What Are Dead Languages?
“Latin is a language as dead as dead can be,” runs an old schoolroom verse, “it killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me!” Humor aside, this student jingle
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Ancient Tablets and AI Translation
Translating between two languages is a matter of carefully constructing sentences which best convey the meaning of the original text. As such, it isn’t about a rudimentary word-per-word switch from
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Is Bengali about to Boom?
From its earliest days as a trading lingua franca to the present day, Bengali has played a leading role in the cultural and economic development of South Asia. Its 200
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What’s in the Future of Language Translation?
The field of language translation is rapidly evolving, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. While human translators are still necessary for many contexts, machine translation has made
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California’s Secret Language: Boontling
It was around 150 years ago that hunter Walter Anderson got lost while tracking a wounded deer across the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. The lush valley he discovered (and
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One Town, Five Official Languages
Deep in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, a huge municipality (about the size of Tennessee) is establishing a unique linguistic legacy: it has five official languages! Sharing borders with
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Yiddish Language 101
“He’s just extra meshuggeneh today,” I sigh when our cat is sprinting around the apartment, knocking tchotchkes off the shelves left and right. As someone raised in Brooklyn, such phrases
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Climate Crisis and Language Loss?
When concerns regarding the climate crisis are voiced in the West, the conversation is often oriented around Western concerns. Which is not an entirely unreasonable reality. But it is important
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Korean Language: North and South
Spoken by around eighty million people, Hangugeo (or chosŏnmal) is the official language of both South and North Korea. However, after almost eight decades since the division into North and
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The Origins of Basque Language Revealed?
Language has been an evolving part of human civilization since ancient times. Many languages have come and gone, with the Basque language standing stubbornly as one of the oldest and
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