Language Trainers Blog

Source: news.cnet.com

When people use computers, they have to adjust themselves to working within the constraints of the system. Nowadays with the general computer literacy levels of the younger generations, this is an unconscious act – you’re doing what the computer wants you to do, so the computer can then do what you want it to do.

However, developer Marc Schroeder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – an agency who standardize many online technologies and languages – has started work on EmotionML: a language that allows a computer to adjust to the user instead, by reading and interpreting their emotions using a camera or sensor.

From the article:

The idea is called affective computing in academic circles, and if it catches on, computer interactions could be very different. Avatar faces could show their human master’s expression during computer chats. Games could adjust play intensity according to the player’s reactions. Customer service representatives could be alerted when customers are really angry. Computers could respond to your expressions as people do. Computer help technology like Microsoft’s Clippy or a robot waiter could discern when to make themselves scarce.

“Rather than having to click the ‘no’ button on some touch screen, I would rather shake my head,” Schroeder said. “Without having to consciously decide to do so, I will show a puzzled and confused facial expression, and a human would know that I need advice and guidance.” Computers could adapt to this human communication style, he said.

This development could improve the entire user experience, and even pave the way for the as yet elusive all-knowing ‘robot butler’ that is a popular trope in science fiction movies and TV shows!

Source: reuters.com

Following up from a previous post about Microsoft’s decision not to include ASL-enabled technology in their new Kinect product, UW researchers are trying to find a way to allow ASL over video calls on current 3G mobile technology.

The issue is that 3G networks are not sufficiently fast enough to broadcast uncompressed video, so the quality is generally not good enough to be able to understand sign language over a standard video call. The new 4G networks that are starting to crop up around the country will aid in this dilemma; but not everyone will immediately have access to the newer networks when they arrive.

However, by concentrating the image quality over the face and hands portion of the video, researchers have been able to develop an effective avenue for ASL communication over older cellphones on current 3G networks. The technology (known as MobileASL) is currently being tested by ASL speakers at the university – over 200 calls were made, averaging around 60 seconds apiece – and the results have been “generally positive”.

Apple’s recent FaceTime video call integration into the new iPhone handset – not a new concept, by any means, but the first time it has been brought to the masses – still is not sufficiently clear enough to allow ASL over the phone. However, MobileASL betters it in this regard, and uses only one tenth of the bandwidth used by FaceTime.

A larger field study will be performed in the winter, so stay tuned to this interesting development for deaf cellphone users!

Source: thesmokinggun.com

I’m not the hippest cat on the street, but this news certainly surprised me. Usually Ebonics is generally classified as a non-standard (or bastardized) form of the language rather than a bona fide dialect, the DEA is actively seeking Ebonics experts to help translate wiretaps and decipher bugged phonecalls. From the original article:

The DEA’s need for full-time linguists specializing in Ebonics is detailed in bid documents related to the agency’s mid-May issuance of a request for proposal (RFP) covering the provision of as many as 2100 linguists for the drug agency’s various field offices. Answers to the proposal were due from contractors on July 29.

In contract documents, which are excerpted here, Ebonics is listed among 114 languages for which prospective contractors must be able to provide linguists. The 114 languages are divided between “common languages” and “exotic languages.” Ebonics is listed as a “common language” spoken solely in the United States.

They are also seeking expert speakers of many other languages, including Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Farsi and Jamaican patois – but it is interesting to note that ebonics is among the listed languages.

Die hard linguists are reacting in a strange way, fighting against the DEA’s apparent ‘upgrading’ of Ebonics to a fully fledged dialect, but of course the DEA is not trying to classify this distinction – they are simply in need of translators!

In my limited experience of Ebonics, I’ve found that it varies greatly and seems to be mostly used as a catch-all term for African American non-standard English. Surely the DEA’s targets – that is to say, drug dealers – would be better understood by a former dealer, rather than someone who is simply well-versed in Ebonics?

Source: news.discovery.com

I recently read this fascinating article about orangutans in the Borneo rainforest communicating with humans and other apes using mime – an artform rather more associated with third-rate street performers.

“Of course what orangutans do isn’t up to Marcel Marceau, but they can certainly fake their own bodily signals, the essence of pantomime, and that opens up a much richer world of communication than we have believed possible,” added Russon, a Glendon College professor of psychology.

Russon and colleague Kristin Andrews identified pantomime cases by mining 20 years of text and video data from observational studies conducted on orangutans.

“Pantomime, like language, can be used to declare, lie, request, reminisce, tell stories, teach, explain and more,” Andrews told Discovery News. “We saw cases of pantomime used to request and to deceive, which are typical examples of great ape communication but, interestingly, we also report one case of pantomime used to tell a story, to reminisce and to make a statement.”

They not only use mime to communicate with others – for example the orangutan who would chop at coconuts with a stick in the same way that humans open them with machetes, in order to communicate that she wanted somebody to cut open her coconut for her – but have even reached the stage where mimicking human behavior can teach them valuable skills:

[...] an older orangutan female named Kikan reenacted how a human worker helped to heal Kikan’s wounded foot. Beforehand, the person noticed that Kikan had accidentally pierced the sole of her foot with a small stone, so the worker used a pencil to pick the stone out and then dripped latex from the stem of a fig leaf into the wound. Such latex is locally known to help dry wounds.

Kikan watched all of this intently and resumed playing when the treatment finished.

Over a week later, Kikan hugged the human healer’s leg. The worker was busy observing another orangutan and didn’t pay much attention. Kikan returned with a leaf and completely reenacted the leaf treatment that had been given to her foot. Three months later, Kikan held up her now-healed foot to the person.

Orangutans are apparently not alone in this habit: bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas have also been known to communicate in this charades-style fashion.

Which leads me to my next question: how long before they band together and overthrow the humans?

As you may have noticed, I am pretty passionate about languages in general, and over the years have heard many misconceptions thrown around the place when the topic has come up in discussion. Here are three interesting linguistic myths, and why I (and many others) believe them to be myths…

1. The Eskimo language has a hundred words for snow.
You’ve probably heard this one, and you probably believed it the first time you heard it. I know I did. It’s a very old misconception, and has even been mentioned in several text books by academics who should perhaps have known better.

The truth of the matter is, just because snow is a central part of Eskimo life, they only have around 25 words for snow, and most of those are either compound words including the Eskimo word for snow, or descriptive words. If you think of the number of words in English containing the root ‘snow’ (e.g. snowstorm, snowbound, snowshoes etc.) as well as all our many descriptive words (e.g. blizzard, powder, slush etc.), we have far more words for snow than the Eskimos do.

2. Americans are ruining the English language.
Ask any Brit and they’ll tell you how Americans are butchering the Queen’s English. From the vocabulary we use, to our accents, to dropping the ‘u’ in color, to spelling words ending in -ize instead of -ise – the overall impression you’ll get is that we’re “doing it wrong”.

Well, next time a British person berates you for single-handedly ruining the English language, you might want to let them know that modern British English is just as different from Colonial English (the English everyone was speaking when Great Britain owned a quarter of the world’s landmass) as American English is. To take it one step further, American English is in many ways closer to Colonial English and its roots: color is actually from the Latin word, uh, color. Who knows why Brits added the u between the second o and the r in the first place?

Despite our thoroughly out of date British English stereotypes (e.g. “jolly good old chap”, “cor blimey guv’nor”, etc.), thanks to the ubiquity of Hollywood movies and popular TV shows like Friends, British people are far more aware of American neologisms than we are of theirs – so it’s only natural for the differences in the English variants to be more visible to Brits.

3. Children can learn a new language easily, adults cannot.
Well, this one at least has a basis in truth. The brains of children are like sponges, soaking up new information and thirsting for more. However, that doesn’t mean that they are innately better at learning a new language.

To fully explain this would take a post a lot longer than this one, but one of the main reasons that children appear to pick up new languages faster is that of immersion: they spend most of their childhoods learning their native language, and studying at school. If an adult was able to spend the same number of hours as a child learning a language, it’s likely that they would advance far faster. Unfortunately, most adults are not in the position where they can dedicate quite so much time to their language studies.

Also, an adult’s mindset when learning a new language is often that of learning a different ‘way’ of expressing their native language. If you’re English and you’re learning French, many adults unconsciously see French as a different way of expressing English, rather than treating it as a brand new, separate language. Children are much better at immersing themselves and accepting reality for what it is, whereas adults are more likely to question what they’re told, as well as relate everything to their own experiences.

Adults are far better at learning to read and write than children – the average adult can learn a brand new alphabet in about a week, and be reading it at a fairly decent speed within a month or two. Most children take a significantly longer time to gain these skills.

So there we go – 3 myths about languages, busted wide open for all to see.

Source: Associated Press

A recent Associated Press-Univision poll shows that for Latino students in American schools, sometimes the English immersion can do more harm than good. While the children’s English thrives under the immersion conditions of US schools, many find that their Spanish-speaking parents are unable to help them with homework, as well as communicate effectively with the school faculty on the kids’ behalf.

From the article:

The poll says just 20 percent of mainly Spanish-speaking parents say they are able to communicate “extremely well” with their child’s school, compared with 35 percent of Hispanics who speak English fluently.

About 42 percent of the Spanish speakers say it’s easy for them to help with their children’s schoolwork, compared with 59 percent of Hispanics who mostly speak English.

Given the results of this survey, it is perhaps less surprising that Hispanic children are nearly three times as likely to drop out of school. This seemed a pretty relevant topic given the recent state law controversy in Arizona!

Source: telegraph.co.uk

An interesting story from a newspaper across the Atlantic Ocean – the British government’s communication chief, Jean Gross, has warned against parents using in-car TVs, but not over concerns for safety. Instead, she fears that children would not be using the time to learn new vocabulary from interacting with their parents on the road, and playing spotting games in the car like “I Spy” – all of which means that parents aiming to keep the kids quiet during long car journeys could be doing just that, and having an adverse effect on their speech development.

From the article:

[Gross] said that long car journeys were opportunities to “double their vocabulary” and warned that children of wealthy families were most at risk because they were likely to have the latest technology.

“I remember [when my children were little] we did spotting games in the car, but with the Nintendo DS and other hand-held video games it’s going to be more affluent parents whose children have problems learning to speak, not just those from poorer homes who have less exposure to a wide range of language,” Mrs Gross told The Times.

Personally I feel like this is going a little over the top, but I do see where the concern is coming from. Children absorb new information so easily during formative years that it is a shame to waste hours of possible interaction during a journey where their changing surroundings are almost guaranteed to show them something new.

However, surely a compromise would be to let the children watch the TV in the car, but give them Sesame Street to watch?

Related to a recent post about the Chinese government’s somewhat unpopular phasing out of local Cantonese dialects to be replaced by Mandarin, recently the older Indonesian generations have voiced their concerns that the native Indonesian tongue – Bahasa Indonesia – is being sidelined by youths in favor of a more fluent grasp of English.

As the world’s unofficial lingua franca (and certainly the international language of business), English has permeated into countless cultures worldwide, but it is the prospering Indonesian middle and upper classes who are responsible for the sharp increase in English fluency over Bahasa Indonesia. As families make more money, they are able to forego state-funded education and send their children to the growing number of Indonesian private schools, where a greater focus is given to the English language, and Bahasa Indonesia is often overlooked.

English fluency has, in fact, become somewhat tied to wealth – it has been reported that many people even take a certain amount of pride in having only a basic grasp of the local Indonesian tongue, as their command of English is seen as something of a linguistic badge of a private education. This has given rise to a certain level of bitterness – last year’s Miss Indonesia, born to an Indonesian mother and an American father, was widely criticized (along with the judges who granted her the title) for her scant knowledge of the Indonesian language and preference for speaking in English.

Older generations fear that English overtaking native Indonesian could be potentially ruinous not only for Indonesian tradition, but even cause a divide amongst the people, slowly corroding Indonesia’s national identity.

This goes to highlight just how important language can be to a nation’s culture. Is Indonesian on the way out? Probably not. But it certainly seems that the spread of English around the world has great repercussions than you would think.

Source: msnbc.msn.com

American astronaut aboard the International Space Station, Tracy Caldwell Dyson, has recorded a six minute video to deaf children, in American Sign Language. This is the first time ASL has been used on board the ISS, and possibly the first time in outer space – despite it being the 4th most commonly used language in the USA. The purpose of the video was to encourage deaf children not to feel like there are certain things that they can’t do, and to pursue a career science if that is what they want. Caldwell Dyson herself says “the only thing deaf people can’t do is hear”.

Caldwell Dyson learned sign language after befriending a deaf athlete on her university track team. She learned the basics of ASL, and later developed her understanding after encountering deaf students whilst teaching Chemistry at graduate school.

You can watch the full video here.

Languages slowly dying out is always something I feel a little sad about, but as mentioned in previous posts, this seems to be the direction the world is taking.

Recently, people have taken to the streets in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, in protest of the local Cantonese dialect being ever more replaced by Mandarin. The specific issue that sparked the protest – numbering around 10,000 people, according to reports – was the majority of the TV stations switching to broadcasting in Mandarin.

For decades, pressure from Beijing to adopt Mandarin as the national language of China has seen many local Cantonese dialects usurped by the government’s preferred tongue. Spokespeople from the Chinese Communist Party claim that they simply wish to “strike a balance” and “respect dialects” rather than simply wipe out the widespread use of Cantonese, but with several newspapers having reports of people actually being fired from their jobs for speaking Cantonese rather than Mandarin, it is difficult to gauge the extent of the government’s “encouragement”.

This policy is most noticeably resisted in the city of Hong Kong, where Cantonese still reigns as the preferred language not only of the locals but also in the government and education sectors. Nearby provinces such as Guangdong have also resisted the migration to Mandarin.

Fear not, though – a Cantonese course will still stand you in good stead for travelling around China – so long as you stick mainly to the southern provinces. If you’d rather go to Shanghai or Beijing, Mandarin is probably a better bet!