Source: readwriteweb.com
Previously Google used the Systran translation engine for most of their translations. However, they have switched to using their own in house engine for all language translations now. The Babelfish service at altavista still uses the Systran engine.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
Should English class teach students a great love of literature or critical literacy? Who's behind all of this 'ideological posturing'? Politics is always in the classroom and columnist Miranda Devine believes that the English culture wars will continue...
No one is listening to me out there. The most atrocious story I have printed yet and not one person comments.
Source: Australian News Network
What is the cost of monolingualism? There are many more people in the world who are bilingual or multilingual, yet the assumed dominance of monolingualism underlies several popular language fallacies...
Source: nature.com
Both papers were written by teams with evolutionary biology backgrounds, and both call attention to the similarities between language change and the evolution of species. Leiberman even refers to early English as a "primordial soup" of verb forms in his paper.
Source: The Globe and Mail
The OED is cleaning up their act when it comes to hyphenation. Neat, it's funny to think that so many really smart people spend so much time thinking about these things so that you and I don't have to. :)
I've been reading some weird stuff lately. After doing Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy on Celestina's recommendation I picked up a few of his other books.
Source: The New York Times
The parents of Damion Frye's ninth-grade students are spending their evenings this fall doing something they thought they had left behind long ago: homework. -- I don't think I'd get the same kind of support this teacher gets from my administration, but it would be nice.
Source:
Breathtaking CariDee English, Cycle 7 winner of America's Next Top Model, is set to guest star on the hit CW show Gossip Girl this November. Cari is rumored to be playing the girlfriend of an older man.. but who knows what that means in TV land. The full story is here
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
Whether it's about God or the pangs of earthly love, the poetry of Rumi is often startlingly modern, partly due to those who have translated his poems from 13th century Persian into many of the world's languages.
Source: Plastic
Back in 1994, after the Hutu majority in Rwanda murdered 800,000 Tutsis, a Tutsi rebel group swept into the country from Uganda and took power.
Source: Australian News Network
Brownie Doolan's position as the lone speaker of a native tongue is not unique in central and northern Australia, which has just been declared the most linguistically endangered area in the world...
Source: Science Daily
A lot of money goes into thinking up just the right brand names. Product names with vowel sounds that convey positive attributes are deemed more favourable by consumers...
Source: On The Hill
A group of Republican senators and a pro-English advocacy group, citing a decade-old federal commission, are calling on President Bush to promote the English language among immigrants to the United States.
George Frederick Handel 1685-1759 Born in Germany, but educated in Italy, Handel showed many musical talents as a small child. When he finally made it to the height of his success in his career centralized in England.
Source: Independent.co.uk
When dolphins or eagles become extinct, people can get sentimental and mourn their passing but the death of a language is an unnoticed event, despite the fact it's happening more frequently, with one language being killed off every fortnight.
Source: The Age
Which President would win a Spelling Bee? Who can pronounce Mauritania and Kyrgyzstan and Ahmadinejad and the names of Presidents and Prime Ministers across the world?
Nudiustertian, I read about the Zabernism by President Bush. posted on Newsvine, about how he was full of Phenakism and was a Pronk or a Nihilarian. Recently on Newsvine there have been many stories that adopt floccinaucinihilipilification of other people's opinions.
Source:
11. Nudiustertian The day before yesterday 12. Phenakism Deception or trickery 13. Pronk A weak or foolish person 14. Pulveratricious Covered with dust 15. Rastaquouere A social climber
Source: Reuters
About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.
Source: The New York Times
Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.
Source: The Age
It has taken decades of struggle, but more than half a century after the British left India, standard English has finally followed. Young and educated Indians regard the desire to speak English as it is spoken in England as a silly hang-up from a bygone era.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
There are too many weasel words sucking the life out of the English language...
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
Learning an Aboriginal language - in addition to English - will become compulsory in schools with large indigenous populations under a State Government strategy to improve Aboriginal retention rates and literacy standards.
Source: The Times
Gordon Brown is ruling that medium-skilled migrants from outside the EU must speak and understand English. The highly skilled already have to; the unskilled, it seems, may remain uncomprehending.