Recovering Aboriginal Languages

by Richard Kazandjian on January 26, 2012

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In Australia, English is by far the most commonly spoken language. Of course, that wasn’t always so.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, before Europeans set foot there, about 250 languages were spoken, divided into at least 500 different dialects.

Many of those languages are completely extinct. As it stands now, only about 15 of them are still taught to children, which is necessary for any language to survive long-term.

However, indigenous activists like Diane McNaboe are leading an effort to recover some of these lost languages. McNaboe is a member of the Wiradjuri people, an indigenous group living in New South Wales. Although their language was once effectively dead, Ms. McNaboe is one of a group of activists trying to piece it back together. In an interview with ABC.net, she explained her efforts to recover the lost words her ancestors spoke by asking for help from local communities: [click to continue…]

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Texting in Endangered Languages

by Richard Kazandjian on January 18, 2012

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If you’re trying to preserve an endangered language, technology can be both your best friend and your worst enemy. More and more frequently, however, technology has become an ally in the quest to keep indigenous languages alive. Apps and computer programs have been developed to bring these previously left-behind languages into the digital age. That makes it easier and more practical for people to keep using them.

Indigenous Language Institute executive director Inée Slaughter explained this sea change to the New York Times:

“For a long time, technology was the enemy.  Even in 1999 or 2000, people were saying technology killed their language. Community elders worried about it. As television came into homes, English became pervasive 24/7. Mainstream culture infiltrated, and young kids want to be like that. It was a huge, huge problem, and it’s still there. But now we know ways technology can be helpful.” [click to continue…]

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Japan fbomb

by Richard Kazandjian on January 13, 2012

No matter where you are these days, it seems that holiday advertising has become increasingly in-your-face: flashing lights, signs that shout at you, and of course Christmas carols played at the highest possible volume starting sometime around Halloween. Leave it to a department store in Japan (where else?) to take it to the next level.

Two readers of the Japanese Subculture blog were strolling around Shinsaibashi, Osaka, when they came upon a store having a New Year’s sale that featured deals so huge that apparently the only way the store could properly advertise them was to festoon their signs with one of comedian George Carlin’s seven dirty English words. As Japanese Subculture’s Jake Adelstein so eloquently put it, this was “no ordinary sale- it’s an effin sale!” [click to continue…]

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Who is Santa Claus?

by Richard Kazandjian December 23, 2011 Entertainment

Santa Claus is a familiar figure to children and adults across the world; a “jolly old elf” who rides through the night sky on a sleigh, bringing presents to all the good boys and girls. But who is Santa Claus, really? Where the does the legend come from? The English name “Santa Claus” comes from [...]

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Ancient Roman Graffiti

by Richard Kazandjian December 22, 2011 Entertainment

5 Funny Inscriptions You might think of graffiti as a modern urban problem, but rest assured, writing on walls is an ancient art. Our forebears liked to make their mark on a place just as much as we do. Perhaps even more so, considering that they often had to chip away at stone walls to [...]

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Speaking Dothraki

by Richard Kazandjian December 16, 2011 Education

Now  more than ever, it seems like constructed languages have really taken off. Tolkein got the ball rolling with his elvish languages, Sindarin and Quenya, and Klingon has been showing up in some of the strangest places imaginable. Now, the success of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” series has fans trying to pick up another fantasy [...]

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Duolingo

by Richard Kazandjian December 15, 2011 International

What language does the Internet speak? All languages, of course, but English much more so than others. Per Wikipedia, anywhere from 65 to 85 percent of the content on the World Wide Web today is written in English. That’s great for all of us English speakers, but what about the huge chunk of the world [...]

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18-century Code Cracked

by Richard Kazandjian December 14, 2011 Languages

Machine translation is probably not a good choice for your business. However, in the right hands it can be quite useful. A case in point: researchers from the University of Southern California and Uppsala University in Sweden just used a machine translation program described as being similar to Google Translate to crack an 18th-century cipher [...]

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Universal Translator

by Richard Kazandjian December 8, 2011 Interpreting

“Universal translators” have fuelled science fiction plots for decades, and building such a device has long been the Holy Grail for tech-oriented linguists. However, the prototypes that have appeared so far have used machine translation. Over the past few years, machine translation has  improved by leaps and bounds, but it’s still not precise enough to [...]

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A Bounty on Engrish

by Richard Kazandjian December 7, 2011 Education

Visitors to South Korea, take note. The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) has set a bounty on the awkward, low-quality translations known as “Engrish.” These malapropisms are a prime source of amusement for tourists abroad in Asian countries (see The Top 10 Asian English Translation Failures for examples), but locals are generally somewhat embarrassed by their [...]

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