"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert (poetry reading)

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In Poland I have seen a nice code-switching example. At the National Museum in Krakow the signs indicating the floors are bilingual, giving the numbers in Polish and in English: the first floor in English is the second floor in Polish, and the second floor in Polish is the third floor in English.

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THIS week's New Yorker contains a fascinating piece by Oliver Sacks on
what happens when you lose the ability to read (link to summary). The
condition, alexia, is usually the result of a stroke, but Dr Sacks
describes how he himself suffered a temporary migrained-induced alexia
while driving in New York, which made the street signs suddenly look
to him ( Read more... )

...."English is about to make a “declaration of independence from the linguistic past.” English is shedding many of its colonial and imperial connotations and is becoming what the anthropologist Benedict Anderson calls a type of “post-clerical Latin.” The road signs on the information highway are written in English. Eighty percent of the world’s ( Read more... )

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An article (in Hebrew...) on the efforts to revive Syriac as a spoken language in different communities in the Middle East (and..in Sweden).


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