Is this taking the whole Star Trek thing a teensie weensie bit too far? d'Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of its life.
Klingon? Not Spanish, French, Mandarin? Not some gutteral genuflecting concoction from the deepest recesses of Borneo? Klingon? You heard it right. (And if you don't know about the Klingon Empire, look it up.)
"I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language," Speers told the Minnesota Daily. "He was definitely starting to learn it."
And get this, Speers says he isn't really a huge Star Trek fan.
We'll take his word for it.
More...http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/11/dinkytown_dad_s.php
Is this taking the... more
The birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
So when Ultralingua, a dictionary, translation and grammar software company in Dinkytown, honored requests from customers to create applications for a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, a self-employed software consultant.
The wail of a newborn may sound the same to the ears of sleep-deprived parents the world over, but according to scientists, that's not the case: Babies cry in the language their parents speak from the first days of life.
An international team of researchers said a study of 60 newborns suggested babies start to learn language in the womb, long before they utter their first coos or babbles -- and their wails can be distinguished according to the mother tongue.
(more very interesting details at link)Excerpt:
The wail of a newborn may sound the same to the ears of sleep-deprived... more
Glasses which 'hear' a foreign language and automatically translate what's being said, before beaming it onto the lens, have been revealed.
NEC say their Tele Scouter glasses will let a wearer see exactly what people around them are saying, even in other languages.
It features a microphone and camera which record foreign languages before converting it to text and running it through a translation computer worn on the wrist.
The translation is them beamed onto a tiny retinal display for the wearer to read what was just said - the entire process happens in a fraction of a second.
Does this mean Brits will just start reading slower and louder?
A spokesperson for NEC said: "Tele Scouter is a real visual images, and type retinal scanning display glasses to view images of different layers do not exist.
"The server and wireless communications center was established to manage the content displayed on the display wearable devices do, and other small cameras, we are comprised of audio equipment such as microphones and earphones."Glasses which 'hear' a foreign language and automatically translate what's being said,... more
"Since it’s debut in 2006, there hasn’t been a more quotable comedy than 30 Rock. Memorable lines include the quacky pronouncements of Dr. Spaceman (“Medicine’s not a science”), Jack Donaghy’s non-compliments (“Lemon, don’t ever say you’re just you, because you’re better than you”), Tracy Jordan’s bizarre endorsements (“I love this cornbread so much, I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant”), Liz Lemon’s grammatical breakdowns (“I want to go to there”), and Tracy’s awesome advice (“Live every week like it’s Shark Week”).
But it’s a trio of terms that are 30 Rock’s most significant linguistic impact, so far: “blurgh,” “lizzing,” and “mind grapes.”
“Blurgh” (sometimes spelled “blergh”) is a synonym for “bleah” and “ugh” that was first used in “Cleveland” (April 19, 2007), a first-season episode featuring four different blurghs, each expressing a slightly different form of revulsion, deflation, or disgust.
On the 30 Rock website, Tina Fey gave some insight into the term on April 26, 2007: “Blurgh is something we say around the writer’s room and also since we’re on network television we can’t curse or anything…sometimes we run out of non-cursing ways of saying things. So we started to make up expletives…feel free to use it!” Folks have done just that—especially on Twitter, the most bountiful home of unselfconscious language use these days:""Since it’s debut in 2006, there hasn’t been a more quotable comedy than 30 Rock.... more
Hoolan made a very helpful post on how to find, download and than put together all your favorite videos in Japanese, obviously this can be used in a ton of other ways but it should be used to help you learn Japanese.
DumbOtaku who has a real passion for verb conjugation gives a lesson which by the end you'll be able to say "I just learnt something awesome!" in Japanese.DumbOtaku who has a real passion for verb conjugation gives a lesson which by the end... more
This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady excitement of the crowd. “The crowd doesn’t have to know,” Mussolini often said. “It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.” Always, he said, be “electric and explosive.” Belief can triumph over knowledge. Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural self-destruction.This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate... more
The need for translations i a big problem today, especially with more people travelling globally than before. This problem is likely to be tackled by the introduction of the Tele Scouter prototype glasses, designed to display language translations by projecting them on to the retina.
The Tele Scouter -- created by technology company NEC -- features a microphone installed on the frame of the glasses, which records the conversation and transmits it to a wearable computer (strapped around the waist). Once the text is translated, it is displayed to the wearer, within their regular focus range, so both the text and individual can be focused on simultaneously.
NEC plans to release a more practical version of the Tele Scouter, for factory workers and sales assistants.....The need for translations i a big problem today, especially with more people... more
Coalition Launches National Campaign Against CNN’s Lou Dobbs
El Semanario de Nuevo México, Interview, Luis F. Sarmiento, Translated by Elena Shore, New America Media, Posted: Oct 17, 2009
Editor's Note: The national campaign "Basta Dobbs" is calling for CNN to remove anchor Lou Dobbs from the air. Campaign cordinator Roberto Lovato traveled to Albuquerque, N.M., to increase awareness about the campaign among Latinos. He was interviewed by Spanish-language newspaper El Seminario de Nuevo México.
Albuquerque, N.M. -- One of the most powerful English-language television networks in the country, CNN, has as one of its star anchors Lou Dobbs, a Harvard graduate in economics, who has a considerable number of viewers among the Anglo community. So far, there would be nothing extraordinary about the personality of the host of "Tonight with Lou Dobbs,” who has received numerous awards for his journalistic work.
read the rest of this article at www.newamericamedia.orgCoalition Launches National Campaign Against CNN’s Lou Dobbs
El Semanario de Nuevo... more
Dictionary.com rolled out the first free dictionary application for BlackBerry today, an app that should improve the quality of business emails and text messages to significant others everywhere.Dictionary.com rolled out the first free dictionary application for BlackBerry today,... more
"So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of "whatever" in conversations.
The popular slacker term of indifference was found "most annoying in conversation" by 47 percent of Americans surveyed in a Marist College poll released Wednesday.
"Whatever" easily beat out "you know," which especially grated a quarter of respondents. The other annoying contenders were "anyway" (at 7 percent), "it is what it is" (11 percent) and "at the end of the day" (2 percent).
"Whatever" -- pronounced "WHAT'-ehv-errr" when exasperated -- is an expression with staying power. Immortalized in song by Nirvana ("oh well, whatever, nevermind") in 1991, popularized by the Valley girls in "Clueless" later that decade, it is still commonly used, often by younger people.
It can be an all-purpose argument-ender or a signal of apathy. And it can really be annoying. The poll found "whatever" to be consistently disliked by Americans regardless of their race, gender, age, income or where they live.
"It doesn't surprise me because 'whatever' is in a special class, probably," said Michael Adams, author of "Slang: The People's Poetry" and an associate professor of English at Indiana University. "It's a word that -- and it depends how a speaker uses it -- can suggest dismissiveness."
Adams, who was not involved in the poll and is not annoyed by "whatever," points out that its use is not always negative. It also can be used in place of other, neutral phrases that have fallen out of favor, like "six of one, half dozen of the other," he said.
But the negative connotation might explain why "whatever" was judged more annoying than the ever-popular "you know," which was recently given a public workout by Caroline Kennedy during her flirtation with the New York U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "You know," Adams notes, is a way for speakers to seek assent from others.
Pollsters at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y. college surveyed 938 U.S. adults by telephone Aug. 3 - Aug 6. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points. The five choices included were chosen by people at the poll discussing what popular words and phrases might be considered especially annoying, said spokeswoman Mary Azzoli.""So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of... more
The great void will be full of the sublime indifference of Whatever, the ghost of a shrug and an everlasting yawn. The boredom of it would kill the most die-hard nihilist, for so much of nihilism is pure talk.
A tiny survey, conducted by an American college with 938 adult Americans, has found that nearly half the people questioned said whatever was the word that got on their nerves the most. Close on its heels came you know, anyway and at the end of the day. What is it about the word that annoys even the Americans? Perhaps it stands for a kind of urban cool that the iPodding, netting, texting, chatting, not-so-bright young thing has perfected to a First World stereotype: a bored and sullen teen shading into a virtual, chat-engine avatar, indifferent to the pleasures and responsibilities of nuanced verbal communication. The link with America and the First World is only historical. Whatever rules the world. A Singaporean soft drink is called Whatever (the other brand is called Anything), and Oasis has a song called “Whatever”, which goes, “I’m free to be whatever I/ Whatever I choose… I’m free to say whatever I/ Whatever I like…”
Another little survey, also made in the West, is relevant here. Among finalists in genetics at London’s Imperial College, the British students were found to make three times as many errors in their English compared to their overseas classmates from China, Singapore and Indonesia (surprisingly, there seems to have been no Indian in that class). This is a different bracket of youngsters, more Facebook than iPod, more expensively educated and among the toppers in their specialist subjects (usually in the sciences or technology), but their language skills woefully inadequate. Perhaps this has got more to do with modes of competitiveness in the global higher-education scenario, and in the way English becomes the primary vehicle of such competition. For native speakers, English is the language in which they make themselves understood to one another, primarily in conversation or through means in which the niceties of spelling, grammar or vocabulary do not matter. But for overseas students in the Anglophone West, good English is a matter of survival and, increasingly in Britain, of integration. They cannot afford to shrug it all off with the hated W-word. Whatever is still not Whoever.The great void will be full of the sublime indifference of Whatever, the ghost of a... more
I find it unbelievable that a common phrase (that was used way before it was the title of any book) can be trademarked. We’re not talking about the names of products … we’re talking about the English language. You know, the words many of us use for such things as … talking, and writing, and general communication? Perhaps I’m a little behind the times, but is it really possible to claim whole chunks of the language, and force people to get permission to use the language, just in everyday speech?I find it unbelievable that a common phrase (that was used way before it was the title... more
Like many Native Americans around the U.S., elders in the Warm Springs tribe want to pass along language as part of their rich culture.Like many Native Americans around the U.S., elders in the Warm Springs tribe want to... more
Nou Refel Anko (we've done it again) or in French (on l'a encore fait) by C-PROJECTS also known as FAMILY SENCI produced by Play Entertainment Inc., this is a music video performed in Creole and it's Hip-Hop music, the genre is Rap Creole, it's new from Haiti and it's hot for the Hip-Hop Industry, please vote if you like it or love it.Nou Refel Anko (we've done it again) or in French (on l'a encore fait) by C-PROJECTS... more
