I’m currenty rereading Louis de Bernières’ series of novels set in a ficticious South American country. In the first book, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, the revolutionaries give people receipts whenever they take something from them, and say that they will pay everything back after the revolution. Many of the people who receive these receipts are unable to read them and don’t really understand their purpose, however they are impressed by the writing on them and start using them as an alternative currency. The value of the receipts depends on the number of words, so people ask the revolutionaries to write more on them.
I haven’t been able to discover whether receipts have been or are being used in this way in South America or elsewhere. Does anyone know?
On another matter – Radványi Balázs would like to create a font for his Harta alphabet. If you can help, please contact Balázs at guti@tvnetwork.hu. He can supply the images in vector format.
Here’s a recording a part of a radio programme in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?
Today we have a guest post from James P. in Chile:
I was listening to Catalan radio the other day (long story: short version, I’m thinking of whether to live in Spain and if I can be bothered with learning Catalan or whether it would just get mixed up in my Spanish).
They had interviews with people about the Madrid Spanair crash, and the people were talking in Spanish. No big deal really, as all Catalan speakers in Spain will know Spanish too. However , I’ve just been listening to Radio España 5, and they had clips of untranslated Italian, which assumes mutual intelligibility in all listeners. That reminded me of one time on Colombian Radio Caracol, when they had untranslated (Brazilian) Portuguese in an interview with a footballer. Again, they assumed that all listeners would be able to understand the Portuguese.
Do others have examples of bilingual radio, which assumes mutual intelligibility at a general level?
(I have strange half memories of listening to Italian radio and hearing an interview when one person spoke in French, and the other in Italian, but I may be hallucinating.)
———————–
I’ve heard people on Irish language radio (Raidió na Gaeltachta) speaking Scottish Gaelic without translation.
I came across an interesting article on Michel Thomas and his methods for teaching languages in the Guardian today.
Thomas believed that “there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher” and that with the right teaching method, anybody can learn a language quickly and easily. However was very reluctant to explain his teaching methods with others. He believed that people would only take parts of his ideas if he shared them, which would dilute them and make them much less effective. It was only in the 1990s that Thomas was persuaded to record language lessons by Hodder Education.
In a new book, The Language Revolution, by Jonathan Solity, an educational psychologist, discusses how Thomas taught languages and the psychological prinples that underpin his methods. Solity believes that if such methods were adopted in schools, they could made a huge difference.
The article mentions some of Thomas’ methods, which include breaking down languages and explaining how they work in easy-to-understand ways; teaching relatively small amounts of material at any one time; and going over things until the students really understand them and can use them. There is also a link to a BBC documentary about Michel Thomas on YouTube.
Have you tried any Michel Thomas language courses
I haven’t tried any yet, but am thinking of having a go at the Russian course.
Here’s a recording of a poem being read in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?
I received an email today about a number of vacancies at Rosetta Stone:
They are looking for Voice Actors, Voice Coaches and Audio Reviewers who are native speakers of, or have native-level fluency in Vietnamese, Turkish and Tagalog. They are also keen to find people who speak Latin well or who have a good knowledge of the language.
If you’re interested, please contact:
TagalogAudition@RosettaStone.com
TurkishAudition@RosettaStone.com
VietnameseAudition@RosettaStone.com
or LatinAudition@RosettaStone.com
Ideal Voice Talent and Audio Reviewer candidates have prior experience in audio reviewing, voice acting, voiceover, dubbing, broadcast, theatre, film or a closely related field.
Here’s a PDF with more details.
Our brains are wired to recognise repeated auditory and visual patterns, an ability that possibly evolved as a way to detect the non-random sounds made by predators, and which is also used in language acquisition.
According to a report on canada.com, researchers from Canada, Chile and Italy have done studies of newborn babies in Canada and Italy using brain scans to discover which parts of the babies brains are active when they hear words, and whether they react differently to different words. They found the part of babies’ brains that responds most to language is the same part, the temporal lobes, used for language processing in adults, and that babies react most to words with repeated syllables, such as mama, dada and banana.
One of the researchers, Judit Gervain of the University of British Columbia, believes that rudimentary language structures already in place from birth, and that it’s easy for a baby to attach meaning to the words like mama and dada.
A report I found today in Science News suggests that early hominids had hearing capabilities similar to modern humans, and paleoanthropologists at the American Natural History Museum in New York believe that this could indicate that they had some form of language.
Analysis and reconstruction of the auditory bones in skills of Homo heidelbergensis dating from 530,000 years ago have demonstrated that their hearing was probably similar to that of modern humans. They could hear best between 2 khz and 4 khz, the frequency range within which much of the sound of speech is transmitted, and researchers believe that such an ability must have been used, as maintaining such sensory systems is neurologically very expensive and they are unlikely to evolve and not be used. Whether they were connected with speech or something else is not known.
Here’s a recording in a mystery dialect. Do you know or you guess which dialect this is?