Fascinating article in the New York Times the other day about the languages that are more commonly heard in New York than anywhere else in the world, even from where they originated: “Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages.”
Key quote is a short one but a good one: “some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages.”
Wow.
So as you know South Africa is hosting the FIFA World Cup in June.
Ahead of that, the “Schott’s Vocab” blog on the New York Times has a list of South African slang.
Check out: “Soccer World Cup Slang.”
I love languages. I love that you can say the same thing in hundreds of different ways. How some languages have subtleties that others lack. Each has it’s own strength and beauty.
It just sucks I’m so bad at them.
So instead I can marvel in how different people communicate. I think I mentioned recently how the United Nations has six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).
Well in this New York Times article from Monday about Google’s translating software I saw a fun fact – European Parliament proceedings are translated into 23 languages.
Dang!
I had to google it. We’ve got: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
Josh finally lives in Maine again
after four years at Boston University, a stint in Southern California with
Walt Disney Feature Animation,
and two years in Dubai, UAE,
where he created and wrote
Newlywed in Dubai.
