Listen & Learn Blog

Indiana has become the latest state to drop the requirement for children to learn joined-up (cursive) handwriting.

The new Common Core State Standards Initiative does not require cursive, and around forty states have so far signed up to it. Some states, including Massachusetts and California, have re-included cursive as is allowed by the Standards.

Indiana will instead focus on children learning typing skills, which education officials say are more useful for the employment world.

Many schools have said there simply is not enough time in the term to teach children both.

Dr Scott Hamilton, an Indiana clinical psychologist, said the time children spend labouring over script could be better used.

“From an intuitive standpoint, this makes sense, based on the increasingly digital world into which this generation of children is growing up,” he said.

Denna Renbarger, an education official in Lawrence Township, Indiana, said there were many more important things for students to be learning at school

“I think it’s progressive of our state to be ahead on this,” she told the Indianapolis Star. (Source: BBC News)

The decision is contentious, with some parents, psychologists and educators arguing that there is more to handwriting than being able to write quickly.

“The fluidity of cursive allows for gains in spelling and a better tie to what they are reading and comprehending through stories and through literature,” Paul Sullivan, head teacher of a school in California, told CNN.

“I think there’s a firmer connection of wiring between the brain’s processes of learning these skills and the actual practice of writing.”

What do you think? Should children still be learning cursive?

What kind of dictionary takes 90 years to complete? One from the ancient world apparently.

Scholars from The University of Chicago have just completed an Assyrian dictionary that was started in 1921. Lots of staff have worked on the project, with scholars from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London in addition to those from the US and Canada.

The dictionary was compiled from words recorded on clay or stone tablets from ruins in Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq.  When the project started the technology used included typewriters and mimeographs. Over 2 million index cards were used. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is comprised of 21 volumes, around 10,000 pages and 28,000 words. Some volumes only cover one letter.

So what is the value of a dictionary that showcases a language that died so long ago?

Gil Stein, director of the university’s Oriental Institute (the dictionary’s home), has a ready answer:

“The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world’s first urban civilization,” he says. “Virtually everything that we take for granted … has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it’s the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing.

“If we ever want to understand our roots,” Stein adds, “we have to understand this first great civilization.”

The translated cuneiform texts – originally written with wedged-shaped characters – reveal a culture where people expressed joy, anxiety and disappointment about the same events they do today: a child’s birth, bad harvests, money troubles, boastful leaders.

“A lot of what you see is absolutely recognizable – people expressing fear and anger, expressing love, asking for love,” says Matthew Stolper, a University of Chicago professor who worked on the project on and off over three decades. “There are inscriptions from kings that tell you how great they are, and inscriptions from others who tell you those guys weren’t so great. … There’s also lot of ancient versions of `your check is in the mail.’ And there’s a common phrase in old Babylonian letters that literally means `don’t worry about a thing.’” (Source: AP/Seattle Times)

Quite a story!

The word ‘dude’ often conjures up images of surfers and Californian drop-outs, but it’s becoming increasingly well-used by English speakers all over the world.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, its origins are in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the dialect spoken by African Americans throughout the United States:

dude
1883, “fastidious man,” New York City slang of unknown origin. The vogue word of 1883, originally used in reference to the devotees of the “aesthetic” craze, later applied to city slickers, especially Easterners vacationing in the West (e.g. dude ranch, first recorded 1921).
Application to any male is recorded by 1966, U.S., originally in Black English.

The Dialect Blog looks at this further and concludes:

Here is what’s interesting, though. Dude is currently used in both African American Vernacular English and “white” dialects like General American. But it’s used somewhat differently in these two contexts.

Among AAVE speakers, I have noticed that “dude” is used far more commonly in the third person. For example, an AAVE speaker might say:

“What’s wrong with that dude?”

But the sentence …

“What’s wrong with you, dude?”

… doesn’t sound right in AAVE. In California or other kinds of Englishes, on the other hand, this question would sound perfectly normal. This is my own perception, of course, but I’ve noticed that African Americans (who speak AAVE) rarely refer to the people they are directly speaking to as “dude.”

The comments on the blog post are also interesting – dude seems to have quite a history!

Do you say dude and in what context?

By now you’ve probably seen the video of the twin baby boys having a ‘conversation’. But here it is anyway!

The video seems to show that whilst the language isn’t there yet, the boys have picked up on some nuances of human speech. They really remind me of politicians in the British Parliament – laughing and arguing with the opposite side. Indeed, College Humor have ‘translated’ their conversation to be political.

What do you think the boys would be saying if they could talk?

Last month I posted about some great language infographics. Now I have another to share.

People often say that one language is harder to learn than another. Currently I tell people that Spanish is hard because in class we are learning verb conjugations! I tend to think a tonal language such as Mandarin would be more difficult to learn though, as native English speakers may not have been exposed to speaking and listening to language in this way.

The US State Department, has “compile[d] learning expectations for a number of languages based on the amount of time it takes a native English speaker to achieve speaking and reading proficiency” and this is what the infographic (produced by Voxy) shows. Having studied Spanish for around 30 class hours now, I can see I have a long way to go to achieve proficiency, even if it is rated an ‘easy’ language!

What do you think? Does your experience show that Japanese is ‘easier’ to learn than Swedish for example?

Via: Voxy Blog

Another really interesting talk from TED titled “the birth of a word”. TED is a small non-profit organisation devoted to “ideas worth spreading”.

Deb Roy, a researcher at MIT wired up his house with video cameras so he could track his son’s language evolution – from “gaaa” to “water”. 90,000 hours of tape later, he presents his conclusions. Take a look at the video:

Research conducted at North Carolina State University shows that the Southern accent is changing and may be disappearing.

Robin Dodsworth, associate linguistics professor at NC State, has been collecting recordings of Raleigh, NC, natives to discover how their accent has changed over time. Using software that breaks down the way people say words and changes it into numbers, Dodsworth can then run a statistical analysis to see how the accent has changed over time and in specific groups of people.

So why is the accent changing?

The major difference is in something linguists call the “Southern vowel shift,” the way of speaking that makes words like “bait” sound more like “bet,” and turns “bed” into a two-syllable word. Those Southern quirks of speech are less noticeable with each generation Dodsworth interviews.

You could try blaming the influx of Yankees over the past couple decades, but the regional quirks of, say, New York- or Chicago-area speech patterns aren’t being picked up locally, Dodsworth said. Rather, the Raleigh dialect is becoming less traditionally “Southern,” smoothing out into an accent that is recognizably American but difficult to place.
Raleigh resident Bob Tomb, 70, grew up around Raleigh, then lived in California for 40 years. When he returned to the city as an adult, his ear caught the change in diction between the generations – the younger they were, the less pronounced the accent.

“It’s very pleasant to run into an older person who sounds like they’re from Raleigh,” Tomb said. “The accent gives the place a little style.”

Lifelong Raleigh resident Jim Stronach, 83, chalks up some of the change to improved schools during the area’s economic boom, plus the increased mobility of modern culture.

“The speech changes to the degree that you don’t really sound like you’re from Dixie anymore,” Stronach said. (Source: News Observer)

And the advice for people who don’t want to see the Southern accent lost forever?

“The best way to preserve it is to keep talking that way,” says Dodsworth.

The Onion reports that ‘incomprehensible shouting’ has been named an official US language. Opponents of the move favour Obama’s ‘dulcet tones’ initiative.

Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language

Hilarious.

It’s a sad day for one of my favourite language columns, “On Language” in the New York Times. After a 32 year run, this is the final week for the column.

“On Language” explored language issues and explained them in an easily accessible way. Ben Zimmer’s final column looks at the future of languages, particularly exploring the impact of technology on the way we communicate and the language we use:

Every aspect of our linguistic life is open to technologization of one form or another, from the way that kids of Blake’s generation will learn to acquire literacy with the help of app-laden multitouch devices to our growing expectations that computer interfaces should be able to recognize our speech and text, understand it and talk back to us.

Do you agree with Zimmer? Is “technologization” going to affect our linguistic lives to such a large extent?

An interesting article in The Ledger looks at how acronyms are being used in speech.

It seems to be teenagers who use these most – from “ILY” (I love you) to “LOL” (laughing out loud). These terms appear to have come from ‘text speak’ – the use of abbreviations to fit more into text messages or when chatting online. They make sense when in written form (even my mother uses LOL) but what about when they are spoken?

Linguists are interested in this question, but they have no research on why these acronyms have been picked up and why they are used. According to one researcher, “Americans have always liked abbreviations” and this usage predates the internet. They also point out that acronyms are not new and were used by the Romans and Greeks.

Just be careful when sprinkling your speech with “LOL” and “WTF” though – the kids will probably have moved on to using something else by the time you figure out what context to use them in!