http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn_eBrIDUuc
Related: Language and the Human Experience • Languages"Original pronunciation' Brings New Life to Shakespeare Last week, an intriguing video on Shakespeare became a mini viral hit. Emailed and forwarded and tweeted around was a recording of father and son, linguist David Crystal and actor Ben Crystal, reading Shakespeare side-by-side in a manner they call “original pronunciation.” Studying clues in poetry, variations in spellings (think shew instead of show in Jane Austen novels), as well as other historical linguistic remnants, the pair have come up with what they believe is English pronunciation as it was spoken in Shakespeare’s England—in other words, how some of literature’s most famous verses might have been originally heard. TIME managed to catch up with the ever-busy Ben, who—right before he was off to catch a production of Much Ado About Nothing—shared these thoughts on the topic:
How to identify any language at a glance Sign Up for Our free email newsletters Thanks to globalization, it's very likely that at some point you've found yourself faced with a line of text written in a language you couldn't quite identify. Maybe in the international section of a grocery store, or on Facebook, for example. "What the heck is this language?" 10 FREE Classroom Resources for Teachers We know you are always looking for ways to add a little spark to your classroom. So we pulled together a list of some of our favorite FREE classroom resources for teachers. These are fun classroom activities and creative lesson ideas to help you plan for the new school year. You’ll find some online story time programs to give students variety during reading. We share a virtual field trip program perfect for gaining new educational experiences, without ever leaving the classroom.
atlasobscura In 1988, Yi Nianhua, a frail, sickly woman in her 80s, spent many evenings scribbling elegant characters at a table in her kitchen in the small rice-farming village of Shangjiangxu Township, China. With only a blunt writing brush, the elongated script came out fat and blotchy on the newsprint she used for paper. But Cathy Silber, a professor at Skidmore College in New York, worked alongside Yi in her kitchen, diligently deciphering and studying the written language. “Out of the thousands of scripts that are gender-specific to men, here we have one that we know is gender-specific to women,” says Silber, who has been researching Nüshu since 1985. Explicit cookie consent JOHNSON is a fan of the Freakonomics books and columns. But this week’s podcast makes me wonder if the team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt aren’t overstretching themselves a bit. “Is learning a foreign language really worth it?”, asks the headline. A reader writes:
Half of All Languages Come from One Root Language. How it Spread Is Something of Debate The sheer variety of languages on Earth is dizzying in their array and divergence. What’s more intriguing, is that about half of them spoken today by some three billion people, come from a single root language, used thousands of years ago. Hindi, Bengali, Persian, English, German, Spanish, and Greek, all come from the same root, known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). In total, 400 languages and dialects originate from PIE.
How to quickly learn declensions and conjugations I’m definitely a weirdo. I enjoy learning grammar! Declensions, conjugations, possessive pronouns. I love them all! A Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe's Languages A Finn and a Spaniard walk into a bar. How do they strike up a conversation? It would be exceptional for either to speak each other's language. And it would be rare for both to be fluent enough in French, German, Esperanto or Russian – all languages which once had the ambition to become Europe's lingua franca. No, that Finn and that Spaniard will talk to each other and order drinks in English, the true second language of the continent. Also, the bartender is probably Irish anyway.