primero, Peterson intentó a hacer la fonología y sintaxis de sus lenguas inventadas en concordancia con que Martin proveyó en sus libros. En adición, Peterson tomó inspiración de otras lenguas reales a construir estas nuevas lenguas para la televisión. Por ejemplo, Peterson decidió que la lengua conocida como “Valyrian Alto”, el cual es hablada como un idioma literatura y religiosos en la serie, debe tomar las características de latín y griego antiguo en su morfología y fonética. En su sintaxis, “Valyrian Alto” es lo mismo que las dos lenguas anteriormente mencionadas y el ruso. Mientras Peterson aprendí mucho como construir lenguas de sus clases lingüísticas en la universidad, él dice que su éxito debe mucho a su percepción que el lenguaje es una forma de arte. Según él, a crear una lengua ficcional que es creíble, es necesario a conectar la lengua con la identidad cultural de sus hablantes imaginarios.

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In case you somehow haven't heard yet, the much anticipated eighth and final season of "Game of Thrones" premiers this Sunday on HBO. The television series based on George R.R. Martin's books has made millions for HBO, drastically altered the fortunes of actors who've starred in it and launched the Hollywood career of a language creator named David Peterson.

Back in 2009, Peterson won a contest to create a fictional language for the show called "Dothraki." Since then, he's been hired to create a second language for "Game of Thrones" called High Valyrian, languages for the CW show "The 100" and the Netflix movie "Bright." He's become the go-to language guy in Hollywood. Marketplace caught up with him at his home in Orange County, California.

I started creating my very own language in my first linguistics class. If you want to create languages, linguistics helps, but it's not all you're going to need. Language creation is an art form, and linguistics is a science. You can learn the principles behind it, but that will really only teach you to create a functional language, not a good one.

When I was creating both Dothraki and High Valyrian, there were little bits of language that George R.R. Martin included in his book, a few for Dothraki, including a couple of full phrases and then really just two for High Valyrian, just the phrases, "Valar morghulis" and "Valar dohaeris," and then like a stray word here or there. My job was to take everything that George R.R. Martin had created and use that as my starting point, building off of it after that to make sure that everything that I created fit with his original vision and to make sure that everything that was in the book still counted as grammatical once I was done.

Most of the time, the actors on all the various shows and films I work on get the pronunciation and the delivery of their lines pretty good. Sometimes it's excellent, which is great. And then every so often it's absolutely abysmal, and I just roll my eyes, but it's like, that's show biz. You just kind of have to roll with it.

Ever wondered how to say "This is Marketplace" in Dothraki and High Valyrian? Peterson taught us how:
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He brought "Game of Thrones" languages to life - Marketplace

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In case you somehow haven't heard yet, the much anticipated eighth and final season of "Game of Thrones" premiers this Sunday on HBO. The television series based on George R.R. Martin's books has made millions for HBO, drastically altered the fortunes of actors who've starred in it and launched the Hollywood career of a language creator named David Peterson.

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Este articulo provee una entrevista y discusión sobre la clasicista Emily Wilson, la primera mujer a traducir la Odisea de Homero a inglés. Mientras la Odisea ha sido traducido alrededor de sesenta tiempos desde el siglo XVII, la traducción de Wilson provee una nueva perspectiva del texto antiguo. En su transducción, la meta de Wilson era a tratar a regresar a la antigüedad original del texto y la caracterización de su personaje principal Odiseo, el cual, en su opinión, ha sido demasiado simplificado en anos pasados. Un parte del texto que Wilson pasaba considerando mucho tiempo era la primera descripción del Odiseo como un hombre ‘polytropos’. La palabra ‘polytropos’ en la lengua literal es una combinación del prefijo “poly” que significa ‘mucho’ o ‘múltiple’ y la palabra ‘tropos’ que significa ‘vuelta’, y, así, significa ‘muchas vueltas’. Pero, es evidente que, como este texto es una obra de poesía épico, esta palabra no se debe entender literalmente. Según una perspectiva figurativa, esta palabra puede significar que Odiseo es un hombre desafortunado que es ‘vuelto’ por su entorno como él trata a regresar a su hogar. También, la palabra puede significar que Odiseo es un hombre de poca confianza, un tipo de persona quien ‘vuelta’ cualquier situación a su ventaja. En última instancia, en su transducción, Wilson decide que la palabra debe ser equivalente a la palabra ‘complicado’, reflectar la profundidad y complejidad del personaje de Odiseo. Mientras, Wilson cree que su transducción hace justicia a la versión griega, ella es consciente que alguno del material será inevitablemente perdido en translación. Esto es la consecuencia de las diferencias en la sintaxis entre griego antiguo e inglés y la parcialidad inherente del traductor.

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Credit... Geordie Wood for The New York Times

Feature

The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer's epic a radically contemporary voice.

Credit... Geordie Wood for The New York Times

Late in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me through a line of Ancient Greek. " Polytropos," Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice, pointing to the fifth word - πολuτροπον - of the 12,110-line epic poem that I had come to her office at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss. On the wall hung pictures of Wilson's three young daughters; the windows behind her framed a gray sky that, as I arrived, was just beginning to dim. The poem lying open before us was Homer's "Odyssey," the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the "Iliad," in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them.

Since the "Odyssey" first appeared in English, around 1615, in George Chapman's translation, the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseus's ill-fated 10-year attempt to return home from the war in Troy to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope, has prompted some 60 English translations, at an accelerating pace, half of them in the last 100 years and a dozen in the last two decades. Wilson, whose own translation appears this week, has produced the first English rendering of the poem by a woman.

"One of the things I struggled with," Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack " polytropos, " the first description we get of Odysseus, "is of course this whole question of whether he is passive - the 'much turning' or 'much turned' - right? This was -"

"Treat me," I interrupted, "as if I don't know Greek," as, in fact, I do not.

"The prefix poly," Wilson said, laughing, "means 'many' or 'multiple.' Tropos means 'turn.' 'Many' or 'multiple' could suggest that he's much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he'd like to be on. Or, it could be that he's this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he's the turner."

As Wilson spoke, I recalled a little formula by the American critic Guy Davenport about the difference between Homer's two poems: "The 'Iliad' is a poem about force; the 'Odyssey' is a poem about the triumph of the mind over force." Wilson was parsing the nature of that triumph, embedded in the poem's very first adjective, a difference in mind that would make for a difference in Odysseus's nature, both as a warrior and as a husband.

"So the question," Wilson continued, "of whether he's the turned or the turner: I played around with that a lot in terms of how much should I be explicit about going for one versus the other. I remember that being one of the big questions I had to start off with."

That there could still be big questions about a nearly-three-millenniums-old poem that most everyone has heard of - it has exerted an influence on writers, from Virgil to Milton to Joyce - has everything to do with how Wilson is seeking to redefine the job of modern literary scholarship, an ambition that seems, in part, an inheritance. Born in 1971 in Oxford, England, Wilson comes from a long line of academics on her mother's side. Her mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Shakespeare specialist, taught English literature at Oxford; her mother's brother, Roman history at Cambridge; her mother's father, "a disappointed philosopher" - disappointed because, though he went to Cambridge, he couldn't get a job there - taught at Birmingham; and her mother's mother, Elsie Duncan-Jones, also at Birmingham, was an authority on the poetry of Andrew Marvell.

That inheritance was as much literary as it was a matter of temperament. Her mother's experience as a female academic, Wilson said, over lunch the next day at a noisy bistro, "was tied up with her colleagues in Somerville," the women's college where she taught. "The older colleagues were mostly childless women and had this whole sort of anger - anger and also refusal to understand that there might be extra demands on my mom's time, because she had children." Wilson's mother and another colleague took matters into their own hands. "It was revolutionary," Wilson tells me, with uncomplicated pride, "and it was resented: I was the founding member of the Somerville crèche. She and another female colleague who had a child who was the same age as me organized this day care, first in my house and then it moved to this building near Somerville College."

Mostly, Wilson recalls a quiet, almost somber childhood with her younger sister, the writer Bee Wilson, and her father, the prolific biographer, novelist and critic A.N. Wilson. "There was a lot of silence," Wilson says. "As a kid I was just aware of unhappiness, and aware of these things that weren't ever being articulated, but the sense that nobody is going to be saying what they feel or encouraging anyone else to say what they feel. If you're unhappy, all you can do is go to your room and cry silently." Her parents divorced shortly before she went to college.

In school, Wilson was shy but accomplished. She liked French but was in terror of talking in class. "The potential shame of pronouncing a French word wrong was pretty inhibiting," Wilson said, laughing. "It's very easy to pronounce a French word wrong." But with Latin, Wilson found an instant home. She loved the systematization of it, the reams of things to memorize and to get right. "You have all this information, and you can regurgitate, in the sense that you can strategize to translate an English sentence or a Latin sentence. You can do it all in writing. You don't have to have beautiful Latin pronunciation. It took away a whole level of shame."

As an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, Wilson studied classics and philosophy. Though her education there, she says, offered her a strong introduction to literary study, it wasn't lost on her that none of her professors were women. "There was an awareness of it being sort of a boys' club. Just the fact of never having a female teacher, but it's a difference to how you feel when you don't have any mentors who don't even know what it would be like. I never had a female mentor in classics." Still, the appeal of classics as a discipline was profound, particularly the way that Greek drama presented great emotional tumult. "I had a childhood where it was very hard to name feelings, and just the fact that tragedy as a genre is very good at naming feelings. It's all going to be talked out. I love that about it."

Although Wilson was undecided on a direction after taking her undergraduate degree - she had thoughts of doing law - she ultimately chose to do further studies in English literature at Oxford while she figured her way forward, rereading some of her favorite books, particularly Milton's "Paradise Lost." Emerging with a sense that the writers she appreciated most were in dialogue with antiquity, Wilson pursued a Ph.D. in classics and comparative literature at Yale. Wilson knew that if she was "being smart," she ought to focus on something understudied, like Plutarch. "I loved Plutarch, but I didn't love him as deeply as I loved Sophocles, Euripides, Milton. I just felt like I wanted to spend a little bit longer with Euripides."

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A page from a notebook Wilson kept while translating the "Odyssey." Credit... Geordie Wood for The New York Times

Dedicated to her grandmother Elsie, Wilson's first book, "Mocked With Death," grew out of her dissertation and was published in 2004. It looks at the way mortality was imagined, in the tragic tradition, by Milton, Shakespeare, Seneca, Sophocles and Euripides. Rigorous in its readings, Wilson's study is also frequently touching. It is about the broadest of human inheritances: our constant awareness of all that we will lose, are losing, have lost.

"If you're going to admit that stories matter," Wilson told me, "then it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? The whole question of 'What is that story?' is going to depend on the language, the words that you use."

Throughout her translation of the "Odyssey," Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented - "radical" in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind.

The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson's 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by. Chapman starts things off, in his version, with "many a way/Wound with his wisdom"; John Ogilby counters with the terser "prudent"; Thomas Hobbes evades the word, just calling Odysseus "the man." Quite a range, and we've barely started. There's Alexander Pope's "for wisdom's various arts renown'd"; William Cowper's "For shrewdness famed/And genius versatile"; H.F. Cary's "crafty"; William Sotheby's "by long experience tried"; Theodore Buckley's "full of resources"; Henry Alford's "much-versed"; Philip Worsley's "that hero"; the Rev. John Giles's "of many fortunes"; T.S. Norgate's "of many a turn"; George Musgrave's "tost to and fro by fate"; the Rev. Lovelace Bigge-Wither's "many-sided-man"; George Edgington's "deep"; William Cullen Bryant's "sagacious"; Roscoe Mongan's "skilled in expedients"; Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang's "so ready at need"; Arthur Way's "of craft-renown"; George Palmer's "adventurous"; William Morris's "shifty"; Samuel Butler's "ingenious"; Henry Cotterill's "so wary and wise"; Augustus Murray's "of many devices"; Francis Caulfeild's "restless"; Robert Hiller's "clever"; Herbert Bates's "of many changes"; T.E. Lawrence's "various-minded"; William Henry Denham Rouse's "never at a loss"; Richmond Lattimore's "of many ways"; Robert Fitzgerald's "skilled in all ways of contending"; Albert Cook's "of many turns"; Walter Shewring's "of wide-ranging spirit"; Allen Mandelbaum's "of many wiles"; Robert Fagles's "of twists and turns"; all the way to Stanley Lombardo's "cunning."

Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above couldn't be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word they're translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseus's nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate ("of many a turn") and Cook ("of many turns") preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them - poly ("many"), tropos ("turn") - answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does "a man of many turns" suggest the doubleness of the original word - a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the "Odyssey," one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?

"I wanted there to be a sense," Wilson told me, that "maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don't quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that's not going to be interpretively straightforward."

Here is how Wilson's "Odyssey" begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem's fifth word - to polytropos:

When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I'd never read an "Odyssey" that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half ("wandered ... wrecked ... where ... worked") and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem ("Tell me about ..." and "Find the beginning") seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer's polytropos and Odysseus's complicated nature.

Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson's choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of "complicated" is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means "to fold together." No, we don't think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it's what we mean: that they're compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.

"It feels," I told Wilson, "with your choice of 'complicated,' that you planted a flag."

"It is a flag," she said.

"It says, 'Guess what?' - "

" ' - this is different.' "

Although translation might seem a natural step for a scholar preoccupied by the connections between antiquity and later texts, Wilson was dissuaded from pursuing it. "My colleagues told me: 'You really shouldn't be doing that kind of thing before tenure. Before tenure you have to write, you know, the right kind of book' " - the right kind being one on a subject that your discipline has yet to exhaust. Wilson did write a range of books before tenure, most on canonical texts: her study of suffering and death in literature; a monograph on Socrates. But, not heeding her colleagues' advice, she began to translate Greek and Roman tragedies. A selection of Seneca's plays appeared in 2010; four plays by Euripides in 2016. Both projects were outgrowths of her old desire to "spend a little bit longer" with these authors.

I asked Wilson why translation isn't valued in the academy.

"Because there is no perception that it's serious intellectually. It's imagined as a subset of outreach. That you're going to be communicating with the masses, which is less important than being innovative within your field. And even though I think translation is a way of being innovative within your field, my colleagues don't see it that way."

One way of talking about Wilson's translation of the "Odyssey" is to say that it makes a sustained campaign against that species of scholarly shortsightedness: finding equivalents in English that allow the terms she is choosing to do the same work as the original words, even if the English words are not, according to a Greek lexicon, "correct."

One of Wilson's copies of the "Odyssey." Credit... Geordie Wood for The New York Times

"What gets us to 'complicated,' " Wilson said, returning to her translation of polytropos, "is both that I think it has some hint of the original ambivalence and ambiguity, such that it's both 'Why is he complicated?' 'What experiences have formed him?' which is a very modern kind of question - and hints at 'There might be a problem with him.' I wanted to make it a markedly modern term in a way that 'much turning' obviously doesn't feel modern or like English. I wanted it to feel like an idiomatic thing that you might say about somebody: that he is complicated."

I asked: "What about the commentator who says, 'It does something that more than modernizes - it subverts the fundamental strangeness of the way Odysseus is characterized.' I'm sure some classicists are going to say it's flat out wrong, 'Interesting, but wrong.' "

"You're quite right," she replied. "Reviewers will say that."

How, I asked, would she address such a complaint from someone in her field?

"I struggle with this all the time," Wilson said. "I struggled with this because there are those classicists. I partly just want to shake them and make them see that all translations are interpretations." Most of the criticism Wilson expects, she says, will come from "a digging in of the heels: 'That's not what it says in the dictionary, and therefore it can't be right!' And if you put down anything other than what's said in the dictionary, then, of course, you have to add a footnote explaining why, which means that pretty much every line has to have a footnote. ..." Wilson paused. "That goes to what this translation is aiming to do in terms of an immersive reading experience and conveying a whole narrative. I don't know what to say to those people, honestly." Wilson laughed her buoyant laugh. "I need to have a better answer to them, because they will certainly review it, and they will certainly have a loud voice. They just seem to be coming from such a simple and fundamental misunderstanding."

"Of what?"

"Of what any translation is doing."

What a translation is doing - and what it should do - has been a source of vigorous debate since there were texts to translate. "I'm not a believer," Wilson told me, "but I find that there is a sort of religious practice that goes along with translation. I'm trying to serve something."

Early arguments about translation were over the Old Testament. One tale has it that an Egyptian king of the third-century B.C. wanted a Greek copy of the Pentateuch - the five books of Moses - for the Library of Alexandria. Some 70 Jewish elders said to be "skilled in the Scriptures and in both languages" were sent from Jerusalem. Each worked in a separate room to translate in isolation. When finished, they compared their work. The 70 translations? Identical, "in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end," according to one account. The translation was, literally, faithful: God himself had moved their hands in unison, only one possible translation for his Word. Called "Septuagint" after its 70 translators, this Greek version became a foundational text, both for the early Christian church and for the impossible standard to which all subsequent translations are held: faithfulness. Later Bible translators failed to meet that mystical standard. The Catholic Church took 1,200 years to accept Jerome's Latin version ("tainted with Judaism," was the charge, as it relied on Hebrew sources). The first English Bible's translator, John Wycliffe, was disinterred and his bones were burned for the heresy of translating into English, and his successor, William Tyndale, was excommunicated, sentenced to death by strangulation and burned at the stake.

Emily Wilson in her Philadelphia home. Credit... Geordie Wood for The New York Times.

Although you can understand, if not condone, how murderous rage at a translator might arise if a believer supposed a sacred text to have been desecrated by a translator's hand, it is somewhat surprising that similar vehemence can greet translations of secular canonical texts. Perhaps the most famous such expression is in Matthew Arnold's "On Translating Homer," his series of lectures in 1860 when he was Oxford professor of poetry. In them, he offered a takedown of existing translations of Homer and then asked "in what faithfulness exists": "The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities ... that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble."

Most every Homeric translation since has been scrutinized against his quartet of qualities. Wilson is not persuaded.

"These are not good criteria," Wilson told me. "I think he was a terrible reader of poetry. It's not like he ever translated Homer. I think he had a good 'classics major' undergraduate kind of Greek, but I think it's all to do with a particular notion of aesthetics and class, the whole 'plainness and nobility.' It's about noblesse oblige and you're going to be the kind of gentleman who's going to have gone to Rugby and that will be the kind of language that we speak: the classy kind of language. And projecting all of that back on to the classics. This is what 'sweetness and light' is. It's describing a boys' club. I think it's very interesting that's still with us. Those are the four? It's just the boys' club."

"I do think that gender matters," Wilson said later, "and I'm not going to not say it's something I'm grappling with. I'm trying to take this task and this process of responding to this text and creating this text extremely seriously, with whatever I have, linguistically, sonically, emotionally."

At the center of each of Homer's epics is a warrior. In the "Iliad," it is Achilles, the greatest of the Greeks, a demigod almost invulnerable to death. Although the war is begun over a woman, Helen, stolen from her Greek husband by a Trojan, the "Iliad" is a poem about and presided over by men. Zeus is the poem's prevailing god, and what men do, or are willing to do, in love and war and in the friendships that arise in war and its losses, are the poem's preoccupations.

In the "Odyssey," preoccupations shift, radically. Zeus is replaced by Athena as the dominant god of the tale; the poem begins not with Odysseus but with his wife, Penelope, who has been without him for 20 years, in a kingdom overrun by suitors for her hand, whom the conventions of hospitality ensure she cannot simply expel. The reader doesn't even see Odysseus until the fifth of the poem's 24 books, where we learn that he has been living on an island with Calypso, a goddess, for seven years; that, earlier, he was detained by another goddess, Circe, with whom he also shared a bed; that the Sirens, as he navigates, call to him, desiring him; that a young princess falls in love with him; that, on all sides, women are temptresses, and whereas he submits, we are to understand that Penelope, alone, assailed, remains faithful.

"In the second-wave feminist scholarship in classics," Wilson told me, "people were very keen to try to read Penelope as, 'Let's find Penelope's voice in the "Odyssey," and let's celebrate her, because look, here she is being the hero in an epic in ways we can somehow unpack.' I find that's a little simplistic. What happens to all the unelite women?"

In the episode that Wilson calls "one of the most horrible and haunting of the whole poem," Odysseus returns home to find that his palace has been overrun by suitors for his wife's hand. Though she has resisted them, the women in her palace have not. Odysseus, after slaying the suitors, tells his son, Telemachus, to kill the women. It is an interesting injunction from Odysseus, who himself, during his 10 years of wandering, was serially unfaithful. In Robert Fagles's much-praised translation of the poem, Telemachus says, before he executes the palace women on his father's command: "No clean death for the likes of them, by god!/Not from me - they showered abuse on my head, my mother's too!/You sluts - the suitors' whores! "

But Wilson, in her introduction, reminds us that these palace women - "maidservants" has often been put forward as a "correct" translation of the Greek δμωαι, dmoai, which Wilson calls "an entirely misleading and also not at all literal translation," the root of the Greek meaning "to overpower, to tame, to subdue" - weren't free. Rather, they were slaves, and if women, only barely. Young female slaves in a palace would have had little agency to resist the demands of powerful men. Where Fagles wrote "whores" and "the likes of them" - and Lattimore "the creatures" - the original Greek, Wilson explained, is just a feminine definite article meaning "female ones." To call them "whores" and "creatures" reflects, for Wilson, "a misogynistic agenda": their translators' interpretation of how these females would be defined. Here is how Wilson renders their undoing:

"If I was really going to be radical," Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, "I would've said, polytropos means 'straying,' and andra" - "man," the poem's first word - "means 'husband,' because in fact andra does also mean 'husband,' and I could've said, 'Tell me about a straying husband.' And that's a viable translation. That's one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. The fact that it's possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? That tells you something." But, Wilson added, with the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in: "I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth."

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The First Woman to Translate the 'Odyssey' Into English (Published 2017)

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Feature The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer's epic a radically contemporary voice. Credit... Geordie Wood for The New York Times Late in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me through a line of Ancient Greek.

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Este articulo discute el debato sobre si aprender la programación informática es un reemplazo para aprender un idioma extranjero. Recientemente, muchos estados han considerado permitir cursos en informática a satisfacer los requisitos en la instrucción de lenguas extranjeras para los estudiantes en las escuelas segundarias. Según el autor, mientras las lenguas extranjeras y la informática comparten semejanzas en la estructura de sintaxis, las cuales siguen reglas lógicas, los cursos en informática no enseñan las habilidades en comunicación que son necesarias en nuestro mundo globalizado. El autor apela a los políticos a no olvidar sobre los beneficios de aprender una lengua en un esfuerzo a maximizar las habilidades que parecen ‘comercializables’.

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Maryland's legislature is considering a bill to allow computer coding courses to fulfill the foreign language graduation requirement for high school. A similar bill passed the Florida State Senate in 2017 (but was ultimately rejected by the full Legislature), and a federal version proposed by Senators Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, is being considered in Congress.

The animating idea behind these bills is that computer coding has become a valuable skill. This is certainly true. But the proposal that foreign language learning can be replaced by computer coding knowledge is misguided: It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief that science and technology education should take precedence over subjects like English, history and foreign languages.

As a professor of languages and literatures, I am naturally skeptical of such a position. I fervently believe that foreign language learning is essential for children's development into informed and productive citizens of the world. But even more urgent is my alarm at the growing tendency to accept and even foster the decline of the sort of interpersonal human contact that learning languages both requires and cultivates.

Language is an essential - perhaps the essential - marker of our species. We learn in and through natural languages; we develop our most fundamental cognitive skills by speaking and hearing languages; and we ultimately assume our identities as human beings and members of communities by exercising those languages. Our profound and impressive ability to create complex tools with which to manipulate our environments is secondary to our ability to conceptualize and communicate about those environments in natural languages.

The difference between natural and computer languages is not merely one of degree, with natural languages' involving vocabularies that are several orders of magnitude larger than those of computer languages. Natural languages aren't just more complex versions of the algorithms with which we teach machines to do tasks; they are also the living embodiments of our essence as social animals. We express our love and our losses, explore beauty, justice and the meaning of our existence, and even come to know ourselves all through natural languages.

The irony is that few people appreciate the uniqueness of human language more than coders working in artificial intelligence, who wrestle with the difficulty of replicating our cognitive abilities. The computer scientist Alan Turing noted that the question of whether a machine can think is incredibly difficult to determine, not least because of the lack of a clear definition of "thinking"; he proposed investigating instead the more tractable question of whether a machine can convince a human interlocutor that it's human - the so-called Turing test.

One of the important lessons of Turing's test is the reminder that in our interactions with other people, we are fundamentally limited in how much we can know about another's thoughts and feelings, and that this limitation and the desire to transcend it is essential to our humanity. In other words, for us humans, communication is about much more than getting information or following instructions; it's about learning who we are by interacting with others.

The interpersonal essence of language learning extends to learning as a whole. We know that small-group, in-person instruction is more effective than traditional lectures. We ask questions, are asked in return, and we learn more, learn faster and retain more when we care about the people we are interacting with. It's no accident that despite the initial enthusiasm generated by MOOCs, or massive online open courses, they have in fact been a major disappointment, with completion rates as low as 5 percent. By comparison, online courses with smaller groups of students and direct feedback from the professor show completion rates as high as 85 percent.

In an age of ever-rising inequality and student debt, it's understandable that policymakers should seek to maximize the skills that seem the most marketable. And there is no doubt that computer programming is a valuable tool.

But this is also a time when we are becoming increasingly isolated from our communities and alienated from any notion of a common good. We need to invest more, not less, in language learning, and in the human contact it epitomizes.

William Egginton is a professor of the humanities at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses."
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Opinion | Is Computer Code a Foreign Language?

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Maryland's legislature is considering a bill to allow computer coding courses to fulfill the foreign language graduation requirement for high school. A similar bill passed the Florida State Senate in 2017 (but was ultimately rejected by the full Legislature), and a federal version proposed by Senators Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, is being considered in Congress.

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Este articulo discute y revisa una nueva transducción de la biblia por Robert Atler, un profesor de hebreo y literatura comparativa a la Universidad de California, Berkeley. En la opinión de Atler, las traducciones modernas de la biblia no se han dado cuenta de los aspectos literarios de prosa y poesía bíblica y él quería arreglar esto. En su transducción, él enfoca en cinco elementos lingüísticas principales: la sintaxis, la selección de palabras, la juega de sonidos y palabras, el ritmo, y la lengua de dialógica a proveer una mejor traducción del hebreo original. Él cree que, en un intento a ‘familiarizar’ el texto a lectores ingleses, la biblia perdió mucho de su sentimiento ‘primitivo’. Atler cree que es preferible a quedar muchos de los elementos ‘extranjeros’ del original texto para los lectores modernos. Por ejemplo, un rasgo distinto de la sintaxis bíblica original es el uso de parataxis, el cual es la unión de los clausulas con la palabra y en vez de las conjunciones como porque y aunque. Las traducciones inglesas modernas a menudo han rechazado el uso de parataxis a favor de claridad adicional. Por lo tanto, en la opinión de Atler, estas traducciones perdieron el ritmo belleza y la ambigüedad de la versión original.

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IN 1997 Gary Paul Morson, an American professor of Slavic literature, reflected on the work of Constance Garnett, the translator who introduced Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky to the English-speaking world. "Every time someone else redoes one of these works," he wrote, "reviewers say that the new version replaces Garnett; and then another version comes out, which, apparently, replaces Garnett again, and so on." Much the same can be said about the King James version of the Hebrew Bible, for centuries considered the authoritative English translation.

A new, complete translation seeks to set itself apart from both the King James version and from modern translations. Robert Alter first rendered the Book of Genesis in English in the 1990s, with no "quixotic" plan, in his words, to take on the whole Hebrew Bible. A professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr Alter had long argued that the literary aspects of biblical prose and poetry had been overlooked by scholars. In translating Genesis-and later, book by book, the rest of the Hebrew Bible-he sought to amend this.
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Mr Alter's full translation, which took him 24 years to complete, was published in December 2018; in "The Art of Bible Translation", a companion book published this month, he discusses the principles that guided his work. The King James version and the modern translations both fall short, he argues. The modern translations, taken on by committees with philological expertise, often focus on getting the lexical meanings of the text right, but lack literary sensitivity. They underestimate readers and over-explain the text, Mr Alter says, disambiguating the many possible meanings of a word in favour of a single one, resulting in a "deceptive antiseptic clarity". The committee responsible for the King James version, on the other hand, while more loyal to the original Hebrew in its literalism, lacked philological expertise. And moreover, for all their fine sense of English, the language has changed somewhat since 1611, when their translation was first published.

"The Art of Bible Translation" focuses on five main linguistic elements: syntax, word choice, sound play and word play, rhythm and the language of dialogue. For each of these, Mr Alter provides examples that illustrate the challenges involved, showing how a literary sensibility can affect the outcome for the better. The story of Jacob and Esau, for example, is used to demonstrate the importance of maintaining the original word choice. Esau, hungry from an unsuccessful hunt, enters Jacob's tent, where his brother is preparing a lentil stew. In Mr Alter's translation, Esau says: "Let me gulp down some of this red red stuff, for I am famished." The original Hebrew simply reads ha'adom ha'adom hazeh, "this red-red"-but the King James version and the New Jerusalem Bible opt for "that same red pottage". In the attempt to familiarise the text to English readers, Esau's inarticulate crudeness is lost. "Foreignising" the text, Mr Alter argues, is preferable to "domesticating" it.

A distinctive feature of biblical syntax is the use of parataxis: the linking of clauses by and rather than by subordinate conjunctions such as because or although. The King James translators, presumably to avoid tampering too much with the word of God, tended to preserve parataxis. Modern English translations, however, largely dispense of it, in favour of a supposed clarity-thus losing what Mr Alter calls the "beautifully uncoiling rhythmic sequence" of the original, as well as the artful ambiguity created by the absence of a direct causal link. Other sins against the ancient text include "airbrushing" the original Hebrew, attempting to smooth over its concrete simplicity with the reflexes and embellishments of a copy editor. Mr Alter prefers short, blunt Anglo-Saxon words, which are closer to the simple Hebrew in effect, to those with Latin or Greek origins.

Mr Alter rightly notes that many recent translations seem a bit detached from modern literature. Still, there are instances in which a greater sensitivity to pop culture would have benefitted his own work. After King Saul fails to obey the word of God, and takes his enemies' sheep and cattle rather than killing them outright, he is informed by the prophet Samuel that he has fallen out of favour. In Mr Alter's rendering, Samuel asks: "And why did you not heed the voice of the LORD, for you pounced on the booty and did evil in the eyes of the LORD?" To younger readers, pouncing on booty might sound less like a biblical sin and more like a lyric by Nicki Minaj. Given that Mr Alter is 83 years old, this is understandable, but it further illustrates how mercurial language can be, and how even the most careful translations can miss the mark on occasion.

Mr Alter's translation is unlikely to unseat the King James version, if only for reasons of historical attachment. Yet even if it is sometimes hard to share in Mr Alter's outrage at the "egregious choices" some other Bible translations have made, his argument for a more literary rendering is sound and convincing. "The Art of Bible Translation" is a compelling book, which demonstrates both the extent of Mr Alter's mastery and the degree of care and attention he put into this momentous project.
We talked to Robert Alter for a podcast (below). Skip to 17:33 to listen to the interview.

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A monumental new translation of the Hebrew Bible

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IN 1997 Gary Paul Morson, an American professor of Slavic literature, reflected on the work of Constance Garnett, the translator who introduced Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky to the English-speaking world. "Every time someone else redoes one of these works," he wrote, "reviewers say that the new version replaces Garnett; and then another version comes out, which, apparently, replaces Garnett again, and so on."

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Este articulo presenta una discusión sobre la controversia el cual ha enfrentado los educadores por muchos años en si los jóvenes deben aprender como a leer y escribir principalmente con el uso del método fónico o otro método, se llama el método de lenguaje completo, el cual instruye los estudiantes a utilizar y enfocar en las pistas que da el contexto. Según la autora, ambos de estos métodos son insatisfactorios. Para enseñar los estudiantes mejor, ella dice que los sistemas escolares deben implementar un currículo el cual instruye los estudiantes a leer y escribir al aprender ambos la fonética de la lengua y las reglas de la morfología de la lengua. La autora dice que, como las disciplinas de matemática y ciencia, maestros de literaria deben enseñar sus estudiantes las reglas fundamentales y lógicos de la lengua desde el principio.

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Perspective | A case for why both sides in the 'reading wars' debate are wrong - and a proposed solution

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This is an unusual post about the "reading wars," that seemingly never-ending battle about how to best teach reading to students - systematic phonics or whole language. This argues that both sides have it wrong, and the authors, two brothers who are literacy experts, suggest a new way. They are Jeffrey S.

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Esta obra discute la importancia del idioma nativo de Irlandesa, se llama el gaélico, en el movimiento independentista irlandés al principio del siglo XX. Debido a el trabajo de lingüistas irlandesas como Eoin MacNeill, el gaélico fue resucitado después de casi se volvió extinto a causa de su represión bajo el colonialismo inglés. Mac Neill luchó a convertir el gaélico del sistema de escritura latina a su alfabeto original. Él pensó que la disminución de la lengua irlandesa podría atribuida a el uso del alfabeto latín. El alfabeto latín, el cual fue traído por los ingleses, complicaba la ortografía de la lengua porque durante la regla inglesa, las palabras fueron escribidos usando fonemas ingleses. Entones, múltiples letras deben ser usados a representar muchos sonidos gaélicos, y, por lo tanto, hacer las palabras demasiadas largas y la morfología confusa. Después de la independencia de irlandesa, el gobierno implementó las reformas ortografías por todo el país a simplificar la morfología por adaptar los sonidos gaélicos mejor a un alfabeto latín revisado.

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In these last days of empire, Britain is slowly withdrawing into some isolated hikikomori state, distrusting old European relationships, trying to build a future by longing for a past that never was. This former empire, fretfully and not always functionally, has had to reconsider what it means now to be British.

The debate over Brexit, so steeped in desire for sovereignty and nostalgia for the days of the empire, often overlooks something crucial: Britain is not just a land that is forever England. There are actually other countries in the United Kingdom. Scotland and Northern Ireland, two Gaelic countries, each with their own rich cultures and native languages, voted to stay with their European friends and neighbors. What of their rights and sovereignty?

Breaking up is hard to do

As strong as the cultural ties are between the countries that make up Great Britain, this kind of split has happened before. But Brexiteers don't always see the strong parallels between Great Britain wanting to leave the European Union, and that one time, still in living memory, when the Republic of Ireland wanted to leave the United Kingdom.

There's a growing momentum for Scottish independence, a united Ireland, and even talk of an independent Wales.

Many conservative politicians have displayed a mindboggling ignorance about parts of their own nation that are not English, dismissing them as trivial or unimportant, only to realize too late that, for one, the knotty Irish border problem is probably not one that should unravel on its own. One Tory MP simply assumed that all English people would be automatically entitled to Irish passports which would presumably allow them all the benefits of the EU... and still have their Brexit. Eager Eurosceptic politicians may not have seriously considered the fracturing of the United Kingdom as a result of Brexit, but there's a growing momentum for Scottish independence, a united Ireland, and even talk of an independent Wales. These would not be adrift and anchorless countries, going it alone, but nations with European futures.

The Easter Rising

These days, leaving means an exchange of petulant words and white papers. But back at the turn of the twentieth century, during the Easter Rising of 1916, disagreement with these kinds of Anglo-Saxon attitudes of superior entitlement meant over 3000 people were arrested, fifteen Irish revolutionary leaders were executed... and at least one linguist was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Yes, one of the most influential thinkers and leaders of the Irish revolution was a linguistic scholar turned political revolutionary, Eoin MacNeill. MacNeill was a co-founder of the Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, which aimed to preserve Irish language and culture. He became a key figure of the Gaelic revival. No one could have guessed that the grassroots revival of an almost dead language would be so dangerous, so threatening, to those who were in favor of the union with Britain. Brigittine M. French's essay on the curious linguistic history of Irish independence shows how, while Britain has often had mixed feelings about its place in Europe, the conception of Ireland as linguistically and culturally European, rather than British, was one of the central motivations for independence. French argues that Eoin MacNeill's scientifically-approached linguistic research on the Irish language, as well as his linguistic ideology that language and nationhood were intertwined (and this could be inclusive rather than negatively exclusive), would play a huge role in the quest for Irish sovereignty for all those who thought of themselves as Irish.

MacNeill's Gaelic League cofounder was the more well-known and charismatic Douglas Hyde. Hyde would eventually become the first president of the Republic, while MacNeill (after being released from prison and then later re-arrested, with all his scholarly research confiscated) would become the first minister of Education. The highly influential Gaelic League was at first intensely dedicated to "the preservation of Irish as the National Language of Ireland, the extension of its use as a spoken language, the study and publication of existing Irish literature, and the cultivation of a modern literature in Irish."

What is the Irish Language?

Not everyone knows that Ireland has its own language. It's actually one of Europe's first, pre-Christian literary languages, thousands of years older than English. Yet it's now spoken regularly by only about 2% of the Irish population. It's called "Gaeilge" in Irish, and "Irish" in English by the Irish, and often (improperly) "Gaelic" by non-Irish others, or "Irish Gaelic" to distinguish it from its mostly mutually intelligible dialectal sibling, "Scottish Gaelic" (also known, confusingly, as "Gaelic"). And of course there's (Irish) English, which is the more prominently spoken of Ireland's two official languages, as Irish speaker Manchán Magan found in his documentary series No Béarla (No English), in which he attempts to travel around his own country using just Irish, only to be continually asked to "speak English." In linguistically-fraught Northern Ireland, unionist politicians regularly disrespect and are stridently opposed to government support of any official status for the language, undercutting its links to an Irish identity, even going so far as to furiously scratch Irish words off manhole covers.

What manner of dire things happened to make an ancient language once spoken by the Irish majority decline in popularity and cause so much hate? Classical Irish, an early modern literary standard of the language used by the Irish majority, began to fade out by the seventeenth century, as its speakers were "annihilated or dispersed" through a concerted, long-running campaign of ethnic cleansing, in which a third of the population was killed through execution or starvation or banished into slavery in the Carribbean. The destruction of the language was often part of official British policy, such as the law that the Irish must take on English surnames or lose their property. In 1585, British statesman Sir Henry Sidney told the king he thought the best solution for controlling these unruly people who refused to accept they were British was "all brehons [judges], carraghes, bards, rhymers, friars, monks, Jesuits, pardoners, nuns and such like, to be executed by martial law... Irish habits for men and women to be abolished, and the English tongue to be extended." Army commander Sir Charles Coote simplified this in 1641 by ordering his men to just kill all Irish adults and children "more than a span long."

When yet another attempt at independence in the eighteenth century, supported by France, was crushed, Ireland fully merged with Great Britain. The language of the colonists, English, took over as a majority language. The only spoken Irish that remained were the dialects of the rural poor. The quality of life for these speakers declined so markedly in the nineteenth century, with the Great Famine, that Irish became stigmatized as the language of outcasts and the dispossessed, where the majority opinion, even for some Irish leaders, was that "even in Ireland the respectable people do not speak it, only the wilder sort."

With that kind of history, it's remarkable that the Irish are still on speaking terms with the English language, much less friends with their once oppressive neighbor.

Language and National Identity

We're often told that in terms of Ireland it's differences in factors like class and religion that group people apart politically, such as Catholics (pro-independence) vs. Protestants (pro-union). In truth there are people of diverse beliefs on either side. It's interesting to note that independent Ireland's first president, Douglas Hyde, was an upper middle class Protestant, voted in by Catholics, and worked together with Eoin MacNeill, a middle class Catholic, in both revolution and language revival.

Language seems like such an ordinary, insignificant part of our lives. We use it to pass the salt, remember the milk, and make small talk with our neighbors. But language, even a homely community language, can be a powerful symbol and expression of shared national identity, what it means to be the same, from the same place. Both Hyde and MacNeill were well aware that language was central to a debate on nationalism, uniting a people, diverse in ethnicities, religion, dialects or beliefs, into a community and a country. Hyde declared "What do the in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim we have upon the world's recognition of us as a separate nationality. [...] Spectator and Saturday Review harp on? That we ought to be content as an integral part of the United Kingdom because we have lost the robes of nationality, our language and customs."

A country can support more than one language without diluting what it means to be from that country.

Many countries and cultures celebrate their language as an expression of their unique identity. This designation can start to seem negative when the expression of other ways of speaking is tied to systemic punishment, shame, or hate speech. The United States for one doesn't actually have an official language, but that doesn't stop some Americans from raging at Spanish speakers to "speak English, this is America", even to the point of violence. Yet the Spanish language has an older history in America, having been introduced to the lands that would eventually become the United States by way of Christopher Columbus. The first Spanish settlement at St Augustine, Florida was founded in 1565, just as Shakespeare was probably about to utter his first baby words and certainly much earlier than the first English settlement in Jamestown in 1607. A country can support more than one language without diluting what it means to be from that country. Certainly a lack of one language shouldn't invalidate a people's national identity.

The relationship of language to nationalist movements can indeed be problematic, but, drawing on a long history of linguistic persecution, Eoin MacNeill did not believe in championing just one way of speaking while forbidding others. The diversity of the Irish people could be united as the same through the joint ownership of their slowly dying ancient language. MacNeill believed in taking in all of its living dialects, instead of choosing just one and imposing that as a standard, while refusing all others. That evolved language would be tied to a modern Irish identity and culture, which was different from an expression of that culture in the more predominantly spoken English language.

"If Irish is to become once more the language of a nation, it must shape itself to express all the thoughts of a modern nation's life... The view [of Irish as an inferior language to English] more than anything else, led to the weakening in Ireland of that instinct, universal among nations, of recognizing in the national language the most essential element of national life."

Remarkably, as MacNeill showed, even something as simple and as strange as spelling and phonetics can help define a national identity and culture.

The Curious Irish Spelling System

As English speakers, we look at spelling and its phonetics from an Anglo perspective, in which one letter represents one sound and that a perfectly phonetic, one-to-one system is the ideal. We never think to think in any other way. English spelling is of course far from perfect, with many irregular, archaic forms still in use, and more than one letter used for one sound, such as "th." In the gilded age, there was a perfect mania, a "cult of efficiency," for spelling to be reformed and simplified, bankrolled by Andrew Carnegie. A prominent engineer, Frank B. Gilbreth, believed spelling just needed fixing to match the ideal and confidently thought that "it should not be difficult to convince anyone that standardizing spelling is primarily a problem in finding the One Best Way, which is the special work of the engineer." This assumes there's only one way to use the Roman alphabet, which MacNeill decried.

"Owing to the fact that most of us learn to spell in English first, many imagine that spelling according to the English system, or want of a system, has a kind of divine right or prior claim to the representation of sounds. [...] We daily hear that such and such a thing is written "phonetically," meaning that it is spelled in the English way."

Carnegie and Gilbreth would have been horrified or amazed, as many people are, if they'd seen Irish words written down. Irish used to use its own writing system, Ogham, before it moved to the Latin alphabet and had to do the best with what that imperfect system could give. Full of strings of vowels and consonants clumped bewilderingly together, such as in "bhfaighidh" "will get" (which is pronounced almost as a monosyllable), Irish spelling looks so weird and unwieldy from an English spelling perspective, that Irish names like Saoirse, Siobhan, and Niamh are often mispronounced by non-Irish speakers who want to sound out every letter the English way.

In fact the Irish spelling system, simplified in the 1940s to remove many archaic spellings, though complex, is fairly regular, phonetic and logical, once you know the very un-English code, compared to some of the more illogically phonetic archaic forms we might encounter in English. Irish also maintains a relationship to the phonology, morphology, syntax, and history of the language in a useful way that is otherwise erased in English spelling.

Irish's spelling system elides the concept of an alphabet as indicated one sound for one symbol. Left to form Irish words with a borrowed, reduced Latin alphabet that didn't have enough letters (especially when it came to things like typesetting and typewriters, there was not much choice), Irish uses sequences of silent letters that indicate more precisely how a word is to be pronounced and more clearly shows the relationship of sounds to each other. In English for example, we might be amazed once we realise that "b" and "v" and even "w" are phonetically related since we use different symbols for them, but in Irish, with "b", "bh" [v] and "bh" [w] (depending on the vowel that follows) the relationship is clear. It's a pretty clever system.

Ireland's Place in European Culture

But it can be harder to achieve Irish literacy if you're bogged down with English phonetic assumptions. By encouraging people to appreciate the Irish language in a more Irish-centric way, even down to the sound and the letter, MacNeill was advocating for more independence and separation from a thinking that gave English modes of writing a higher default status.

MacNeill's research on the Irish language as its own independent entity unrelated to English customs was influential partially thanks to help and support from a growing pan-European scientific interest in Celtic languages and Romanticism, particularly Irish culture. German linguistic scholars especially were arguing for an inclusion of the Celtic family of languages into Indo-European, which had been disregarded before. It was this kind of scientific and linguistic enquiry that was a foundation for the much maligned Irish identity and language to really claim its place and status as a historically significant and older European culture... and helped fuel the growing desire for independence by its people.

A far cry from a traditional British suspicion of the European continent, Irish revolutionary leaders, through linguistic scholarship of their very own language, were embracing an independent Irish way of thinking, their connections to a rich European past and looking forward to a European future.
Editors' Note: An earlier draft of this piece misspelled "Gaeilge" as "Gaelige;" the error has been corrected.

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When Language Started a Political Revolution | JSTOR Daily

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In these last days of empire, Britain is slowly withdrawing into some isolated hikikomori state, distrusting old European relationships, trying to build a future by longing for a past that never was. This former empire, fretfully and not always functionally, has had to reconsider what it means now to be British.

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Esta publicación discute las razones de las diferencias entre el español y el portugués, a pesar su proximidad geográfica. La raíz de muchos de estas diferencias es a causa de que la situación política en la península ibérica durante la edad media. Después de la conquista árabe del reino visigoda en el siglo VIII, solo un pequeño parte de la península ibérica quedaba bajo regla cristiana. Esta región, el cual se volvió conocido como Asturias, unificó a formar el primer reino cristiano después de la llegada de los árabes. Pero, como el territorio del reino expandió, el estado eventualmente partió en dos partes—El reino de León en el este y el país de Portugal en el oeste. Estos reinos desarrollaban identidades únicas regionales y sus lenguas empezaron a divergir. Me interesa que la morfología de portugués es más similar a latín vulgar que castellano porque el reino de Portugal conquistó su territorio y consolidó su control político más temprano. Por lo tanto, portugués pudo ser estandarizado mucho antes de castellano.

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"They look similar!" I can already hear you saying. "Look, just change this, and constituci ón becomes constituição. Todo is tudu and bien is bem. Lengua is lingua, and is idioma. They're just dialects of the same language."

Yes and no.

Now, no. Portuguese and Spanish are currently quite different. You can't learn one and expect to function effortlessly in the other. Portuguese sounds are quite different from Spanish ones, as are the two languages' vocabularies. And which variety of present-day Portuguese and Spanish are we talking about, specifically? There's Argentine Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, for starters, and Canary Islands Spanish and Guinean Portuguese, not to mention the regional differences between Portuguese and Spanish dialects within Portugal and Spain themselves.

But once upon a time, yes. Portuguese and Spanish were, basically, dialects of the same language. That language was Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, from which all Romance languages spring.

Hundreds of years later, how have Portuguese and Spanish grown apart, and why? And will they always be different?

Iberian siblings

Spain and Portugal presently occupy almost the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula, the spit of land that sticks out of Western Europe just below France. (Almost, but not quite: the tiny Principality of Andorra sits snug along the border of Spain and France, ensconced in the embrace of the Eastern Pyrenees.) The Iberian Peninsula is where Portuguese and Spanish were 'born' (if languages can be born) and it is also the main reason why Portuguese and Spanish are much closer to each other than to the other major Romance languages: it has allowed them to develop in relative isolation. Indeed, this is plain to see on a map: the oceans surround the western, southern and eastern edges of the Peninsula, while to the north, the Pyrenees form a natural border with France. It is for this reason also that Portuguese and Spanish are usually known as the Iberian or Iberoamerican languages.

But Portuguese and Spanish were not the first languages on the Peninsula, nor are they those first languages' descendants. They come from a very different place.

All roads lead from Rome

The story of Portuguese and Spanish, as with all Romance languages, actually begins in Italy. Or, more specifically, with the Roman Empire, which spoke Latin and spread the language across the lands that it conquered and governed.

At their height, the Romans controlled almost all the areas immediately surrounding the Mediterranean, including modern-day Italy, Croatia, the Levant (the area around modern-day Israel, Lebanon and Syria), the Maghreb (modern-day Morocco), and the Iberian peninsula (which the Romans called 'Hispania'). Latin, as the language of the Roman Empire, was thus brought into all these places, and it gradually began to supersede the use of many other languages on the Peninsula.

Aquitanian, Tartessian, Lusitanian, Celtiberian: these are some of the languages believed to have existed on the peninsula before the arrival of the Romans in 218 BCE. All have now been lost to history (except perhaps Aquitanian, which may have survived in its possible daughter language, Basque, and which you can read about here) because Latin superseded them all in the new Roman province of Hispania. At this time, there was no Spain or Portugal to speak of; there was only Hispania, initially divided into two sections, Hispania Ulterior and Citerior, which became three from 27 BCE: Lusitania (the south-west), Baetica (the south), and Tarraconensis (the rest); and then five from 284 CE, with swathes of Tarraconensis becoming the new provinces of Galicia (the north-west) and Cartaginense (the south-east).

Thus, for the next 600 years, Latin continued to reign supreme on the Iberian Peninsula, as it did in most of the other areas of the Roman Empire.

Latin, however, was itself changing. Just as there are formal and informal versions of Arabic and Tamil today, spoken in different contexts, so too were there different varieties of Latin emerging in the Empire. There was a standardised, 'higher' version of Latin, which we call Classical Latin, spoken in more formal contexts like matters of administration and, later, in churches; and then there was the more informal Latin that everyday people spoke, which gradually came to be called colloquial or Vulgar Latin.

Vulgar Latin developed differently in different parts of the Empire. Not all the reasons for the differences are known, but one main factor could be that different parts of the Empire had different indigenous languages that came into contact with Latin, and thus different parts of the Empire had different loanwords (and eventually vocabularies) in their versions of Vulgar Latin. For example, the Vulgar Latin spoken in Spain and Portugal might have included loanwords from Celtiberian, whereas the Vulgar Latin spoken in France might have loanwords from other indigenous languages instead such as Gaulish.

Of course, Vulgar Latin was frowned upon by authorities and those from the higher echelons of society, and Classical Latin remained their language of choice; they maintained it as a unifying language that was used for administration in all parts of the Roman Empire. Thus, as long as the Empire stayed intact, so too did Latin.

Gothic and Arabic

Like all great empires, however, the Roman Empire was destined to fall. As its influence and control over the territories on its periphery began to weaken significantly, territories like Hispania began in the 5 th century CE to experience several waves of invasions by Germanic peoples like the Vandals, the Alans, and the Visigoths. Eventually, Hispania came under control of this last group, the Visigoths, who were invited to rule the province for Rome by Emperor Honorius in 415 CE, and who gradually took complete control of it, especially after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE.

The new kings were native speakers of Gothic, a distant but now extinct relative of today's German and English. Gothic never really caught on in Hispania, and remained the language of the upper classes, while the majority of the population continued to use Vulgar Latin for everyday communication and interaction. However, with Classical Latin no longer readily available for 'reference' as the standard to aspire to, Vulgar Latin in Hispania likely began to change further, incorporating several new features from Gothic.

Then, beginning in 711 CE, Visigothic Hispania was almost entirely conquered by the Moors of the Umayyad Caliphate, becoming the new Muslim kingdom of Al-Andalus. In a series of swift, lightning-fast conquests, the Umayyads took almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, and replaced Gothic with Arabic as the language of the elite.

However, the Vulgar Latin dialects continued to survive in large part because most of the population remained Christian despite now being subject to heavy Arabic influence. For this reason, the Vulgar Latin of this time is known as Mozarabic. As had been the case under the Visigoth kings, Mozarabic was spoken by a large majority of the population, while Arabic was only used by the upper echelons of society.

Whence Portuguese and Spanish, then? At last, with the Muslim conquest of Spain, they were beginning to appear.

Beloved Homeland

In the northwest corner of Spain, the tiny kingdom of Asturias successfully resisted the Moors, and was able to recover and grow in strength throughout the 9 th and 10 th centuries CE. This one remaining Christian bulwark on the peninsula thus served as the nucleus of the movement known as the Reconquista or the Christian reconquering of Spain, and also as the nucleus from which Portuguese and Spanish as we know them today were eventually born.

At its inception, Asturias was composed of the modern-day regions of Asturias and Galicia, which were never fully under the control of the Moors. Indeed, Galicia especially had remained fiercely distinctive since the 4 th century. In 409 CE, slightly earlier than the rest of the peninsula, it had become a separate Roman vassal state under the Suebi, a separate Germanic race from the Visigoths, and remained an independent Suebi kingdom until 585 CE, when Visigoth King Leovigild absorbed it into the rest of Visigoth Hispania. Galician dialects of Vulgar Latin were thus already rather more divergent compared to Vulgar Latin and Mozarabic dialects on the rest of the peninsula, and even compared to their Asturian brethren.

Enter a Galician nobleman named Vimara Peres, who at the end of the 9 th century CE, led an Asturian force to conquer a sizeable chunk of Andalusian territory between the Minho and Douro rivers. Asturian King Alfonso III awarded the entire region to Peres as a County, and Peres resettled the area with Galician colonists. He also named it after the largest port city in the region, Portus Cale -taken today as the origin of the name Portugal. From this point on, Portugal began to develop its own regional identity, and indeed, its own distinct Vulgar Latin dialects, separate from the Asturian ones.

Portuguese and Spanish

Eventually, Asturias splintered into several successor states as various kings and heirs fought for control over the area. Two of these successor states were the Kingdom of Leon, and the County of Portugal, the latter of which declared its independence as a separate Kingdom from Leon in 1143 under King Afonso Henrique, and by which time had expanded to fill out most of the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Portuguese was also by this time a markedly different dialect from the other Vulgar Latin daughter dialects, and Portugal's separation from Leon ensured that this would continue to be so.

Meanwhile, Leon, later the Kingdom of Leon and Castile, gradually began to assert itself as the dominant force in the central area of the Peninsula. It eventually defeated the Moorish kingdoms, and expanded to control the territory of modern-day Spain by the end of the 15 th century CE. The Vulgar Latin daughter dialect that eventually became the language that we know today as Spanish was the Castilian dialect that originated with Leon and Castile, and which became standardised in written form in the 13 th century around the city of Toledo through the work of the Toledo School of Translators. Under the official patronage of King Alfonso X, this group worked to translate a large body of various Arabic and Hebrew texts into Latin and, for the first time, Castilian, giving Castilian a sizeable body of "official" written language, and in doing so laying the foundations for Castilian's eventual dominance over the other daughter dialects of Vulgar Latin.

Differences today

Today, both Standard Castilian Spanish and Standard Continental Portuguese reflect this rich tapestry of linguistic and cultural history, with a sizeable number of loanwords from Arabic, Gothic and (in the case of Spanish) Basque. Both languages retain similar grammatical features and syntax, and also share many cognates, or root word forms, as a result of their common descent from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the peninsula.

However, Portuguese and Spanish differ mainly because of their different origins during the period following the Muslim conquest of Iberia and the advent of the Reconquista. Modern-day Portugal was conquered and consolidated as a stable kingdom much earlier than Spain, and thus the process of the standardisation of Portuguese began earlier than that of Spanish, resulting in Portuguese retaining more recognisable features of Vulgar Latin than Spanish, whose original core dialects evolved and became standardised much later. Geography, both natural and political, has also played a part-had Portugal not remained an independent kingdom and state, it is conceivable that Portuguese might have deteriorated, much as the other Vulgar Latin dialects have today. (The reverse with Castilian Spanish is possible too, though much more unlikely, due to the relative size of the two polities).

Other Vulgar Latin dialects?

What happened to those, I hear you ask? After all, there were other successor states to Asturias, like Aragon, and Navarre. Surely they had their own unique dialects. And what happened to Leonese and Galician?

The answer is that with the process of standardisation, other dialects that have not been chosen as the standard often become marginalised and are left to simply fade away. In many cases, this is exactly what happened with the other dialects up until recent times: Aragonese, Leonese, and Navarrese are all still spoken, but by relatively few people, as Castilian Spanish became the sole language of use in almost all domains of public life after the 15 th century. Nonetheless, Galicia has managed to maintain its strong distinctive regional identity, and Galician has survived quite well into the present day as a strong marker of that identity. Galician and Portuguese continue to be rather more mutually intelligible than Portuguese and Spanish as a result of Portuguese's evolution from the Galician Vulgar Latin dialects; indeed, most linguists agree that Galician and Portuguese form a sort of continuum of intelligibility. Two other languages that have experienced a resurgence on the peninsula are Catalan, which after almost near-extinction has reemerged as one of the primary drivers of the Catalan independence movement, and Basque, very probably the last survivor of the languages originally spoken on the peninsula before the coming of the Romans.

The New World

Now that you know how Portuguese and Spanish came to be, the question is, where are they going?

In the 14 th and 15 th centuries, Portuguese and Spanish explorers were an integral part of the European Age of Exploration, which saw the colonisation and domination of Africa, the Americas, and much of Asia by European colonists. Portuguese and Spanish came to override indigenous languages in much the same way Latin did, and with almost identical end results: Spanish is now the dominant language in most of Central and South America at the expense of many native languages, while Brazilian Portuguese has far outstripped Continental Portuguese in terms of number of speakers and influence. Both languages have also left their mark on daughter languages as far flung as Tagalog in the Philippines, Kristang in Malaysia, and Guinean Creole in Guinea-Bissau.

With the collapse of the Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, all these varieties and offshoots of Portuguese and Spanish have been largely left to develop on their own, much as the various dialects of Vulgar Latin were left to their own devices after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And already we are seeing marked differences: Brazilian Portuguese speakers, for example, often pronounce initial 'd' sounds with a sound rather like the English 'j', an innovation unknown to Continental Portuguese, while Argentinian Spanish speakers are famous for their almost lyrical intonation patterns, a feature not found in Castilian Spanish. Chilean Spanish is full of loans from Quechua, while informal Angolan Portuguese is filled with loans from Kimbundu.

It seems possible that both languages might go the way of their once dominant Roman parent. Already we sometimes speak not of Portuguese and Spanish, but Portugueses and Spanishes; in a hundred years, perhaps we might even speak of an Iberian language family. As the Spanish saying goes, no hay dos sin tres -never two without three.

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Iberia's children: A short history of why Portuguese and Spanish are different | Unravel Magazine

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Once upon a time, Portuguese and Spanish were, basically, dialects of the same language: Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Hundreds of years later, how have Portuguese and Spanish grown apart, and why? And will they always be different?

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Este video discute la formación y prevalencia de palabras más largas en el mundo. Una cultura que es muy conocido por sus grandes palabras es la cultura hawaiana. En su lengua, es común que las palabras son formadas de no soló una palabra basada y muchos sufijos y prefijos, pero también largas cadenas de palabras basadas. Este fenómeno es especialmente prevalente con sustantivos como lugares y nombres de animales. Mientras algunas lenguas (por ejemplo: griego antiguo, sanscrito, y alemán) tiene la habilidad a crear palabras infinitamente largas, la mayoría de estos tipos de palabras no adoptarán en el uso común.

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Este articulo discute los orígenes y el desarrollo de español andaluz. Este dialecto se habla en el sur de España es caracterizado por una pronunciación y léxico únicos. La característica más importante del dialecto andaluz es el uso combinado del seseo y el ceceo pronunciaciones en la región. Con el seseo, las palabras su aceite podrían ser pronunciadas [swaˈsejte] y con el ceceo esta frase podría ser pronunciada [θwaˈθejte]. El origen de este fenómeno es a causa de la fusión de los fricativas dentales y los fricativas alveolares durante el siglo XVI en el dialecto andaluz. Algunos investigadores creen que la fusión andaluza de las fricativas era el resulto de español andaluz adquiría su pronunciación dental del árabe.

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As regards the possibility of Mozarabic influence on Andalusian Spanish, the situation is not quite so clearcut, as the Reconquest of southern Spain by Castilians can be assumed to have resulted in dialect mixing and hence, potentially, dialect levelling.

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Este articulo discute las avanzas recientes en la estudia y reconstrucción de las lenguas muertas. En el pasado, los lingüistas debieron que reconstruir las lenguas manualmente a través de investigación meticulosa. Ahora, el poder de las computadoras y ‘big data’ a acelerar el proceso de reconstrucción de años a solamente algunos días y horas. Esta tecnología utiliza algoritmos a buscar y analizar grupos de cognados. Luego, este algoritmo proviene una reconstrucción posible para cada cognado en su lengua ancestral.

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Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated "time machine," of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

In a compelling example of how "big data" and machine learning are beginning to make a significant impact on all facets of knowledge, researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program that can rapidly reconstruct "proto-languages" - the linguistic ancestors from which all modern languages have evolved. These earliest-known languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and, in this case, Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia and the Pacific.

"What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about historical reconstruction, and it automates them at a new scale: more data, more words, more languages, but less time," said Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper published online today (Feb. 11) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team's computational model uses probabilistic reasoning - which explores logic and statistics to predict an outcome - to reconstruct more than 600 Proto-Austronesian languages from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, replicating with 85 percent accuracy what linguists had done manually. While manual reconstruction is a meticulous process that can take years, this system can perform a large-scale reconstruction in a matter of days or even hours, researchers said.

Not only will this program speed up the ability of linguists to rebuild the world's proto-languages on a large scale, boosting our understanding of ancient civilizations based on their vocabularies, but it can also provide clues to how languages might change years from now.

"Our statistical model can be used to answer scientific questions about languages over time, not only to make inferences about the past, but also to extrapolate how language might change in the future," said Tom Griffiths, associate professor of psychology, director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science Lab and another co-author of the paper.

The discovery advances UC Berkeley's mission to make sense of big data and to use new technology to document and maintain endangered languages as critical resources for preserving cultures and knowledge. For example, researchers plan to use the same computational model to reconstruct indigenous North American proto-languages.

Humans' earliest written records date back less than 6,000 years, long after the advent of many proto-languages. While archeologists can catch direct glimpses of ancient languages in written form, linguists typically use what is known as the "comparative method" to probe the past. This method establishes relationships between languages, identifying sounds that change with regularity over time to determine whether they share a common mother language.

"To understand how language changes -- which sounds are more likely to change and what they will become -- requires reconstructing and analyzing massive amounts of ancestral word forms, which is where automatic reconstructions play an important role," said Alexandre
Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study, which he started while a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

The UC Berkeley computational model is based on the established linguistic theory that words evolve along the branches of a family tree - much like a genealogical tree - reflecting linguistic relationships that evolve over time, with the roots and nodes representing proto-languages and the leaves representing modern languages.

Using an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, the program sorted through sets of cognates, words in different languages that share a common sound, history and origin, to calculate the odds of which set is derived from which proto-language. At each step, it stored a hypothesized reconstruction for each cognate and each ancestral language.

"Because the sound changes and reconstructions are closely linked, our system uses them to repeatedly improve each other," Klein said. "It first fixes its predicted sound changes and deduces better reconstructions of the ancient forms. It then fixes the reconstructions and re-analyzes the sound changes. These steps are repeated, and both predictions gradually improve as the underlying structure emerges over time."

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Scientists create automated 'time machine' to reconstruct ancient languages

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Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated "time machine," of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

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Este articulo examina los problemas más comunes las cuales los hispanohablantes enfrentan cuando ellos están aprendiendo inglés. A causa de las diferencias en las posiciones de las vocales entre español y ingles, munchas personas que están aprendiendo ingles como una segunda lengua luchar a menudo. En adición, ingles contiene muchos sonidos los cuales no existen en español, además aumentar la dificultad de aprender la lengua.

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If your mother tongue is Spanish, you may find certain sounds in English more difficult than others. Here we present to you the most common errors made by Spanish-speaking students at Pronunciation Studio (audio is firstly in GB English then with a Spanish accent):

1. Vowel Sound Positions

Spanish uses 5 vowel sound positions in pronunciation, GB English uses 12 vowel sound positions - so this is a key area for Spanish speakers to learn. The most important area is making the right shape with the mouth, rather than focussing on the length of the sound:

Spanish has just one high front vowel [i] and Spanish speakers often use this vowel for both the /ɪ/ vowel in HIT and the /iː/ vowel in HEAT. One 'i' in English is normally the lower /ɪ/ vowel:

Spanish speakers often make the vowels in HUT /hʌt/, HAT /hæt/ and HEART /hɑːt/ into the Spanish /a/ - they should be made in different positions in English:

Spanish /u/ is made with the tongue at the back of the mouth, English /uː/ in FOOD is more central, and English /ʊ/ in GOOD is more open and central (note also that the spelling < oo > can produce both sounds in English):

The central, neutral vowel /ɜː/ in HURT, EARLY, BIRD, WORSE, PREFER is often mispronounced by Spanish speakers because there is no similar vowel sound in the Spanish, and the spellings are confusing:

2.Weak Vowel: schwa /ə/

The most common sound in English is the weak vowel, 'schwa' /ə/. The problem is that this sound can be spelt with any vowel - A, E, I, O, U and it should never be stressed, which is difficult for Spanish speakers who normally stress every syllable:

https://pronunciationstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/spanish-pronunciation-errors-5.mp3

Spanish /r/ involves tapping or trilling the tongue on the gum, English /r/ does not, it's a smooth approximant:

British English 'r' is silent at the end of a syllable (non-rhotic), Spanish speakers pronounce these 'r's because Spanish is rhotic:

In English /v/ is a voiced fricative using teeth and lip, Spanish speakers tend to replace it with a plosive /b/ or an approximant sound using both lips:

Spanish speakers don't tend to pull the tongue back when making the /ʃ/ sound, so it sounds more like /s/:

English /h/ is a glottal fricative - it's the sound you make when steaming up a mirror. Spanish speakers may replace this with a velar fricative:

https://pronunciationstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/spanish-pronunciation-errors-10.mp3

The 'h' in little function words like HAVE, HE, HIS, HER, HIM is often silent in connected speech, but Spanish speakers may put it in:

https://pronunciationstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/spanish-pronunciation-errors-11.mp3

In English, the plosive sounds /p,t,k/ are normally aspirated (a big explosion of air), but they never are in Spanish:

8. Voicing

Spanish speakers often de-voice (/d/=/t/, /b/=/p/, /v/=/f/) at the end of syllables, as the distinction is not made in Spanish:

The spelling 's' is often pronounced as voiced /z/ at the end of syllables in English, Spanish speakers tend to always pronounce it as voiceless /s/:

9. Sentence Stress

Spanish is a syllable-timed language so you stress every syllable, whereas English stress-time involves choosing (normally only one or two) certain syllables to stress, with everything else becoming weak and/or shorter:

https://pronunciationstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/spanish-pronunciation-errors-15.mp3

10. Falling Intonation

GB English uses a wide pitch range and high falling tones are very common, whereas Spanish uses more rising tones:

It's very ↘good.
Do you fancy going for a ↘drink tonight?
https://pronunciationstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/spanish-pronunciation-errors-16.mp3

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Spanish Speakers' English Pronunciation Errors

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10 English Pronunciation Errors by Spanish Speakers If your mother tongue is Spanish, you may find certain sounds in English more difficult than others. Here we present to you the most common errors made by Spanish-speaking students at Pronunciation Studio (audio is firstly in GB English then

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Este articulo discute los lugares con nombres españoles que son pronunciados malos por los Tejanos. Alrededor Austin, nosotros conocemos muchos sitios, como calle Guadalupe, que la mayoría de las personas pronuncian erróneamente. Hay un debate si pronunciar mal estas locaciones es problemático. Algunas personas ven este fenómeno como irreverente a la comunidad hispánica. Sin embargo, otras personas sienten que este fenómeno sea indicativo de la mezcla diversa de culturas en Tejas.

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A Comprehensive List of How Texans Mispronounce Places With Spanish Names

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The Texas map draws inspiration from as many cultures as any state in America. There's Czech: Praha, Moravia, Dubina. And German: Breslau, New Baden, New Ulm, and New Braunfels, to name just a few. Scattered across the landscape are small towns with names coming from the Polish (Panna Maria), Swiss (New Bern), Norwegian (Oslo), Danish (Danevang) and Russian (Marfa, Odessa) pioneers who got there first.

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Este artículo, titulado Sefaradí, idioma histórico; entre recuerdo y la melancolía, discute la decisión de la RAE a reconocer oficialmente el idioma ladino. Ladino eran hablado por las comunidades judías que vivieron en la península ibérica hasta su expulsión a bajo la regla de la monarquía castellana en 1492. La lengua todavía es hablada por comunidades fuera de España, pero, hoy en día, la lengua solamente posee alrededor cuatrocientos mil hablantes en todo el mundo. La decisión fue enfrentada con una respuesta mezclado. Algunas personas estaban felices que la lengua estaría protegida, pero otros creen que el esfuerzo a salvar Ladino es fútil.

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CIUDAD DE MÉXICO.

¿Es posible revivir al sefaradí? Sin niños que lo hablen, sin "un sustrato generacional" que lo sostenga, el judeoespañol es "una especie de fósil vivo" que ha quedado como "la lengua del recuerdo, de la melancolía", un idioma que "no tiene academia ni patria".

La ensayista y narradora Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (1936), de ascendencia sefaradí, y la escritora y periodista Myriam Moscona (1955), de origen búlgaro sefaradí, coinciden en que el ladino, como también se le denomina, es una literatura "muy rica" de cinco siglos que ya cumplió su meta y que "no le hace falta a las nuevas generaciones".

Esta reflexión sobre la lengua que hablaban las comunidades judías que vivieron en la península ibérica, hasta su expulsión en 1492, y que no sólo la conservaron como idioma familiar, sino que la llevaron a los distintos países a donde emigraron, cobra vigencia a raíz de los recientes intentos de la Real Academia Española (RAE) por mantenerla viva.

El 12 de noviembre del año pasado la RAE incorporó como académicos correspondientes a ocho estudiosos extranjeros, cuya especialidad es el judeoespañol, lo que significa que, por primera vez en la historia de esta institución, el sefaradí está representado oficialmente.

Además, en 1990, las comunidades sefaradíes recibieron el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de la Concordia, hecho que marcó el inicio de la revaloración de este idioma que aún tiene una fuerte presencia en países como Israel, Turquía, el norte de África y Latinoamérica, sobre todo en México.

Para el académico de la lengua Ignacio Padilla (1968), incorporarla a la RAE es "degradarla" un poco a un dialecto o argot del español. "Hay hablantes tanto en México como en España y Turquía, y quizá tendría que haber una academia turca de la lengua sefaradí que estuviera vinculada con una academia mexicana de la lengua sefaradí y, claro, que se mantuvieran en constante comunicación con las academias de la lengua española".
SIN PATRIA

Es demasiado tarde para el judeoespañol", afirma tajante la poeta Myriam Moscona sobre el idioma que se hablaba en la península ibérica en el siglo XV y que ha sido conservado por los judíos que tuvieron que abandonar España, tras su expulsión por los reyes católicos en 1492.

El sefaradí es una lengua que no tiene academia ni patria. No hay niños que lo hablen. Yo creo que siempre se va a estar muriendo", agrega la hija de judíos sefaradíes nacidos en Bulgaria que emigraron a México en 1948.

Ahora hay mucho interés por el ladino en las academias, en instituciones, en hablantes, pero no creo que una lengua se mantenga viva por un interés institucional o académico, sino porque tiene hablantes", añade.

La novelista cuyos padres se comunicaban en búlgaro entre ellos, y sus abuelas en ladino, por lo que su madre y ella aprendieron el español juntas, insiste en que "ya no hay quien lo hable, los últimos viejitos que lo hablan están muriendo".

La ganadora del Premio Xavier Villaurrutia 2012 ha escrito en judeoespañol la novela Tela de sevoya, el libro de ensayos Por mi boka, textos de la diáspora sefaradí compilados por Moscona y Jacobo Sefamí, así como el poemario Ansina.

Yo nunca hablé este idioma, sólo lo escuché y lo entendí", confiesa. "Entró por mi oído, pero nunca salió por mi boca. Pero mi nexo con él es muy vital. No sólo es la lengua de mi infancia, sino la infancia de mi lengua. Tengo el privilegio de conocerla. Siempre que pueda seguiré escribiendo algo, pero tampoco me quiero convertir en la escritora oficial".

Dice que le da gusto que el sefaradí esté representado en la RAE. "Pero perdón, aunque se paren de cabeza los académicos, no va a estar viva hasta que sea de comunicación cotidiana".
UN FÓSIL VIVO
Para Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, el ladino en realidad tuvo sentido después de la expulsión de los judíos de España. "Es una especie de fósil vivo, porque detuvo la evolución del español en 1492. Al salir del contexto de España la fijaron, ya no siguió evolucionando, sólo fueron agregando palabras de otros idiomas.

Los investigadores del siglo XIX descubrieron que podían estudiarla y recoger su pronunciación y también formas poéticas, canciones, romances, música de esa época. Todavía en el XX hubo imprentas que publicaban en ladino", detalla.

La egresada de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York señala que, en el caso de México, donde se habla el español, les fue muy fácil dejar de lado ese idioma antiguo y la nueva generación aprendió el español moderno.

Les pasó lo mismo a quienes regresaron a España del norte de África. Quedó como una lengua del recuerdo, de la melancolía, de la antigua poesía. Si no existe el sustrato generacional poco a poco se va perdiendo. Quedará como muestra de una lengua que existió, se seguirá leyendo su literatura, pero sin que forzosamente sea hablada", indica.

La doctora en Literatura advierte que no sabe si valga la pena que el ladino esté representado en la RAE. "No es una lengua viva. No le hace falta a las nuevas generaciones. Me gustaría conocer el programa de trabajo de la academia, qué van a hacer", apunta.
MÁS ALLÁ
DEL ESPAÑOL
El escritor y comunicólogo Ignacio Padilla reconoce que desde la adolescencia se ha sentido fascinado por el sefaradí, que disfruta y además atesora como "una fuente infinita de revelaciones sobre la lengua que habito y sobre la cultura que me constituye".

Sin embargo, el maestro en Literatura inglesa por la Universidad de Edimburgo cree que el reconocimiento académico hispano de esta lengua "tiene matices que no hay que pasar por alto, entre ellos, que es lingüística, idiomática y hasta políticamente singular en muchísimos sentidos".

Al miembro de la Academia Mexicana de la Lengua le parece "hermoso pero a la vez confuso" la incorporación del judeoespañol a la RAE. "Como el gallego, el portugués o el español, el sefaradí es una lengua romance, pero no es español. Incorporarla académicamente es degradarla un poco a un dialecto o argot del español".

El doctor en Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana por la Universidad de Salamanca concluye que el ladino es una de las lenguas de México, como lo es de España, Turquía o Grecia. "Que en cada una de las academias de la lengua de esos países haya hablantes y conocedores del sefaradí me parece imprescindible".

Herencia singular de los judíos españoles, el sefaradí, judeoespañol o ladino, a pesar de sus pocos hablantes, continúa inspirando obras literarias contemporáneas en varios países y se niega a morir.

Desde 1979, la revista Aki Yerushalayim, editada en Israel, única que se imprime completamente en ladino, mantiene viva la historia y la cultura sefaradí.

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Sefaradí, idioma histórico; entre el recuerdo y la melancolía

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CIUDAD DE MÉXICO. ¿Es posible revivir al sefaradí? Sin niños que lo hablen, sin "un sustrato generacional" que lo sostenga, el judeoespañol es "una especie de fósil vivo" que ha quedado como "la lengua del recuerdo, de la melancolía", un idioma que "no tiene academia ni patria".

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Esta imagen muestra una tabla de las relaciones entre las lenguas romances. La tabla demuestra como las lenguas romances desarrollaron en Europa después de la caída del imperio romano. Me interesa que exista muchos subgrupos de lenguas romances, por ejemplo ‘iberio-romance’, que contienen lenguas las cuales evolucionan independientemente de, o en relación con, otros grupos.

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Este video es un documentario sobre lingüística histórica y la búsqueda por el primer idioma común. El documentario, mientras ahora probable anticuado en algunos aspectos, discute las investigas la cuales descubren la existencia de indo-europeo y las otras familias de idiomas antiguas que forman la raíz de la mayoría de los idiomas nosotros sabemos hoy. El video muestra como los investigadores encuentran semejanzas entre idiomas contemporáneos y antiguos. Según este documentario, existe un desacuerdo en la comunidad lingüística con respecto a si todos los idiomas descienden desde un antepasado singular o si algunos idiomas desarrollaban independientemente.

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Este video discute el problema de la extinción de los idiomas por todo el mundo en los siglos XX y XXI. Según algunos investigadores, es posible que más que la mitad de los idiomas en existencia hoy vaya a ser extinto en cien años. El video informa el publico de la importancia de la lengua a cultura y como diversidad lingüística también promueve pensamiento diverso.

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What does the world lose when a language dies?