Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Nick Moon, linguist @cApStAn When I was seven, my family and I moved to Somerset. Three hours west of London, but light years away in terms of pace of life. And apparently language. At the end of my first day of school, I was told by my teacher to bring my daps in the …

“cApStAn linguist Nick Moon teaches us how to speak “roight proper Zummerzet””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Tim Berners-Lee, credited with the invention of the world wide web, has joined forces with entrepreneur John Bruce to create a company called “Inrupt”, the aim of which is to “bring resources, process and appropriate skills” to promote the adoption of the long-running Solid decentralised …

“Restoring ownership of user data to users”

by Danina Lupsa – Translation technologist and translation project manager @ cApStAn On September 30, my young colleagues and I woke up to discover a Facebook post from our company on a topic we had never heard about: International Translation Day. It was the perfect occasion for young translation studies graduates, senior translators and language …

“International Translation Day celebrates the key role of translators in connecting the world. Time now to give the profession a legal protection”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village At the recent TAUS webinar on “geo-linguistic shifts” two leading experts in the field, Lane Green and Nicholas Ostler (see bios below), discussed whether machine translation could one day replace English as the world’s “lingua franca”. The first TAUS debate on this topic between Green …

“Is machine translation taking over from English as the global communication language?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Mandarin Chinese comprises around 370,000 words, more than double the number of words in the Oxford English dictionary, and almost three times those in French and Russian dictionaries. “Reci”, literally translated as “hot words” are new terms that young Chinese are inventing and using online …

“When the evolution of a language is driven by political dissent: the example of Chinese “hot” words”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A thought-provoking title for the keynote address by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent “International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media”. The workshop, which took place at Stanford University, USA, on June 25, brought together computer and social science researchers and practitioners from …

““Emoji are Great and/or They will Destroy the World””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village This is the opinion of the Accademia della Crusca, the Italian institution dedicated to the study and promotion of the Italian language. Its President, Claudio Marazzini, in a recent radio interview, lamented the fact that English is increasingly being used not only in the press and …

“Could the excessive use of foreign “loanwords” represent a threat to democracy?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Self defined “word geek” Paul Anthony Jones has put together a delightful compendium of forgotten English words, one for each day of the year, in his book “The cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities”. Notable examples include “beard-second” (measure of time, calculated how long a beard grows …

“Scurryfunge, frowst and hunch-weather – unused words now being rescued from obscurity”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emojis are becoming increasingly popular worldwide and it is estimated that 92% of the online population is using them. Recent statistics from Facebook about the Messenger platform alone put the daily number of emojis sent as 5 billion. There is an emoji real time tracker …

“Emojis, a “developing language”?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Is it still acceptable, in a world which is increasingly connected, mobile and multicultural, to only speak one language? Fabrice Jaumont*, author of the “The Bilingual Revolution, the Future of Education is in Two Languages”, opened his keynote speech at the US Language Advocacy Day …

“Is monolingualism “the illiteracy of the 21st Century”?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Translators play a key role in making world literature accessible to all but are not always given the recognition they deserve. Many publishers, for example, do not give credit to them on the covers of books. Translators say that this renders their work invisible and …

“‘At the Vanguard of Literary Change’”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village French author Georges Perec imposed upon himself this amazing linguistic and intellectual challenge when writing La Disparition, published in 1969. The novel is written in “lipogrammatic” style; a “lipogram” is a literary work in which one compels oneself strictly to exclude one or several letters …

“Literary acrobatics: a 300 page novel without a single “E” in it”