More Americans should learn to speak languages native to the African continent. There is a small, statistical base of speakers in the country—according to the 2011 US census, 884,660 individuals aged five years or older already speak a language originating in Africa. But we could have so much more.
Traveling through Scotland is obviously not a linguistic experience limited to the Scottish accent alone. Last year, Christine De Luca was appointed as Edinburgh’s poet laureate. She often writes in a Shetlandic dialect, and you can hear her work here.
Scientists in Scotland have recently created a database of accents after exposing tongues to one ultrasound after the other—1,500 tongues in all from 16 countries—as part of the “Dynamic Dialects” project (which was done in coordination between the University of Glasgow, the University of Strathclyde, and Queen Margaret University in London.) To give you an idea: here’s a woman from Georgia, a man from Bhopal and a woman from Orkney saying “goose.”
“The governor is going to order ice cream.” So the media was informed by a campaign organizer before he arrived, and so Martin O’Malley, former US governor of Maryland, did during his first official stop as a 2016 presidentical candidate in New Hampshire at the Goldenrod Drive-Thru Restaurant in Manchester. There was the first deployment of what is likely to be his core talking-point: “The two phrases I hear everywhere I go are ‘new leadership’ and ‘getting things done.’” A nearby reporter whispered notes into the base of her iPhone. “Mary from Londonderry!” The Governor said to one supporter. “It’s like a song!” There was plenty of rain.
Michael Gove’s tenure as education secretary in the UK makes his appointment to justice secretary one that ought to invite caution and attention. There were surely moments of that tenure that have raised questions as to why he was ever appointed to the post in the first place.
Britons head to the polls to cast their votes in the country’s general elections on May 7, 2015. Six-hundred and fifty individuals will be elected as members of parliament (MPs) and make their way to Westminster. One person who isn’t running for a seat at Westminster, but who has nevertheless played a substantial role in shaping the entirety of the election—and, potentially, the after-election negotiations, too, which she’s insisted on leading—is the first minister of Scotland and the head of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Nicola Sturgeon.
The field of linguistics has a subset called “medical discourse,” a term we can at least trace back to the publication of Peter Middleton’s eponymous work in 1769. It’s through this lens that we can examine the recommendation made in The Journal of the American Medical Association that we redefine cancer—not as a malignant neoplasm, not as kαρκινος—but by such names as “indolent lesions of epithelial origin.” While there is a medical reality to consider, I can’t help but greet this idea with caution and reserve. Language is capable of too many things (subtle and otherwise) to have the idea of changing a term brought to the fore “just like that.”
