The vocabulary of a given language is constantly changing: new words emerge, old words “die,” i.e., they are no longer actively used and eventually no longer understood. This process varies according to the type of word: new nouns, adjectives and verbs emerge quickly and spontaneously. Other types of words, such as articles or numeral words,…
When I wrote the blog post “Linguistics and Linguists in Film” over a year ago, I thought that for a brief period we would have to confine our lives to the living room, bedroom, and kitchen. Now we still can’t travel without restrictions, and those of us who wanted to do projects on the ground…
These are not so much films that focus on a linguist as a person (e.g. Still Alice, 2014), but films whose subject is language or linguistics: Pygmalion (1938), My Fair Lady (1964), Pygmalion (1983): about pronunciation, social status and feelings Ball of Fire (1941): Should lexicographers also include colloquial language in their dictionaries … and…
In part one of this series, I introduced you to constructed languages (conlang) and in part two, planned languages. Now I’ll conclude with languages games, also called ludling in English: In a playful way, children, but also adults change an existing language according to predefined rules. The result is a kind of secret language that…
In the first part of this short series on artistic languages we focussed on constructed languages (conlangs). Planned languages, previously also called international auxiliary languages, represent another large section. Their history goes back to the seventeenth century when scholars and philosophers, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, developed so-called a priori languages. These were strictly logical…
Part 1: Extra-terrestrial and indigenous peoples All languages that are not natural languages – in other words, they have not developed historically and are spoken (or expressed in gestures) by people – are known in linguistics as artificial languages or constructed languages. This includes planned languages such as Esperanto, fictional languages such as Klingon from…
Egyptian version of “We are sinking” – with subtitles:
As a child, I loved the German TV series “Die Sendung mit der Maus“ (“The Program with the Mouse”). The introduction was in a different language every week. I used to listen curiously to the strange sounds and I was even more curious to hear the answer: “That was Spanish“, “That was Turkish“ or “That…
Dutch and German are not only neighboring languages geographically, they also both belong to the west-germanic language family and are quite similar. The difference is somewhat comparable to the one between Spanish and Portuguese. I have always been interested in the history and culture of the Netherlands. And even in my job I had to…
In the first part of this article I wrote that the EuroCom method – also know as “Seven Sieves” – draws primarily on common elements in vocabulary and our understanding of language structure, in order to acquire in just a few hours the ability to read a foreign language. Now I want to take you…