Written by Mark Mardell asks in his post Learn EU-speak: Does the EU shroud itself in obscure language on purpose or does any work of detail produce its own arcane language? Of course it is not just the lingo: the EU does seem difficult for people to understand. What’s at the heart of the problem? His answer [...]
READ MORE »Posts in category Language alternatives
From Adamic or the language of the Garden of Eden until the Tower of Babel: the confusion of tongues and the earliest dialects attested
No, I didn’t have a revelation today. I am just offering a little support exactly to what Dawkins and his Brights dislike, to show them extreme action causes extreme (re)actions. I’d like to play their radical game, too, offering some help in linguistics to those who have only naïve theories on the language of Eden. [...]
READ MORE »A simple FAQ about the “advantages” of Esperanto and other conlang religions: “easy”, “neutral” and “number of speakers”
This is, as requested by a reader of the Association’s website, a concise FAQ about Esperanto’s supposed advantages: Note: Information and questions are being added to the FAQ thanks to the comments made by visitors. 1. Esperanto has an existing community of speakers, it is used in daily life, it has native speakers… Sorry, I [...]
READ MORE »How many words do we use in daily speech? A new study from the Royal Spanish Academy on language acquisition
According to the members of the Royal Spanish Academy (the Real Academia Española), humanities have experienced a decrease in importance for younger generations, English is becoming predominant, language in general is poorer in the Media and in all public speeches, classical languages disappear, people play less attention to reading, and computer terms are invading everything. [...]
READ MORE »Air Berlin against the use of Catalan when flying to and from Catalan-speaking regions – Where is the European Union language policy based on “multilingualism” when one really needs it?
I don’t like to write about ‘domestic’ problems, so to speak, and I don’t usually do it because I cannot be neutral, but I think this one has transnational implications that go beyond Spain’s language policy – or, better, the language policy of Spain’s Autonomous (i.e. ‘slightly less than federal’) Communities – to reach the [...]
READ MORE »WordPress Translation Plugin: ‘Indoeuropean Translator Widget’ – now also Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, …
The latest upgrades are only available in the simpler WordPress Translation Widget Plugin. You can download it from the official WordPress Plugin Repository site. New upgrades will automatically appear on your WordPress blog dashboard. As always, this widget plugin, when activated from the Design tab of your WordPress blog dashboard, will put links – with [...]
READ MORE »How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?
For native speakers of most modern Romance languages (apart from some reminiscence of the neuter case), Nordic (Germanic) languages, English, Dutch, or Bulgarian, it is usually considered “difficult” to learn an inflected language like Latin, German or Russian: cases are a priori felt as too strange, too “archaic”, too ‘foreign’ to the own system of [...]
READ MORE »When a language should be considered artificial – A quick classification of spoken, dead, hypothetical and invented languages
Following Mithridates’ latest post and comment on artificial language compared to revived language, I consider it appropriate to share my point of view on this subject. For me, the schematic classification of languages into “natural” and “artificial” could be made more or less as follows, from ‘most natural’ (1) to ‘most artificial’ (20): NOTE 1: [...]
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