One of the big buzzwords in use today is globalization. Wikipedia defines it as "Globalization (or globalisation) is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture....
We study languages so as to communicate with other people, but what about other species? What happens we we go beyond our planet? How do we communicate then? Here we look at some of the linguists and translation devices of science fiction.
Entertainment...
The language conflict of Norway is a rather odd one. Other conflicts usually arise because of two different spoken languages. In this case, the spoken language is agreed upon, what we call "Norwegian", although you will still have local dialects, like...
At the Cinema - Pane e Tulipani - Bread and Tulips
This months review is about a simple romantic comedy from Italy called Pane e Tulipani (Bread and Tulips). The lead character is an Italian housewife named Rosalba who lives in Pescara with her two sons and her husband, Mimmo.
We first see the family...
Sections is a regular column about different parts of Paleremo, explaining their purpose and how to use them.
Often when someone is looking for something new to buy or use, they will look for advice from others. The most common way to do this is to...
GlobTech is a new column dealing with new ways of utilizing globalization technology on the internet.
For most language lovers, the mere mention of Google Translate is likely to evoke groans of misery or even curses.
The idea of having a machine...
When we study a language, we are learning thousands of words. They make up a kind of fingerprint for a language; we can often guess what a language is just by seeing a few of its words. The vocabulary of a language gives the language a unique identity.
Lang...
There are over six thousand natural languages in the world, with only a relatively small number of those being used and learned by the majority of people in the world. The rest are used by smaller groups of people in villages and tribes.
Despite this...
Many of us who study languages do so in the hopes of crossing the bridge of understanding into other cultures. Through learning another language, we can learn another way of life. But what happens when cultures clash because of language differences?...
At the Cinema - Il Comandante e la Cicogna - Garibaldi's Lovers
Despite the English title, Garibaldi's Lovers is not a steamy, torrid film full of sex scenes and love stories. It is a single love story and comedy between a widowed plumber and a struggling artist (why are the artists always struggling? Haven't they...
Looking at a very meaty topic this month... sausages.
Most of us, with the likely exceptions of Buddhists and vegetarians, have probably eaten a sausage at one time or another. A sausage is, in general terms, a seasoned minced meat, usually pork or...
One of my primary interests in languages is how much they reflect society and cultures. We've all heard the anecdote of how the Eskimos have a vast number of words for types of snow. That is the type of material that this book covers. "Native Tongues"
The...
One of the annoying issues when dealing in a global environment like the internet is trying to present people in multiple countries with data in their regional format. There are different ways of displaying time (AM/PM vs 24 hour), dates (month / day...
"Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion." - Stephen Jay Gould
One of the key points to survival is the capacity for expansion. Countries expand their borders to take more land and resources as their populations grow and they need...
For many people, religion is a very touchy subject. Those that have strong religious convictions often want others to believe the same, and if they don't, a conflict may occur. The tension can be just as intense for those that who don't follow any religious...