MYOOPS and OCW

A recent New York Times story contained this startling statement: “Lucifer Chu, a 31-year-old from Taipei, Taiwan . . . has become a millionaire by...

“The hottest jobs”

First, the good news: Translation was listed as one of the “hottest jobs” in the annual “what people earn” article Sunday (April 15) in...

Bilingual document to the rescue

Ian Austen reports in The New York Times ("The Comma That Costs 1 Million Dollars (Canadian)” published on October 25, 2006) that a comma...

Enter Cyrillic

The European Commission has recommended admission to the European Union for Romania and Bulgaria. This brings the number of official EU languages to what,...

Arrrr!

Ahoy! Today’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day and we couldn’t let it go by without a salute. Various sources on the web offer...

The language that keeps on expanding

Thanks to The Week for bringing to wider attention this item from The Times (London): The Internet “has changed English more rapidly than any invention...

Is resistance futile? Or can we go Globish?

News reports from Iran say that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered governmental agencies, newspapers and publications to use modified Persian words instead of English...

Word of the day

“A.Word.A.Day” is “a worldwide online community of some half-million readers who share a love for words, wordplay, language, and literature.” The selected words may...

Easier Indic input

HP Labs India recently launched a “gesture-based keyboard” (GKB), a new input method that will allow more people to use computers without typing. Current...

Faith-based language learning

This might be the answer to some of the “hurry-up” language acquisition decrees: according to the Jakarta Post, an Islamic boarding school in...

Language preservation can be fun

Keeping a language alive isn’t all work and no play. In North Dakota, according to the Grand Forks Herald, teams from Sioux reservation schools...

Native American languages in the news

Efforts to promote the Penobscot and Pequot languages have been in the news lately in Maine and Connecticut, respectively. And, according to the Norwich...