Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The members of the Académie française are referred to as “the Immortals”. Many French-speaking linguists who respect the talent and authority of the Académie and use Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française will occasionally refer to the Immortals as “dinosaurs”, says our CEO Steve Dept, himself …

“Should the “Académie française” continue to safeguard the French language’s antiquated purity or try to instill new life into it?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Publishers around the world are reporting booming sales of “The Plague” (La Peste), an allegorical tale set in a town at the mercy of an epidemic, written by French Nobel prize writer Albert Camus in 1947. Penguin is rushing through a reprint of its English translation …

“New English version of Camus’ “The Plague” during Covid-19: how historical context can affect translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Much has been said and written about Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language, but the video narrated by British philosopher and author Alain de Botton provides a fresh and playful take on his complex background, life, philosophy, and vision of language. The narrator says …

“Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language made simple – and fun – by philosopher Alain de Botton”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The French film Les traducteurs (The Translators) premiered last year in November at the French Film Festival in Prague. The plot follows a group of nine talented polyglots charged with translating the third installment of a fictitious Daedalus trilogy, a series of novels that, with …

““Literary lockdown”: how the translation of a novel by a best selling author made for a thriller film plot”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion of new words and phrases, both in English and in other languages. We have written about the new lexicon, and how it is helping people to make sense of the changes in our lives, in three recent …

“Beyond the battle, far from the frontline: a call from linguists for non-war-related ways of talking about Covid-19”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Neologisms related to the coronavirus pandemic are spreading so fast that it is hard to keep up and our article on this topic  of March 25 is already out of date! We have picked up some new terms here and there from different sources in …

“Elephant in the zoom, Le Creuset wrist, and cough-shaming: how Covid lingo is creeping into our every day language”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Multiples”, is an anthology of multiple translations edited by world-acclaimed British novelist Adam Thirlwell and published in 2013. Thirlwell chose 12 stories, written in Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Arabic, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Italian, Hungarian and English, and asked the sixty-one writers who accepted to take …

““Multiples”, 12 short stories in 18 languages by 61 authors, a captivating experiment in translated literature”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village 35-year old rapper Mikkâl Antti Morottaj,  aka Amoc, is quite a celebrity in his home country, Finland. He says that through his music he is doing his part in helping to preserve the language and culture of the endangered Inari Sámi language, estimated to have only …

“How rap and Frozen2 are helping revive the endangered Sami languages”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A mitraillette (French word for machine gun) is a type of sandwich commonly served at friteries and cafés in Belgium. The food editor of Taste Atlas says that the name comes from the fact that the baguette bread, on account of its elongated shape, can metaphorically …

“The odd semantics of Belgium’s machine gun (mitraillette) sandwiches, aka américains”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), was a writer, journalist, art critic, art dealer and publisher who “shook up the world of literature” in the early 1900s by inventing a new literary genre: the “news in three lines.” (1) Fénéon was employed by the the French daily Le …

“Félix Fénéon’s three-line “nouvelles”, an experiment in haiku journalism and insightful snapshot of life in the “Belle Epoque””

by Roberta Lizzi – Senior project manager, external human resources director @cApStAn In the framework of an international assessment study, PISA, some years ago I was asked to verify the Italian version of the Home Questionnaire, aimed at collecting background information about the parents of the tested students. One of the questions asked which language(s) …

“What makes a language a language?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Tired of the corona infodemic and endless doomscrolling? Take a break, join a covideoparty and chill out with a quarantini …🍸 New words and phrases such as these are popping up practically every day, not to mention the thousands of memes, puns, jokes and videos …

“The new forms of living, working and socializing during the current pandemic have engendered a crop of neologisms”