sMAartblog

Wesołych Świąt… This is how you say  “it”  in Polish.

To check other languages visit: http://www.santas.net/howmerrychristmasissaid.htm

Islamic Ministry of Maldives has said that it will request the Fiqh Academy to take a ruling on the Dhivehi Translation of the Holy Quran.

Ahmed Shaheem Ali Saeed, Minister of State for Islamic Affairs said that the mistakes recently discovered were major ones because it has the potential to confuse the readers.

He also said that the checking copy by copy would be a gigantic task and that his official and personal position is to destroy all the copies.

Read more: http://www.miadhu.com.mv/2009/12/local-news/islamic-ministry-to-let-the-fiqh-academy-take-a-ruling-on-translation/

Of the world’s 6,500 living languages, around half are expected to die out by the end of this century, according to Unesco. Just 11 are spoken by more than half the earth’s population, so it is little wonder that those used by only a few are being left behind as we become a more homogenous, global society. In short, 95 per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by only five per cent of its population – a remarkable level of linguistic diversity stored in tiny pockets of speakers around the world.

In a small office room in the back of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology – a place in which you almost expect Harrison Ford to walk around the corner at any moment, fedora on head, whip in hand – Turin looks over the contents of a box that arrived earlier in the morning from India. “[The receptionists] are quite used to getting these boxes now,” says the 36-year-old anthropologist, who is based at the university. Inside the box, which is covered in dozens of rupee postage stamps, are DVDs representing hours of chants, songs, poems and literature from a tiny Indian community that is desperate for its language to have a voice and be included in Turin’s venture.

For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative works as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities – from the Kallawaya tribe in Bolivia and the Maka in Paraguay to the Siberian language of Chulym, to India’s Arunachal Pradesh state Aka group and the Australian Aboriginal Amurdag community – have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded. Until now. Turin launched the World Oral Literature Project earlier this year with an aim to document and make accessible endangered languages before they disappear without trace.

He is trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with anthropologists around the world to record what he calls “oral literature” through video cameras, voice recorders and other multimedia tools by awarding grants from a £30,000 pot that the project has secured this year. The idea is to collate this literature in a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the nuts and bolts of lost cultures readily available. As useful as this archive will be for Western academic study – the World Oral Literature Project is convening for its first international workshop in Cambridge this week – Turin believes it is of vital importance that the scheme also be used by the communities he and his researchers are working with.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-beckoning-silence-why-half-of-the-worlds-languages-are-in-serious-danger-of-dying-out-1837179.html

Delwin T. Lindsey and Angela M. Brown analyzed the color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS) (www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/), a large color-naming database obtained from informants of mostly unwritten languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures that have had limited contact with modern, industrialized society. The color naming idiolects of 2,367 WCS informants fall into three to six “motifs,” where each motif is a different color-naming system based on a subset of a universal glossary of 11 color terms. These motifs are universal in that they occur worldwide, with some individual variation, in completely unrelated languages. Strikingly, these few motifs are distributed across the WCS informants in such a way that multiple motifs occur in most languages. Thus, the culture a speaker comes from does not completely determine how he or she will use color terms. An analysis of the modern patterns of motif usage in the WCS languages, based on the assumption that they reflect historical patterns of color term evolution, suggests that color lexicons have changed over time in a complex but orderly way. The worldwide distribution of the motifs and the cooccurrence of multiple motifs within languages suggest that universal processes control the naming of colors.

English and many other languages spoken in industrialized societies include 11–12 basic color terms. In contrast, there is great diversity in color terminology across languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures, with some languages using as few as two or three color terms, and other languages using more. To account for this diversity, Berlin and Kay proposed two conjectures: (i) there exists a limited set of “universal” categories from which all languages draw their color lexicons, and (ii) languages “evolve” by adding color names in a relatively fixed sequence. There is now overwhelming empirical support for the first conjecture. The second conjecture has been more difficult to evaluate, in part because it has proven difficult to compare color naming across languages, and in part because it is difficult to test an inherently time-dependent process with synchronic data.

In this paper, we explore an important idea that links these two conjectures: that color lexicons occur in only a modest number of distinct, universal color-naming systems, which can be placed in an ordered hierarchy from simple to complex based on the number of categories into which color space is lexically partitioned. We evaluated this idea by analyzing the data of the World Color Survey (WCS) (www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/), a corpus of color-naming data from 110 world languages. The results of our analysis indicate that color-naming lexicons tend to cluster statistically into just a few systems, which we call motifs, which occur, with some individual variation, in the lexicons of informants living in all parts of the world. In this sense, motifs are universal. Analysis further revealed a striking cooccurrence of multiple distinct motifs within most of the WCS languages.

We then examined Berlin and Kay’s second conjecture, on the hypothesis that within-language lexical diversity is a marker for lexical change in synchronic data. In broad agreement with Berlin and Kay and their collaborators, our analysis suggested that color terms change over time in a principled way.

Read more: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/47/19785.full

We invite you to participate in Michael P. Kaschak’s experiment.

Details: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/12/picturing_language_does_it_hel.php

The assembly in the Indian state of West Bengal has passed a resolution backing Bangladesh’s call for Bengali to be made an official UN language.

Bangladesh’s parliament made its call in April. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina argued in support of the motion before the General Assembly in September.

Bengali is spoken by more than 250 million people around the world.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8425744.stm

Since 1996, linguists at the University of Bremen have been successfully involved in research on Chamorro, the autochthonous language of the Marianas in the West Pacific.

During the first Festival of Languages (17 September –7 October, 2009),experts from ten countries founded CHIN (“Chamorro Linguistics International Network”) which is the first international Organization devoted to the study, the preservation and the development of Chamorro, a moderately endangered language.

CHIN is located at the University of Bremen (www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/chin/), Thomas Stolz, professor of general and comparative linguistics at the University of Bremen, is vice-president of the new network. The German Science Foundation (DFG) has given him a grant of 320,000.00 EURO (about 480,000.00 U$) as financial support for a three years project on Chamorro.

In English, the project title is “Chamorrica – the annotated (re-)editionand translation of the early non-English-based sources on and in Chamorro(1668-1950)”. From April 2010 onwards, Professor Stolz and two PhD candidates will edit, evaluate, translate and comment upon the many Chamorro-related texts of the times of Spanish, German and Japanese rule.

Some of these texts have never appeared in print before. In these texts, the Chamorro language is described from the vantage point of the colonial powers (e.g. in grammars,dictionaries) or (a non-native variety of) Chamorro is used to convey religious, philological and historical content.

Chamorro is currently experiencing massive pressure on the part of the dominant English.

Now a days, contemporary speakers of Chamorro do not usually know the languages of the former colonial powers such that they cannot access the bulk of the extant documents of the past. The project aims at making these texts accessible and thus gives back a cultural treasure to the Chamorro speech-community which otherwise has only a rather limited literary production in Chamorro.

On the one hand, the project investigates how the foreigners have perceived, understood or misunderstood Chamorro.

On the other hand, the edited sources may serve as a means for the development of Chamorro, because these sources contain long forgotten words, constructions, idioms, etc. which could be revitalized for the purposes of the modernization of Chamorro.

In this way, the project will contribute to the survival of the language. The project respects the interests of the Chamorro community and will be conducted with their consent. The Bremen linguists cooperate not only with the University of Guam and the Northern Marianas Humanities Council, but also with the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Asociación Espanola de Estudios del Pacífico in Madrid/Spain and other associates of CHIN.

With this project, the cooperation contract between the University of Guam and the University of Bremen has been put into practice in the realm of research. This is terrific news. In large part, this is a product of our collaborative efforts with the University of Bremen and the recent trip to Germany.

The key person in this is Thomas Stolz and our key people at the University are, of course, Peter Onedera and Rosa Palomo. While we were in Germany, we started the CHiN network.This is the international network of scholars interested in the Chamorro language. “For me, the really key point in this research is the fact that international sources are being used to study the first printed texts of Chamorro in order to make them available for further study.

The studies will be primarily historical in focus and have tremendous implications formodern linguistic studies and for Chamorro scholars trying to gauge the historical changes in the Chamorro language through the years,” said UOG President Robert A. Underwood.

Source: http://www.pacificnewscenter.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1982:german-university-funds-3-year-chamorro-language-study&catid=45:guam-news&Itemid=156

The language of the Comanche people, a lifeline of its culture, is fading fast.

Its muted vowels and sapient cadence once echoed throughout the fenceless grasslands of the South Plains, but today it can muster barely a whisper.

That’s why Texas Tech anthropologist Jeff Williams and a handful of other researchers have devised a plan that could help save Comanche from confinement in history books.

With a recent $215,000 two-year grant from the Administration for Native Americans, they’ll shoulder the task on modern technology and a new generation of Comanche students eager to learn their ancestral tongue.

“Its important for any language to have its say, to be documented,” Williams said. “It’s interesting for Comanche because it rose to dominance on the South Plains so quickly, then to have it so quickly go into a state of complete demise.”

Read more: http://lubbockonline.com/stories/121809/loc_536884399.shtml

Vincent Holmes proposes:

“There is a fundamental error, in my view, in the State’s approach to translating documents, and it needs to be addressed (‘Translating documents into Irish costs €3,000 a week’, Irish Independent, December 18).

Today, most of the State’s documentation is translated from an original version in English to a new version (usually later) in Irish. My thesis is that this pattern should be reversed.

Documentation should be generated initially in Irish (many of our government departments have the capacity to do so) and then translated into English. In keeping with the State’s new 20-year strategy for Irish (Plean 2010 — 2030) this proposal should be addressed for sound economic and linguistic reasons.

The language trajectory for an Ghaeilge is heading in the wrong direction at present, ie, the language is being dominated by English. To reverse this trend, creativity in Irish is a compulsory requirement.

Now that Irish is an officially recognised EU language there may be a way to source payment from Europe — for translations from Irish to English and other languages. I suggest that the Government (as part of its linguistic plan) should address these possibilities.

UNESCO, in its February 2009 report, designated Irish as one of the endangered languages of the world.

To head off these linguistic perils we need to start using an Ghaeilge more creatively.”

Source: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/time-to-put-irish-language-first-1981684.html

The Jelly Donut Awards pay tribute to one of the most infamous translation errors in US history: John F. Kennedy’s pronouncement “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Although Kennedy intended to express empathy for the citizens of Berlin, his German phrase actually translated to “I am a jelly donut.”

From the highest levels of international politics to the ad campaigns of multinational corporations, 2009 saw some big translation errors – all of which could have been prevented by professional, accurate translation services.

#5. Unexpected Gifts

When a South Korean government representative visited Russia, he commented on the beauty of the endangered Siberian tigers of Eastern Russia. “Korea is very interested in Siberian tigers,” he told Vladimir Kirillov, head of Natural Resources Management.

But Kirillov heard a very different message. The Russian/Korean interpreter told him that South Korea was asking Kirillov to consider donating a tiger instead. Kirillov proposed the gift upon his return to Russia, and the tiger is now living in the wilds of South Korea – all because of a translation error!

#4. Game Over

Fans of the controversial – and resoundingly popular – game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” might be confused by a translation error in the Japanese release.

In the American version, the Russian villain Vladimir Mararov organizes a massacre at a Russian airport. (Spoiler alert!) The player’s character, an undercover CIA agent, is instructed not to speak Russian, since Mararov intends to frame the Americans for the attack.

But in Japan, Mararov’s line, “Remember, no Russian,” was translated as “Kill ’em; they’re Russians.” The translation error did not properly set up Mararov’s plan to frame the Americans and left Japanese players confused as to why Mararov kills their CIA character and leaves his body and CIA identification at the scene of the crime.

#3. Look Before You Cross

Visitors to Wales should make sure to look both ways before they cross the street, thanks to a translation error in Cardiff. A temporary road sign this summer cautioned English-speaking pedestrians to “look left” to avoid dangerous road hazards.

The problem? The sign was translated for Welsh readers as “cerddwyr edrychwch i’r dde” – “pedestrians look right.” Luckily, no Welsh speakers were harmed in the making of this translation error.

#2. Microsoft Misjudgment

Microsoft’s error in a website for Polish businesses became national news this summer. Although the translation of the ad copy was accurate, the company’s localization experts altered the photo accompanying the ad to “adapt” the graphic for Poland.

The original ad featured three racially diverse people sitting around a conference table, but the Polish ad replaced an African-American man’s face with a Caucasian one. How did people catch on? The man’s hand hadn’t been changed.

#1. Translation Overload

During a foreign policy meeting between American and Russian leaders in March, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a “reset button,” representing the erasure of past tension between the two countries.

But the English word “reset” had been translated to the Russian “peregruzka” – meaning “overcharged” or “overloaded.” The photo op of the two politicians pressing the button lost its international significance – and instead became a global joke thanks to the translation error.

Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/12/prweb3367024.htm

John Dennis was a London playwright who no doubt dreamt of achieving immortality. He pulled it off, but not in the way he imagined. In 1709, for a performance of Appius and Virginia, his tragedy about ancient Rome, he devised a new way to imitate the sound of thunder. That show failed, but the theatre management later used Dennis’s technique in a performance of Macbeth, to Dennis’s intense annoyance. He rose from his seat and shouted: “That is my thunder, by God; the villains will play my thunder, but not my play.”

It was the first time in history that a writer suggested he held moral copyright on a sound effect. More important, it was the first accusation of thunder-stealing ever hurled at anyone, except perhaps a Greek god.

Dennis, it turned out, had by a fluke carved out his small place in history. He not only generated a fresh metaphor, he did it on an occasion that can be dated. So we know that this year his creation reached its 300th birthday. As it has for all that time, it remains a lively element in the language.

A Financial Post writer reported in November that Research In Motion investors thought their company “needed to steal thunder” from Apple and in early December another Post writer suggested that Canadian skiers won’t “let upstart snowboarders steal their thunder.” Discussing the Golden Globe nominees on Dec. 14, Emily Blunt (one nomination) joked that Matt Damon (two nominations) was “apparently trying to steal my thunder.”

Susie Dent, a lexicographer and the language expert on a British TV show called Countdown, mentions Dennis’s contribution to everyday speech in What Made the Crocodile Cry? 101 Questions about the English Language (Oxford University Press). That title suggests the up-to-date corporate style of Oxford: The once stern adjudicator of English now shows a touching desire to be a popular, lovable version of an academic publisher. And who can blame it? Everybody’s in show business now, from golfers to politicians.

As educational opportunities in the United States attract the families of students from across the globe, the need for effective methods in educating English-language learners (ELLs) continues to increase.

The ELL population has more than doubled since 1990 and numbers more than 5 million students today. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that by 2025, there will be 18 million ELL students in the U.S. The most recent statistics available from the U.S. Census Bureau, from 2003, estimate the foreign-born population to make up 11.7 percent of the U.S. population.

Foreign-born and other non-English speaking students not only have to learn how to speak English, but also how to learn in English. And with about 80 percent of ELLs speaking Spanish as their first language, many education companies are creating products that feature both Spanish and English to help Spanish-speaking students feel more comfortable as they master a new language.

Several companies, including Pearson, Curriculum Advantage, American Education Corp., and Lexia Learning, offer either separate ELL products, or ELL components built into existing curriculum packages.

Read more: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/news-by-subject/curriculum/index.cfm?i=62195

A Vancouver Island aboriginal language now risks extinction with the deaths of two more native speakers, a First Nations leader says.

Within the last month, two members of the Hupacasath First Nation died, leaving their relatives fearing that their native tongue could die along with them.

“Our language has gone from critical to very near extinct,” said Judith Sayers, a former Hupacasath chief who was instrumental in starting an intensive language program that has produced 10 books and numerous CDs and DVDs with the help of five fluent speakers.

“Our language is not just about . . . identifying ourselves as a people, it is also about the ability to tell our histories, know our protocols and teach our teachings,” she said.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/life/First+Nation+fears+language+could+along+with+elders/2357237/story.html

In “Don’t Speak English, Parlez Globish”, Nerrière warned Europeans that English was taking over the world, but in a form that would not be the same as Standard English. In fact, he said, people speaking Globish-English were doing a lot of the world’s international business in English and excluding the native English speakers, all of whom tended to monopolize conversations.

Not surprisingly, English native speakers didn’t want to hear it, and so not only were the initial books denied publication in English, most academicians who had never read the French book declared that nothing of value could ever be said with Globish, which they equated with “broken English.” But in fact, the rest of the world just made new rules, and understood each other quite well.

Globish the World Over is the world’s first book written in Globish. It discusses one of the main barriers to global communication: those language barriers which stall progress in business and every other area of international contact. Since WWII, the English language grew to be the preference of the international jet-set and executive classes. However, this book shows how Globish-English, with its 1,500 words and simple grammar, is more democratic, easier to learn, and learned more quickly. The 90% of world citizens who are now forming the prosperous nations of the future in Brazil and Russia and India and China, will be doing their business in Globish.

Read more: http://www.prweb.com/releases/Globish_English/Globish/prweb3341024.htm

Apart from translators of literature such as Thuy Toan, Duong Tuong, Tran Dinh Hien, Nguyen Ngoc and Trinh Lu, a new generation of young translators has come to the fore in Viet Nam in recent years, bringing local readers the latest best-sellers.

In the last year, Vietnamese readers were presented with translated books from Poland, Hungary and Chile to add to well-known classical writers such as Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot.

Their translations include best-sellers and globally award-winning novels such as The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellbecq; The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho; The Piano Teacher by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize for Literature 2004), and Kitchen by Yoshimoto Bananai.

Read more: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=01TAL131209

The National Museum of Language in College Park opened in 2008 as the first of its kind in the United States – a museum dedicated to teaching the history of the world’s languages.

Since its inception, the museum has featured an exhibit tracing the roots of early alphabet languages, such as Arabic, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, as well as one featuring the Chinese and Japanese character-based languages. Interactive displays involve computers, writing and reading.

At the moment, the museum is facing severe financial problems and may be closed.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/16/AR2009121602159.html

An army of translators and Hindi officers in the department of official language (DOL) under the home ministry keep themselves busy translating reams of government material, bringing out journals and newsletters meant to promote the use of Hindi for official purposes of the union. Eight regional offices have also been established to monitor the implementation of the official language policy. There is also a retinue of people who expand administrative glossary by finding Hindi equivalents for commonly-used English terms. Never mind the fact that even Hindi speakers might find the English terms more familiar.

The Official Language Resolution of 1968 adopted by Parliament stated that “concerted measures should be taken for the full development” of all the languages under the Eighth Schedule of the constitution, besides Hindi, as it was necessary for “the educational and cultural advancement of the country” .

“The reality is that no language gets even a tenth of the budget that Hindi gets. Even our embassies have courses teaching Hindi, but no other languages. The Centre funds innumerable seminars and events for Hindi. There is hardly any funding for other languages,” points out Prof V Arasu, head of the department of Tamil in Madras University.

“All that the people in Hindi divisions do is harass officers insisting that they sign their names in Hindi, keep tabs on how many letters you write in Hindi and so on. They spend their time putting up name plates and sign boards in Hindi even in non-Hindi speaking states. What sense does that make?,” asks an exasperated civil servant. “Such partiality to Hindi ignoring other languages in a country that claims to be multilingual is bound to cause heartburn,” says a government employee from a non-Hindi speaking state.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/What-it-costs-to-keep-Hindi-alive-Rs-36-crore-/articleshow/5304154.cms

Facebook has launched an award system for translators, where those who translate for the social network can get special icons as they accomplish specific milestones. Awards are grouped into into the categories of voting participation, words published, and translations published.

“Since launching our Translations application two years ago, more than 300,000 people have answered the call to contribute translations and make Facebook available in more than 70 different languages,” says Facebook’s Eric Kwan. “These translators are helping more people connect in the languages that feel most comfortable to them, no matter how big or small of a community speaks a language or dialect. For all of their efforts, we think that translators deserve some extra recognition.”

Read more: http://www.arisyulianta.com/2009/12/17/facebook-gives-translators-awards-for-their-services/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ArisYuliantaBusinessArt+%28arisyulianta.com%29, http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=204787062130

The Government of Canada has provided $50,000 in funding through the Aboriginal Languages Initiative (ALI) Innovation Fund. The objective of the ALI Innovation Fund is to encourage and support innovative community-based language projects utilizing existing technology in the promotion and preservation of First Nations languages. The Aboriginal Languages Initiative provides funding to support the preservation and promotion of Aboriginal languages to increase their use in community and family settings. The Initiative is part of the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Aboriginal Peoples’ Program, which supports the full participation of Aboriginal peoples in Canadian society and the promotion, revitalization, and preservation of Aboriginal languages and cultures. It also helps enable Aboriginal peoples to address the social, cultural, economic, and political issues affecting their lives.

Read more: http://newsblaze.com/story/2009121610340300001.cc/topstory.html

How do we know that certain combinations of letters have certain meanings? Reading and spelling are complex processes, involving several different areas of the brain, but researchers from Johns Hopkins University in the USA have now identified a specific part of the brain – named the left fusiform gyrus -which is necessary for normal, rapid understanding of the meaning of written text as well as correct word spelling. Their findings are published in the February 2010 issue of Cortex.

Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091216103600.htm

The aspects of human language that make it uniquely human remain an open question, but the short answer is that there isn’t as much that’s unique as had once been thought. That is, it seems that much of the foundation for our language perception and speech abilities was laid down long before the evolution of hominids, and is shared by even distantly-related species. And, a surprising lot about language that seems uniquely human seems to be learned rather than innate.

The trend seems to be toward a chipping away at specifics that have previously been thought to make human language a singular attribute of our species, or at least as singular as many would fancy it to be. It seems likely that there’s no one aspect of our language and perception capabilities that can explain how we alone have the ability to give abstract meaning to sound or to convey completely new ideas between ourselves in the open-ended ways that we do.

Language is another complex trait that can’t be explained by reducing it to its many parts — the use of prefixes, suffixes, the effect of a single gene, our sound discrimination abilities, and so on. Instead, it’s an emergent property that flows from what our brain allows us to make of the world, combined with our biological ability to make and detect sound (although, that’s clearly secondary and not essential, as the complexity of sign language used around the world demonstrates), and built on a foundation that has been evolving for millions of years. Hundreds or thousands of genes are required for this, as the plethora of mutations in genes that affect cognitive abilities including language clearly show.

This makes sense. Every trait evolves from precursors. Every step of the way we humans are shown not to be unique but to be more a part of the Nature that produced us — even if, albeit, every species is, almost by definition, unique. It is hubris to think otherwise, be it with respect to language or even consciousness. That doesn’t take away in any sense from the interesting question of what humans are and how we got that way — and why we are as much different from other species as we are.

Read more: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2009/12/non-humanness-of-human-language.html

Scientists have known for 40 years that even though it takes longer to use sign language to sign individual words, sentences can be signed, on average, in the same time it takes to say them, but until now they have never understood how this could be possible.

Scientists Andrew Chong and colleagues at Princeton University in New Jersey have been studying the empirical entropy and redundancy in American Sign Language handshapes to find an answer to the puzzle. The term entropy is used in the research as a measure of the average information content of a unit of data.

The fundamental unit of data of ASL is the handshape, while for spoken languages the fundamental units are phonemes. A handshape is a specific movement of the hand and specific location of the hand.

Their results show that the information contained in the 45 handshapes making up the American Sign Language is higher than the amount of information contained in phonemes. This means spoken English has more redundancy than the signed equivalent.

The researchers reached this conclusion by measuring the frequency of handshapes in videos of signing uploaded by deaf people to websites YouTube, DeafRead, and DeafVideo.tv, and videos of conversations in sign language recorded on campus. They discovered that the entropy (information content) of the handshapes averages at 0.5 bits per shape less than the theoretical maximum, while the entropy per phoneme in speech is around three bits below the maximum possible.

This means that even though making the signs for words is slower, signers can keep up with speakers because the low redundancy rate compensates for the slower rate of signing.

Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news180085938.html

When L.L. Zamenhof created the language Esperanto, his goal for it was to help bring about peace by eliminating communication barriers. Esperanto has become the most widely spoken constructed international language through out the world.  Zamenhof created the new Esperanto language after growing up watching different ethnic groups argue in his hometown. He published his book on his new language under the pen name “Doktoro Esperanto.” Esperanto means “one who hopes.” Zamenhof hoped his new language would provide a common ground for different groups of people to be able to build on peace.

Esperanto is a neutral language and is often used by some relief groups. The military has used in when doing exercises with other nations. It is also used by many people when they travel the world or corresponding to others through out the world. TV and radio broadcasting sometimes uses the Esperanto language as well as literature.Zamenhof translated the Old Testament into Esperanto. It is also used in language instruction course to help teach other languages.

Many experts say that by learning the Esperanto language, one would have a good foundation to learn other languages. Esperanto is considered easier to learn than other languages.It is estimated that it only takes about a quarter of the time to learn the Esperanto language compared to other languages. This is due to the Esperanto words being based off of a core group of root words.

Since most of the Esperanto language is linked to these core roots, it is easier for to learn the words and their meanings. These roots are similar to the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.Another reason the Esperanto language is easy to learn, is that it is a phonetic language. This allows the person learning Esperanto to know how to say a written word and write a spoken word.

Source: http://www.huliq.com/7504/89693/esperanto-could-be-language-peace

Though Nilce Camargo Scanlon says she has trouble speaking conversational English, she says she can write “pretty well”. Well enough to help tutor another woman learning English as a second language, as Scanlon did when she moved to State College 10 years ago.

“At that time I couldn’t speak, could not understand,” she said. “Even though I had studied English in my country, Brazil.”

Our eyes  are formidable communicators of feelings including comfort and discomfort, which help us decipher others from a very tender age. The eyes reveal excitement at mom walking into the room but also reveal concern when we are troubled. Often what is not spoken out loud is expressed exquisitely in the eyes. In fact I was prompted to write this today as I was visiting a research colleague and her eyes, at a distance, told me something was wrong, her father had passed away.

While a mother’s eyes will reflect the hopelessness she may feel when her baby is hospitalized they conversely reveal the joy having found that the child is healthy and fine. Few things reflect our emotions as well or as rapidly as the eyes. Babies which are just several days old already respond to the eyes of the mother and can tell the difference between a squint and wide opened dilated eyes. Babies can tell the difference between a happy and contented mother and one who is stressed, just form looking at the yes.

The eyes serve as conduits of information we have relied on for thousands of years. We rely on them because of their accuracy. The man who is asked to help someone move will cover his eyes with his fingers rubbing them as he answers, “yes I will help you,” when no doubt this will be an inconvenience. This blocking behavior authentically reveals how he feels even though he will assist.

Read more: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/200912/the-body-language-the-eyes

The sign for a McDonald’s in the Guangzhou (Canton) Airport:

The English slogan, “i’m lovin’ it,” is followed by the standard Chinese version:  “WO3 JIU4 XI3HUAN1 我就喜歡 (“I just love [it]).”  To the right of the arches and the slogan, the sign gives directions for how to get there:  “Go out at gate 9; walk forward, turn left, 100 meters (not “100 rice” for “100 MI3 米,” though I have seen such translations on Chinglish signs), at gate 5 (next to the WC).”

Source: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1954

“A Show of Hands” is a Christmas concert using performers who interpret the words of popular holiday songs using sign language. The unique Christmas show will be performed at the Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Center of Arts and Education theater in Ocean Springs.

“A Show of Hands” is a student-led organization at the University of Southern Mississippi that sponsors sign-interpreted musical performances during the year.

About 25 students majoring in deaf education, speech, hearing sciences and other studies participate in the shows.

The purpose for the traveling show is to bridge the gap between the hearing and deaf worlds by entertaining through music enriched with sign language.

Read more: http://www.sunherald.com/local/story/1804837.html

The lack of qualified teachers and classroom materials have made it difficult to offer Chinese language lessons to students in foreign countries, educators said at the closing ceremony of the fourth Confucius institute Conference in Beijing Sunday. Insufficient teachers have created problems for some Confucius Institutes overseas to offer courses, and some institutes have had to hire teachers whose qualifications were not up to standard.

Confucius Institute was established under the Office of Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, to promote the Chinese language and culture internationally.

The first Confucius Institute was established in 2004. There are 282 Confucius Institutes and 241 Confucius Clasrooms in 87 countries in the world.

“The shortage of qualified teachers and applicable teaching materials are a common problem facing most Confucius institutes when more students are interested in learning Chinese,” said Nora Yao, director of Confucius Institute at the University of Auckland.

Read more: http://china.globaltimes.cn/society/2009-12/491523.html



Why is Jesus widely used as a personal name in Spanish-speaking countries but not in other traditionally Catholic areas? Among Hindus, Carol observes, some names of gods seem to be widely used as personal names (Vishnu, Krishna) while others are not (Brahma, Shiva).

Read more: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1949

Dr. Pat M. Boone, author, psychologist and minister, originated the idea of learning languages from the opposite direction. For five years, she studied what people said in different languages, only to find that, although the words were different, the words communicated the same ideas and thoughts. She determined to identify the words and phrases common to all languages. Dr. Boone compares it to building a house. “When you’re building a house, you must first have a foundation. Your foundation is made of the daily words we all use. After you’ve mastered your foundation words, then your building words, like the walls, windows and doors to a house, can be easily added.”

The good news is that less than 100 words and phrases make up your foundation. And she doesn’t subscribe to the hype about “immersion” programs. “Immersion programs are what it feels like to go into another language culture and not have a clue what is being said around you or when anyone is trying to help you.”

Read more: http://www.earnedmedia.org/drpb1209.htm