This is an awesome mashup. Search the world for newspapers using a map interface. Then translate them with one click. Cooooool
Ancient world dictionary finished after 90 years – an amazing project
Ancient world dictionary finished _ after 90 years
Ancient world dictionary finished _ after 90 years
(AP) CHICAGO (AP) — It was a monumental project with modest beginnings: a small group of scholars and some index cards. The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries — and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers.The year: 1921. The place: The University of Chicago. The project: Assembling an Assyrian dictionary based on words recorded on clay or stone tablets unearthed from ruins in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, written in a language that hadn’t been uttered for more than 2,000 years. The scholars knew the project would take a long time. No one quite expected how very long.
Decades passed. The team grew. Scholars arrived from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London, joining others from the U.S. and Canada. One generation gave way to the next, one century faded into the next. Some signed on early in their careers; they were still toiling away at retirement. The work was slow, sometimes frustrating and decidedly low-tech: Typewriters. Mimeograph machines. And index cards. Eventually, nearly 2 million of them.
And now, 90 years later, a finale. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is now officially complete — 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language (with several dialects, including Assyrian) that endured for 2,500 years. The project is more encyclopedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, through every conceivable form of writing: love letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems and more.
via cbsnews.com
This is an amazing project. It’s not just the language at a certain point, it is the language, in context, over 1000s of years. To put that into perspective, you’d have a tough time with Middle English, much less Old English. Now imagine that that you were just “discovering” this range language from a collection of badly damaged texts.
Again, amazing work.
Jesse Sheidlower: The F-Word – Looks like a fun book http://forum-network.org/lecture/jesse-sheidlower-f-word#
check out the video at http://forum-network.org/lecture/jesse-sheidlower-f-word#
Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower discusses his new, in-depth look at that most offensive, rhymes-with-pluck, four-letter English obscenity, The F-Word.
This second edition includes many new words and phrases, F-words from Britain, Ireland, and Australia, and hundreds of new examples of usage. Words, explanations, and examples come from thousands of sources, including Lord Rochester, Norman Mailer, e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Liz Phair, Jack Kerouac, Anne Sexton, Playboy, and the Internet.
Krashen’s Natural Order Hypothesis – Order of Acquisition
As noted above, the order of acquisition for second language is not
the same as the order of acquisition for first language, but there are
some similarities. Table 2.1, from Krashen (1977), presents an averageTABLE 2.1. “Average” order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes for English
as a second language (children and adults)
Notes:
1. This order is derived from an analysis of empirical studies of second language acquisition
(Krashen, 1977). Most studies show significant correlatons with the average order.2. No claims are made about ordering relations for morphemes in the same box.
3. Many of the relationships posited here also hold for child first language acquisition, but some do
not: In general, the bound morphemes have the same relative order for first and second language
acquisition (ING, PLURAL, IR. PAST, REG. PAST, III SINGULAR, and POSSESSIVE) while
AUXILIARY and COPULA tend to be acquired relatively later in first language acquisition than
in second language acquisition.
via sdkrashen.com
Full of holes, but interesting.
Open CALL Resources for the 4 Skill Areas – Prezi
I’m giving a talk today at Hanyang Cyber Univerity in Seoul to TESL students. I decided to give a broad overview of Web services/sites that could be useful for learning/instruction for listening, reading, writing, and speaking. It’s a 90 minute talk and I’m sure we will use all of it as you can see from the scope of the presentation.
Of course, after I finished with this first iteration, I realized that I completely ignored Opensource software and Open Educational Resources (OER). I figured that I’d hold off on that for now considering this group might not be ready for that discussion. There are so many fun applications in those categories. I guess that will be a part 2 that will have to wait until later.
The handout is here: http://tinyurl.com/opencall4skill
And the Prezi presentation is embedded below.
<a href="http://prezi.com/lwllwrdjvm-o/open-call-resources-for-the-4-skill-areas/" title="This presentation accompanies a handout at http://tinyurl.com/opencall4skill on free Web resources for language learning”>Open CALL Resources for the 4 Skill Areas on Prezi
Let me know what you think.
English: Who speaks English? | The Economist (via @ddeubel)
Who speaks English?
EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well.
EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The bottom five were Panama, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Among regions, Latin America fared worst. (No African country had enough takers to make the lists’s threshold for the minimum number of participants.)
via economist.com
Realistically, this study doesn’t mean much. The method is Swiss cheese (lots of holes). It is, none-the-less, interesting.
MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son’s First Words, Graphs It | Fast Company
In a talk soon to grab several million views on TED.com, cognitive scientist Deb Roy Wednesday shared a remarkable experiment that hearkens back to an earlier era of science using brand-new technology. From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear.
via fastcompany.com
This could be amazing. I’d love to see a write-up and the TED Talk. It’s not up yet 🙁
EDIT – The video was published (see below). I’m not as excited about the talk as I thought I would be. Over have of it is essentially an advertisement for his new company focusing on social media analysis. However, I hope that he publishes (or someone associated with the group does so) findings of words, locations, interlocutors, and such. Like many of the commenters are suggesting, this doesn’t seems to provide anything new theoretically; however, it can help to support (or weaken) these existing theories considering there has never been as complete (and unobtrusive) collection of data of this kind ever.
Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies
via ted.com
Great video and new data on morpheme recognition (distinction) in infants. This is not a new idea. This has been rather well known for years, but the new technology allows for better measurement of this phenomenon. In short, babies are excellent at recognizing and distinguishing sounds from any language, given exposure, up until around 6-8 months. This ability falls off later.
Given the brevity of the presentation, I can’t criticize her too much, but her description of the critical period and what it means to learn a language is certainly not complete. In fact, from what we see here, it is downright misinformed. Her comment that no scientist doubts that a critical period exists (as presented on the chart) is absolutely wrong. In reality, many do.
She is talking almost entirely about sound recognition and distinction, but she uses an SLA theory on language that involves so much more. It’s always difficult to mix-in theories from different fields without operationalizing your terms. I’m going to guess that’s where the 10-minute time limit is restricting.