Illustration by W. Vasconcelos
A CERTAIN genre of books about English extols the language s supposed difficulty and idiosyncrasy. “Crazy English”, by an American folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?”. Bill Bryson s “Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells
a lie but
the truth.”
Such books are usually harmless, if slightly fact-challenged. You tell “a” lie but “the” truth in many languages, partly because many lies exist but truth is rather more definite. It may be natural to think that your own tongue is complex and mysterious. But English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.
Lending an ear to rare languages
January 20, 2021CNRS
A unique collection of sound archives of rare and endangered languages is now accessible to all on the Pangloss website. Several thousand tales and stories in more than 170 languages, collected and documented by dedicated linguists, are now available in audio.
Do you know Ubykh, a Caucasian language that slowly declined and finally disappeared due to Russian expansion into the region from the late 19th century? Have you ever heard a song in Na, a Sino-Tibetan tongue still spoken in the mountains of Sichuan, a region of China located to the east of Tibet where Mandarin is gradually establishing itself as the sole means of communication? Together with 170 others, these little-known parlances are now available to all on the Pangloss website, an exceptional body of sound archives of rare and endangered languages collected thanks to the painstaking fieldwork of linguists.