It is known that few North American languages have their own writing systems (Cherokee and Canadian syllabics are among the few exceptions).
However, I've recently learned that there is Osage script designed for Osage language and even adapted for Navajo language.
So I'm wondering if there are some other scripts that are relatively unknown. Perhaps some that were designed but never successfully implemented, or designed as an experiment?
European and North American countries should stop compulsory teaching of a second spoken language in schools*, and should instead teach one common**^(3)** sign language (maybe ASL, but an alternative would be a language designed from the bottom up to be easy to learn). Advantages would be:
- It would get used regularly by everyone in situations where spoken languages caused problems (crowded bar, across a crowd, in a library, talking to grandad when he's forgotten his hearing aid, foreign travel, communicating with people who are completely deaf**).
- As a result enough people would be good enough at it that it COULD be used for international communication.
- If the above countries started it, almost certainly other countries (at least those with significant trade or tourism links with them) would follow - it would be a lot easier to learn than the current option!
- Europe rather needs a new lingua Franca (and yes, I do love the irony that it almost certainly won't be French!) unless it wants to give the UK the satisfaction of continuing to use English (although there are of course benefits to the current generation of diplomats of continuing with the status quo)
Disadvantages would be:
- Foreign language teachers needing to retrain.
- Possibly slower verbal development in kids if their parents don't prioritize verbal communication even when sign language is more efficient.
- Less demand for the skills of those who can already speak foreign languages (although I'm not sure this would actually be a big issue given older generations would likely be slower to pick up the new language).
*I'm not saying don't teach other foreign languages at all and there might be exceptions where you'd want to make one compulsory (I imagine teaching Spanish to Californians would make sense, for instance) but it makes sense to me to let (eg) UK kids take French as an option the way they would German or Spanish.
**I realize that this might seem to be belittling the impact on the deaf community. I don't mean to do that, and in fact, I'd hope that they'd get a lot of benefits. However, in terms of a policy that you might get not only governments but also their citizens behind, I'm inclined to appeal to the self-interest of the average voter, who doesn't specifically want to talk to deaf people but does want to be able to chat to their mates in a noisy bar while holding (and possibly even drinking) a pint.
3 Added, because I just realized that
... keep reading on reddit ➡According to this, there are 2 million Mexican speakers of just Nahuatl, which looks like it's probably more than all speakers of all Native languages North of Mexico. ( http://www.native-languages.org/most-north.htm ) There are more speakers of Klingon than many Native North American languages.
Similarly, in South America Guarani has around 6 million speakers and Quechua has around 5 million speakers. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas#Numbers_of_speakers_and_political_recognition )
Why?
The phrase is usually used in reference to the state of the world or universe prior to the actual creation taking place.
I am looking to add multilingual field guides to a field guide lending library. When you travel to the U.S. to bird, do you predominantly use English language field guides? Can anyone recommend field guides to birds of North America written in other languages? I've only come across one Spanish translation of Kaufman's "Guia de Campo Kaufman: a las Aves Norteamericanas." Will also appreciate recommendations for plants, insects, mammals, etc. Thank you!
From my understanding, Black American Sign Language (BASL) diverged from mainstream ASL in the American South, because of the longer history of racial segregation. Is BASL used in the American North, in cities like New York City?
Seen this discussed in different forms with uncertainty, now that I’ve tried it out for myself I thought I’d put it out there in clear terms. For both the physical and digital North American releases, English, German, Spanish, and French are the only languages you can choose. It is not possible to switch to Japanese in the game or via DLC. This is listed on the digital summary, but not printed on the physical box.
This came as a surprise to me since other Japanese developed Nintendo Switch games (Animal Crossing, Pokémon) had the ability to play in Japanese by either changing your system language or setting the language at the start of a new game. Neither way is possible in PoOT.
It looks like you can get a Japanese digital version of the game only if you have an eShop account with the region set to Japan, which can only be done upon creating an eShop account and cannot be changed. I am going to try this and post results and a link to instructions in the comments if it is successful!
Hi all, could anyone help me to know if this game (with code CUSA00692 in North American PSN Store) includes Spanish (Spain) or latin (South American) language?
Many thanks
I saw another reddit post with a suggested etymology of the word “okay” as maybe being related to the a Cherokee word “okeh” meaning “correct”. The word “okay” seems to have a disputed origin, but are there any words that North American English speakers use that we don’t normally think of as NA language borrowings? A few that come to mind might be “canoe” and “kayak”, but I don’t remember their origins.
Years and years ago on an amateur linguist forum people argued that PIE or Proto-IE had what those people called an Active/Stative allignment. In this type of alligment they said inanimate nouns cannot be subjects of transitive verbs, because there is no need for animate nouns to be subjects of transitive nouns because as they are inanimate they cannot be agents and therefore not subjects of transitive verbs. I always thought this line of reasoning was a bit weird, because obviously, in Western languages you have inanimate subjects of transitive verbs all the time, for instance as in "The rock killed the ant" "This incident ended his career" or "earthquakes frighten me.", and it goes against all my instincts as a linguist that those sentences are inexpressible in some languages, but that was what those people argued for.
This week I did some digging, and found some handbooks of PIE that indeed mentioned this theory, and argued it was plausible, and mentioned Siouan languages and Na-Dene language as languages that had this alliggnment. However, they didn't give any example sentences that clarify exactly how this would work. When I followed it up, the first problem is that most people take the term Active/Stative allignment as much wider as the writers of those PIE handbooks, and usually people use the term to define all split ergative languages. When I looked for sources for those languages in particular I did see some reputable sources mention it, but I couldn't find out exactly how it worked, as I found a surprising lack of grammars of these languages online. For instance, one source was a review of a grammar of a Siouan language, where the sentence "transitive verbs cannot have animate subjects" was mentioned as an example of a typo, but I couldn't consult the grammar myself.
So if it is indeed the case that in some languages some verbs can only have animate subjects, I wonder how those sentences mentioned above are expressed in those languages. I realize that there are work-arounds, for the first two sentences you could say something along the lines of "because of the rock, the ant was killed", or "because of this incident, his career ended.", and for the last sentence you can say "I am afraid of earthquakes.". However, I suspect that such work-arounds are more let's say standardized in those languages if inanimate subjects are never possible for transitive verbs. Anyway, can somebody please shed a light on this?
Hey, first year and I heard that there's an orientation in Madrid for the government program. Where/when do they update the place and time?
Hello, everyone! I'm from Sweden, and here, we start learning English around the time we start going to school, and then, later on, we start learning another foreign language too, which is German, Spanish or French most times, but at certain schools, they also offer other options like Italian, Mandarin or Japanese, but those are rather uncommon, so I was wondering if it's similar in the USA as well?
I know that Spanish seems to be common there, but other than that, I'm not sure what other language is popular.
Cheers! :)
Most relevant meaning the one native to your area or closest.
Only including living languages, but including languages with very few speakers.
Like if in Midwest, (except Chicago) or southern US, if I said I have to schlep something across town, or I called omeone a putz, schlub or schmuck, would they know what it meant? Would it just seem strange and unnatural? Or has Jewish culture and lexicon been somewhat integrated across US (I wonder if tv/media may have helped this, if so).
Edit: I just saw from this sitehttps://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/10-yiddish-words-that-arent-in-english-but-should-be/ thanks to commenter, shushkeh pronounced "shoosh-keh" means whisper. I wonder if "shushing" someone or saying "shhh" for short is also of Yiddish origin? Endlessly interesting!
Since the new year Amazigh is approaching and many medias are covering this event. the Amazigh medias are covering it and also the Arabic medias.
as for Algeria, when I read the news paper or when I met two Arab only speakers . the only thing I read is the racism and hate speech from the Algerian Arab speakers where they use the worst words and nicknames they could find against anything that is Amazigh and they specifically target the Kabyle and Kabylie since it is the one who was and still fighting for the right of the indigenous of Algeria.
These Algerian Arabs once you look into their profile, they always carry the flag of Algeria, support Palestine , and you only find the name of God, Prophet and Islamic quotes on how to be good and so on. those people it is not only one or two it is a big percentage of the population and the comment section. maybe you can tell me that they are just to make fun or they are the military secret service who wants to spread false view but I also have met some who think kind of this and why specifically targeting Kabyle in particular?
I am going to explore this by myself by speaking to many Algerian Arabs face to face and I am not wiling to hurt them or whatever. I want just to get their real opinions without trying to play the good person, so I can make my final conclusion about this very lasting topic of hundreds of years.
by default, the World knows that Amazigh are the indigenous people of North Africa. Why I am saying this because the Amazigh have no other land to show off their culture and languages. they are not going to Yemen or Qatar to celebrate Yennayer for example. They do it like Arabs do in their motherland in El Djazira!!!.
I would like to hear from you guys what you think, I really need your honest opinion whether it is good or bad. please tell how do you think and no need to make things look great.
https://preview.redd.it/2k68vz7zhoa81.png?width=377&format=png&auto=webp&s=0dd73a10ec6d5b6c48d9ce95dc5495134c47bf1f
This never happened several weeks ago when was the last time I got into PUBG.
I'm from Canada and have always wondered what the religious (especially Christian) culture is like across Europe. Specifically wondering if the new "Hillsong" type of church a thing over there?
I guess the church would be defined like this: trendy youth pastors fresh out of school, Internet-savvy online presence, big shiny new church buildings that double as community centres (shared office space, nurseries, sports arenas etc), slightly more progressive views on sexuality but fairly traditional when it comes to having kids and a nuclear family, "youth" oriented worship focused around modern music like pop, rock, hip hop etc
'''
Written language seems to be better documented among Mesoamerican cultures than North American ones, but that doesn't mean none of them ever wrote. At the very least the Ojibwe have been literate for what appears to be centuries. As for more eastern cultures like the ones encountered on the coast by explorers, I'm not sure. Not like the Europeans were exactly interested in treating the natives like they were civilized. They may have ignored those written languages or even tried to stamp them out. I'm not saying it did happen, but it very well may have. As history has repeatedly shown us, trusting those people to responsibly preserve native culture would be a mistake.
'''
Author: /u/ilikedaweirdschtuff
From my understanding, Black American Sign Language (BASL) diverged from mainstream ASL in the American South, because of the longer history of racial segregation. Is BASL used in the American North, in cities like New York City?
Edit: Cross-posted to r/linguistics, and they are also saying yes.
