Spoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca--its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "rise of English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign colleagues. Business interests can flourish in the global economy. But the rise of English has very real downsides at times generating intense legal conflicts. In Europe, imperatives of political integration, job mobility, and university rankings compete with pride in national language and heritage as countries like France attempt to curb its spread. In countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency and devalued commonly spoken languages. In Anglophone countries like the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages. InThe Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language(Oxford University Press, 2021), Dr. Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business. From the inner workings of the European Union to China's use of language as "soft power" in Africa, Salomone draws on a wealth of research to tell the complex story of English--and, ultimately, to argue for English not as a force for domination but as a core component of multilingualism and the transcendence of linguistic and cultural borders. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Abhishek Avtans talks about the apabhraṃśa, a word that refers to the middle stage of the Indo-Aryan languages, crucial links between ancient languages like Sanskrit, and modern South Asian languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Marathi, Nepali, and others. The first mention of apabhraṃśas is inMahabhasya, a 2nd century BCE text by Patanjali, where the author refers to languages considered deviations from Sanskrit. However, research into apabhraṃśas, for the same reason, has become crucial in dispelling notions of linguistic purity and politics that is dependent on these notions. Abhishek Avtansis a lecturer of Indic language/s at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He loves to work on literature and linguistics of languages spoken in south Asia. He has contributed in making dictionaries of Great Andamanese, Bhojpuri and Brajbhasha. He writes a column Dialecticalfor the Himal SouthAsian Magazine. He tweets at@avtansa. Image: 2021 Saronik Bosu (the stanza of verse in the image comes from the text ofBāhubalī rāsaby 13th Century AD Jain poet Shalibhadra Suri, it is an onomatopoeic stanza that describes the activities done by elephants, soldiers and horses.) Music used in promotional material: “Rajasthani Folk Instrumental Music” by Rupayan Sansthan, Jodhpur, from the collection of Shri Komal Kothari Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators. Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans ta...
InA Sociolinguistic History of Scotland(Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Dr. Robert McColl Millar presents the first sociolinguistic history of all languages spoken in Scotland. The book includes analyses from across the country including coverage of Gaelic, Scots, Pictish, British, Norn, Immigrant languages and Scottish Standard English. It also covers four case studies dealing with the birth of a dialect or variety: North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Scots. In the book, Dr. Robert McColl Millar examines how language has been used in Scotland since the earliest times. While primarily focusing on the histories of the speakers of Scots and Gaelic, and their competition with the encroaching use of (Scottish) Standard English, he also traces the decline and eventual ‘death’ of Pictish, British and Norn. Four case studies illustrate the historical development of North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Scots. Immigr...
Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University and editor of theJournal of Business and Technical Communication. We talk about welds that hold and about sentences that stand. Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, I'd definitely agree that people can be motivated in what they're learning when they appreciate theartof it. I mean, for instance in welding, you need to put in a certain number of hours in order to have your mind and your body work as one in this technique — you know, you need tobecomethe technique. And that kind of thing doesn't just happen. Your body has to do it over and over and over again for you to become an artist, or in the terms I use in the book, an expert. And those hours that you spend practising in a welding program, or in a writing program for that matter — those hours are all just building up your practice hours, building up your technique, and you keep continuing on towards true expertise." Contact ...
In this episode Kim talks to Adrienne Raphel about crossword puzzles. For lots more about crosswords, check out Adrienne’s bookThinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them(Penguin Random House, 2021) For some of the historical puzzles she mentions in the episode, Adrienne recommendsThe Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles from Then and Nowby Ben Tausig. If you’re inspired to start doing crosswords and looking for some guidance, she suggests theNew York Timesguide: “How to Solve The New York Times Crossword.” For more on cryptic crosswords, check out Stephen Sondheim’s article “How to Do a Real Crossword Puzzle.”New York Magazine(April 1968). Also on cryptics, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon’s bookThe Random House Guide to Cryptic Crosswords(Random House, 2003) is out of print but very good. And thecrossword bloginThe Guardianhas lots of cryptic crosswords too. Adrienne is a poet, scholar, andlecturerin the Prin...
Listen to this interview of Julia Molinari, lecturer in professional academic communication at The Open University (UK) and independent researcher. We talk her bookWhat Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice(Bloomsbury, 2022) andabout the things people use academic writing for. Julia Molinari : "We need to ensure that teachers of academic writing have access to scholarship and can do the research that they need to do in order to sensitize themselves to the different ways of conceiving of writing. Because I see scholarship very much as a lever to the change that needs to happen in higher education. Scholarship means, for the teacher of EAP, knowing what has been written about academic writing and knowing that there isn't just one standard form, there isn't just one template that says, 'This is academic. This is not academic.' So, enabling practitioners to do research, to do the scholarship — this is something that requires an institutional commitment: people need to ...
Should academic scholars trust machine translation for the publication of their academic articles? In this episode, Avi Staiman and Ana Guerberof Arenasdiscuss how the evolution of machine translation and the most recent developments in machine translation technology. Ana shares her insight on the potential pitfalls of relying on machine translation for unpublished manuscripts as opposed to when getting the 'gist' suffices for understanding the research of others. She also shares the results of her recent study on the advantages of human translation for creative and literary texts. Ana Guerberof Arenasis a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at University of Groningen. Her project (CREAMT) looks at the impact of MT on translation creativity and the reader's experience in the context of literary texts. Ana is also a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Multimodal Technologies at University of Surrey (UK) where she is a member of the Centre for Translation Studies. She has worked mo...
The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland(Oxford UP, 2021)contains explanations of over 3,800 family names, of any origin, that are established in Ireland, both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. It provides an entry for every family name that has more than 100 bearers in the 1911 Census of Ireland. The entries bring together a variety of sources, medieval to modern, to uncover the histories, contexts, and transformations of surnames in Ireland. Research Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in theIRIS Centerat Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Sabdanugamah(Sanskrit Library, 2021)is the first of two volumes of studies in honor of Professor George Cardona, the preeminent authority on Paninian grammar and the linguistic traditions of India as well as one of the worlds leading scholars of Indo-European linguistics.These studies cover topics in Paninian grammar, other Indian linguistic traditions, issues in Sanskrit morphology and syntax, and theories of verbal cognition. Visit the Sanskrit Libraryhere.The Sanskrit Library offers coursehere. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information seerajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language