From Medical News Today: Languages 'Leak' into Each Other in Subtle Ways Says Study.

While linguistics experts are reluctant to talk of a 'third language' being formed in the brain of an immigrant, studies are now beginning to show that the brain does find it difficult to completely compartmentalize two distinct languages without merging them in subtle ways, says U of T linguistics professor Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux.

"What we are finding is that we don't and can't have complete separation between different languages in our heads. Yes, you can become very talented with your acquired language but there will always be a kind of window in our brains where one language will always 'leak' into another."

For example, a fluently bilingual speaker may say something in almost perfect English with the exception of one or two words or word structures from their mother tongue infiltrating the sentence. One instance is a person whose native language is German and who has mastered the English language saying something like, "I to the dining room go." [continue]

From the University of BC website: A Magic Reading Box.

Most kids would find the Reading Tutor a pretty cool classroom buddy. The computer program listens patiently, never laughs at your mistakes, reads out loud with you and sounds out words you don’t know or stumble over.

These are the kinds of four-star reviews that UBC education professor Ken Reeder has been receiving from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside grade schoolers and teachers as he test drives a state-of-the-art electronic tutor equipped with speech recognition and artificial intelligence. [continue]

From the New York Times: How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages.

Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.

Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.

Though its unusual history draws some criticism among secular linguists, the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If I'm teaching field methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go look it up in Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics chairman at the University of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to locate it in the language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the one-stop place to look." [continue]

Related:
Ethnologue -ethnologue.com

From Rebecca Front's article in The Guardian, This Week:

The British Potato Council - look on their works, ye mighty, and despair - has begun a campaign this week to have the term "couch potato" removed from the Oxford English Dictionary, on the grounds that it implies that potatoes are bad for you. They are threatening to demonstrate in Parliament Square. So is it political correctness gone mad to worry about the negative stereotyping of a vegetable? And is the fact that the Potato Council's initials are PC reason enough to make cheap jokes at its expense? [continue]

Related:
Potato ban isn't so nutty - The Guardian
Ban 'couch potato' from dictionary: spud farmers - CBC
Ozymandias (In case you can't quite remember where you read "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!") - library.utoronto.ca

From ExpressIndia.com: Excavators find ancient urban settlement in south Kashmir.

Excavators have stumbled into the remains of a bustling ancient urban settlement in Anantnag district of south Kashmir with tiled pavements 'stamped in colourful human and animal motifs' and inscriptions in the now defunct Karoshti script. [continue]

And arrrrgh, where are the photos?

Here's the Omniglot page on the Kharosthi script.

Related links:
Kharosthi - Wikipedia
Kharosthi - AncientScripts.com
Kharosthi - AncientIndia.com

From the BBC Wordhunt page at oed.com:

Did you eat a balti before 1984 or have a mullet before 1994? And do you know how they got their names?

In conjunction with a major forthcoming BBC2 series, the OED invites you to hunt for words and help rewrite 'the greatest book in the English language'.

250 years after Dr Johnson wrote his celebrated dictionary with the aid of just six helpers, the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary have teamed up to appeal to the nation to help solve some of the most intriguing recent word mysteries in the language.

The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word. Quite a task! The fifty words on the OED's BBC Wordhunt appeal list all have a date next to them - corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that? If so the BBC wants to hear from you. [continue]

Of course you can still contribute to the OED the regular way, too.

Link found here at Language Hat.

From Eurekalert: Adults can be retrained to learn second languages more easily, says UCL scientist.

Our ability to hear and understand a second language becomes more and more difficult with age, but the adult brain can be retrained to pick up foreign sounds more easily again. This finding, reported by Dr Paul Iverson of the UCL Centre for Human Communication, at the "Plasticity in Speech Perception 2005" workshop - builds on an important new theory that the difficulties we have with learning languages in later life are not biological and that, given the right stimulus, the brain can be retrained. [continue]

From today's National Post: The secret life of the octothorpe.

When the impressive-sounding term "octothorpe" first swam into my consciousness, some 25 years ago, it sounded ancient, magisterial, possibly scientific. What did it mean? It could have been a stringed instrument on which long-ago Albanian peasants composed anthems to King Zog ("Young Gramoz is the sweetest damn octothorper between Fier and Vlore"). Or perhaps it was the name of a giant bird, a now-extinct raptor big enough to snatch up a small sheep. ("I was scared out of my wits, this colossal octothorpe appeared out of nowhere, swooped down, and ...")

Whatever it meant, the word obviously emerged from the mists of antiquity, shining with the patina that reflects centuries of usage.

It didn't take me long to learn that in the language of phone companies and other industries it means the symbol #, a.k.a. "the number sign" or "the pound sign." That crosshatching (two parallel lines crossing two parallel lines) has been used traditionally to mean numbers or weight or, among editors, "Insert space here." It also closely resembles the musical sign for sharp.

It was natural to assume that the term describing it should be as old as the thing itself. Imagine my disillusionment when I discovered that octothorpe-the-word is younger than I am. [continue]

Related:
WHAT THE ####? - sigtel.com
Octothorpe - WorldWideWords.org
Octothorpe - Wiktionary.org

From Smallweed in The Guardian:

Have you been wreaking anything lately? If so, let me guess: was it havoc? I thought as much. There seems to be an epidemic of reports on the wreaking of havoc at present, even in the Guardian. Very occasionally you come across evidence of something else being wreaked - usually devastation, though vengeance too is wreaked every now and then. There are those who maintain that havoc ought not to be wreaked, but wrought. But Chambers says wreaked is correct, while wrought, I gather from Fowler, is an archaic past tense deriving from the verb work, as in: "By the hands of the Apostles were many signs and wonders wrought". Little seems to be "wrought" nowadays, apart from iron. "Overwrought" by the same token must mean "overworked", yet I guess that at least 94% of us sometimes get overwrought for reasons unconnected with overworking. Then there is "fraught"; of what is that the past tense? Have those who are fraught been freaked? Or have they been freighted? The mystery just gets deeper and deeper.

I blogged about the Nuuchahnulth dictionary a few days ago. Here's more about the project from The Guardian: A snootful of Nootka ... pithiest language gets first dictionary.

The world's pithiest language, which combines a lavish vocabulary with a terseness that would have made the Spartans jealous, has been cracked for the first time by a British university project. (...)

Also known as Nuuchahnulth, which means "along the mountains" - a reference to the speakers' homeland - Nootka's telescoping of words is unparalleled in other languages. The range of alternatives means that a sentence as long as "to wipe the tears from one's eyes with the back of one's hand" is rendered simply "fib". [continue]

From the University of Toronto Magazine's New & Notable page:

Chesterfields have gone missing in Canada. Curiously, couches are everywhere. Though the piece of furniture is identical, the word Canadians use to describe it has changed. "Chesterfield was so distinctive that it was used by, I think, 100 per cent of Canadians in the 1950s," says Jack Chambers, a longtime linguistics professor at U of T known to his colleagues as "Mister Canadian English." (...)

Chambers, who still teaches at U of T, is best known for describing how Canadians pronounce "ou" in words such as out and about. He identified the phenomenon in 1973 as "Canadian Raising," because Canadians raise the height of the onset vowel in the diphthong, allowing them to say the word more quickly. Out ends up sounding more like oat, about more like aboot. "It is the most characteristic feature of our speech," says Chambers.

Canadian speech is unique in other ways. The establishment of the railroad early in our history has kept regional differences to a minimum. "We sound more like one another from coast to coast than any other nation in the world," says Chambers. While some people worry Canada's English is being Americanized, Chambers says that isn't the case. "There are big changes going on, but they're going on in both directions," he says.

Chambers expects differences in how English is spoken around the world to diminish over time, as globalization continues. "The more mobile people become, the more mixing there will be of language forms," he says. Chambers believes the least mobile people in Canada, farmers and blue-collar workers, will retain distinct Canadian varieties. "That's where the idiosyncrasies of Canadian English will last the longest."

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Canadian English

From the BBC: Bid to save nearly-lost language.

It is spoken by only a handful of people but, after 5,000 years, a rare native American language is to get its own dictionary.

Some 300 people, descendants of a Native American people in west Canada, still speak Nuuchahnulth.

But almost no young people in the community on Vancouver Island know the ancient language.

The professor behind the dictionary project hopes the text will help the language survive by aiding teachers.

The dictionary, which has 7,500 entries, is the fruit of 15 years of research into the language. [continue]

Related:
Nuuchahnulth Tribal Council - nuuchahnulth.org
Nuu-chah-nulth - Wikipedia
Edward Sapir - Wikipedia
Edward Sapir - bartelby.com
A Concise Dictionary of the Nuuchahnulth Language of Vancouver Island -MellenPress.com
Corpus of Nuuchahnulth Language - www.magma.ca/~stonham/
Bibliography of Materials on the Nuuchanulth Language - ydli.org
Keyboard layout for Nuuchahnulth - languagegeek.com

From the Social Studies section of the Globe and Mail:

Father Reginald (Reggie) Foster, a Wisconsin native, is the Pope's senior Latinist, reports The (Milwaukee) Journal-Sentinel. The renowned Latin teacher and fluent speaker of complex Ciceronian Latin has served four popes over 36 years, despite a curmudgeonly temperament and intemperate outbursts of personal opinions. When Karol Wojtyla began signing papal documents in Latin as "Joannes Paulus II," instead of "Ioannes Paulus II" after being elected pope 26 years ago, Father Foster quickly pointed out to a papal adviser that there is no letter "J" in Latin. "I said, 'By the way, friend, there's no J,' " he recalled. "And the answer kind of came back that the pope said 'Well, now there is.' Well, fine, fine. He's the boss. And if you look at his tomb, the J is gone. One of my brethren said, 'Well, he enjoyed his J for 26 years, and now it's gone.' His tombstone has 'I' "

From Aljazeera: Lost Eritrean language put on record.

Nearly a decade after accidentally discovering a previously unknown language on an Indian Ocean archipelago off the Eritrean coast, a French linguist is fighting to save the unwritten, untaught tongue.

Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle who, with colleague Martine Vanhove, found Dahlak island fishermen conversing in the unusual vernacular nine years ago, said: "Dahaalik is part of humanity's heritage and must be preserved."

Puzzled by words and usage that did not correspond to the two main languages of the region - Afar and Arabic - the pair at first thought it was a dialect of Tigre, but later ascertained it was a distinct entity, she said.

Although close to Arabic and Tigre, Dahaalik was determined to be a language in itself due to its markedly different phonetics, morphology and syntax, but had languished in obscurity on the isles off the port of Massawa. [continue]

From The Register: UK computer boffins build sign language avatar.

Computer scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have joined forces with animation specialists at Televirtual, and the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) to create a signing avatar capable of translating written web pages into British sign language.

Two signing experts from the RNID helped to translate the physicality of British sign Language into a set of symbols. These symbols have been further translated into computer code by UEA researchers, the BBC reports, which will prompt Guido to animate the appropriate gesture. [continue]

Related:
Virtual signer for deaf web users - BBC

From WFMU's Beware of the Blog: She Be She Strike.

Eskimo Radio MP3s: Ayatollah Khomeini, You Are My Sunshine, Labatt's Beer Ad, Heart of Stone, Marijuana Humor.

The story and the tapes began circulating around the cassette underground in the early-eighties: an Inuit Radio station operated in Northern Canada by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was vacated by its regular staff due to a CBC strike, and the station was temporarily programmed by its Eskimo janitor and his buddies. The phrase "She Be She Strike" (CBC Strike) can be heard repeatedly on portions of the tape which are not excerpted here, but the truth may never be known until the language can be identified and a native speaker translates the entire recording, hint hint.

The story isn't too far-fetched though; the CBC operates dozens of Inuit radio stations through it's Northern Service, and the record shows that they've had their fair share of strikes over the years. [continue]

Some of this is just hilarious. And anyway, how often do you get a chance to hear Inuktitut?

Link found here at Metafilter.

Glyphdoctors is:

...the first Web site where you soon will be able to learn the ancient Egyptian language under the guidance of a professional Egyptologist from the comfort of your own home, along with other Egypt enthusiasts from around the globe. You can learn about our future hieroglyphs course, join our open Egyptology discussion forums to chat about ancient Egypt with other Egyptophiles, meet Glyphdoctors' founder, find out about careers in the field of Egyptology, explore our glyph gallery where you can read the fascinating story of specific hieroglyphs, or access an annotated list of essential books to help you learn hieroglyphs, which you can purchase on-line.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Link found here at the Egyptology Blog.

From The Independent: Academics suggest Irish travellers are remnant of pre-Celtic culture.

Irish travellers, long derided as anti-social itinerants rather than "true" Gypsies, are an ancient people in their own right, researchers say.

Academics preparing for the world's first symposium on the travellers' mysterious past, claim they could even be the last surviving remnants of a pre-Celtic Ireland, with their own distinctive language called "Cant" or "Gammon".

Commonly known as "tinkers" because of their tin-smithing past, Irish travelling families have never enjoyed the romantic associations of Romany Gypsies. They now bear the brunt of complaints about illegal encampments, a concern that the Tory leader, Michael Howard, has tried to turn into an election issue with adverts in The Independent on Sunday and other papers.

Research by an Irish socio-linguist, Dr Alice Binchy, suggests that more than half the surviving Cant/Gammon lexicon may be derived from a long-lost language spoken in Ireland before the Celts arrived. "A partially pre-Celtic origin would have substantial implications for the way we look not only at traveller history, but at early Irish history as a whole," said Dr Binchy, a delegate at a conference of linguists, historians and anthropologists to be held at the University of Limerick. [continue]

From Tolkien's Elvish Prayers page:

It is a well-known fact that Tolkien was a devout Catholic. He translated 5 well-known Catholic prayers into his contrived Elvish language -- the Our Father, Hail Mary, and the Glory Be among them. (...) Below, you should find the last versions Tolkien wrote before his death. They are beautiful when one knows how to pronounce them. [continue]

Link found here at Siris.

From The Daily Star (Lebanon): Modern science spurs closer look at Arabic.

Even some native Arabic speakers would dispute that the language is "a quick and easy" one to learn, but Dr. Roland Seif insists it is true - even if it does take some time.

Seif says he has developed a new method of teaching the language, not only to foreigners, but also to native Arabic speakers. The key to this new method lies largely in the patterns he has found within the language, patterns he uses to categorize nearly every Arabic word into three dozen "family groups."

"It is inspired by modern science, where you have a link between form and function; it is exactly the same as in Arabic where there is a link between [word] structure and function," Seif says, adding that he has broken Arabic vocabulary down into three groups, each with 12 families.

Each group is divided according to the way in which the words can be modified to produce other words with different meanings. Doing this, he says, makes the seemingly impossible Arabic grammar simple and scientific. [continue]

From the Beeb: Searching for craic on the web.

A linguistics expert has been drafted in to help with an internet search engine which recognises Northern Ireland slang.

Dr Alison Henry of the University of Ulster has provided consultation on the type of words users may type into the website.

Colloquialisms such as gutties, craic, poke and bog will be recognised on the search engine Yell.com.

It has looked at slang words used in areas across the UK.

It said people from Northern Ireland living in Ipswich would be able to find opticians by typing in ‘gleckers’, which is slang for glasses. [continue]

From the Globe and Mail: Mark their words, eh?

Our yods are toast. Our "eh?" is disappearing from adolescent speech. Young women are showing signs of abandoning our prized raised diphthongs. But gotchies — or gonchies, west of the Alberta-Saskatchewan border — is a vibrant all-Canadian word for underpants.

Indeed, at least 2,000 words in our everyday speech now merit the lexical accolade of "Canadian English." And, national-linguistics-pride-wise (multiword modifiers functioning syntactically as a single word appear with statistically significant high frequency in Canadian English-language newspapers), the good news doesn't stop there.

The folks of Nova Scotia's rural Lunenburg County are hanging on to the only non-rhotic dialect spoken by mainland Canadians of European descent. (They don't pronounce the letter "r" after vowels, in words like "car" and "world.") [continue]

Language geeks will love these interactive charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet at PaulMeier.com. Click on the chart you want, and you'll be taken to an interactive version of that chart. (You need Flash, of course.) Then you'll be able to mouse over symbols to see their names, and click any symbol to see it pronounced. Very cool.

I think the best bit is on the suprasegmentals page. Some of the sentence samples in the "tones and word accents" section are just excellent. (Hover on the asterisks to see those sentences in IPA, then click for the sound sample.)

Where was all this back when I was taking linguistics?

From New Scientist: Rats show off language skills.

Rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese, suggests a new study. But it is not because some spy agency has bioengineered them to eavesdrop on conversations in Tokyo or Amsterdam.

They are simply recognising the difference in rhythmic properties of the languages, says Juan Toro, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, whose study is part of an effort to trace the origins of the skills that humans use to analyse speech.

Human infants are extremely sensitive to the rhythmic regularities of language, which researchers think may help infants to break sound into patterns they can decipher as words. Earlier experiments showed that both tamarin monkeys and human infants can discriminate between Dutch and Japanese - two languages with rhythmic content that differs greatly.

Toro's team trained rats to recognise either Dutch or Japanese - by pressing a lever in response to a short sentence - and then exposed them to sentences they had not heard before, in both languages. [continue]

From Reuters: Brain Processes Whistled Language Just as Spoken.

No one knows how long the shepherds on the island of La Gomera have used the rare whistled language called the Silbo Gomero, but American and Spanish researchers said on Wednesday that the brain processes it like a spoken language.

"We found that the same areas (of the brain) that are activated for language are also activated for the Silbo," Manuel Carreiras, of the University of La Laguna on the island of Tenerife, told Reuters.

He and his colleague David Corina, of the University of Washington in the United States, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare how the brain is activated in five Spanish speakers and five shepherds who spoke Spanish and Silbo. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Whistling children save ancient language
Whistling language on the Canary Islands

From the Telegraph: Whistling children save ancient language.

Pouring from a classroom window of the primary school in San Sebástian came a sound similar to the chirping of caged song birds.

A glance inside the room, however, revealed not an aviary but a room full of eight-year-olds, each with a knuckle in their mouth, whistling the islanders' ancient language of silbo.

It has been bought back from the edge of extinction and the Canarian island of La Gomera is to host its first silbo competition later this month.

"It was about to die and, incredibly, for once officialdom did something about it," said Eusebio Darias, a silbo teacher. "Five years ago silbo was made obligatory in schools and the children have taken to it. Now it is here to stay."

The language evolved as a means of communicating across the island's jagged terrain thousands of years ago. La Gomera, a lump of volcanic rock west of Tenerife, is riven by barrancos (ravines) that make communication of any kind arduous. Silbo is thought to have arrived with settlers from the Atlas mountains of North Africa 2,500 years ago and it is far more complex than a few simple signals. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Whistling language on the Canary Islands

Elsewhere:
Summary: whistled speech - Linguist List
Whistled Speech - Wikipedia
Agulo la Gomera - silbo - agulo.net. (In Spanish)
Canary island whistles again - BBC
Nearly extinct whistling language revived - CNN
Here's a Silbo sound sample in mp3 format. Found on this page at CoreyHaines.com.

From the Beeb: Peter Rabbit gets hieroglyph tale.

Beatrix Potter's classic children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit has been translated into ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by the British Museum.

The translation turns the story of a mischievous rabbit into symbols of the Egyptian world, shapes and squiggles.

Peter Rabbit becomes a square, a semi-circle, an ellipse and a rabbit image.

The "time seemed appropriate" for the hieroglyph version, due in April, translators said, as the story had already been published in 35 languages.

The British Museum holds early drawings of Peter's sister Flopsy as well as having leading experts in hieroglyphics - so decided to put the two together, a spokesperson said. [continue, see image]

Also see Celebrating 100 years of Peter Rabbit - A Beatrix Potter Trail at the 24 Hour Museum. Or perhaps you'd like to read the online version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit?

Related:
World of Peter Rabbit - peterrabbit.co.uk

Simon Hoggart has a lovely article in the Guardian today, Thanks for the flapping owls and other family gems. It's all about family expressions, and there are some fine ones listed. Here are a few:

This came from Martin Loft of Sheffield: "When my brother was about three years old, one of his presents was a wooden owl, with a string hanging from it. When the string was pulled, the owl raised its wings and opened its beak. He looked at it with rapture, sighed and said, ‘The only thing I wanted was a flapping owl.’ Since then, any well-received gift is known in our family as a ‘flapping owl’."

John Brown of Manchester writes about his mother, who had not travelled much. "So when we came across a beautiful spot in Britain, she would say to us in all seriousness, ‘You could be abroad, couldn't you?’ We still use it when we visit any lovely place ... though our children don't find it funny any more."

David Johnson from Leeds recalls his mother at Twycross Zoo, looking at a silverback gorilla sitting on a tree stump. "‘Bugger me,’ she said. ‘It looks just like a statue of Cardinal Wolsey.’ It's amazing how many situations since then this phrase has been appropriate."

Stuart Kinzett of Stratford-upon-Avon was eating out with his wife and overheard the loud conversation of a posh middle-aged woman and her mother. "‘But darling,’ said the distraught mum, ‘I just can't think of you without Richard.’ To which the daughter replied, ‘Well, think harder, mummy!’ The phrase is our standard reply when either of us says we can't think of doing this, that or the other." [continue]

What's an apostrofly? Ian Mayes explains in this Guardian article. The apostofly

...is an insect which lands at random on the printed page depositing an apostrophe wherever it alights.

The activities of this creature, by the way, were completely overlooked by Lynne Truss in her otherwise admirable book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Rather naively, if I may say so, she clings to the idea that the apparently misplaced apostrophe is attributable to human failing.

Anyone can see that this is not the case. To take an example (from a recent edition of G2): "This break's Kant's maxim ..." Clearly the work of the apostrofly. Similarly, no one would seriously suggest that the placing of the apostrophe in the following (from a recent Letters page) was the work of a human hand: "With reports that 100,000 Iraqi's [etc]."

From BillingsGazette.com: Scientist says prairie dogs appear to have their own language.

Prairie dogs, those little pups popping in and out of holes on vacant lots and rural rangeland, are talking up a storm.

They have different "words" for tall human in yellow shirt, short human in green shirt, coyote, deer, red-tailed hawk and many other creatures.

They can even coin new terms for things they've never seen before, independently coming up with the same calls or words, according to Con Slobodchikoff, a Northern Arizona University biology professor and prairie dog linguist.

Prairie dogs of the Gunnison's species, which Slobodchikoff has studied, speak different dialects in Grants and Taos, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Monarch Pass, Colo., but they would likely understand one another, the professor says.

"So far, I think we are showing the most sophisticated communication system that anyone has shown in animals," Slobodchikoff said. [continue]

Related links:
Decoding the Prairie Dog Language- knauradio.org.
Prairiedogs.org
Prairie dog communication -prairiedog.info
Prairie Dog Information - prairiedog.info
Animal intelligence: how brainy are they? Scientist are learning how animals talk, think, and feel - findarticles.com

Update:
Rodents' Talk Isn't Just 'Cheep' - Wired, June 05

From the CBC: Iris Murdoch novel may be evidence of Alzheimer's.

British novelist Iris Murdoch's last book, 1995's Jackson's Dilemma, is evidence that the author was coping with the effects of Alzheimer's disease before she had been diagnosed.

That's according to researchers who have analyzed books by Murdoch from different stages in her career.

According to their findings, Murdoch's vocabulary shrank considerably when she was writing Jackson's Dilemma — which may explain why the novel got a frosty reception from critics.

The team of neuroscientists, led by Dr. Peter Garrard of University College London, used specialized software to compare the variety of words that Murdoch used. [continue]

Cabbaged and fabaceae, each eight letters long, are the longest words that can be played on a musical instrument. Seven letter words with this property include acceded, baggage, bedface, cabbage, defaced, and effaced.

Aegilops, eight letters long, is the longest word whose letters are arranged in alphabetical order. Seven letter words with this property include beefily and billowy. Six letter words include abhors, accent, access, almost, biopsy, bijoux, billow, chintz, effort, and ghosty.

Spoonfeed, nine letters long, is the longest word whose letters are arranged in reverse alphabetical order. Trollied is an eight letter word with this property. Seven letter words with this property include sponged and wronged.

Cimicic and Cimicid, each seven letters long, are the longest words that are exclusively made up of Roman Numerals. [continue]

That's from the word oddities page at rinkworks.com. For more fun, check out their other pages about words.

(Thanks to my friend David for telling me about this site.)

From Science Daily: Tone Language Translates To Perfect Pitch: Mandarin Speakers More Likely To Acquire Rare Musical Ability.

Could it be that cellist Yo-Yo Ma owes his perfect musical pitch to his Chinese parents? While we may never know the definitive answer, new research from the University of California, San Diego has found a strong link between speaking a tone language — such as Mandarin — and having perfect pitch, the ability once thought to be the rare province of super-talented musicians. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
A two-lobe language

From nature.com: Classic English and French composers influenced by their language.

Would Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance or Debussy's Clair de Lune have sounded the same if the composers had been born in different countries? Probably not, according to researchers who have found that the melodies composers write are influenced by the language they speak.

The team's analysis shows that fluctuations in pitch in music written by classic French composers vary much less than in British music. The difference mirrors the patterns of pitch found in the corresponding languages. [continue]

From The Himalayan Times: Male keeper of secret female language.

In China's Hunan province lives a 79-year-old man who is the keeper of an ancient, enigmatic language used only by women. "People say I'm the first male in the world to inherit a female language," jokes Zhou Shuoyi. Behind him are scrolls he has written in a mysterious script of characters made up of soft dots and simple, elegant strokes. [continue]

Related:
Nushu - Mirabilis.ca

From Wired: Progress in an Ancient Tongue.

For centuries, its letters have covered the pages of goatskin manuscripts, illuminated Bibles and the chronicles of ancient kings.

Now one of the world's oldest living alphabets could be about to make its debut on a mobile phone, if a group of Ethiopian academics gets its way. [continue]

Oooh, this is fun: The Language Guesser. Paste in some text, click the button, and the Language Guesser will tell you what language it's in.

Of course you'll want something to use as a test, hmmm? Here's a bit of sample text for you to use:

Ja, vi elsker dette landet,
Som det stiger frem,
Furet, værbitt, over vannet,
Med de tusen hjem.

And here's another sample:

Isten álld meg a magyart
Jó kedvvel, böséggel,
Nyújts feléje védö kart,
Ha küzd ellenséggel;
Bal sors akit régen tép,
Hozz rá víg esztendöt,
Megbünhödte már e nép
A multat s jövendöt!

The above excerpts are from the national anthems of today's mystery nations. Can you guess what languages you're looking at there? The Language Guesser can.

(Link to Language Guesser found here at Idle Words.)

From Reuters: Ancient Language Clings to Life at Tip of Britain.

Lisa Simpson, the spiky-haired U.S. cartoon character, may just be the spark that revives an ancient language and fuels a tiny political movement at the tip of Britain's southwest coast.

The sister of bad-boy Bart and daughter of bumbling Homer will appear in a special episode of "The Simpsons" shouting out support for the independence of Cornwall in the nearly dead language of ancient Cornish as an alternative broadcast to British Queen Elizabeth's traditional Christmas address.

Matthew Clarke, Lisa Simpson's translator and a member of the Cornish Language Fellowship, told Reuters that news of the Christmas special has ignited more than the usual mocking interest in a language which some say was the lingua franca of such British legends as King Arthur and Boadicea. [continue]

Related:
Lisa puts cool into Cornish cause - BBC, July 2004

From Ananova: Germany's most beautiful words.

Habseligkeiten - which means ‘property’ — has been voted the most beautiful word in the German language.

And rhabarbermarmelade — ‘rhubarb jam’ — has been singled out as Germany's coolest word.

Germany's Goethe Institute and the German Language Council, which are the guardians of the language, organised the contest to highlight beautiful German words. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Hunting Germany's linguistic gems

Elsewhere:
German's Beautiful ‘Belongings’ - Deutsche Welle

From The Guardian: Arab scholar ‘cracked Rosetta code’ 800 years before the West.

It is famed as a critical moment in code-breaking history. Using a piece of basalt carved with runes and words, scholars broke the secret of hieroglyphs, the written ‘language’ of the ancient Egyptians.

A baffling, opaque language had been made comprehensible, and the secrets of one of the world's greatest civilisations revealed - thanks to the Rosetta Stone and the analytic prowess of 18th and 19th century European scholars.

But now the supremacy of Western thinking has been challenged by a London researcher who claims that hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier - by an Arabic alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah. [continue]

I've become quite fond of háčeks. Don't you wish we had some in Engliš?

Related:
Czech language

From The Telegraph: Deaf children invent a new sign language.

Scientists have witnessed the birth of a new language, one invented by deaf children.

A study published today shows that a sign language that emerged over two decades ago now counts as a true language.

It began in a school for the deaf in Managua, Nicaragua, founded in 1977. With instruction only in lip-reading and speaking Spanish, neither very successful, and no exposure to adult signing, the children were left to their own devices.

Their first pantomime-like gestures evolved into a grammar of increasing complexity as new children learned the signs and elaborated. Now it has a formal name: Nicaraguan Sign Language, (NSL), and is so distinct that it would not be understood by American and British signers. [continue]

Oh, this is splendid! It probably won't last long, but still.

You can get at the Oxford English Dictionary for free. Yay. Unfortunately you have to use this backdoor thing. Don't tell anyone.

Ssssh!

Found here at Metafilter.

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
From OED to poetry
Matrimony cake
New OED Edition

Elsewhere:
Oxford English Dictionary - oed.com

From Ananova: Nurses get lessons in Geordie.

Nurses from overseas who work in Newcastle are going back to college to learn Geordie.

The nurses — from Singapore, the Philippines and India — passed English language tests before being recruited.

But The Sun says they can barely understand the North East accent.

One nurse had to check with local staff when a patient asked for the "netty" — meaning they needed the toilet.

And phrases such as "howay man" and "that's canny" left them so puzzled that NHS bosses decided to launch ten-week courses at Newcastle College to help them understand. [continue]

Related:
Newcastle English ("Geordie")
Geordie - English dictionary
English to Geordie Tranaslator

From nature.com: Chinese dyslexics have problems of their own.

There is no one cause for dyslexia: rather, the causes vary between languages. So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts.

The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another. The team also hopes the work will aid the design of culturally specific strategies for learning to read and write that could benefit everyone. [continue]

From an NPR blurb about one of their programs:

If Napoleon hadn't come along, half of France might still speak the Occitan language. But Napoleon did come along, and he forged a highly centralized state. Paris became its capital and the language of the north became what we now know as French.

Two hundred years later, some natives of the southern region of France are challenging the one-language decree, using a blend of reggae, folk, and the music of the medieval troubadours. [continue]

Isn't Occitan fascinating?

From nature.com: Tribe without names for numbers cannot count.

A study of an Amazonian tribe is stoking fierce debate about whether people can count without numbers.

Psychologists, anthropologists and linguists have long wondered whether animals, young children or certain cultures can conceptualize numbers without the language to describe them.

To tackle the issue, behavioural researcher Peter Gordon of Columbia University in New York journeyed into the Amazon. He carried out studies with the Pirahã tribe, a hunter-gatherer group of about 200 people, whose counting system consists of words which mean, approximately, ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘many’.

Gordon designed a series of tasks to examine whether tribe members could precisely count and conceive of numbers beyond one or two, even if they lacked the words. For example, he asked them to look at a group of batteries and line up a matching amount. [continue]

Related:
Language may shape human thought - New Scientist

Update:
Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe - Globe and Mail (Thanks to Stryder for telling me about the Globe and Mail article.

From The Straights Times: Modernisation a threat to dialects in China.

BEIJING - The original 27,000 residents of Shenzhen, a former sleepy fishing village, have melted into today's metropolis of four million - and so has the local dialect they used to speak.

Similarly, mass migration of entire villages along the Yangtze River to make way for the Three Gorges Dam project and the scattering of their residents, has sounded the death knell for the villagers' local dialects.

Modernisation is posing a greater threat to China's more than 1,000 dialects than the government's efforts to popularise putonghua or Mandarin since 1955.

‘The modernisation process is a main reason for the decline of dialects,’ said assistant professor Jing Wendong of the Central University for Nationalities.

The popularisation of putonghua - the national language based on the Beijing dialect - only quickened the pace of decline, he added. [continue]

At last, an ancient tongue will be taught. From csmonitor.com:

FEZ, MOROCCO – "What is it?" asks first-grade teacher Malki Abderrahmane, as he points to a hieroglyphic letter in pink chalk on the wall.

"It's the free man!" exclaims the classroom full of six-year-olds.

The letter "yaz," shaped like a joyful human being, is the symbol of the Imazighen people. It's one of the 39 letters of Tifinagh, the ancient language all children in Morocco will be required to learn — in addition to classical Arabic and French — by 2008.

"It's our maternal language," says Amina Ibnou-Cheikh Raha, director of Le Monde Amazigh, a newspaper dedicated to Imazighen, or Berber, cultural issues. "It's the first language that existed here in Morocco. What's abnormal is that it has never been taught."

Berbers — the name given to the Imazighen people because they were viewed as "barbarians" who at first did not accept Islam — have inhabited North Africa since 7,000 BC. Their ranks have included St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and they have managed to preserve their languages despite French, Roman, and Arab conquests. [continue]

Related links:
Tifinagh - Wikipedia
Tifinagh abjad - Omniglot
Berber & Tifinagh - AncientScripts.com

This Guardian article offers a few interesting tidbits about Malta.

Int lil min thobb? asks the Maltese health service poster, showing a crying baby next to an overflowing ashtray. Malti, a Semitic language that sounds like a gentler, less guttural Turkish, apparently only began to be used for literary purposes in the 17th century, which might explain why it is convoluted and impenetrable to foreigners: it grew wildly, without primers or grammar to confine it.

The assimilated ad-ons from Mediterranean neighbours are easy to spot - bonswa for "good evening", grazzi for "thank you", merhaba for "welcome"; but where does jekk joghgbok (please) come from? Not that this matters to the visitor; most Maltese speak perfect English and often Italian too. But while there isn't a long literary tradition, the culture and civilisation stretch back into prehistory. The Maltese were carving rock chambers and gigantic mother-earth figures when the ancient Britons were probably daubing themselves with woad. The Hypogeum, a World Heritage site, is thought to be about 5,000 years old. [continue]

From The Guardian: Germans bridle at language law.

It is the language of Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Bertolt Brecht. But an official attempt to reform German has provoked an unprecedented denunciation of the changes by writers, publishers and literary critics as ‘stupid and confusing".

A committee of bureaucrats introduced the reforms — known as neue Rechtschreibung, or new spelling — six years ago to make the complex language easier to learn. Since then opposition to the changes has grown. It culminated in Germany's two leading publishing houses, Axel Springer and Der Spiegel, announcing on Friday that their publications would revert to the old spelling.

The reforms had failed, the publishers said, providing neither 'enlightenment nor simplicity'. They urged other newspapers to follow the example of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which had gone back to old spelling. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Hunting Germany's linguistic gems
Rechtschreibreform
Anglicisms ‘invading Germany’
The Awful German Language

From the BBC: Hunting Germany's linguistic gems.

The search for the most beautiful word in the German language is almost over.

Entries for a competition to unearth the most stunning example - organised by the German language council - have been flooding in.

More than 20,000 words, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, have been sent in by email and letter.

German, for example, has a word to describe that niggling melody you just cannot get out of your head - "Ohrwurm", literally "earworm".

"Eisenbahnknoten" is a "knot of rail-lines" or, in other words, a railway junction.

My favourite German word is umgekert, which means inside out. But have I got it right? Maybe some German speaking reader will write and let me know. It's been a long time since I studied German, and some of what I used to know is a bit muddled in my head by now.

Update: it seems I did ok on the meaning, but blew it on the spelling. The correct spelling is umgekehrt.

Thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje and Clemens Radl for help with the word's meaning and spelling. Much appreciated!

Related content on Mirabilis.ca:
The Awful German Language
Rechtschreibreform

From the Toronto Star: Thinking before you speak.

Baby may not be saying much at five months but she could be thinking deep thoughts.

Researchers have found that five-month-old babies can comprehend concepts for which they have not yet learned words, thus answering the age-old question: Which comes first, an idea or the language to express it?

"How do we think about the world before we are corrupted by culture and the world?" asks Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom. "One way to learn is to look at babies.''

Researchers at Vanderbilt University and Harvard University found that 5-month-old babies being reared in English-speaking homes were able to grasp the difference between a loose fit and a tight fit — putting a pencil into a plastic cup, for instance, versus stacking a second cup inside the first.

That distinction is important in the Korean language but absent from English. By showing that babies growing up in English-speaking homes are sensitive to the distinction, the researchers demonstrated that some forms of thinking do precede language. [continue]

From Forbes.com: Stutterers Process Language Differently.

Even when people who stutter aren't speaking, their brains process language differently than other people, say Purdue University researchers.

In a series of studies, the scientists measured brain activity of adults who stutter and those who don't as they responded silently, by pressing a button, to questions about sentence meaning, grammar, and rhyming.

"Traditionally, stuttering is thought of as a problem with how someone speaks, and little attention has been given to the complex interactions between neurological systems that underlie speaking," researcher Christine Weber-Fox, an assistant professor of speech sciences, said in a prepared statement.

"We have found differences in adults who stutter, compared to those who don't, in how the brain processes information when people are thinking about language but not speaking. For example, there was a significant delay in response time when subjects were given a complex language task. We also found that in people who stutter, certain areas of the brain are more active when processing some language tasks," Weber-Fox said. [continue]

From the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Papa’ ... from the mouths of Stone Age babies.

One of the first words to be uttered by Stone Age babies was probably "papa", according to scientists.

Researchers trying to piece together the origins of human language believe the word may have been passed down through the generations from a "proto-language" spoken 50,000 years ago. [continue]

Related:
Why babies always voice love for papa - The Herald

From the BBC: Long-winded village name protest.

Campaigners are giving their village the longest place name in the UK of 66 letters in a protest at plans for a wind farm nearby.

People in Llanfynydd in Carmarthenshire are changing signs to read Llanhyfryddawelllehyn-afolybarcudprindanfygy-thiadtrienusyrhafnauole.

It means "a quiet beautiful village, an historic place with rare kite under threat from wretched blades". [continue]

From StarTribune.com: Medieval language finds revival among Israeli Jews.

JERUSALEM — More than 500 years after Jews were expelled from Spain, an effort is afoot in Israel to save Ladino, a medieval dialect that helped preserve the exiles' culture as they scattered across Europe and the Middle East.

Ladino, also called Judeo-Spanish, is slowly dying. Israel is believed to have the largest number of people — perhaps as many as 200,000 — who can speak or understand the language. But many are older than 60. (...)

Ladino is a recognizable cousin of modern Spanish, though some sounds and spellings vary. For example, "pobre," the Spanish word for "poor," is rendered in Ladino as prove. The letter "j," pronounced like "h" in Spanish, sounds more like "zh" in Ladino.

The language is a form of 15th-century Spanish bearing influences of Portuguese, Catalan and Hebrew. It remained largely intact after Spanish Jews were expelled en masse in 1492 and sought refuge in such places as the Balkans, the Netherlands, Greece and Turkey. [continue]

Related:
Ladino - Wikipedia

From the Washington Post: Study: Dogs Similar to Children When Learning Language.

A dog can do something scientists thought only humans could do: figure out that an unfamiliar sound is the name of a strange object, researchers reported today.

A series of carefully designed studies of a German house dog named Rico concluded that the border collie uses the process of elimination to determine that a name he had never heard before refers to a toy he had never seen before.

"This is called ‘fast-mapping,’ which was thought to be something exclusively human. It is how children learn the meanings of new words," said Julia Fischer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who helped conduct the research. "Nobody thought this could be done by an animal."

While many species can be trained to recognize the names of objects, what makes Rico unique is that he has a stunningly large vocabulary, can puzzle out the names of new objects on the first try and is surprisingly good at remembering what he learns weeks later, the researchers said.

"Maybe this is the Albert Einstein of dogs. Or maybe this is something that other dogs can do too," said Fischer, whose research is being published in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "We just don't know. We need to find out."

The findings are the latest evidence that animals are capable of more complex communication than had been thought, with dogs being especially astute at comprehending their human companions.

"This is an extremely provocative paper," said Robert Seyfarth, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who studies monkey behavior and communication. "Dog owners will say a lot of things about their dogs. The question is always, 'Are dogs really as smart as they think they are?' This says they might be." [continue]

Related:
Dog's verbal tricks probe origin of language - NewScientist.com
Smart border collie learns new words like toddler - CBC
Dogs can understand words, study says - Globe and Mail

From the BBC: Yoda ‘speaks like Anglo-Saxon’.

Star Wars character Yoda's sentence structure is similar to old Anglo-Saxon, a linguistics expert has said.

Author David Crystal also says a number of characters in the Lord of the Rings are excellent examples of non-standard English for children to study. (...)

Mr Crystal, a professor of linguistics at Reading University for 20 years, said Yoda — a Jedi master in the Star Wars films — was a good way to get children interested in how preferences in English word order changed from the Anglo-Saxon era to that of Middle English.

He told BBC News Online: "It is a nice example if you want to persuade kids and get them interested — if you say Yoda did it they are all ears.

"It is a clever little trick on George Lucas's part to get an effect. He reverses the order: ‘full of the force I am’. The end of the sentence comes at the beginning." [continue].

Related links:
Anglo-Saxon - Wikipedia
A profile of David Crystal - Wordsmith.org

Related book:
The Stories of English - Amazon.com

From the BBC: Latin set for schools comeback.

Latin is being made available to thousands of pupils across the UK, even if there is no specialist teacher in their school.

And gone are the days of wading through Julius Caesar's accounts of his Gallic wars.

Pupils now get to read about the exploits of "wheeler-dealer" Caecilius who manages to offends his wife by buying the prettiest girl available at a slave market and Grumio the cook who is in and out of affairs.

The Cambridge Online Latin Project, which has been tested by 2,000 pupils aged 12 and upwards over the past four years, is being rolled out nationally in September.

It is hoped the e-learning course will go some way to reverse the downturn in the number of pupils learning about the ancient world.

"We're looking to make Latin available to everyone who wants to study it," said Will Griffiths, director of the Cambridge School Classics Project which produces the courses in partnership with Cambridge University Press and Granada Learning. [continue]

In addition to the Starting Latin courses for schools, the Cambridge School Classics Project also offers Starting Latin for independent learners, which is for students of all ages.

I've just noticed an article about etymology on The Telegraph's site: How the bee got his knees. Most interesting! Here's part of the section on all mouth and trousers.

This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male. Proverbial expressions like this are notoriously hard to pin down: we have no idea exactly where it comes from nor when it first appeared, although it is recorded from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. However, we're fairly sure that it is a pairing of "mouth", meaning insolence or cheekiness, with "trousers", a pushy sexual bravado. It's a wonderful example of metonymy ("a container for the thing contained"). [continue]

[see full article]

Related book:
Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths - amazon.co.uk

From the (Lebanon) Daily Star: Keeper of The Word shares a few.

DAMASCUS: With the recent release of the film, "The Passion of The Christ," Aramaic has likely been heard by more people in the past months than in it's entire history. Once the vernacular, it is now reduced to subtitles, spoken daily by a few. The man in front of me has a less brutal way of keeping the language alive.

Patriarch Zakka sits in a gold encrusted chair in a fading cathedral in the Old Quarter of Damascus, but the power of this holy man is not contained in a chair. Or in his extensive title: His Holiness Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas. The power of Pope Zakka rests in words.

Pope Zakka is the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East and the Supreme Head of the Universal Syriac Orthodox Church, the planet's second oldest church, founded by the Apostles.

As intriguing as the longevity of the institution, is its charge to keep alive Aramaic, the language in which Christ spoke. That is, the words in which The Word spoke.

Words have consequence, but few take words as seriously as Pope Zakka.

We all know one phrase in Aramaic: Abracadabra. Childish magical gibberish to the rest of us, loosely translated from Aramaic it has a vastly more serious meaning: "Create what I speak, or, May my words be brought to life." These are not men who dangle their participles.

The church has come within a breath of extinction at least twice in its long history, and its survival is a miracle. (...)

In the early 21st century, the church and the language so intimately linked to it again struggles to survive. This time it has found an oddly modern ally; the internet.

"The most important thing is that Aramaic was spoken by Our Lord Jesus Christ," the Patriarch says. "That's why we love it. It has been the liturgical language of our church from the beginning of Christianity and, of course, it was the ancient language of Syria before Islam. That's also why we love it. And we feel it is our duty and responsibility to keep it alive because we can't imagine that, one day, the language spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ will be forgotten. It's something we can't imagine." [continue]

From The Telegraph: Sturm und Drang spell doom for Germany's Rechtschreibreform.

A national experiment to reform the German language is close to collapse after a quiet but angry revolt by publishers, academics and teachers who say it is "barbaric" and would destroy centuries of linguistic freedom.

Under the new rules, which were meant to simplify a complex language once described by Mark Twain as "slippery and elusive to the grasp", Germans were supposed to find it easier to read and write.

But with 1,106 new rules to learn, and 12,000 new spellings, even the hardiest academics have declared the system "almost impossible".

The president of Germany's PEN club, Johano Strasser, has called it "language rape".

The Rechtschreibreform (spelling reform) includes in select cases, replacing the ancient symbol resembling a fat capital B (known as the S-Zett) with "ss".

Despite a campaign to replace the umlaut with a "u" or an "e", more were introduced into the language. Oddly, there has been no attempt to simplify aspects of the language which can be infuriatingly complicated to Germans and foreigners alike, such as the compound Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen (declarations of independence). [continue]

Related:
The German spelling reform - learn-german-online.net
German spelling reform - Wikipedia
The Awful German Language (Mark Twain's article) - Mirabilis.ca

Today's New York Times has an article about Reginald Foster, the Vatican's Latin expert.

VATICAN CITY — Let us now enter the inner sanctum of the Vatican. Walk past the Swiss Guards, up the marble stairways of the Apostolic Palace, through corridors adorned with wondrous Renaissance frescoes rarely glimpsed by outsiders, to a hushed spot near the residence of the pope himself.

There, in a small office, toils a plumber's son from Milwaukee with a shaved head, rascally sense of humor and fondness for janitor outfits that look as if they came from a J. C. Penney. (Which they did).

He is a Carmelite priest, but do not address him as father. The name's Reggie, as he is known to admirers around the world. Or perhaps Reginaldus.

Part ecclesiastical oddball, part inspirational educator, the Rev. Reginald Foster is a master classicist who has devoted his life to saving Latin from extinction. Not just quill-on-parchment Latin. The conversational Latin language of Cicero, wellspring of Western civilization and, at one time, mother tongue of the Roman Catholic Church. (...)

Father Foster, 64, has immersed himself in Latin since he was a teenager at a Carmelite seminary in New Hampshire. He says he dreams in Latin, and considers it his first language.

As one of a handful of Vatican Latinists, he writes and translates a daily regimen of documents weighty and banal, from encyclicals to a recent congratulatory letter issued by the pope – Summus Pontifex Ioannes Paulus II - to the bishop of Rochester, Matthew Clark, on the 25th anniversary of his appointment. Most of his translations are into Latin from Italian, the Vatican's real lingua franca. [continue]

(You'll need a NYT password if you want to read the full article.)

Related:
Roman Rebound - Mirabilis.ca, December 2003
Modern Lation dictionary - Mirabilis.ca, May 2003
FAQ de Aestiva Romae Latinitatis - Latin.org

From iol.co.za: Rome takes tourists back in time with Latin.

Rome - When in Rome, do as the Romans do... or at least did.

Tourists have long been drawn to the Colosseum and ruins of magnificent Roman temples in the heart of the Italian capital, but starting this week they can immerse themselves in ancient history and even pick up beginners' Latin.

The regional government along with two historical societies is offering free Latin classes to tourists in a bid to lure even more of the sword-and-sandals loving crowd to Rome. (...)

For those itching to really live the Roman experience, organisers plan to team up this summer with the Scuola Gladiatori Roma, or gladiator school, to offer a package with Latin classes and a crash course in gladiator fighting.

After donning tunics and helmets, tourists would be treated to a typical Roman feast.

"Tourists are always looking for something ‘typical’ of a region - well for ancient Rome it doesn't get much more typical than gladiator fighting and Latin," said Pediconi.

Still, he said the ancient post-supper vomiting ritual would be dropped. [full article]

Related:
Sito Ufficiale del Gruppo Storico Romano

I learned a little bit of Irish today, and I'm fascinated by the standard greeting and response. The equivalent of hello is Dia duit, which is literally God to you. The response is Dia's Muire duit: God and Mary to you. How cool is that?

To hear those phrases pronounced, head over to Daltaí na Gaeilge, and click on whichever phrase you'd like to hear.

From The Telegraph: Taiwan gives in and drops traditional writing style.

Taiwan is to end the practice of writing from top to bottom and right to left, breaking a Chinese tradition that has lasted for hundreds of years.

From next year, bureaucrats have been told, all government documents will have to be written horizontally and from left to right, as in the West. [continue]

Related:
Taiwan law orders one-way writing - BBC

From Boston.com: Cuneiform Goes Digital: UCLA Professor Illuminates Life in Ancient Iraq.

It's not exactly Google, but the stunning cache of information Professor Robert Englund and his colleagues are making accessible on the Web is revolutionary - nearly one million lines of transcribed cuneiform, the earliest form of writing, with much more to come - documenting the social and literary worlds of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia, ancient lands comprising modern Iraq and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. While the wedge-like cuneiform script was often incised on stone slabs that could weigh several tons, it was usually impressed onto more portable clay tablets that hardened quickly in the hot and dry climate of the region.

While roughly five million of these tablets are believed to be still buried in the ruin mounds of Iraq, awaiting archaeological discovery, some 500,000 are safely held in museum collections in London, Berlin, Istanbul, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. These clay documents contain the Epic of Gilgamesh (first written in Sumerian and Akkadian around 1800 B.C. and carefully copied until 500 B.C.) and the Code of Hammurabi, as well as notes and calculations by merchants, doctors, and others from the Babylonian bureaucracy and from the general population, that illuminate what daily life was like thousands of years ago. But these priceless tablets and shards are so fragile that they have been known to crumble spontaneously, so transporting them from place to place for research is unheard of.

Enter Robert Englund, a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, who has been sorting and compiling cuneiform data on computers since pre-Internet days, when he was a research assistant at the Free University of Berlin. Together with Peter Damerow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Englund conceived and now directs the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators, and historians of science whose mission is to make the form and content of cuneiform tablets available online, eliminating the need for scholars to travel around the world to study them. [continue].

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Digitizing cuneiform - February, 2003

Related link:
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

From the McGill University website: Psycholinguistics: studying speech processes.

Psychology professor Debra Titone's research is breaking ground in determining the key parts of the human brain that are involved in the relatively new field of psycholinguistics — the study of how people understand and use language. She aims to determine how the human brain processes speech by comparing language processing in non-schizophrenic and schizophrenic people. Most people use contextual clues, but many schizophrenics have difficulty with this. For example, the word "pen" has several meanings. The dominant association with this word is a writing tool, and the less frequently associated meaning is an animal enclosure. In her work, Titone has found that schizophrenics can only understand the more common usage of such multiple meaning words, regardless of the context.

Titone's latest project focuses on figurative language. Schizophrenics are generally capable of producing and understanding language very well, however figurative language poses problems. For instance, the figurative proverb, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss,’ has both literal and idiomatic meanings. Schizophrenics always interpret this type of expression literally. As Titone further explains, "There are hundreds of different idioms, and some employ metaphors that have no plausible meaning, such as, ‘paying through the nose’." Interestingly, schizophrenics have no difficulty understanding expressions with only metaphorical meanings, but they become confused when an expression has multiple meanings. Titone has discovered that, different areas of a schizophrenic's brain are involved when processing idioms with both literal and metaphorical meanings. She plans to compare the brain activity of schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic people to determine how this processing occurs. [continue]

If you enjoy interesting words like lucubration, myrmidon, niddering, katabasis and hebetude, you might want to arrange for a word and its definition to arrive in your mailbox each day. (Who can resist?) Subscribing to any of these mailing lists will do the trick:

Word of the Day - dictionary.com
A Word A Day - wordsmith.org
The Word Spy - logophilia.org

(If it's French words you want, try word of the week from CBC Radio's C'est la vie.)

Shakespeare's Coined Words Now Common Currency. From National Geographic:

While William Shakespeare died 388 years ago this week, the English playwright and poet lives on not only through his writings, but through the words and sayings attributed to him that still color the English language today.

So whether you are "fashionable" or "sanctimonious," thank Shakespeare, who likely coined the terms. [continue].

Related:
Shakespeare's Coined Words - theatrehistory.com
List of words coined by Shakespeare - rhymezone.com
Review: Coined by Shakespeare - quinion.com
Coined by Shakespeare: Words and Meanings First Used by the Bard - amazon.com

From SeattlePI.com: Documents may prove ancient runestone fake.

Scholars who believe the Kensington Runestone is a 19th-century prank — and not concrete evidence that Norsemen beat Columbus to America by 100-plus years — say they have found the smoking gun to prove it.

The latest in the century-old controversy centered in Minnesota came in documents written in 1885 by an 18-year-old Swedish tailor named Edward Larsson. He sometimes wrote in runes — an ancient Scandinavian language that differs from the English alphabet. But Larsson's runes were not the usual runes used over the centuries.

The scholars contend that parts of his documents seem to be written in a secret runic alphabet used by tradesmen in Sweden in the late 1800s, rather like codes that tramps have used over time to leave secret messages for one another.

Swedish linguists happened upon Larsson's documents recently and found that his writing corresponds to pieces of the Kensington Runestone inscription. They say that the journeymen's code did not exist in medieval times, when the Kensington Runestone is purported to have been carved. [continue]

Related:
The Story of the Kensington Runestone
Kensington Runestone
Kensington Runestone Goes to Sweden
Debunking the Kensington Stone Mystery

From the Guardian: How to fight the gorilla war at work - use chimp talk.

Don't be a chump, be a chimp. Don't hail the boss with a meaningless greeting, try a thoughtful grunt instead. If that doesn't get a rise, try grooming your dominant colleague and see if it smartens up office relationships. If things start to go wrong, don't swear, just emit a short, high-pitched "oo oo oo" call and watch your colleagues swing into action.

Zoologists want a few hundred volunteers to ape humanity's nearest relative, the chimpanzee - and perhaps learn to get along a little better. "When we as keepers are working with the chimps, we use their language to communicate with them," said David Field, curator of mammals for the Zoological Society of London. "Our feeling is that if we can communicate this way with the chimps and build bridges, there is a chance we can build bridges within the work environment as well." [continue]

Oh right. You do it and I'll watch, ok?

From The Art of Second Language Conversation, Linda Besner's article at The Dominion.

When I talk to my new friend Tom, we're not just talking-- we're metatalking. When I ask him how he's enjoying the weather, he tells me he is not enjoying it at all because it has too many future tenses. "Will it rain?" he asks me. Then answers himself, "In the afternoon it may begin to rain." "It will soon be raining." [continue]

I loved this article, especially the bit about the best part of a flower.

The other day I was noodling around on the web and came across The Classics Pages, which is Andrew Wilson's website. He's the guy who translated Harry Potter into ancient Greek! Andrew's Greek Harry Potter page explains how he got the job, and gives interesting details about the translation, such as this:

Quidditch becomes i)karosfairikh/ (on the analogy of podosfairikh/ for football and kalaqosfairikh/ for basketball- with which Quidditch is compared). Lucian calls Menippus the philosopher Icaromenippus after his alleged trip to the moon - that's where I got the idea. The quaffle has the near homophone (with the sort of metathesis that Greeks often applied to foreign words) kolofw=n which means a ball in Greek, and a bludger is r(opalosfai/rion, reminding us of a ball which acts like Heracles' club! The snitch is fqaste/on, meaning "that which must be anticipated" from fqa/nw, a fantastic Greek verb with no English equivalent, meaning "I do something before someone else realises that I'm doing it". The philosopher's stone (why the apostrophe before the s, I asked myself?) becomes h( tou= filoso/fou li/qos - if you are worried about the gender of l/iqos, I assure you it becomes feminine when referring to a special stone. [continue]

Mosts excellent. (Sorry the Greek text doesn't display properly; it's the same on Andrew's page. You people who read Greek will have to use your imagination a bit.)

While at the Harry Potter in Greek page, do note the links on the left side of the page. There is much to explore on this site, and it's fascinating.

Related:
Harry Potter's Greek Odyssey - CBC
Harry Potter becomes Warrior Cup in Ancient Greek - Mirabilis.ca
Harry Potter in ancient Greek - Mirabilis.ca
Medieval Christian symbols in Harry Potter - Mirabilis.ca

Related book:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Ancient Greek Edition)

How Minimus the mus is helping revive a moribund language. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

If the enthusiasm these kids show is infectious, Minimus the mouse might do for a dying language what Harry Potter has done for children's reading.

Minimus is the lead character and title of a colourfully-illustrated Latin textbook created by British teacher Barbara Bell. The course has doubled the study of Latin in British primary schools and revived interest in the dying language in classrooms.

Most importantly, it's fun, say students from the Ravenswood School for Girls in Gordon, one of a rare few schools that teach Latin in primary. "Latin is new, it's different," says Adelaide Pratt, 9, holding her Latin scrapbook proudly. "It's one of my favourite subjects." (...)

Since it was published four years ago, more than 50,000 copies have been sold, with 20 per cent bought in the United States and Australia. Scholastic, the book's Australian distributor, said Minimus had been popular and was also being used in high schools. [continue]

Related books, etc:
Minimus Pupil's Book : Starting out in Latin
Minimus Secundus : Moving on in Latin [ABRIDGED] - audio cassette
Minimus Secundus Pupil's Book : Moving on in Latin
Minimus Secundus Teacher's Resource Book : Moving on in Latin

Another article on Aramaic, this time from the Financial Times: The language of Christ awaits resurrection. First there's the usual sort of background:

Khaled Ahmad Alloush and Mohammed Qassem Tawil are anxiously waiting to hear whether there will be a special screening of Mel Gibson's controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, in their isolated village of Jab'edine, perched in the hills north of Damascus.

The two farmers are among the few thousand people who will not need subtitles to understand the language spoken throughout the movie, Aramaic.

A bit later we get to the more interesting stuff:

In this village the language of Christ blends with the call to prayers from the mosques and Jesus is referred to as the prophet Issa.

"Prophet Issa, may peace be upon him, is one of our prophets as Muslims. He spoke Aramaic and so do we. We are proud of our history," says Mr Tawil. "There was a time when we were actually Christians in this village, but some centuries ago, everybody here converted to Islam."

Bakh'aa is also a Muslim village while nearby Maaloula is predominantly Christian, with two monasteries.

"I don't know if you can say that [the people of Maaloula did not convert because] they had more faith, maybe. During the Ottoman Empire, a lot of Christians became Muslims because of social pressures and economic pressures," says Father Toufic at Maaloula's St Sergius monastery.

"But this is the language of all the people who lived in this region before and after Christ, so Aramaic is not something special to Christians."

It is unclear why Aramaic survived in this particular region but the most common explanation is the villages' isolation, which preserved them from the spread of Arabic.

For the Christians of Maaloula, Aramaic has an added significance. Ten years ago, villagers celebrated Good Friday mass in Aramaic for the first time in centuries. Everything from the sermon to the hymns was translated.

This was made possible by one man, George Rizkallah, Maaloula's Aramaic expert. He has been working hard to promote the language and develop it beyond simple, everyday, Aramaic. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
The Jesuit scholar who translated The Passion
Aramaic still spoken in Cyprus
Where the language of Christ lives
Aramaic: almost extinct, but still spoken in Maalula

From the Globe and Mail: A computer-like brain.

Joseph Visser doesn't like hats, so he looks skeptical when a researcher slips a dangly wire wig of 128 electrodes over his head. He is six months old, and this is just another outing with his mom.

For Laurel Trainor, a researcher at McMaster University, Joseph's visit to her lab is a chance to figure out how babies learn language. The white plastic net is hooked up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG, that monitors electrical signals from Joseph's brain as he hears a series of clicks.

While babies use many non-verbal ways to communicate with their parents, including crying, smiles and other facial expressions, none are that precise. From the moment infants are born, they are learning the spoken language they hear around them. Dr. Trainor is one of many researchers studying how. [continue]

Ooooh, there's now a Dictionary of the Scots language on the web. A BBC article about the dictionary notes:

The project has incorporated the 12 volumes of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and all 10 of the Scottish National Dictionary. (...)

The resource, which was three years in the making, has also included snippets of speeches from the closing session of the Scottish Parliament in 1707 and the words spoken at the Declaration of Arbroath.

English lecturer Victor Skretkowicz, who led the project with lexicographer Susan Rennie Victor, said: "For nearly a century, successive editors of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary laboured to create a historical and cultural record of Scots, from 1200 to 1976.

"The 22 volumes contain hundreds of thousands of quotes describing all walks of life but now through a process of virtual integration the Dictionary of the Scots Language brings their linguistic, historical and cultural records together and facilitates rapid searching of their contents." [continue]

Here's an article from xinhuanet.com about the Nushu script.

China's archive keepers said Monday that they would reveal the mysterious Nushu, probably the world's only female specific language, to the public at an exhibition scheduled for late April.

Nushu, a language that was incomprehensible to men, was used exclusively by women in central Hunan province and some areas in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, said Liu Gening,head of the provincial archive.

The language was used widely in the three adjacent counties of Jiangyong, Daoxian and Jianghua, but was on the verge of extinction today for lack of use, he said. "Only elderly women in some rural areas still use it now."

To preserve the language, Liu and his colleagues have collected handkerchiefs, aprons, scarves and handbags embroidered with Nushu characters, manuscripts written on paper or fans, and calligraphic works by Zhou Shuoyi, the first man to learn the language in China.

"We have collected 303 pieces of heritage bearing the rare language during five trips to Yongjiang county, birthplace of the female language, over the past year," said Liu. "The oldest of them dates back to the late Qing Dynasty in the early 1900s, and the most recent pieces were from the 1960s or 1970s." [continue]

Related:
Nushu - ancientscripts.com
Nushu - wikipedia
A language by women, for women -msnbc.msn.com

Also see Languagehat's post on Nishu, and the links provided there.

From the New York Times: An Effort to Make Arabic Easier.

The hurdles of learning Arabic as a second language are daunting. Arabic is written right to left, and each letter can take one of four forms, depending on where it appears in a word. Finally, Arabic is printed and written only in flowing script, never as individual letters.

Those obstacles can be overwhelming for students of the language - and for computer programmers trying to render Arabic characters on screen - at a time when there is a critical need for clear communication between the West and the Arabic-speaking world. In fact, it can be a challenge even for some native Arabic speakers to learn to read and write in their mother tongue. That is what led Saad D. Abulhab to patent a simplified Arabic alphabet that he says is easier to learn.

"The whole thing came about because my 6-year-old daughter did not want to learn to read Arabic because she said it was written backwards," said Mr. Abulhab, an Iraqi-American who was born in California and spent his childhood in Baghdad. He earned a master's degree in library science and is now director of technology at the Newman Library of Baruch College in New York. He lives with his family in Milford, Conn.

"That gave me the idea to make it bidirectional, with letters that went both ways but didn't lose their characteristics," he said. "It's your choice how to use them. Like with Chinese, which was originally written top to bottom but now is written mainly left to right by many young Chinese." [continue]

Interesting idea. I'd rather learn the regular Arabic script, though, wouldn't you? Start with the Arabic alphabet, and then move on to stuff like the Arabic alphabet song Whee! (Flash required for Arabic alphabetic fun.)

Perhaps you've come across Henry Beard's amusing Latin phrase books, Latin for All Occasions and Latin for Even More Occasions. Well! Mr Beard has been at it again, and now he's written X-Treme Latin: Unleash Your Inner Gladiator. Here's an article from economist.co.uk about that latest book:

For years now, Henry Beard, the founder of National Lampoon, has been pursuing a rollicking crusade to put Latin back in everyday life. As he explains, Latin is widely used by lawyers to cheat you, by doctors to scare you witless and by houseplant sellers to shift their wares. (See, under "Botanical Latin", grandiflora, tormentosa, pendula, rugosa and sempervirens, all of which mean "leafless clump of dry brown twigs in one week flat".) This book lets the homunculus (little guy) get his own back. [continue]

I've been meaning to read about The Jesuit scholar who translated ‘The Passion’ since I saw it mentioned in Dappled Things a few days ago. Today Random Notes pointed to the same article, so off I went to have a look.

It sounds like Rev. Fulco had quite a bit of fun translating this movie.

Fulco left Greek out of "The Passion," substituting Latin in occasional cases where Greek might have been used. He also made mostly imperceptible distinctions between the elegant Latin of Pilate and the crude Latin of soldiers, thanks to an X-rated source he found on his shelf.

"I tracked down some obscene graffiti from Roman army camps," Fulco said. "Somebody who knows Latin really well, their ears will fall off. We didn't subtitle those words."

Fulco even confessed to some linguistic mischief.

"Here and there I put in playful things which nobody will know. There's one scene where Caiaphas turns to his cohorts and says something in Aramaic. The subtitle says, ‘You take care of it.’ He's actually saying, ‘Take care of my laundry.’"

Other linguistic tricks of Fulco's serve a function in the script.

For example, he incorporated deliberate dialogue errors in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups' inability to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations and word endings.

Later, "there's an exchange where Pilate addresses Jesus in Aramaic, and Jesus answers in Latin. It's kind of a nifty little symbolic thing: Jesus is going to beat him at his own game," Fulco said. "One line [in that exchange] I kind of enjoyed is when Jesus says, ‘My power is given from above, otherwise my followers would not have allowed this.’ That's [spoken in] the pluperfect subjunctive." [continue]

Related:
What's popcorn in Aramaic? - from the Guardian. Link found at Random Notes.

From the BBC: Do you speak Elf?

As if murderous orcs and magic spells weren't enough to contend with, there are two languages to learn - loosely based on Welsh and Finnish.

Undeterred by the challenge, a group of schoolboys has volunteered for lessons in Sindarin, the "conversational" form of Elvish, invented by Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien.

Zainab Thorp, a special needs co-ordinator at Turves Green Boys' Technology College in Birmingham, is offering after-hours classes, where pupils plough through vocabulary and verb tables.

She said: "The recent success of the Lord of the Rings films has increased the interest in learning Elvish.

"The children really enjoy it. It breaks the idea that education should simply be aimed at getting a job."

Tolkien, an Oxford academic who was expert in ancient languages, developed two forms of Elvish.

Sindarin - based on the sounds of Welsh - is the more commonly used. Quenya - related to Finnish - is largely a ceremonial language.

Tolkien, who died in 1973, only wrote down around 350 words in Sindarin, so Lord of the Rings experts have had to work together to increase the vocabulary for everyday use. From the BBC: [continue]

Related:
Rings fans opt for Elvish lessons - BBC
Turves Green Boys' Technology College in Birmingham

I thought I had British slang pretty much sussed, but obviously not. Here's the Britspeak I learned today from Darren Barefoot's blog and his link to this definition on the BBC site:

Pile of pants

pile of pants, noun, slang, official term of rejection. Relatively new non-swearing slang term, meaning a load of rubbish or, indeed, knickers. Pants in this sense (NB not trousers as in the US; in the UK pants means underwear) only became slang in the 1990s (according to slang lexicographer Jonathon Green). Became official term of rejection even more recently (see below). Popular with students and DJs.

USAGE: Letter rejecting asylum seeker's case, from a Home Office official, December 2000: "With regard to your claim to be a national of Afghanistan, the Secretary of State thinks that this is a pile of pants." [continue]

From the Globe and Mail: Excursionizing and verbifying.

"Bagel me, please."

My daughter wasn't asking someone to perform an extreme chiropractic procedure with those words. She was simply asking me to pass her a bagel, in emulation of Homer Simpson's, "Beer me."

Beyond that, her request signalled the movement of verbing from boardrooms and cartoons into the public domain.

And my kitchen.

Before we finished breakfasting, she had been toastered, plated, knifed and cream-cheesed.

Her verbifying didn't red flag me at the time. It was largely funning around, gaming the language. But then it hit me. Here she was, havocing the Queen's English, right in the presence of a professional writer.

For 30 some years, I have earned my living by togethering words into sentences, and verbifying is nothing new to me.

But was this mere verbification, or a signal that the language is systematically being verbicided? [continue].

This reminds me of a certain Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

From Reuters: Harry Potter becomes Warrior Cup in Ancient Greek.

LONDON (Reuters) - Harry Potter becomes "Warrior Cup" and his enemy Voldemort "Scaly Death" in a translation of the schoolboy wizard's adventures into Ancient Greek due for publication this summer.

Retired classics teacher Andrew Wilson told Reuters he had to stretch his linguistic ingenuity to turn J.K. Rowling's magic boarding school fantasy into a language not used for 1,500 years.

Wilson, 64, was commissioned in January 2002 by publisher Bloomsbury to translate "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" into the Greek spoken in ancient Athens.

The book, the first in Rowling's multi-million-selling series, has already been translated into 60 languages and is available in 200 countries. [continue]

From The Telegraph: Northern dialects saved from Estuary English.

For those who fear that the great Northern dialects are about to be overwhelmed by a tide of Estuary English - that words such as mebbies, bleb and gan will soon be as rare as proper mushy peas - comes comforting news.

Yesterday, the British Library unveiled a new website intended to preserve for all time the language and accents of the North, saving them for the day when its inhabitants will know it only as the Norf.

The site contains more than 11 hours of recordings made during two surveys carried out in 1950 and 1999, and provides an insight into the changes that have overtaken dialects in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland in the past half century.

The listener has only to click on his or her mouse to be regaled with tales of pig slaughtering in Twenties' Northumberland or what it was like to support Burnley Football Club in the Fifties.

The recordings are dripping with dripping, taters (potatoes), tanners (sixpences), teddies (potatoes again) and dolly tubs (washtubs). One can almost smell the Hovis. [continue]

Here's the British Library English Accents and Dialects site the article is talking about.

Here's another article about Aramaic in Cyprus: Aramaic, language of Jesus, lives on in Cyprus.

KORMAKITI, CYPRUS – If the people of this remote village were to travel back to Jesus' time and hear him preach, they wouldn't need an interpreter to understand the Sermon on the Mount or the parable of the prodigal son.

Spoken in the Middle East during Jesus' time, Aramaic is still used in everyday life by most of the 130 elderly Maronite Catholics in Kormakiti, which overlooks the Mediterranean Sea.

This could be good news for Mel Gibson. If the megastar has trouble finding an audience for "Passion," his upcoming movie about the final hours of Jesus' life on Earth with dialogue mostly in Aramaic, due to be released next month, the folks here should have no trouble with the original biblical tongue.

Still, Kormakiti's unique diluted version of Aramaic, called Cypriot Maronite Arabic, is in danger of extinction. Once the thriving center of the island's Maronite community, Kormakiti now has the eerie atmosphere of a ghost town. [continue]

More about Aramaic:
Aramaic language - Wikipedia
Where the language of Christ lives - Mirabilis.ca, December 2003
Aramaic: almost extinct, but still spoken in Maalula - Mirabilis.ca, March 2003

The Passion of Christ movie:
The Passion of the Christ - thepassionofthechrist.com
Passion of Christ - passion-movie.com

A Guardian article for logophiliacs: From OED to poetry.

Take the spines of encyclopedias and dictionaries. Sometimes the summaries they give of their contents are flatly austere: A to Auto, Turk to Zygo, and so on. But where more of the first and last words are revealed, there are sometimes conjunctions that create a kind of poetry. The Encyclopaedia Britannica that was still around in the 1960s, with its Daisy to Education and its Sarsaparilla to Sorcery, has been superseded, but the new one has its pleasures too: Chicago to Death, Menage to Ottawa, and even Excretion to Geometry. Nor is the Encyclopedia Americana outdone, with its Egusquiza to Falsetto; Photography to Pumpkin; Sulphur to Tramways, aerial; and its gloriously evocative Trance to Venial sin.

Even that is surpassed by the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, which gets into its stride in volume 2 (BBC to Calypsography), picks up the pace with volume 7 (Hat to Intervacuum) and then offers in the space of eight volumes Poise to Quelt, Quemadero to Roaver, Soot to Styx, Su to Thrivingly, Thro to Unelucidated and, most intellectually stimulating of all, Unemancipated to Wau-Wau.

Logic tells us that in each case the first and last words have nothing to do with each other. Yet the sense that there must be a connection persists. Surely the BBC, with its all-seeing eye on the world, must dabble from time in calypsography? (Perhaps; perhaps not. Calypsography has nothing to do with calypsos but means, the OED says, steel engraving; it's a "bad formation" from Greek). Yet Thro seems a solid example of something that's unelucidated, at least until you get round to looking it up, while the Wau-Wau sound like a race ripe for emancipation. [continue]

This afternoon I went in search of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky poem. One click towards the land of distraction led to Hebrew-wocky, - a Hebrew translation of Jabberwocky. Who knew?

The poem has been translated into lots of other languages, too... you can read Dromeparden (Jabberwocky in Norwegian), Siaberwoci (Jabberwocky in Welsh), or Il Ciarlestrone (Jabberwocky in Italian). And there are three Latin translations: Gaberbocchus, Mors Iabrochii, and Gabrobocchia.

Just the thing for a bit of polyglot fun. Many more Jaberwocky translations here.

(Oh, and those who enjoy Indian food should not miss Chapatiwocky.)

From The Economist: Babel's children.

It is hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that is just what Riau Indonesian is, according to David Gil, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. Dr Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realised that what he had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact, grammatically the same. For example, the phrase "the chicken is eating" translates into colloquial Riau as "ayam makan". Literally, this is "chicken eat". But the same pair of words also have meanings as diverse as "the chicken is making somebody eat", or "somebody is eating where the chicken is". There are, he says, no modifiers that distinguish the tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns that distinguish the definite from the indefinite ("the", as opposed to "a"). Indeed, there are no features in Riau Indonesian that distinguish nouns from verbs. These categories, he says, are imposed because the languages that western linguists are familiar with have them.

This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom about what language is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky—in particular, his theory of "deep grammar". According to Dr Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in their brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a language quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what is learnt. Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of children to make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to impose rules on what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (eg, "I dided it" instead of "I did it"). There is also the ability of the children of migrant workers to invent new languages known as creoles out of the grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents. Exactly what the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a basic distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its minimum requirements.

Dr Gil contends, however, that there is a risk of unconscious bias leading to the conclusion that a particular sort of grammar exists in an unfamiliar language. That is because it is easier for linguists to discover extra features in foreign languages—for example tones that change the meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian but do not exist in European languages—than to realise that elements which are taken for granted in a linguist's native language may be absent from another. Despite the best intentions, he says, there is a tendency to fit languages into a mould. And since most linguists are westerners, that mould is usually an Indo-European language from the West. [continue]

Oh look, BBC Wales has a Dylan Thomas random poem generator!

It's said that if an infinite number of monkeys were each given typewriters for an infinite number of years, they'd come up with the complete works of William Shakespeare. We wondered if the same would apply to the works of Dylan Thomas.

However, being sceptical about the idea of monkey literature, we looked instead for a more efficient way to amuse ourselves. And so the Dylan Thomas random poem generator was born. [continue]

Here's an article about the revival of an ancient Arabic word in Iraq. From the Mercury News: Ancient word insults, greets U.S. troops.

College students whisper the word when they spot U.S. troops in Baghdad streets. Vandals scrawl the word across military vehicles. Sneering taxi drivers mutter it when convoys block their cabs.

"Ulooj," they say, and while some use it with disdain and others more lightheartedly, it's unmistakably not a nice reference - though what precisely the ancient term from Arabic literature means depends on whom you ask. Among the translations offered: pigs of the desert, foreign infidels, little donkeys, medieval crusaders, bloodsuckers and horned creatures.

While no one can quite pin down the original definition, Iraqis agree on the modern definition: "It's the American military," said Maria Hassan, a 23-year-old history major at a university in Baghdad. "We use this word from the past for our occupiers of the present."

The revival of "ulooj" (pronounced oo-LOOZH) is the handiwork of Mohammed Saeed al Sahaf, the alternately comical and caustic information minister from the former Iraqi regime.

In the first days of the war, Sahaf sent Iraqis running for their dictionaries when he used the word in a speech to describe advancing U.S. forces. Today, "ulooj" lingers as the unofficial national nickname for American soldiers, even among many who profess support for the U.S. presence. (...)

Salah al Qureishi, a linguistics professor at al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, said he consulted four dictionaries when he first noticed his young students casually using a word he last recalled seeing in yellowed texts describing the conquests of a seventh-century Islamic ruler.

"I was astonished," Qureishi said. "I thought, ‘Where on earth did they get this word?’ " [continue]

From AskOxford.com, the word of the day: ultra-crepidarian.

an adjective related to the (widespread) practice of giving opinions on topics beyond one's knowledge. The word comes from Latin words meaning ‘beyond the sole (of the shoe),’ an allusion to the story of Apelles and the cobbler, Apelles being the favorite painter of Alexander the Great. His shoemaker told him of a mistake Apelles had made in depicting a shoe, and Apelles corrected it. The shoemaker then presumed to criticize the painting of the leg as well, and Apelles said: "Don't criticize above the sole!"

Thanks to my friend Lawrence for pointing out Roman Rebound, an article about Latin in The Economist. Here's the first bit:

TO SCARY music, a furtive Jewish nationalist of the first century paints on a wall the words Romanes Eunt Domus. A centurion enters:

Centurion: What's this, then? ? ‘People called Romanes they go the house?’
Nationalist: It—it says, ‘Romans, go home’.
Centurion: No, it doesn't. ‘Go home’? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
Nationalist (being savagely beaten): Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the...accusative! Domum, sir! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
Centurion: Except that takes the...?
Nationalist: The locative, sir!

The scene, from "Monty Python's Life of Brian", marked the apotheosis of Latin in film—until last March. At that point Mel Gibson, star-turned-director, announced that his new film "The Passion", about the last hours of Christ, would be made entirely in Latin and Aramaic. At first, the hero of "Thunderdome" and "Lethal Weapon" did not even want subtitles. When he realised that audiences needed to know, just roughly, what the characters were saying, he reluctantly backed down.

The milites¹ in their caligae² are now being coached in barrack-room conjugations by Father William Fulco, a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. They are taking to it quickly, he says; sometimes too quickly, with a steep slide into Italian-waiter accents. Italian is in fact his rough guide for pronunciation of first-century Latin, about which there is much debate. Subtitles will still be waived for soldier-talk, which Father Fulco has derived from graffiti found in Roman camps. You could argue, as he does, that Greek would often be more appropriate, and that the conscripted troops in Judea spoke little Latin. But, as the language of an oppressive superpower, Latin can't be beat.

As for Mr Gibson, he positively brags about making a film "in two dead languages". Not dead enough, some may think, remembering tear-stained sessions with Sallust and those cloth-bound small books, blotted with blue ink, in which scouts were forever crossing rivers and winter camps being struck. No wonder the world has galloped so gratefully to English, which has little use for genders or gerunds and never, if it will have been able to help it, employs the future perfect.

Yet hold on a minute (festina lente, as Caesar would have said, while gripping some hapless Gaul by the neck). Latin has a surprising number of advocates in the modern world. And these are not merely classicists or arty types entranced by the glories of Virgil, the cockiness of Catullus or the breathtaking fall of the rhythms and words of Horace. They are people who believe Latin has a future, as well as a past. [continue]

From the Montreal Gazette: Where the language of Christ lives. (Update: article no longer available.)

"Apeal lehma," Ziad Said said to his father as they walked up an alley in this small village found in the rugged Qalamoun mountains of central Syria.

What the 5-year-old wanted was a piece of the hot, rounded loaf of bread his father, Hanna Said, had just bought. He was asking for the bread in Aramaic, the language Jesus Christ spoke 2,000 years ago.

White and lilac houses are piled one on top of the other along the steep cliffs of Maaloula. They overlook a 4th-century Greek Orthodox monastery in the village. Perched on a nearby mountain is one of the oldest chapels in Christendom, its cross glinting in the sun.

A neighbour greeted the elder Said and both men engaged in a prolonged conversation in Aramaic, an ancient tongue rarely heard outside the area, about 60 kilometres north of Damascus.

A group of women in long robes and traditional head covers passed by and the men greeted them: "Ikhtshob?" ("How are you?")

It's as if history had stopped in the early Christian era in Maaloula and the nearby villages of Jabadin and Bakha, where a combined population of about 5,000 still speaks Aramaic.

Related:
Aramaic: almost extinct, but still spoken in Maalula

From Lingua Franchise, Charles Foran's article in The Walrus Magazine.

In a restaurant in Singapore’s Little India district I chatted recently with a man doling out bowls of fish-head curry. He called me a "mat saleh," Malay for ‘white foreigner.’ He dubbed a woman who walked past us an "S.P.G." a ‘Sarong Party Girl.’ Upper-crust Singaporians who put on posh accents were "chiak kantang." "Chiak" is Hokkien for ‘eating,’ "kantang" a mangling of the Malay for ‘potatoes.’ ‘Eating potatoes’: affecting Western mannerisms. Singapore has four official tongues Mandarin, English, Malay, and Tamil. At street level, though, none of these takes precedence. Neither does the Hokkien dialect, spoken by many older Chinese. The city-state’s functioning language is actually Singlish, a much-loved, much-frowned-upon hodge-podge of dialects and slang. When the man asked if I could pay for the meal with a smaller bill, he expressed it this way: "Got, lah?" I recognized that bit of language cobbling. In Hong Kong, where I was then living, Cantonese speakers sprinkle their English with similar punctuation. ‘Lah’ often denotes a question, like ‘eh’ for Canadians. ‘Wah’ infers astonishment. Once, when I was walking through that city’s nightclub district with a Chinese friend, we nearly knocked into a Canto-pop star, a young man of smouldering Elvis looks. "Wah, now can die!" my friend said, only half-jokingly. [continue]

From The Independent: ‘Lost’ sacred language of the Maya is rediscovered.

Linguists have discovered a still-surviving version of the sacred religious language of the ancient Maya - the great pyramid-building civilisation that once dominated Central America.

For years some Maya hieroglyphic texts have defied interpretation - but now archaeologists and linguists have identified a little-known native Indian language as the descendant of the elite tongue spoken by rulers and religious leaders of the ancient Maya.

The language, Ch’orti - spoken today by just a few thousand Guatemalan Indians - will become a living "Rosetta Stone", a key to unravelling those aspects of Maya hieroglyphic writings which have so far not been properly understood. Over the next few years dozens of linguists and anthropologists are expected to start "mining" Ch’orti language and culture for words and expressions relating to everything from blood-letting to fasting. [continue]

Related:

Cosmological and Ritual Language in Ch’orti’ - famsi.org
Maya Language - Wikipedia
There's a story in Ch’orti’ at the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America website; you can download a sound file of the story, or a .pdf document. You'll first need to create a user account, though. It's free.

From nature.com: Language tree rooted in Turkey.

A family tree of Indo-European languages suggests they began to spread and split about 9,000 years ago. The finding hints that farmers in what is now Turkey drove the language boom - and not later Siberian horsemen, as some linguists reckon.

Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand use the rate at which words change to gauge the age of the tree's roots - just as biologists estimate a species' age from the rate of gene mutations. The differences between words, or DNA sequences, are a measure of how closely languages, or species, are related.

Gray and Atkinson analysed 87 languages from Irish to Afghan. Rather than compare entire dictionaries, they used a list of 200 words that are found in all cultures, such as ‘I’, ‘hunt’ and ‘sky’. Words are better understood than grammar as a guide to language history; the same sentence structure can arise independently in different tongues.

The resulting tree matches many existing ideas about language development. Spanish and Portuguese come out as sisters, for example - both are cousins to German, and Hindi is a more distant relation to all three.

All other Indo-European languages split off from Hittite, the oldest recorded member of the group, between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago, the pair calculates. [continue]

Near-Extinct ‘Whistling Language’ Returns. From an Associated Press article at Yahoo [UPDATE: sorry, article no longer available]:

SAN SEBASTIAN, Canary Islands - Juan Cabello takes pride in not using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up and whistles.

Cabello is a "silbador," until recently a dying breed on tiny, mountainous La Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off West Africa. Like his father and grandfather before him, Cabello, 50, knows "Silbo Gomero," a language that's whistled, not spoken, and can be heard more than two miles away.

This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age 14.

Silbo — the word comes from Spanish verb silbar, meaning to whistle — features four "vowels" and four "consonants" that can be strung together to form more than 4,000 words. It sounds just like bird conversation and Cabello says it has plenty of uses. [continue]

Thanks to Amity Wilczek for pointing out this article.

Related:
Whistled Speech - Wikipedia
Agulo la Gomera - silbo - agulo.net. (In Spanish)

Updates:
Canary island whistles again - BBC, November 28th, 2003.
Whistling children save ancient language - Mirabilis.ca, January, 2005

You should study Old Norse because it is your best source of information in understanding how early Germanic people thought, what their world was like, and what was important to them, and it is your best source for understanding the early history of all Germanic languages, including German, English, and the Scandinavian languages. (...)

Iceland, that fair sized island in the North Atlantic, was settled by Norwegians around the 900's. And one thing these new settlers did that no other Germanic people had done, is they wrote. Boy, did they ever write. they wrote down many of the stories, and historical accounts (Sagas), they wrote of the marvelous type of strict poetry that had arisen in Germanic culture, they wrote of the Gods and Goddesses and monsters that had so shaped their culture and view of the world. (Mind you, by this time they were Christians, so they didn't believe in these Gods.) They wrote in a certain blunt, yet powerful style that is tremendous and something really to be experienced and unlike any other type of writing, and they used many kennings, or metaphorical phrases for things (of which the most common English example is calling a camel 'the ship of the desert', there aren't a lot of kennings in English. They wrote all this marvelous stuff in Old Norse, and it survives until today, and you can read it for yourself.)

So why study Old Norse? To give yourself a thrilling window into a world long gone, the heritage of a people who have undergone so many changes. To Germanic peoples, Old Norse literature is a treasure, a gift from ancestors long gone, and learning Old Norse is a chance to see the world through the eyes of early Germanic people.

This is from GR Burgess's Old Norse Page, which has lots of interesting content and links.

From the Guardian: University project to teach seals how to talk.

St Andrew's University has acquired its very own Dr Dolittle, with the arrival of a Harvard academic on a mission to teach seals to talk.

Tecumseh Fitch, a specialist in language evolution, plans to recruit undergraduates to "hang out" with young seals in the hope that the seals will pick up human speech patterns.

The experiment may have echoes of Hugh Lofting's creation, but it is inspired by the bizarre but entirely genuine example of a talking seal called Hoover, who entertained visitors at an aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts, with entire phrases delivered in gravelly male tones.

"He said things like ‘hey Hoover, get out of there’, and ‘move over Hoover’," said Dr Fitch. "Not only did he do this, he said it with a Maine fisherman's accent."

On this side of the Atlantic, Dr Fitch and his colleague Vincent Janik will research seals' rare ability - shared with humans and birds - to imitate sounds. [continue]

Related:
Hoover, the talking seal - from the New England Aquarium

From ambigram.com:

Ambigram n., - a word or words that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, such as both right side up and upside down. (from Latin: ambi=both + gram=letter)

Ambigram.com has some good stuff - check out the reversible matchbook art, the Q and A, and the many ambilinks.

While you're clicking away, do pop over to see the lovely ambigrams at John Langdon's site, Wordplay. Amazing.

Link found at Typographica.

Sleep Boosts Ability To Learn Language, University Of Chicago Researchers Find. From ScienceDaily.com:

Scientists at the University of Chicago have demonstrated that sleeping has an important and previously unrecognized impact on improving people's ability to learn language.

Researchers find that ability of students to retain knowledge about words is improved by sleep, even when the students seemed to forget some of what they learned during the day before the next night's sleep. This paper, "Consolidation During Sleep of Perceptual Learning of Spoken Language," is being published in the Thursday, Oct. 9 issue of the journal Nature. The paper was prepared by researcher Kimberly Fenn, Howard Nusbaum, Professor of Psychology, and Daniel Margoliash, Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy.

"Sleep has at least two separate effects on learning," the authors write. "Sleep consolidates memories, protecting them against subsequent interference or decay. Sleep also appears to ‘recover’ or restore memories."

Scientists have long hypothesized that sleep has an impact on learning, but the new study is the first to provide scientific evidence that brain activity promotes higher-level types of learning while we sleep.

Although the study dealt specifically with word learning, the findings may be relevant to other learning, Nusbaum said. "We have known that people learn better if they learn smaller bits of information over a period of days rather than all at once. This research could show how sleep helps us retain what we learn."

In fact, the idea for the study arose from discussions Nusbaum and Fenn had with Margoliash, who studies vocal (song) learning in birds. "We were surprised several years ago to discover that birds apparently ‘dream of singing’ and this might be important for song learning," Margoliash said. [continue]

Maybe I should go back to bed.

From Japan Today: British, Japanese gesture differently due to language.

LONDON — It has long been assumed that although people may speak different languages, when it comes to describing the same event in gestures, the actions used are universally alike. New research by a Japanese academic using Japanese and English speakers, however, has severely questioned this long-held belief.

Sotaro Kita, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol's department of experimental psychology, shows that British and Japanese sometimes use different hand gestures when they are expressing the same event because of the differences in language.

Kita's findings have recently received a favorable response at the British Association's festival of science. He believes that the study of gesture can have positive spin-offs both in terms of business and education.

The academic thinks that future research on other languages will show the link between language and gesture. And Kita's discovery is reinforced with his own preliminary findings which show that competent bilingual speakers change their gestures according to the language they are using. [continue]

Starting with Aleph will teach you some Hebrew... and it'll be easy! You'll see the letters, learn their names, and hear how they sound. There are interactive excercises, and each of the four lessons features a multimedia midrash story. Very fun. Suitable for kids, and for language lovers of all ages. Turn up your speakers! (Requires Flash.)

From Pravda: Language Problem in Ukraine.

About 15 years ago, the Ukrainian speech could hardly be heard in Ukraine, both in the western and in the eastern part of it. Almost all street signs and billboards were written in Russian, the majority of schools were teaching children in Russian. The Russian language was used even in special Ukrainian schools. Almost all institutes and universities were teaching in Russian too.

A lot of changes have taken place since that time. The majority of Kiev residents still speak Russian, but all Kiev schools are teaching children in the Ukrainian language. There are only eight Russian schools in Kiev from the total number of 500. The Russian language is gradually disappearing from Ukrainian streets too. There is a fashion in Ukraine - to be a Ukrainian. The people who called themselves Russians just a short time ago are proud to be Ukrainians now. They grow the Cossack moustache and make a lot of mistakes trying to speak the Ukrainian language.

Russian language classes in Ukrainian schools have been changed to English classes. Ukrainian children learn just the very basis of Russian, but they study English from the first grade. Apparently, someone does not like that Ukraine has been too much rusified, so that person decided to change Russian classes to English to "englify" Ukraine. [continue]

From Ananova: Language influences the way you think.

Speakers of different languages not only describe the world differently but think about it differently too, according to a new study.

Researchers used a cartoon featuring black and white cat Sylvester to study how language was reflected in the gestures people made.

Dr Sotaro Kita of the University of Bristol's Department of Experimental Psychology, showed the cartoon to a group of native English, Japanese and Turkish speakers and then watched their gestures as they described the action they had seen.

He found speakers of the three different languages used different gestures to depict the same event, which appeared to reflect the way the structure of their languages expressed that event.

For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc trajectory and the Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc.

Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb ‘to swing’. [continue]

Related:
Cartoon cat in science study - BBC

From GreeceNow: Harry Potter to be published in ancient Greek.

The publishers of the best-selling Harry Potter children's books have announced plans to release an ancient Greek translation of the series.

With global interest in J K Rowling's schoolboy wizard peaked by the success of its film tie-in, publishers Bloomberg believe the stories could make learning the ancient language more fun. [continue]

Bless their hearts.

Related content:
Harrius Potter
Medieval Christian symbols in Harry Potter
Gloucester Cathedral's medieval window

From an Ananova article:

Linguistics experts in Germany fear the country is being invaded by a hybrid language full of English words.

Experts from the Association of the German Language and the Goethe Institute warn the German language could even die out.

They said German words were continually being replaced by Anglicisms, and in most parts of the country pure German was no longer spoken.

They said "Denglish", a mix of German and English, was now the language most commonly being used.

Erika Steinbach from the Goethe Institute in Berlin said: "Consumer protection has to be extended in order to tackle this problem.

"Every product, from train tickets to fabric softener, has to have their name and instructions in readable German."

Authorities have now been banned from using Denglish in official business and Jutta Limbach, former President of the Federal Constitutional Court, has even founded her own German Language Council.

This is lovely: Bob the Angry Flower's Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots. I'm going to print 17 copies and post them on walls where they are most needed. You may also like Bob's Quick Guide to Its and It's, You Idiots. Both are from Angryflower.com. Link found at Polyglut.

Related:
Apostrophe poster. Full colour.

From the Washington Post: Scholars Perform Autopsy on Ancient Writing Systems.

When a system of writing begins to die, people probably don't even notice at first. Maybe the culture that spawned it loses its vitality, and the script decays along with it. Maybe the scribes or priests decide that most ordinary people aren't able to learn it, so they don't teach it.

Or a new, simpler system may show up -- an alphabet, perhaps -- that can be easily learned by aggressive upstarts who don't speak the old language and don't care to learn its fancy pictographic forms.

Or perhaps invaders take over. They decide the old language is an inconvenience, the old culture is mumbo jumbo and the script that serves it is subversive. The scribes are shunned, discredited and, if they persist, obliterated.

In the first study of its kind, three experts in the study of written language have described the common characteristics that caused three famous scripts -- ancient Egyptian, Middle Eastern cuneiform and pre-Columbian Mayan -- to disappear. [continue]

Mind your tongue, from News24.com.

"Vel ny partanyn snaue, Joe?," says the ghostly voice from the archives.

"'Cha nel monney, cha nel monney,' dooyrt Joe. 'T'ad feer ghoan'."

The voice belonged to Ned Maddrell, the very last native speaker of Manx, the Celtic language once spoken on the Isle of Man - the small island located between Britain and Ireland.

Maddrell died in 1974, leaving behind recordings of his fishing anecdotes and daily chat (translation of this snippet: "Are the crabs crawling, Joe? 'Not much, not much,' said Joe. 'They're very scarce'.").

Casual, almost banal as they seemed at the time, Mandrell's utterances are now precious beyond price.

Carefully stored and pored over by phonetics experts, his words are the linguistic equivalent of a gene bank for dead species.

More than 300 languages have already become extinct, and "thousands" more are hurtling down the same road, say Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz of New York's Cornell University. [continue] (News24 requires annoying registration.)

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (Scotland's Gaelic college) has a two Manx language samples on their website, in written and .wav format. One is the text quoted above, and the other is the story of the pig and the parson.

The Oxford English Dictionary's new edition is coming out this week. From an AP article at the Toronto Star, here's a bit about the new words included.

Are you feeling like a muppet because you cannot remember the meaning of a word? Or are you a bit Eeyorish and confused at our rapidly changing language?

Those are among 3,000 new words and expressions, many of them slang or foreign, that have entered English usage and are included in the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, which is being released Thursday.

Muppet, taken from the children's TV show, Sesame Street, means a foolish person, while Eeyorish refers to the character in Winnie the Pooh known for his gloomy outlook on life.

Unsurprisingly, many new entries come from the world of science and high-technology, particularly genetics and the Internet. Thus blog (short for Web log), and egosurfing (searching the Internet for references to oneself) are joined in the dictionary by more unusual phrases such as shotgun cloning (the insertion of random fragments of DNA).

New words included in the dictionary often reflect trends and the changing cultural makeup of the United Kingdom.

Britain's multiethnic population has had a great influence on the new edition, with many words included from Chinese, Yiddish and Indian languages. Chacha is a Hindi word for uncle, doudou is a West Indian term of endearment, sic bo is a Chinese game of dice, and bashert is a Yiddish word for fate. [continue]

This has got to be the best edition of Harry Potter: Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis. Cool!

Spotted at PeteBevin.com.

Previous Mirabilis.ca entry on Harry Potter:
Medieval Christian symbols in Harry Potter

From the Compendium of Lost Words.

The Compendium lists over 400 of the rarest modern English words - in fact, ones that have been entirely absent from the Internet, including all online dictionaries, until now.

Just the place to find words like famelicose, phlyarologist, speustic, and sceptriferous. (Isn't that last one the best?)

Link found at Metafilter.

From IranMania.com: Iranian judges forced to take calligraphy lessons.

Iranian judges are being forced to take calligraphy lessons to make their verdicts more readable, the head of Iran's supreme calligraphy council, Hasan Gholampour told the Entekhab daily on Sunday.

"On the order of the chief of the judiciary (Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahrudi), all judges and other officials with important posts in the judiciary will have to take Nastaliq lessons," he said, referring to Iran's official style of calligraphy.

Despite computerisation, Iranian judges still handwrite their verdicts which are often illegible.

Modern-day Persian script is based on the Arabic alphabet, with extra markings added to Arabic letters to represent sounds which only exist in Persian. [continue]

A Shanghai Museum has bought the Chunhuage Tie!

BEIJING (AP) — A museum in Shanghai has paid a record $4.5 million to buy a 1,000-year-old set of Chinese calligraphy books from an American art dealer, officials said Monday.

The "Chunhuage Tie" includes the only known works by several master calligraphers, said Zhou Yanqun, head of the Shanghai Museum's cultural exchange office. She identified the seller as Robert Hatfield Ellsworth of New York City.

"It's one of the most valuable national relics," Zhou said.

The price is the highest ever paid by a Chinese institution for calligraphy, said an official of the China National Relics Bureau in Beijing. She refused to give her name.

The purchase comes amid Chinese efforts to recover art treasures from abroad. Several institutions have made multimillion-dollar purchases recently, taking advantage of a fall in prices due to the global economic slump.

Chinese regard the writing of their language's ideograms as an art form on a level with painting.

The "Chunhuage Tie" was assembled in the 10th century during the Song dynasty, Zhou said. The state newspaper China Daily said it was created for the Emperor Taizong, gathering together the work of 100 calligraphers from antiquity through the 9th century.

Their works were copied onto wooden blocks and then printed on paper, Zhou said. She said those represented included Wang Xizhi, who lived in the 4th century and is regarded as one of China's most important calligraphers. [continue]

Related links:
Shanghai buys back lost calligraphic work - Bangkok Post
Chinese Calligraphy - Inscriptions and Handwriting - ChinaKnowledge.de

From an Associated Press article at the Toronto Star: E-glove turns sign language into speech.

An electronic glove that can turn American Sign Language gestures into spoken words or text, designed to help the deaf communicate more easily with the hearing world, is under development.

Researcher Jose Hernandez-Rebollar of George Washington University has demonstrated that his "AcceleGlove" can translate the rapid hand movements used to make the alphabet and some of the words and phrases of sign language. (...)

Hernandez-Rebollar demonstrated his invention during a recent interview. He wore a right-hand glove and two small armbands, one near his wrist and the other on his upper arm.

His software converted the signs he made with his hand into sound from a small loudspeaker — all in milliseconds. After a few taps on a laptop keyboard, he made standard American Sign Language gestures and the loudspeaker came out with single words — "food," "drink," "restaurant," "father." The words can also appear typed on a screen.

The single glove can make the signs that correspond to all 26 letters of the alphabet, so any word can be spelled out. But this is a slow process.

American Sign Language also includes hundreds of gestures that express single words and simple sentences, but most require two hands. So far the single glove can produce fewer than 200 words that can be signed with the one hand, and a few expressions such as "What's the matter?" and "I'll help you."

Some further testing is needed, Hernandez-Rebollar said. He believes the right hand glove could be manufactured and on the market next year, while a two-handed version with much greater possibilities could be ready in 2005. [full article]

Related links:
The Sound of One-Hand Signing - from George Washington University
photo of the Acceleglove (scroll down a bit) - from George Washington University
Acceleglove: Turning sign into much more from nbo4.com
Sign Language Glove - from komotv.com
Giving a Helping Hand - from techtv.com
A High-Tech Helping Hand: Prototype Glove Translates Sign Langauge Into Speech - from abcnews.go.com

Oooh! Look what I found over at Alan Phipps' blog, Ad Altare Dei:

Check out the Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum, a collaborative effort to assemble a digital library containing the entire corpus of Latin Literature.

The Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum (CSL) is a collaborative project among scholars from a variety of disciplines with the main purpose of creating a digital library of the entire body of Latin literature, spanning from the earliest epigraphic remains to the Neo-Latinists of the eighteenth century. As a first step toward this end, we maintain an up-to-date catalogue of all Latin texts that are currently available online, making CSL a single, centralized resource for locating Latin literature on the internet. If you can't find a text or translation through this site, odds are that it does not yet exist online.

It's part of Forum Romanum, one of my favorite Internet resources.

Completely fascinating. Thanks, Alan!

From a Reuters article at the Toronto Star: A two-lobe language.

LONDON — Mandarin speakers use more areas of their brains than people who speak English, scientists say in a finding that provides insight into how the brain processes language.

Scientists at the Wellcome Trust research charity in Britain discovered that both the left and right temporal lobes are used to interpret variations in sounds in Mandarin, a language in which intonation conveys meaning. "Ma," for example, can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp, depending on the tone.

English speakers use just the left lobe. The right lobe is normally used to process melody in music and speech.

"We were very surprised to discover that people who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways; it overturned some long-held theories," said Sophie Scott, a psychologist at the charity. [continue] [Update: article no longer available.]

From an abc.net.au article:

A new method of analysing language supports the idea that farmers carried Celtic to the British Isles, Ireland and France in a single wave 6,000 years ago, researchers report.

This runs counter to existing linguistic theories that Celtic, one of the Indo-European languages, arrived in two separate events.

Dr Peter Forster, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge in Britain used techniques usually reserved for DNA analysis for his study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It is a major debate among geneticists whether Europeans are descended mainly from Indo-European speakers, who came in possibly with farming, or whether most of our genes have been here much longer - with the early hunter-gatherers who arrived 30,000 to 40,000 years ago," Forster said.

Experts have dated the migration of peoples, and even the origin of humans, using a technique called mutational analysis. The idea is there is a 'genetic clock': that random mutations in DNA average out to a steady rate over thousands and millions of years. The technique has dated human origins to a theoretical single African female living 180,000 years ago.

Forster applied this technique to language - specifically to the Celtic languages, spoken widely before the Roman empire imposed Latin 2,000 years ago. Celtic languages survive in parts of Ireland, Britain, France and Wales. [continue]

related link:
Celtic Found to Have Ancient Roots - New York Times (requires free registration)

Here's an addition for your "to visit while in Paris" list: Café Signes, where your waiter will likely be deaf, and you're encouraged to place your order in French Sign Language. From the BBC: Thumbs up for sign-language café.

Walking past the Café Signes on a leafy avenue on the Left Bank, there is little to suggest it is any different to other cafés in Paris. Until you take a closer look, that is.

The customers seem to be gesticulating a little more than usual - even taking into account the expressiveness of Gallic hand gestures.

And the waiters and waitresses are gesticulating back. Yet they are not arguing, and in fact, the café is really rather quiet compared with the usual noise levels of a busy Paris bistro at lunchtime.

Once you sit down, and are handed a menu, all is explained. This is France's first bistro where the deaf and the hearing can interact on an equal basis.

Most of the 45 staff are deaf, as are some of the customers, though by no means all.

Those who come here unable to read or understand sign language are given a quick tutorial: the menu contains pictures of all the main signs needed to communicate an order.

The menu also lists the whole of the French signing alphabet, a one-handed alphabet unlike Britain's two-handed sign alphabet.

Anyone still unable to order can always point or write it down, but most customers seem to enjoy the challenge, and the waiting staff are happy to teach anyone who wants to learn. [continue]

About Sign Languages:
French Sign Language -summary info from Ethnologue
American Sign language -summary info from Ethnologue.
(We use American Sign Language here in English-speaking parts of Canada, by the way.)

When it's necessary to spell a word in Sign Language, the French use the one-handed manual alphabet, which is also used in Canada and the US. However, French Sign Language and American Sign Language signs for words and concepts are often very different. Here's a bit about that.

More about the café:
Hushed reception for the Café des Signes - Guardian article
Café Signes home page (in French)
How to get there - Métro and bus info (in French)
Map, showing café location

Another one from the Telegraph: Anglo Saxon brooch has oldest writing in English.

What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes representing the letters N, E, I and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The six inch cruciform brooch is among one million artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. Dominic Powlesland, the archaeologist leading the excavation team, said: "This could well be the earliest example of written English we know of.

"Only one or two other runic inscriptions from around this period have been found, but this is either the earliest or one of them. We have no idea what the letters mean, except that it would have been something in early English.

"Whether it is a charm of some form, a person's initials or the first letters of a phrase is something only future research will be able to determine. It was obviously something treasured by its owner as it had been carefully repaired."

The site alongside the cemetery is the first Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain to be forensically excavated using modern techniques. [continue]

The Associated Press reports that the Vatican has released a modern Latin dictionary.

VATICAN CITY - Latin may be considered by some a dead language, but a dictionary of modern Latin published by the Vatican has become a "liber venditissimus" -- a best-seller.

It is a project to keep the language updated, even if they didn't have dishwashers, discos and miniature golf in Roman times.

The Vatican's publishing house has just come out with a combined edition of the Latin-Italian dictionary after two earlier volumes, one covering the letters A-L and the second M-Z, sold out. Five hundred copies have been printed with a sale price of about $115.

"There's still life out there," said the Rev. Claudio Rossini, director of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

The two volumes contain some 15,000 modernized Latin words, many of them compounds of existing Latin words.

And a committee is now working on a new volume, adding mainly words from the computer and information fields. Publication is expected in two or three years.

Behind the project is the Vatican's Latin Foundation, which was set up by Pope Paul VI in the 1970s to help keep Latin alive in the Roman Catholic Church as its use began seriously to wane after the Vatican decreed that Mass could be celebrated in local languages. [continue]

Related links:
Vatican breathes new life into Latin - BBC
Vatican Volume Updates Latin - Zenit

Polyglots and language lovers are likely to enjoy Essentialist Explanations, which "comprises a list of 523 ‘essentialist explanations’ of the form ‘Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z’."

From BBC News, 10 things we didn't know this time last week:

When Elizabeth I wrote to her suitors, she used a secret love code of Old French sprinkled with Greek and Roman letters. That code has been broken by a retired crossword compiler and a cryptographer from British intelligence, who worked out that each Roman, Greek and nonsense letter has an equivalent in the conventional alphabet, for instance pi equals e.

Anybody have more details about this?

Related link:
National Maritime Museum - Elizabeth exhibition

Related book:
Elizabeth I: The Exhibition Catalogue

I've been meanining to say something about the etymology of cappuccino ever since I read this in Under the Tuscan Sun: "One of the Capuchin friars who lives there now trudges uphill barefoot toward town. He's wearing his scratchy brown robe and strange pointed white hat (hence cappuccino)..." Capuchin, cappuccino — did you ever connect those words? I didn't, but now that I have the drink seems even nicer.

Anyway, today's news: Pope moves cappuccino friar along sainthood path.

Pope John Paul has beatified a 17th-century friar credited with halting a Muslim invasion of Europe and in the process discovering the frothy coffee-drink cappuccino.

More than 300 years after his death, Marco d'Aviano cleared the last step before sainthood, as the pope recognised the friar's miraculous work including curing a nun who had been bedridden for 13 years.

History books also show that with a vast Ottoman Turk army beating a path to Vienna in 1683, d'Aviano was sent by the then-pope to unite the outnumbered Christian troops, spurring them to victory.

As the Turks fled, legend has it they left behind sacks of coffee, which the Christians found too bitter, so they sweetened it with honey and milk.

The drink, now supped by millions around the world, was called cappuccino after the Capuchin order of monks to which d'Aviano belonged.

Under a cloudy sky in St Peter's Square on Sunday, the pope paid tribute to d'Aviano and five other Italians whom he also beatified.

"They show us the path to follow, always confident in God's help," the pope told thousands of gathered faithful.

Related links:
Pope beatifies 'father of cappuccino' - BBC
Pope Beatifies 6 People, Including 4 Nuns - Times Daily
A politically incorrect monk - sspx.ca
History of coffee - telusplanet.net
What is espresso and cappuccino? - europa-co.com
Capuchin Friar FAQ - BeAFriar.com
Etymology and history of cappuccino - bartleby.com

Update:
Rumors brewing: Beatified monk really did not invent cappuccino - Catholic News Service, May 2nd, 2003.

Happy Easter! From the Paschal Greeting page at monachos.net:

During the season of Pascha (through to the feast of the Leavetaking of Pascha, the day before the Ascension), it is traditional to greet the faithful with a joyful 'Christ is Risen!', to which the other party responds, 'Indeed, He is risen!' Below are transliterations of this Paschal greeting into 58 languages.

China Unearthed Shang Oracle Bones Again, 104 Years Later of First Discovery. From the People's Daily:

China recently unearthed again oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th-11th century B.C.) in Daxinzhuang Shang ruins, more than 100 years later of the nation's first discovery of inscribed animal bones and tortoise shells in Anyang City of central China's Henan Province.

This time's excavation area is located at the south-east of Daxinzhuang ruins, and 30 "tanfang" (artificial pits in dimension of 10*10 meter or 5*5 meter, as a method in archaeological works) were excavated, said professor Fang Hui of archaeological department of Shandong University at a news briefing on April 8, who is charge of the excavation work.

The inscribed bones found this time are from four "tanfang" of Shang culture layers. Eight pieces carrying Chinese characters have been sorted out, four of them could be pieced together into a whole page, including 25 characters. They have been confirmed, through the shape of bones, character and grammar, to belong to the same group of inscriptions unearthed in Anyang City a century ago. [continue]

From travelchina.com, here's some background information about oracle bones and the script used to write on them:

Oracle Script is an ancient script carved on tortoise shells or animal bones. Having emerged during the Shang Dynasty (BC 1600-1000), Oracle Script is considered the oldest script in China.

During the Shang Dynasty, the ancients reckoned the natural elements as the exertion of some mystical power. When there were floods, drought, lightening and thunder, or some big events, like royal hunts, journeys and military campaigns, through divination, ancients would predict the future by "reading" the messages of nature. The divination performer first drilled holes on tortoise shell or a piece of bull scapula, then put it over fire. Since the shell or bone would crack irregularly under heat, the diviner could supposedly interpret these cracks as good or bad omen. All the dates and results of the divination were written down on the shells or animal bones, which became the earliest historical document with writing symbols. [continue]

Related links:
Ancient China's Shang Dynasty's oracle bones found in Shandong Province
Shang Dynasty Oracle Bones
Oracle bones
Photo of an oracle bone
Oracle bone with photo and translation
Oracle bone script

Because you just know you need it:

1:1 In-ay e-thay eginning-bay Od-gay eated-cray e-thay eaven-hay and-ay e-thay earth-ay.1:2 And-ay e-thay earth-ay as-way ithout-way orm-fay, and-ay oid-vay; and-ay arkness-day as-way upon-ay e-thay ace-fay of-ay e-thay eep-day. And-ay e-thay Irit-spay of-ay Od-gay oved-may upon-ay e-thay ace-fay of-ay e-thay aters-way.1:3 And-ay Od-gay aid-say, Et-lay ere-thay e-bay ight-lay: and-ay ere-thay as-way ight-lay.1:4 And-ay Od-gay aw-say e-thay ight-lay, at-thay it-ay as-way ood-gay: and-ay Od-gay ivided-day e-thay ight-lay om-fray e-thay arkness-day.1:5 And-ay Od-gay alled-cay e-thay ight-lay Ay-day, and-ay e-thay arkness-day e-hay alled-cay Ight-nay. And-ay e-thay evening-ay and-ay e-thay orning-may ere-way e-thay irst-fay ay-day. [continue]

From thestate.com: Language of Christ survived two millennia, on cusp of extinction.

In this quaint stone village perched high in the mountains above Damascus, the language of Christ has somehow, miraculously, endured through the millennia.

Aramaic, which was dominant in the region when Jesus was alive, died out elsewhere many centuries ago. But in remote Maalula, time and geography have conspired to keep it alive, and today this village is the last place on Earth in which the language spoken by Jesus is still the native tongue. (...)

That Aramaic, which was introduced from the Persian Gulf in the 9th Century B.C., has survived at all is remarkable. Countless foreign invaders, including Greeks, Romans, Turks and Arabs, have swept across the region, each seeking to impose their own language and culture.

Historians attribute the survival of Aramaic in this farming community, clinging to steep mountains 5,000 feet above sea level, to the village's isolation and harsh climate. Blanketed by snow in winter, residents were traditionally cut off from the outside world for half of every year, leaving them to chatter away in the language passed down by their ancestors. [continue]

From the Guardian: Sign language wins recognition in the UK.

Deaf people yesterday won formal government recognition of British sign language as a language in its own right, requiring education authorities to provide better opportunities for deaf children to learn communication skills.

Andrew Smith, the work and pensions secretary, promised more resources for training teachers and interpreters in the language. Charities representing deaf people said the door was now open to establish the language as a subject for GCSEs, A-levels, and university degrees.

Sign language is the preferred method of communication for 70,000 people in Britain, making it second to Welsh as a minority language, but until yesterday it lacked legal status. [continue]

From the New York Times: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients.

Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say language changes far too fast for that to be possible. But a new genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue.

They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive, spoken by peoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, who include hunters and herders.

Each language has a set of four or five click sounds, which are essentially double consonants made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth. Outside of Africa, the only language known to use clicks is Damin, an extinct aboriginal language in Australia that was taught only to men for initiation rites. [continue] (NYT requires free registration.)

Related:
Click consonant
Ancient Roots for an African language?

Update:
Clicking linked to birth of language - New Zealand Standard, April 23rd, 2003.

From the Finnish Broadcasting Company: Foetuses Begin Learning Language in the Womb.

Scientists in Finland have demonstrated that the hearing of a foetus is far more developed than was previously believed, and actually begins learning its native language before it is born.

Neurologists at the University of Helsinki recorded the first-ever empirical data of the audio memory of an unborn baby. They proved that a foetus not only can tell the difference between spoken sounds, but begins memorising them.

The research reveals that an unborn child begins to hear language much earlier than was previously thought. For example, during the last weeks of pregnancy they can hear the difference between the vowels a and i, which are nearly identical acoustically. This means that in the last three months of pregnancy, a foetus learns to listen to its native language and lays the groundwork for more complicated language learning. [continue]

If you've ever studied German (and maybe even if you haven't), you're likely to find Mark Twain's The Awful German Language to be hilarious.

I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German. I spoke entirely in that language. He was greatly interested; and after I had talked a while he said my German was very rare, possibly a "unique"; and wanted to add it to his museum.

If he had known what it had cost me to acquire my art, he would also have known that it would break any collector to buy it. Harris and I had been hard at work on our German during several weeks at that time, and although we had made good progress, it had been accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance, for three of our teachers had died in the mean time. A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.

Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird -- (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question -- according to the book -- is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or possibly neuter -- it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well -- then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion -- Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something -- that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, -- it is falling -- to interfere with the bird, likely -- and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."

N. B. -- I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was an "exception" which permits one to say "wegen den Regen" in certain peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not extended to anything but rain. [continue]

From the Spectator: Sin for your supper.

Before his death last year in a helicopter accident, France’s best-known baker, Lionel Poîlane, drafted a letter to the Pope in which he asked for a change to the French translation of the catechism. He wrote that the capital sin of gluttony was mistranslated. The catechism called it gourmandise, which Poîlane said meant an appreciation of good food and meals with friends — hardly sins. A more correct word would be gloutonnerie, the English gluttony, or goinfrerie, piggishness.

This being France and the subject being food, however, the matter did not stop there. A committee, De la Question Gourmande, has now been set up in Poîlane’s memory, whose sole task is to extract an admission from the Vatican that enjoying food is no sin in itself. Its headquarters is at number 56 rue Brillat-Savarin, named after France’s greatest food writer. Its patrons include chefs, intellectuals and the simply very rich, who want in on the malarkey.

In his letter, Poîlane wrote that the French gourmand has been traduced in the catechism. The true gourmand does not eat for eating’s sake. Rather, he values quality over quantity. He knows when to stop, and more often than not he regards the communal activity of eating with friends as an essential part of his gourmandise.

Other languages, Poîlane argued, have more specific translations. English has gluttony, though Poîlane cannot resist a passing dig at British cooking — ‘gourmandise is not translatable into English’. Italian has gola, Spanish gula and German lüsternheit, which translates as eating like an animal that does not know when to stop. All these terms refer to people who stuff their faces to no purpose. The gourmand, on the other hand, is engaged in a noble pursuit, the proper appreciation of God’s gifts. [continue]

(Note: I think the Spectator meant to put the circumflex accent in Poilâne above the a, where it belongs, not above the i. Oops.)

Related links:
Lionel Poilâne, 1945-2002
poilane.fr
A taste for sin?
Give Us This Day Our Global Bread
The meaty issue of gourmet v. gourmand
Poilâne bread direct from Paris

From Sunspot.net, Digging up a modern way of tracking ancient text. (Update: page no longer available)

Imagine the difficulties of studying cuneiform. First, you have to learn to read the ancient Middle Eastern language, a feat that only a few hundred people worldwide have mastered.

Once you've learned to decipher cuneiform, which takes at least three or four years, tracking down reading material can be just as hard. The clay tablets are often discovered in pieces.

"One fragment could go to a museum in Britain, the other could be in Philadelphia and maybe the third is in Britain. You can spend a third of your time just doing footwork to try and track everything down," said Piotr Michalowski, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages at the University of Michigan.

But a team of professors and scientists is working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County and on the Homewood campus in Baltimore to change that by creating an Internet library of scanned cuneiform tablets. (...)

"It's a very noble goal. We have to be able to see different shadings to identify poorly preserved cuneiform," said Robert Englund, a professor of Assyriology at UCLA and the director of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, which is cataloging tablets in two-dimensions.

But because cuneiform tablets generally have writing on all six surfaces, bringing the ancient writing into the 21st century won't be easy. [continue]

Related link:
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

"You won't believe the words that didn't exist until the first English translations of the Bible." From an interview with Stanley Malless, author of Coined by God:

According to Coined By God: Words and Phrases That First Appear in English Translations of the Bible (published this month by W.W. Norton), puberty, appetite, and excellent are among more than 100 English words, phrases, rhythms, and idioms coined in Bible translations.

Authors Stanley Malless and Jeffrey McQuain researched the Wycliffe (1382), Tyndale (1526), Coverdale (1535), Geneva (1560), and King James (1611) translations for words or phrases that had no previous record in the English language. The terms they found—or didn't find—might surprise you. The book includes 131 brief entries that trace the items' origins and how they are now used. [continue]

From the CBC, Montreal English called a 'linguistic laboratory'.

Charles Boberg, who teaches linguistics at McGill University, has just finished a study on English spoken in various parts of Canada. Many of the regional differences are unsurprising to those who travel from sea to sea. On the Prairies, for instance, "chesterfield" is more common than "couch" or "sofa." In the East, "see- saw" rides above "teeter-totter."

Some people prefer "sneakers" to "running shoes," others "soda" to "pop." But it's in Montreal – where many people use "soft drink", perhaps because it is a literal translation of the the French "liqueur douce" – that some Canadian language scholars are really bubbling with enthusiasm over the nature of English. "It's so special because it's the only major city in North America where English is a minority language," says Boberg. A Montrealer, for instance, might say she's looking for "a three-and-a-half close to a dépanneur" instead of a "one bedroom apartment near a corner store."

"You had the same sort of intimate contact between English and French in 11th century England as you do today in Montreal," according to Boberg. "And that was responsible in the 11th century for the conversion of English from a basically pure Germanic language to a kind of a hybrid language."

Mumbai on the web has an article about the popularity of text messaging amongst the local deaf population.

Those little ‘msgs’ that flash across your mobile probably don’t thrill you the way they once did. But for Mumbai’s deaf population, Short Messaging Service (SMS) has become the single-most efficient form of communication.

Meher Sethna-Dadabhoy, coordinator of the Indian Sign Language at the Ali Yawar Jung National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped, Bandra, says a mobile phone has become essential for hearing-impaired, working people. "Once they begin working, their priority is not food or entertainment, it’s getting a mobile phone," she says.

The popularity of the SMS is easily explained: text is short and understood even by those not used to the English language. It’s also quick, and since most mobiles can be set on vibrator mode, the deaf user is easily alerted to a message.

"Once they start working, there is the need to use a mobile for communication. If they cannot afford to buy one, many try to at least share a phone," Sethna-Dadabhoy says. [continue]

From the Moscow Times, A Push to Update and Save Latvian.

Latvia's translator-in- chief sits at his desk leafing through dog-eared French and English dictionaries trying to think of a Latvian word for "ombudsman."

As chief terminologist at Latvia's Translation and Terminology Center, Peteris Udris is working to pull the country's language out of its Soviet- era hibernation into the age of free markets, open borders and modern technology.

"For 50 years our language lived behind the Iron Curtain, away from English, and we had no need to translate words we would never use," he said.

Words like entrepreneur, franchise and bank overdraft.

. . .

So far he and the center's 57 other linguists and translators have come up with 51,000 new Latvian words.

Each term has to get approval from a government commission, and it takes an average of three years for people to begin using it regularly, said the center's director, Marta Jaksona.

The center periodically sends out lists of new words to newspapers, hoping journalists will lead the way in incorporating the words into the Latvian lexicon. Jaksona sees the center's role as the front line in the battle to save Latvian, which many here had feared would die out during the Soviet period. "We're not doing this just to enter the EU," she said. "It's very important to us that our language survives, and that will only happen if we help keep it modern, keep it alive." [continue]

I could spend quite a while looking at Ayesha's amazing animated Arabic alphabet. Rest your mouse on a letter to see what that shape is called, or click on a letter to watch as it's drawn for you. (Requires Flash.) Isn't that cool?

For related information, see the calligraphy section of Islamicart.com, particularly the pages about the six major styles of Arabic calligraphy.

The latest interesting news about the Opera web browser is that it's now available in the Sami language. (And 41 other languages too, of course.) From an Aftenposten article:

A Norwegian software company has released a version of its Internet browser in Sami, the language used by the indigenous population of northern Scandinavia and Russia, many of them traditional reindeer herders.

...

The Sami, once called the Lapps, are believed to have followed their herds of reindeer to Europe's northern fringe thousands of years ago and, like the Inuit of North America, are an indigenous people of the Arctic.

Related links:
Northern Sami Completed, Opera Released in 42 Languages
The Sami and Lapland

James Evans (1801-1846) was a very determined fellow. Often called the Apostle of the North, he was the missionary who invented a new orthography for native languages. When he wanted to do his own printing, James melted down scraps of lead to make his own metal type, then mixed fish oil and soot to make ink. Goodness! Syllabic writing systems are now used by Ojibwa, and Cree, and Inuktitut.

Here are some excerpts from a biography of James Evans at tiro.com:

In 1827, James Evans received the responsibility of the mission post at Rice Lake. After a year there were some 40 native students, half of whom could read English. Evans himself was becoming familiar with the local languages, and wrote in Ojibwa, and in 1830 was preaching sermons in the local Ojibwa language. By 1831, Evans had produced an original orthography and the beginnings of a writing system for the native languages to replace the only current representation for the language which was in the Latin script. As the Ojibwa were being taught both in English and in their own tongue, it was confusing for them to use the same script, especially as English.

Through his study of the language, Evans realized that the Ojibwa language could best be represented through just nine sounds, which are: a, ch, k, m, n, p, t, s, and y all of which can be combined with the basic vowels in four variations: ai, chi, ki, mi, ni, pi, ti, si, yi and so on for the vowels e, i, o, u. It was probably also around this time that Evans first considered a new syllabic writing system as being the ideal way to render the Algonkian languages.

and later:

Evan's educated himself in the customs and language of the Cree. Evans determined that the language had 36 principal sounds and a few affixes for which he adapted a syllabic writing system he originally devised for Ojibway, of nine basic shapes which when rotated on their axis could be used to represent each syllable.

The biography of James Evans page has lots more information, including some good photos.

Writing Inuktitut: Syllabics or Roman Orthography - from the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut
Learning Inuktitut - excellent resources from the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut
the Pigiarniq and Uqammaq syllabic fonts, available for download
James Evans -from Canadian Heritage at the Victoria University Library
The Apostle of the North, Rev. James Evans - from anglican.org

Today I was reminded about that Ancient Chinese map of Africa, and I wanted to see what written Manchu looks like. It's beautiful. Here's the Manchu alphabet and here's the Lord's prayer in Manchu.

Most Christmas songs are more fun in Latin, and that includes the modern ones. Here, try the Latin version of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer:

Reno erat Rudolphus,
Nasum rubrum habebat;
Si quando hunc videbas,
Hunc candere tu dicas.
[continue]

Or how about Deck the Halls? That one's easy.

Aquafolia ornatis
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Tempus hoc hilaritatis
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Vestes claras induamus;
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Cantilenas nunc promamus
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

These translations are from the Caroling in Latin site, where you'll also find Tinniat Tintinnabulum (Jingle Bells), Tranquilla Nox (Silent Night), XII Dies Natalis (The Twelve Days of Christmas), and more besides.

From the Globe and Mail: 'You just get on with it'.

One morning in the summer of 2001, novelist Howard Engel opened his front door, picked up the newspaper and realized he could no longer read. Either that, or The Globe and Mail had suddenly decided to print in a foreign language. "It was written in Serbo-Croatian, or something," he says, in a conversation in the living room of his late-Victorian semi in the Annex area of Toronto on a mild December afternoon.

The pictures and the layout of the paper looked familiar, but the print was confused. "I couldn't make out individual words," he remembers. "Even very familiar words, like my own name, were impossible for me to read." Fearing he had suffered a stroke, Engel, a widower, made his way to the emergency ward of the nearest hospital by taxi with the help of his son Jacob, who was 11 at the time. "I did the whole hospital routine and then the rehab routine and when they flushed me back out on to the street, I was walking, talking and able to do everything but read." [continue]

Fascinating article, that. Here's some information about alexia, the condition from which Engel suffers:
alexia - definition
information about alexia
alexia without agraphia

and here are Howard Engel's books at amazon.com.

From today's Globe and Mail: Pre-Mayan written language found in Mexico.

Scientists believe they have found evidence of the earliest form of written communication in the New World, a pre-Mayan language that could shed light on the ancient peoples who populated what is now Mexico.

Several years of research in the Mexican state of Veracruz has turned up a number of finds suggesting that a people known as the Olmecs operated an organized state-level political system that included the use of a 260-day calendar.

The finds include a cyclindrical seal and handful of carved stone plaques; the former is thought to have been used to imprint clothing with symbols and the latter used as a form of jewelry. Both of them would have indicated rank or authority within a hierarchical society. [continue]

The New Scientist also has a story about this discovery, Earliest New World writing revealed. They say:

The discovery of a fist-sized ceramic cylinder and fragments of engraved plaques has pushed back the earliest evidence of writing in the Americas by at least 350 years to 650 BC.

Rolling the cylinder printed symbols indicating allegiance to a king - a striking difference from the Old World, where the oldest known writing was used for keeping records by the first accountants.[continue]

Related article:
Roots of Mesoamerican Writing

From the Globe and Mail, Icelanders add a leaf to Viking mystery tale:

Here on this remote northern edge of Iceland, buried under a thousand years of volcanic ash and drifting soil, the second half of one of Canada's most ancient human mysteries finally is being dug up.

It is, they say, the home of Snorri Thorfinnson, famed in Viking lore as the first European born in the New World and a key family member in Eric the Red's legendary clan.

Thorfinnson's birthplace is thought to be in Newfoundland, at l'Anse aux Meadows. Discovered 40 years ago, it has been made a United Nations World Heritage Site and is considered one of the world's major archeological finds.

Besides being the only authenticated settlement of Norse Vikings in North America, l'Anse aux Meadows is the earliest mark of the sweeping role Europeans were fated to play on the North American stage.

But the question always has been: Where did Thorfinnson go from there?

The answer, it seems, is right here, to this farmer's field in Glaumbaer. At the moment, a few dozen of Iceland's shaggy sheep are grazing over what would have been Thorfinnson's sleeping quarters. [continue]

I've been snooping around the web for sites about the Occitan language. (Curiosity aroused by a book about Eleanor of Aquitaine; Langue d'Oc, the medieval version of Occitan, was probably her mother tongue.)

From the Easy Occitan website:

Our language is mainly spoken in France where it is not officialized in spite of a huge number of claims from its speakers. It is also spoken in Italy (las Valadas) and Spain (Val d'Aran), where it has an official status. The word Occitan, already in use more than 700 years ago, comes from "òc" (mainly pron. [ò]) which means "yes" in our language. Currently it is difficult to know its exact number of speakers but it's worth noting that Occitan was THE European language in the Middle Ages (remember the Trobadors). Nowadays, lots of people try to protect the original language of Occitània but the harm's already done: like other languages of the french State, Occitan is very endangered. I hope this modest page (my modest contribution to a Country I love) will bring its small brick to the wall of survival of la polida lenga nòstra. Never forget before learning our language that, despite what claims France to make a fool of us, Occitan is not a dialect or a patois of French; it is a true language with its own rules; a language written and sung much before French (French is nothing more than le patois du roi (the king's dialect) itself…)

I'm sure you'll sleep better now that you know that.

Here are some Occitan links:
Occitan language - Wikipedia
Occitan - encyclopedia.com article
Occitan Language
Occitan on the Internet
Institut d'Estudis Occitans de París

And here's a Mirabilis.ca blog entry about the Aquitaine sundial ring, which is how I came to be interested in Eleanor of Aquitaine (and hence, Occitan) in the first place.

From the Sunday Herald: Egypt's secrets are revealed ... in five seconds.

Cracking the ancient code of hieroglyphics was once considered one of the greatest feats of cryptology. But thanks to a group of academics from Scotland the secrets of the Pharaohs are set to be revealed in a matter of seconds.

In a bid to replace the time- consuming techniques currently available to translate the ancient scripts, computer experts at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen are developing a program that will allow tourists and archaeologists to understand the texts from inside the tomb itself.

A digital photo of a hieroglyph can be taken with a mobile phone, sent to a computer and translated into English in seconds. Previously Egyptologists have had to manually match each hieroglyph with a translation using word-processing materials. Because there are more than 4700 known glyphs -- including almost 800 basic ones, of which some 400 are considered common -- this has always been a lengthy and laborious task.

'We are taking one of the oldest languages in the world and turning it into the newest -- that of the computer,' said Dr Nik Whitehead, head of the research team.'Once it is in the computer you can translate it instantly, making it accessible to everyone. The potential for academics -- or whetting people's appetite for ancient Egypt -- is huge,' she added. [continue]

From the Rosetta Project website:

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. In this updated iteration, our goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages. Our intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic research and education as well as a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery or revitalization of lost languages in unknown futures.

Today Wired published an article about the Rosetta Project, Word Up: Keeping Languages Alive. An excerpt:

When Napoleon's troops discovered a granite slab in 1799 containing Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphic translations of ancient text dating back to 100 B.C., they unearthed more than 1,000 years of history.

Now, a group of scientists and engineers are crafting a modern Rosetta stone that will preserve more than 1,400 of the world's 7,000 languages on a 3-inch nickel disk.

Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, according to the The Rosetta Project, a collaborative, open-source endeavor by language specialists and native speakers around the world who are creating a "near permanent" archive of the world's languages.

Developers of the modern Rosetta disk hope they will help future generations recover lost languages that are now on the brink of extinction.

An ambitious and fascinating project. I suspect linguists have more fun than the rest of us.

Wendy Maxwell has developed an incredibly successful technique for teaching French. Today's National Post has a full page article about Wendy's method, which she calls Pared Down Language.

It sounds like a fun approach, as both students and teacher use a set of hand gestures along with spoken French. Then there's the pared down part: the program emphasises the verbs kids use most, and there isn't a lot of fuss about gramatical forms in the early parts of the program. A short blurb about Pared Down Language at the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence website says ‘... rather than introducing verbs from a grammatical viewpoint, they are presented via the "regularized stem" naturally used by native speakers of French when they are acquiring language as infants.’

Sensible, n'est-ce pas?

Watch out for the appearing mushroom. This is one of the proverbs and expressions listed at the Sicilian Culture website. The page gives the Italian version of the proverb, the English literal translation, and the idiomatic translation.

So, can you guess what that mushroom warning means?

The Lord's prayer page at sacaredtexts.com starts off with the Pater Noster, the Latin version of the prayer. Then it has five English versions. There's a modern version, a version found in a 13th century manuscript in the library of Caius College, and a couple of versions in between. (14th century, 15th century, and, 1538.)

OK, before you go look, see if you can guess which century this belongs to: "come thi kyngdom: fulfild be thi wil in heuene as in erthe."

What a happy find! Here's a Latin version of the weather page for Vancouver, which includes the forcast and current weather conditions. (Plerumque Nubila.) There's also a weather map of Canada; note the small world map off to the right of that if you want a forecast for somewhere else in the world.

Need some silly new words? The random word generator is here to help.

I gave the generator snollygoster to start with. In return, it gave me snollygosterialievelucting, snollygosterous, snollygostersurednest, snollygosterructimmidposa, and a whole bunch of other fine suggestions as well.

Try it with your name, or your blog's name, and see who you get to be.

Do you know what floccinaucinihilipilification means? How about pandiculation, and snollygoster?

These are some of the entries at funwords.com. The archive page lists all sorts of interesting words, ranging from accismus ("The pretended refusal of something that is actually desired very much") to zydeco ("Southern Louisiana dance music combining the blues, French dance tunes, and Carribean rhythms.") Definitions and etymology are included.

I think snollygoster has replaced schnoodle as my favourite funny-sounding word.

Québec's language law has been in the news for years, so we're all used to the nonsense that causes. But now Tourisme Québec wants a store owner to remove a sign which features only a large question mark. An Ottawa Citizen article quotes the store owner saying that the tourism official: ". . . told me the pictogram of a question mark is copyrighted, and if I wouldn't take it down, he would."

Isn't that just mind-boggling? There should be some sort of award for bureaucratic stupidity like this.

Those journal entries, those writing projects, whatever it is you write. Would it be easier to produce good writing if you were to impose a rule? Would imposing a specific sort of structure help you to become a better wordsmith? One way to find out might be to join the 100 Words project, in which participants write exactly 100 words each day, for a month. The website explains:

All daily entries must be 100 words in length. Not "approximately" or "almost"--but exactly 100 words. Proust noted that poets often create their finest work under the tyranny of rhyme. So it goes with 100 Words.

(Thanks to Peter for the link.)

How should the word blog be declined in Latin? And what would be a good Latin motto for the Universitas Blogariensis? Over at Caveat Lector, David Salo has written about these essential matters. David's Bloggatio Latina entry suggests "Bloggaturi te salutamis" (we who are about to blog salute you) as a motto. Perfect!

Norwegian has two official versions: Bokmål and Nynorsk, and it's not just to confuse the tourists. I noticed an article about this unusual language situation at the Odin website. Professor Eyvind Fjeld Halvorsen begins:

"...it is hard for foreigners to comprehend why Norwegians, who 150 years ago did not have a written language of their own and managed quite well with Danish, have, over the past 100 years, developed for good measure two Norwegian tongues. The purpose of this article is to attempt to explain this paradoxical situation."

And he explains it rather well, I thought. The article is Norway: Small country with two written languages.