A Round-Up of Articles

Here are a few articles on language, literature, and translation.

The first one is an article about inventing languages. More specifically, it’s on John Quijada and his Ithkuil language.

For those of us who work on the Nordic languages, this piece, which is on whether English is a Scandinavian language, is particularly interesting. It lists a number of English words that are Scandinavian in origin, such as: “anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong.”

Next is an article about the 800 languages in New York City.

Here is a piece on legal language and translation.

Finally, here is an intriguing article on a whistling language. As the article says, “This method of communication, in which the Spanish language is replaced by two whistled vowels and four consonants, has a peculiarity perfectly suited to this landscape of deep valleys and steep ravines. It has the ability to travel up to two miles (3.2km), much further and with less effort than shouting. By the 1970s and 80s, there were only a few whistlers remaining, but at the end of the 90s there was renewed interest in silbo, in part due to an initiative to make it a compulsory subject at primary school.”