Last.fm’s Endangered Language group, featuring a more or less weekly newsletter describing an endangered or potentially endangered language and an artist who performs using it. They also have set up the Minority Language Radio.
When worlds collide, the sparks are sometimes linguistic. Not long ago, in a Q and A on the Web site of The New York Times, an Iraqi translator was asked to explain the points of difference he saw between his own people and the Americans he encountered in Iraq. He brought up the Arabic phrase “inshallah.” The Americans, he said, “have respect for time”; Iraqis, in contrast, “use the word inshallah, which means `if God wishes,’ to postpone things.”
It may be that this point of difference won’t be a distinction much longer. An American colonel in Iraq, writing to The Washington Post’s Thomas E. Ricks, recently observed: “The phrase ‘inshallah,’ or ‘God willing,’ has permeated all ranks of the Army. When you talk to U.S. soldiers about the possible success of ‘the surge,’ you’d be surprised how many responded with ‘inshallah.’” The phrase seems to have permeated all ranks of the diplomatic corps, too: Zalmay Khalilzad, when he was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, once stated at a press conference, “Inshallah, Iraq will succeed.
– Cullen Murphy
I noticed this phenomena at USF but never had an name for it: Desire Paths
Desire Path: A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.
See also: The Flickr Desire Paths Group
The languages of extinction: The world’s endangered tongues: on David Harrison’s work on endangered languages.
For the Nivkh people of eastern Siberia, it’s not as easy as one, two, three. Depending on whether they are talking about skis or boats or batches of dried fish, there are different ways of counting. Twenty-six different ways in fact. Small wonder, then, that 90 per cent of Nivkhs choose to communicate in Russian but that choice has put Nivkh on the list of endangered languages.
And it is not alone. Linguists believe half the languages in the world will be extinct by the end of the century. The 80 major languages such as English, Russian and Mandarin are spoken by about 80 per cent of the global population, while the 3,500 linguistic minnows have just 0.2 per cent of the world keeping them alive.
– Claire Soares
It’s slightly used, so you can have it cheap.
From It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now:
Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet.
At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.
Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
– Tony Long in Wired
Well, not really. There are internets and there is the Internet, which links a bunch of internets. There is a difference.
Two web toys for exploring the frequency of word use: WordCount shows the how often words are used in the English language (British English, that is) and QueryCount shows how often words are searched for in WordCount. The adjacencies can be surprising sometimes.
Bootstraping a Forth in 40 lines of Lua code
The core of a conventional Forth system is composed of two main programs: an outer interpreter, that interprets textual scripts, and an inner interpreter, that runs bytecodes; the outer interpreter switches between an “immediate mode”, where words as executed as soon as they are read, and a “compile mode”, where the words being read are assembled into bytecodes to define new words.
In Forth all variables are accessible from all parts of the system. Several important words use that to affect the parsing: they read parts of the input text themselves, process that somehow, and advance the input pointer - and with that they effectively implement other languages, with arbitrary syntax, on top of the basic language of the outer interpreter.
Due mostly to cultural reasons, Forths tend to be built starting from very low-level pieces: first the inner interpreter, in Assembly or C, then the basic libraries and the outer interpreter, in Forth bytecodes, or - rarely - in C. We take another approach. If we consider that Lua is more accessible to us than C or Assembly - and thus for us Lua is “more basic” - then it is more natural to start from the outer interpreter, and the dictionary only has to have the definition for one word, one that means “interpret everything that follows, up to a given delimiter, as Lua code, and execute that”. An outer interpreter like that fits in less than 40 lines of Lua code, and it can be used to bootstrap a whole Forth-like language.
– Eduardo Ochs
We often tend to think of autistics as being unable to communicate. This video clearly shows otherwise: that communication is there, simply in a language that most of us are unprepared to understand. Here, Amanda demonstrates her language of constant interaction and contact with her environment and then provides an interpretation for us with the help of a speech generator.
