Author Archive
Language is a human right: A printable English primer for US Spanish-speakers
In all the hullaballoo lately about the democratization of foreign language education through the internet, one issue that tends to get left by the wayside is: What happens if you want – or really need – to learn a language but don’t have access to a computer?
Under the banner of “Language is a Human Right”, [...]
Pirahã meet the crooked heads… and don’t care: Everett’s book challenges the Universal Grammar theory
Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, referred to it as “a bomb thrown into the party”. The bomb? The discovery by Christian-missionary-cum-Linguistics-chair Daniel Everett of a group, the Pirahã, deep in the Amazon, whose language seems to eschew the grammatical use of “recursions”. What kind of party is that then, you ask? It’s a academio-linguistic [...]
Opening up your ears and letting it make sense: Interview with Berlin novelist Anna Winger
Anna Winger, novelist, photographer, mother and all-around Berlin renaissance woman, talked to Babbel Blog about her recent novel “This Must be the Place”, writing between languages, multi-lingual motherhood, and her new US National Public Radio series “Berlin Stories”. She will be doing a live reading at 9:30 pm on November 26th at Kaffee Burger in [...]
¡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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
How do you say “body language” in Spanish? Debate does not provide the answer
Maybe too cowed to weed out the actual message(s) from last night’s American presidential debate, the media’s now wringing their hands over “body language“. Once again, more than what Senators Barack Obama and John McCain said, it’s how they said it. A nice bear hug at the end deflected the damage of McCain pointing and [...]
Of words, wudz, dialects and accents: The “man of a thousand voices” speaks in tongues
Actor/dialect coach Robert Easton as the Klingon Judge in Star Trek VI
Click here to hear the interview with the dialect coach Robert Easton (mp3 – right click to download)
Robert Easton has been working in Hollywood and all over the world for over 42 years “strengthening dialects” and “curing accents”. Ever wonder how Al Pacino [...]
Palin(drome) goes back and forth
According to a mysterious “language monitoring service” cited by CNN, Sarah Palin , the American Republican vice presidential candidate, spoke at a tenth grade level (due to her astute use of “passive deflections”) at last week’s debate, while her Democratic counterpart Joe Biden managed only to graduate from the 8th. The analysis however championed form [...]
