Gizmodo Australia » languages

Man Spoke Only Klingon To His Son For Three Years

Rosa Golijan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:46:00 +0000

d’Armond Speers isn’t really a huge Star Trek fan. The reason he spoke only in Klingon during his son’s first three years of life was to learn about the language acquisition process. Yeah, sure. What a petaQ.

Yes, I think That Speers is such a horrid person that I had to learn how to say so in Klingon from our intern Don. It just baffles me that Speers actually sounds genuinely proud of his personal pseudo-academic project:

I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language. He was definitely starting to learn it.”

It’s great that he wanted to see how languages are picked up, but did he not think that there’s potential that he hindered his son’s social development by keeping focus away from a real language? I’m all for teaching foreign languages early on, but lets make it ones that are spoken on this planet, please. [Citypages viaGeekologie]

Photo by Star Wars Blog, probably not d’Armond Speers.

Microsoft Axum Programming Language Focuses on Multi-Core Processor Development

Jason Chen — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:18:33 +0000

The latest .NET-based programming language by Microsoft is Axum, which was previously known as Maestro. It’s neat because it’s aware of concurrent computing, the paradigm of having multiple processes or programs run simultaneously, which makes it optimal for taking advantage of multi-core processors. [MSDN via Slashdot]

Aussie Scientists Preserving Dying Languages Online

Nick Broughall — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:30:09 +0000

Did you know that there were over 200 different aboriginal languages in Australia? Of those, there are now only about 20 that are still in use today – the rest have essentially been wiped out. What’s more, the Asia Pacific region is home to about a third of the world’s indigenous languages, many which are now facing the possibility of being lost forever.

But, thankfully, a group of Australian scientists are in the process of digitising and cataloging these languages so that they will never be completely lost. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a collaboration between ANU and the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and New England. Already in its data banks are thousands of pages of notes, plus hours and hours of audio recordings as part of their research.

The archive has just won a Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences, which gave them a $26,000 PowerEdge 2950 rack mountable Dell server as their prize.

In the future, it’s efforts like this that will form the basis of cultural and historical studies throughout a large part of the world. Sadly, it’s probably inevitable that these smaller cultures get absorbed into the global machine, but at least we’ll have some record of the past. And probably on a Dell server, no less.

[Science in Public - Thanks Niall!]