Nine Made Up Languages from Books

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

15 English Words Derived from Irish Gaelic

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Don't Kill Your Language

How to Say "Merry Christmas"

The Longest Words in World Languages

Decoding Linear B - A Very Old European Language Indeed

When Alice Kober died at the age of 45, she was a forgotten and ignored classics professor. But she arguably did more than anyone to decode what was then the oldest written European language known to exist. 

From a story in the Daily Beast...

The story of Linear B is well known. This 3,000-year-old language was discovered on clay tablets excavated in 1900 on the island of Crete. It thereafter puzzled scholars for half a century before it was decoded by Michael Ventris, an English architect with no formal training in archeology or linguistics. Linear B’s history is an absorbing tale, full of mysteries both intellectual and historical, and it’s been told and retold since Ventris made his breakthrough. The problem, as Fox sees it, is that what’s been published so far is by no means the whole story. Previous versions, she argues, neglect a major player, so much so that the story as we know amounts to if not a lie then certainly a libel. The Riddle of the Labyrinth is her attempt to set the record straight, to apportion credit correctly, and by doing so to explicate the solution of Linear B in a way that at last makes sense.

Whistled Speech in Oaxaca

210 - Whistles in the Mist: Whistled Speech in Oaxaca from The Southwest Center-Dan Duncan, on Vimeo.

The World's Oldest Undeciphered Writing About to Be Deciphered

The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far defied attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about to be decoded by Oxford University academics.

From a story on the BBC...

The clay tablets were put inside this machine, the Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the clay tablets.

It allows a virtual image to be turned around, as though being held up to the light at every possible angle.

These images will be publicly available online, with the aim of using a kind of academic crowdsourcing.

He says it's misleading to think that codebreaking is about some lonely genius suddenly understanding the meaning of a word. What works more often is patient teamwork and the sharing of theories. Putting the images online should accelerate this process.

But this is painstaking work. So far Dr Dahl has deciphered 1,200 separate signs, but he says that after more than 10 years study much remains unknown, even such basic words as "cow" or "cattle".

The Easy-Shmeezy Guide to Yiddish

What Color is This?

The question is not only “Where does blue end, and red begin?”, but do people from different countries have different concepts of color boundaries? Colors, in different languages, here.

Keeping the Tower of Babel from Falling

How? With Google's Endangered Language Project.

From a story in the New York Daily News...


The project's website provides this statement on its aims: "The Endangered Languages Project, is an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat."

A world map provides visual aid, with dots representing endangered languages, in their area of origin. Clicking on a dot, such as the one for Tsakonian, opens a page with a description, samples, guide and activity for the language. It also has a classification of the language's vitality, determined based on the number of speakers worldwide. Tsakonian's 1,200 speakers make it a “threatened” language. Social media links are provided on the page, inviting users to "spread the word and help raise awareness" for the language through Google Plus, Twitter or Facebook.

It has already received and posted submissions, under the categories of language documentation, language learning, technology and personal statements. Languages that are relatively well-known but still considered endangered, like Yiddish, should garner a fair amount of attention. Time will tell if the more obscure languages' speakers will support their tongues on the site.

Silenc

How much of a language is silent? What does it look like when you take the silence out? Can we use code as a tool to answer these questions?


silenc – visualization from Kenneth Aleksander Robertsen on Vimeo.

Wait - How Did We Name Colors Like Orange Anyway? And Is It Messing With Our Brains?

Yes!

From a piece on Empirical Zeal...

There are plenty of other languages that blur the lines between what we call blue and green. Many languages don’t distinguish between the two colors at all. In Vietnamese the Thai language, khiaw means green except if it refers to the sky or the sea, in which case it’s blue (Update: Thanks, Ani Nguyen, for catching this mistake. See her comment below about blue and green in Vietnamese). The Korean word purueda could refer to either blue or green, and the same goes for the Chinese word qīng. It’s not just East Asian languages either, this is something you see across language families. aIn fact, Radiolab had a fascinating recent episode on color where they talked about how there was no blue in the original Hebrew Bible, nor in all of Homer’s Illiad or Odyssey!

I find this fascinating, because it highlights a powerful idea about how we might see the world. After all, what really is a color? Just like the crayons, we’re taking something that has no natural boundaries – the frequencies of visible light – and dividing into convenient packages that we give a name.

Invented Languages

On Lapham's Quarterly there is an interesting podcast about language inventors and the languages they invented.

Listen to it, here.

Botanists Agree to Loosen Latin's Grip

Latin's dead and getting deader. From a piece in the Washington Post about how botanists are starting to name things in English...

For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled. Scientists say plants will keep their double-barreled Latin names, but they have decided to drop the requirement that new species be described in the classical language. Instead, they have agreed to allow botanists to use English (other languages need not apply). In their scientific papers, they can still describe a newly found species of plant — or algae or fungi — in Latin if they wish, but most probably won’t.

“The new chatter is in chemicals and molecules,” said Laurence Dorr, one of three Latinists in the Smithsonian Institution’s botany department who would help their colleagues translate. “It was heading toward extinction,” said Warren Wagner, department chair.

The change, which took effect Jan. 1, is more than just academic. Smithsonian botanists alone might introduce as many as 100 new plant species a year, discovered either on their travels or in the national herbarium, a collection of 5 million dried specimens housed at the Natural History Museum. Globally, scientists discover 2,000 new species per annum. As many as one in five of the world’s plant species have yet to be identified, and not until they are named and known to the scientific community can they can be protected and studied further. “You can’t talk about it until that point,” said James Miller, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden. “It’s not the end of knowing a species, it’s the beginning.”

From Elvish to Klingon

Why do we make up languages?

From a piece in Time Magazine...

How many invented languages are there, and how do you count them?

We look at the remains of the languages, from books and pamphlets and manuscripts, so it’s probably a very partial count. There are about a thousand of them if you count the ones like Elvish or Esperanto that you could actually, fully use as a language because they have grammar and enough vocabulary. But that doesn’t count revitalized languages, like Hawaiian; or Na’vi, the language of Avatar; or languages from video games or novels like 1984. If you start to add all those up, you come up with more invented languages than we have natural languages in the world.

Why do people invent languages?

The basic reason is some dissatisfaction with the languages that are around us. Then that branches off. In Tolkien’s case, it had something to do with beauty and what was personal to him. He thought he could produce something that you couldn’t find naturally in the world. Other people, like the folks who are [trying to] revitalize a language, are doing it to preserve an ethnic identity. Or building a national identity. In the case of Modern Hebrew, you’re bringing old language into the modern world, where it has to respond to things like toaster ovens. For games, they’re invented partly to make money and partly for the experience of playing the game, creating that integral reality that is so satisfying to players.

The Water Calligraphy Device

Weird and cool.

The Endangered Alphabets Project

The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written.

Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.

The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of fourteen carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue.

Top Ten Invented Languages

The list, care of Top Tenz.

From the piece...

Enochian

This language appeared in the 16th century in a series of books by astrologer John Dee and seer Edward Kelley. According to Dee, it was the language used by God to create the world, which had gradually ‘devolved’ over time to become the Biblical Hebrew of the Old Testament. Luckily for them, this language was taught to Dee and Kelley by angels. Enochian also came with an alphabet, which Dee and Kelley used to write their books detailing magical practices.

Modern skeptics have since pointed out that Enochian has far more in common grammatically with English than any form of Hebrew. Still, the language became popular again in the 20th century, and it’s still used by some occultists today.

Hello

Around the globe, we all say hello differently. Mental Floss celebrates that fact highlighting some of those differences.

From the piece...

2. Have you eaten rice?
喂, 食咗飯未呀?; wei, sik jor fan mei a?

Language: Cantonese.
Where it comes from: Mostly southern China. The phrase, or derivations of it—“have you eaten?”—is also used in several other southeast Asian languages.
3. Are you getting old?
A po plakesh?

Language: Albanian
Where it comes from: Kosovars and Macedonian Albanians also use the common expressions, “A je lodhë?” and “A je mërzitë?” which literally translate to, “Are you tired? Are you upset?” in place of “What’s up?”