Babel No More (55 page)
Authors: Michael Erard
technologies of,
10
,
274
–75
sea,
68
,
147
,
154
train,
17
–19,
147
–48
“Travelling Linguistics” (Ganahl),
84
–85
trilingualism,
226
Truss, Lynn,
207
Tsimpli, Ianthi-Maria,
94
–99,
283
Tukano language,
190
Turin, University,
6
Turkic
language family,
44
n
Turkish language,
4
,
39
,
42
,
43
,
54
,
132
,
151
,
181
,
250
–51
Twitter,
15
languages featured on,
10
typewriters,
79
ultimo dei Mohicani, L’
(Cooper),
40
United Arab Emirates (UAE),
8
,
15
,
85
n
United Nations,
54
United States,
14
counterterrorism strategy in,
71
economic and military power of,
85
English-speaking predominance in,
71
–72,
147
,
148
,
206
intelligence community in,
53
–54,
71
language learning in,
9
Latinos in,
22
University College, London,
67
,
94
Uralic language family,
44
n
Vandewalle, Johan,
249
–56,
253,
269
,
293
Vatican,
5
library of,
3
Victor, Elizabeth,
87
Vietnam,
8
Vietnamese language,
167
visuospatial abilities,
165
Viva el lunes,
109
vocabulary,
34
,
42
,
45
,
99
,
233
,
275
gaps in,
103
memorizing of,
24
,
259
recall of,
11
,
96
shared,
48
Vogt, Oskar,
154
–55,
171
–73,
175
,
178
voices, hearing of,
50
Volovick, Reuben,
153
–54
Walkman,
114
Wallachian language,
43
Washington Post,
73
Watts, Thomas,
41
,
43
,
44
,
100
,
279
Wernicke, Carl,
157
White, E. B.,
207
Will to plasticity,
14
,
85
–86,
107
,
122
,
209
,
212
Wikipedia,
73
William II, Kaiser,
147
Williams, Harold,
73
wordplay,
11
choosing of,
142
color,
49
,
280
connecting of,
46
meaning of,
53
,
124
order of,
97
,
99
,
122
–23,
141
,
210
,
240
n
recognition of,
162
rhyming of,
57
spelling of,
78
,
96
structure of,
96
World Atlas of Language Structures,
249
n
World Tourism Organization,
85
Yemen,
45
Ysaÿe, Eugène,
171
n
Zach, Baron von,
5
Zilles, Karl,
171
,
172
,
175
,
177
–79,
212
,
229
,
287
,
289
Zoraida,
19
Zulueta, Felicity de,
49
–50
About the Author
Michael Erard is not a polyglot. He considers himself a monolingual with benefits. A native speaker of American English, he has lived in South America and Asia, where he learned Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, but please don’t ask him to say anything in those languages. He has graduate degrees in linguistics and rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin. His writing about
language, linguists, and linguistics has appeared in
Science, Wired, Atlantic, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate,
and many other publications, and he is a contributing writer for
Design Observer
. His first book,
Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,
a natural history of things we wish we didn’t say (but do), as well as a look at what happens in our culture
when we do (and wish we didn’t), was published in 2007. Michael was awarded the Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship in 2008 to work on
Babel No More.
See more at
www.michaelerard.com
.
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*
Eight he studied critically, eight he could read with a dictionary’s help, and twelve others he considered “attainable.” The eight he could speak he supposedly did so as perfectly as he did his native English.
*
Dutch and Flemish, of course, are widely acknowledged now to be the same language.
*
Semitic, Hurro-Urartian, Afroasiatic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, Turkic, Romance, Germanic, Slavic,
Uralic, and Sino-Tibetan.