Language Museum Blog

Last month I posted about a new book by Michael Erard called Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.

Erard defines a hyperpolyglot as someone who speaks eleven languages or more, and he can add Oxford University student Alex Rawlings to the list. Alex is only twenty, but can speak eleven languages: English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian.

He started learning as a child because his mother spoke three languages with him – English, French and Greek. Alex’s love of languages has grown from there. You can hear him talk about his language acquisition progression in this video from BBC News.

Google Translate recently got a fantastic new update: the ability to recognise handwriting!

Translate can now recognise written words in seven different languages, including English, Italian and German. This is great if you have an old-school pen pal who writes you letters rather than emails, or if you can’t quite figure out what the waiter wrote on your receipt.

Possibly the best part of this news though, is for Chinese and Japanese language learners, who can now use the app for characters that are not usually found on English keyboards. Perhaps it can also be used for checking that you are creating characters correctly when practicing your written language skills.

Can anyone think of other language learning uses for this new function?

(Source: Android Police)

Britney famously sang “oops, I did it again” and now Rick Perry, a US Republican presidential candidate, has brought the word back into the popular consciousness.

Perry’s “oops” came as he couldn’t remember the name of a third national agency he would close if he was made president. It’s unlikely he has an idea of the origins of the word, which started to appear around the 1930s. Whilst the exact origins are unknown, it’s thought it may come from the phrase “up-a-daisy”, which has been used since the 18th Century.

And oops isn’t just confined to the English language:

An Italian found in error might say, “ops!” while a Frenchman who’s made a faux pas might say, “oups!” In Spanish, one can say opa, but just as common are huy and ¡ay! A Russian who’s made a goof might exclaim, “ой” (pronounced oj), while a German blunderer might blurt out, “hoppla!” (Source: Slate.com)

What do you say when you’ve made an error?

Something that has always struck me about Spanish speakers is that they talk so fast in their native language. I’ll normally catch the beginning of a sentence, but the rest of it is lost as they talk at what seems like a million miles per second.

I’m not alone in thinking this. An interesting study just published in the journal Language has attempted to answer the question of why some languages sound faster than others. Researchers from the Universite de Lyon recruited native speakers of seven common languages – English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish – and one uncommon one, Vietnamese. The speakers were recorded reading different texts, and the recordings used to analyse language.

What they found was that some languages have a higher “information density” than others. English has a high information density and is spoken at an average rate. Spanish has a low density so is spoken much faster (about a syllable per second). Japanese is even faster. The differences mean that in the same period of time, each language will convey around the same amount of information.

“A tradeoff is operating between a syllable-based average information density and the rate of transmission of syllables,” the researchers wrote. “A dense language will make use of fewer speech chunks than a sparser language for a given amount of semantic information.” In other words, your ears aren’t deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time. (Source: Time.com)

The study is fascinating, but it doesn’t make spoken Spanish any easier for me to decipher!

The Globe Theatre will be staging all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays in a different language in 2012.

Part of the wider celebrations in the UK to mark the 2012 London Olympics, the plays will help mark the Cultural Olympiad. Theatre companies from around the world will be asked to participate, and confirmed productions include King Lear in Aboriginal languages, The Tempest in Arabic, Julius Caesar in Italian and The Taming of the Shrew in Urdu as well as a performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost in British sign language.

The artistic director of the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole said:

“It has long been recognised that Shakespeare, as well as a great playwright, has become an international language and has proved one of the most life-affirming and barrier-transcending ways that people can speak to one another.

“His plays have been translated into every major living language and there is a long tradition of Shakespeare performances around the world in people’s own vernacular.

“During the course of these six weeks, the Globe will create an international Shakespeare community in the heart of London.” (Source: Telegraph)

What a fantastic project!

A cool new application from Google will soon be able to help you translate from written words.

Google Goggles users can point their phone at a word or phrase they wish to have translated, and then fine-tune their onscreen selection to a smaller area. Using the phone’s camera, the application will recognise the language and give you an option to translate it. This makes the application perfect for globetrotters – whether you need a menu or sign translated, you can do so without the hassle of searching through a guide book or dictionary.

The application can only translate languages based on the Latin alphabet such as English, French, Italian, German and Spanish at the moment, but once the text is captured it can be quickly translated to other languages. Google are apparently confident that other languages, including Chinese, Arabic and Hindi will soon be added to the app.

Whilst the app is free, you’ll need a mobile device running Android 1.6 or higher. I’ll definitely be giving this a try on my trip to Italy next month!