ALTA Language Services is a proud sponsor of the 2009 East Point Track Club. The team will be bringing the hammer down at Dick lane Velodrome’s first Pro Race Series of the season on Saturday, May 9th.

The Keirin is presented by No Brakes & Kazane. If you’ve never witnessed track racing here in Atlanta, this is your chance!

The Keirin is an Olympic event where riders are paced up to maximum speed behind a motorcycle until the final lap and a half when they tear up the track to the finish.

A field full of local and imported talent, including Masters World champion Steve “Hitman” Hill, Lanell “The Rock” Rockmore and his Pennsylvania crew, Collegiate National Sprint Champion, David “Goliath” Espinoza, Team Type 1’s “Blazin’” Joe Eldridge and more will battle it out over 4 heats of Keirins to see who the top 6 riders will be to compete in the A-Final and take all the cash and bragging rights as Dick Lane Velodrome’s Keirin Champion. Arrive early to catch the Little League kids race and Men’s and Women’s categorized races.

Afternoon program kicks off at 3pm with the main events beginning at 6pm.
Admission: $5 per person or $10 for the whole family.
Food & Drink: Concessions include the best Hot Dogs in Atlanta!!!

Visit www.dicklanevelodrome.com for more info.

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Photo Courtesy: Chris Kelly

In the desert of Mahler Gobi there lives a herd of Grass Mud Horse. Their diet consists of grass, and they’re able to adapt to harsh conditions as there is little water available in Mahler Gobi. The peaceful life of the grass mud horse is threatened by the encroaching migration of river crabs. A battle ensues and the crabs are defeated.

This seemingly innocuous story, and more specifically the grass mud horse itself, has become a global phenomenon. It’s thriving popularity is the latest expression of the Chinese Government’s online censorship policy . The catch is that the names of the animals and their indigenous region are homonyms for vulgar Chinese phrases that otherwise would have ensured any affiliated website the same fate as the 3,000 websites and 270 blogs shut down by censors in China as of last month.

In a recently published Language Log post about the grass mud horse, Mark Liberman, of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, sheds light upon this fabled creature’s linguistic roots and social implications. The article, and it’s many comments, will quickly bring one up to speed on this revolutionary beast’s struggle.

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Photos Courtesy: chinakorea55 & Language Log

Donna Parrish over at Blogos, just informed us that United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has released the most recent “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger“. Now in its third edition, the Atlas’ release was especially poignant considering that UNESCO had proclaimed 2008 to be the International Year of Languages and its release intentionally coincided with the latest issue of the UNESCO Courier, in which contributor Lucía Iglesias Kuntz wrote an editorial entitled, Endangered Languages, Endangered Thought.

Back in December we featured a video of linguist, David Harrison, discussing the devastation to culture that occurs when a living language disappears. Apparently, Kuntz shares this sentiment:

When languages die, not only words disappear, but ways of seeing and describing reality; we lose valuable knowledge and worlds of thought.

The mere prospect of a language going extinct is harrowing. As Kuntz’s quote illustrates, the implications of such a tragedy are truly far reaching. His editorial details the scope and reach of the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The Atlas was edited by Australian linguist Christopher Moseley. Moseley also authored the Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages. This encyclopedia catalogs and describes a vast majority of the world’s six thousand or more distinct tongues, which are in danger of dying out within the next few decades.

Kuntz continues to cite UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura in regard to the death of a language,

[It] leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it – from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes. The loss of languages is also detrimental to humanity’s grasp of biodiversity, as they transmit much knowledge about the nature and the universe.

If such statements are not troubling enough, consider that the last three genrations have witnessed the extinction of more than 200 of the aforementioned estimated 6,000 existing languages in the world. There are, according to Moseley, 538 critically endangered languages, 502 severely endangered, 632 definitely endangered and 607 unsafe.

Unlike the formerly ubiquitous and equally as puzzling Homeland Security Advisor System of multiple hues of fear and fright ranging from green to red, UNESCO’s methodology for accessing language vitality and endangerment actually quantitatively appraises a threat in a tangible manner. To learn more read the concept paper entitled “Language Vitality and Endangerment”.

Endangered Languages, Endangered Thought is not an alarmist tract; there is some good news. For instance, Kuntz references Papua New Guinea, which has the greatest linguistic diversity on the planet with more than 800 languages and only 88 endangered languages. Furthermore certain endangered languages are currently experiencing an active revitalization. Languages like Cornish (Cornwall) and Sîshëë (New Caledonia) now face the prospect of becoming living languages once again. Some languages like Central Aymara and Quechua in Peru, Maori in New Zealand, Guarani in Paraguay are benefiting from linguistic sustainability conducive legislation and policies.

To learn more about Moseley’s stance on the crucial importance of preserving languages read this interview.

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Image Courtesy of: Obi-Akpere

(click image to enlarge)
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To determine if you qualify & to inquire, please visit:
www.altalang.com/beyond-words/help-alta-develop-proficiency-tests/
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Original Artwork Courtesy: banlon1964

Our friends over at Blogos just published a blog post on the film “The Linguists“.

The documentary, made possible by major funding by The National Science Foundation (NSF), chronicles two ethnographers’ endeavor to record endangered languages around the world. It has steadily garnished recognition since premiering early in 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The film dramatizes the kind of work involved in reaching indigenous communities and documenting their languages. It premieres Feb. 21 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris in conjunction with “International Mother Language Day,” an annual observance intended to promote multilingualism worldwide.

Keep reading to check out the trailer!

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A recent TechCrunch article penned by Leena Rao posed the common question: How does one say Vimeo in French?

The translation left Rao’s readers grinning, but it was unfortunately much to Vimeo’s chagrin: Google Translate thinks ‘Vimeo’ is pronounced ‘youtube’.

When prompted to translate the English sentence ‘videos on Vimeo’ into French, Google produced: ‘des videos sur YouTube’. According to Rao, only when Vimeo is submitted as a singular word, does Google correctly keep it as Vimeo in French translation. However, when it is incorporated into a sentence, Google chooses to change Vimeo into YouTube.

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txteagle is an ambitious initiative that aims to empower and employ the people of least developed nations via their cell phones. By leveraging a vastly underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world, its founder, Nathan Eagle, hopes to change the world for the better.

Despite the great innovations that computers engender in societies around the word, the perception and dexterity of a human being remains unmatched in tasks such as transcribing and translating text from another language.

The business of utilizing this human expertise to address problems where automated solutions come up short has become a mainstream phenomena called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. Google is allowing its users to refine search results, Amazon uses a system called Mechanical Turk to off-load all manner of simple tasks to humans around the world and even the Catholic youth organization of Cologne, one of Germany’s largest dioceses, is on board!

According to Nathan Eagle,

“We’re trying to . . . tap into a group of people to complete these tasks who haven’t been tapped before and we’re using mobile phones, which have a high penetration rate. More people are mobile-phone subscribers in developing countries than in the developing world, so we can get a user base of billions of people.”

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While promoting his latest film, Valkyrie, Tom Cruise recently startled both reporters and fans in Rio de Janeiro with his disoriented comprehension of Brazil’s language and culture.

According to Brazilian gossip website Glamurama, Mr. Cruise reportedly addressed the press conference with the Spanish words “hola” and “gracias”. the correct words in Portuguese would have been olá and obrigado.

In addition to his language fail, he continued to showcase his Latin culture expertise. Tom mentioned that the tango was one of the reasons he fell in love with Brazil. The tango originated in Argentina.

Tom Cruise Photo Courtesy: Paulo Fernando

In her 1996 book, Lexical Changes in Present-day English, Roswitha Fischer details how Bell Laboratories first coined the term acronym in 1943, defining them as, “words made up of initial letters or syllables of other words.”

The creation of acronyms by the U.S. government began during WWI, and increased during the second World War to denote concepts and organizations as concisely as possible, and also to obfuscate their meanings for foreign enemies. Later, the use of acronyms spread to the technical and medical fields, and eventually into corporate jargon throughout the world.

It could be argued, as the editors of the Internet Acronym Server do, that certain restricted forms of the acronym have been in use for thousands of years.

Take, for example, SPQR (pictured above). SPQR is an acronym for the Latin phrase Senatus Populusque Romanus, or, The Senate and the People of Rome, which was the official signature of the ancient Roman Republic, and appeared on coins, buildings, and monuments that date back to 500 BCE. If only acronyms today were so rare as to be carved in stone; each letter glimmering with a profound, lucid and logical lemma. But then we wouldn’t have such a tasty modern dilemma: the rampant overuse of acronyms, with often hilarious and unintended results.

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