The first English-Zulu dictionary for more than 40 years has been published in South Africa.
Zulu is South Africa’s most common African language, and it is hoped the new dictionary will help break down the language barriers in a country where English is the main language used for business and politics. Zulus are the largest ethnic group in the country, and 2.8 million school pupils study the language.
South Africa has 11 different official languages. Many children speak Zulu at home but are taught in English at school. It is hoped the dictionary will bring together children who speak Zulu and English.
Megan Hall, the publisher’s manager for dictionaries, said: “To our knowledge the last substantial bilingual Zulu dictionary was published more than four decades ago. A great deal has changed since then – in the world around us, the language we use to talk about it, as well as in the way we now make dictionaries.”
Hall said the book had been an “enormous project” that took more than three and a half years and involved an international team of academics, teachers, language experts and specialist lexicographers. “It’s taken so long because it’s an exceptionally difficult job.”
It included research with sample entries at schools in the Zulu heartland, KwaZulu-Natal province. “We found out that teachers wanted key curriculum words included in the dictionary, together with definitions – something never done before in a bilingual dictionary of this sort,” Hall said. “So we selected terms from textbooks across the curriculum, like acid, greenhouse effect and multiply, and gave learners and teachers the support they’d asked for.” (Source: The Guardian)
Take a look at the full article for some examples of Zulu translated into English.
Britain is trying to change the language rules for candidates seeking civil service jobs in the European Union, according to an article in the Telegraph.
Whilst currently candidates are expected to take admissions exams in a second language, Britain is seeking to have this changed so pre-selection tests can be taken in the first language.
With the declining number of students taking a foreign language at school, along with closures of university language departments, it is perhaps not a surprise that British candidates are put off by the second language requirement.
As I’ve mentioned previously, the EU has 23 official languages. Surely the focus should be on encouraging British people to learn the languages of our neighbours, rather than changing the rules to ensure they don’t need to?
A quirky admissions exam that asked candidates to write an essay based on a single word has been scrapped by an Oxford University college.
All Souls College had offered the exam since 1932, along with more traditional tests. Applicants would discover the word in the exam and have three hours to somehow produce a coherent essay.
It’s described as the “hardest exam in the world”, but surely spinning an essay out of a single word can’t be that difficult?
The horrifying thing about Essay is not how difficult it is, but how simple. You turn over the plain blank sheet of A4 paper, and there is a single word on it; you have nothing else to write about for the next three hours….
The Essay is an exceptional test of intelligence. Ask someone when the Battle of Hastings took place, and they’ll either get it right or wrong. Ask them, “How did Athens run the Laurium silver mines?” – as I was asked in my ancient history Finals – and the answer is still pretty specific. But ask someone – or don’t even ask them, just state to someone – a single word, and there’s infinite room for genius, or stupidity, to expand within the word’s parameters. (Source: The Telegraph)
Here’s a word for you to ponder on: language.
Closed captioning (subtitles) have recently been introduced to some videos on YouTube, which could potentially be a great language learning resource. The service is in beta mode at the moment – and apparently it needs a lot of work. From Dvice.com:
Engadget first spotted how weird Apple’s iPad launch video got when the feature was activated — sometimes the text is so different from what’s being said that you wonder if Google is just having a laugh. “A high-res color display” becomes “a high risk going to split,” and when one of the designers says he doesn’t have to change himself to use the iPad, the captions make it sound like he very clearly does. If you were relying on these captions, it would be a very different commercial.
The captioning is machine-generated, so it seems the software has a ways to go before this becomes a reliable means of translation!
There’s been a lot of debate recently about language learning in schools in the UK. The government has shifted the focus of language teaching to primary schools, with high school students not required to learn a second language at GCSE level.
Interestingly, it seems that teaching a second non-English language may not be the only issue for the government. Surveys have revealed that in some parts of the country, pupils are attending school with little or no English.
A Government study found last year that some 240 different languages are spoken by schoolchildren in the home across Britain as a whole, with one-in-seven primary school pupils not speaking English as a first language across the UK.
There are 10 schools in the UK where no child speaks English as a first language, the figures show.
Staff and pupils at Fairlight Primary School in Brighton resorted to learning sign language to communicate, with children speaking 26 different languages at home in 2008. (Source: Telegraph)
A survey in Reading, England, has found that 150 languages and dialects are spoken by pupils in its area, including the Indian language of Telugu and the Ghanaian dialect of Akan. This incredible diversity is making it difficult to provide for all pupils. I wonder if, rather than seeing it as a negative thing, their knowledge could be used to help others – child to child language exchange perhaps?
Last week I posted about how bilingualism can apparently be promoted even before babies are born. Introducing a second language at a young age seems to be a very popular idea – a mother in Scotland has won an international prize for teaching French to babies.
Fiona Moffat and her company, Lingobaby, aim to introduce a second language at a young age, and run sessions for children from birth to five years old.
“There are no expectations that they come out with French words, but often you can hear babies of about 15-16 months say bits of words like ‘bonjour’, ‘merci’ and ‘au revoir’,” she said.
Ms Moffatt said there were “huge” benefits to babies and toddlers learning foreign languages.
“If children are exposed to the sounds of a language before the age of nine months, they’re much more likely to pick the sounds out at a later age,” she said.
“We’ve also had a lot of comments from parents who are coming to classes that it just makes language learning normal.” (Source: BBC News)
I wonder exactly how much of the language these children actually pick up, or whether it’s more about laying down some foundations for learning in later years?
Language exchanges can be a good way of improving your abilities, especially your confidence in speaking and listening. With new technology and the power of the internet, you can talk to people from other countries online, thus ‘exchanging’ languages, hopefully to the improvement of both parties.
Living in the country of the language you are learning is a step further than this. Traditionally, language exchanges were only a few weeks long on either side. Now however, it seems the trend is for “extreme” language exchanges, with children spending up to six months with their host family.
According to The Independent, children aged 9 to 14 are taking part in these exchanges, living in their host country with a local family and attending the local school for up to six months. With almost no language ability before travelling, the children become fluent by the end of their stay.
It’s often been noted that children pick up new languages faster than adults, so for those of us who are slightly older than 14, I’d probably recommend taking a couple of classes in your home country to see if you like the language before you commit to something this intense!
The language exchange discussed in the article was arranged by En Famille International, who are always looking for English-speaking families. This may also be a way to get involved in language exchange, if you’re interested and have children!
If you’re at court, you would expect the lawyers to be fully conversant and confidently expressing themselves, much as you see in the many American TV shows dedicated to courtroom drama.
A report published in 2008 showed that trainee barristers didn’t think much of their fellow students linguistic abilities, however.
The Bar Standards Board is now introducing a test that aims to get prospective barristers to prove their fluency in English, the Financial Times reports.
The [2008] report highlighted deficiencies among both native and non-native speakers, including an “inability to speak fluently, with close attention to grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and an inability to write clear, correct and well-structured English prose”.
The diagnosis is a far cry from the renowned articulacy of legendary advocates such as the fictional Rumpole or the real-life Sir Edward Marshall Hall, whose persuasiveness helped win acquittals for defendants in a series of sensational murder cases during the late Victorian and Edwardian era.
Instead, the islands of inarticulacy among trainee barristers now seem to have grown so large that, as one person put it to the profession’s own investigators: “The problem is not the course, nor the staff, but the students.” (Source: Financial Times)
This is definitely one of the professions where excellent linguistic abilities are needed, so hopefully these measures will help safeguard the profession and the system.
There’s been a lot of debate in the UK recently over what language skills should be taught to children, and when.
Since learning a second language stopped being compulsory in secondary school, there appears to have been a decline in the amount of students taking up a language, with a knock-on effect on university courses, and perhaps the economy.
So could Latin be the solution?
According to this report, the language has been popular in pilot schools in Cambridgeshire, and the project has just been expanded. Latin is seen as a good way of introducing children to language learning, especially of the Romance languages, of which Latin is the root. It also provides an interesting way to look at history and civilization, says the head of the project.
Others argue that children would be better off learning a language that they can use in more practical ways. Spanish, for example, is the world’s number 2 language in terms of number of speakers, so would arguably be far more helpful for children travelling and eventually going into business.
Whatever the debate, it’s good to see that someone is pushing for language learning for British schoolchildren. I learned some French and German at school but have continually been put to shame by my European counterparts who can speak fluent English!
*That’s “the dog ate my homework” by the way.
Recently I posted about the pros and cons of machine translation versus human translation.
It seems computers are also helping people to communicate in other ways – a new study shows they may be more effective at lip reading than humans.
Researchers compared the accuracy of an automated lip-reading machine to that of 19 people who had lip-reading training. The study found that the automated system recognized 80 percent of words, compared to 32 percent for human lip readers.
The machines were also able to read lips on simplistic representations of facial shape, whereas human lip-readers required a video of actual people speaking.
“This pilot study is the first time an automated lip-reading system has been benchmarked against human lip-readers, and the results are perhaps surprising,” said study author Sarah Hilder. (Source: US News)
This could be of major benefit to lip reading learners, and lead to new and improved methods of learning. A difficult to learn skill, lip reading will become more essential as people live longer. Any skill that helps people communicate is valuable – can you lip read?
