The language that gave English the words dingo and boomerang has been extinct for more than a century. But that’s not stopping one Australian school from teaching it. A better known language that refuses to die, Latin, lives on in the dummy texts of book and web designers. But who wrote the most famous Latin [...]
Entries from April 2009
April 24, 2009
New pod: The CIA’s foreign language deficit, a linguistic fantasy island, and learning Hawaiian in song
Add this to the CIA’s troubles: the agency is nowhere near multilingual enough. Despite urging from Congress and the 9/11 Commission, the CIA remains overwhelmingly English-only. Also, what Hollywood might make of one linguist’s social experiment: Derek Bickerton proposed marooning six families who spoke mutually incomprehensible languages on an uninhabitated island to see if they [...]
April 21, 2009
New podcast: Obama’s pirate talk, why you shoudn’t criticize Thailand’s king, and silly British pub names
In the political chaos that is Thailand today, there’s one thing that most Thais agree on: their king is untouchable.Now, the Thai government is using its lèse majesté law to prosecute anyone who criticizes the monarch. Also this week, recordings of American poets are added to a British archive, British pubs are being given [...]
April 10, 2009
A verbless North Korean song, the DMZ linguistic divide, and Obama learns a little Hungarian
Live! From the hermit kingdom! Yes, it’s a North Korea special. The Korean language, like everything else on the peninsula has split into two. Our report from inside North Korea features a song whose lyrics fixate on one thing: food. Then we take a look at the linguistic challenges facing North Korean refugees in South [...]
April 3, 2009
pod #48: The meaning of yoga
To most people in the west, yoga means…yoga. No translation necessarily. It is a naturalized foreign word, and as with many foreign terms, we appropriate it, and quickly forget – if we ever knew in the first place – what it actually means. A new film, Enlighten Up! explores yoga’s many meanings and manifestations in [...]
