How Being Bilingual Helps Your Brain (Even If You Learn a New Language in Adulthood)

in Language, Neuroscience | January 30th, 2024

There was a time in Amer­i­ca, not so very long ago, when con­ven­tion­al wis­dom dis­cour­aged immi­grants from speak­ing the lan­guage of the old coun­try at home. In fact, “it used to be thought that being bilin­gual was a bad thing, that it would con­fuse or hold peo­ple back, espe­cial­ly chil­dren. Turns out we could­n’t have been more wrong.” These words are spo­ken by one of the vari­ety of mul­ti­lin­gual nar­ra­tors of the recent BBC Ideas video above, which explains “why being bilin­gual is good for your brain” — not just if you pick up a sec­ond lan­guage in child­hood, but also, and dif­fer­ent­ly, if you delib­er­ate­ly study it as an adult.

“Learn­ing a new lan­guage is an exer­cise of the mind,” says Li Wei of the Insti­tute of Edu­ca­tion at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. “It’s the men­tal equiv­a­lent of going to a gym every day.” In the bilin­gual brain, “all our lan­guages are active, all at the same time.” (This we hear simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in Eng­lish and the pro­fes­sor’s native Man­darin.) “The con­tin­u­al effort of sup­press­ing a lan­guage when speak­ing anoth­er, along with the men­tal chal­lenge that comes with reg­u­lar­ly switch­ing between lan­guages, exer­cis­es our brain. It improves our con­cen­tra­tion, prob­lem-solv­ing, mem­o­ry, and in turn, our cre­ativ­i­ty.”

In this cen­tu­ry, some of the key dis­cov­er­ies about the ben­e­fits of bilin­gual­ism owe to the research of York Uni­ver­si­ty cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist Ellen Bia­lystok and her col­lab­o­ra­tors. Speak­ing a for­eign lan­guage, she explains in this Guardian inter­view, requires using the brain’s “exec­u­tive con­trol sys­tem, whose job it is to resolve com­pe­ti­tion and focus atten­tion. If you’re bilin­gual, you are using this sys­tem all the time, and that enhances and for­ti­fies it.” In one study, she and her team found that bilin­guals with advanced Alzheimer’s could func­tion at the same cog­ni­tive lev­els with milder degrees of the same con­di­tion. “That’s the advan­tage: they could cope with the dis­ease bet­ter.”

Mas­ter­ing a for­eign lan­guage is, of course, an aspi­ra­tion com­mon­ly held but sel­dom real­ized. Based on per­son­al expe­ri­ence, I can say that noth­ing does the trick quite like mov­ing to a for­eign coun­try. But even if you’d rather not pull up stakes, you can ben­e­fit from the fact that the inter­net now pro­vides the great­est, most acces­si­ble abun­dance of lan­guage-learn­ing resources and tools human­i­ty has ever known — an abun­dance you can start explor­ing right here at Open Cul­ture. If it feels over­whelm­ing to choose just one for­eign lan­guage from this world of pos­si­bil­i­ties, feel free to use my sys­tem: study sev­en of them, one for each day of the week. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s Tues­day, which means I’ve got some français à appren­dre.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Becom­ing Bilin­gual Can Give Your Brain a Boost: What Recent Research Has to Say

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Why You Have an Accent When You Speak a For­eign Lan­guage

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

Meet the Hyper­poly­glots, the Peo­ple Who Can Mys­te­ri­ous­ly Speak Up to 32 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Can You Crack the Uncrackable Code in Kryptos, the CIA’s Work of Public Art?

in Art, Computer Science, Design, Language | January 17th, 2024

It can be chal­leng­ing to parse the mean­ing of many non-nar­ra­tive art­works.

Some­times the title will offer a clue, or the artist will shed some light in an inter­view.

Is it a com­ment on the cul­tur­al, socio-eco­nom­ic or polit­i­cal con­text in which it was cre­at­ed?

Or is the act of cre­at­ing it the artist’s most salient point?

Are mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions pos­si­ble?

Artist Jim San­born’s mas­sive sculp­ture Kryp­tos may inspire var­i­ous reac­tions in its view­ers, but there’s def­i­nite­ly a sin­gle cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion.

But 78-year-old San­born isn’t say­ing what…

He wants some­one else to iden­ti­fy it.

Kryp­tos’ main mys­tery — more like “a rid­dle wrapped in a mys­tery inside an enig­ma” to quote Win­ston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped cop­per screen using jig­saws.

Image cour­tesy of the CIA

Pro­fes­sion­al crypt­an­a­lysts, hob­by­ists, and stu­dents have been attempt­ing to crack the code of its 865 let­ters and 4 ques­tion marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA head­quar­ters in Lan­g­ley, Vir­ginia.

The hands-on part fell well with­in Sanborn’s purview. But a Mas­ters in sculp­ture from Pratt Insti­tute does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­fer cryp­tog­ra­phy bonafides, so San­born enlist­ed Edward Schei­dt, the retired chair­man of the CIA’s Cryp­to­graph­ic Cen­ter, for a crash course in late 20th-cen­tu­ry cod­ing sys­tems.

San­born sam­pled var­i­ous cod­ing meth­ods for the fin­ished piece, want­i­ng the act of deci­pher­ing to feel like “peel­ing lay­ers off an onion.”

That onion has been par­tial­ly peeled for years.

Deci­pher­ing three of its four pan­els is a pelt shared by com­put­er sci­en­tist and for­mer pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Cryp­togram Asso­ci­a­tion, James Gillo­gly, and CIA ana­lyst David Stein.

Gillo­gly arrived at his solu­tion in 1999, using a Pen­tium II.

Stein reached the same con­clu­sion a year ear­li­er, after chip­ping away at it for some 400 hours with pen­cil and paper, though the CIA kept his achieve­ment on the down low until Gillo­gly went pub­lic with his.

The fol­low­ing year the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency claimed that four of their employ­ees, work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly, had reached an iden­ti­cal solu­tion in 1992, a fact cor­rob­o­rat­ed by doc­u­ments obtained through the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act.

(On a relat­ed note, I got Wor­dle in three this morn­ing…)

This still leaves the 97-char­ac­ter phrase from the final pan­el up for grabs. Crack­ing it will be the penul­ti­mate step in solv­ing Kryp­tos’ puz­zle. As San­born told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a rid­dle:”

It’s mys­te­ri­ous. It’s going to lead to some­thing else. It’s not going to be fin­ished when it’s decod­ed.

The pub­lic is wel­come to con­tin­ue mak­ing edu­cat­ed guess­es.

San­born has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final pas­sage of decrypt­ed text.

BERLIN, at posi­tions 64 — 69 (2010)

CLOCK, at posi­tions 70 — 74 (2014)

NORTHEAST, at posi­tion 26 — 34

Have you solved it, yet?

No?

Don’t feel bad…

San­born has been field­ing incor­rect answers dai­ly for decades, though a ris­ing tide of aggres­sive and racist mes­sages led him to charge 50 bucks per sub­mis­sion, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolute­ly no hope of hints.

Kryp­tos’ most ded­i­cat­ed fans, like game devel­op­er /cryptologist Elon­ka Dunin, seen ply­ing San­born with copi­ous quan­ti­ties of sushi above in Great Big Sto­ry’s video, find val­ue in work­ing togeth­er and, some­times, in per­son.

Their dream is that San­born might inad­ver­tent­ly let slip a valu­able tid­bit in their pres­ence, though that seems like a long shot.

The artist claims to have got­ten very skilled at main­tain­ing a pok­er face.

(Wait, does that sug­gest his inter­locu­tors have been get­ting warmer?)

Dunin has relin­quished all fan­tasies of solv­ing Kryp­tos solo, and now works to help some­one — any­one — solve it.

(Please, Lord, don’t let it be chat­G­PT…)

San­ford has put a con­tin­gency plan in place in case no one ever man­ages to get to the bot­tom of the Kryp­tos (ancient Greek for “hid­den”) conun­drum.

He, or rep­re­sen­ta­tives of his estate, will auc­tion off the solu­tion. He is con­tent with let­ting the win­ning bid­der decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.

“I do real­ize that the val­ue of Kryp­tos is unknown and that per­haps this con­cept will bear lit­tle fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the mass­es of peo­ple des­per­ate to learn the solu­tion and fac­tors in Sanford’s inten­tion to donate all pro­ceeds to cli­mate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.

Join Elon­ka Dunin’s online com­mu­ni­ty of Kryp­tos enthu­si­asts here.

To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two pan­els, fol­lowed by their solu­tions, with the artist’s inten­tion­al mis­spellings intact.


1.
Encrypt­ed Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD

Decrypt­ed Text
Between sub­tle shad­ing and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlu­sion.

2.

Encrypt­ed Text
VFPJUDEEHZWETZYVGWHKKQETGFQJNCE
GGWHKK?DQMCPFQZDQMMIAGPFXHQRLG
TIMVMZJANQLVKQEDAGDVFRPJUNGEUNA
QZGZLECGYUXUEENJTBJLBQCRTBJDFHRR
YIZETKZEMVDUFKSJHKFWHKUWQLSZFTI
HHDDDUVH?DWKBFUFPWNTDFIYCUQZERE
EVLDKFEZMOQQJLTTUGSYQPFEUNLAVIDX
FLGGTEZ?FKZBSFDQVGOGIPUFXHHDRKF
FHQNTGPUAECNUVPDJMQCLQUMUNEDFQ
ELZZVRRGKFFVOEEXBDMVPNFQXEZLGRE
DNQFMPNZGLFLPMRJQYALMGNUVPDXVKP
DQUMEBEDMHDAFMJGZNUPLGEWJLLAETG

Decrypt­ed Text
It was total­ly invis­i­ble Hows that pos­si­ble? They used the Earths mag­net­ic field X
The infor­ma­tion was gath­ered and trans­mit­ted under­gru­und to an unknown loca­tion X
Does Lan­g­ley know about this? They should Its buried out there some­where X
Who knows the exact loca­tion? Only WW This was his last mes­sage X
Thir­ty eight degrees fifty sev­en min­utes six point five sec­onds north
Sev­en­ty sev­en degrees eight min­utes forty four sec­onds west ID by rows

View step by step solu­tions for the first three of Kryp­tos’ encrypt­ed pan­els here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

The Code of Charles Dick­ens’ Short­hand Has Been Cracked by Com­put­er Pro­gram­mers, Solv­ing a 160-Year-Old Mys­tery

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Dying Whistled Language of Laos, Featured in a New Short Film, “Birdsong”

in Language | January 9th, 2024

Even by the stan­dards of south­east Asia, Laos is a lin­guis­ti­cal­ly inter­est­ing place. As a for­mer French colony, it remains part of la Fran­coph­o­nie, yet iron­i­cal­ly, French is not its lin­gua fran­ca; that would be Lao, spo­ken native­ly by just over half the pop­u­la­tion (as well, in anoth­er dialect, by many more Thais on the oth­er side of the west­ern bor­der). And that does­n’t even get into the 90 oth­er tongues spo­ken in the var­i­ous regions of Laos, many of which sound noth­ing like the major lan­guages in use. Ven­ture far from Vien­tiane, up into the coun­try’s north­ern high­lands, and you’ll even hear a lan­guage com­posed entire­ly of whis­tles.

You’ll hear it if you’re lucky, any­way. As con­veyed in Omi Zola Gup­ta and Sparsh Ahu­ja’s short doc­u­men­tary Bird­song, this lan­guage has pre­cious few remain­ing native speak­ers — or, in the case of one arti­san who com­mu­ni­cates through a kind of tra­di­tion­al bam­boo bag­pipe called the qeej, play­ers. They hail from Long Lan, a vil­lage inhab­it­ed by the Hmong peo­ple (who in the Unit­ed States became known as an immi­grant group thanks to Clint East­wood’s film Gran Tori­no).

“Hmong peo­ple are roman­tics because we live in the moun­tains, sur­round­ed by the sounds of the birds and the rodents, the winds and mead­ows of flow­ers,” says one of them. “The insects and birds are still singing in the for­est,” adds anoth­er, “but we don’t hear them in the city any­more. And with­out the birds, how can we tell the sea­sons?”

Like oth­er whis­tled lan­guages (includ­ing the Oax­a­can, Turk­ish, and Canari­an ones we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), that used by the vil­lagers of Long Lan does not belong to the urban world. As Lau­ra Spin­ney writes in the Guardian, some 80 such lan­guages still exist in total, “on every inhab­it­ed con­ti­nent, usu­al­ly where tra­di­tion­al rur­al lifestyles per­sist, and in places where the ter­rain makes long-dis­tance com­mu­ni­ca­tion both dif­fi­cult and nec­es­sary — high moun­tains, for exam­ple, or dense for­est.” Though all of them are now endan­gered, “whis­tled lan­guages have come into their own in sur­pris­ing ways in the past. They have often flour­ished when there has been a need for secre­cy,” as when Papua New Guineans used theirs to evade Japan­ese sur­veil­lance in World War II — or, as one of Bird­song’s inter­vie­wees remem­bers, when he had things to say meant for his girl­friend’s ears alone.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

Dis­cov­er the Dis­ap­pear­ing Turk­ish Lan­guage That is Whis­tled, Not Spo­ken

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Whis­tled Lan­guages of the Canary Islands, Turkey & Mex­i­co (and What They Say About the Human Brain)

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

The Rarest Sounds Across All Human Lan­guages: Learn What They Are, and How to Say Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Prisencolinensinainciusol, the Catchy Italian Pop Song That Sounded Like It Had English Lyrics, But Was Actually Gibberish (1972)

in English Language, Language, Music | November 17th, 2023

Yes­ter­day a friend and I were stand­ing on a New York City side­walk, wait­ing for the light, when Stayin’ Alive began issu­ing at top vol­ume from a near­by car.

Pavlov­ian con­di­tion­ing kicked in imme­di­ate­ly.  We’d been singing along with the Bee Gees for near­ly a minute before real­iz­ing that nei­ther of us knew the lyrics. Like, at all.

Ital­ian actor and musi­cian Adri­ano Celen­tano’s cult clas­sic, Prisen­co­l­i­nensi­nain­ciu­sol, inspires a sim­i­lar response.

The dif­fer­ence being that should I ever need to prep for karaoke, Stayin’ Alive’s lyrics are wide­ly avail­able online, where­as Prisen­co­l­i­nensi­nain­ciu­sol’s lyrics are kind of anyone’s guess…nonsense in any lan­guage.

Celen­tano impro­vised this gib­ber­ish in 1972 in an attempt to recre­ate how Amer­i­can rock and roll lyrics sound like to non-Eng­lish-speak­ing Ital­ian fans like him­self.

As he told NPR’s All Things Con­sid­ered through a trans­la­tor dur­ing a 2012 inter­view:

Ever since I start­ed singing, I was very influ­enced by Amer­i­can music and every­thing Amer­i­cans did. So at a cer­tain point, because I like Amer­i­can slang — which, for a singer, is much eas­i­er to sing than Ital­ian — I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inabil­i­ty to communicate…I sang it with an angry tone because the theme was impor­tant. It was an anger born out of res­ig­na­tion. I brought to light the fact that peo­ple don’t com­mu­ni­cate.

And yet, his 1974 appear­ance in the above sketch on the Ital­ian vari­ety series For­mu­la Due spurs strangers to make stabs at com­mu­ni­ca­tion by shar­ing their best guess tran­scrip­tions of Prisen­co­l­i­nensi­nain­ciu­sol’s lyrics in YouTube com­ments, 51 years after the song’s orig­i­nal release.

A sam­pling, anchored by the cho­rus’ icon­ic and unmis­take­able “all right:”

@glassjester:

My eyes lie, sense­less.
I guess I’m throw­ing piz­za.
Eyes.

And the cold wind sailor,
freez­ing cold and icy in Tuc­son
Alright.

 

@emanueletardino8545:

My eyes are way so sen­si­tive
And it gets so cold, it’s freez­ing
Ice

You’re the cold, main, the same one
Please let’s call ’em ‘n’ dance with my shoes off
All right

 

@sexydudeuk2172

My eyes smile sense­less but it doesn’t go with diesel all right.

 

@leviathan3187:

I don’t know why but I want a maid to say I want pair of ice blue shoes with eyes…awight.

 

Prisen­co­l­i­nensi­nain­ciu­sol’s loop­ing, throb­bing beat is wild­ly catchy and immi­nent­ly dance­able, as evi­denced by Celentano’s per­for­mance on For­mu­la Due and that of the black clad dancers back­ing him up dur­ing an appear­ance on Mil­lelu­ci, anoth­er mid-70s Ital­ian vari­ety show, below.

The atten­tion gen­er­at­ed by these vari­ety show seg­ments — both lip synched — sent Prisen­co­l­i­nensi­nain­ciu­sol up the charts in Italy, Bel­gium, Ger­many, France, the Nether­lands, the UK,  and even the Unit­ed States.

Its mix of dis­co, hip hop and funk has proved sur­pris­ing­ly durable, inspir­ing remix­es and cov­ers, includ­ing the one that served as philoso­pher Slavoj Žižek’s Euro­vi­sion Song Con­test entry.

Prisen­co­l­i­nensi­nain­ciu­sol has net­ted a whole new gen­er­a­tion of fans by crop­ping up on Ted Las­so, Far­go, a com­mer­cial for spiced rum, and seem­ing­ly innu­mer­able Tik­Toks.

We’ll prob­a­bly nev­er get a firm grasp on the lyrics, despite Ital­ian tele­vi­sion host Pao­lo Bono­lis’ puck­ish 2005 attempt to goad befud­dled native Eng­lish speak­er Will Smith into deci­pher­ing them.

No mat­ter.

Celentano’s supreme­ly con­fi­dent deliv­ery of those indeli­ble non­sense syl­la­bles is what counts, accord­ing to a YouTube view­er from Slove­nia with fond mem­o­ries of play­ing in a rock band as a teen in the 1960’s:

This is exact­ly how we non-Eng­lish-speak­ers sung the then hit songs. You learned some begin­ning parts of lyrics so that the audi­ence rec­og­nized the song. They heard it at Radio Lux­em­bourg. From here on it was exact­ly the same style — out­side the cho­rus of course. Adri­ano Celen­tano was always been a leg­end for us back in Slove­nia.

h/t Erik B.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became the Stan­dard For Type­set­ters Every­where

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

Watch La Lin­ea, the Pop­u­lar 1970s Ital­ian Ani­ma­tions Drawn with a Sin­gle Line

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Writing Systems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alphabet to the Abugidas of India

in Language, Writing | October 30th, 2023

The Kore­an alpha­bet, hangul, is “the most sci­en­tif­ic writ­ing sys­tem.” One often hears that in South Korea, a soci­ety that has tak­en to heart Asia schol­ar Edwin O. Reis­chauer’s descrip­tion of hangul as “per­haps the most sci­en­tif­ic sys­tem of writ­ing in gen­er­al use in any coun­try.” But what­ev­er their sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials, all the oth­er writ­ing sys­tems in use (and indeed out of use) have fas­ci­nat­ing qual­i­ties of their own, a range of which are explained in the Use­fulCharts video above on the writ­ing sys­tems of the world — not just the alpha­bets of the world, mind you, but also the abjads, the syl­labaries, the logo-syl­labaries, and the abugi­das.

The sym­bols used in an abjad, like that of Hebrew or Ara­bic (or ancient Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs), rep­re­sent only con­so­nants; as for vow­els, “the read­ers are expect­ed to add them in on their own, based on con­text.” In a syl­labary, like the hira­gana and katakana used in Japan­ese, each char­ac­ter rep­re­sents a syl­la­ble: に for “ni,” ほ for “ho,” ん for “n” (though lin­guists no doubt argue about whether that last should real­ly count as a syl­la­ble).

But most of the Japan­ese writ­ing is adapt­ed from the Chi­nese one, a logo-syl­labary in which “a sin­gle char­ac­ter can stand for a unique syl­la­ble or an entire word or idea,” which results in “thou­sands of char­ac­ters that need to be learned for basic lit­er­a­cy.”

Abugi­das, pri­mar­i­ly used in Indi­an and south­east Asian lan­guages (but also to write Amhar­ic, the lan­guage of Ethiopia), “have unique char­ac­ters both for vow­els and for con­so­nants. How­ev­er, these vow­el let­ters are gen­er­al­ly only used in sit­u­a­tions where a word begins with a vow­el.” Oth­er­wise, a “small change” made to a con­so­nant char­ac­ter indi­cates which vow­el fol­lows. How­ev­er mechan­i­cal­ly or aes­thet­i­cal­ly diverse they may appear, none of these writ­ing sys­tems (all pic­tured on a poster from Use­fulCharts, avail­able for $19.95 USD) are so fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent that they can’t be mas­tered by a non-native with time and effort. Not that they’re all as easy as hangul, which — as its com­mis­sion­er King Sejong the Great put it, in anoth­er quotable quote — a wise man can learn before the morn­ing is over, and a stu­pid man can learn in ten days.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

The Evo­lu­tion of the Alpha­bet: A Col­or­ful Flow­chart, Cov­er­ing 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

How to Read Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs: A British Muse­um Cura­tor Explains

The Atlas of Endan­gered Alpha­bets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Pre­serve Writ­ing Sys­tems That May Soon Dis­ap­pear

Dis­cov­er Nüshu, a 19th-Cen­tu­ry Chi­nese Writ­ing Sys­tem That Only Women Knew How to Write

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Discover the Regions in Italy Where the People Descended from the Medieval or Ancient Greeks, and Still Speak Greek

in History, Language, Travel | October 12th, 2023

All of us, across the world, know that Italy is shaped like a boot. But almost none of us know that, in the regions of Apu­lia and Cal­abria at the coun­try’s “heel” and “toe,” live small com­mu­ni­ties who, among them­selves, still speak not Ital­ian but Greek. The word “still” applies because these peo­ples, known as Griko (or Gre­cani­ci), are thought to have descend­ed from the much larg­er medieval or even ancient Greek com­mu­ni­ties that once exist­ed there. Of course, it would­n’t have been at all unusu­al back then for inhab­i­tants of one part of what we now call Italy to speak a quite dif­fer­ent lan­guage from the inhab­i­tants of anoth­er.

John Kaza­k­lis at Isto­ria writes that “the Ital­ian lan­guage did not become the sta­ple lan­guage until well into the end of the 19th Cen­tu­ry dur­ing the process of Ital­ian uni­fi­ca­tion, or the Risorg­i­men­to,” which turned the Tus­can dialect into the nation­al lan­guage. Yet “there exists today a tiny enclave of Greek-speak­ing peo­ple in the Aspromonte Moun­tain region of Reg­gio Cal­abria that seem to have sur­vived mil­len­nia.”

Are they “descen­dants of the Ancient Greeks who col­o­nized South­ern Italy? Are they rem­nants of the Byzan­tine pres­ence in South­ern Italy? Did their ances­tors come in the 15th-16th Cen­turies from the Greek com­mu­ni­ties in the Aegean flee­ing Ottoman inva­sion?” Every­one who con­sid­ers the ori­gins of the Griko/Grecanici peo­ple (or their Griko/Gri­co/Greko lan­guages) seems to come to a slight­ly dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion.

“I sus­pect they speak a dialect more close­ly relat­ed to the Koine Greek spo­ken at the time of the 11th cen­tu­ry Byzan­tine Empire, the last and final time South­ern Italy was still part of the Greek-speak­ing world,” writes Gre­coph­o­ne Youtu­ber Tom_Traveler, who vis­its the Griko-speak­ing vil­lages of Gal­li­cianò and Bova in the video above. “Or per­haps it was influ­enced by Greek refugees flee­ing Con­stan­tino­ple upon its fall to the Turks in 1453.” How­ev­er it devel­oped, it’s long been a lan­guage on the decline: “the clear­est esti­mate of remain­ing Greko speak­ers seems to be between 200–300,” Kaza­k­lis wrote in 2017, “and num­bers con­tin­ue to decrease.” In the inter­est of pre­serv­ing the lan­guage and the his­to­ry reflect­ed with­in it, now would be a good time for a few of those speak­ers to start up Youtube chan­nels of their own.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Byzan­tine Empire Rose, Fell, and Cre­at­ed the Glo­ri­ous Hagia Sophia: A His­to­ry in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Map­ping the Sounds of Greek Byzan­tine Church­es: How Researchers Are Cre­at­ing “Muse­ums of Lost Sound”

Learn Ancient Greek in 64 Free Lessons: A Free Online Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

Can Mod­ern-Day Ital­ians Under­stand Latin? A Youtu­ber Puts It to the Test on the Streets of Rome

Meet the Amer­i­cans Who Speak with Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish Accents: An Intro­duc­tion to the “Hoi Toi­ders” from Ocra­coke, North Car­oli­na

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Welcome to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoc, the Town with the Longest Name in Europe

in Language, Travel | September 26th, 2023

Its name can be squeezed onto a tea tow­el, a dec­o­ra­tive plate, a mag­net, a mug, and oth­er touris­tic sou­venirs, but has the north­ern Welsh town of Llan­fair­p­wll­gwyn­gyll­gogerych­wyrn­drob­wl­l­l­lan­tysil­i­o­gogogoc been cel­e­brat­ed in song?

Indeed it has. The Great Big Sto­ry’s Human Con­di­tion episode, above, has vinyl proof, though the tune’s unlike­ly to give The White Cliffs of Dover, The Bon­nie Banks of Loch Lomond, or The Rocky Road To Dublin much of a run for the mon­ey.

Still, whichev­er out­side-the-box Vic­to­ri­an thinker had the bright idea to attract tourists by expand­ing the village’s orig­i­nal name — Pwll­gwyn­gyll — by 46 let­ters was onto some­thing.

Turns out you don’t need nat­ur­al won­ders or world-renowned cul­tur­al attrac­tions to stake a claim, when out-of-town­ers will make the trip just to take pho­tos of the local sig­nage.

Image by Adraio, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Vil­lage Com­mu­ni­ty Coun­cil Chair­man Alun Mum­mery attrib­ut­es the name-length­en­ing pub­lic­i­ty stunt in 1869 to a local cob­bler.

Or per­haps he was a tai­lor. That’s what poet John Mor­ris-Jones, author of 1913’s A Welsh Gram­mar, His­tor­i­cal and Com­par­a­tive, main­tained, while refus­ing to out­right iden­ti­fy this clever civic boost­er.

Wikipedia throws doubt on these ori­gin sto­ries by cit­ing an entry in an eccle­si­as­ti­cal direc­to­ry pub­lished a few years pri­or to 1869, which gave the full parish name as “Llanfair­pwll­gwyn­gyll­goger­bwll­tysilio­gogo.”

(Close enough!)

Some­one in the tourist infor­ma­tion office told trav­el writer Dave Fox that it trans­lates to “St. Mary’s Church in the hol­low of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave.”

It’s tempt­ing to think this lit­tle Welsh town has the longest name in the world, but that hon­or actu­al­ly goes to Bangkok.

Wait, what?

The name by which most for­eign­ers know Thai­land’s cap­i­tal city is actu­al­ly an archa­ic ref­er­ence to its pre-1782 loca­tion.

Thai peo­ple call their cap­i­tal Krung Thep — short for Krungth­ep­ma­hanako­r­namorn­ratanakos­in­mahin­tarayut­thayama­hadilokphopnop­pa­ra­tra­jathaniburiro­mu­dom­ra­jani­wes­ma­hasathar­namorn­phi­mar­na­vatarn­sathit­sakkat­tiyav­isanukam­pr­a­sit.

It means “City of angels, great city of immor­tals, mag­nif­i­cent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of roy­al palaces, home of gods incar­nate, erect­ed by Vish­vakar­man at Indra’s behest” and looks like this, when writ­ten in Thai script:

กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลก ภพนพรัตน์ ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์ มหาสถาน อมรพิมาน อวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะ วิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์

Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­gochians still get to brag that they have the longest town name in Europe.

Their foot­ball club, Clwb Pêl Droed Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch Foot­ball Club — CPD Llan­fair­p­wll FC for short — might well be the longest named foot­ball club in the world if it weren’t for that damn Amon Rat­tanakosin Krung Thep Mahanakhon Mahinthara Mahadilok Phop Nop­pharat Ratchathani Ayuthaya Burirom Udom­ratchani­wet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathat­tiya Wit­sanukam Pra­sit Bra­vo Asso­ci­a­tion Foot­ball Club (aka Bangkok Bra­vo FC).

Some of the fun of liv­ing in a town with such a cum­ber­some name must be amaz­ing tourists by how casu­al­ly it rolls off local tongues.

Pub own­er Kevin Bryant oblig­es vis­i­tors from The Great Big Sto­ry by down­ing a pint on cam­era before rap­ping it out.

Any­thing for the local econ­o­my!

Llan­fair­p­wll­gwyn­gyll­gogerych­wyrn­drob­wl­l­l­lan­tysil­i­o­gogogoc also got a boost from men­tions on Grou­cho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, in a Bossa Nova-inflect­ed Stephen Sond­heim song, and in sev­er­al films, includ­ing 1968’s Bar­barel­la.

As YouTu­ber Tom Scott points out below, long words are invari­ably short­ened in every­day speech, and place names are no excep­tion.

Post­mas­ter Jim Evans advo­cates short­en­ing the town name to Llanfair­pwllgwyn­gyll.

When not active­ly impress­ing tourists, local peo­ple say Llan­fair­p­wll.

Which is still a pret­ty impres­sive con­so­nant to vow­el ratio.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Medieval City Plan Gen­er­a­tor: A Fun Way to Cre­ate Your Own Imag­i­nary Medieval Cities

The Atlas of True Names Restores Mod­ern Cities to Their Mid­dle Earth-ish Roots

Fly Through 17th-Cen­tu­ry London’s Grit­ty Streets with Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tions

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Scientists Working in Antarctica Unwittingly Started to Develop a New Accent

in Language | September 20th, 2023

The dis­tinc­tive­ness of the accent heard in a place reflects that place’s iso­la­tion. It’s prob­a­bly no coin­ci­dence that, as almost every place in the world has become less iso­lat­ed, accents have become less dis­tinc­tive. In these days of van­ish­ing forms of region­al speech, if you want­ed to hear a new one com­ing into being, you’d have to go to the ends of the Earth — or one spe­cif­ic end of the Earth, any­way, as demon­strat­ed not long ago by researchers from the Lud­wig Max­i­m­il­ian Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich. Tak­ing and ana­lyz­ing record­ings made over the course of one win­ter, they dis­cov­ered that a new accent has begun to take shape in Eng­lish as spo­ken in Antarc­ti­ca.

“Antarc­ti­ca has no native pop­u­la­tion or per­ma­nent res­i­dents, but it does have a tran­si­to­ry com­mu­ni­ty of sci­en­tists and sup­port staff who live there for part of the year on a rota­tion­al basis,” writes Tom Hale at IFL Sci­ence. “In the sum­mer months, there are typ­i­cal­ly around 5,000 peo­ple liv­ing in Antarc­ti­ca, but that drops to just 1,000 in the win­ter.” It was from this group of the Antarc­tic “over-win­ter­ers” — and in par­tic­u­lar, from those work­ing on the British Antarc­tic Sur­vey — that the lin­guis­tic researchers recruit­ed their sub­jects, eight of whom were from Eng­land, one from the Unit­ed States, one from Ger­many, and one from Ice­land.

“The find­ings revealed sub­tle but mea­sur­able changes in the speech of the over­win­ter­ing staff dur­ing their time in Antarc­ti­ca,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Brett Reynolds. “One change was con­ver­gence, where indi­vid­u­als in a close-knit group uncon­scious­ly begin to adopt sim­i­lar speech char­ac­ter­is­tics. In this case, that meant con­ver­gence of /u/ (the ‘oo’ in goose), /ju/ (the ‘you’ in few), /ou/ (the ‘oh’ in goat), and /ɪ:/ (the ‘ee’ in the last syl­la­ble in hap­py).” Apart from that phe­nom­e­non, the researchers also noticed anoth­er change in the /ou/ of goat: “the over-win­ter­ers began to pro­nounce it more toward the front of their mouths than toward the back. (British pro­nun­ci­a­tions are already typ­i­cal­ly fron­ter than Amer­i­can /ou/.)”

Even if you got into a con­ver­sa­tion with a sci­en­tist just back from a long win­ter in Antarc­ti­ca, you prob­a­bly would­n’t notice any of this. But the fact that the dif­fer­ences between the series of record­ings tak­en at six-week inter­vals dur­ing the win­ter show mea­sur­able changes in pro­nun­ci­a­tion when com­pared to con­trol record­ings tak­en back in the Unit­ed King­dom sug­gests that the iso­la­tion of Antarc­ti­ca real­ly does encour­age the for­ma­tion of a new accent. Giv­en a suf­fi­cient­ly long time span, an accent nat­u­ral­ly becomes a dialect, and even­tu­al­ly a sep­a­rate lan­guage. Per­haps, even in our age of much-lament­ed loss of lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty, some of us can look for­ward to hav­ing Antarc­tic-speak­ing descen­dants.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Speech Accent Archive: The Eng­lish Accents of Peo­ple Who Speak 341 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

Why You Have an Accent When You Speak a For­eign Lan­guage

What Eng­lish Would Sound Like If It Was Pro­nounced Pho­net­i­cal­ly

Meet the Amer­i­cans Who Speak with Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish Accents: An Intro­duc­tion to the “Hoi Toi­ders” from Ocra­coke, North Car­oli­na

Metal­li­ca Plays Antarc­ti­ca, Set­ting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Con­ti­nents: Watch the Full Con­cert Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast