by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Many words we consider everyday vocabulary like "spacesuit”, “blast off”, “deep space”, “zero gravity” and “alien” have their roots in science fiction, and not in science, as one might think. The word "robot" was first used to denote a fictional ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The name of the “Sonder café”, recently opened in Cape Town, South Africa, takes its inspiration from one of the neologisms listed in the "Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows". “Sonder” means “the realisation that each random passerby is living a life ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Jargon is, by definition, “exclusionary” and can get in the way of understanding crucial information, says Andre Spice, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the University of London, writing for The Conversation. Research has shown that when used by doctors it ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village While language change is not a new thing, says Chi Luu, a computational linguist and natural language processes (NLP) researcher, “it’s different in how fast and how virally it can spread now, as well as the impact it can have ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village "Holding my brush to write this letter, two streams of tears flow/ Of the thousands hardships I have suffered nobody knows" ... These words are written in a language called "Nüshu", which literally means "the script of women". Nüshu is ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The age of online communication has brought about a radical reinvention of punctuation, in ways that transgress the boundaries of what is commonly defined as "good grammar". This has sparked concerns about the future of formal language and become a ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emoji have become an immensely popular form of online communication. The numbers about their use are staggering: it is estimated that more than 700 million are used every day on Facebook alone. Many consider emoji simply a way of adding ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes create a new one, combining bits of each into something new that everyone can use to communicate easily. A recent article in BBC Future warns that these "linguistic ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Fiona Bell is a literary translator and scholar of Russian literature, based in Oxford. She won a highly competitive fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2018, and her translation of Natalia Meshchaninova's Stories received a 2020 PEN/Heim ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village "Planet Word", opening up in Washington DC on October 22, 2020, will be an interactive center dedicated to language arts. Its mission is to inspire a love of words and language and the project is grounded in the belief that ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village "International Non-Binary People's Day" is celebrated ever year on the 14th of July since 2012 and is aimed at raising awareness around the issues faced by non-binary people. The use of a more inclusive, gender-neutral language is one such issue, ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Chi Luu, a computational linguist and natural language processing researcher, writes about idioms and their special power to draw people together in a recent article for JSTOR Daily. The origins of idioms, she says, are most often frozen in time, ... Read more >