Author: 101translations

Throughout the cold war, the USA and the USSR engaged in space exploration as a proxy for hostilities. In 1993, amid improving relations, American Vice-President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced plans for a new space station, which eventually became the International Space Station, which would enable cooperative research and observation, and potentially transportation, maintenance, and a staging base for possible future missions to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. 

Astronauts on the International Space Station – who come from various different backgrounds, not just the USA and Russia – are all expected to know both English and Russian, but as many are not proficient in both, over the years the ISS crews have developed their very own pidgin language that combines words, sounds, phrases, and expressions from both Russian and English, which they refer to as ‘Rushglish’.

Photo Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cold-war-politics-shaped-international-space-station-180975743/

Throughout the medieval period in Europe, large numbers of people traversed the many pilgrimage routes to sacred sites. These multiple journeys had a vast impact on language, as they exposed travellers and their hosts to many vernacular tongues that they would never otherwise have encountered. 

Very educated pilgrims could communicate with one another in Latin, then the language of scholarship and the Church, but the need for everyday communication led to the development of glossaries and guides that pilgrims could use on their religious journeys, thus contributing to the standardisation of many languages.

Photo Source: https://historymedieval.com/medieval-pilgrimage-routes-beyond-the-horizon/

In 1999, acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney published a new translation of the Old English epic, Beowulf. While his translation won awards and was greeted with great acclaim by many, others criticised him for the liberal use of terminology from the English as spoken in Northern Ireland – the linguistic tradition in which Heaney grew up, which has profoundly marked his writing.

Heaney himself commented that he had used Northern Irish dialectal terms he knew from listening to his aunts and other relatives, and that he had seen similarities between the original Old English and some of the words he was familiar with as a child.

Heaney’s most vociferous critics took to referring to his translation as “Heaneywulf” to signal their disapproval of his treatment of the text.

Photo Source: https://susannahfullerton.com.au/13-april-1939-seamus-heaney-is-born/

One of the lesser-known fields of psychology is ‘maledictology’ which, as the name suggests, examines how people express themselves emotionally by swearing. Swearing is studied in its neurological, psychological and social contexts.

Clearly, the decision to swear comes from the brain. It is hypothesised that swearing involves both higher-level cognitive functions, such as decision-making and language, and the subcortical system, which determines how the person will respond to stimuli in their environment.

In psychological terms, we learn how to swear as part of our normal psychological development in society. From childhood, we learn what the common swearwords of our culture are, and which circumstances prompt their use. Knowing what is, and isn’t, considered rude in different contexts is an essential element of a child’s psychosocial development.

Socially-based research examines the cultural markers that people, and societies, use to determine when a particular word is or isn’t appropriate.

Currently, maledictology remains very much a minority field of study, a contested ground between psychology and linguistics that struggles to find funding, suggesting that the taboo element of swearing permeates academia as much as any other field of endeavour. For those who are particularly interested, the academic journal Maledicta was published between 1977 and 2005.

Photo Source: https://www.tuw.edu/psychology/career-in-psychology-traits/

Luxembourg is a small European country tucked between France, Belgium, and Germany. Alongside French and German, its official language is Luxembourgish, a West Germanic language similar to several High German dialects, spoken by about three-quarters of the population. Of course, as so few speak it – fewer than 300,000 – Luxembourgers generally also speak French or German, and often both.

The tricky question of the difference between a dialect and a language raises its head here once again. Until the mid-twentieth century, Luxembourgish was considered a dialect of German, but following a rigorous process of standardisation it was promoted as an independent language in its own right.

Photo Source:  https://www.luxtimes.lu/yourluxembourg/luxembourgguide/luxembourg-s-capital-celebrates-30-years-of-unesco-status/29149917.html

The spell checker tool that is an integral feature of word processing programs like Microsoft Word has been a joy for bad spellers everywhere, but it has its flaws.

The ‘Cupertino effect’ is a term that was coined to refer to the spell checker’s annoying habit of occasionally replacing correctly spelled words that are not in its dictionary with a different, often wildly wrong, word. It is named after the fact that some older spell checkers used to replace the English word ‘cooperation’ with ‘Cupertino’ (a California city), because its dictionary had only the hyphenated variant, ‘co-operation.’

Most of the time errors like this are just a minor irritation, but when important documents aren’t carefully proof-read after running a spell check, embarrassing – and potentially even dangerous – errors can slip by. This can happen even more easily when people are writing in a language other than their mother tongue and may be relying more heavily on a spell checker.

Even with all the technology at our disposal, sometimes you just can’t beat the human touch!

Photo Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/autocorrect-fails-how-and-why-to-turn-off-word-prediction-on-your-phone.html

Many cultures and religions have mythologies about the origin of language. Think of the Tower of Babel, which attempts to explain why there are so many languages in the world.

But did you know that many cultures also have mythologies about a divine language spoken by their god or gods?

This is the idea that the deity or deities of the culture in question spoke a ‘pure’ language that dates back to before human beings came into existence. Often, the faithful also believe that this language is still present in religious rite and ritual, and sometimes also in modern parlance. For example, some Christians see Aramaic-Hebrew, Greek and Latin as God’s languages. In Hinduism, Sanskrit is seen as the language of the gods, and in Islam, Arabic is seen as God’s language. Even modern mythologies like J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ saga imagines a sacred language, Valar, spoken by the gods.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/selective-focus-photography-of-plant-87MIF4vqHWg?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

The Inuit of Labrador speak Inuktitut. This was only a spoken language until the arrival of Moravian missionaries in the eighteenth century. The Moravians introduced Christianity to the area, with a very disruptive impact on the Inuit belief system and way of life. They also recorded Inuktitut in writing, enabling the population to become literate in its own language, and resulting in its preservation, when many Indigenous languages died out because of the processes of colonisation.

Photo Source: https://www.meisterdrucke.uk/fine-art-prints/Unbekannt/721595/Inuit-people-from-Labrador,-northern-Canada,-c.-1928.html