Languages

Does Texting Limit Your Vocabulary?

by Alison Kroulek February 24, 2012 Languages
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The popularity of texting may have expanded the English language with abbreviations like “LOL” and “ROFL,” but is it actually limiting our vocabulary? Research conducted by Joan Lee, a linguistics student at the University of Calgary in Canada suggest that it might be. The abbreviations used in text messages irritate language curmudgeons to no end, [...]

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International Mother Language Day Celebrated Around the World

by Alison Kroulek February 23, 2012 In Danger of Extinction
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Tuesday was International Mother Language Day, a worldwide holiday that celebrates and promotes linguistic diversity. The holiday was established and promoted by UNESCO starting in 2000, with the goal of supporting and protecting threatened languages. It is estimated that more than half of the languages currently spoken around the world will be around for a [...]

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Spotlight on Mirandese

by Richard Kazandjian February 2, 2012 Languages

The New York Times recently ran an article by Seth Kugel, the Frugal Traveller, describing a recent visit to the Mirandese-speaking region of Portugal. Today, Mirandese is Portugal’s second official language, but before it was officially recognized as such in 1999, it was sometimes treated as a rural (and therefore undesirable) dialect of Portuguese. However, [...]

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Recovering Aboriginal Languages

by Richard Kazandjian January 26, 2012 Languages

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 [...]

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Texting in Endangered Languages

by Richard Kazandjian January 18, 2012 Education

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 [...]

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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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Ojibwe Language Into Modern Day

by Richard Kazandjian December 2, 2011 Education

The Ojibwe language is the fourth most common Native American language spoken in North America, with a total of approximately 56.531 speakers in the US and Canada. Even so, like most native languages, it is in some danger of dying out as most of the speakers are elderly. However, steps are being taken to preserve [...]

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