'On Language' Archive
Slogan puts Bulls in the thick of it
Thursday, September 30th, 2004
The Chicago Bulls’ slogan for their current season-ticket campaign is “Through Thick and Thin!”
Apprentices learn ancestral tongues
Thursday, September 23rd, 2004
The death of a language, the late linguist Ken Hale said, is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre. Every time a language dies out, “you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art.”
Preventing these cultural catastrophes in California is the work of Leanne Hinton, Hale’s co-editor of “The Green Book of Language Revitalization [...]
Expectant parents form bonds through ‘belly talk’
Thursday, September 9th, 2004
Everyone knows how parents talk to their babies, using the childlike syllables and sentences we call “baby talk.”
But one researcher is studying how parents talk to the baby before it is born. Sallie Han, a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, has a name for the attempts [...]
Bilingual writers reflect on their ‘Mother Tongues’
Thursday, September 2nd, 2004
Learning a new language means more than memorizing a new vocabulary and mastering different rules of grammar. It also means adopting a new way of matching words to experience and memory, as “The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues” (Pantheon, $23) illustrates.
This collection of essays by bilingual authors—most of them immigrants [...]
Fact or fiction? ‘Solecism’ history sounds Greek to me
Thursday, August 19th, 2004
The Word of the Day that turned up in my e-mail inbox was “solecism,” meaning a breach of grammar or etiquette. It comes from the Greek word “soloikismos,” for “speaking incorrectly.”
I learned this from Merriam-Webster’s free service for word buffs; you can sign up at www.m-w.com, but I warn you, it launches endless etymological expeditions.
Here’s [...]
Besides jobs, U.S. accents also being exported to India
Thursday, July 8th, 2004
With the outsourcing of American jobs comes the exporting of American accents. In Bangalore, India—the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent—the booming customer service call center industry depends on coaching Indian workers to talk like they’re from Wisconsin. Sort of.
The process is called “accent neutralization.” But in reality, trainers are out to transform, not just tweak, [...]
Rico the dog’s vocabulary restarts linguists’ debate
Thursday, July 1st, 2004
One thing everyone agrees on: Rico is one special dog.
Researchers in Germany spotted Rico on a TV game show and brought him in for tests. What they found, the journal Science reported last month, was that the brilliant border collie seemed to recognize more than 200 German words. That kind of vocabulary was previously thought [...]
At the end of the day, ‘back in the day’ just means ‘past’
Thursday, June 24th, 2004
CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien once owned a lavender Citroen, she recalled on the air June 10.
“Wow! That was back in the day,” her guest remarked.
“That was so back in the day it’s not even funny,” O’Brien replied. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Which “day” we are talking about is not always clear, but there has been a lot of going back to it lately.
Esperanto’s fans hoping it becomes `lingvo internacia’
Thursday, June 10th, 2004
“Saluton!” The greeting rings throughout the Sulzer Regional Library auditorium in Ravenswood as members of the Esperanto Society of Chicago gather for their monthly meeting. They have come to study and celebrate the language of Esperanto, invented in the late 19th Century to be an international language.
The meeting is conducted almost entirely in Esperanto, but [...]
Our not-so-sound language a natural for spelling bees
Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
Korean has a simple correspondence between spelling and sounds. English, with its many foreign influences and irregularities, does not.
“Spelling bees are largely an American phenomenon, something that is unique to the English language,” said Paige Kimble.
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