Aka-Bo, also called Bo, is a language of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands off the eastern seaboard of India. The language is now existict, with the passing of Boa Sr, pictured here, the last known speaker of the language.
 
Having lived through diseases that British Settlers brought in, the Japanese Occupation, and the 2004 Tsunami, Boa Sr died on the 26th of January 2010 at the age of approximately 85.
 

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.

“Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology,” Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. “To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else.”

The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.

Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.

According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52. Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.

“The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence,” said Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry. “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/04/ancient-language-extinct-speaker-dies

My good friend “The Capt’n”, is from Australia, a pretty rugged part where apparently you can do the beach and then go snow skiing all within the same day. The Capt’n is a real captain, if you are out at seas, you’ll trust your life with this guy, he’s that much in control and wise to the whims of the high seas.

That said, he has picked up a bit of Yachtie/Australian slang along the way. For starters, they don’t pronounce the “aus” when saying Australian.. It’s just plain “Stralian-mate”. Some of the Capt’ns slang, well most of it, is cutting edge, he’s at the forefront, coming up with his own terminology.

Why, just the other day his way of saying “good evening” to me when bidding me a farewell was ”ahyyite, go get on plowin into that dragon”, which is perhaps only humorous if one knew the accuracies involved.

It came as a suprise to me that he was a bit offended by this tounge in cheek application form to become an Austrlian Citizen, as it pokes fun of the Aussie slang, and stereotypes of redneck mentality.

He explained, he wasn’t offended by it’s off-color portrail of Australians, but rather, that it’s just plain not funny, because nobody talks like that, all the terminology is old and outdated, and it’s how the outside world stereotypes the country-folk Aussies, but none of it is true, they don’t use hardly any of these terms anymore.

And further, many of the terms were never used period, they just sound to outsiders like terms that would be used. Kinda like how there is no such thing as Fosters been within Australia, it’s just an outsiders beer with marketing and branding making it to appear like that is what real Australians drink.

Robin Williams caused a tiff with Kevin Rudd, the Australian PM, when he made aussie jokes on the Triple J radio station and back in the USA on David Letterman. Nevertheless, I present to you, the Australian Citizenship Application Form, (there’s a couple gems in it):

australian-citizenship-test

In the last few years, linguists have come to believe that language is a natural part of the human experience, they even coined the term “language instinct”, to describe how children easily learn languages because language follows a set of rules that are automatically built into our brains.

The theory is that there is a “universal grammar” across all languages, that certain rules apply to all human languages. For example, it is widely accepted that all languages contain 4 classes of words; nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. If you continue looking for similarities between all languages, you will find there are a lot more. This is the path that linguists have been following for the past several years, discovering all the commonalities of language.

They believe that languages do not share a common set of rules. Instead, they say, their sheer variety is a defining feature of human communication – something not seen in other animals. And that’s not all. Language diversity is the “crucial fact for understanding the place of language in human cognition”.

While there is no doubt that human thinking influences the form that language takes, if Evans and Levinson are correct, language in turn shapes our brains. This suggests that humans are more diverse than we thought, with our brains having differences depending on the language environment in which we grew up. And that leads to a disturbing conclusion: every time a language becomes extinct, humanity loses an important piece of diversity.

If languages do not obey a single set of shared rules, then how are they created? “Instead of universals, you get standard engineering solutions that languages adopt again and again, and then you get outliers,” says Evans. He and Levinson argue that this is because any given language is a complex system shaped by many factors, including culture, genetics and history. There are no absolutely universal traits of language, they say, only tendencies. And it is a mix of strong and weak tendencies that characterises the “bio-cultural” hybrid we call language.

According to the two linguists, the strong tendencies explain why many languages converge on common patterns. A variety of factors tend to push language in a similar direction, such as the structure of the brain, the biology of speech and the efficiencies of communication. Widely shared linguistic elements may also build on a particularly human kind of social reasoning. For example, the fact that before we learn to speak we see the world as a place full of things causing actions (agents) and things having actions done to them (patients) explains why most languages deploy these categories.

Full Story at NewScientist.com

What is wealth? What does it mean? To each person, perhaps something a bit different. To each person of different culture, a whole lot different meanings can be extracted.

A new Barclay’s Wealth Insights study surveyed 2,000 people from 20 countries with investible assets of $1.5 million or more. They shared some common themes: a vast majority of rich people from all regions agreed that wealth enables them to buy the best products and that wealth gives them freedom of choice in their life. Most also agreed that wealth is a reward for hard work.

But the differences are more interesting:

Respect

Asians and Latin Americans were more likely (49% and 47%) to say that wealth “allows me to get respect from friends and family.” Only 28% of Europeans and 38% of Americans said respect was a byproduct of wealth.

Charity

About 75% of respondents in the U.S. and Latin America said wealth enabled them to give to charity. That compares with 57% in Europe and 66% in Asia.

Happiness

About 66% of Europeans and Americans said wealth made them happy. But it had a greater happiness affect in emerging markets, with 76% of Asians and Latin Americans saying wealth made them happy.

Role Models

Less than half of Americans and Europeans say the wealthy “set an important example to others to be successful.” That compares with 71% of Latin Americans and 61% of Asians.

Spending

Wealthy Europeans are far more likely to spend their dough on travel and interior decorating. Latin Americans seem to put the highest spending priority on education, while the U.S. surges above the rest in philanthropy (which the report counts as spending).

We can read several things into the differences. Most obviously, the U.S. has a more formalized and tax-favorable system of philanthropy than the rest of the world. (It is too sweeping to say Americans are the most “generous.”)

What is more, the global financial crisis may have tarnished the image of the wealthy — even among the wealthy. And finally, the longer a country has wealth, the less it craves the attention and respect wealth brings.

Sauce

Tokyo-based startup myGengo today rolled out an API that allows developers to plug on-demand human translation directly into websites, apps, widgets, social networks, etc..
 
myGengo also created their API as a way to monetize the the users of international social media networks and community-driven websites. Owners of a document hosting platform, for example, could re-sell translations to users who might be interested in publishing their texts or presentations in multiple languages, earning a mark-up.

The main idea is to automate the process for dynamic content as much as possible, without forgoing the power of human translation. Take an e-commerce site, for example, that keeps adding items to the database on a regular basis. That site could make use of the API by sending new item descriptions for translation to myGengo automatically from within the site. The startups’s team of now 800 pre-tested translators worldwide would then translate the item descriptions into any of up to eight different languages. The texts would then be inserted back into the e-commerce site automatically (“within hours”, as myGengo promises).

WizWorldOnline.com by 8D World is an online virual world which aims to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as it’s primary focus.
 
The company raised $7 million in March 2008 from Spark Capital and Gobi Partnes to launch the site first in Chinese language, then other languages such as Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian in the future.

 Each player in Wiz World gets an avatar, but to get through the game and rack up points players need to pronounce words properly in English using a microphone. It is all software based, using speech recognition and pronunciation assessment software.
 
The way Wiz World makes money is through subscriptions: about $20 a month or $160 a year, which is a lot in China, but less than the average $700 a year parents pay to send their kids to the training schools.
 
8D World also has partnerships with about 1,500 of those training school who resell Wiz World subscriptions and get a rev-share.

If anyone has played in this virtual world, we would like to hear from you. Please post your experience here in our comments.

Source: Techcrunch

Moonshoot.com is website that specializes in helping children learn English by providing fun and interactive games for children to play online.

Launching first in Japanese, Mooshoot will exapand to cover other languages. The first product released by Moonshoot will help children build a vocabulary of 600 words, 200 phrases, that will enable them to read up to 50 classic children’s books. 

Moonshoot already raised $6.6 million in funding by Alsop Louie Partners and TL Ventures. The firm will be bringing on board Tom Kalinske, former CEO of Leapfrog.

Source: Techcrunch

This is a conundrum…

MyGengo, a low cost translation company recently published a report covering the state of affairs in the language learning industry for 2009. Some of the interesting points and statistics revealed is as follows:

• Chinese, Spanish and English represent only 30% of the worlds spoken language by population. But these languages make up roughly 60% of the internet users.
• The translation industry is expected to grow by roughly 11% per year over the next 5 years.
• Since 2008, Russian and Arabic online audiences have grown over 1000%, which Chinese close behind.
• Language Translation market to reach $25 Billion by 2013 with a compound annual growth rate of 10.8%.

Here is the whitepaper from the folks at MyGenga.

When creating the movie Avatar, James Cameron turned to a USC linguistics professor named Paul Frommer to create the language of the Na’vi tribe of aliens inhabiting the planet Pandora.
 
There are several resources that cover the Na’vi language. The LanguageLog has a great overview of the Na’vi language. There is also a Learn Na’vi Language wiki.

Frommer talks about the making of the Na’vi language and explains the main perils as follows:

“If you allow everything and the kitchen sink, you get a mishmash, it sounds like gibberish,” Frommer said. “An analogy is cooking and deciding how you are going to spice up a certain dish. If you put everything you have on the shelf, you get a mess. If you are judicious you get something good. In language, sometimes things are defined by the absences.”

The finished product sounds, to some ears, vaguely Polynesian, while others hear the rhythms of African languages in it. “Someone said it sounded German to them, someone else told me Japanese, and I think that’s good. If everyone were saying one single language then it would be bad,”

 Here is More Information on the making of the Na’vi language for the movie Avatar.