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Why Can’t Everyone Speak the Same Language?
1–2 minutesOur kids have fallen in love with listening to podcasts at bedtime. In fact, they’ve become an essential part of our evening routine. Bathe, brush your teeth, grab your blanky, and cuddle up with digital transmissions of audible education. Vermont Public Radio’s But Why: A Podcast For Curious Kids is one at the top of our list, alongside Brains On and Wow in the World. These are some of the best podcasts for kids. Seeing as language and all things linguistical are quite close to our hearts, we were delighted when But Why took time to respond to the question,…
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Twas The Night Before Christmas (Linguists’ Version)
2–3 minutesTwas The Night Before Christmas (Linguists’ Version) by Dr. Dave Sayers https://www.academia.edu/9856733 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license) Twas the night before Christmas in the ivory tower, Not a creature was stirring at the midnight hour, Twas a problem for linguists who live to hear sounds, Consonants, vowels (open or round). We linguists were nestled all snug in our beds, While visions of fricatives danced in our heads. Snug in our gowns and our four-cornered caps, We pondered enigmas like bilabial taps. When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter. I sprang from the bed hoping for research matter. Away…
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Celebrating Good Times
1–2 minutesMoments ago songs of celebration and thanksgiving rang out in our branch auditorium where earlier today we held the closing ceremony for the third and final part in a series of new translator workshops designed based on orality and resulting in a preliminary draft of the book of Ruth. Participants from four different languages of Cameroon took part in what we can be described as enriching and capacity-building first steps towards translating the Bible into their “treasure language.” Watch the video and celebrate with us. 💃
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20 Fascinating Language Facts
3–5 minutesWhether it’s spoken, written, or signed, all people communicate. Here are twenty fascinating facts about human language culled from the inaugural edition of the new academic journal, the Journal of Language Evolution. Only spoken and signed languages have native speakers although whistled and drummed languages exist–communicating messages by whistling and drumming, respectively. All known whistled and drummed languages are based on spoken language. There are approximately 6,500 attested spoken languages that are mutually unintelligible–meaning that if you speak language A and I speak language B, we will not understand each other. As of 2015, the whole world has been surveyed for spoken languages.…