Moorish grafitti and texting in Yiddish

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The Alhambra in Grenada, the crowning glory of Moorish Spain, has more than 10,000 prayers and poems in Arabic inscribed on its walls. We hear about an effort to catalog the inscriptions. Then it’s the second part of the BBC’s documentary on Yiddish. Reporter Dennis Marks takes us to New York, where the language is undergoing a modest revival: among Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, with a family who text message in transliterated Yiddish, and with a musician a novelist who are re-interpreting the old language of Eastern Europe’s shtetls for new generations. Download MP3

Your brain on language

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In this week’s World in Words podcast, a mom-and-pop effort to restore Arabic script to street signs in Israel. Also, author Katherine Russell Rich on learning Hindi at a language school in Rajasthan. Her book “Dreaming in Hindi” is also an investigation into what happens to our brains when we learn a learn a language. Plus, a somewhat shameful expression in Spanish.Download MP3

Israel’s road sign debate

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Last month, Israel’s new transport minister Israel Katz proposed an overhaul to his country’s road signs. Israeli signs are trilingual: Hebrew, Arabic and English. But Katz wants to remove Arabic and English city names and replace them with transliterations of the Hebrew names. Daniel Estrin reports from Jerusalem. >>> See more photos. (Photo credit: Daniel Estrin)

Iran and translation, a search engine is sick in Chinese, and a drug ring’s Arabic dialects

Patrick Cox and Carol Hills select the top five language-related
stories from June. Among them: Google translation gets to work on the streets of Teheran; Microsoft’s choice of Bing as the name for its search engine to rival Google may not go down well in China; a music festival in Quebec runs afoul of language sensitivies; and a drug ring in Pennsylvannia uses Iraqi Arabic dialects in its communications.Listen

Show Ender: De-coding the Alhambra

Investigators are trying to catalog the thousands of Arabic inscriptions that cover the walls and columns of the Alhambra in Granada. The Alhambra was the last Moorish fort to fall to the Christians during the Spanish conquest. Its inscriptions shed light on its history. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports from Granada. And we end our broadcast with music from a New York-based ensemble called Alhambra. Listen