SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) It has been mentioned in some Ahadith that:

1- People in Paradise speak Arabic[1] and the heavenly Houris also speak Arabic.[2]

2- In a hadith by the prophet he says: "I like Arabs for three reasons: First because I am Arab myself. Second because the Quran is in Arabic, and third because Arabic is the language people speak inParadise."[3]

3- Imam Sadiq narrates a hadith in which his father said: "Allah did not speak to any prophet but in Arabic."[4]

4- Arabic is the language of Allah[5] and Allah has preferred it over other languages.[6]

5- Also at the beginning of the world, Prophet Adam spoke Arabic but after he disobeyed Allah and ate from the forbidden tree, Allah expelled him from Heaven and its blessings and replaced it with plain land and plantations. He also took Arabic and substituted it with Syriac.[7] After him the first person to speak Arabic was prophet Ismail[8]. In his first confrontation with the king of ancient Egypt, Prophet Yusuf greeted him in Arabic[9] and prophet Soleiman chose it as the language of worship[10]. It is also said that all ministers of Imam Mahdi will speak Arabic despite the fact that none of them are Arab.[11]

6- This language has shown itself as a holy language in most acts of worship and some Islamicmu’amalat (transactions). In Islam the Adhan, Iqama, Prayer and Talbiyya of Hajj (saying Labbaik Allahumma Labbaik…) and Umrah must be performed in Arabic and it is obligatory for all Muslims to learn the Arabic words used in them. Also the Quran is recited in Arabic and other religious texts like the Duas, Ziyarat and Tasbihat are in Arabic.  Even the Islamic beliefs are dictated to one who has just passed away in Arabic (this act is called ‘Talqin’).  In some cases, there are discussions in Islamic fiqh to determine whether or not formulas of certain transactions must be performed in Arabic and if it is obligatory, it can have different levels, for instance, despite the different opinions there are among the ulema regarding important issues like marriage and divorce, all agree that the special formula must be recited and it should be done in Arabic if possible. Although the essence of a contract or transaction lays in the intention behind the formula that is verbalized, but regarding important contracts like marriage or divorce there is said to be a divine connection and this is why in such issues the formula must be recited and it should also be recited in Arabic.[12]

Regardless of the chain of narrators of the mentioned Ahadith and whether or not they have been truly stated by a Masoom, they can be prove that Arabic is a special and chosen language. Moreover we must pay attention that first: The great number of this group of Ahadith leaves no need to scrutinize the chain of narrators and secondly, accepting such an issue isn't something unusual and there is no intellectual or narrative reasoning against it.

In any event, Arabic is the language of the Quran, and Allah has chosen this language to convey his everlasting and global message. Its special features and ability to convey different meanings and concepts can be considered proof for it being chosen by Allah,[13] and it is on this premises that the Quran being in Arabic is mentioned as a means of grace and courtesy from Allah in eleven verses of this holy book.

Related Links:

1- Arabic and Different Forms of Worship, Question 146 (website: 890).

2- The Completeness of Arabic, Question 2480 (website: 2621).

[1] Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 11, pg. 56; vol. 8, pg. 218 and 286 and vol. 10, pg. 81, al-Wafa Institute, Beirut, 1404 ah.

[2] Ibid, vol. 8, pg. 134.

[3] Tabarsi, Aminuddin, Tafsir Majma’ul-Bayan, vol. 2, pg. 206, Beyrut, Dar al-Ihya’ al-Torath al-Arabi.

[4] Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 16, pg. 134 and vol. 18, pg. 263: "ما أنزل الله تبارک و تعالی کتاباً و لا وحیاً إلا بالعربیه؛ فکان یقع فی مسامع ألانبیا بألسنه قومهم و کان یقع فی مسامع نبینا (ص) بالعربیه"

[5] Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 1, pg. 212 and vol. 76, pg. 127: "تعلموا العربیه فإنها کلام الله الذی یکلم به خلقه " " الوحی ینزل من عند الله عزوجل بالعربیه فاذا أتی نبیا من الانبیا إتاه بلسان قومه"

[6] Ibid, vol. 25, pg. 29.

[7] Ibid, vol. 11, pg. 56: "کان لسان آدم العربیه و هی لسان اهل الجنه. فلما عصی ربه أبدله بالجنه و نعیمها الارض و الحرث و بلسان العربیه السریانیه"

[8] Ibid, vol. 12, pg. 87.

[9] Ibid, vol. 12, pg. 294.

[10] Ibid, vol. 14, pg. 112; Ibid, vol. 27, pg. 9 and vol. 38, pp. 58 and 59. Prophet Musa had engraved these sentences on a stone in Hebrew that was discovered after the dawn of Islam mentioning that the teachings of Islam were in Arabic: " باسمک اللهم جاء الحق من ربک بلسان عربی مبین لا اله الا الله، محمد رسول الله، علی ولی الله و کتب موسی بن عمران بیده."

[11] Muhyiddin ibn Arabi, Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyyah, chapter 366.

[12] See: Tawfiqi, Husein, Arabi, Nemune’i az Zabane Moqaddas, the Haft Aseman Periodical, no. 27.

[13] From linguistics’ point of view, Arabic is one of the world’s most comprehensive languages that has the capability of conveying deep meanings in short and beautiful phrases. See: Al-Mizan, vol. 4, pg. 160; Tafsir Nemouneh, vol. 9, pg. 300 and vol. 13, pg. 311; and vol. 21, pg. 8; Pasokh be Porseshaye Mazhabiye Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi va Ayatollah Sobhani, pg. 293.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Just this week Rosetta Stone acquired Seattle-based online language-learning community Livemocha for $8.5 million in cash. At exit Livemocha had a 16 million member online language-learning community. It had also raised $19 million over six years. But today Busuu, a competing language-learning community based out of London, announces that it has reached 30 million users and its launched a dedicated iPad app for kids to learn Spanish.

It now reaches into 200 countries, and could lay justifiable claim to being the largest language learning community in the world. They also say they are growing at 40,000 new users a day with growth mainly coming from emerging markets like Brazil, Russia and Turkey, where clearly learning a language can help you get on.

In October last year Busuu raised a Series A investment round of €3.5 million from PROfounders Capital in London and private investors. So as you can see, this is potentially going to be a much bigger exit than Livemocha if or when it happens.

Cofounder and CEO Bernhard Niesner told me: “Having raised 19m usd and selling for 8m usd [Livemocha] is obviously not a great exit. But this goes back to what you actually do with the money you have raised and it seems that they burned through their cash focusing on the wrong areas. We have raised only 4.2m EUR in total and grew to 30m users, simply because we had been very careful in looking at the user metrics and trying to improve our product day after day. We still have a long way to go and online education in general is at a very early stage, but it´s as simple as in any other industry: if people like your product because it works, they will come back, recommend it to their friends and actually pay for it.”

Developed after the startup created its ‘Kids learn English with busuu’ app (which has been downloaded over 200,000 times) the new app is aimed at kids aged 4-7 years and teaches children 150 words of Spanish through 30 learning units.

A free basic version, containing three learning units, is available for download from the iTunes app store. Parents can then choose to upgrade to the full app for £6.99 / €8.99 or buy learning units in bundles of three for £1.49 / €1.79.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: Techrunch

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- THERE are a lot of good questions to consider about the internet and language. There are equally many good questions to be asked about the future of English now that a majority of its speakers are non-natives.  But last week's BBC Magazine piece on the future of English online is a dog's breakfast of confused concepts, true but misleading facts, and otherwise misguided attempts to make sense of many related, but distinct, trends in English.

Fortunately, Jane O'Brien avoided the tsk-tsking, declinist tone of so many articles like this. She talked to some relevant experts. But to take just one core example, she seems to have misunderstood what they told her:

In previous centuries, the convergence of cultures and trade led to the emergence of pidgin - a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, says Michael Ullman, director of research at Georgetown University's Brain and Language Lab.

When the next generation of pidgin speakers begins to add vocabulary and grammar, it becomes a distinct Creole language. "You get different endings, it's more complex and systematised. Something like that could be happening to English on the web," he says.

Take Hinglish...

No, don't take Hinglish. It's not a creole. It's a broad term referring to either English with a healthy dash of unique Indian vocabulary, or the Indian languages spoken with English words and phrases thrown in, or the speech of Indians comfortable switching back and forth quickly between two languages.  But it's nowhere near a full creole, and so is not a good pointer to what is happening to English online.

Ms O'Brien is right that linguists call an improvised contact language a pidgin. It will typically mix the two groups' native languages. The almost magical transformation to a creole is when children born in the contact situation learn the pidgin as their native language. Only then do we see "different endings...more complex and systematised". Creoles are internally consistent, with a fully functional new grammar. (Typically they use fewer word-endings than the parent languages do.)  Such creoles can even be national languages, as in Haiti and New Guinea. The fact that such perfect languages arise from such imperfect circumstances has long been fascinating to psychologists of language. The story of Nicaraguan Sign Language, developed by neglected deaf children, is a particularly exciting example of a full-fledged language arising from no ingredients at all.

But this isn't what's happening to English online. Many non-natives write online in English. Some of them have distinctive varieties of English, but none are creolising the main body of English. Hinglish is not being learned or written by non-Indians. Singlish (from Singapore) is more like a real creole, an established dialect of English that is difficult for non-Singaporeans to follow. But again, it's not being learned by non-Singaporeans and thus changing standard English. Singaporeans use (usually quite good) standard English with non-Singaporeans. Many other non-natives are simply writing English full of the typical mistakes of a non-fluent speaker. But there are no children learning their first language from this broken English and regularising the mistakes into a new creole. The reason is obvious: children do not learn their first language from the internet.

Roughly, three things are happening. One is that we already know British and American English are seeding each other with new words and phrases (to the annoyance of some onboth sides). It's likely that this is increasing in the age of globalisation and the internet. As India rises and its many speakers of English spread their culture around the world, we're likely to see more Hinglish in standard English, too. Other English-speaking groups will contribute as well. But this will probably be limited to a few words and phrases. This is just plain old borrowing, not creolisation.

The second new thing is that improvised, speech-like forms of written English are proliferating on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. This means that non-standard dialects (Hinglish, Singlish, southern white English, black American English) are being written more than they used to. We might even see "standard" written forms of these, or something like them, emerge. But they will remain minority dialects, with Indians, Singaporeans, Cockneys or Brooklynites knowing they need to use standard English when writing formally for a wider audience.

The biggest potential change is the third. What could it mean that so many non-natives are learning and using English imperfectly? This has less to do with the internet. Non-natives are already interacting with each other in person, in English, all around the world. It's harder to forecast the structural changes that this could cause to standard English. But a few guesses are possible.

A few bits of English grammar are both tricky and non-essential. The contact between Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans probably caused the death of Old English's elaborate case system, as many adults and then their children learned the old language imperfectly. It's easy to imagine modern-day contact finishing off some of the last vestiges of that case system, like "whom".  (This is an easy call, since natives already fail to master "whom"; its decline is in progress.)  Probably many other such changes will take place. But it's hard to say what they'll be.  The tense-aspect system is one candidate. When to use "I speak", "I do speak" and "I'm speaking", "I have spoken", "I spoke" and such is hard to master. As the numerical advantage of non-natives over natives grows, changes to that system are possible. Maybe non-native speakers can tell us in the comments: what bits of tricky English do you ignore when you can get away with it (speaking to other non-natives, for example)?

English is undergoing a novel experiment. I can't think of a standardised living language that has been spoken by more non-native-speakers than natives for a long time. Natives consider the language "theirs", and will resist deep structural changes. The influence of foreigners is likely to cause annoyance. But such changes will come, inevitably, if slowly. Check back on this blog in five hundred years.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- THERE are a lot of good questions to consider about the internet and language. There are equally many good questions to be asked about the future of English now that a majority of its speakers are non-natives.  But last week's BBC Magazine piece on the future of English online is a dog's breakfast of confused concepts, true but misleading facts, and otherwise misguided attempts to make sense of many related, but distinct, trends in English.

Fortunately, Jane O'Brien avoided the tsk-tsking, declinist tone of so many articles like this. She talked to some relevant experts. But to take just one core example, she seems to have misunderstood what they told her:

In previous centuries, the convergence of cultures and trade led to the emergence of pidgin - a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, says Michael Ullman, director of research at Georgetown University's Brain and Language Lab.

When the next generation of pidgin speakers begins to add vocabulary and grammar, it becomes a distinct Creole language. "You get different endings, it's more complex and systematised. Something like that could be happening to English on the web," he says.

Take Hinglish...

No, don't take Hinglish. It's not a creole. It's a broad term referring to either English with a healthy dash of unique Indian vocabulary, or the Indian languages spoken with English words and phrases thrown in, or the speech of Indians comfortable switching back and forth quickly between two languages.  But it's nowhere near a full creole, and so is not a good pointer to what is happening to English online.

Ms O'Brien is right that linguists call an improvised contact language a pidgin. It will typically mix the two groups' native languages. The almost magical transformation to a creole is when children born in the contact situation learn the pidgin as their native language. Only then do we see "different endings...more complex and systematised". Creoles are internally consistent, with a fully functional new grammar. (Typically they use fewer word-endings than the parent languages do.)  Such creoles can even be national languages, as in Haiti and New Guinea. The fact that such perfect languages arise from such imperfect circumstances has long been fascinating to psychologists of language. The story of Nicaraguan Sign Language, developed by neglected deaf children, is a particularly exciting example of a full-fledged language arising from no ingredients at all.

But this isn't what's happening to English online. Many non-natives write online in English. Some of them have distinctive varieties of English, but none are creolising the main body of English. Hinglish is not being learned or written by non-Indians. Singlish (from Singapore) is more like a real creole, an established dialect of English that is difficult for non-Singaporeans to follow. But again, it's not being learned by non-Singaporeans and thus changing standard English. Singaporeans use (usually quite good) standard English with non-Singaporeans. Many other non-natives are simply writing English full of the typical mistakes of a non-fluent speaker. But there are no children learning their first language from this broken English and regularising the mistakes into a new creole. The reason is obvious: children do not learn their first language from the internet.

Roughly, three things are happening. One is that we already know British and American English are seeding each other with new words and phrases (to the annoyance of some onboth sides). It's likely that this is increasing in the age of globalisation and the internet. As India rises and its many speakers of English spread their culture around the world, we're likely to see more Hinglish in standard English, too. Other English-speaking groups will contribute as well. But this will probably be limited to a few words and phrases. This is just plain old borrowing, not creolisation.

The second new thing is that improvised, speech-like forms of written English are proliferating on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. This means that non-standard dialects (Hinglish, Singlish, southern white English, black American English) are being written more than they used to. We might even see "standard" written forms of these, or something like them, emerge. But they will remain minority dialects, with Indians, Singaporeans, Cockneys or Brooklynites knowing they need to use standard English when writing formally for a wider audience.

The biggest potential change is the third. What could it mean that so many non-natives are learning and using English imperfectly? This has less to do with the internet. Non-natives are already interacting with each other in person, in English, all around the world. It's harder to forecast the structural changes that this could cause to standard English. But a few guesses are possible.

A few bits of English grammar are both tricky and non-essential. The contact between Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans probably caused the death of Old English's elaborate case system, as many adults and then their children learned the old language imperfectly. It's easy to imagine modern-day contact finishing off some of the last vestiges of that case system, like "whom".  (This is an easy call, since natives already fail to master "whom"; its decline is in progress.)  Probably many other such changes will take place. But it's hard to say what they'll be.  The tense-aspect system is one candidate. When to use "I speak", "I do speak" and "I'm speaking", "I have spoken", "I spoke" and such is hard to master. As the numerical advantage of non-natives over natives grows, changes to that system are possible. Maybe non-native speakers can tell us in the comments: what bits of tricky English do you ignore when you can get away with it (speaking to other non-natives, for example)?

English is undergoing a novel experiment. I can't think of a standardised living language that has been spoken by more non-native-speakers than natives for a long time. Natives consider the language "theirs", and will resist deep structural changes. The influence of foreigners is likely to cause annoyance. But such changes will come, inevitably, if slowly. Check back on this blog in five hundred years.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- When America emerged from the ashes of a bruising war with Britain in 1814, the nation was far from united. Noah Webster thought that a common language would bring people together and help create a new identity that would make the country truly independent of the British.

Webster's dictionary, now in its 11th edition, adopted the Americanised spellings familiar today - er instead of re intheatre, dropping the u from colour, and losing the double l from words such as traveller. It also documented new words that were uniquely American such as skunk, opossum, hickory, squash and chowder.

An American Dictionary of the English Language took 18 years to complete and Webster learned 26 other languages in order to research the etymology of its 70,000 entries.

The internet is creating a similar language evolution, but at a much faster pace.

There are now thought to be some 4.5 billion web pages worldwide. And with half the population of China now on line, many of them are written in Chinese.

Still, some linguists predict that within 10 years English will dominate the internet - but in forms very different to what we accept and recognise as English today.

That's because people who speak English as a second language already outnumber native speakers. And increasingly they use it to communicate with other non-native speakers, particularly on the internet where less attention is paid to grammar and spelling and users don't have to worry about their accent.

Unicode: Facilitating international languages

English remains the single most commonly-used language on the web. But in 2010, for the first time ever, the majority of the world's data was in non-English text.

That's because new computer technology has made it easier to read and write in non-Roman languages.

"Much technology was initially unreliable in languages other than those using Roman script," he says. "But the broader adoption of standards like Unicode means that this is changing."

Unicode enables a message generated in Chinese characters in Shanghai to appear the same when it's read on a computer or mobile device in San Francisco.

"The internet enfranchises people who are not native speakers to use English in significant and meaningful ways," says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington DC.

Users of Facebook already socialise in a number of different "Englishes" including Indian English, or Hinglish, Spanglish (Spanish English) and Konglish (Korean English). While these variations have long existed within individual cultures, they're now expanding and comingling online.

"On the internet, all that matters is that people can communicate - nobody has a right to tell them what the language should be," says Baron. "If you can talk Facebook into putting up pages, you have a language that has political and social standing even if it doesn't have much in the way of linguistic uniqueness."

Some words are adaptations of traditional English: In Singlish, or Singaporean English, "blur" means "confused" or "slow": "She came into the conversation late and was blur as a result."

Others combine English words to make something new. In Konglish, "skinship" means intimate physical contact: handholding, touching, caressing.

Technology companies are tapping into the new English variations with products aimed at enabling users to add words that are not already in the English dictionary.

And most large companies have English websites, while smaller businesses are learning that they need a common language - English - to reach global customers.

"While most people don't speak English as their first language, there is a special commercial and social role for English driven by modern forms of entertainment," says Robert Munro, a computational linguist and head of Idibon, a language technology company in California.

Fragile languages find footing online

Unesco estimates that half of the world's 6,000 languages will have disappeared by the end of the century - but new research shows that social media and text messaging in particular are promoting and supporting language diversity.

Texting is now conducted by speakers of around 5,000 languages.

"Text messaging is the most linguistically diverse form of written communication that has ever existed," says Munroe.

"It's also become the first form of written communication of many of the world's languages," he says.

"Most have only ever been spoken. But the technology and economics of text messages and the proliferation of cells phones means it's the most economic option of communication."

"The prevalence of English movies in regions where there is not much technology other than cell phones and DVDs makes English an aspirational language. People think it's the language of the digital age."

In previous centuries, the convergence of cultures and trade led to the emergence of pidgin - a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, says Michael Ullman, director of research at Georgetown University's Brain and Language Lab.

When the next generation of pidgin speakers begins to add vocabulary and grammar, it becomes a distinct Creole language. "You get different endings, it's more complex and systematised. Something like that could be happening to English on the web," he says.

Take Hinglish.

Hinglish is a blend of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English and is so widespread that it's even being taught to British diplomats.

Mobile phone companies are also updating their apps to reflect its growing use.

In Hinglish, a co-brother is a brother-in-law; eve-teasing means sexual harassment; an emergency crew responding to a crisis might be described as 'airdashing', and somewhat confusing to football fans, a 'stadium' refers to a bald man with a fringe of hair. There's even a new concept of time - "pre-pone", the opposite of postpone, meaning "to bring something forward".

The increasing prevalence of the internet in everyday life means that language online is not a zero sum game. Instead, it allows multiple languages to flourish.

"Most people actually speak multiple languages - it's less common to only speak one," says Mr Munro. "English has taken its place as the world's lingua franca, but it's not pushing out other languages."

Instead, other languages are pushing their way into English, and in the process creating something new.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – It is a warning Quebec anglos have been hearing for the past 40 years – the French language is in danger, Quebec’s identity is threatened.

That perceived threat has led to the creation of Quebec’s language charter and four decades of amendments and protests as language activists mobilized against what they have perennially described as the sea of English that surround them.

But a survey published this weekend suggests that once you stick your toe in that sea, so to speak, the waves aren’t anywhere near as frightening as you thought they’d be.

The poll, conducted for the Association of Canadian Studies, finds that the more time francophones spend with their anglophone neighbours, the less they worry about losing their first language.

That result seems to contradict the idea that francophones living in urban areas like Montreal are concerned about the increasing use of English in their midst.

Among the respondents who had frequent contact with anglophones, about 37 per cent said they were somewhat or very concerned about losing their French. As contact with English decreased, however, the number rose until it reached 60 per cent among francophones with who “never” encounter English speakers in their daily lives.

Is it possible that more you get to know anglophones, and their television shows, the less scary they become?

We asked the question to Jack Jedwab, director of the Association for Canadian Studies.- www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: Montreal Gazette

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – "What do you know about where I come from?" That was one of the first questions I ever asked Bosco Mongousso, an Mbendjele pygmy who lives in the sparsely populated Ndoki forest at the far northern tip of the Republic of Congo. We were sitting on logs around a fire one evening four years ago, eating a dinner of smoked river fish and koko, a vitamin-rich wild green harvested from the forest. I'd come to this hard-to-reach corner of the Congo basin – a spot at least 50km from the nearest village – to report a story for National Geographic magazine about a population of chimpanzees who display the most sophisticated tool-use ever observed among non-humans.

Mongousso, who makes his living, for the most part, by hunting wildlife and gathering forest produce such as nuts, fruits, mushrooms and leaves, had teeth that had been chiselled to sharp points as a child. He stood about 1.4m (4ft 7in) tall and had a wide, wonderful grin that he exercised prolifically. He considered my question carefully.

"I don't know. It's far away," he told me finally, through a translator. According to Oxford anthropologist Jerome Lewis, the Mbendjele believe that the spirit world is inhabited by people with white skin. For them, the afterlife and Europe go by the same word, putu. "Amu dua putu" is a common euphemism for death – literally, "He's gone to Europe." For me to have come all the way to the Ndoki forest was a journey of potentially metaphysical dimensions.

"Have you ever heard of the United States of America?" I asked Mongousso.

He shook his head. "No."

I didn't know where to begin. "Well, the United States is like a really big village on the other side of the ocean," I told him. The translator conveyed my explanation, and then had a back-and-forth exchange with Mongousso.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"He wanted to know, 'What's the ocean?'"

There was a brief moment this summer, a little over a year after the publication of my first book, Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art And Science Of Remembering Everything, when I thought I had finally put the subject of my memory into my memory. No phone interview with an obscure midwestern talk radio station or lunchtime lecture in a corporate auditorium was going to prevent me from finally moving on to another topic and starting work on my next long-term project – inspired by my encounter with Mongousso – about the world's last remaining hunter-gatherer societies and what they can teach us.

As part of my research, I had begun planning a series of logistically complicated trips that would take me back to the same remote region where I had met Mongousso. My goal was to spend the summer living in the forest with him and his fellow Mbendjele pygmies. It's virtually impossible to find pygmies in northern Congo who speak French, much less English, and so in order to embed to the degree I was hoping, I needed to learn Lingala, the trade language that emerged in the 19th century as the lingua franca of the Congo basin. Though it is not the first language of the pygmies, Lingala is universally spoken across northern Congo – not only by the pygmies, but by their Bantu neighbors as well. Today, the language has about two million native speakers in both the Congos and in parts of Angola, and another seven million, including the Mbendjele pygmies, who use it as a second tongue.

You might think that learning a language with so many speakers would be an easy task in our global, interconnected age. And yet when I went online in search of Lingala resources, the only textbook I could find was a US Foreign Service Institute handbook printed in 1963 – when central Africa was still a front of the cold war – and a scanned copy of a 1,109-word Lingala-English dictionary. Which is how I ended up getting drawn back into the world of hard-core memorising that I had written about in Moonwalking.

Readers of that book (or the extract that ran last year in this magazine) will remember the brilliant, if slightly eccentric, British memory champion named Ed Cooke who took me under his wing and taught me a set of ancient mnemonic techniques, developed in Greece around the fifth century BC, that can be used to cram loads of random information into a skull in a relatively short amount of time. Ed showed me how to use those ancient tricks to perform seemingly impossible feats, such as memorising entire poems, strings of hundreds of random numbers, and even the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards in less than two minutes.

Since my book was published, Ed had moved on to other things and co-founded an online learning company called Memrise with a Princeton University neuroscience PhD named Greg Detre. Their goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything – from the names of obscure cheeses, to the members of the British cabinet, to the vocabulary of an African language – as efficiently and effectively as possible. Since launching, the site has achieved a cult following among language enthusiasts and picked up more than a quarter of a million users.

"The idea of Memrise is to make learning properly fun," Ed told me over coffee on a recent visit to New York to meet with investors. "Normally people stop learning things because of a bunch of negative feedback, such as worries about whether they'll actually get anywhere, insecurities about their own intelligence, and a sense of it being effortful. With Memrise, we're trying to invert that and create a form of learning experience that is so fun, so secure, so well directed and so mischievously effortless that it's more like a game – something you'd want to do instead of watching TV."

I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish, and that came only after five years of intense classroom study and more than half a dozen trips to Latin America. Still, I was determined to master Lingala before leaving for the Congo. And I had just under two and a half months to do it. When I asked Ed if he thought it would be possible to learn an entire language in such a minuscule amount of time using Memrise, his response was matter-of-fact: "It'll be a cinch."

Memrise takes advantage of a couple of basic, well-established principles. The first is what's known as elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you'll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind's eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it'll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote.

Memrise encourages you to create a mnemonic, which it calls a "mem", for every word you want to learn. A mem could be a rhyme, an image, a video or just a note about the word's etymology, or something striking about its pronunciation. In the case of languages such as French and Chinese, where there are thousands of people learning it at any one time, you can browse through a catalogue of mems created by other members of the Memrise community. This is especially fun for Chinese, where users have uploaded videos of various logographic characters morphing into cartoons of the words they represent.

As I was the only user trying to learn Lingala at the time, it was up to me to come up with my own mems for each word in the dictionary. This required a good deal of work, but it was fun and engaging work. For example, engine is motele in Lingala. When I learned that word, I took a second to visualise a rusty engine revving in a motel room. It's a specific motel room I stayed in once upon on a time on a cross-country road trip – the cheapest room I ever paid to occupy. Twenty dollars a night, as I recall, somewhere in central Nevada. I made an effort to see, hear and even smell that oily machine revving and rattling on the stained carpet floor. All of those extra details are associational hooks that will lead my mind back to motele the next time I need to find the Lingala word for engine.

Likewise, for motema, which means heart, I visualised a beating organ dripping blood on a blinking and purring computer modem. To remember that bondoki means gun, I saw James Bond pointing a gun at Dr No, and saying, "Okey-dokey." If this all sounds a little silly, it is. But that's also the point. Studies have confirmed what Cicero and the other ancient writers on memory knew well: the stranger the imagery, the more markedly memorable.

Memrise is built to discourage cramming. It's easy to spend five minutes learning vocabulary with the app, but hard to spend 50. That is by design. One of the best-demonstrated principles of memory – proven both in the controlled setting of the laboratory and in studies conducted in the wilds of the classroom – is the value of what's known as "spaced repetition". Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it – to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. The effect on retention of learning in this manner is staggering. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don't try to cram.

One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens. What if instead of tabbing over to the web browser in search of some nugget of gossip or news, or opening up a mindless game such as Angry Birds, we could instead scratch the itch by engaging in a meaningful activity, such as learning a foreign language?

If five million people can be convinced to log into Zynga's Facebook game Farmville each day to water a virtual garden and literally watch the grass grow on their computer screens, surely, Ed believes, there must be a way to co-opt those same neural circuits that reward mindless gaming to make learning more addictive and enjoyable. That's the great ambition of Memrise, and it points towards a future where we're constantly learning in tiny chunks of our downtime.

The secret of Zynga's success has been endless iteration of its product through A/B testing. Show two groups of users two slightly different versions of the same game, and see which group sticks around longer. Then change another variable and re-run the experiment. Memrise is beginning to use the same aggressive empirical testing to figure out not just how to make learning appealing, but also how to make it more effective. If it turns out that users remember 0.5% better when words are shown in one font versus another, or that their memories are 2% more durable when prodded at 7am versus 11am, those changes will be logged in Memrise's servers and affect the next day's updates to the app. The software is beginning to act as a massively distributed psychology experiment, discovering on a daily basis how to optimise human memory.

In a nod to Farmville, Memrise refers to the words you're trying to learn as "seeds". Each time you revise a given word, you "water" it in your "greenhouse" until it has fully sprouted and been consolidated in your long-term memory "garden". When you've been away from Memrise for too long, you receive an email letting you know that the words you've memorised have begun to wilt and need to be watered.

Because Memrise knows what words you already know – plus exactly how well you know them – and what words you haven't yet got a handle on, its algorithm tests you only on the information just at the edge of your knowledge and doesn't waste time forcing you to overlearn memories that you've already banked in your long-term garden.

My own pattern of using the app worked like this: each morning there would be a message waiting in my inbox, prodding me to water a few of my memories that were in danger of wilting, and so I would dutifully log in and spend a few minutes revising words I had learned days or sometimes weeks earlier. Sometime mid-morning, when I was ready for my first break from work, I'd log back in and get a new bundle of seeds to start watering. Two or three times after lunch, just after checking email and Facebook, I'd go back and do some more watering of whichever plants Memrise told me needed the most attention. All the while, I kept a close eye on all the points I was accumulating, and took meaningless satisfaction in watching my ranking among Memrise users inch up day by day.

After two and a half months, I'd not only planted my way through the entire Lingala dictionary, but also watered all of my mems to the point where they were secure in my long-term memory garden. You could pick any word in the dictionary and I could translate it into Lingala. Still, even after memorising an entire dictionary, I was only the 2,305th highest-ranked Memrise user.

I asked Ed if one of his software engineers could mine the data stored on Memrise's servers and put together a report on how much time I ended up whiling away with the software. When the figures were finally tallied, I had clocked 22 hours and 15 minutes learning vocabulary on Memrise, spread out over 10 weeks. The longest single uninterrupted burst that I spent learning was 20 minutes, and my average session lasted just four minutes. In other words, it took a little less than one full day, spread out over two and a half months, devoting bite-sized chunks of time, to memorise the entire dictionary.

But did it work?

It took me almost a week by plane, truck and ferry to get back to the Ndoki forest and Mongousso's village of Makao, the last small outpost on the Motaba river before you reach the uninhabited wilderness of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. For several days, I was stuck 120km west of Makao in a village called Bomassa, while I waited for a truck. It was a frustrating experience, but it gave me an opportunity to begin to test my Lingala with the locals. On my third day in town, a pygmy named Makoti came to visit me early in the morning. I couldn't tell within a decade in either direction how old he was, but he had a long, intimidating scar down his left cheek and an intense demeanor. "Yo na ngai, totambola na zamba" – "You and me, let's walk in the forest," he said. He pointed at me and pointed at himself, and then held his index and middle finger together to suggest it should be just the two of us.

I had brought with me a translator from Brazzaville, who spoke not only English, French and Lingala, but also a little bit of Mbendjele – and four other tribal languages to boot. Though he was helpful in getting me settled, we quickly ran into a problem. The pygmies have a complicated relationship with their Bantu neighbours, one that in some ways resembles medieval serfdom. Pygmies are relentlessly discriminated against by the Bantu, who refer to them as subhuman and often refuse even to touch them. Each pygmy has an inherited Bantu "proprietor" for whom he does menial labour, often in return for little more than cigarettes or alcohol. The pygmies in turn put on a completely different face among the village Bantu – to whom they refer as gorillas behind their backs – than they do when they're alone out in the forest. Even the presence of an affable, urban, educated outsider such as my translator immediately caused the pygmies to tighten up.

I followed Makoti out of the village and on to an elephant trail, where we found a comfortable log on which to sit, smoke a cigarette and talk in hushed tones about relationships between the Bantu and the pygmies. "Bantu, mondele, babendjele: makila ya ndenge moko" – "The Bantu, the whites, the pygmies: we all have the same blood." He pinched the skin of his forearm. "Kasi, bayebi te," he told me. "But they don't know that." He meant the Bantu.

This was my first conversation in Lingala without a translator at my side. Even though I had to keep telling him, "Malembe, malembe" – "Slow down, slow down" – I realised I was understanding quite a bit of what he was telling me and that my drilling with Memrise had given me a far better grounding than I had thought possible.

It goes without saying that memorising the 1,000 most common words in Lingala, French or Chinese is not going to make anyone a fluent speaker. That would have been an unrealistic goal. But it turns out to be just enough vocabulary to let you hit the ground running once you're authentically immersed in a language. And, more importantly, that basic vocabulary gives you a scaffolding to which you can attach other words as you hear them. It also lays down the raw data from which you can begin to detect the patterns that define a language's grammar. As I memorised words in Lingala, I started to notice that there were relationships between them. The verb to work is kosala. The noun for work is mosala. A tool is esaleli. A workshop is an esalelo. At first, this was all white noise to me. But as I packed my memory with more and more words, these connections started to make sense and I began to notice the same grammatical formulas elsewhere – and could even pick them up in conversation. This sort of pattern recognition happens organically over time when a child learns a language, but giving myself all the data points to work with at once certainly made the job easier, and faster.

Makoti, who had worked with European foresters, American primatologists and even for a brief spell with the Oxford anthropologist Lewis, seemed to understand what I was after, and why I had come such a long way to spend time with his family and friends. As he stubbed out the last ashes of his cigarette, he suggested, in Lingala sentences that had to be repeated three or four times before I fully grasped them, that I abandon my Bantu translator and make him my assistant instead. It was a tremendous, if perhaps unwarranted, statement of confidence in my Lingala. "Nakokende na ya na Makao" – "I'll come with you to Makao." It was only a four-hour truck ride away, but the farthest he'd been from home in his entire life.

I told him, "Omona, nayoka Lingala malamu mingi te. Nasengeli kozala na mosalisi koloba Anglais" – "Look, I don't understand Lingala very well. I need to have a helper who speaks English."

He shook his head. "Te, te, oyoka malamu" – "No, no, you understand well."

Then a thought occurred to him, which I was surprised it had taken him so long to express. "Wapi oyekolaka Lingala?" – "Where did you learn Lingala?"

I thought about trying to tell him about the internet, about my computer, about this web app developed over in putu– but once again I didn't know where to begin. Instead, I held out my hand to shake his and told him he should let his wife know that he'd be travelling with me to Makao. As for explaining Memrise, that conversation would have to wait for a little more fluency.— www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: The Guardian

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — Quebec's new government is about to enable more strict enforcement of the language laws in the French-speaking Canadian province.

The Parti Quebecois provincial government plans to update the Charter of the French language, also known as Bill 101, which defines French -- the language spoken by the majority of Quebec’s population -- as the province’s official language.

Bill 101 was originally passed in 1977 to protect the French language in the province. It banned the use of English in public signs and posters. It also prevented immigrants from sending their children to English-speaking schools.

The newly-proposed version of the charter will give more power to the so-called language police to fine and supposedly bring to justice those who defy it.

It will also close down all English-speaking private bridging schools and require all businesses with more than 11 employees to use French in their communications.

The new separatist party, led by Pauline Marois, is fighting against, what it calls, the Anglicization of Quebec.

The Liberal leadership candidate, Justin Trudeau, said it was not necessary to toughen the language laws.

“I think we are revisiting old debates,” Trudeau was quoted as saying. “The majority of people in Papineau in Quebec City and across Quebec are focused on their jobs, the economy, health, and education of their children to participate fully in this era of globalization in which we live.”— www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: Press TV

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — Twitter agreed to pull racist and anti-Semitic tweets under a pair of French hash tags after a Jewish group threatened to sue the social network for running afoul of national laws against hate speech, the organization said.

The decision came a day after Twitter bowed to German law and blocked an account of a banned neo-Nazi group there.

The freewheeling social network is increasingly running up against European anti-discrimination laws, many of which date to the aftermath of the Holocaust by governments that acknowledged the contribution of years of hate speech to the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews.

Friday's action, which was not carried out immediately, would mark a dramatic new stage for the company that has famously refused efforts to police its millions of users.

"Twitter does not mediate content," the company said in a statement.

"If we are alerted to content that may be in violation of our terms of service, we will investigate each report and respond according to the policies and procedures outlined in our support pages."

Slurs, photos evoked Holocaust

The company's policies require international users to comply with local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.

The French Union of Jewish Students, which planned to supply Twitter with a list of the offensive tweets to be pulled, said it would still file a formal complaint against the social network to bring the tweeters to justice. The union held a conference call Thursday night with Twitter executives in California.

The anti-Semitic tweets in French, which started Oct. 10, included slurs and photos evoking the Holocaust, including one of a pile of ash and another of an emaciated Holocaust victim. They were followed by offensive, anti-Muslim tweets.

On Thursday,Twitter blocked the neo-Nazi's account in Germany, although its tweets were still visible to any user whose settings include a different location.

The French-language tweets came from hundreds of users, not all of them necessarily in France.

Twitter dismisses criticism

Almost immediately after the French group announced its agreement with Twitter, tweets went up against what some users saw as an attack on freedom of expression — all using the hash tag that started the wave of racist posts on Oct. 10.

Elie Petit, vice president of the group, dismissed the criticism: "I don't think a call for murder is freedom of expression," he said.

French law forbids all discrimination based on ethnicity, nationality, race or religion.

German law is more specific. Because of its Nazi past, the country has strict laws prohibiting the use of related symbols and slogans — like the display of the swastika, or saying "heil Hitler."

After the decision in Germany on Thursday, Twitter's general counsel Alex Macgillivray said in a tweet that the site's administrators "never want to withhold content, good to have tools to do it narrowly and transparently."

In a statement, Jonathan Hayoun, the French group's president, said the group wasn't trying to be the "garbage collectors of the Internet." But, he added, "Twitter can't be a place of illegal expression."— www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: CBC

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — Their findings differ from conventional theory that these languages originated 5,000 years ago in south-west Russia.

The New Zealand researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose.

Their study is reported in Science.

A language family is a group of languages that arose from a common ancestor, known as the proto-language.

Linguists identify these families by trawling through modern languages for words of similar sound that often describe the same thing, like water and wasser (German). These shared words - or cognates - represent our language inheritance.

According to the Ethnologue database, more than 100 language families exist.

The Indo-European family is one of the largest families - more than 400 languages spoken in at least 60 countries - and its origins are unclear.

The Steppes, or Kurgan, theorists hold that the proto-language originated in the Steppes of Russia, north of the Caspian Sea, about 5,000 years ago.

The Anatolia hypothesis - first proposed in the late 1980s by Prof Colin Renfrew (now Lord Renfrew) - suggests an origin in the Anatolian region of Turkey about 3,000 years earlier.

To determine which competing theory was the most likely, Dr Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland and his team interrogated language evolution using phylogenetic analyses - more usually used to trace virus epidemics.

Fundamentals of life

Phylogenetics reveals relatedness by assessing how much of the information stored in DNA is shared between organisms.

Chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor and share about 98% of their DNA. Because of this shared ancestry, they cluster together on phylogenetic - or family - trees.

Like DNA, language is passed down, generation to generation.

Although language changes and evolves, some linguists have argued that cognates describing the fundamentals of life - kinship (mother, father), body parts (eye, hand), the natural world (fire, water) and basic verbs (to walk, to run) - resist change.

These conserved cognates are strongly linked to the proto-language of old.

Dr Atkinson and his team built a database containing 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo‐European languages, which included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.

Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages - the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree.

The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated.

Looking back into the depths of the tree, Dr Atkinson and his colleagues were able to confirm the Anatolian origin.

To test if the alternative hypothesis - of a Russian origin several years later - was possible, the team used competing models of evolution to pitch Steppes and Anatolian theory against each other.

Cognate words represent our language inheritance

In repeated tests, the Anatolian theory always came out on top.

Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: "This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution - the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages.

"This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there."

Commenting on the inclusion of ancient languages in the analyses, he added: "The use of a number of known calibration points from 'fossil' languages greatly strengthens the conclusions."

However, the findings have not found universal acceptance. Prof Petri Kallio from the University of Helsinki suggests that several cognate words describing technological inventions - such as the wheel - are evident across different languages.

He argues that the Indo-European proto-language diversified after the invention of the wheel, about 5,000 years ago.

On the phylogenetic methods used to date the proto-language, Prof Kallio added: "So why do I still remain sceptical? Unlike archaeological radiocarbon dating based on the fixed rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope, there is simply no fixed rate of decay of basic vocabulary, which would allow us to date ancestral proto-languages.

"Instead of the quantity of the words, therefore, the trained Indo-Europeanists concentrate on the quality of the words."

Prof Pagel is less convinced by the counter-argument: "Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner."—www.shafaqna.com/english

Source: BBC