Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village American artist, designer and art director Jennifer Daniel is the first woman to chair the Emoji Subcommittee for the Unicode Consortium, the official gate-keeper for new emoji. Today most of our online communication is typed: emails, text messages, Facebook, Twitter … and an estimated 10 …

“The new Head of the UNICODE Emoji Subcommittee is advocating for more diverse and inclusive emoji”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion of new words and phrases in many countries and cultures. We have written about this new lexicon, and how it is helping people to make sense of the changes in our lives, in a few articles for …

“German is an interesting case of how grammar can facilitate the creation of new words and influence the evolution of a language”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Like haikus in Japan, Latvia has its own poetic form, dainas, four-line poems that are either sung or recited. The origin of dainas, which have historically been transmitted orally from generation to generation, is still uncertain. The first dainas were written in the XVIth century, …

“Dainas, four-line Latvian poems created over 1,000 years ago, are getting a new major English translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Falling on deaf ears”, turning a “blind eye”, making a “dumb” choice… Expressions like these are widely used but can have damaging effects on millions of people, even if there is no intent to do harm. Sara Nović, an American writer, translator, creative writing professor …

““Ableist” language receives renewed attention in the current debate on diversity, equity and inclusion”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village For centuries science has been a polyglot enterprise, conducted in a number of languages whose importance waxed and waned in popularity over time, depending on politics, war, economics, and institutions, says Michael D. Gordin, Professor of History of Science at Princeton University. Latin was the …

“Today, more than 90% of the indexed articles in the natural sciences are published in English. That wasn’t always the case”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In a delightful recent article for the New York Times American writer Lauren Oyler describes her love of punctuation, which, she laments, “despite its unflagging service to the essential project of communication, is often subject to pointless regimes of austerity”. Of all the punctuation marks, …

“Making the case for semicolons, the saddest, most unfairly represented victim of the current regime of punctuation austerity”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A new online dictionary launched on International Francophonie Day, March 20, 2021, includes French expressions from all the countries where the language is spoken. Promoted by the French government, the dictionary reflects not only the language’s evolution but also the reality that most of today’s …

““International Francophonie Day” celebrations include the launch of a revolutionary new French dictionary”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “One of the more unexpected twists of an unprecedented year is that the little-known business of literary translation has become a source of public controversy”. This is how the Los Angeles Times comments the heated debate around the translation of US Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman’s …

“Diversity, equity and inclusion may be the real issues at stake in the debate around the Amanda Gorman translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In languages like Spanish, French and Italian people, objects, adjectives, and articles are either male or female. In English, the discussion around “gender neutral” language focuses on pronouns; in Romance languages it is more complicated, says poet, translator and academic Prof. Deborah J. Bennett. Prof. …

“Romance languages are rooted in a binary vision of the world: this poses challenges for educators seeking to create a more inclusive environment in the classroom”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The term “exophony”, which is the practice of writing in a language that is not one’s own, is quite recent. It was introduced to cultural and literary circles in 2007 by linguists Prof. Dr. Susan Arndt, Dr. Dirk Naguschewski and Prof. Dr. Robert Stockhammer, in …

“A new wave of exophonic writers with a migration background is reshaping and enriching the language of their country of adoption”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, as well as founder, in 2017, of the TA First Translation Prize, awarded annually for a debut literary translation and shared equally between writer and translator. In a recent entry for his Translation Diary series, Hahn raises …

“Dilemmas translators face with Romance languages, where every adjective betrays more information than in English”

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 humanoid in a 1920 Czech-language …

“Sci-fi is a fertile breeding ground for neologisms: some have entered everyday language and even scientific jargon”