Until 400 years ago, the Ainu controlled Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands. Today they are a small minority group of Japan. They are a hunting and fishing people whose origins remain in dispute.
Long before the people who would come to be known as "the Japanese" completed their migrations from the Asia mainland, the islands of Japan were already inhabited by a race of people known as the Ainu ("human").
On this northernmost island, (Hokkaido), in the "snow
country," there still may be found remnants of this once proud and vigorous people who roamed the Japan islands long before the Japanese themselves arrived.
More links inside [more inside]
posted by dawson
on Jun 6, 2008 -
35 comments
Immediately, Herson spotted an offense—a second-floor awning outside a tarot shop that advertised "Energy Stone's." They climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached a middle-age women with a quizzical expression. "We happened to notice the sign for energy stones," Deck said, "and there happens to be an extra apostrophe. 'Stone's' doesn't need the apostrophe."
"And?" she asked, her voice flat with annoyance.
"And we wanted to bring it to your attention," Deck said.
A look inside the daring lives of Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, vanguards of the
Typo Eradication Advancement League.
posted by Rhaomi
on May 21, 2008 -
84 comments
Ever notice how some words just sound like what they mean? Like how a distant star really does seem to
sparkle. Words like
mumble,
twist, and
squeamish.
Jospeh Bottum describes them well: "They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness... More like proper nouns than mere words, they match the objects they describe.
Pickle, gloomy, portly, curmudgeon--sounds that loop back on themselves to close the circle of meaning. They're perfect, in their way." But he tries to coin a new term for them when some already exist.
[more inside]
posted by AceRock
on May 20, 2008 -
57 comments
Harmanz ha haz b
bargan ahn za MMARBG
Ahban Bahb [
brahbazazzah ] ar zambahz. Zambahz haz AAGHZ g!bz gab azzar zambahz: a, b, g, h, m, n, r, z. Zambahz maz hab gab, za Zambahz zgrabbarh
Zamgrh, a gab grh a
gab bag,
a grammah, n
zhranzazzaz. Habganna
barbaga zaarz grh za
bra!nz?
posted by xthlc
on May 8, 2008 -
33 comments
Social Class in the US and UK Lynne Murphy, a linguist from the US living in the UK, looks at the differences in class distinctions through the lens of the language we use to talk about them.
posted by mosessis
on Apr 30, 2008 -
51 comments
Polyglot
Michel Thomas came to prominence through his work for the French resistance and the
successful interrogation of Nazis (who had formerly imprisoned him). After the war he started to develop (and eventually
patent) a method for teaching languages that eschewed notes, books, writing, memorisation and homework. Instead, words and phrases would be built up in lego-like constructions to provide “confidence in hours not years”. He gave private lessons to
a long list of A-list celebrities including Woody Allen, Natasha Kinsky, Tony Curtis and Grace Kelly. A BBC documentary from 1997 told his story and tested him out with the less exalted audience of 16 year old London school kids pre-selected to be “incapable of learning a foreign language” by their teachers [YT pt
1,
2,
3,
4]. He was secretive about how his methods worked until the end of his life when he finally made his
courses available as audiobooks.
[more inside]
posted by rongorongo
on Mar 20, 2008 -
24 comments
The Dictionary of Coming to Terms with the Past (
Wörterbuch der 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung') examines over 1,000 German words that have Nazi connotations, such as
Endlösung (Final Solution) and
Selektion, It is featured in a
review by der Spiegel. Such loaded words still constitute a minefield for Germans today, as the Archbishop of Cologne
discovered last year in a situation
analogized to Senator Biden's use of the term "articulate" when referring to Senator Obama.
[more inside]
posted by Rumple
on Feb 17, 2008 -
49 comments
Over the years millions of children have been introduced to a foreign language by
Big Muzzy [wiki], a friendly, green, clock-eating monster. Here's the complete British English version of Muzzy in Gondoland on YouTube:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20.
posted by sveskemus
on Dec 16, 2007 -
12 comments
"Hundreds of thousands of Americans have endured tours of duty in Iraq. They are returning home with a new word on their lips. It will have an impact on the American Experiment,
inshallah."
posted by Firas
on Dec 7, 2007 -
52 comments
Mango is a new beta service offering free online language lessons. 11 languages available (each with 100 lessons). For English speakers there are lessons in French, German, Italian, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Pig Latin. For Polish and Spanish speakers, lessons in English.
posted by nickyskye
on Nov 7, 2007 -
35 comments
Blackburn makes manifest a propensity for turgid language. Not content with foisting “cockalorum” (meaning, boastful talk), “froward” (willfully disobedient) and “mordaciously” (bitingly) on the reader, he may be the first judge to use both “contumelious” (scornful) and “contumacious” (pigheaded) in the same opinion. Judge Robert E. Blackburn's
ruling [pdf] granting a motion for a new trial based on attorney misconduct is an interesting read for those who enjoy the use of uncommon, flowery and "big" words.
[more inside]
posted by amyms
on Oct 14, 2007 -
14 comments
§7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is such a contradictory figure that there are, in professional philosophical usage,
two of him. Wittgenstein I had solved every philosophical problem in his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921); having nothing else to do, he went home to Austria and became, unsuccessfully, a schoolteacher. In 1929, Wittgenstein I returned to Cambridge, where he began his transformation into Wittgenstein II. He was no longer confident in the
Tractatus, his
certainty in any answers less firm. Wittgenstein II's great, posthumous, work was the
Philosophical Investigations. But Wittgenstein the living man was one, not two:
musician and
architect,
reader of mysteries and
engineer. "If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom," he once wrote, "there's certainly not a grain of that in
Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective stories."
posted by nasreddin
on Sep 7, 2007 -
52 comments
Ventiçello is a miniature ceramic village sculpted and photographed by Steven Travis, who also invented a language and script called
Tapissary, inspired by American Sign Language, which appears on the images.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 24, 2007 -
5 comments
American Sign Language Flash Video Dictionary is a high quality, free dictionary with a huge number of signs. It includes specialized dictionaries of religious signs, conversational phrases, and ASL for babies. Unfortunately it's not possible to link to specific signs, but if you look inside you'll find words from "Abbreviate" to "Zoom" and phrases such as "I cannot fasten my belt," "has he been neutered?" "I already took a bath," "are you married?" and "I need a better firewall."
posted by alms
on Jul 25, 2007 -
17 comments
