it took a dyslexic designer to create a typeface that optimizes the reading experience for people who suffer from that condition.Christian Boer's "Dyslexie" doesn't exactly make the letterforms look conventionally beautiful, but since when is that a prerequisite for well-designed? If it works, it works.
The New York Times tells of a lawsuit "filed by Paul Ceglia, owner of a wood-pellet fuel company in upstate New York. Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mark Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune." The gist of the evidence is a collection of emails purportedly from Zuckerberg to Ceglia, ostensibly saved in Word files. The foundation of the refutation is an analysis of syntactical minutiae -- whether "internet" is capitalized or "cannot" is one word or two as commonly written by the Facebook founder.Many linguists, however, would challenge the notion that the “fingerprint,” a supposedly unique identifier, can be metaphorically applied to writing. Surely we all have our own written quirks and mannerisms — I tend to overuse em-dashes, for instance. But there is just too much internal variability in any person’s body of writing to imagine that we could take just a bit of it — a handful of e-mails — and recognize some sort of linguistic DNA.
Krauss suggests the erosion of Native languages could be due to television, which is mostly English and ubiquitous in villages nowadays, and "the likely lethal effect of the 'No Child Left Behind' (federal school mandate), requiring proof of proficiency in English but not Native language."
But he also says that Yup'ik and Inupiaq are being retained at rates much higher than the Aleut and Indian languages. Yup'ik is particularly strong, he writes, accounting for "fully 93 percent of those who speak an Alaskan Native language."
The Economist writes about the book "The Last Lingua Franca" which postures that English will decline in importance.
English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English?
Mr Ostler suggests that two new factors—modern nationalism and technology—will check the spread of English. The pragmatism of the Achaemenids and Mughals is striking because no confident modern nation would today make a foreign language official. Several of Britain’s ex-colonies once did so but only because English was a neutral language among competing native tongues. English has been rejected in other ex-colonies, such as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, where Anglophone elites gave way to Sinhala- and Swahili-speaking nationalists. In 1990 the Netherlands considered but rejected on nationalist grounds making English the sole language of university education.
English will fade as a lingua-franca, Mr Ostler argues, but not because some other language will take its place. No pretender is pan-regional enough, and only Africa’s linguistic situation may be sufficiently fluid to have its future choices influenced by outsiders. Rather, English will have no successor because none will be needed. Technology, Mr Ostler believes, will fill the need.
This argument relies on huge advances in computer translation and speech recognition. Mr Ostler acknowledges that so far such software is a disappointment even after 50 years of intense research, and an explosion in the power of computers. But half a century, though aeons in computer time, is an instant in the sweep of language history. Mr Ostler is surely right about the nationalist limits to the spread of English as a mother-tongue. If he is right about the technology too, future generations will come to see English as something like calligraphy or Latin: prestigious and traditional, but increasingly dispensable.
Indiana is the latest state to dump cursive handwriting as part of the curriculum.The national move away from cursive is being fueled by the Common Core curriculum. That is an effort led by governors in 46 states, including Indiana, to agree to common standards and, eventually, common tests to measure whether kids are learning them. Cursive is not part of the Common Core curriculum. Keyboarding is.
NPR reports on a class available in Boston to help locals reduce their accent (link to audio file).The Boston accent is a sound that's as much a trademark of the city as Fenway Park and Harvard Yard. But some locals are looking to ditch the accent. Michele Norris talks to Billy Baker of The Boston Globe about his story on a class to help Bostonians get rid of their accents.Six years earlier NPR reported on those distinctive Boston accents.
Pahk the kah in Hahvud yahd... Say what? To celebrate the launch of Day to Day on Boston member station WBUR, NPR's Mike Pesca reports on the nuances of Bostonian accents
The company plans to adopt English as the sole official language for all its employees in 2012, according to Kim Sung-dae, director of the OCI public relations office.
"The reason behind this is because exports already account for 80 to 90 percent" of sales, Kim told Yonhap.
The move, of course, comes with huge costs for the companies, not just in terms of money but also in time and energy as communications between their employees are often hampered by their poor English skills.
They, however, say it is a price they are willing to pay.
"We are still in the very early stages of the plan and there must be significant amounts of stress placed on our employees," said the official from Korea East-West Power Co.
"The point is to encourage our employees to continue learning until speaking English becomes natural or sort of a habit."
Trilingual voting materials are now the law in Alameda County, Calif.“The right to vote is the foundation of our democracy, and language barriers should never keep citizens from accessing that right,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. The “agreement ensures that Alameda County’s Spanish- and Chinese-speaking citizens will be able to cast an effective ballot and successfully participate in the electoral process. I congratulate Alameda County for their earnest cooperation in resolving this matter.”
This team of scholars also noted that the fact that the Russian speakers had better Hebrew skills than the Hebrew speakers themselves indicates that acquiring a mother tongue and preserving that language in a bilingual environment does not come at the expense of learning a second language -- Hebrew in this case. In fact, the opposite is true: fluency and skills in one language assist in the language acquisition of a second language, and possessing skills in two languages can boost the learning process of a third language.
"Gaining command of a number of languages improves proficiency in native languages," Prof. Abu-Rabia explained. "This is because languages reinforce one another, and provide tools to strengthen phonologic, morphologic and syntactic skills. These skills provide the necessary basis for learning to read.
Our next word is "horrible." How does that first vowel sound?
Weighing the pros and cons of textspeak, this essay balances the ideas that communication skills are enhanced by every means and the short-hand is short-sighted.“These different channels of communication have led to the emergence of new communicative styles including text abbreviations and acronyms,” says Prof Merchant. According to him, writing is “enjoying a moment of creativity”, with young people at its heart.
His conclusion is that “there is no evidence that literacy is in decline, reading and writing, in whatever form, is advantageous”.And
... textspeak is not enough. “As someone with a deep concern for English literature, and the full possibilities of the use of the language, I’m eager for children and young people to read real books as extensively as possible, so that they can absorb all the things that textspeak doesn’t cover: a large vocabulary, the shape that well-made sentences can take, how to develop ideas through language, even punctuation. I want them to experience all the pleasure that reading gives, and the satisfaction that writing well brings.”
