Archive for October, 2008
Lost your alphabet? Korean is up for grabs
Apparently there are people who lack any alphabet for their spoken language. You find such groups for example on some of the 10.000 islands of Indonesia - that’s what linguists from South Korea are reporting. But these minorities are ready to embrace “Hunminjeonguem” -nowdays called “Hangeul” - the Korean alphabet, researchers found out.
The aphabet was [...]
¡Sube, sube! Or rather, baja!: Zune to become Univisión’s exclusive digital music provider
Zune, microsoft’s candy-colored answer to the ipod and itunes, has recently put their cards on the US Latin music industry by signing a pact with Univisión to become their exclusive online music download provider. Univisión is a New York based Spanish-language TV station broadcasting in the US and Puerto Rico, with one of the more [...]
Voting from Spanish to Yup’ik: Rights for language minorities in the US presidential elections
Bryan Sells, an attorney with the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) spoke to Babbel Blog about the legal provisions made to facilitate voting for non- or limited- English speakers in United States, especially in light of the upcoming US presidential election .
Click here to hear the interview with Bryan [...]
Some lists and it’s dialects again
They couldn’t find one, and so they simply made their own list of the “Top 100 Language Blogs” . That’s how the people over at LexioPhiles explained their motivation for searching through 300 blogs, sorting them by “three main categories: content, consistency and interactivity”. They also made some lists about language Podcasts, most spoken languages [...]
“The words should roll out of the mouth” - On the dubbing of “The Wire” in German
For the original interview in German click here.
Frank Schröder is one of the two authors of the German dubbing of the acclaimed television series “the Wire”. In an interview with Babbel Blog, he speaks about the difficulties of translating the dialogue-rich series, which portrays the day to day goings-on of the police and drug dealing [...]
“Die Worte sollen aus dem Mund purzeln” - Über die Synchronisation der Serie “The Wire” ins Deutsche
For the English translation click here.
Frank Schröder ist einer der beiden Autoren der deutschen Synchronfassung der vielgelobten US-Serie „The Wire“. Im Interview mit dem Babbel-Blog spricht er über die Schwierigkeiten bei der Übersetzung der dialogreichen Serie, die den Alltag von Polizisten und dem Drogendealermilieu in Baltimore schildert. Sie läuft seit September im deutschen Pay-TV. Schröder [...]
No judgements: Global Language Monitor tracks political buzzwords, filters through Obamarama and surges out of the quagmire
After posting last week about the CNN story proclaiming that Sarah Palin spoke at a higher grade level than Joe Biden, I was curious about the organization that made this assessment, and what they thought it meant. Now that curiosity has brought Babbel Blog together with Paul JJ Payack of Global Language Monitor to [...]
Maps: 1,000 dialects and 6,912 living languages
Last week we had Mara interviewing the Dialect Doctor, who claims to cure accents and strengthen dialects. Well, now here is databank of roughly nearly 1,000 speech samples: Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph; the recordings are collected and listenable over at the speech accent archive. [...]
Sex, drugs and gobbledigook: Sigur Rós and RjDj emote in “musilanguage”
According to evolutionary musicology, “Musilanguage” is a proto-linguistic form of communication somewhere in between, on the one hand, emotive grunting/cooing/moaning/what-have-you, and then on the other, semantically/ symbolically appropriate but sonically arbitrary sounds that convey meaning (i.e. words). As most things are when it comes down to it, this particular concept is about gettin’ busy.
There goes another myth: Children aren’t “sponges”
It’s not just the free-market myth that’s crumbling these days: Anne Sodermann, Michigan State University professor emeritus of Family and Child, spent some hundred hours in a bilingual Mandarin-English Kindergarten in Bejing. In a recent study (Powerpoint-presentation here), watching 3 to 6 year old children from 16 nationalities, she came to a surprising conclusion: “There’s [...]
