Author: 101translations

Seidensticker was born into a farming family in 1921 and graduated with a degree in English from the University of Colorado in 1942, the same year the US Navy started expanding its school of Japanese language, which moved from Berkeley in California to the University of Colorado, largely because Americans of Japanese descent were then being taken into custody as enemy aliens in the west. Seeking only to avoid the draft, Seidensticker enrolled.

Thus began Seidensticker’s love affair with the Japanese language, which would lead to his becoming one of the most famous translators from Japanese into English, to his working as an academic at the University of Tokyo and, later, Stanford, and to the introduction of generations of English-speakers to the best of Japanese literature. His labours not only made Japanese works of literature available, but also showed English-language publishers that Japanese literature could sell well. To this day – he died in 2007 – he is regarded as one of the finest translators from Japanese into English.

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Our fashion choices are a form of communication. When we decide how to dress, we are making statements about who we are, and who we want to be seen as. Depending on our choices, we might be saying ‘I’m a goth,’ or ‘I’m a football fan,’ or ‘I want to get ahead in business.’

Above all, fashion mostly says, ‘I care what others think about me, and I want to fit in with people I consider similar to me.’

Using fashion in this way – to make statements about ourselves and form bonds with others – is not surprising. We are social mammals and – alone among mammals – we wear clothes, which give us a wide array of fashion options.

But maybe it is a little more surprising to learn that some other social mammals are interested in fashion too.

For example, back in 1987, people observed orcas off the coast of British Columbia wearing dead salmon as hats. They’d been known to playfully wear kelp at times, but this was the first time they’d been seen wearing dead salmon. At first it was just one or two, and then many of them started doing it.

When the behaviour died out after a year or two, researchers concluded that it had been a fashion trend that had simply gone out of style, as human trends do all the time.

Until 2024, when suddenly dead salmon hats were apparently in style again, perhaps among older orcas (they can live up to the age of 90) reliving their glory days!

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Diverse types of writing developed in various cultural and geo-historical contexts around the world, but what was the very earliest attempt to write? One of our earlier blog posts explored the idea that painting could itself be seen as a form of writing, especially when it serves, among other things, as an aide-memoire.

Consider the example of the famous cave paintings found in Spain and France, which often include vivid hunting scenes, and depictions of animals that lived in the area when the climate was vastly different than it is today. These are often accompanied by handprints – sometimes loads of them – made by using the simple technique of holding the hand up against a wall and then blowing ochre pigment around it.

We know extraordinarily little about the artists who created the works of art in those caves, although they’ve given us so much in terms of artistic expression and the opportunity to see at least a glimpse of the distant past. But those handprints suggest that they had a sense of pride and ownership in their work and that, like any artist, they wanted to sign it.

Arguably, if not quite writing, these vivid handprints from the past are at least the earliest form of signature.

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Since smartphones became ubiquitous, many of us have been experiencing addiction, feelings of anxiety when our phone is not at hand, and issues with attention span, alongside the tangible benefits of having the internet in our pocket.

But what are the impacts – if any – of smartphones on language acquisition?

The research is still in flux, but it does show that when parents use their smartphones around their children, it has a negative impact on how they interact with them, which in turn can cause problems for children’s development.

From birth, babies are drawn to gazing into adults’ faces. This is a behaviour that is related to later language outcomes, so when caregivers are distracted by smartphones, and spend less time looking into their infants’ faces, this creates a challenging environment for language acquisition. Older, verbal children are also less likely to ask their parents questions when they see them interacting with their phones, and this in turn impacts on their ability to pick up language skills.

New problems give rise to novel words. The issues associated with how technology impacts negatively on how parents and caregivers interact with children is often referred to as ‘technoference.’  Researchers are still exploring exactly how it impacts on language acquisition, but it does seem clear that it’s not a good idea to mix smartphone use and the care of small children, tempting as it can be to seek some distraction from a handy screen.

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Almost 50 years after his death, the cultural and linguistic impact of Elvis Presley continues to be felt.

Elvis is considered to have been a true revolutionary. From the mid-1950s, before the concept of cultural appropriation had been coined and debated, he integrated diverse musical genres, including country music, rockabilly, gospel, and the blues. 

Alongside his music, Elvis’s image and his public persona penetrated the consciousness of the world, driving youth culture as an entire generation of young people emulated his hairstyle, dress sense, and signature moves. Teenagers integrated the words and phrases he used into their own language (referring to someone as a ‘hound dog’ and so on). Often, these words and phrases originated in the African American musical culture that Elvis often tapped into. In his own words, he said: ‘[They] been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goosed it up.’ 

While in more recent years, Elvis has been retrospectively criticised by some for the ways in which he used African American music, at the time white racists were horrified by the fact that he was helping to make African American music and language commercial and mainstream. His massive popularity made the music business see that all these genres could make lots of money and laid the ground for generations of singers to come.

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Whistled speech, which is found in more than 80 languages around the world, is a way to communicate using whistling. It is heavily influenced by landscape and is typically found in areas such as dense forests, where using whistles to communicate makes it easier to be heard across a greater distance. 

Whistled speech generally coexists alongside spoken language – it is more common alongside tonal languages – and it is just as complex. Whistled languages generally follow the sounds and intonations of spoken language, so that listeners who are familiar with both can understand what is being said. 

Examples of whistled language include Sfyria, which was in use on the Greek island of Euboea until the 1980s; Sochiapam Chinantec in Mexico – where men can be fined if they are not sufficiently competent to carry out particular jobs in whistled speech – and the Tsonga whistle language in southern Mozambique. 

While in some cultures whistled speech is used in certain contexts only and is therefore more limited in expression than spoken language, in others full, complex conversations can be held. 

Most interesting of all, the presence of whistled speech in any given culture is generally much more closely related to the natural features of the landscape (dense forests and the like) than to contact with other cultures that practice this form of speech.

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We all know jazz as a music genre, but is it a language too?

Some experts think it is. They point to the fact that jazz has its own vocabulary that has been expanding since the musical genre first emerged from African American culture and started spreading around the world. Every jazz musician has used this musical language to build upon the work of their predecessors.

Thus, each generation uses aural communication to pass down their language, with jazz developing and evolving organically, just as language does.

But unlike a language, there’s no dictionary of jazz, and although there are cultural and musical norms, there are no rules, either. Each musical jazz artist is free to draw on what they’ve learned from previous generations, but also to create their own musical vocabulary and to borrow and create their own musical grammar.

Whether or not you think jazz is a language, it’s certainly an interesting concept to riff off.

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Researchers have known for some time that learning a new language as an adult can help to prevent or delay the onset of age-related cognitive decline. But now new research, carried out in partnership by Trinity College Dublin, the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastian, and the Latin American Brain Health Institute in Santiago, Chile suggests that being multilingual has far-reaching positive health effects that go far beyond keeping the little grey cells fit and active.

In fact, the researchers have discovered that the more languages people speak the more they are protected against health decline relating to age. Even after factoring in issues such as education, overall health, and lifestyle, it turned out that people from countries where being multilingual is the norm were 2.17 times less likely to experience accelerated ageing compared to people living in monolingual cultures.

The researchers further believe that incorporating language acquisition into public health plans will result in healthier, happier populations into old age, with huge positive benefits at individual, community, and societal levels.

At 101translations, where language is our first love, we’re not even slightly surprised.

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If you’re interested in European military history, you may have come across the word ‘Huns’, as in the context of war, it was often used as an anti-German slur. 

But who were the Huns really?

The Huns were nomads who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th centuries CE. By 430, they had established a vast, but short-lived, empire on the Danubian frontier of the Roman empire in Europe. Under their king, Attila, they made many destructive raids into the Eastern Roman Empire.

Scholars once believed that the Huns originated from Turkic-speaking groups, but recent linguistic research has shown that they had Palaeo-Siberian ancestors, the Xiognu, and spoke a language that belonged to the Yeniseian language family, a subgroup of the so-called Palaeo-Siberian languages which were spoken in Siberia before the invasion of Uralic, Turkic and Tungusic ethnic groups. By studying placenames, scholars have also been able to learn much more than was known before about how these fascinating people ended up settling in Europe.

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