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For those familiar with Anki, you may be interested in Memrise, a spaced repetition system tool that helps users memorize vocabulary in different languages. Word associations and spanned testing reminders are used to facilitate vocabulary recognition and recall. The choice of languages is huge, from Mandarin (narrated by a very sultry-sounding woman) to French and Cherokee (beta mode.)
The learning process is visualized as a plant, so that when a new word is introduced a seed is planted in both your brain and a browser-based greenhouse. To water your seedlings, your memory is tested for the meaning of the word between spaced intervals. Depending on how well you do and how often you visit, your plants may either wither or grow, eventually graduating from greenhouse to garden. Memrise’s sleek web design and enjoyable interface has got me hooked. Besides that–I hate to see my plants die.
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Today is Presidents Day in the US, and it is UNESCO International Mother Language Day everywhere. This is a day to celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism, and to learn about the world’s languages. National Geographic has an interactive world map highlighting areas where languages are in danger of dying out, as part of their Enduring Voices Project. As it is now, one of the world’s 7,000 languages is gone for good an average of every two weeks.
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.
Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.
Hear New Year greetings in languages used all over the world. WojtekNYC assembled this with help from friends at Columbia University and the International House. If you can contribute any translation as to what was said, please leave them in the comments. -via The High Definite
The Economist has an article about how languages can be said to be, comparatively speaking, more or less complex. The grand prize for most complex language goes to one in the Amazon:
With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.
Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Image: NASA
Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall created this map using the relative size of regions to express how many languages they have produced. Papua New Guinea is quite a linguistic superpower. Aaron Hotfelder explains why:
Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups’ languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.
Since the early days of Internet history, web addresses have only been available in languages that used the Latin alphabet, such as English and French. But on Friday, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — an organization that provides international oversight for the Internet — agreed to allow web addresses with non-Latin characters. Anick Jesdanun writes for the Associated Press:
The result clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.
“This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s CEO, said ahead of the vote.
Link | Photo: NASA
