joshedwards.com » language

Spelling and the Internets

Josh — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 13:06:18 +0000

At Thanksgiving dinner we talking about text messaging and the damages to proper spelling, and now I just saw this: “Chatrooms and social websites encourage bad spelling, says study.”

Determined among a survey of 18- to 24-year-old children “there is now a ‘general attitude’ that there is no need to correct mistakes or conform to regular spelling rules, it says. But this means that children who have been brought up with the internet do not question wrongly spelt words.”

(Don’t worry, the article is British, so “spelt” is properly spelled.)

I know that English is an always adapting language, which has helped make is so popular, but I do agree with this article. Kids today!

New Language

Josh — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:00:25 +0000

Did you see this article last week? I thought it was pretty interesting: “Undocumented Language Found Hidden In India.”

Key quote:

Previously undocumented languages are “noticed from time to time” Harrison said, so such a discovery is not rare. But at the same time linguists estimate that a language “dies” about every two weeks with the loss of its last speakers.

Apparently there are 6,910 documented languages in the world, so by my math we still have 265 years before we’re all speaking Chinese.

Lost Languages Found, in New York

Josh — Sat, 01 May 2010 11:30:40 +0000

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.

South African Slang

Josh — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:30:46 +0000

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.”

European Parliment Languages

Josh — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:25:12 +0000

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.