Archive for Languages
A video about how to pronounce the original Finnish names of many of the Moomin characters. (12-min video, from August, 2022; from @KatChatsFinnish, a channel intended as a resource for English speakers who are learning Finnish.) If I understood right, the person who made the video doesn’t know some of the characters’ English names; at […]
The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship site has the look of a site from the 1990s or so, but it’s still active. The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship (E.L.F.) is an international organization devoted to the scholarly study of the invented languages of J.R.R. Tolkien. The primary activity of the E.L.F. is carried out in the pages of its […]
According to Wikipedia: Yan Tan Tethera […] is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in most of Northern England by the sixth century, but they were commonly used for […]
Interesting NPR article about various ways to pronounce Uvalde, and about language as a “signifier of race” and identity, and about power structures and anglicization, and respecting how people say their own town’s name, and more. Content warning for descriptions of people having been punished for speaking Spanish. Here’s a quote, though there’s lots more […]
Every time I see another article breathlessly announcing a new high-tech glove that will “translate” American Sign Language into English, I wonder what that really means, but I’ve neglected to follow up with research. A 2017 article from the Atlantic, “Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People,” answers my questions; it turns out that all […]
I recently read a couple articles on how to identify many languages by how they are written. Harbeck offers good, often cheeky mnemonics for recognizing languages based on Roman lettering (Western and European languages), as well as Asian, Middle Eastern, Cyrillic, and North African languages. Helpful, although I would like to see tips for identifying […]
The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) have published a New York City map that denotes languages and dialects (e.g., Sindhi, Ilokano, Ojibwe, etc.) to specific regions within the five Boroughs. The map in the middle of the page is zoomable, but not to a really high resolution (street and block level). They are currently working on an […]
From Howard Waldrop’s afterword to his story “The Effects of Alienation”: [Peter Lorre] arrived in England knowing three words of English: Milk, Hamburger, Yes. He got his first job with Hitchcock because someone told him Hitch liked to tell long boring shaggy-dog stories. Lorre went up, shook his hand, watched Hitchcock's lips move for five […]
I just read/skimmed a story from 1983—“Cryptic,” by Jack McDevitt—in which the protagonist has come across a radio signal that seems to include “sixty-one distinct pulse patterns, which was to say, sixty-one characters.” The protagonist consults the only linguist he knows, who says, among other things: “Sixty-one letters seems a trifle much.” And goes on […]
I’ve long been fascinated by writing systems across languages and history. Languages, whether written or spoken, sometimes remind me of living organisms: Over time they not only change and adapt, but can become endangered and extinct. To reduce the chances of language extinction, the Endangered Alphabets Project aims to play an active role in preserving […]