Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

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 as vivid and complex as …

“The “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”, a project to give names to our most profound emotions”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A growing movement of language activists, cultural stakeholders, and scholars across the world is seeking new ways to preserve endangered languages and bring dormant ones back to life, through everything from digital dictionaries and apps, to cultural events such as language arts festivals and films …

“Children’s classics in translation can contribute to nurturing threatened languages and bringing dormant ones back to life”

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 can lead to patients not …

“In defence of jargon – it might be annoying but it also has its uses, including for status compensation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Exophony is the practice of writing in a language that is not one’s own. Some exophonic authors are bilingual or multilingual from their childhood years while others write in an acquired language. Although the phenomenon is not new the term was coined in 2007. It …

“Exophonic writing offers authors the chance “to cloak themselves in a different language, and thereby culture””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Hindu scholar and linguist Jeffrey Armstrong has spent the past 10 years translating and “decolonizing” the Bhagavad Gita, one of India’s most famous epic poems, written 5.000 (some say 7.000) years ago. His work was published this month with the title The Bhagavad Gita Comes …

“After centuries of “colonized” English translations of the Bhagavad Gita a Canadian scholar restores it to its original meaning”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Language science has focused for so long on things like grammatical complexity that information about “transfer rate” has been mostly overlooked, says evolutionary linguist François Pellegrino, from the University of Lyon, co-author of a study on this topic published in Science Advances. An interesting article …

“Study suggests that no matter how fast or slow people speak in different languages the rate of information transfer is the same”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emily Wilson’s 2017 English translation of The Odyssey raised quite a stir for its its audacious use of contemporary language and her gender neutral approach (see our blog article on this topic) but the new English version of the epic poem Beowulf takes modernisation of …

“How far should we modernise language in literary translation? The case of the epic poem Beowulf”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Rotwelsch is an ancient language of the road, spoken by vagrants, refugees, merchants and thieves since the European Middle Ages. It means “beggar’s cant” and is based on a combination of German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Romani — the language of Sinti and Roma — Czech, and …

““Rotwelsch”, the European travelers’ tongue, has united outcasts for centuries”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village It’s that time of the year again when dictionaries announce their selection of top trending words. “Words of the Year” (WotY) are supported by usage statistics and typically reflect societal attitudes and concerns. The tradition dates back to 1971, with the German Wort des Jahres, …

“2020: A year of seismic shifts in terms of language usage and rise of new words”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Library: The Greatest Curiosities of Literature is hot off the Simon & Schuster Ltd press (published October 2020). In it the English author has put together an impressive collection of some of the strangest books ever written and produced. The author’s …

“A compendium of some of the most eccentric books ever written”

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 on real life, as speakers …

““Cancel culture” may be one of the key linguistic trends defining the last decade”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Does joy, by any other name, in another language, still taste as sweet, and fear still sting as bitter?” asks Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D. lecturer in Cultural Psychology, in a recent article for Psychology Today. The article refers to a study published in Science where researchers …

“Cross-cultural variations in the meaning of emotions and challenges in translation, especially when the stakes are high”