English is spoke all over the world. How come? Erica Brozovsky explains.
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Why do some people say “ax” instead of “ask”? Geoff Lindsey explains.
Related:
“Ask or aks? How linguistic prejudice perpetuates inequality,” Amanda Cole, Ella Jeffries, and Peter L Patrick, The Conversation
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Kory Stamper, former dictionary editor at Merriam-Webster, explains the work of lexicography. A Vox video by Phil Edwards.
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Native North America has long been mult-lingual, and Great Plains peoples used hand signals to bridge the gaps. Plains Indian Sign Language, (PISL) became fairly standardized, and was used by both deaf and hearing people. A Vox video by Ranjani Chakraborty.
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You’re psyched to see the new Star Wars movie, but do you remember the older Star War films? Anne-Sophie Goninet and Worldcrunch present 90 seconds of highlights Just watch the video above.
There. All caught up?
Before you ask: Spanish, Russian, English, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, French, German, Turkish and Italian.
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“For 19-year-old Brooklyn native Maggie Rosenberg, learning Thai pop songs began as a frustrated attempt to connect with the people of her host country. But the connection turned out stronger than she had anticipated ….
After returning home from a cultural immersion program in Thailand four years ago, Rosenberg taught herself Thai by learning how to sing the country’s pop hits. Today, her covers draw tens of thousands of views, while her original song, the endearing “I Don’t Speak Thai,’ has racked up nearly a million. Most videos feature her strumming a ukulele in her bedroom ….”
— “Maggie Rosenberg, Thailand’s American Sweetheart.” Melissa Pandika, OZY
Maggie Rosenberg @Facebook
Downloads @Bandcamp
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Video: “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me,” written by Butch Hancock, performed by Joe Ely with Lloyd Maines on pedal steel and the Muscle Shoal Horns.
“Met her in old Mexico
She was laughing sad and young
In a smokey room no one could see
Her favorite poets all agreed
Spanish is a loving tongue
But she never spoke Spanish to me”
Data analysis adds:
“Spanish was the most positively biased language followed by Portuguese and English. China landed at the end of the list, having used the fewest positive words of the 10 most spoken languages. Each language contains a complex history in which certain words became more important according to custom, practicality, and culture.”
— “Spanish is the Language of Love. English, of Poetry.” Orion Jones, Big Think
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“New research by Mark Dingemanse and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics … has uncovered a surprisingly important role for an interjection long dismissed as one of language’s second-class citizens: the humble huh?, a sort of voiced question mark slipped in when you don’t understand something. In fact, they’ve found, huh? is a “universal word,” the first studied by modern linguists.
“Vowels,” a short film by illustrator and filmmaker Temujin Doran, based on a 1945 Linguaphone instructional recording.
Hat tip: Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
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Want to know America’s lingustic gift to the world? Okay.
No, that’s it, the word “okay.” If you travel or scan global broadcasting you’ll hear it used by speakers of many languages, but the word came from the USA, coined in 1839 by Boston journalist Charles Gordon Greene (1804-1886).
More:
“Did you know a journalist coined the word ‘OK’?” Mignon Fogarty, MuckRack
OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, Allen Metcalf (Oxford, 2010)
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