Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Mandarin Chinese comprises around 370,000 words, more than double the number of words in the Oxford English dictionary, and almost three times those in French and Russian dictionaries. “Reci”, literally translated as “hot words” are new terms that young Chinese are inventing and using online …

“When the evolution of a language is driven by political dissent: the example of Chinese “hot” words”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A thought-provoking title for the keynote address by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent “International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media”. The workshop, which took place at Stanford University, USA, on June 25, brought together computer and social science researchers and practitioners from …

““Emoji are Great and/or They will Destroy the World””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village This is the opinion of the Accademia della Crusca, the Italian institution dedicated to the study and promotion of the Italian language. Its President, Claudio Marazzini, in a recent radio interview, lamented the fact that English is increasingly being used not only in the press and …

“Could the excessive use of foreign “loanwords” represent a threat to democracy?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Self defined “word geek” Paul Anthony Jones has put together a delightful compendium of forgotten English words, one for each day of the year, in his book “The cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities”. Notable examples include “beard-second” (measure of time, calculated how long a beard grows …

“Scurryfunge, frowst and hunch-weather – unused words now being rescued from obscurity”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emojis are becoming increasingly popular worldwide and it is estimated that 92% of the online population is using them. Recent statistics from Facebook about the Messenger platform alone put the daily number of emojis sent as 5 billion. There is an emoji real time tracker …

“Emojis, a “developing language”?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Is it still acceptable, in a world which is increasingly connected, mobile and multicultural, to only speak one language? Fabrice Jaumont*, author of the “The Bilingual Revolution, the Future of Education is in Two Languages”, opened his keynote speech at the US Language Advocacy Day …

“Is monolingualism “the illiteracy of the 21st Century”?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Translators play a key role in making world literature accessible to all but are not always given the recognition they deserve. Many publishers, for example, do not give credit to them on the covers of books. Translators say that this renders their work invisible and …

“‘At the Vanguard of Literary Change’”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village French author Georges Perec imposed upon himself this amazing linguistic and intellectual challenge when writing La Disparition, published in 1969. The novel is written in “lipogrammatic” style; a “lipogram” is a literary work in which one compels oneself strictly to exclude one or several letters …

“Literary acrobatics: a 300 page novel without a single “E” in it”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village We live in an age in which we communicate with “hashtags, broken sentences and fragments of ideas” and where opinion and debate are reduced to “liking and disliking, binary options rather than articulate responses”. The author of the recent Financial Times (FT) article deplores that …

“Is Latin still relevant in today’s world?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Franco Moretti, literary critic and co-founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, argues that to truly understand literary history one needs the help of computers to “crunch” data from thousands of books at a time. A new publication, “Canon/Archive”, collects 11 of the lab’s research pamphlets, …

“Can computers “read” books and what knowledge can we gain from them?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Lost in translation – this recurring and derogatory judgement is an “old chestnut” that keeps bouncing back, says the author of the article. While she does confirm that some words do not have an equivalent and that translators do struggle with idioms, culture-specific words and …

“On old chestnuts and misguided ideas about translation”

Two weeks ago, a complete 18th century library was discovered in Bouillon. The books, all of them over 200 years old, are in pristine condition. A miracle for bibliophiles. The 18th century was the last moment in history when it seemed possible for Encyclopedists to be well-informed about the latest developments in just about every science …

“Multidisciplinary Task Forces to Manage Complexity”