The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/493117
thelinguist.uberflip.com APrIL/MAY The Linguist 5 Can a national anthem be sexist, or is the debate in Canada political correctness taken one step too far? Sometimes the language itself is more gender-neutral. The English version and the Maori version of New Zealand's national anthem differ… Where the second verse in English says 'men of every creed and race', the Maori version has 'let all people'… In several cases, such as Serbia, this possibly has more to do with a lack of gender-related themes – beyond the country itself not being referred to in masculine terms – than to genuine equality in choice of words. 'Which is the Most Sexist National Anthem?', 25/2/15 What the papers say… 'Almost no one will go to see more than one subtitled film a month. Winter Sleep was unlucky to come out just after Leviathan, one of the other Oscar nominees.' … Jason Wood says in his new role [as Artistic Director of Film at HOME] one of his aims is to create a sense of event around the best foreign films. 'For instance, Jean-Luc Godard's 3D film Goodbye to Language got great reviews last year at Cannes but no theatrical release in the UK. So that means no distribution and advertising budget behind it. So how do you compete with a big film with access to possibly £1.4m in prints and advertising?' 'How Foreign Language Films Struggle for UK Success', 24/2/15 Perfectly intelligent people will tell you not to worry. Everyone speaks English in the world of business (they don't), your iPhone will now translate road signs for you (but you may crash or choke on the roaming data charges) and the next generation of wearable tech will enable intercultural telepathy anyway. 'Language Learning in the UK: "Can't, won't, don't"', 27/1/15 The latest from the languages world An online campaign saw people tweeting in a range of endangered, indigenous and minority languages to mark International Mother Language Day on 21 February. The rising Voices project encouraged users of the social media site to celebrate their languages using the hashtag #MotherLanguage. The internet has become an important tool in language preservation but, despite an increase in the number of languages used online, 85% of tweets are written in just eight languages. NEWS & EDITORIAL LANGUAGE TREE Illustrator Minna Sundberg has created a map showing the relationships between Indo-European and Uralic languages. Her primary aim was to explain how, in her webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, some of the characters can understand one another even though they speak different languages. An analysis of GCSE results in England and Wales has highlighted huge geographical discrepancies in the number of pupils taking a language, leading to concerns that 'subject deserts' in poorer areas are impeding social mobility. Almost all of the 20 local authorities with the highest take-up of languages at GCSE are in London, according to the research by the Open Public Services Network. Four times as many teenagers took a modern language GCSE in Kensington in 2013 as they did in Middlesbrough, where take-up was limited to just 25% of pupils. In some areas, not one school offered a language at Key Stage 4, leading Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust, to say that the Leeds City Council-funded study was evidence of 'the bleak correlation between educational opportunities and geography'. See www.thersa.org/discover/publications. 'Area lottery' for language GCSE New research provides 'compelling evidence' that Proto-Indo-European – the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, including English – originated in the Pontic- Caspian steppe around 4500-3500BCE. researchers at the University of Chicago compared data from more than 150 Indo- European languages, both living and extinct, and combined that with statistical modelling and pre-existing knowledge about the relationships between languages to calculate when Proto-Indo-European began to diverge. For nearly 30 years, researchers have debated two main theories about the origin of Indo-European languages: the steppe (or Kurgan) theory and the Anatolian hypothesis, which argues that the languages began to spread in Anatolia around 7500-6000BCE. The latter gained weight in 2003 and 2012, when New Zealand biologists published two successive statistical studies suggesting that Proto-Indo-European was spoken 8,000- 9,500 years ago. This new research from Chicago takes the NZ studies as a starting point but removes eight instances where a hypothetical cousin of an ancient language was used. It is the first quantitative study to date the language to 4500BCE, in accordance with the steppe model. A concurrent study, looking at the DNA of 69 people who lived 3,000-8,000 years ago, further supports the findings, suggesting a mass migration from the steppes to Germany around 4500BCE. Roots of English Diversity tweets MINNA SUNDBErG, WWW.SSSSCOMIC.COM OPSN (CC BY 4.0)