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Made by Aaron Peckham, Jamie Wilkinson and Casey Pugh.

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From the INTRODUCTION
“There are many books and many websites describing the journey of the English language from its ancient origins to today’s dynamic and powerful communication tool (you can find some of them on the Sources and Links page). Some follow it in minute and excruciating technical detail, some are brief one-page summaries, and you may be wondering: do we really need another?

Well, perhaps not, but I wanted to create one anyway for my own enjoyment and edification. And this one is neither too long and intimidating nor is it too skimpy and “lite”, but, as Goldilocks might have said, just right. Not too much in the way of “fricatives” and “palatizations” and “labialized velars” (this does not pretend to be a work of serious philology), but plenty of rollicking historical detail, action and intrigue.

Whatever your thoughts on the matter, English, with all its vagaries and annoying inconsistencies, remains the single most important and influential language in today’s world. Throughout history, it has repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time: English-speaking Britain was the leading colonial nation in the 17th and 18th Century, as well as the leader of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 18th Century; in the late 19th and 20th Century, English-speaking America was the leading economic power, and was also at the forefront of the electronic and digital revolution of the late 20th Century.

But, it has also proved itself the most flexible and resilient of languages, remarkable for its ability to adopt and absorb vocabulary from other cultures. It has survived incursions by invading armies, outfaced potential extinction on more than one occasion, and navigated the changing cultural zeitgeist, growing ever stronger in the process. Its continued vitality is evidenced by the number and diversity of its worldwide variations today.”

Read on…

The History of English in 10 minutes

New Scientist reports: “LUIS VON AHN claims he can translate Wikipedia – all 2 billion words of it – from English into Spanish in just 80 hours. What’s more, he will not have to pay anyone to do the work.

His secret weapon is Duolingo, a free language tutorial website that doubles as a paid-for translation service (see video below). The deal is that users get to learn a language while simultaneously helping to translate website content.

“The crazy thing about this method is that it works,” says von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This is not the first time von Ahn has recycled user input in this way. His reCAPTCHA system, which many websites employ when signing up new members, displays snippets of distorted text to confound the automated software used by spammers. Unbeknownst to many users, however, the text that they are deciphering is material that the computers used in book-digitisation projects have tried and failed to understand. The system was bought by Google in 2009 for an undisclosed sum and is now used in the company’s book-scanning project.

On the surface, Duolingo, which opened its doors to testers last month, looks like any other language tutorial system. Users receive lessons in either Spanish or German and then practise on their own. Tasks include translating written sentences and rating the accuracy of translations made by others. The lessons combine standard content with material pulled from web pages written in the language the user is learning. After the web material has been translated it is slotted into an English-language version of the original web page, which is built up sentence by sentence as learners plough through Duolingo worksheets.

Learners inevitably make mistakes, so the system ensures a number of people work on and check each sentence before declaring the translation correct. It also routes complex sentences to more advanced learners and provides tools, such as easy access to language dictionaries, to aid in translation.

But will website owners be prepared to pay for a service performed by students? Pricing has not yet been set but von Ahn insists Duolingo can match professional translators for quality – a claim that has attracted some scepticism.

“Anything that relies solely on learners will limit the number of experts who will participate,” says Mark Chatow, vice-president at Servio, a San Francisco-based company that offers translation and content-generation services. Chatow says that Duolingo will work fine for simple sentences, but notes that some material requires a grasp of nuanced meanings, which learners will struggle with. Nuance is a particularly common problem in Chinese-to-English translations, he adds.

Idiomatic expressions, the bane of automated translation services, may also cause problems. Google, for example, translates the Spanish idiom “nunca llueve a gusto de todos” as “it never rains to everyone’s taste”, whereas a professional translator would provide something like “you can’t please everyone”. It remains to be seen whether Duolingo’s learners can do as good a job.

Also uncertain is the speed at which translations can be completed, which obviously depends on the number of language students using the software. Von Ahn estimates that it would take a million students to translate Wikipedia in 80 hours, while 100,000 learners would take five weeks. However, language tutorials are already popular – more than 5 million people in the US alone have paid for language-learning software – and von Ahn says there are already 200,000 people on the waiting list for Duolingo.

To keep the translations flowing, users will also have to find the learning process “mildly addictive”, says Philip Resnik at the University of Maryland in College Park. In tests, New Scientist found the site easy to use and its reward system of points and stars compelling. Students can also compete against their friends.

“Given von Ahn’s record I imagine he’ll be successful,” says Resnik.

It contains:
-Details of more than 180 writing systems, including Abjads, Alphabets, Abugidas, Syllabaries and Semanto-phonetic scripts
-Information about over 500 languages
-More than 300 con-scripts
-Writings systems invented by visitors of the site
-Tips on learning languages
-Language-related articles
-Useful foreign phrases in more than 150 languages with quite a few audio recordings
-Texts, language names, country names, colours and songs in many languages
-A language book store
-Links to language-related resources

You can find a guide to the contents of Omniglot on the sitemap, and a list of all the writing systems and languages featured on the site in the A-Z index.

A story from The Book Beast: “On a quest to find the person we could say spoke the most languages in the world, I stumbled on the online personae of a language learning guru and hyperpolyglot, Alexander Arguelles, who invited me to Berkeley, California, where he was living at the time. It was my first introduction to the life of the contemporary hyperpolyglot. On many mornings, once Alexander has greeted the sun doing extensive writing exercises in Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Russian, Persian, German, and other languages, he goes for a long run in the arid hills of the park above his neighborhood, while listening to a German audiobook tape on his Walkman. (So far, he eschews the MP3.) Marathon lengths are easy for him—once, he says, he got lost in the woods and ended up running more than thirty miles, though he felt faint. Later someone told him that long-distance runners have to eat every two hours, which came as a revelation; he finds the carbohydrate goo disgusting. He eschews that, too.

One morning, he discovered the campus of a theological seminary that he now covets for a polyglot academy he dreams of starting. The school was made up of low, Mission Revival–style buildings surrounded by redwoods and eucalyptus trees stirred by the wind. Alexander pointed to a fire trail cutting down the hill, saying that it would be good for shadowing. Shadowing is how he gets to know a language’s sounds: put a tape in the Walkman and, while briskly walking and arms swinging, you shout the sounds as you hear them. Though you won’t know what the words mean, later you read the dialogues and translate them, then you shadow the same material again. For him, parsing the sounds first then adding meaning later makes it stick. Shouting now is also an inoculation against embarrassment later.

At first, I assumed that his ambition was to speak all of his languages—otherwise, what’s the point of shadowing? This turned out to be wrong.”

Read on at The Book Beast

The Duden has been Germany’s dictionary numero uno for more than 130 years and it finally managed to get a proper website with everything you would expect from Duden. They got articles, browser plug-ins, word of the day and a phone service for urgent translation problems. Pretty good.

Have you seen those useful little toolbars & bookmarklets for your Internet browser? Those might save you some time here and there.

This was the language that Sargon the Great, king of Akkad in the 24th century B.C., spoke. That Hammurabi used around 1700 B.C. to proclaim the first known code of laws. It was the vocabulary of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first masterpiece of world literature. The project was started in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute.”

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project site.