This week in languages: September 16, 2016

09/09/2016–16/09/2016

Headlines

Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories about the arbitrariness of the relationship between signals (words) and the signified (the concepts the words represent) may not be as universal as we thought, a new study shows. The word for ‘nose’ across languages is likely to contain an ‘n’ (or other nasal sound), the words for mother and father are likely to contain /m/ and /p/ (or /b/) respectively, etc. Read a summary and the key implications of the research in Sarah Kaplan’s article in The Washington Post.

Over in the US, recipients of the 2016 National Student Poets accolade were invited to the White House to share their poetry with First Lady Michelle Obama and the American public. Two of the recipients, Maya Eashwaran and Gopal Raman, both aged 17, shared poems about losing their mother tongue to the English language, from the point of view of Tamil Americans. Watch their poetry recital. “I have lost more than I have ever lost in sixteen years. I have started shedding ethnicity like hair: Mother, I fear I’ll go bald”, recited Maya Eashwaran.

A compendium of fieldwork in the domain of “Language and Migration” is now available for public perusal by Language on the Move. Ingrid Piller investigates the how the migratory nature of humans has affected their linguistic lifestyles. Check out the book’s table of contents and editorial introduction here.

Singaporeans celebrated the week of the Mid-Autumn Festival with mooncakes and also the news that char kway teow has made it to the Oxford English Dictionary! Apart from food terms, dozens of other Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English) terms have made their mark in the online versions of the OED. As September is the month of author Roald Dahl’s centenary, the OED has also paid homage by including some ‘Dahlesque’ words such as scrumdiddlyumptious, reported Channel News Asia.

Commentaries and Features

We all know—and probably use—the language learning app Duolingo. But what’s the story behind the app and its success with 150 million over users? Duolingo was the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, who grew up in Guatemala where proficiency in English could easily double one’s salary. But without the wherewithal, that goal was out of reach for many people there, leaving them socially immobile. That’s why Luis, an associate professor of computer sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, made sure the app could be accessible to anyone with an internet connection, for free. Forever.

Daniel Hahn writes an evocative piece lamenting the lack of newer translations of children’s stories into English. While many English-speaking children grew up with The Brothers Grimm, Moomins, Tintin, Asterix, and The Little Prince, “the dearth of translations today narrows our literary horizons”, Hahn says.

Married to a Frenchman whose name she couldn’t (at first) pronounce, Lauren Collins, in her new book When in French: Love in a Second Language explores what it’s like to fall in love, pick up a second language, and master it. Read NPR‘s review here.

The Supreme Court in Pakistan has ordered the use of Urdu in place of English—the language of its British colonialists—in the government. However, Arthur Dudney wonders at the Eurocentricity of the notion of the function of a nation-state and surveys the linguistic situation in Pakistan for The Conversation.

Could the period in which wheat and barley were first introduced to South India mark the first encounter between the Vaduku language and Indo-Aryan ones? Times of India profiles the Vaduku language and its historical interaction with other regional languages.