The Conversation
- Holy Jesus, Jeremy (7)
- Eurasian Sensation: @ Colin: I’m pretty sure Jeremy Lin and his supporters are not the same person.
- colin: I was pretty impressed with Lin, until some digging around leads me to believe he’s more interested in...
- Eurasian Sensation: Why does anyone give a shit? The US is the global capital of people loudly claiming their love...
- What Cultures Value (21)
- “But he hit me back first!” (37)
- colin: It’s taboo to speak this truth in America, but here it is: Blacks are as racist as, if not more than,...
- Eurasian Sensation: @ Raguel: It’s interesting that you raise the Indonesian Chinese, as there are indeed some...
- Raguel: As heated as the debate has become I think that it has been productive. The perspectives raised, unpopular or...
- Seeking Asian Female (7)
- King: “If I ever get a mail order bride I will get her addicted to sex first.” I assume you mean with you...
- bigWOWO: Linda, Haha! Maybe that dude is on to something with the foreign language nagging. But to be honest, maybe...
- raguel: LOL @ Chen and traumatic comedy XD The more I discover about mail-order marriages the more horrible the...
- About A Boy by Nick Hornby (6)
- bigWOWO: That’s a really good point, Raguel. Like it or not, TV executives control everything (including what...
- Raguel: I could be wrong but the distribution windows for media and especially film seems very hierarchical. If you...
- bigWOWO: Illegal streaming? I had no idea anyone did that! Well, I really should check out some movies one of these...
- Superbowl Recipe and Xenophobic Superbowl Ad (22)
- Raguel: Time to get your concealed carry licences, folks!
- Eurasian Sensation: Jeff Yang has a good article about this ad: http://inamerica.blogs.cnn....
- Raguel: I haven’t even gotten to why the ad really is so offensive to us, ROFL
- Jeremy Lin shines (20)
- N: @danny You should youtube his college games. The two against Boston college and the one against UConn. Lol, he can...
- Lingyai: @Ben Efsaneyim Why would it be surprising a non Asian crowd cheering for Lin? Most of the NBA fans going to...
- bigWOWO: Danny and Mojo, Holy crap! That’s amazing! I didn’t know he could dunk either! I think...
- Stop SOPA and PIPA (9)
- Raguel: ^ Nice one Byron! I’m reading through the NYT picks, they’re good!
- bigWOWO: The Times had an Op-Ed by the President of the RIAA, and I commented. My comment was picked as a...
- Raguel: Found a great website, take a look at this: https://www.cdt.org/ Why should privacy be important, in an age...
- The Perversity of Human Biodiversity, a.k.a. “Scientific” Racism (402)
- bigWOWO: Here’s an interesting suggestion coming out of MIT: Connectome by Sebastian Seung...
- Battle Hymn of the Kitten Daughter (36)
- Raguel: You know Andre, you and me, I think we and a lot of other folks may have gone through some pretty harrowing...
- Andre M. Smith: Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew....
- Two podcasts that address racism in the military, and Danny Chen the person (9)
- Raguel: The origins of racism in the American military as described by loudestfuckingazns is accurate. Very recently,...
- bigWOWO: Sorry, Larry, just noticed that the spam robot junked your comment. Approved!
- bigWOWO: Agreed. It just has more weight if you include your name. Not that the ideas are any less valid, but it just...
- Facebook IPO (5)
- King: Actually WOWO, I bump into plenty of Asians up at the Art Center College of Design http://www.artcenter.edu/a...
- bigWOWO: Agree with King. This might not be a bad thing for Asian Americans to hear about. We can jump off the STEM...
- Raguel: People are too accustomed to thinking about value only in terms of money. Even artists are guilty of it. Some...
- Activism is as activism does (10)
- trolldetector: Brooks also goes onto say ‘You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of...
- bigWOWO: By the way, speaking of activism, there was a great David Brooks column recently. He talks about how people...
- Raguel: I have no experience whatsoever with activism. I simply do not feel safe participating in it. There is always...
- How to Win a Streetfight (18)
- bigWOWO: No worries. I feel the same way. Nothing against her, but just doubtful.
- Raguel: Hi Byron! I’ve been occupied doing a lot of reading and thinking recently. I suppose its just another...
- bigWOWO: Hey Raguel, What about your comments on ASSK?
I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
- UFC 117 Sonnen vs. Silva Recap (1)
- bigWOWO: I think Michael Bisping solved the Chael Sonnen puzzle today, even though he lost a controversial decision....
- 6 on 1 Beatdown of Asian Man (36)
- King: “I mean I look around me and 99% of the time there are no women that look like or dress like Adriana Lima...
- SWR: Apparently the girl in the second video was not the girl who filmed the fight. It was probably unwise of her to...
- Raguel: I mean I look around me and 99% of the time there are no women that look like or dress like Adriana Lima in...
- Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan (Review) (6)
- bigWOWO: Jeff, You called it! They were (if I recall correctly) 7 (twins) and 2. He’s still in the honeymoon...
- jeffat8asians: “Overpaying?” With the possible exception of college tuition (and even that is arguable),...
- Hitler: Kids suck lol.
- The Asian Rock Thread (16)
- ben: I’ve been getting into Asian rock music recently so thank you all very much for uploading all these videos.
- Simple Pickup on ABC News (132)
- “Lazy” Americans and the Decline of the American Middle Class (6)
- bigWOWO: But kobu, how can we have literature and art without money to support artists and writers? About...
- kobukson: I don’t know why everyone seems to think the notion of the decline of the middle class is such a bad...
- bigWOWO: There are a lot of veterans (supposedly) on that site. I can kind of understand it–military guys are...
- Aung Sung Suu Kyi Movie with Michelle Yeoh (45)
- bigWOWO: Eurasian, Lee Kuan Yew has always been upfront about Singapore’s hybrid system. To the best of my...
- Eurasian Sensation: @ BigWowo: New governments following independence or a major power struggle often have the sort...
- N: @bww And ironically, one of the rare democratic successes in the region that is Singapore behaves much closer to a...
- Holy Jesus, Jeremy (7)
Tag Archives: languages
Koro: New Language Discovered in India
Very interesting article here about how a linguists in northeastern India recently discovered a new language. A National Geographic team co-chaired by Greg Anderson, who spoke in Portland last year, was trying to study a language called Aka but instead discovered an entirely new language called Koro, which was completely unknown to Westerners. There are only an estimated 800 living people who still speak Koro.
I think Greg Anderson has the world’s coolest job. This is fascinating. By the way, the Koro speakers in the pictures in India look more East Asian than South Asian. See and hear the National Geographic recordings here:
Dying languages that live in New York
Husni Husain, perhaps the only person in America who speaks Mamuju, an Austronesian language
Check this interesting article in the Times. Also check out the video feature. New York is the world’s most diverse city for languages, with an estimated language count of 800. Some of these languages are endangered; if you watch the video feature, one of the linguists interviewed traveled to Indonesia to find a native speaker of Mamuju, but he couldn’t find one until he went back to New York (see photo above). I posted on the phenomenon of dying languages a long, long time ago, and as I mentioned in the previous posts, human beings have saved lots of the world’s knowledge within their languages. It is likely than many will die out, but I applaud all attempts to record them for posterity. Language is knowledge, and knowledge is power.
Mandarin replacing Cantonese
I guess this was bound to happen sooner or later: Rise of Mandarin Changes the Sound of Chinatown. Sure, Bruce Lee spoke Cantonese, as did Anita Mui, as does Jackie Chan. But there are just too many Mandarin speakers in the world with Mandarin being the official dialect of China and Taiwan. And with there being a trend of people moving out of Chinatowns across the country, the shift was going to take place anyway.
Saving the World's Endangered Languages
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages
I went to the Portland City Club yesterday to see Greg Anderson from the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. You can download the entire presentation here, or you can listen to it below:
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The supplemental handout is here. The audio is about an hour and two minutes, and Mr. Anderson starts speaking about ten minutes into the program.
Question for Readers: Bilingualism and Money
Councilman John Liu
I’d love to get to know the readers of this blog, so I thought I’d pose a question to all of you. I hope you’ll all drop a comment if you have an opinion. Remember, registration on big WOWO is not necessary. I welcome everyone to share his or her voice.
In our podcast last week with William, James, Jason, Larry, and myself, we were talking about “Crabs in a Bucket,” and William mentioned that Councilman John Liu has taken flack from some Asian American groups for supposedly being a “media whore.” Minority Militant blogged about it here. (And I probably wouldn’t be writing this post if he hadn’t used his blog to bring attention to this part of our podcast…so, thank you.)
Father of American dictionary
Some of you word geeks might find this interesting: Yale salutes father of American dictionary.
I had no idea that back in the Revolutionary days only 60% of the country spoke English. According to the article, back in the day, everyone else spoke German, Swedish, and Dutch. Noah Webster was the one who unified the country through language. It says:
A teacher after the Revolutionary War, Webster believed that Americans should have their own textbooks rather than rely on English books. He created a speller that taught students to read, spell and pronounce words and traveled around the country to promote the book.
Asian Education Foundation: Podcast
Here is my first podcast on local Portland events/groups. It’s an interview with Victoria Yu, the Executive Director of the Asian Education Foundation. You can download the podcast here, and you can hear it here:
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According to their website:
Making the Old Cool Again
This is one of the most popular posts on the NY Times site today: A Dead Language That’s Very Much Alive. It’s about the study of Latin, which is making a resurgence. According to the article, Latin was once rejected as outdated or irrelevant, but evidently it’s now exploding in popularity. Teachers are in high demand, and kids are tying it in with history.
Enrollment in Latin classes here in this Westchester County suburb has increased by nearly one-third since 2006, to 187 of the district’s 10,500 students, and the two middle schools in town are starting an ancient-cultures club in which students will explore the lives of Romans, Greeks and others.
