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      Dogs can understand the meaning of nouns, new research finds

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 15:00

    Study confirms our canine companions can grasp more than simple commands – or at least for items they care about

    Dogs understand what certain words stand for, according to researchers who monitored the brain activity of willing pooches while they were shown balls, slippers, leashes and other highlights of the domestic canine world.

    The finding suggests that the dog brain can reach beyond commands such as “sit” and “fetch”, and the frenzy-inducing “walkies”, to grasp the essence of nouns, or at least those that refer to items the animals care about.

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      Early learning needs parental engagement | Letter

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 10 March - 18:08

    Fashions in speech change, but children need to learn to speak clearly and fluently, writes Janice White

    I share John Harris’s concern ( Opinion, 3 March ) over Kindred 2 ’s new study about an increase in the number of children starting school who are not “school-ready”, which reported that 28% of children in reception year “ incorrectly use books (swiping or tapping as if using an electronic device)”. May I suggest another reason why young children now have difficulty learning to read? Many appear to have little verbal interaction with the adults in their life.

    In public I often see a parent with child in pushchair, the parent completely engaged on their mobile phone while the child, given a tablet to keep them quiet, taps and swipes distractedly as the screen changes.

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      ‘We are all mixed’: Henry Louis Gates Jr on race, being arrested and working towards America’s redemption

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 10 March - 13:00

    The US academic and TV historian’s rejection of racial categories has drawn criticism from some but his sense of mischief and underlying belief in American decency remains undimmed

    The first time I met Henry Louis Gates Jr raised more questions than it answered. It was the year 2000, I was still a teenager, and he – already a distinguished Harvard professor – was hosting a launch for his new BBC and PBS series Wonders of the African World.

    I remember the occasion as a series of firsts – my first TV launch party, first documentary series I’d seen on African civilisations, first encounter with a real-life Harvard professor. I remember wondering whether the circumstances were normal. The venue was the British Museum, an institution that harbours a practically unprecedented quantity of colonial plunder. Was it, I wondered, a deliberately ironic choice? Were all Harvard professors as friendly and personable as Gates, whom everyone calls “Skip”, and was charmingly informal and kind? And perhaps most pressingly, was it normal for Harvard professor TV presenters to dress as Gates so memorably had, in shorts, socks, and a ranger’s hat?

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      The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft review – eight translators lost in a forest

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 2 March - 07:30

    The International Booker-winning translator takes a deep dive into the complexities of the role in her ambitious second novel

    “Translators are like ninjas,” the Israeli author Etgar Keret wrote in 2017. “If you notice them, they’re no good.” The literary translation community must have felt delighted at this upgrade to their image: no longer dictionary dorks, but lithe, black-clad assassins! The thrilling story of ninja translators is yet to be told, but Jennifer Croft, an eminent translator whose English version of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker prize in 2018, has put her own spin on the profession with this ambitious, fecund novel, her second after the autofictional Homesick (published in Spanish in 2014, then in English in 2019).

    Croft has been fascinated by translation since she was a child, and this novel is a deep dive into the complexities and ambiguities of the role. A translator’s job is to render the original as faithfully as possible, yet they are also creating a new work of their own with every word they type. It’s an artistic paradox, the kind that can’t be represented straightforwardly in fiction. It needs something special – and Croft does not disappoint.

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      Let’s not police the language we use about cancer | Letter

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 29 February - 17:14 · 1 minute

    Dr Chris Howell , a cancer survivor and paediatric oncologist, on why people reach for certain words when faced with the disease

    I am a 35-year survivor (my choice of language) of childhood acute myeloid leukaemia and, not coincidentally, now a paediatric oncologist. I’ve never particularly liked metaphors of war and fighting in the context of cancer discussions, but I hear relatively commonly from parents or relatives that a child is “a fighter” or is “incredibly brave”. From my own experiences as a patient (four cycles of intensive chemotherapy interleaved with five episodes of near-fatal sepsis), and as a clinician (I look after children awaiting bone marrow transplants, undergoing high-dose chemotherapy, who have had amputations or other major surgery, or who have spent years taking chemotherapy), I can fully understand why people do reach for this language.

    It’s good to be reminded that, like Simon Jenkins ( Let King Charles’s illness finally change how we speak about cancer: it’s not about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ a ‘war’, 16 February ) and your correspondents ( Letters, 22 February ), many people’s experience of cancer is of a single mass found early and fully resected before it metastasises, or of a once-fatal condition converted to a chronic illness by modern medication. Of course, we should be careful about how we speak of cancer. But please, let people choose their own words. And if your own experience of cancer has been relatively fortunate, don’t police too heavy-handedly the language of those who do feel themselves to be in a life-or-death struggle.

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      Terrible news for pedants as Merriam-Webster relaxes the rules of English

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 27 February - 17:38


    It’s fine to end a sentence with a preposition, according to a shock ruling from the American dictionary publisher. But is it OK to recklessly split infinitives?

    Name: Correct preposition use.

    Age: The quarrel is probably as old as English prepositions themselves, so about 600 years.

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      Fighting talk: why we should mind our language on cancer | Letters

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 22 February - 17:36

    Readers respond to an article by Simon Jenkins on the use of violent terms to speak about the disease

    Thanks to Simon Jenkins for his thoughtful article on the language of cancer ( Let King Charles’s illness finally change how we speak about cancer: it’s not about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ a ‘war’, 16 February ). On getting my diagnosis of prostate cancer, my wife and I experienced a momentary sense of numbness. The consultant was reassuring, telling us he aimed to cure me. I was cured thanks to a proactive GP and an incredible NHS Cymru medical team.

    My wife and I told anybody and everybody, and gave them the complete picture. We still do this to raise awareness. Once the ice is broken, even the most reserved of friends ask the inevitable questions about sex, continence and the examination. Some then get tested. If this saves one life, it is worthwhile. We use simple language. I had prostate cancer. I had surgery. I was cured. We never saw this as a battle, and this freed us from hushed-tone discussions and the use of euphemisms. It was liberating and reassuring.

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      Can any English word be turned into a synonym for “drunk”? Not all, but many can.

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 22 February - 17:17 · 1 minute

    The lads from Edgar Wright's 2013 sci-fi comedy <i>World's End</i> know when to start drinking and get "totally and utterly carparked."

    The lads from Edgar Wright's 2013 sci-fi comedy World's End know when to start drinking and get "totally and utterly carparked." (credit: Universal Pictures)

    British comedian Michael McIntyre has a standard bit in his standup routines concerning the many (many!) slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk. These include "wellied," "trousered," and "ratarsed," to name a few. McIntyre's bit rests on his assertion that pretty much any English word can be modified into a so-called "drunkonym," bolstered by a few handy examples: "I was utterly gazeboed," or "I am going to get totally and utterly carparked."

    It's a clever riff that sparked the interest of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg decided to draw on their expertise to test McIntyre's claim that any word in the English language could be modified to mean "being in a state of high inebriation." Given their prevalence, "It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective," the authors wrote in their new paper published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. Bonus: the authors included an extensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for "drunk," drawn from various sources, which makes for entertaining reading.

    There is a long tradition of coming up with colorful expressions for drunkenness in the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary listing a usage as early as 1382: "merry," meaning "boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy." Another OED entry from 1630 lists "blinde" (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin got into the act with his 1737 Drinker's Dictionary , listing 288 words and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there were more than 353 synonyms for "drunk" listed in that year's edition of the Dictionary of American Slang . By 1981, linguist Harry Levine noted 900 terms used as drunkonyms.

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      Disappearing tongues: the endangered language crisis

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 22 February - 05:00

    Linguistic diversity on Earth is far more profound and fundamental than previously imagined. But it’s also crumbling fast

    At the heart of linguistics is a radical premise: all languages are equal. This underlies everything we do at the Endangered Language Alliance , an eccentric extended family of linguists, language activists, polyglots and ordinary people, whose mission is to document endangered languages and support linguistic diversity, especially in the world’s hyperdiverse cities.

    Language is a universal and democratic fact cutting across all human societies: no human group is without it, and no language is superior to any other. More than race or religion, language is a window on to the deepest levels of human diversity. The familiar map of the world’s 200 or so nation-states is superficial compared with the little-known map of its 7,000 languages . Some languages may specialise in talking about melancholy, seaweed or atomic structure; some grammars may glory in conjugating verbs while others bristle with syntactic invention. Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should form part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.

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      This post is public

      www.theguardian.com /science/2024/feb/22/disappearing-tongues-the-endangered-language-crisis

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