14-year old makes his city cuss-free

by Abha Malpani on

9-months ago, 14-year old McKay Hatch founded the No-Cussing Club in junior high-school. It started off with 50 members in South Pasadena, now the entire zone where approximately 25,000 people reside is cuss-free. South Pasadena has officially declared the 1st week of March as cuss-free week. (Umm…if the whole zone is anyway cuss-free I don’t see the need to have a “week” for it, but it’s all good).

South Pasadena has made illegal to cuss and you won’t get more than a few dirty looks as punishment, but it’s still a pretty cool initiative they are enforcing without the brunt of a law.

I think swearing has become part of our daily vocabulary (it is certainly part of mine); I would never swear in front of my parents or my little brother, but these days it’s so commonplace it seems acceptable — I’m not bothered too much by it now and often use bad language with both. Yes, inexcusable. Foul language is a pretty foul way to communicate, even if that is not your intention.

Little McKay’s endeavor seems to also have reached a national and international scale as he boasts members from all 50 states in the US and 10,000 members from overseas.

“Leave people better than you found them” is the motto of the club; talking without using foul language is a good place to begin.

“Le” or “la”? Even the French can’t decide

by Anna Brones on

If you’ve ever dabbled in the French language, you know the difficulty of memorizing which gender goes with which noun. Why is a beard — la barbe — feminine? Why is a bicycle — le vélo — masculine? Well you shouldn’t have to feel bad about your French language difficulties; turns out even the French can’t agree on which gender goes with which word.

A recent study conducted by Dalila Ayoun at the University of Arizona found that, “Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed [on] only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.”

Put simply, even native speakers have a hard time distinguishing between le and la. But I’m not surprised, French is after all très difficile.

Via LanguageHat

The English Project 2012

by Abha Malpani on

As part of the London Olympics cultural program, the plan is to build a museum tracing the roots of the English language.

In conjunction with BBC and the British Library, the museum will allow visitors to experience physically and virtually (holograms!) the global evolution of the language from when it was a mixed tongue of the Jute, Angle and Saxon tribes, to how it stands today as spoken by 2 billion people around the world.

Although being organized by and in the UK, I’m assuming that it will take into context English spoken as a first language in the US, South Africa and Australia.

I’d be particularly interested to see how the future of English is predicted. Language experts say that because of its global reach, new varieties are emerging and there is a possibility that English will evolve into a family of new languages — like what happened to Latin a thousand years ago.

The idea is not unique and just when I was wondering how is it that this hasn’t been thought of before, I find that it has — but for other languages, not purely for English, and on a much smaller scale.

There’s the Museum of the Portuguese Language in Brazil, the Afrikaans Language Museum in South Africa, and the National Museum of Language in the US that talks generally about world languages.

The English Project sounds like a monster project; one that would involve an extensive amount of research and careful articulation to represent a language that is so boundless today.

This is America, please order in English

by Abha Malpani on

Since 2005, a Philadelphia based cheese-steak bistro owner has been defending a signpost in his shop that said: “This is America, please order in English.” Not surprisingly, he was taken to court on grounds of discrimination, equating it to derogatory signs like “Whites Only”. No ruling has been given yet.

I wrote a post earlier about how surprising I found it that people barely speak English in a big, cosmopolitan capital city like Madrid. It triggered a debate over whether it’s necessary for big cities (where English isn’t the first language) to have basic knowledge of English, or not.

I think it is relative. In non-English speaking metropolises, as long as the tourists put in some effort, lack of basic English may not be an important day-to-day communication hindrance, but it is definitely a disadvantage in the larger scope of things. For example: Madrid is bidding to host the 2016 Olympics — surely the knowledge of English would play an important role there. How is China tackling that issue for next year’s games? Anyway, I digress.

What do you do in an English-speaking country when your customers don’t speak English? Do you put up a sign like our friend did? Hmmm, I don’t think so — it’s quite an insult. The sign reminded me of when the English ruled India and the “No Indians or Dogs” sign was not uncommon. Couldn’t they just be offered picture menus where they could point out what they wanted? Or what about bilingual menus?

There is an online poll on the article asking whether people approve this sign post. At this moment, of the 115,732 people who voted, 92% of them approve. Call me overly sensitive but I’m kinda shocked to see the response.

What do you think? Are signs like that acceptable?

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So that’s why they hardly speak English in Spain!

by Abha Malpani on

It has always shocked me how little English people speak in Spain. Travel to big cities and generally you can communicate with the locals in English, but in Madrid (for example) you will be lucky to encounter a Madrileño to speak to in English. It’s embarrassing how here you can’t even order a coffee in English at Starbucks!

I think one of the main reasons for its lack of English-speaking capabilities is the fact that Spain is the only country in the world (according to a recent article in the English version of El Pais published by the IHT) that dubs everything. Everything!

The article (which unfortunately isn’t online) also says that Spain has 4,300 cinema screens, making it the country with the highest number of movie theaters per person in Europe. Although now there are a number of Version Original (VO) theaters in the country, they are visited mostly by tourists; Spaniards generally don’t want to read subtitles. When asked, although Spaniards said they prefer to watch films in VO, only 4% of them actually go to cinemas to watch them in VO.

To make a comparison of sorts: I have a lot of Swedish friends, both here and in Sweden. What always surprised me was how well they speak English and how perfectly American their accents are. When I asked them, they all unanimously said it’s because they have grown up watching English-language programs on television as nothing is dubbed. Sweden generally being a rich and cold country, most people have cable and I guess they stay in a lot!

Although English is taught in Spanish schools, it is not uncommon to find it being taught by teachers who can’t really speak English, but they know the grammar. On that note, it’s interesting to think that should Spain not have dubbed programs (initially done under the Franco regime), Spaniards would at least have had basic English communication skills.

The influence of media on the language capabilities of a country is quite fascinating, don’t you think!?