The assertion that serendipity is notoriously difficult to translate from English into other languages will often turn up while conducting research on the word serendipity; “voted one of the top 10 most difficult English words to translate by a British translation company” is a ubiquitous passage on the web.

The translation company Today Translations had conducted a survey of translators to determine what they considered to be the most difficult non-English words to translate into English, and vice versa. The results of the survey were published in a 2004 The Times of London article by Robin Young, entitled, “The special words that are somehow lost in translation”. Here are the results reposted on a discussion thread of a forum.

For translators involved in English translation, serendipity was indeed among the top 10. Others included words used chiefly in British English, for example, googly (a term used in cricket), but a classic American culinary contribution made it on the list: Spam.

A word search

As I delved further into the origins and definitions of the word serendipity, I began to see how the word might have made the top 10 list...

In fact, my assumption was that serendipity’s etymology would be relatively easy and include the word “serene”. Perhaps the last half of the word “-dipity” might yield something interesting, something to do with the word “dip”, or perhaps, if I was lucky, something more mysterious, something that would have made the creators of the hair-styling gel of the 1970’s, Dippity-do, choose to name their product after it…

One search tells me that “serene” comes from the Latin serenus which means “cloudless”, and by extension, calm and peaceful. Another tells me that the English language gets its version from the Old French serain, meaning “dusk” from the Latin “sērus“, meaning “late”. Collins English Language Dictionary has “serein” as an entry in English and defines it as follows:

serein [səˈreɪn] 

n (Earth Sciences / Physical Geography) fine rain falling from a clear sky after sunset, esp in the tropics Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

The fine rain falling from a clear sky after sunset… Sounds pretty serene, doesn’t it? And may even be a description of a serendipitous meteorological phenomenon. So let’s look a little more closely at the etymologies of two other possibilities, “sērus” and “serēnus”. From an email correspondence with Dr. Tyler Lansford, Classics instructor at University of Colorado at Boulder:

According to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the etymology of serēnus ('clear', 'bright', 'fair', 'tranquil') is unknown. The short ĕ in the first syllable of serēnus means that it's etymologically unlikely that it's related to sērus (late). A possible cognate is the Greek xēros ('dry', as in 'xeroscape'), although the quantity of vowels (short versus long) is one of the most persistent characteristics in Indo-European words and is unlikely to vary between two cognates.

However, regardless of the origins of serēnus, serendipity’s etymology has neither Latin nor Greek roots, much to my surprise.

A vogue word

So where does the word “serendipity” come from? In this case, “where” ends up being the perfect question.

In fact, there is no real controversy surrounding the origins of the word. Horace Walthrop is credited with coining the term. From Wikipedia:

The first noted use of "serendipity" in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib, from Tamil "Seren deevu" or from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa or golden island [...]

The controversy surrounding Walthorp’s formation, definition and usage of serendipity has perhaps best been described by Richard Boyle in a book review titled "Serendipity: How the vogue word became vague." Boyle, author of Knox's Words: A Study of the Words of Sri Lankan Origin, contends that the entry for serendipity in the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is lacking because it makes no mention of the key element necessary for a fortunate event to be an instance of serendipity. From the OED:

Pronunciation:  /sɛrɛnˈdɪpɪtɪ/
Etymology:  < Serendip, a former name for Sri Lanka + -ITY suffix. ...

The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery. Formerly rare, this word and its derivatives have had wide currency in the 20th century.

The missing element in the OED definition is that the “unexpected discoveries” need to occur “while looking for something else.” Otherwise, what distinguishes a serendipitous event from plain old luck?

Another key element of serendipity is essential to the end result of discovery, “sagacity”, or wisdom; if your mind is not alert to the possibility of there being value in something you’ve encountered while looking for something entirely different, you will not see it. While looking for India, Christopher Columbus unexpectedly ran into what would become known as the Americas; while culturing germs, Alexander Fleming inadvertently grew mold that would become penicillin (video below); while attempting to get my French “green card” [carte de séjour], I instead met my future husband.

The aforementioned examples roughly illustrate the contemporary understanding of the word. Now let’s look at the mention of serendipity and an example from the original story of the Three Princes, as transmitted by Walpole to Mann, where we are likely to meet with some confusion:

"As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right - now do you understand serendipity?”

Uh, no. Please try again, Horace.

Horace, trying again…

"One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who, happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table."

That didn’t really help much, Horace. Thanks anyway.

In his review, Boyle quotes the authors of the book in question, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science by Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber: "The complexity of meaning with which Walpole endowed serendipity...was permanently to enrich and to confuse its semantic history."

So is serendipity what you thought it was? Do you have any serendipitous personal examples you’d like to share?

Landline recently sold his beautiful silver convertible, put all his things in storage, and went for a two-month surfing sabbatical in Central America without many belongings or concerns. Back home now in the States, he's readjusting and re-acclimating to urban pace. 

We've been talking lately about our existential struggle with western material life. It might be an imaginary problem for most people, but the thought of having "too much stuff" tends to bother me every day. We talked a lot about actively maintaining a slow outflow just to stay net-zero – like Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass, who travels past hills that become valleys and moves forward just to make the world stand still.

'Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

Having an average American home raises an even bigger material challenge because there's no lack of space/no pressure to purge, Landline explained. And then, there are the "house things" you need to own because the house requires them.

These conversations we have (spiritual communions) are simultaneously full of comfort and angst. I haven't asked about my friend's adventures in Central America – hikes, waves, animals, public transit, and other crazy encounters. I've been more interested in the aftermath of how such trips bring radical personal growth. He seems even more existentially unfulfilled than when he'd left, finding discomfort in social expectation about how one ought to hurtle through time and space.... that one ought to pursue a particular career structure, settle by a certain age, maintain a home in one city and fill it with useful or attractive objects. We discover that the unsettled feelings never leave. They just get duller after months and years.

George Carlin's "Stuff" routine (*contains 4 expletives)

The more advanced English language speakers in the group were tickled and convinced that they should spend more time building up both their speaking and listening skills; the less advanced speakers, like the German Coast guard trainee in the Berlitz commercial, wondered what the British crew members were “sinking about”, and why they sounded so excited about it – the British were meant to be quite calm and reserved, weren’t they?

A particularly astute student in the group of Koreans then thought to ask another question about something she’d heard in the ad: Why do English speakers use “May Day! May Day!” as a distress call? What does a day in May have to do with needing help? And isn’t May Day another way of referring to May 1^st, in fact? Is the Maypole frightening?   

Or maybe it’s frightening that May 1^st is Labor Day and a holiday in most industrialized countries in the world, with the exception of the United States?

Actually, the quirky expression May Day as a call for help has nothing at all to do with the month of May. Usually written “Mayday”, it is defined by my Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language as follows:

n. the international radiotelephone distress signal used by ships and aircraft. [1925-30; < F (venez) m’aider (come) help me!]

Instead, Mayday is an attempt by English speakers to correctly pronounce a French expression; it is a transliteration of sorts.

The original French expression “Venez m’aider!” or “Come (to) help me!” became shortened to “M’aider!” The pronunciation of Mayday very closely replicates the sound of “M’aider!” (to help me). The imperative form “Aidez-moi!”, approximately pronounced “AY-day-mwah!”, might have had a harder time being so seamlessly integrated into the English language.

Be all that as it may, the month of May is indeed here. The Maypoles and May Day manifestations have come and gone for another year. But may all of you currently living in the Northern hemisphere enjoy the remainder of the month and all the other manifestations of springtime renewal that surround us. And may none of you have a reason to use the expression “Mayday! Mayday!” in the near future – except to share a bit of etymological trivia with friends.

Most of us take citizenship for granted, but the naturalization process involves a 3- or 5-year residency requirement, depending on whether the candidate is applying for citizenship as a result of marrying a U.S. citizen, navigating a lot of IF/THEN statements in federal instructions, and studying for a civics test that a large portion of current citizens would fail (You can download the official list of 100 Civics Questions and Answers here, and see the scoring guidelines),

Get the lowdown on the N-400 form here, or read the eligibility requirements and see the fee schedule. The Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also recently revised the naturalization test, and it looks like they've done a study on pass rates.

If you went through the naturalization process, how was your experience? What's your story?

Esperanto star

Esperanto aspires to be an unbiased second language that allows people from diverse linguistic backgrounds to communicate while maintaining their native languages. According to the Esperanto-USA.org website,

“People who speak Esperanto are internationally minded, concerned about social justice and peace, and are helping to preserve linguistic diversity. Meetings and conventions in America, Europe, and Asia provide a fun opportunity to travel and meet new people from around the world.”

The Common Language Project (CLP), on the other hand, is not itself a language at all, but a platform which seeks to...

"[...] engage, educate and inform Americans of all ages on the crucial human issues of our time through innovative and accessible journalism." 

Operating from the University of Washington’s Department of Journalism, CLP is a non-profit multimedia organization that focuses its work in the areas of international reporting, local reporting, and journalism in education.

International reporting is listed first in CLP’s “What We Do” section, indicating the importance of a global discourse to its mission.

CLP reporters frequently undertake topical reporting projects around the globe.[...]Our work tends to focus on the people affected by key social justice issues--the small human stories that illuminate broad social, political or economic issues. Our coverage is focused on human rights, gender equality, social and economic justice, immigration, education, labor, health, and the environment. 

From the FAQ section of the Common Language Project’s website:

What do you mean by a “common language”? 

We believe that journalism can help foster dialogue among people across the political, geographic, ethnic and linguistic barriers that divide them. 

By telling human interest stories on topics to which people the world over can relate, CLP allows the international community to grow closer through the common language of human experiences; when we have the opportunity to learn of others’ lives, their struggles and successes, our commonalities become apparent, our differences minimal. From stories about cancer in the developing world [Covering Cancer in the Developing World] to a comic about northern Iraq in November 2010 [The Rollerbladers of Sulemaniya], CLP offers readers a broad international perspective on the issues that concern us all.

It may seem a stretch to consider the two organizations related, but Esperanto and the Common Language Project are not actually dissimilar. My initial assumption makes sense; Esperanto itself could be described as a common language project. And, with global communication as a shared goal, both of these initiatives encourage the exchange of ideas, concerns, and breaking news on an international scale through words. Where Esperanto tries to create cross-cultural communication with a mosaic of international grammar and vocabulary, the Common Language Project does so with stories.

Here's a sample from CLP, a trailer of a feature film about terrorism-related arrests and investigations of Americans following 9/11.

Here's another about the Syrian hip hop scene

More content from CLP is available on their YouTube channel.

Sometime last week, Laura Glyph caught an instance in which I had mispunctuated a sentence by putting a semicolon where a comma belonged. It sparked a family conversation on her end, in which everyone agreed it is incorrect to use a semicolon after a dependent clause. They were right, and I've had semicolons on the brain all week, so it turns out we don't disagree after all on the rules of proper use. Instead, we disagree on the ideal frequency of use.

Should we take a survey? Something tells me everyone has strong opinions one way or another. I wonder if there's much gray area. I'm rather anti-semicolon myself, but I do use them when necessary. I avoid semicolons when possible, just as other people avoid certain vegetables. A semicolon is a vague and non-committal pause, neither a comma nor a period, and I don't like using one if I can accommodate another punctuation mark. My industry (news) is not really digging it either, which could explain my discomfort and infrequent use.

Most semicolon excitement is lost on me, but I'm aware of the arguments in favor. A semicolon can add simple elegance to an otherwise awkward sentence. It connects two related thoughts without drastically splitting them into two discrete sentences, which might ruin cadence or make the writing sound like a telegram (or worse, a TV newscast). Used best, a semicolon splits a long sentence that contains geographical locations or stitches a compound sentence to another compound sentence, etc.

There's also misuse, where one sneaks in as a casual afterthought or quick fix to bad prose. When I catch a semicolon, my first act of extermination is to overhaul the sentence and eliminate the need for one. They're especially silly in dialogue, because nobody ever thinks them into a sentence: "I ran down the street in a panic, semicolon, I'm being chased by a giant rat."

Maybe I just need more calm exposure or to overcome a self-imposed semicolon quota. I once had a writing professor who put a limit on the number of exclamation points we were allowed to use during all four years of college. This was serious business – she promised to knock off points if she caught you using more than two, because "good sentences don't need them."

Exclamation points come with a handle, she explained. You hold it by the bottom and then "...you bash the other person over the head with the long end."

The "Phonetic Punctuation" routine, by Victor Borge

In a 1998 interview, Marvin Minsky takes Noam Chomsky to task for the lack of good machine translation systems: "Prof Noam Chomsky is to be faulted why we don’t have good machine translation programs. He is so brilliant and his theory of generational grammar is so good, that for 40 years it has been used by everyone in the field, shifting the focus from semantics to syntax." 

It is unlikely that any one person is to blame for the inadequacies of machine translation – or, conversely, to be praised for how much better it works today in 2011 than back in 1998.

In fact, despite its limitations, machine translation has improved so much that I began to wonder if I could use my browser's automatic machine translation to study other languages. How? Let’s use the Newspaper Index website as an example.

Newspaper Index is a simple, yet fascinating, collection of links to renowned international newspapers from all over the globe – and according to the ‘Why’ section on this website, its journalist creator needed such an index as a ‘tool in (his) daily work.’ "I collect and maintain links only to newspapers and publications containing local, free and independent news from each country in the world," he writes.

The website, does boast 72 countries in its list, though the official count is closer to 195 countries worldwide – changing to 196 in July 2011 when South Sudan became an official country. And there may be dispute as to whether or not all the countries listed would be considered ‘official’. Regardless, it’s an impressive list.

When I do a name search for any one of these publications, there is an ever-increasing number of offers of machine translation that automatically appear any time a webpage in a language, other than English, is displayed on my computer. Generally speaking, I am well aware that my search term will likely turn up on a page in another language.

For example, if I do a Google search for the Spanish word ‘nación’, I fully expect the resulting websites to be in Spanish. However, I am offered many opportunities to have a Spanish-to-English translation done. Perhaps because most of my interactions online are in English, the automatic offers for machine translation are ‘just trying to help’. I’ve stopped being offended at having my language choices being second-guessed, after all I really do appreciate it when spell-check programs create their own mistakes: “Showing results for noam chomsky linguistics. Search instead for noam chompsky linguistics”…

If I take a different route and take the auto-translate bait, I stumble upon something very interesting. If I choose the country France, for example, from the country list on Newspaperindex.com, and then select the French daily Le Monde, its online version will appear. Almost just as quickly, I’m told that the site is in French and asked if I want it translated into English. Choosing to translate the French to English, however, doesn’t make the French disappear entirely: when I run my cursor over a translated sentence, the original text appears in a pop-out speech bubble. Brilliant! That way I can ‘study’ an article in a different language, sentence by sentence. A short cut? Eureka!

But wait, I already know French…hmm…maybe that’s why it was so easy…

So let’s try Korean, of which I have a very rudimentary understanding. Basically, I can approximate the correct pronunciation of the phonetic writing system – Hangeul.

Going back to the Newspapers Index choice of 56 languages in which to view the list of 72 countries, I find and choose 한국어, which means “Korean language”.

Then, I accept the machine translation offer to translate the page into English for me and now see the list of countries in English. However, since the ‘original’ is in Korean, when I run my cursor over the country name Ghana, for instance, the Korean translation appears in a dialog box above it:

Original Text:

가나                

And so, I just learned the Korean for Ghana, 가나. I found a shortcut to language study, thanks to Google Chrome's translator! I’m confident that this is not the original intention of the programmers – nor is it a means to become fluent in a new language. But this machine translation tool clearly has an unintended benefit that I intend to take advantage of to further my language studies; this machine translation tool, combined with the access to the international newspapers provided by Newspapersindex.com, can facilitate my language study. All I have to do is use it.

Use it? Wait, maybe the ‘shortcut’ analysis of the situation was a bit premature…

"I am stir crazy," she said in a recent text. "I enjoy the challenge and beauty of being my own best company, but when healing it is quite the opposite and I find it hard to be alone."

Visiting was a spiritual communion, the exchange of long hugs and a tea party. We were little old ladies again under a blanket on the couch, talking for hours about human experience.

Our conversations do get me thinking about human need. Despite human need to reach out to others an be understood, there are a myriad of voluntary and involuntary ways in which we cut off communication with others and with our environments. On the voluntary side there are solo hobbies, camping, retreats and vows of silence. There's a grey area that includes spaces such as hospitalization where, despite the company of professionals and strangers, patients spend a lot of time alone. Then there's the rare extreme of longer-term isolation...such as field research, walkabout, or solitary confinement.

Perhaps less need- and location-based, there's also the transition of communication methods: quitting Facebook, getting rid of a cell phone, or moving to a different city. I tend to fluctuate between periods of isolation and periods of sensory overload. There is a cycle in which I gravitate toward gatherings and intimacy and then push it all away when it becomes overwhelming.

How long can a person go without human communication without going mad? How long can a person keep up the necessary workarounds?

When is the longest you have gone without communication with others, and how was that experience? Have you ever tried to quit Facebook? 

Basically, Mehrabian found that when ambiguity existed between a speaker’s word choice, tone of voice and/or facial expressions, a listener’s overall impression was influenced 7% by word choice, 38% by tone of voice, and 55% by facial expression. Beware of any statistical information which includes a mathematical equation as easy as 7 + 93 = 100 and which purports to be true for the whole of a topic as broad as, say, all human communication…

That said, we do not need a large body of research to tell us that, in addition to tone and facial expressions, other forms of wordless communication can also speak volumes: silences, interpersonal distance, posture, gestures, quickness of movement, are just a few examples.

Which brings us to dance, and to German director Wim Wender’s 2011, 3-D documentary film, “Pina”.

Dance might be considered the ultimate body language. Dance, like music, can illustrate and evoke emotions ranging from the sublime to the most base, without any linguistic support. While it is true that what resonates with audiences in music and dance performance can be culturally bound, much of the emotionality transcends these boundaries, and is “felt” rather than “interpreted”.

A tribute to the work of the German modern dance performer and choreographer Philippina Bausch, “Pina” (not “Piña” or “Peña”, as a Spanish language spell-check program suggests) is a remarkable voyage into the realm of nonverbal communication as expressed in modern dance.

Twenty years prior to the start of filming in 2009, Wenders had conceived of doing a documentary of Bausch and her work. He'd discussed it with Bausch, who for years would ask him from time to time about it. It became kind of an ongoing joke to which Wenders would reply, “I don’t know how to make it yet.”

It was after viewing U2’s film “U2 3D” at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, that Wenders figured out how. “We had to do it in 3-D. That was the only way.”

If you choose to see “Pina”, I highly recommend you see it in 3-D. Wenders was right; recreating an on-film approximation of dance as movement through space, and Pina’s dance theater settings (mounds of soil, rock formations, water) can best be captured and experienced in 3-D.

Not the entire documentary “Pina” is dance, nor is the film void of verbal communication. Though dance is perhaps the nonverbal communication medium par excellence, the dancers in Pina’s troupe Tanztheater Wuppertal do speak. And they speak in a variety of languages – English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish among others – reflecting the international makeup of the group. If the language of dance transcends verbal language, this is a fascinating notion. Why dancers from all over the globe? What is it that speakers of various languages can embody in dance and add to the integrity and depth of the performance that would otherwise be lacking? Do the nuances and emotions of spoken languages, often difficult to translate, somehow become more easily understood through movement, through what could be described as intricate body language?

At various moments in the film, each dancer appears on screen sitting alone. These male and female dancers from ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds are in similarly sober attire, silent, mouths closed, looking out the screen into the eyes of audience. The dancers’ voices speaking in their native tongues have been recorded; or they choose not to speak, instead letting stillness and silence accompany their gaze.

Wim Wenders said that “[Pina] really believed that with dance, she could solve things.”

Perhaps she has. In the 1970’s, she dared to free dance from many of its traditional limitations and conventions. Through the body language of dance in unexpected settings as a point of departure, Pina’s troupe of dancers interpret, communicate, and share feelings and emotions as varied as humor and pain, in ways that become universally accessible. Perhaps transcending any one spoken language through the physical presence, vulnerability and grace of dancers from many different origins is indeed a way to “solve” something – A language of word-defying, heartfelt sincerity and compassion is created of such stuff. And with his masterful tribute to Bausch’s life’s work in the film “Pina”, Wenders communicates this language exquisitely.

Quotes from Wenders were taken from the following article: Wim Wenders takes 3D dancing in new film "Pina", published December, 19 2011 - by Reuters

Bread machines are so quick and easy that I felt a bit of machine guilt. As we were inching our way through wintertime, the novice in me had been using a super easy recipe by Jim Lahey, the sculptor-turned-baker genius behind Manhattan's Sullivan St Bakery (on 47th between 10th and 11th Avenues). Several years ago, a feature about him in the New York Times brought a surge in artisan boule production in the non-baking readership. Lahey explains this ridiculously easy bread recipe to Mr. Mark Bittman from The New York Times here:

As the seasons change, my search for bread evolves. Warmth turns me back into a seeker the same way warmth pushes people out of the house. I've recently re-acclimated from spending a week wandering in big cities where bread is crusty, people are frantic, and Love is ephemeral. I danced on the metro to invisible Fugees, carrying a beautiful loaf of cranberry walnut bread in a messenger bag from pier to pier. Big-city competition pushes bread bakers to artisan excellence.

The nice thing about the bread industry is that it forces domestic consumption, but even better, good bread calls for local and immediate consumption. There is not much import/export of bread, according to some numbers from the Federation of Bakers in the U.K. – Bread doesn't require hyper-exclusive techniques, cultural breads can be reasonably duplicated anywhere, bread doesn't last long enough to travel very far, and import/export fees make it not worth the hassle. The best is probably right in your 'hood somewhere.

Thin slices from all over:

• the communal aspect of baking bread.
• Numerous Biblical references to bread
• pan de sal from the Philippines (rolls)
• naan, an flatbread from India
• Native American frybread
• Jewish challah, a braided egg bread. Here's a recipe people liked, adapted from Joan Nathan
• Ancient Romans had public bakeries where people brought their dough
• History of Irish soda bread
• Three recipes for pizza dough: Peter Reinhart | SimplyRecipes | Emeril Lagasse

What breads come from your culture? Your childhood? Your stories and legends? What is the best bread you've ever eaten?

I've always found it fulfilling but never noticed the amount of risk and loss of control it would create. I had the urge to go back and rewrite into a better draft, but that would have defeated spontaneity and authenticity – especially because my sender had taken the time to use a real nib (check out an explanation of quill pen production, from the Jane Austen Society of Australia. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 20,000 or so letters throughout his life, even bred his own geese for quills).

I wondered whether our unique writing styles (our "fists", in telegraph-speak) have evolved around our access to lossless edit and save. How different would your written communication be if everything came out as-is? How do your thoughts render in raw form? Is this format a more accurate reflection of how thoughts come out of a person's head, or am I holding back because I have one shot to get it right without using Wite-Out? Will it make me self-conscious to cross things out?

Why so obsessive? No one's going to judge me, not for long-windedness, not for illegible scrawl, not for abstraction and figuration. These are the truths we carry, and the goal is to carry them well.

One time, a former journalist in New Jersey told me a "when I was your age" story about an apartment fire. His classmates all remembered him for having climbed out the window carrying only his two most valuable possessions: his suit and his typewriter. All his life, he mailed letters to his friends all over the world.

Glyph operations would never fly in such a decade, although I always hear newsroom stories about typewriters, wet labs, and cut-and-paste page layout. We might imagine that the early translation and localization outfits would have a lot of filing cabinets.

Just for fun, here is special-effects master Michael Winslow (born in Spokane!!) doing an incredible vocal demonstration of different typewriter models.

Do you have memories of typewriters? Do you send letters? Do you keep pen pals?

My son, Ian, and his Korean friends were walking across the lawn in front of the Jeongdok Library, near the heart of Seoul, when they noticed some cats lounging carefree in the shade, with library patrons. The cats were friendly and truly enjoyed being petted. Ian joked “Maybe these are library cats and we can check them out, like library books.”

From here, the conversation turned to the therapeutic value of having pets and musing about the possibility of doctors actually prescribing a healthy dose of pet-contact. A depressed patient would take the MD’s prescription to a pharmacist, who would then fill the prescription by presenting the patient with a barrel full of kittens or puppies to play with for a while. The boundless joy and cuteness of the cuddly creatures would lift the cloud of despondence off the afflicted human – at least until the next time the prescription was filled…

“Or,” Ian continued in the hypothetical and semi-absurd vein, “there could be cat cafés, where you could just go and play with cats.”

Ian laughed at his own joke, but his Korean companions weren’t laughing. Jihyun, an animal lover herself and eager host, enthusiastically proposed, “Would you like to go to one?”

“Go where?”

“To a cat café. There are several here in Seoul. There’s one I really like near Hongik University [홍익 대학교].”

Yes, in this too, Koreans prove to be far more practical than their U.S. counterparts; micro-processors, cats – it’s all about efficiencies, I suppose. I understand there are cat cafés in Japan as well.

Cat cafés are indeed popular spots for Seoulites. According to one of Korea’s largest English language newspapers, the Korea Herald, the original cat café in Seoul was started in 2003 by Yu Sang-Wook, owner of Gio Cat café (Jihyun’s favorite). Yu had been running a cat adoption service; his primary interest in opening a café was to find people willing to adopt cats, and providing these potential adoptive families the opportunity to interact with felines beforehand.

Generally speaking, unlike Westerners, Asians do not have a long history of growing up with pets living in their homes. This unfamiliarity with domestic animals means that Koreans may be leery or afraid of cats and dogs, or have canine and/or feline allergies they are unaware of. It also often means new pet owners would like to know more about how to care for the new family members before taking them home.

Gio Cat can also be written as one word, Giocat (지오캣in Hangeul, the Korean script). I initially thought the café owner had surely chosen this name because of the Italian verb “giocare”, which means “to play” in English. “La Gioconda”, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting known to most English speakers as the Mona Lisa, in Italian literally means “The Playful One”. Perhaps it is her coy smile.

“Giocate” is 2nd person plural present indicative and imperative [“you (all) play” or “Play, (you all)!” in English] of the verb, and the Italian word for “toy” is “giocattolo”, so a logical enough guess, no? It turns out to be merely a happy coincidence. For website creation considerations, Yu was told he needed to use a word having no more than 6 letters and included the word “cat”, and “gio” had a nice ring to it.

Actually, it turns out there is an Italian wholesale company in Ferrara, called “GioCAT” [http://www.giocat.it/ ] which does indeed deal in toys, “gioccatoli”. Their teddy-bear logo seems to suggest they, too, like cuddly, if inanimate, things…

The menu at Gio Cat Café does look like a real menu but is called a "profile" – your basic cat bio sheet. The profile features flattering photos and lists gender, names, breeds, ages, and occasionally personality traits. On the profile sheet, we learn that Ho-ya is “kindly”, Sung-hwa is “Kao’s dad”, Andre is a “quiet cat” and Cho-long is “hysteric”.

If you ever happen to find yourself in Seoul and feeling a little “hysteric” like Cho-long, why not try calming your nerves by heading to a neighborhood cat café? I’ve heard it’s very therapeutic. 

Dog-lovers will be happy to know dog cafés exist too. Dog café aficionados, please feel free to leave any information or tips in the comments section.

* Ian did volunteer work with Peace Trees Vietnam http://www.peacetreesvietnam.org/, an organization dedicated to demining and reforestation activities in Vietnam. 

The International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) puts on the High Speed Telegraphy World Championship every odd-numbered year, this recent one having taken place in Bielefeld, Germany. Participants transmit and receive Morse code messages as quickly as humanly possible in different competitive categories, under these rules).

Morse might seem difficult, but a statistical research project shows that frequently used letters do have shorter codes. The long-term goal of an operator, according to this relatively popular telegraphy guide, is to eventually reach a point of understanding the series of long and short sounds as naturally as if they were words. Here's a quick demo:

Technically, Morse and Braille differ from language because they are not massive environments of interdependent symbols, symbols by which to understand and transmit our thoughts. These codes are simply a means to transcribe and/or transmit segments in existing languages. Because of their relationship/integration with existing language, though, even though Morse is "just a code", personal style manifests itself. For example, the personalities and communication habits of World War II radio operators would leak into their work, sometimes making it possible to tell their identities and locations merely by receiving their messages and guessing at form or cadence.

And if users of American Sign Language also develop their own slang and personal styles, is ASL a language or a code? Drawing boundaries around the definition of a language is a tricky subject because the answer really depends on whom you ask.

Recent years of telephone and Internet use have left Morse code by the wayside. The FCC eliminated Morse code in 2003 from the FCC exam requirements for amateur radio service, as "the public interest is not served by requiring facility in Morse Code when the trend in amateur communications is to use voice and digital technologies for exchanging messages."

There are few remaining modern uses –Morse code has made its way into assistive technology for people in rehabilitation settings or with special needs – for example, those who cannot use communication devices that require the voice (one such Morse device is the TandemMaster). Even in such settings, Morse code is becoming less and less useful as newer assistive technology becomes available.

When all else falls away, the telegraph remains an art piece. Telegraphy still belongs to a romantic steampunk aesthetic – one that unites time-traveling and futuristic technology with the brass, leather, and gears of the H.G. Wells and Thomas Edison era. We're far from consumer editions of a telegraph to transcribe your thoughts, but somewhere, there at least are instructions to make one that delivers your RSS feed...in Morse. 

If you use more than one language keyboard on your computer or iPhone, you may have encountered a sometimes humorous, sometimes annoying phenomenon: the auto-correct feature misinterpreting your intentions. 

Usually the auto-correct function works to my advantage – for instance, it just added the letter ‘a’ before ‘ge’ in the word ‘advantage’ because I had neglected to hit the ‘a’ key hard enough.

However, the English auto-correct feature occasionally finds my combination of letters so odd that it decides it cannot possibly help me – and that the best solution is to shift whatever I type into Korean Hangeul.

Interestingly, it does not seem to care whether or not my Hangeul typing makes any sense. For example, if I mistype the word ‘short’ in English by omitting the ‘o’, my computer politely (i.e. without asking me or making a fuss) changes my impossible combination of letters ‘shrt’, into a possible but nonsensical combination in Hangeul, ‘녻’.  

Unfortunately, this does not work vice versa on my computer. If I enter a series of impossible Hangeul letters, my computer – again, politely – lets me carry on typing nonsense and does not switch me back into English.

Those of you with iPhones, who use the English keyboard to send text messages, are familiar with the iPhone’s helpful offers to either correct or finish typing your word, based on what knows to be statistically most likely. If you happen to use keyboards of various languages, however, and neglect to change from one to the other on the iPhone, you may end up transmitting some unintended, ‘interpretative’ translations.

On my iPhone, I have 5 keyboards installed: English, French, Italian, Korean and Spanish. The iPhone will not switch my current keyboard but makes likely spelling suggestions based on that current keyboard.

Unlike on my computer, I do have the option of refusing the suggested word – assuming I catch the misguided guess soon enough – but hitting the space bar is interpreted as a sign of acceptance and the suggestion enters my text, like it or not.

This can have comical results. If I forget that I have selected the French keyboard, and I am typing the English word ‘does’, the iPhone thinks I must mean ‘dors’ – the 2^nd person singular familiar form of ‘sleep’. ‘Just’ becomes ‘jus’ – ‘juice’ in French. ‘The’ is misinterpreted as another beverage, ‘thé’ for ‘tea’.

An Italian keyboard interprets the English ‘please’ to be ‘pelasse’ – the 3^rd person singular imperfect subjunctive form of the verb ‘pelare’, which has many translations in English: to pluck, to shave one’s head, or to fleece (interestingly, ‘to fleece’ has the same figurative, idiomatic meaning as it does in English – to cheat someone).

If, though, I have the English keyboard selected but happen to be typing Spanish text and enter ‘lleguen’ – subjunctive form for ‘they arrive’, in English – the proposed English word is ‘lowdown’…

Accidental language gems, such as the above, are often found in translation. New technology, especially in the form of apps and other devices that support multiple languages, is a great self-generating source of unintended, cross-cultural linguistic fun. What have you ‘found in translation’ recently via some new technology that you’d like to share?

The jacket cover of Eric Weiner's 2008 work, "The Geography of Bliss", is a deep sky-blue and features a small paper airplane made out of a colorful page from an atlas.

Atlases are tools of the trade for Weiner, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent. During his 10-year stint with NPR, he covered events in excruciatingly unhappy places across the planet. Injustice, destruction and war are always newsworthy topics – he notes that stories of the misery of others can inspire compassion and often move people to good actions. But, according to Weiner in the introduction to his travelogue, The Geography of Bliss, in some ways he was drawn to these locales and stories because unhappiness was familiar terrain for him.

Despite being born in the year of the yellow happy face, 1963, Weiner is a whiner by his own account; like many people who tend to be dissatisfied with their own context. Pondering the intangible nature of happiness and seeking its quantifiable qualities, Weiner sets out to discover if his own mopey-ness might be related to geography: Where on the globe are people the happiest? Can happiness be found, as many of us believe, "somewhere else"? What makes some places "happier" than others?  Are there certain areas where the grass really is greener?

The book follows Weiner's one-year journey to explore the nature of happiness in relationship to place. He examines his personal interior (and rather gloomy) landscape, while bearing in mind that the concept of "where" includes both cultural and physical environments. His experiences around the world make for delightful reading. I especially like the tales involving miscomprehension due to language usage. Here is an excerpt from the chapter on The Netherlands:

The hotel dining room is small, cozy. The Dutch do cozy well. I order the asparagus soup. It's good. The waiter clears my bowl and then says, 'Now maybe you would like some intercourse.'

'Excuse me?'

'Intercourse. You can have intercourse.'

I'm thinking, Wow the Dutch really are a permissive bunch, when it dawns on me that he is speaking of something else entirely. Inter course. As in 'between courses'.

'Yes,' I say, relieved. 'That would be nice.' (p.7)

Even the names of the chapters are funny. For example, "Chapter 2 – Switzerland, Happiness is Boredom" and "Chapter 6 – Moldova, Happiness is Somewhere Else."

Weiner includes a balanced mix of personal anecdotes, scientific data collected on happiness, literary quotes, and historical references from across the globe. It is a well-paced, entertaining and informative read. The Geography of Bliss is a travel book of sorts, but one that delves into the cultural similarities and differences of a single state of being shared by all human beings, happiness.

All the countries Weiner visits offer him a unique perspective from which to contemplate the nature of happiness, but perhaps the title of Chapter 8 best sums up the essence of the book. The chapter is ostensibly about happiness in Great Britain, but the subtitle is applicable to any nation – or any individual, for that matter: "Happiness Is a Work in Progress."

I'm happy to recommend The Geography of Bliss. Wherever you are, geographically or emotionally, this book offers an armchair tour of the globe guaranteed to make you chuckle.

Below, the author talks with internet correspondent Thomas Scrampton about Icelandic happiness. 

Glyph is getting more and more game-oriented as time goes on. It started as a group of verbivores (pretty much everybody who works here now is bilingual or more), but now the most common second languages here are technology, the mobilizing of skill, the efficient transmission of data, and smart information design. The work demands it – translation projects have gotten more media-complex.

We're making really big toasters, many of them for game developers. L10n Tamer (director of localization) describes us as taking things apart, sending the content out to be translated, then reassembling and testing everything when it's finished.

I used to take games for granted. I used to say they were a waste of time, despite previously spending hours in high school playing Super Mario. I never saw the elegance behind the machine until I stumbled upon various aspects of game design via Google – aspects such as simulating the avoidance behavior of a fake crowd, the demand for royalty-free "art assets" for homebrew game developers, or the use of artificial intelligence to create challenging gameplay environments (a bit technical, but a great discussion from International Journal of Computer Games Technology). Hello, Mr. Minsky, we haven't forgotten about you after all.

I'm learning that we play because it lets us explore, escape, solve, orchestrate, vent, experience the absurd, practice and refine... in-home gaming is part of an arc of history [some say] killed off the video arcade, while deniers reminisce and other research shows it's simply evolved to suit changing times.

Game development has changed so much over the past 3+ decades. Here's a gallery from between 1990 and 2008 alone, showing the progression of graphic design. It's astounding to me how extremely simple games such as Akalabeth (1980) were entertaining, but perhaps even the simplest games hook people for the same reason that Haruki Murakami keeps people reading....creates frustration in the reader, in addition to creating elegant backstory or neediness in the plot.

Here's a clip from 1980 of the aforementioned Akalabeth. I guess this is how gaming used to be.

Compare this with a very old version of Everquest, from 1996, or with the latest installment of Elder Scrolls. Elder Scrolls Skyrim came out on 11/11/11:

Instead of being just any random man, "the guy" is a semi-fictional character called Mullah Nasruddin who serves as a culture-wide subject of the same big joke. He blurs the line between foolishness and wisdom and probably existed in the 13th century as a Mullah – a teacher or educated man. Sufism eventually incorporated him into their teachings as a destroyer of expectations.

For my Afghan-American friend K and I, the Mullah became a shared fictional acquaintance and shared experience.

My friend and I met as first-graders shortly after her family moved to the States, into a fairly empty apartment in the hilly Martian landscape of our 'hood. We were skinny dorks at age sixish with little need for television. We were perfectly happy playing Monopoly and deep cleaning the bathroom while her big brother set fruit on fire with his magnifying glass. Otherwise, we were pestering her cool teenage sister to put on "Whoomp! (There It Is)" – mis-memorizing the lyrics to what we believed was the baddest hip hop song in the world, thinking the main chorus was, "Whoop, ehhhh?" The song was actually pretty terrible in retrospect, if you're YouTube-curious.

Then we grew up and discovered Nas, Tupac Shakur, and Wu-Tang Clan. We manifested new visions of ourselves. We became women who loved the arrangements of words, words that were never sufficient to express philosophical growth, metaphysical anthropology and our responsibilities to culture and religious life. We pushed against what we believed to be true and custom-built a social narrative that could make sense to us. We went in search and collection of witnesses, because a meaningful life is a witnessed life.

Sometime in college, she and I also bonded over stories about Mullah Nasruddin. One of the sillier ones went like this: "Mullah Nasruddin was sitting in a chair, eating eggs. When someone asked him, 'Mullah Nasruddin, why are you sitting in a chair and eating eggs?' his response was, 'Why, do you think I ought to sit on the eggs and eat the chair?!?"

There are more stories in this collection of retellings by Sufi scholar Indries Shah.

One December day, the village boys decided to play a trick on Mullah Nasruddin to fool him. They hid Mullah Nasruddin's coat when he was performing ablution for Friday ritual. But Mullah Nasruddin perceived [that] trick on the way. "Mullah Nasruddin, it's a cold day, why don't you wear your coat?" asked one of them "I left my coat at home to keep the place warm!" answered Mullah Nasruddin.

Because these stories have spread by word of mouth across Turkish, Greek, Afghan, Bulgarian, and other cultures in that neighborhood, historians have a similar problem here as with baklava...There are many variations on the Mullah's name (Nasreddin, Nasr al-Din, etc...), and origin stories differ. Here for example, or here (PDF). There are hundreds if not thousands of unique Mullah stories (see here for some that have been published), many of them incorporated into the practices of Sufism, varying greatly in length and in the degree to which they are funny (See also: Evolutionary Psychology's exploration of humor as a cognitive function, PDF).

I remember calling and leaving Mullah joke voicemails. Most of these stories are fairly short and easy to remember – conveniently voicemail-sized – and much funnier to those who have "known" the Mullah for a while. We still laugh at the one about the eggs and the chair, even though on the grand scale of funny, it lands somewhere next to Mother Goose.

My friend and I don't talk about the Mullah much anymore, opting for conversations about personal purpose and asking the right questions over searching for the right answers. We also came to an understanding that loss only exists if containers exist.

I guess the Mullah isn't too far removed from our thoughts, after all  – he might have told us those exact things in his cryptic ways.

Welcome to Goa, the smallest of the 28 states and 7 territories that comprise India. Located on the mid-southwestern coast of the sub-continent, today it is primarily known for its gorgeous beaches, psychedelic trance music and, increasingly (especially internationally), its cuisine.

The legacies of having been a Catholic Portuguese colony for nearly 500 years - up until 1961 - linger on in obvious and subtle ways: architecture, food, names of people, names of places, and a single yet divided language – called Konkani in Roman script and  कोंकणी in Devanagari script.

It turns out that restaurants are not the only things divided by religion.

At least with restaurants, a person can have a bit of variety. You can go to a Hindu restaurant one night and order vegetarian dishes, like dahl (lentils) or aloo gobi (cauliflower and potatoes). Another night why not try mutton biryani (biryani comes from Persian word beryā(n) (بریان) which means "fried" or "roasted" and is a saffron rice dish to which many different ingredients can be added) at a Muslim restaurant? Though admittedly there are few Muslims in the area. But if you're looking for the spicy and unapologetically pork-laden sorpotel/sarapatel, the eating establishment will have to be Christian.

When it comes to the local language, Konkani, things get more complicated. Native Konkani speakers primarily use one of two different scripts to write the language: Roman and Devanagari.

And a person's script use, like the food, is generally a question of religious culture. If you write the language in Roman script, you are probably Christian; if you write the language in Devanagari, you’re most likely Hindu or Muslim. The school you go to, the books you will be able to read, and the people with whom you can have a written correspondence – all will be inadvertently determined by, and limited to, your cultural-religious background.

In Christian and Muslim restaurants, if I want to, I can just order vegetarian dishes; if I don’t want to drink alcohol, I can order an alternative no matter which restaurant I’m in.

But in their learning institutions, there are no menus to provide choice. Although there are people who can read and write both scripts, most Konkani speakers cannot easily choose to read, write and study in Devanagari script one day and in Roman script the next…

Sasupai is the Konkani word for "father-in-law" in Roman script. The same word, same pronunciation exists in Devanagari as सासुपै.

My Konkani, Portuguese- and English-speaking sasupai passed away in 2008 and is sorely missed. Upon a visit to Goa without my father-in-law in 2009, my husband and I struck up a friendship with a Hindu Goan family we had met and ended up visiting their home.  The grandmother of the house was in her early 80s, approximately the same age of my father-in-law, who had lived in the area as a boy.

The family was delighted to learn that I’d called my father-in-law "sasupai" and insisted I call the grandmother, "sasumai" [ सासुमै in Devanagari ]– you guessed it, mother-in-law.

Gradually, it came to light that the grandmother had known my father-in-law’s family. However, although the two families had known each other intimately, and were native speakers of the same language, they would not have been able to attend the same schools or write letters to each other.

Although English was the language of the British colonists, this script phenomenon partway explains why English remains an official language in India today. Internationally and even within post-colonial India, for better or worse, English is hard to beat as a lingua franca.

My sasupai, a devout Catholic, was able to enjoy his sorpotel, Kingfisher beer and fenny (or feni, a Goan cashew liqueur)... all of which we found at various Christian restaurants between the lovely, if touristy, Goan beaches of Baga and Calangute. 

Regardless of what language, religion, or restaurants you prefer, the rich diversity of landscape and of cultures that a trip to Goa provides is well worth any confusion such diversity might occasionally create. Bon voyage!

Lately, we've been experimenting with a new feature that slices up and analyzes large quantities of text (English text, in this case). Based on its findings, it guesses which words and phrases might be appropriate as glossary terms.

This would sound like an approximate use of semantic analysis, a process that allows users to discover trends or prioritize issues within text – the machine looks for structural patterns and relationships among words and phrases in a large document. Our software uses mathematical algorithms to produce a sortable list of words and phrases that the machine believes are important. The list also includes number of occurrences, a number to describe the term's likely relevance, and sentences that contain each term (to show context). Then, a human can go in and evaluate the system's suggestions, weeding out the silly ideas. For more details about how this works, here's a piece published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

This tool will help tremendously when we build glossaries for clients with specialized terminology... collections of terms we'd like to keep consistent into future projects. It's possible to build a list manually while working on a project, picking out phrases that are specialized industry terms, but for long-term clients with multiple projects, it helps to prepare a trove of glossary terms ahead of time. A computer can slice up and sort the document into phrases before we even approach it.

One creator of semantic analysis software, Janya, Inc., described semantic analysis as the extraction of "critical information from unstructured and semi-structured data to create actionable intelligence." (read more here) A company called Expert System has a similar development called Cogito, used to analyze news about terrorism (Lower on the page is an explanation of the data visualization).

You may have heard of SA's cousin, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – same concept but different purpose, because LSI is designed to improve data retrieval. The system analyzes a large collection of data to produce more intelligent search results or to group documents according to "conceptual similarity".

Both semantic analysis and semantic indexing have dozens of uses related to search engines, programming languages, plagiarism, Biblical texts, and even customer service (Intesa Sanpaolo, a financial services organization in Europe, is using this technology to look for different sentiments in customer satisfaction. Some places transcribe customer calls and identify keywords) Such technology might make our jobs disappear someday, but for the while, smart information design is giving us new uses and applications for the same knowledge. We're applying it to translation and software localization and it's doing us pretty good service.

The following article is based on a conversation I had with polyglot and scholar, Alexander Arguelles, in the fall of 2011. I am indebted to Mr. Arguelles for his willingness to share with me his personal and professional perspective on language learning. Many thanks, Alexander!

Laura Nelson: “So, Mr. Arguelles, please tell me a few things about you that I won’t be able to find doing an Internet search.”

Alexander Arguelles: [chuckles] “Well, I don’t just live and breathe languages; I have a life outside of language study.”

You may, however, doubt his claim of having a life outside of language study if you take a look at the YouTube video, “A polyglot’s daily linguistic workout,” featuring Mr. Arguelles. How could he possibly dedicate time to any other activities given the rigorous, daily – if self-imposed – requirements of the scholarly pursuit of polyglottery? Not to mention holding down a full-time job as a language specialist at SEAMEO [Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization] – a teachers’ training institute in Singapore.

But neither his sincerity nor his accomplishments can be doubted. With a B.A. from Columbia and a PhD. from the University of Chicago, Prof. Arguelles has published 9 texts on language topics ranging from Old Norse sagas to Korean Zen legends to a French/German/English dictionary. His accessibility to both students and like-minded language aficionados is downright infectious, his unconventional and innovative language-learning techniques stimulating.

AA: “I’m married and have 2 sons. I swim and/or run every day. I play the flute. And the didgeridoo.” 

As our conversation was happening on Skype, Mr. Arguelles was generous enough to agree to play the didgeridoo for me. The sound quality was excellent and the music hauntingly beautiful. He adds, “And I’m a vegetarian.”

If polyglottery were a religious institution, Alexander Arguelles would surely be canonized in his own lifetime. I’m not sure if there is a saint of language study, but I am pretty sure that Hermes (the Greek god of languages) would have loved to have Arguelles as an assistant!

But what IS polyglottery anyway?

Polyglottery is considered a misspelled word by my version of Microsoft Word, but Word has “no spelling suggestions”.  Yahoo’s spell checker also considers the word a misspelling, but at least offers me what it thinks are useful suggestions: polygraphs, polygamous, polygonal, polymerization, or polynucleotide, perhaps? On the iPhone, English, Italian and Spanish language spell-checkers may be at a loss (“no replacements found”), but the French version proposes two: polyglotte and polyglottes. Now we’re getting somewhere!

I asked Arguelles, the polyglot who after all coined the term, to define it in relation to three other terms: multilingualism, polyglotism and polyliteracy.

AA: “Polyglottery is the passionate study of languages, for the love of language study; polyliteracy is scholarly language knowledge one develops through conscious study, especially through reading. Multilingualism can be defined as the state of acquiring multiple languages as a natural condition, of exposure in childhood. Polyglotism would be perhaps the broadest term, and can be defined as knowing multiple languages, no matter the means by which they were acquired.”

Merriam-Webster defines polyglotism as “the use of many languages: the ability to speak many languages” and cites 1882 as the year of its first known use.

How many languages does Prof. Arguelles know? This is a question he “dreads” according to his website (2), which is dedicated to helping others in their pursuit of polyglottery. A native English speaker, he studied French, German, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit at Columbia University. At the University of Chicago, he studied Old Norse.

But a look at the list of languages Arguelles is able to read gives us a partial answer: a vast array of European languages, modern and ancient, and I’m including Esperanto and Afrikaans; Arabic; Korean; Persian; Hindi; Sanskrit.

Inspiring or depressing? I haven’t decided yet...

I asked Arguelles if he felt help from new technological resources would herald a new age of accomplished polyglots. Can internet-based language-learning programs like Livemocha.com or language apps like Lexicon improve language learning?

AA: “We’ll need to wait and see.”

I gleaned from Arguelles that the tools themselves are important, but not as important as true desire and “serious, concentrated, focused study”. And resourcefulness. When he was studying Russian in St. Petersburg in 2001, listening materials for language learners were limited, so he came up with the idea of going to the library for the blind where they had just what he needed: books on tape.

Though new technologies may not change the number of polyliterates in the world, easier access to new technology resources should – hopefully! – make it easier for a larger percentage of citizens across the globe to acquire a working knowledge of multiple languages. And having some ability to understand, converse, read and write in several languages is itself a worthy pursuit. U.S. citizens need to be particularly pro-active in the pursuit of language study; we have been the butt of a linguistic joke for decades:

Q: What’s someone who knows 3 languages called?

A: Trilingual.

Q: What’s someone who knows 2 languages called?

A: Bilingual.

Q: What’s someone who knows 1 language called?

A: American.

This is a well-earned stereotype, I am sorry to confirm, but the combination of increasing global interdependence and decreasing U.S. world dominance may provide the impetus needed to make the above joke obsolete. Monolingual Americans will simply have to learn other languages to remain competitive.

Mr. Arguelles’ children (9 and 7) are half American, half Korean, and have obviously had early exposure to foreign languages that most Americans have not.

LN: “You are American and your wife is Korean, so I assume your children are at least bilingual. Are they learning other languages as well?”

AA: “Actually, yes, they are bilingual but not in the languages you would logically assume. I was working in Lebanon when my youngest was born and my oldest was 2, so their early schooling was in French and Arabic. I only speak French with them and their schooling here in Singapore is in English and Chinese. So, their English is slightly better than their French and they have a passive understanding of Korean as my wife mostly speaks English with them. They speak French between themselves, and have done Spanish immersion programs…”

Get all that?

LN: “And what do you and your wife speak to each other?”

AA: “Mostly English in the home these days, but still Korean when we are out alone, and we also revert to Korean when we don’t want the children to understand exactly what we’re talking about.”

Arguelles’ children may or may not follow in his footsteps and pursue polyglottery with the enthusiasm and determination of their father. Regardless, they will be well versed in multiple languages thanks to the framework he has provided, a particularly healthy position to be in early in the 21st century.

Inspiring or depressing? I’ve decided now: definitely inspiring, the way another’s passion, drive and success often are.  With a little diligence, the right tools, and guidance from experts in the field like Prof. Arguelles, the rest of us aspiring polyliterates or polyglots should be able to attain our own personal linguistic goals as well – however modest these may be…

For a closer look at Alexander Arguelles’ autodidactic technics (the Shadowing Technique and the Scriptorium Technique), please see http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/foreign_language_study.html.

(1)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Arguelles]

(2)[http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/index.html ] 

1. The origin and historical development of a linguistic form as shown by determining its basic elements, earliest known use, and changes in form and meaning, tracing its transmission from one language to another, identifying its cognates in other languages, and reconstructing its ancestral form where possible.
2. The branch of linguistics that deals with etymologies.

For an example of the first definition, let’s take the word ‘ready’. Online Etymology Dictionary, notes the following etymology for the word ‘ready’:

O.E. ræde, geræde, from P.Gmc. *garaidijaz "arranged" (cf. O.Fris. rede, M.Du. gereit, O.H.G. reiti, M.H.G. bereite, Ger. bereit, O.N. greiðr "ready, plain," Goth.garaiþs "ordered, arranged"), from PIE base *reidh-. Lengthened in M.E. by change of ending.

If we were to translate the above abbreviations into more basic English, they would tell us that the origins of ‘ready’ are Germanic as opposed to Latin or Greek, and they include some fairly logical linguistic transformations both in meaning – e.g. ‘arranged’, ‘ordered’, ‘ready’, ‘plain’ – and in phonemic changes, for example, the fact that the letters ‘r’ and ‘d’ appear consistently throughout different forms.

But what about the word ‘etymology’ itself? What is its etymology?

Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language entry states the following:

L. etymologia, from Gk. etymologia, equivalent to etymology(os) studying the true meanings and values of words; etymo “true”, logos, “word”.

A logical derivation and explanation, and this time the roots are Greek. So does Modern Greek use a form of etymo? The answer is yes, but its meaning – not surprisingly – has evolved. It now means ‘ready’. Here are a few examples of the Modern Greek sentences followed by the English translation:

The etymology of ‘ready’ includes the concept of ‘ordered’, while the Greek usage of etymo is now ‘ready’. The parts have shifted like musical chairs.

Thai dates follow the usual Gregorian calendar (same references to the usual months), but the years are numbered according to the Buddhist calendar as Y + 543 years to mark the estimated birth of the Buddha in 543 B.C. That would put the year 2012 at 2555 in Thai translations, well past any settings of sci-fi movies such as Blade Runner or Back to the Future II.

References to year are often made in both Western calendar years and Buddhist Era years (numerous references on page 4 of this article about Thai cremation volumes, for example, put the latter in brackets). Blade Runner, in 2019, would have been 2562.

There seems to be a varying distribution of words per subject, across different languages. (Also related to word populations, do more frequently-used words tend to be shorter?) There are many more dedicated words in Vietnamese to describe tastes, smells, and the way different nouns are carried, while there seem to be vastly more English words dedicated to medical conditions and legal processes. One of my college professors once observed that during periods of extreme excitement or extreme sadness, her bilingual students tended to gravitate toward their non-English language to express those emotions.

I'm finding that my personality as a Vietnamese speaker is completely different from my personality as an English speaker. We seem to speak faster and louder and with higher pitch, and with many more hand gestures. I find that I'm more affectionate and tactile and stand closer to others. Vietnamese is very songlike (tonal) and has an aquatic flow of one-syllable words. As a linguistic result, I trip over fewer sentences but overrun them more frequently – while (personally) using a lot more onomatopoeia, silly words, falsetto, and a more nasally laugh.

Aside from the practicalities of looking good on a résumé, it turns out there are evolutionary benefits to bilingualism and multilingualism such as in preventing or slowing the onset of Alzheimer's, thanks to how well it exercises the brain's neural pathways (Read more about this news of a recent study released May 2011, or its abstract).

Ellen Bialystok, a research professor involved in the aforementioned study, points out in an interview that bilingualism provides skills for a person to better differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information. The system within a brain that enables bilingualism is also the system "what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them," she explains, although the benefit doesn't seem to apply to foreign language use that is only occasional.

And for many other reasons besides, bilingualism is good for child brain development. By the time most of us wish we had more languages under our belts, we've think we've bypassed the ideal age range for picking them up, even though some experts say there's no cutoff.

Many monolingual parents are taking measures anyway to prevent this regret for their children, and as a recent trend, many New York parents are hiring nannies who are then asked only to speak their native language on the job. Can these decisions have lasting impact? Children who stop speaking their native language early, such as by first or second grade, tend to lose their ability to speak it. The most pressing question for me is always to do with duty – how much duty do we have to preserve our cultural identities through language? Am I a more successful human being if I pass on my heritage to the next generation? I like to think of it as a gift I could someday give.

Since the cat is out of the bag (so to speak), we thought we'd tell you a little bit about our new shirts.

Although maligned by grammar school teachers when used to start a sentence, the conjunction “and” is one of the most useful words in any language. Want to finish a list? Try “and.” Tired of using “also”? Try “and.” Want to connect grammatically coordinate words, phrases or clauses? Try “and.” 

The Ampersand (&) is a ligature of the letters of the Latin word “et” for “and” and is equally useful for scribes in a hurry.

We’ve taken this conjunction and painstakingly translated it into over 150 languages – from Afrikaans to Zulu, with Amharic, Inuktitut, Nyanja and Telugu thrown in for good measure.

Designed by Glyph and printed on a shirt made from organic cotton or organic cotton and recycled polyester.

Want one of our shirts? Keep an eye on our facebook and twitter for chances to get one of your very own!

Dr. Seuss was a genius at dreaming up the perfect names for his children's book characters. But, did he really simply make up the word Grinch?

According to Etymonline.com, "Grinch" is defined as a "'spoilsport'; all usages trace to Dr. Seuss' 1957 book 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas.'"

Dictionary.com defines "grinch" as "a person or thing that spoils or dampens the pleasure of others" and dates its origin between 1965 and 1970, "from the Grinch, name of a character created by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)."

Indeed, the Grinch as we know him first appeared in the book "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" in 1957, followed, just under a decade later, by the animated film of the same name. However, the devoted Seuss fan would know that the word appears earlier in Seuss' 1953 book "Scrambled Eggs Super!," about Peter T. Hooper, a boy who collects eggs from a number of exotic birds to make scrambled eggs. One of these exotic birds is the "Beagle-Beaked-Bald-Headed Grinch," and he looks like a real sourpuss.

Scrambled Eggs Super - by Dr. Seuss (1 of 2) by MistyIsland1

Could one therefore not surmise that the idea of a grouchy Grinch had been festering in the back of Seuss' mind for some time, surfacing now and again in name or in likeness, as so many classic Seuss characters whose lineage can be traced back through Seuss' earlier works from his advertising and cartooning days, before taking their final and enduring forms? It would seem quite plausible.

But back to our Grinch. His name is seemingly endowed with a perfect phonemic-semantic harmony: the sound "gr" connoting the very meaning of the word "grinch" itself–semantically tainted by so many English words beginning with a similar sound and denoting a similar idea of unpleasantness.

The Seuss corpus contains scores of words invented in a similar fashion. It is no surprise, then, that reputable sources trace the word back to the very imagination of the good doctor himself. However, it is quite possible that Dr. Seuss was influenced by a very similar French term, "grincheux."

The adjective "grincheux" comes from a dialectal form of the term "grincer," to screech, grind or squeak, and can be translated into English as "grouchy" or "grumpy." In fact, the French version of Walt Disney's Snow White, used "Grincheux" to translate the name of the similarly-tempered dwarf – Grumpy. Snow White debuted in France in the spring of 1938, shortly after its late 1937 release in the American market, some twenty years before "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." This is the French version of "Heigh-Ho!"

Perhaps Seuss heard the word "grincheux" during the time he spent in Paris in the 1920s after dropping out of Oxford. Perhaps he came across it at some other point. Perhaps it is simply a chance lexical coincidence. We may never know for sure. All we do know is that the Grinch has joined the ranks of Dickens' Scrooge as one of the most beloved humbugs in American Christmas tradition.