Radio Four comedy panel game about words. Presented by Gyles Brandreth, with guests Natalie Haynes, Stephen Fry, Lloyd Langford and Milton Jones.
Tagged with “language”
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BBC - Comedy of the Week - Wordaholics
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‘A Fish In Your Ear’: What Gets Lost In Translation
Russian has a word for light blue and a word for dark blue, but no word for a general shade of blue. So when interpreters translate "blue" into Russian, they’re forced to pick a shade. It’s one of the many complexities of translation David Bellos explores in his new book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/14/142309214/meaning-of-everything-often-lost-in-translation?sc=tw
Tagged with language translation npr
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Why Do Auctioneers Talk So Fast? (full episode) | A Way with Words
Why do auctioneers talk so fast? Martha and Grant discuss the rapid-fire speech of auctioneers, and how it gets you to bid higher. Also, why so many books have ridiculously long titles, where you’d have sonker for dessert, and an appreciation of that children’s classic, “The Phantom Tollbooth.” Plus, “different from” vs. “different than,” the origin of suss out, words that apparently entered English in 1937, and the many names for those little gray bugs that roll up into a ball.
Public radio’s show about words and language and how we use them, with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett
Tagged with auctioneers fast language
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Wild birds talking! - ABC WA - Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
Naturalist Martyn Robinson, has discovered that pet birds who have escaped into the bush have ‘taught’ their wild companions to speak. The words that the the once domesticated pets learned from humans can now be heard from the beaks of their wild cousins.
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Think You Know ‘How To Write A Sentence’? : NPR
Most people know a good sentence when they read one, but New York Times columnist Stanley Fish says most of us don’t really know how to write them ourselves. His new book, How To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One, is part ode, part how-to guide to the art of the well-constructed sentence.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/25/133214521/stanley-fish-demystifies-how-to-write-a-sentence
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Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills : NPR
On October 3, 1955, the Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the "Thunder Burp." The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514
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Aldous Huxley - On Language
Huxley explores both the liberating and limiting aspects of language in our lives and how language can determine our worldviews. He talks of the frustration artists and mystics find in using words to express experience, and how we communicate the incommunicable. This is the fourth in a series of five lectures Aldous Huxley gave in 1961 at M.I.T.
Tagged with huxley language linguistics acquisition