Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “When something is a national priority, like language education, it transcends party lines and politics; language is non-partisan because of the positive impact it has on ALL individuals.” So reads the announcement for the 2019 edition of US Language Advocacy Day (LAD) (1), which took …

“US language education community advocates for government support”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emoji might be a useful precursor to reading for children, says Wired’s Resident Linguist Gretchen McCulloch. She first raised the issue in a Tweet post in late 2018, which generated over 400 reader interactions. “By popular demand” she has since conducted an online “semi-scientific” survey …

“Emoji as a useful precursor of reading for pre-school children”

Asking members of the cApStAn team to share their traditions for the New Year yielded some fun contributions. To start with, many pointed out, the New Year is not on the same date everywhere: according to the Orthodox Church Julian calendar, for example, the last day of the year is on 13th January, in the …

“Our team about celebrating the New Year: a matter of cultural adaptation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village For her dystopian novel “Native Tongue”, about a future America where women are legally subject to men in every way, linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created Láadan, a language in which the focus is on words that efficiently describe “concepts important to women.” The novel was published in 1984 …

“Are existing languages too “patriarchal” to adequately express the feelings of women?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Thanks to a recent agreement between the two companies, Google will provide machine translation (MT) support for over 100 languages on Wikipedia, 15 of which were not served earlier, including Hausa, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Yoruba, and Zulu (1). The encylopedia’s volunteer content editors will have a new MT …

“The language imbalance and “lopsided geography” of Wikipedia”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Linguist and author Søren Wichmann, from Leiden University, provides interesting insights into what defines a language in a recent article for The Wire. (1) From a political standpoint a language may simply be “that which is standardly spoken by a nation”. What about languages spoken in …

“Language or dialect? Making the case for “perception” as one of the defining criteria”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Artificial intelligence (AI) may be negatively affecting the diversity of cultural expression, warns a recent report written by Octavio Kulesz for the UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression. (1) In international forums, says the author, the impact AI …

“Artificial intelligence may be negatively affecting the diversity of cultural expression”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village South Goulburn is an island off North Australia where 500 people speak 9 different languages but somehow manage to understand each other. This happens thanks to a phenomenon that linguists call “receptive multilingualism”: in other words people just talk to one another in their own …

“An island where 500 people speak 9 different languages but understand each other. How?”

by Nick Moon, linguist @cApStAn When I was seven, my family and I moved to Somerset. Three hours west of London, but light years away in terms of pace of life. And apparently language. At the end of my first day of school, I was told by my teacher to bring my daps in the …

“cApStAn linguist Nick Moon teaches us how to speak “roight proper Zummerzet””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Tim Berners-Lee, credited with the invention of the world wide web, has joined forces with entrepreneur John Bruce to create a company called “Inrupt”, the aim of which is to “bring resources, process and appropriate skills” to promote the adoption of the long-running Solid decentralised …

“Restoring ownership of user data to users”

by Danina Lupsa – Translation technologist and translation project manager @ cApStAn On September 30, my young colleagues and I woke up to discover a Facebook post from our company on a topic we had never heard about: International Translation Day. It was the perfect occasion for young translation studies graduates, senior translators and language …

“International Translation Day celebrates the key role of translators in connecting the world. Time now to give the profession a legal protection”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village At the recent TAUS webinar on “geo-linguistic shifts” two leading experts in the field, Lane Green and Nicholas Ostler (see bios below), discussed whether machine translation could one day replace English as the world’s “lingua franca”. The first TAUS debate on this topic between Green …

“Is machine translation taking over from English as the global communication language?”