From rags to riches, or the multifaceted progress of lady
“In 1992, Rainer Schulze, a German researcher, examined the entry lady in the OED and presented the word’s story in nineteen steps, which I’ll reproduce below in an abridged form (all my examples will also be borrowed from his paper). The main steps are as follows: someone who kneads bread; the female head of the household (a mistress in relation to servants or slaves); Virgin Mary (a most important leap), and Lady as the designation of the Virgin (Our Lady, finds its counterparts in Latin Domina Nostra, French Notre Dame, and elsewhere); a woman who rules over subjects; a woman of superior position in society; a woman who is the object of chivalrous devotion; a woman, loosely defined but of usually not very elevated standard of social position.”
Teach Yourself a Language in 15 Minutes a Day: Step-by-Step Demonstration
“With the right materials and methods, it is possible to give yourself a firm foundation in a foreign language in less than a year by studying for 15 systematic minutes each day.”
#Video length: thirty one minutes and forty two seconds.
The Japan Times interviewed me for a May 27, 2024 article on #bilingual#education (1st picture).
While the newspaper article is for paying subscribers, the reporter Eric Margolis agreed that the publication Bilingual Japan of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (#JALT) #Bilingualism SIG may publish the full interview. After that issue comes out next month, I will make the article available in research repositories.
The article is subtitled "Japan wants its next generation to be fluent in English. Culture and economic inequality stand in the way." What it means by #culture getting in the way is treated in my answer as to why the #English level in #Japan is relatively low (2nd picture).
The conclusion quotes part of my response to the common opinion that #foreign#languages are not needed in Japan (3rd picture). My complete answer also predicts that the increasing influx of foreign #tourists and #residents will change that complacent attitude.
How Google Translate Uses Math to Understand 134 Languages | WSJ Tech Behind
“Google Translate uses sophisticated neural networks to translate 134 languages in real time. And using your phone’s camera, it can translate your surroundings without typing.”
“In this video, I run through 10 aspects of English that make it bizarre in comparison with other languages. These include its “meaningless do”, dreadful spellings, odd use of tenses, missing pronouns and the strange array of sounds in English.”
#Video length: twenty one minutes and thirty seven seconds.
“This episode examines the origins of Hebrew and its relationship with Canaanite dialects in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. The episode will explore archaeological artifacts such as an inscription from Izbet Sarteh in Israel, which may be one of the earliest inscriptions of the Hebrew language.”
#Video length: ten mintues and fifty nine seconds.
“Some alphabets have been developed intentionally and purposefully to be exactly what the earliest alphabets became: efficient psychotechnologies for enhanced learning, communication and community building.”
"The word “nostalgia” first described homesickness and likely PTSD symptoms experienced by Swiss soldiers and mercenaries who fought abroad in the 1700s."
"The word “nostalgia” first described homesickness and likely PTSD symptoms experienced by Swiss soldiers and mercenaries who fought abroad in the 1700s."
#emdiplomacy was a multilingual affair. An #emdiplomat who could speak several languages had a clear advantage - not the least because he could thereby show equal respect to different parties, as this example by @dbellingradt shows. (1/2)
"Loiter, a fourteenth-century verb, sounds quite unlike the monosyllables mentioned above. It appeared in Middle English in the form lotere and then in a 1440 English-Latin dictionary as loytre. Still later, the spelling leutere ~ leutre turned up. It is not improbable that “loiterers” (vagabonds) from the Low Countries were the originators of the verb (another case of self-characterization?)."
"This study is the first attempt to apply the masked language modeling approach to corrupted inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic languages, both using the Hebrew alphabet consisting mostly of consonant symbols. In our experiments, we evaluate several transformer-based models, which are fine-tuned on the Biblical texts and tested on three different percentages of randomly masked parts in the testing corpus."
Niv Fono, Harel Moshayof, Eldar Karol, Itai Assraf, and Mark Last. 2024. Embible: Reconstruction of Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic Texts Using Transformers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 846–852, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
"Despite these advancements, the study finds that lexicography remains relevant, especially for less-documented languages where AI falls short, but human lexicographers excel in data-sparse environments. It argues for the importance of lexicography in promoting linguistic diversity and maintaining the integrity of lesser-known languages."
"The breakthrough of the alphabetic script early in the first millennium BCE coincides with the appearance of several new languages and civilizations in ancient Syria-Palestine. Together, they form the cultural setting in which ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible, and, transformed by Hellenism, the New Testament took shape."