Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A Florida county is reminding people to maintain a distance of at least one alligator between each other, and a jounalist for CNN suggests imagining the safety distance as the length of two golden retrievers, the width of an average sedan, a sofa, a dining …

“In the current health crisis accurately describing what we are asking of people is crucial: why the term “social distancing” should be changed”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Recent research by Ted Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Science at the MIT, and Bevil R. Conway, Investigator at the National Eye Institute’s Sensation, Cognition, Action Unit, NIH, aimed to understand why cultures vary so much in their color word usage. People with standard vision can …

“Scientists have a new theory about why languages don’t all have the same number of terms for colours”

Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Molly Young is the literary critic for New York magazine and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. In a recent article about corporatespeak she provides interesting insights about the evolution of this language and how it relates to the developments in technology and …

“Corporatespeak, a cryptic dialect to sound smarter or an interesting reflection of the economic metaphors of its day?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Apostrophes are said to date back to the early 16th century and originally served to signal that something had been removed from a word. During the 17th and 18th centuries they began to be used to indicate the genitive (possessive) role of a noun. Language …

“Is the apostrophe doomed to die? As language and norms evolve the future of this punctuation mark looks bleak”

Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village People across China have been very creative in past weeks in finding ways to get around the ban on an article that was critical of how the government handled the coronavirus epidemic. The article, written by Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at a hospital …

“Skirting online censorship in China by “translating” a banned article into Morse, hexadecimal code, emoji and elvish language”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Two of the most widely felt symptoms of the coronavirus are uncertainty and confusion, and part of this is about jargon”, says the author of a recent article in Time. Since the start of the  epidemic “the news is a whirl of unfamiliar words”, starting …

“From “social distancing” and “fomites” to “boomer remover”: new coronavirus-related terms are entering the lexicon”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Was the removal of the Parthenon Marbles by Lord Elgin, who brought them to Britain in the early 19th century, “legal”? A leaked draft of EU paper stirs Parthenon marbles dispute, reads a recent article in the Art Newspaper. The EU paper, a negotiating mandate for …

“On how a 1801 Ottoman Empire edict and its translated English version changed the fate of the Parthenon marbles forever”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village What perhaps not many of us know is that over half of the world’s population is bilingual, says Victoria Murphy, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Oxford, in her review of “The Bilingual Brain”, by Spanish neuropsychologist Albert Costa. Based on the author’s 20+ …

“High time to review the monolingual mindset when thinking about educational provision”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village An interesting article from one of the world’s most popular media outlets, BuzzFeed, looks at how, before the 2010s, many things that are now integral to our everyday lives did not exist, eg. some of the social apps, streaming services, dating platforms, ride-hail startups, virtual …

“The Decade-Defining Words Of The 2010s: a compilation by BuzzFeed News”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In August 2018, UNESCO proudly announced that 2019 would be its “Year of Indigenous Languages”. Unveiling a website devoted to the project, the organisation warned of the need to “preserve, revitalise and promote indigenous languages around the world”. But while many in past years have …

“It’s not just languages that are endangered: many alphabets around the world are also at risk”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A research team from three New Zealand universities has built an AI model regarding language transmission that splits populations up by looking at whether they fall into one of three levels of proficiency in a language, and how fast people learn. The model was trained …

“AI model developed by New Zealand academics can predict the future of endangered languages”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “It is sometimes said that in order to convey atmosphere a translation must be redone for each generation”. Is this really the case? asks author and journalist Sara Wheeler in a recent article for Literary Hub. (1) Wheeler takes the example of works by translator …

“Constance Garnett, the great Russian classics, and the problem of era-specific translation”