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The big debate in teaching primates, among other animals, is that while some say they are learning language, others insist it is merely communication, generally for a reward like food, that the primate has learned. In other words, simply a learned response, no different from a dog learning to sit or...
Delicious apple in Japanese is : onishii ringo desu.
One of the joys of travelling in a country where they don't speak your language is that occasionally you'll come across a name that has one meaning for the locals and another entirely for you. And you can take a picture and giggle at the crazy foreigners and their crazy names. Spotted this one in...
Can someone please explain this first paragraph on the Think Spain site? Clocks go back an hour this weekend, in the early hours of Sunday morning, as Europe says goodbye to British Summer Time and adopts daylight saving time (Greenwich Mean Time). This makes no sense. 1. Only the UK is on British...
Alta Vida LLC today announced a sale on Babelingo, their language translation utility for iPhone and iPod Touch. For a limited time the app is on sale at more than 70% off. Containing 11 languages, with 110 unique language combinations, Babelingo is an easy-to-use phrase book communicator, allowing...
Papua New Guinea has more than 600 distinct languages because the tribal groups evolved in geographical isolation from each other and the world. Similarly, their systems of counting were traditionally many and varied, and rarely decimally based. Foreigners seeking numerical answers from village...
Remember last year when I took the mickey out of these in the City Life newspaper? The first one is obvious: Melbourne is misspelt. The second one is also obvious: Circle is misspelt, there’s a missing apostrophe for the possessive, and capitalizing a definite article is technically incorrect. I...
Fort Collins, Colorado, is the seat of Larimer County. Larimer Across the northern border of the county, on the eastern side, is the Wyoming County of Laramie, whose county seat is Cheyenne. So, we have a Larimer and a Laramie. That means that "to larim" must be a transitive verb, not only that, but...
I've noticed that our society gets hung up on trendy buzzwords, which are used to death for a period of time, then slowly disappear only to be replaced by the latest buzz word du jour. When a word or a phrase is hot, one will encounter it everywhere: in want ads, names of businesses, product names,...
Jer makes ribs so jucy the meat falls off the bone. I am a spoiled wife! I made a pumkin pie for the first time....it smells sweet but I have not tasted it yet :D Today I learned to say "black and white"in Japanese: kuro to shiro. 2 sentences I can say about myself in japanse: 1) Watashi wa kanojo...
Slovakia: The Forbidden Languages István Deák Viktor Hulik’s sculpture of a sewer worker, Bratislava (Rudy Sulgan/Corbis) On September 1, the Slovak parliament made it largely illegal for its citizens to use any language other than Slovak. The use of minority languages in “official”...
I have a problem: I never learned how to type. Never took a typing course in high school. And in some ways I regret it. I'm pretty proficient for someone who hasn't got good form, but I'm sure I could be better. I'm just not willing to put in the extra effort to learn. I've got better things to do....
I haven't done a language rant in awhile, so here goes. The offense of the day is: "Alot" This spelling abomination is used by people to mean "a lot". It's a mistake I didn't see years ago, even by people with generally atrocious spelling and grammar. It apparently is a fairly "new" mistake, that...
If you could be fluent in any language (that you don't currently read or speak), which one would it be? Dutch of course. I've slacked and never truly put in the effort to learn it. Bad me. Spanish would be useful too. Maybe some French. German. Um, how about every major language known to man? Just...
We were chatting about non-US actors adopting American accents on Jaklumen’s blog and I thought of several American actors who do pretty good English accents. First up, Rénée Zellweger as Bridget Jones: Secondly, James Cromwell as HRH the Duke of Edinburgh in The Queen: And finally, Texan John...
This is as disturbing as when I began to see American publications capitalize after colons in 2001 (which is generally incorrect, according to US publishing professionals I asked, though there are exceptions; it is certainly incorrect in English). Carbon dioxide is written out in full or with CO,...
Carrying on from a post that Jaklumen made on his blog, I went to look for the Lucy Lawless-headed Greenpeace campaign to reduce emissions. This is Lucy Lawless as Lucy Lawless, and her accent has changed a great deal since I saw her in the Shark in the Park episode ‘Double or Quits’. It has...
Linda-Joy pointed me to this article about John Simm in The Independent: Who on earth is John Simms? A bit embarrassing to have a typo in the headline. I assume he is also known to the fictional New Zealand locksmith–prime minister, ‘John Keys’, whom Dr Pita Sharples of the Māori Party has...
A nice little factoid I found out yesterday, in Argentina, the film Grease is called Vaselina.
