Should we be maintaining and preserving Indigenous languages? There have been ongoing discussions on whether or not Indigenous language should be taught in schools…but which language and who would teach it?
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/indigenous-languages/4652826
Get out your skinny jeans and pass the PBR! Martha and Grant discuss the definition of the word hipster. Also, what happens when you pull a brodie? And why do we describe something cheap or poorly made as cheesy? Also, sawbucks, shoestring budgets, the origins of bootlegging, and cabbie lingo, including the slang word bingo.
Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 14: “By Their Words You Shall Know Them.” Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab Is it possible that your writing style is identifiably unique? In the late 1800s, a Polish philosopher named Wincenty Lutosławski imagined a “future science of stylometry,”…
Does Scrabble in fact celebrate language? Or does it merely reduce English to a set of mathematical symbols and probability calculations? In the final episode of our first series of Lexicon Valley podcasts, I talk to Word Freak author and competitive Scrabble player Stefan Fatsis about how a math game disguised as a word game nevertheless unlocks the essential beauty of the English language.
In this wide-ranging one hour conversation with the very smart and very charming author of The Fry Chronicles, we discuss everything from language to education to British moral standards to the sounds of fax machines. And apparently, we’re the only program that had the guts to ask this noted Apple acolyte about Foxconn.
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
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
Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_pagel_how_language_transformed_humanity.html
University of Toronto Physics professor Robert K. Logan on The Origin and Evolution of Language and the Emergence of Concepts