Tag: Language

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Media & Press Media - Audio

[MEDIA] Talking Shortform Text with @PetrieHosken on @BBCRadioLondon

Texting on a touch screen phone turned sideways.

It was a loooooong journey back from Suffolk yesterday, so I was still asleep when my phone rang at 9.15am (I’d missed the earlier text as my phone doesn’t give any notifications between 11pm and 9am), from BBC London, asking if I could respond to the story that David Attenborough says he doesn’t understand textspeak (or emojis).

You can hear the interview here:

You can listen to the full programme here – I’m on just after the news at 9,30am.

TIL, if you’re wondering, is ‘Today I learned’…, and if we’d specifically got to emojis, I might have talked about how wartime posters are evidence of a visual shorthand language that we’ve learnt, and that emojis are a new form of this.

I also referred to the Urban Dictionary.

A few notes on my Facebook (for FB friends only).

Oh, and if you want to see how elegantly I was turned out:

Categories
Digital

BBC Radio 4: Digital Human (Series 6:2014: Episode 2: Language) #DigiHuman

language

2/6: Language http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lpxx9

We communicate with each other in more ways than ever and with an ever expanding range of devices and platforms. But they all piggy back on an earlier invention, our original social networking technology – language.

In this edition of the Digital Human Aleks Krotoski explores the idea of language as a technology itself and how people over the years have attempted to improve it; re-engineer it for maximum efficiency, or use it as a lever of social change.

She speaks to Professor David Crystal about how we’re living through a period of rapid language growth comparable to the renaissance or industrial revolution. Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel explains how we can consider language as a technology devised by natural selection while linguist Arika Okrent charts the attempts down the years by those who think they can perfect the function of language by devising their own.

  • We think of technologies that act on our world, or see language as a technology built on social selection/evolution.
  • Language allows us to find out what is going on inside others minds, but it’s more than a tool – it’s something we join – it’s society.
  • We’ve heard that tech is destroying our mother tongues, text shortening, beauty lost…
  • The importance of language – it doesn’t change at a steady rate. There’s not particularly more words coming into the language, but the technology is allowing them to be shared quicker.
  • We use our language to suit the wiring in someone else’s brains (as if by a remote control) – language is used to manipulate the world to suit our needs.
  • There are those who are not happy with current languages and so are creating new languages – see http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com. Each have their own grammar, etc. Exotic sounding appeal, but also engineering solutions to communication issues?
  • Understanding why people do what they do – language is one of the ways that explain, but also influences what people did.
  • The web is the space in which people can find these new languages, keep it alive, and share it.
  • If you treat a language like a spade, then it will only ever be good for digging. Children take spades and find new ways to use it … Constructed languages (and natural languages) do this.
  • Every piece of material printed material has been passed through a copy-editor, etc… but blogs, etc. offer a ‘rawer’ version, where the restrictions are social rather than procedural.
  • Language is a way of seeing the world…

There’s been a lot about language going on this semester – just completed the Corpus Mooc.

 

Categories
Life(style)

Learning Portuguese with @MindSnacks

I lived in Brazil for 5 months in 1994 (whilst another World Cup was on, and when Ayrton Senna died). Although I spent most of my time speaking English (for the benefit of the kids I was working with), I wanted to learn some Portuguese, most of which I gained from Linkword. I went back through Brazil as part of my ‘Round the World’ trip in 2008 – and seemed to have forgotten most of it, though my pronunciation is still pretty good (better than my French (GCSE Grade A!)… so on Friday I finally had another go at some of the software that’s on my iPad – and found myself drawn into the gamification of language learning with Mindsnacks:

mind-snacks

I am keen to go to Brazil again (I have family there), and it does seem to be a growing economy, so starting again at the beginning (£2.99 for 50 lessons).

I am now on Level 16, having ‘mastered’ 152 words after 8/50 lessons… So, so far – numbers (to 101), days of the week, colours, seasons, months, relations, body parts, house, and now onto basic phrases…

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Life(style)

Mayday Mayday

What do I need to say really?!