The rest of the pod is devoted to the second part of the BBC’s documentary on Yiddish. Reporter Dennis Marks picks up the story in the 1960s, when Yiddish was staring extinction in the face, after many decades in which it language thrived among Jewish Eastern European immigrants, as in this World War Two-era poster). But more recently in New York City, the language has began to undergo a modest revival. A big contributor to that was Aaron Lansky who founded the National Yiddish Book Center, which rescused thousands of Yiddish volumes from depositories and dumpsters: as he puts it to take books “out of the dustbin of history and put them back into use.”

We also hear from YY Jacobson, a rabbi in the Crown Heights section of New York and editor of the Hasidic Yiddish newspaper Algemeiner. His contribution to the survival of Yiddish is the most overtly religious. Others have cultural or ancestral reasons for investigating the language: people like klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals, novelist Dara Horn, and a family who speak with each other in both English and Yiddish. The teens in the family text message each other in transliterated Yiddish, complete with texting shorthand: ZG is zei gezunt (be well) and BSH is biz shpeter (until next time/goodbye). Download MP3

Then the main course in this week’s podcast: the past, present and future of Yiddish, the language that refuses to die. This also comes courtesy of the BBC with a nice slide show here. Once spoken by millions in Europe, Yiddish was nearly wiped out by the Holocaust and through assimilation. That’s why until recently news stories about Yiddish tended to be about its inevitable decline, with the language spoken only by the elderly (pictured: Asya Yanovskaya, one of the last surviving Yiddish speakers of a small town in Belarus). Today Yiddish survives, and not only as the language that gave English klutz, kosher, kvetch and other evocative expressions. It is undergoing a revival in many parts of Eastern Europe and the United States. The BBC’s Dennis Marks’ documentary (part one of two) focuses on how Yiddish took hold in New York in the mid-twentieth century, and how Yiddish songs and plays influenced American culture. Some Yiddish expressions are so assimilated into English that non-Yiddish speakers wouldn’t even question the origin of the words. I mean, I know where putz and chutzpah come from, but nosh? tush? In next week’s pod, Marks will tell us how some young American Jews are are trying to keep Yiddish alive for their generation and beyond.

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5. The End of Bo. As repeat readers and listeners know, I’m on the fence when it comes to recording the death of languages. No, it’s not that. It’s really that I can’t come up with a storyline that isn’t just a repeat (in a tediously predictible public radio way) of the last time a language died. You know the drill: elderly speaker of said language passes on, leaving a the very last speaker without a linguistic buddy. Cue scratchy audio of aforementioned last speaker reciting a poem or prayer. That’s certainly also the case with Bo. Boa Senior (pictured left) was about 85 when she died earlier this year. You can listen to the scratchy audio of Boa Senior here. The difference though, with Bo is that it’s far, far older than most languages. Some linguists claim it is among the world’s original languages, possibly 70,000 years old. That’s where in this case, the storyline differs. RIP Bo.

4. Canada’s polyglot Olympics. The Vancouver Olympics were broadcast all over the world in hundreds of languages. But even in Canada they were broadcast in more than twenty languages, including Cree and seven other native languages. (That’s Cree in the picture, rendered in Canadian Aboriginal Syllabic characters). We hear from Cree commentator Abel Charles who must have had occasion to yell Kitahaskwew pitikwataw! (“He shoots! He scores!”) a few times on the way to Canada’s gold medals in both men’s and women’s hockey. Cree is not an economical language: pretty much everything takes longer to say in Cree than in English, so Charles has his work cut out for him.

3. Bilingual Pandas. So two giant pandas that have been on loan to the United States have been returned to China. They were actually born in the U.S. but had to be “returned” to China under an agreement between the two countries. In the U.S. they learned a few words of English. But what good will that do them in China? More importantly perhaps, will the body language and gestures of their Chinese keepers confuse them? Will they feel comfortable enough in the new — and, species-wise, original — environs to think about mating? Pandas being pandas, maybe not.

2. Two disturbing lawsuits. Americans’ appetite for suing each other sometimes takes my breath away. But– I know — there can be good reasons for litigation. Consider these linguistic lawsuits: #1: Nicholas George, an American studying Arabic at Pomona College, California has teamed up with the ACLU to sue the Transportation Security Administration over his detention at Philadelphia’s airport. TSA officers grew suspicious when they saw the student’s Arabic flashcards, which included the words bomb and terrorism. The suit contends that the officers asked George whether he was Muslim or “pro-Islamic.” Lawsuit#2: School secretary Ana Ligia Mateo, hired in part because she was bilingual, is suing the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina. A new principal at Mateo’s school had issued an English-only policy that banned Mateo from speaking Spanish, not just with students but with their parents. Mateo refused to comply with the new policy was “effectively terminated.”

1. Wartime translator. The Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, is working on that holy grail of handheld translators: a device that can recognize up to 20 languages and translate them with 98% accuracy. Previous attempts have met with mixed success. Remember the Phraselator? The new device will have to do better with dialects: Arabic, for example, has a ton of them. And even though this is military research, its application will be greatly felt in the civilian world.

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Many of the students at the school are immigrants, but only a handful are ethnic Chinese. This is one of the many counterintuitive aspects to this story. Another is that 90% of students come from poor families — poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. So, forget any preconceived notions about only white and Chinese-heritage students learning Chinese: Chinese-learning appears to be going viral. But will it last? There’s a nice debate on that question here. The Asia Society is trying to make the current interest in Chinese more than just a passing fad. Together with a partner in China, it has begun handing out grants to American public schools, including Medgar Evers. As well beefing up the curricula, the idea is to get the American schools networked with each other, and with schools in China.

Then, there’s our nod to Valentine’s Day. Don’t be fooled: the language of love is not universal, not unless you keep you mouth shut. The moment you open it, you get into trouble, especially if your lover speaks a different tongue. American writer Jen Percy knows this. She’s been dating a German-speaking Bosnian for three years.Percy endlessly misunderstands the amorous words of her lover and writes amusingly and touchingly about it. I did two takes on my conversation with Percy: one, a straight one-on-one interview; the other a full production number with foreign love songs that I hope is not too much of a This American Life copycat.

Finally we bodice-rip our way out of the recession with romance novels that are more popular than ever. We hear from writer Suzanne Brockmann who’s having a a vintage year all over the world.
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Next, it’s to Quito, Ecuador, and a special screening of Avatar.

The 3-D screening was for a couple of Ecuador’s indigenous groups, the Shuar and the Achuar. Both are struggling to maintain control of their land in the face of attempts to exploit it by Ecuadorean and multinational corporations. Avatar, of course, is about much the same thing, albeit with a future setting on a far-away planet inhabited by tall blue creatures who speak a language called Na’vi. (See my previous post on Na’vi, the new Klingon.) We have a report on the screening, and some language-related comments from Alejandro Mayaprua, an Achuar leader, and Mayra Vega, president of the Women’s Association of the Shuar Nation of Ecuador. That’s them below. Also, check out this video on the screening from reporter Melaina Spitzer.

After that, there’s a piece from Beijing correspondent Mary Kay Magistad on a new online satirical movie that’s all the rage in China. It features a Chinese double-entendre phrase aimed at avoiding government censorship (it didn’t avoid censorship; it was eventually banned). People became aware of the expression here in the U.S. after the New York Times ran a story on it. The movie also includes a fantastic “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” rant, which you can hear in all its glory in the pod. Or you can watch a version of the movie with English subtitles here.
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For the latest podcast, five language news stories from the past few weeks, as chosen by The Big Show’s crack language team (Carol and me).

5. Nice and nasty words.

Our pick of the many lists — here, here and yes, here – for best and worst words of the year and the decade. We like Abwrackprämie – it’s Germany’s word for Cash for Clunkers, and it means “wrecking premium”. We don’t like 24-7, hopium and mancession. And we’re neutral about jeggings and minarettverbot, the Swiss-German expression that describes Switzerland’s voter-approved ban on minarets (pictured is one of Switzerland’s four minarets. Yes, four: they weren’t exactly dominating the skyline before the ban was approved). Thanks again for the great service performed by the people at Lake Superior State University who put together an annual list of banished words. The 2009 words are again all profoundly offensive. My favorite — or least favorite, whichever it is — is teachable moment. Can’t you just see that nasty little idea given the overcoming-adversity Hollywood Kleenex treatment? Ew! Yuck! Double yuck!

4. Georgia launches a Russian language TV channel.

So what? you may think. The treatment of stories on this new web TV channel is pretty similar to official and semi-official Georgian media: anti-Russian. The difference, of course, is that the other stuff is in Georgian, a language spoken by very few people outside this small mountainous country (the script in the banner picture of this blog, incidently, is Georgian). So, Georgia can now get out its version of the news, particularly as it relates to the Caucasus — and do it in a language that’s widely understood in the region and, of course, in Moscow. You can view this a couple of ways. The launching of this news service may be a more constructive way of getting your point across than taking up arms, as Georgians and Russians did in 2008. But it may also amount to “linguistic provocation” which is what one Georgian opposition leader thinks.


3. New ventures and technologies give a boost to Arabic online.

Arabic is set to become a larger force online after Yahoo’s acquistion of web portal Maktoob and interest in Arabic search engine Yamli which converts Latin letters into Arabic script.

2. Of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages, which is the most difficult to learn?

The Economist has declared this to be the Amazonian language Tuyuca. Of course, everyone has an opinion on this: here’s a good one; another one here. Me, I know nothing about Tuyuca. But I do know that language-learning is subjective and contextual: I can pick up Spanish, for example, far more easily than my Shanghai-born Chinese teacher can. She swears to me that Spanish is the world’s most difficult language. Also, access to the language is key, so learning Tuyuca if you were living among the Tuyuca people might be a relatively straightforward proposition (no TV, not much else to do) — easier perhaps than learning Italian in the exclusive company of the (presumably non-Italian-speaking) Tuyuca. And then there’s the status of the language in question. As discussed in a previous podcast, a language like Hindi is considered lower-status than English by some of its speakers. So, confronted by an English-speaker trying to communicate in Hindi, they may feel more comfortably speaking and English. French people, on the other hand, are generally proud of their language, and are far less likely to switch to English.

1. The New York Police Department, now enforcing the law in nearly a hundred languages.
New York is America’s most cosmolitan city, and its police force may just be the world’s most linguistically diverse. What’s this cop wondering? How to you read someone their rights in…Lithuanian???
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Adam Jacot de Boinod is a seeker of obscure but colorful English expressions. It all began when he was working for a BBC program called QI with Stephen Fry. He was asked to find interesting words beginning with an A. So he picked up an Albanian-English dictionary and found 27 words for moustache and 27 words for eyebrow. That research eventually spawned two books, The Meaning of Tingo and Toujours Tingo. The two books list foreign words and phrases for which there are no direct translations, and they are favorites of this podcast, especially as source material for the Eating Sideways segment. Of course, books that list words for which there are no English equivalents would seem to suggest that English has some deficiencies. And it does, but it also has more than its fair share of wonderfully inventive, if obscure, expressions. That’s where de Boinod’s new book, The Wonder of Whiffling, comes in. Read it, and you’ll know whether you prefer to muppet shuffle or dwile flunk. You’ll know if you are a pozzy-wallah. Some of expressions are brand new, others long gone. Some are from Britain, but many hail from former colonial outposts where English is re-invented with the help of local languages and customs. It’s almost impossible to choose a favorite, so I’ll pick three:

Charientism (c.1589): an insult so gracefully veiled as to seem unintended.

Bend-down plaza (Jamaican English): a row of roadside peddlers, specializing in items that are hard to get in stores, because of import restrictions.

Dulosis (Greek) : the enslavement of ants by ants.

Also in this week’s pod, the meaning of the word peace. Barack Obama is the latest public figure to tweak its definition when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and made the case for “just war”. His arguments weren’t especially new. But in making them as he collected the world’s foremost peace prize, Obama forced us to question our our settled sense of what peace is. He invited us to re-imagine it — or at least as it presents itself in the 21st century — as something that might be achieved only after vanquishing those who oppose peace. Before Obama got to talking about just wars, he acknowledged that he was no Gandhi or King . But he also pointed out that those figures were not heads of state when they espoused their theories of non-violence. Did Obama’s speech echo Psalm 85 and the painting on the left, the Kiss of Justice and Peace? (photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto) Or did it re-cast peace as the bastard offspring of war and justice? After we hear from Obama in the podcast, The World’s Alex Gallafent takes us through several alternative definitions of peace.

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Hebrew is the most successful attempt ever at language revival (though some argue that the evolution of Modern Hebrew is closer to language invention than revival). Drawing on an ancient language has its drawbacks. The original had perhaps only a few thousand words, some of which — cherub, concubine – aren’t hugely useful these days. And then there are the tens of thousands of words that didn’t exist in Biblical Hebrew. Not just technical words either. No word for icecream. Or skateboard. That’s where the Academy of Hebrew Language comes in. In last week’s podcast, Daniel Estrin reported on how the Academy helped come up with Hebrew names for Uranus and Neptune. This week, Daniel tells us about how the Academy works, and what Israelis think of its work. The story was prompted by the Israeli cabinet’s decision to establish a Hebrew National Day on 21st of the Hebrew month of Tevet (in 2010, it was January 7). That’s the birth date of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew. (All this originally came to us via Tablet Magazine and its podcast Vox Tablet, where you can hear a slightly different version of Daniel’s report.)  Picture: Daniel Estrin

Also, Malaysians have rioted and attacked churches after a court ruled that a Catholic newspaper can continue to use the word Allah. The government had banned its use, but an a court sided with the newspaper. Now the government is appealing to Malaysia’s highest court.

Then, two reports on letters in the Latin alphabet. In Sweden, parents have won the right to name their newborn Q. Just Q. It’s not the most charming of names, but it’s not the least either. A previous controversy was over a baby girl named Metallica. Our second letter-related story comes from Turkey, where using the Kurdish-associated letters Q, W or X could land you in jail. There’s a nice Onion skit on the subject of letter additions to the English alphabet here.

Finally, a two-nations-divided-by-one-language examination of the word grit. These days, it’s the mot du jour in Britain because supplies are low. Not that Brits suddenly lack grit of the courageous determination variety. (That figurative take on the word is just about the only way it’s used here in the United States.) No, Brit grit is what Americans call salt, meaning that salt/dirt mix that is spread over icy roads. Britain, of course, is not prepared for the kind of extreme wintry conditions that have been wreaking havoc on the nation this past month. So, there’s not enough grit. Like in the British summertime when it doesn’t rain for a few weeks, there suddenly isn’t enough water.

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This is the new face of St Patrick’s Church in Lawrence, MA. Until recently, St Pat’s was a bastion of Irish-American culture. But Lawrence is a changed city — it’s now overwhelmingly Hispanic. In 2001, Father Paul O’Brien was dispatched there with orders to extend outreach to Lawrence’s Dominicans and Puerto Ricans — its native Spanish speakers. He increased the number of Spanish language masses, started Spanish Bible study groups and raised money for a community center that offered free meals to the city’s poor. What happened next wasn’t pretty. Some old-time parishioners left the church; others contented themselves with leaving messages of hate on Father Paul’s voicemail. But nine years later, things have improved. Far more Spanish speakers worship at St Pat’s. And among the old-timers who remained, there’s acceptance, if sometimes grudging, that two languages, two cultures and two styles can co-exist in one church. All this — and much more — is documented in Scenes From a Parish, a film by James Rutenbeck that’s currently showing on PBS’s Independent Lens. (Check your local listings for repeats etc.) We play some excerpts, and talk to Rutenbeck and Father Paul.

Also, how do you say Neptune and Uranus in Hebrew? The answer used to be: Neptune and Uranus (yes, it’s Uranus in the picture). Now the two planets have Hebrew names, thanks to the votes of interested Israelis, The Academy of the Hebrew Language and a panel of experts. We English speakers are still stuck with Uranus but Hebrew speakers can now call that planet Oron. Neptune will now be known as Rahab.

Finally, a New Year’s Day hangover courtesy of the good people of Denmark.

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December 15 is the most important day in the calendar for people who speak Esperanto. It is Zamenhof Day, named after the man who dreamed up the idea of a language that the entire planet would one day speak. L.L. Zamenhof (that’s him in center of the photo, the one staring at the camera) was born 150 years ago. Though his dream was never realized, Esperanto is still spoken — in fact it’s undergoing something of a revival in the internet age. We consider the failure and success of Esperanto, first in a piece I reported for the Big Show on December 15, and then in an interview with Princeton English professor Esther Schor, who’s writing a book on Esperanto. In the piece, you’ll hear from Arika Okrent, author of the fabulous In the Land of Invented Languages. To listen to an extended interview with Okrent on Esperanto, Klingon, Blissymbolics and other made-up languages from July 2009, go here. Also in the piece, listen out for a clip from the 1965 Esperanto language movie Incubus, starring the incomparable William Shatner. Shatner delivers his Esperanto lines in that same jig-jaggy way as he does English on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Other BBC stories on Esperanto are here and here.

After our Esperanto extravaganza, we consider why the Irish parliament bans words such as guttersnipe and brat, but permits certain swearwords. We know this because Irish MP Paul Gogarty recently dropped the F-bomb — and not in a particularly jocular manner — in the Dáil. We get the back story of why certain words — another is yahoo – cannot be uttered in the Irish parliament from Harry McGee of the Irish Times. A document called Salient Rulings of the House lists all manner of old-fashioned expressions as no-nos in debate. The f-word is not among them.

Finally, a follow-up to a previous podcast in which Carol Hills and I talked about baby names that don’t translate well into certain foreign languages. After that , a Norwegian pod-listener wrote in with some alarming news: if your name is Mark, expect to be teased in Norway. And under no crcumstances name your child Musa. It’s apparently a popular name in Turkey. In Norwegian it refers, coarsely, to female genitalia.

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This week’s podcast is hopelessy devoted to Brit-English. First, the story of what might be the earliest audio archive of regional British dialects. During World War One, German linguist Wilhelm Doegen recorded the voices of more than 140 British prisoners of war. His archive includes dialects from many parts of the UK — tows like Aberdeen, Macclesfield, Bletchington and Wolverhampton. In those days of course, Britain’s imperial reach was global, as was its army’s linguistic reach: Doegen recorded soldiers speaking Hindi, Punjabi, Pashto and Bengali, among other languages. Until recently, the recordings languished in relative obscurity (for the British at least) at the Berliner Lautarchiv at Humboldt University in Berlin. Now, the British Library has acquired a digital copy of the archive.

Then, wine labels. They don’t make much sense at the best of times. Now, British convenience store chain Spar has found a way to make them almost completely incomprehensible. Spar has ahem, translated them into some of the same regional accents (though with less of an eye for accuracy) as those recorded by Herr Doegen. The company says it’s all about making wine talk more regionally relevant. It may also be, excuse the pun, a dry comment on the pretentiousness of label literature. Never one to defer to the European palate, we at the pod add a little New World flavor with a label rendered in Bostonian English.

It’s well known that English is a co-optive language; there’s nothing it likes better than to beg, borrow and steal from anything in the vicinity. It did plenty of that in the wake of a momentous episode in British history, the Battle of Hastings in 1066. That was when William of Normandy (also known as William the Bastard) became William the Conqueror (and later King William I). Cue the start of French and Latin’s influence over English. Well, what if the Saxons — the English as they’re sometimes called — hadn’t beaten William and his Normans at Hastings, sent them back to France? David Cowley has written a book called How We’d Talk If The English Had Won in 1066.

Finally a couple of stories related to cockney rhyming slang. These days, rhyming slang is barely in use, except in parlor game form — and of course as something to make money out of. The first story is on an ATM company uses cockney rhyming slang to dispense cash. And then, a little something I did in 1990 for KALX, college radio in Berkeley, CA on the obsessive love that some Americans have not just for rhyming slang but for anything British.

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For the latest podcast, five language news stories from the past month:

5. African languages to get their versions of Windows.

Microsoft says by 2011 it will release versions of its new Windows 7 operating system in ten African languages: Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Afrikaans, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, kiSwahili and Amharic. It’s a big boost for those languages, as well as for the people who prefer to speak and write in them, rather than English or French.

4. The government of Moldova moves to change the name of the country’s official language.

Most people who live in small eastern European nation of Moldova speak a dialect of Romanian. But in Moldova, the language is known officially as Moldovan. This is an act of placation: it placates non-Romanian- speakers in Moldova and, more importantly, in Moscow. Calling the language Romanian is seen by some in the Kremlin as tantamount to a vote for unification with Romania. Russia, of course, doesn’t want that: it views Moldova, a former Soviet republic, as part of its “Near Abroad”. But Moldova recently elected a pro-Western government. One of its first acts was to change the name of the language on its official website from Moldovan to Romanian. What’s more, the President-elect has declared himself a speaker of Romanian. (He also declared himself “a Romanian.”) That’s in sharp constrast to his pro-Moscow predecessors, who insisted on translators when they had meetings with Romanian officials.

3. South Korean birthing centers go multilingual.

South Korea doesn’t have much of a history of immigration; very few foreigners have learned Korean, at least with a view to settling there. Now though, there’s a shortage of women, especially in the countryside. So South Korean men have starting marrying women from other Asian countries. And they’re having children. Most of women speak very little Korean, so doctors and nurses are learning a few words in Chinese, Thai and Tagalog. That’s just the start of what appears to be quite an ordeal. Even with Korean speakers in their families, the women and their children have a hard time integrating, linguistically and otherwise, into Korean society.

2. Unfortunate foreign meanings of baby names and how YOU can protect yourself (should you wish to).

A London-based translation company with an eye for publicity is offering what appears to be a unique service: for about $1,700, it will run a translation check on the name you have chosen for your baby. It will, of course, alert you if that name means say, pickpocket in Japanese (“Suri”) or shut up in Yoruba (“Kai”). Maybe the celebs, with their surfeit cash and zany name choices will be tempted. For the rest of us, there’s Google Translate. Or we could just call our firstborn, I don’t know, Jessica. Or John.

1. Na’vi, invented for the silver screen, hopes to emulate Klingon.

Klingon’s been in the news a lot recently. There was the (recycled) story of the man who tried to raise his son bilingually — in Klingon, and just to be on safe side, English. Then there’s the story of a new Klingon dictionary in the works. Now, there’s another nod to Klingon. James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar is scheduled to annex and occupy the cinematic world on December 18. Much of the movie takes place on a planet whose inhabitants are 10 feet tall, have tails and blue skin, etc etc. And they speak their own language. Tolkein created Elvish . Star Trek came up with Klingon. And now Avatar has midwifed Na’vi. Cameron commissioned University of South California linguist Paul Frommer to dream up a new language. And he did.

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Did Barack Obama learn a word or two from his grandmother? Well, maybe not — he didn’t grow up with the gran pictured here (it’s his Kenyan stepmother). But many people did learn their very first foreign words from their grandmothers. The Big Show’s Marco Werman learned a Dutch curse. Nina Porzucki learned a Yiddish word that speaks to a existential Jewish mindset: dafka. Nina’s grandmother didn’t think she was conveying such a Big Idea. She was just describing the stubborn behavior of her granddaughter.

Marilyn Chin learned insults, puns and tongue twisters, many of which later found their way into her poetry. Chin has published three volumes of poems. Many of her poems are linguistic investigations of her own Chinese-Americanism. Now she’s published her first novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. It’s the story of two Chinese-American twins, Moonie and Mei Ling Wong, and their search for double happiness. Or maybe single happiness. Double Happiness is just the name of their family restaurant (wordplay and irony abounds). Between episodes of Chinese food delivery gone hilariously wrong — thanks to Mei Ling’s souped-up American need for sex and drugs — the twins enter a mythological world of Chinese fable. From profane to sacred, and back to profane again. In the pod, I interview Marilyn Chin, who like the twins in her novel, had an overly protective Old World grandmother raising her. Chin can still recite her grandmother’s curses and sayings, delivered in the Toisan sub-dialect of Cantonese. She also recites a super-punning poem from her 2002 collection, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.

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How do you spell Obama in Chinese? Depends who you are. The Chinese news media spell it 奥巴马 (àobāmǎ). But the US Embassy in Beijing recently launched a campaign to change it to 欧巴马 (ōubāmǎ). Why no agreement? The embassy says its spelling is closer to the American pronunciation of Obama. But the Chinese don’t appear to like how it sounds, or reads. For one thing, the Taiwanese already transliterate Obama the American way. Beijing likes to keep its scriptural distance from Taipei. More here and here.

Next on the podcast, the contrasting oratorical styles of presidents Hu and Obama. The two leaders draw on starkly different rhetorical traditions, and they may also have somewhat different audiences when they step up to a podium. There are personal differences too, mainly concerning charisma: Obama oozes it; Hu doesn’t go in for oozing much of anything. Some young Chinese have noticed. Like their Japanese counterparts, they’re learning English by reciting famous Obama speeches.

Then, something on a type of Chinese idiom known as chengyu, as explained by the late James Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China. Lilley says Chinese diplomats loved to hide behind these sayings. He recalls how he once turned the tables on them by coming up with an enigmatic saying of his own.

After that we travel to the UK, where Confucian philosophy has infused Chinese language classes in five public schools. It’s almost inevitable that when you learn a language, you learn about the culture of the people who speak that language. (Believe it or not, it helps.) But this new approach in Britain goes a step further: the schools draw on Confucian teaching methods. The idea is that students will learn more through thinking and enjoying a subject than they might through memorization.

And then, a grand finale: poet and writer Marilyn Chin on why she loves the expression chop suey. It’s all in the onomatopoeia. More about the origin of the dish here and the song here (it’s a high point in the musical Flower Drum Song.) Much more, by the way, from Marilyn Chin next week, including a discussion of the role language plays in her new novel.
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For the latest newsy pod, Carol Hills and Clark Boyd from the Big Show help me pick our top five language-related stories from the past month:

5. Some birds develop distinct dialects based on the decibel levels of their habitats. Dialect here is a term of art. It does not mean that birds living in say, North Carolina chirp the avian version of “y’all.” No, it means that over time, some bird species can change the frequency, pitch and volume of their song according to their sonic environment. The latest study, of the white-crowned sparrow (pictured) shows that urban noise appears to have a profound impact on birdsong.

There is a BBC story from a few years ago suggesting that cows pick up on regional human accents. But, alas, the story may have been largely bogus.

4. A British translation firm is offering to provide local interpreters to companies doing business in Glasgow. Proof that there are many, many variations of English, even on one medium-sized island. This service may be more useful at football match or a betting shop than in a boardroom: I can’t imagine that white-collar Glaswegians use terms like moroculous, laldy and maw during working hours. But it is true that Glasgow English is a massive challenge, especially for non-native English speakers. As is Newcastle, Liverpool and Swansea English.

3.The French President Nicolas Sarkozy is calling for reforms in how foreign languages are taught in schools. Surpringly, France lags behind many other developed countries when it comes to bilingualism and foreign language learning, as discussed in a couple of earlier posts and podcasts. Now, doubtless spurred by The World in Words’ efforts to give this matter an airing, the French government is vowing to act. The proposed reforms haven’t been decided upon yet, but they seem likely to favor oral skills over grammar. Some European language-learning groups however, are skeptical that the reforms will help much.

2. Chinese expats are doing battle over which script U.S. schools should use to teach Chinese. Schools have two options — traditional characters, favored in Taiwan and Hong Kong, or simplified characters, used in mainland China. Where there is a large expat Taiwanese community, as there is in certain parts of Los Angeles, schools are more likely to use traditional characters. But that’s changing, as more Chinese communites outside of China (eg in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) switch to simplified characters. And all that trade that the U.S. does with mainland China means that it makes a lot of sense to learn the script in use there. However, proponents of traditional characters aren’t giving up without a fight, sometimes perhaps to the detriment of the kids trying to learn the language.

1. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is going linguistically global. This is the organization that oversees and sets certain rules for domain names. ICANN is now allowing non Latin script urls. It’s something Latin script-writers think of as a mere technicality. But if you’re not used to writing Latin script, it’s a major pain to have to. So this should make the internet accessible to even more people around the world. And who knows, the Georgian script on the banner of this blog may one day end up as part of a domain name. (I took the photo. It’s of a billboard above a highway in central Georgia. The messages, courtesy of the government, are patriotic slogans. Someone told me exactly what the words mean, but…sorry, I’ve forgotten.)

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