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Lost In Translation: American Decodes Weird Spanish Slang
By Monica Garske - AOL NewsLearning a foreign language is hard enough. But if that language is riddled with weird slang terms and ever-changing funny phrases, you may wind up lost in translation. That's exactly what happened to former Maryland resident Jared Romey, author of Spanish slang books "Speaking Argento," "Speaking Boricua" and the most recent "Speaking Chileno" (RIL Editores) -- guides to understanding current slang in Argentina, Puerto Rico and Chile, respectively. Back in 1997, Romey moved from the U.S. to Chile thinking he could get by solely on the years of Spanish language classes he had taken. He was ...
'Pants' Up, 'Trousers' Down on Google's Ngram Viewer
By Dana Chivvis - AOL News(Dec. 17) -- Never one to be caught resting on its laurels, Google has released a massive, searchable database that will give linguists and historians a new tool for quantitatively understanding how language and culture have changed over time. It also makes for a good time-waster on languishing Fridays before the holidays. The Books Ngram Viewer, which Google created with the Encyclopedia Britannica and scientists from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, takes 500 billion words from 5.2 million digitized books and allows you to track their usage over time. The result is a ...
Study: Mom's Voice Has Unique Effect on Baby's Brain
By Hugh Collins - AOL News(Dec. 16) -- There's nothing like a mother's voice. New research from the University of Montreal shows that a newborn's brain responds differently to its mother's voice than to the voices of others. The mother's voice can spark activity in the parts of the brain responsible for learning language. When the child hears others speak, the reactions can be very different. "This is exciting research that proves for the first time that the newborn's brain responds strongly to the mother's voice and shows, scientifically speaking, that the mother's voice is special to babies," said lead researcher ...
Study: Mimicking Accent Makes It Easier to Understand
By Deborah Hastings - AOL News(Dec. 8) -- Having trouble untangling someone's heavy accent? Imitating it could clue you in, a new study shows. According to research published this week in the journal Psychological Science, mimicking the way someone talks makes it easier to discern what he or she is saying. "When listening to someone who has a really strong accent, if you talked to them in their accent, you would understand better," says Patti Adank of Britain's University of Manchester, who co-wrote the study with Peter Hagoort and Harold Bekkering from Radboud University in the Netherlands. The research was sponsored ...
Brit Dailies in Kerfuffle Over OED Bragging Rights
By Theunis Bates - AOL News
LONDON (Nov. 30) -- British newspapers are battling it out for the title of greatest contributor to the English language. "You read it here first: words the Telegraph lexiconated," announced today's Daily Telegraph. The Times of London similarly crowed, "You read it here first: The Times is biggest source for OED." While both broadsheets used the relaunch of the Oxford English Dictionary's website -- which now lists all of the sources for the 3 million quotations that demonstrate word usage, as well as the first written evidence of a word -- to boast about the terms they've added to the ...
A Quarter of Interpreters in Afghanistan Are Unqualified?
By Paul Wachter - AOL News(Sept. 9) -- A whistle-blower has stepped forward claiming that more than a quarter of translators working alongside troops in Afghanistan are unqualified, having failed language exams but nonetheless been sent to the battlefield. "I determined that someone -- and I didn't know [who] at that time -- was changing the grades from blanks or zeros to passing grades," Paul Funk told ABC News. Funk used to be in charge of screening Afghan linguists for Mission Essential Personnel, a Ohio contractor. "Many who failed were marked as being passed," he said. Funk filed a whistle-blower lawsuit that ...
Off-Court Drama With Fight at US Open [VIDEO]
By Paul Wachter - AOL News(Sept. 3) -- While tennis is a gentleman's (and gentlewoman's, of course) sport, it's not unheard of for a little fisticuffs in the stands. Often it happens when players representing countries with geopolitical issues take the court. Serbs and Croats are one of the notable combustible mixes. And while a Serb, Novak Djokovic, was on court against Philipp Petzschner of Germany at Arthur Ashe Stadium Thursday night, the fight that broke out had nothing to do with central Europe. No, it was of the common American variety. A young man was swearing too much for an older lady's liking. She ...
Word Up: British Dictionary Just Twigs to 'Chill Pill'
By Theunis Bates - AOL NewsLONDON (Aug. 20) -- Ever defriended a hater or chillaxed with a vuvuzela? No? Well, apparently a lot of other people have, because along with 2,000 other terms, those ungainly words have just been granted a place in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English. Unlike the more prestigious multivolume Oxford English Dictionary -- which, as AOL News reported last month, is exceptionally picky about the words it lets in -- the single-book Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) is based on how the English language is used in everyday life. Logophiles at the Oxford University Press decide on ...
Opinion: Language Evolves, There's No Refudiating That
By Jessica Barksdale Inclan - AOL News(July 19) -- According to Internet sources, William Shakespeare made up more than 3,000 words that we still use every single day, including elbow, bump, dawn and cater. Who knows what we would have screamed out back in 1515 when we hit that pointy hinge joint between forearm and upper arm. "Blast! I hit my pointy hinge joint!" Shakespeare made it a lot easier for us to swear about our blasted elbow. And who knows how we would have hired the caterers for our weddings without him. Language changes and evolves, though it's preferable to have someone who has shaped the course of civilization ...
'Beyond the Killing Fields': On the Language of War
By Sydney Schanberg - Politics DailyFive Politics Daily staffers -- Carl Cannon, Melinda Henneberger, Walter Shapiro, David Wood and James Grady -- are joining in an online discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, about politics and the press as seen through the prism of his new book, "Beyond The Killing Fields" and his reporting career. Here is Schanberg's response to Grady, who asked him to expand on the concept of language as a political weapon and also talk a bit about some of the truly Orwellian examples of Khmer Rouge "politically correct" speech. As you point out, language ...
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