The Death of Bo

Another language dies...


The death of an 85-year-old woman in the Andaman islands, part of India but physically closer to Indonesia, has marked the death of an entire language.
'Boa Sr' was the last speaker of the Bo language thought to have been spoken by the Bo tribe for up to 65,000 years. (BBC)

I'm pretty sure I once wrote about the loss of a language.
How the world is suddenly deprived of the history, culture, local knowledge and wisdom that its speakers once possessed.
How the world is poorer once the last speaker dies.

Imagine a world, not only dominated by English, but one in which only a handful of languages are spoken. Imagine how impoverished that would be.

Perhaps we should consider protecting languages in the same way as we seek to protect species?
Perhaps we should all adopt a minority language and form a circle of speakers with the aim of keeping it alive?
Before it's too late?
N'est-ce pas?

of course it is....

Babies 'cry in mother's tongue'

Is this really so astonishing a discovery?
It's a well-known fact that newborns begin the process of language acquisition from the moment they're born. Watch the way a baby, in the first few minutes of life, focuses so intently on it's mother and mimics her facial expressions. That is the first step to learning the intricate art of conversation.

We all know that a foetus can hear while it is still in the womb and that it learns to recognise the sound of it's mother's voice. Why would it not imitate her accent? How else do you bond so efficiently with the one person who will protect you with her own life but by imitation, that most sincere form of flattery.

It's all about survival
N'est-ce pas?

Though I have to say that the thought of a French baby turning to the midwife and giving a Gallic shrug rather tickles me

Dreams....

Des chercheurs japonais ont affirmé jeudi avoir conçu une technique d'analyse cérébrale qui permettra peut-être un jour de regarder à la télévision ses propres rêves reconstitués ou d'exprimer par l'image une pensée qui peut difficilement être mise en mots.

Une équipe du laboratoire de neurologie japonais ATR, dirigée par Yukiyasu Kamitani, dit avoir réussi "pour la première fois au monde à recréer tel quel, en image, le contenu de perceptions cérébrales complexes".

Leurs travaux ont consisté à faire observer une forme (lettre de l'alphabet) à un individu et à la reconstituer sur un écran, en analysant au passage l'activité cérébrale du sujet. Ils ont intercepté des signaux électriques émanant de l'oeil et ont vérifié la concordance entre formes observée et reproduite.
(Yahoo news)

Would you want to be able to watch your dreams?

Perhaps, if there were a menu from which Icould select only the good ones...
Those involving lost-loves with whom I'd like to meet up for one last night of passion...
My almost skiing dreams from which I wake before I actually get to ski down a mountain...
Nocturnal trips in which I wander through an Italian landscape...
Happy dreams that leave me feeling all warm and fuzzy when I open my eyes

And those dreams in which I discover something new, or solve a problem that's been nagging me

Sadly these dreams seem to evaporate as rapidly as the morning mist leaving only the merest hint of happiness

Whilst my nightmares remain with me during my day

unfaithful...

You have been sadly neglected, my beloved language lab blog
It's not that you have fallen from grace
You haven't been forgotten
You have just taken x'th place behind The Ragazzi, The New Employer, A Mouse In France and my new life in England...

Today I was unfaithful to you
Today I flirted with A Mouse In France and wrote a post that should, by rights, have been yours

I will be back...

Calling TEFL'ers

I'm currently considering embarking on a TEFL course in Oxford
Yes, I know, I have a new career in IT security and there is much to learn if I am to make a success of it but...

I love languages and linguistics and so even if I do become an expert in my new field I see no reason why I shouldn't be a part-time teacher of English, n'est-ce pas?

So, if anyone is reading this neglected and dusty blog and has any experience or advice covering the following, I would be much obliged

Thank You

1. TEFL courses in England
2. Teaching English online to distance students
3. Teaching speciality English to adult learners (eg IT, business English etc)
4. Because there is ALWAYS a 4. in my world

Mouse...

English as a museum exhibit

This tasty morsel almost past me by as I grappled with grammar (Italian), fumbled through French vocabulary and snoozed my way through a chapter on creativity in English texts

"Bring the story of English under one roof"

"The campaign to create the English Project - the world's first visitor attraction and living museum dedicated to the story of the English language - has begun."

"The flagship will be the English Project International Centre, based in Winchester, in southern England, the city of King Alfred the Great, the first champion of the English language and English literacy"
(The Guardian)

Hands up all those who thought that King Alfred only burnt cakes?

au contraire mes petits amis, au contraire, had it not been for King Alfred's desire to standardise the dialects of Britain in the late 9th and 10th centuries who knows where our ancestors' chattering tongues might have led them?

(and I, personally, am grateful for the question on the steps involved in the standardisation of English that assisted me to pass a previous exam)

So, here's a link to The English Project

and here's a toast (though not burnt!) to King Alfred

Portuguese with a 'y'? Why?

I thought I'd heard this on the BBC World Service in the wee small hours, but being the wee small hours when reality takes on a different hue and dreams intermingle with waking, I wasn't sure I hadn't invented it

But no, here it is:

"Portugal's parliament has voted to introduce contentious changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way"
(BBC News)

This is, its claimed, an attempt to standardise the language and will include the addition of three letters - k, w and y - to the alphabet.

"The official language of more than 230m people worldwide, Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tome and Principe, as well as Portugal. "
(BBC News)

Darn it. Now I'll have to go through my Linguaphone Portuguese books with a red marker!

OK, I agree that there must be a standard form, rules to which the purists adhere, a system of grammar to drive second-language learner nuts, odd quirks and weird spellings that come from the distant past, we have to have a baseline in order to keep it together

and language belongs to the people who speak it...

Why?

Well, as Bakhtin put it:
"A common unitary language is a sytem of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within the heteroglot national language, the firm, stable, linguistic nucleus of an officially recognised literary language, or else, defending any already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia...

But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a 'unitary language', operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified, not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word, but also - and for this is its essential point - into langauges that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, 'professional' and 'generic' languages, languages of generations, and so forth. ...

And this stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what ensures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside the verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward."
(Bakhtin's Discourse in the novel)

Amen to that

But, in the case of Portuguese having to bow to the superior weight of its speakers in Brazil?
Isn't this rather akin to declaring that henceforth British English will adopt the grammatical quirks, the spellings and pronunciations of, say Indian English?

And where will it end?

PS Have to love a PM called Socrates, don't you????