The evolution of language FROM The Economist

"If Dr Dunn is correct, that leaves Dr Chomsky’s ideas in tatters, and raises questions about the very existence of a language organ."

Science invades the humanities FROM The Economist

            "What is more, by the time they did make it into the dictionary, they were becoming obsolete."

Jay Walker on the world's English mania FROM Ted Talk [very short]

What other languages is the written California driver license available in?

The California Department of Motor Vehicles answers as follows:

"Besides English, the basic Class C written driver license exam is also available in the following languages:

Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Cambodian, Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Persian/Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Spanish, Tagalog/Filipino, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, and Vietnamese."

Why ‘English Only’ Will Get the OK in Oklahoma By Tony Dokoupil FROM Newsweek

" Critics, of course, allege xenophobia. But Tim -Schultz, of the advocacy group U.S. English, says these measures promote unity."

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) AND Arabic script website addresses

ICANN is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation which, according to its website, assures unique website addresses:

"That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet."

ICANN's recent decision allowed for three Arabic countries to start using an alphabet other than the traditionally used Roman alphabet in website addresses. Click on the link above and you should see:

 http://blog.icann.org/2010/05/أسماء-النطاقات-الدولية-الأولى/

Language after stroke by Julian Siddle FROM BBC Learning English

"He says brain imaging techniques show tonal languages, such as Chinese, make more use of the right side of the brain, whereas the processing for Latin based languages, such as English, tends to occur in the left side. "

White House Challenges Translation Industry to Innovate By Damian Joseph FROM BusinessWeek

"But there is progress. Companies have combined the power of humans and computers to simultaneously double the speed of translation and nearly halve its cost."

The Philippines and the English language FROM The Economist

"Three decades of decline in the share of Filipinos who speak the language, and the deteriorating proficiency of those who can manage some English, have eroded one of the country’s advantages in the global economy."

Scientists discover oldest words in the English language, predict which ones are likely to disappear FROM Physorg.com

"Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What's more, words like 'squeeze', 'guts', 'stick', 'throw' and 'dirty' look like they are heading for history's dustbin - along with a host of others."

More German students learning English FROM The Local

"Although the EU has 27 member states, it has 23 official languages and 3 different alphabets.

'Multilingualism is an issue for all of European society. It starts in school and goes much further, as we need to master an increasing number of languages to foster social cohesion and prosperity,' European Commissioner for Multilingualism Leonard Orban said in a statement.

German students are required to start learning English at the age of about 9, and can begin taking a third language later in their educational career. In comparison, students in Ireland and Scotland aren’t required to take a foreign language at all, according to Eurydice.

But the agency noted that most pupils in those areas learn a second language anyway. It didn’t count Irish or other rare and local tongues such as Welsh as a foreign language.

The study also showed that kids are learning languages at an earlier age. Children in Spain will begin learning a second language at the age of three beginning in 2009, while pupils in Portugal can begin taking English at the age of six.

After English, German and French are the two most popular foreign languages chosen by European students."

Transorming pictograms into a syllabic script (about 23rd century B.C.)

FROM The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, by Michael Mann

"Akkadian was an inflected language, conveying part of its meaning by tone and pitch. The Akkadians conquered a literate people whose pictograms generally represented physical objects rather than sounds. But they were more interested in developing phonetic writing. The fusion of the Akkadian language and Sumerian literacy resulted in a simplified script, which helped transform pictograms into a syllabic script. The existence of fewer characters was a boon to the diffusion of literacy. Akkadian's advantage over other Middle Eastern languages was so great that in the mid-second millenium, even after papyrus was replacing the clay tablet, it became the main international language of diplomacy and trade." [p. 152]

Expert: New 'must learn' language likely to be Mandarin FROM CNN

"The world faces a future of people speaking more than one language, with English no longer seen as likely to become dominant, a British language expert says in a new analysis."

Split imperils Mexican language FROM BBC

"An indigenous language in southern Mexico is in danger of disappearing because its last two speakers have stopped talking to one another."

A quote about European polyglot polities by Benedict Anderson

"As observed earlier, the major states of nineteenth-century Europe were vast polyglot polities, of which the boundaries almost never coincided with language-communities. Most of their literate members had inherited from mediaeval times the habit of thinking of certain languages -- if no longer Latin, then French, English Spanish or German -- as languages of civilization. Rich eighteenth-century Dutch burghers were proud to speak only French at home; German was the language of cultivation in much of the western Czarist [Russian] empire, no less than in 'Czech' Bohemia. Until late in the eighteenth century no one thought of these languages as belonging to any territorially defined group." [Imagined Communities, p. 196]

A quote about the Vietnamese script

FROM Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

"Quốc Ngữ, a romanized phonetic script originally devised by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, and adopted by the authorities [the French] for use in 'Cochin China' as early as the 1860s, was consciously promoted to break the links with China -- and perhaps also with the indigenous past -- by making dynastic records and ancient literatures inaccessible to a new generation of colonized Vietnamese." [p.126, footnotes omitted]

Young Britons shy away from learning languages by Tom Burridge FROM BBC

"The British Government found that 58 percent of 11-18 year olds in the UK do NOT speak a second language. However two thirds of teenagers in Britain want to work abroad when they're older - the countries of choice being Italy, Spain, France or China. The British Government admits there is a problem - that not enough young people continue learning a second language when they leave school. Teresa Tinley from the country's national centre of languages says it has big implications for the economy. . . "

Immigrants Should Learn English (Pro and Con) FROM BusinessWeek

CON
America was founded on the principle of fairness, of giving everyone a chance to make his or her own way in life—not on language skills. Immigrants who have fulfilled all the other requirements (good moral character, knowledge of U.S. civics and history, five years’ residency) should, like the ancestors of everyone in this country who is not a Native American, be allowed to become a U.S. citizen without fulfilling a stringent language requirement.

How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand by Michael Erard FROM Wired

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

Dyslexia Differs by Language by Randolph E. Schmid FROM Associated Press

April 8, 2008 -- Dyslexia affects different parts of children's brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.

"This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics' brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese," said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. "Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia."