archive

Words don’t care

Dead languages reveal a lost world: Gonzalo Rubio spends his days reading dead languages that stopped being spoken thousands of years ago. The linguistic innovation of trendsetters and troublemakers is a barometer of society’s inner life — a review of books on slang. Christian missionaries have become strangely vital to conserving endangered languages. It's one thing to learn foreign words; it's another to learn their true meanings. Free dictionary: At play in the fields of the OED. Overuse injury: Inside our long impulse to banish trendy words. Men of words: Ben Zimmer remembers four great wordsmiths. Out of the gutter: Erin McKean on how slang sneaks into the language. American Sign Language is close to surpassing German as the third-most-studied foreign language at America's colleges. An article on Piraha, the world’s most controversial language. David Crystal on languages in danger of dying out. At a loss for words: Modern lessons from a lost language. Michael Rosen gives a brief history of a language that has grown to world domination with phrases such as "cool" and "go to it". Primero hay que aprender espanol — ranhou zai xue zhongwen. The Language Tree: Words don’t care about language barriers. Friending, trending, even evidencing and statementing: Plenty of nouns are turning into verbs. Google Translate "Conversation Mode" translates a multi-language conversation in real-time, spitting out a translation just as soon as you finish speaking (and more).