Tagged: Language

Part 1: The Rise of the Brogrammer

Produced by Jonathan Lynch

In the 1980s classic comedy revenge of the nerds, there was a clear cut boundary between the titular nerds and the preppy, popular frat boys that sought to humiliate them. A recent culture trend in Silicon Valley is looking to completely upend that convention by fusing the two. A new breed of software engineers is on the horizon, and they are just as likely to fine tune code as they are to lift weights and party on the weekend.

It’s a fiction writer’s job to create authentic worlds  and suspend disbelief. One of the more time-consuming techniques in their toolbox? Inventing new languages – like the two forms of elvish used throughout J.R.R Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings. Michael Adams is a professor of English at Indiana

There are some 7,000 spoken languages in the world, and linguists project that as many as half may disappear by the end of the century. That works out to one language going extinct about every two weeks. Now, digital technology is coming to the rescue of some of those ancient tongues.

Members of the Native American Siletz tribe in Oregon say their native language, also called "Siletz," "is as old as time itself." But today, you can count the number of fluent speakers on one hand. Siletz Tribal Council Vice Chairman Bud Lane is one of them.

This weekend the New Hampshire State Spelling Bee takes place in Concord; NHPR is a sponsor of the event, in which the Granite State’s top spellers hope to make short work of long words the rest of us would probably trip over.

Produced by Avishay Artsy

We all have our linguistic pet peeves. I, for one, bristle when I hear “literally” to describe things that aren’t literal at all. I admit, I was an English major, and still grieve a little inside when people use “was” for the conditional tense instead of “were.” A painter and writer living in Los Angeles is campaigning against a far less arcane peeve: the overuse of “awesome”. 

The English language is remarkable for the richness of its vocabulary. The revised Oxford English Dictionary includes over 600,000 words, however English is the only language that has, or needs, a thesaurus. There are twice as many words in common use in English than in French. Nonetheless, sometimes English words fail us -- at least when it comes to love. Our guest has compiled an illuminating top-ten list of foreign words describing nuances of love and relationships.