Languages in the news

Here are a few language-related articles I found recently:

Tolkien and Made Up Languages – an article about Tolkien, whose 120 birthday it would be today if he was still around, his languages, and other fictional languages such as Newspeak and Nadsat.

The secret to learning languages – Tips from the polyglots: Find out how your brain works.

I’ve also discovered that Collins Dictionaries in English, French, German and Spanish are available for free online. They also give translations of words in quite a few other languages.

2 thoughts on “Languages in the news

  1. Oh, so I’ll have to wait another two years for Tolkien’s eleventy-eleventh birthday. (I may be wrong but I think Bilbo only saw his eleventy-first birthday, right at the beginning of “The Lord of the Rings”.)
    BTW, I am writing this in Cologne where November 11 (11/11 = “der Elfte im Elften”) marks the beginning of “the fifth season” (die fünfte Jahreszeit = carnival season) on which day at 11:11h public festivities take place all over the city.
    Are there natural languages with an undecimal system of numeration?

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