Neatorama.com has posted an excerpt from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader highlighting different words and expressions whose meanings are not the same now as they were in the past.
The list is fun, informative, and most of all, accurate. The classic example of “irony” is brought up and, well, it won’t do anything to solve the matter. [...]
Archive for June, 2009
Changes in Meaning: Evolution or Corruption?
Monday, June 29th, 2009The Real Origins of the Albanian Language
Friday, June 26th, 2009Albanian is a macrolanguage spoken by roughly 15 million inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, mainly in Albania, located in Europe’s southeastern corner.
The oldest book to have been written in Albanian is the Meshari, written by the Catholic clergyman Gjon Buzuku in 1555.
It was initially suggested that Albanian was the only surviving member of the Iliric [...]
Contemporary Theories on Translation: Nida and Steiner
Friday, June 26th, 2009The translation process is defined as the operation of obtaining the closest natural equivalent primarily in terms of meaning as well as the style (attempt to convey the same meaning and the same style as the original).
Nida denotes two types of equivalency: formal equivalency, in which the formal characteristics of the source text are reproduced [...]
Translations Influencing the Course of History
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009The act of translating a text can sometimes have effects that run much deeper than the agent in charge of performing the translation may be aware. All it takes is a cursory look at history to appreciate this fact.
For example, the translation of the Bible into Latin was a major contributing factor to the consolidation [...]
The Slavic Languages: The Use of the Cyrillic Alphabet
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009The Slavic languages belong to the Indo-European family of languages. They are spoken in much of Central Europe, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. The amount of speakers tops 400 million persons approximately, among which are Russians, Bielorussians, Ukranians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks.
They use the Cyrillic alphabet (under the [...]
The Aryan Tribes: The Importance of Information
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Today we will talk about the Indo-Iranian languages and localization services through a reading of a recommended article.
At the beginning of the second millenium BC, the Indo-Iranian (relatives of the Aryans) emigrated towards Iran. Around the year 1000BC they had already split into two branches: the Indian branch (also known as the Indo-Aryan branch) and [...]
Two Different Internal Logics
Friday, June 19th, 2009In English, we use concision (many short words or phrases) as well as an economy of language (fewer words), the preference we demonstrate for the impersonal vision of reality (objectivity), our calls to evoke feelings (appeal to the senses, images), the abstract analysis and the lack of naming of the agent of an action (passive [...]
Understanding Shakespeare
Thursday, June 18th, 2009No Fear Shakespeare is a service that translates the most difficult of languages most people encounter, the Early Modern English of Shakespeare, into contemporary English prose. As we have touched on before, translators are readers more than anything and are primarily concerned with making a work understandable for their target audience and that is exactly [...]
Bloggers Beware
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009There has historically been a strong affinity between English law and US law, with Common Law precedents being considered valid throughout many stratums of the US legal system. After all, having been responsible for the creation of the Magna Carta (one of the most celebrated legal documents of all human history), it’s hard not to [...]
Tony Bennett Video at St. Jude Gala Organized by Trusted Translations
Monday, June 15th, 2009On May 28, 2009, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, featuring special guest Tony Bennett, held a black tie, red carpet event to help raise funds. The charity event was organized by Richard Estevez, CEO of Trusted Translations, Inc.
As part of its efforts to support St. Jude, Trusted Translations has created a special initiative to raise [...]
The Celtic Languages: the Richness of the Isles
Friday, June 12th, 2009As we saw in a recent post, Celtic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European languages.
The Celts were the first inhabitants of central-southern Europe, around the 5th century BC.
From a geographical and historical point of view, this subfamily can be divided into two branches: the continental branch, which has disappeared by now, and the insular [...]
The Use of the Dash in English and Spanish
Friday, June 12th, 2009This punctuation mark is, in Spanish, the equivalent to parentheses, though it does have one function that differs: marking off asides that are suggestive, ironic, or emotional, and the effect is stylistic. It must always be placed at the end of the aside, even when it is the end of the sentence.
In English, a single [...]
The Symbolic Power of Words
Thursday, June 11th, 2009This blog is not a forum for furthering political agendas of any kind, and that is absolutely not the intention of this particular post. What I am interested in pointing out, nonetheless, is the incredible power of words (at least their perceived power), and the topic I intend to draw upon happens to be highly [...]
The Million Word Followup
Thursday, June 11th, 2009As I mentioned earlier, the Global Language Monitor previewed the introduction of the one millionth word to the English language. Great publicity followed. They have returned two months later to declare that the one million word barrier has been surpassed. Fanfare abounds to celebrate this glorious day. And the GLM brand is once again associated [...]
New Language Toy (Wordnik)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009I was sent over to Wordnik.com yesterday and all productive plans I had were immediately dashed and replaced with “let’s see what it says about this word…”
Wordnik’s purpose is to display all working knowledge, centered around the definition, etymology, and usage examples, but also providing information such as statistics and associated images, of just about [...]
Chairman’s Speech at St. Jude Wine and Chocolate with Tony Bennett and Kristin Davis
Monday, June 8th, 2009I would like to thank everyone for coming tonight to support this great cause. Many people have come from very distant places to be here, including Brazil. In fact, I convinced many of my friends and loved ones to fly in by telling them that this is probably the closest thing I [...]
Synesthesia Revisited: What’s the Word I’m Looking For?
Friday, June 5th, 2009In a previous post of mine I mentioned the intriguing and perplexing condition of synesthesia, noting that it only affects a very tiny portion of the total population. Nonetheless, much to my surprise it has been brought to my attention that we are all synesthetes to one degree or another. In fact, it makes quite [...]
Contemporary Theories on Translation: Octavio Paz
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Octavio Paz asserts that language is, above all, translation (translation and literature are synonyms). Translation is always a literary operation, since it is an artistic or scientific work as it includes a “transformation” of the original that is literary in the sense that it uses literary resources (in essence, metonymy and metaphor). Translations are a [...]
Book Club Meeting #1
Monday, June 1st, 2009(And there’s enough time before Christmas for me to throw this on the wish list…finding this under my tree would instantly move the responsible commenter to #1 on the “Best Commenter” list.)
If you drown yourself in the world of languages, especially historic linguistics, like I do, then you know that the release of a new, [...]
