SUMMARY: Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, Lauren Collins never needed to speak a foreign language outside of high school Spanish classes. It wasn’t until she met her French-speaking husband and moved to Switzerland that she felt the need to become bilingual. She offers her humble opinion (NewsHour IMHO) on the value of learning a new language.
SUMMARY: At age nine, Arsh Shah Dilbagi asked his parents for a puppy; they gave him a Lego kit instead. Undeterred, Arsh used it to construct a dog. Now 17, the tech prodigy is still building his dreams from scratch. His latest project is a smartphone-sized device called “Talk” that converts breath into speech, a boon for the developmentally disabled. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.
ARSH SHAH DILBAGI, Student Inventor: Hi. My name is Arsh Shah Dilbagi. I’m from Panipat, India. I love robots. I’m good at computer science and math. And I wish to change the world.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour):He was 15 when he made this video two years ago, as a finalist in Google’s Science Fair, with a smartphone-sized device called TALK that converts breath into speech.
COMPUTER VOICE: TALK is an innovative device for people with developmental disabilities.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: He is also savvy at marketing, abundantly displayed on social media.
Here he is giving a "TED Talk" in Mumbai:
ARSH SHAH DILBAGI: I felt that, as long as you are breathing, you should be able to live, truly live.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: He’s always like to tinker, he says. When his parents gave him a LEGO kit, instead of a dog, there was only one thing to do.
ARSH SHAH DILBAGI: I made a little dog out of the LEGO kit.
The very fact that we humans are capable of creating machines which can be more capable than we ever can be, that is fascinating. That’s just like cheating evolution.
Over the years, learned locomotion, how to control motors, how to put things together, how to make robots better.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: He learned to turn toys into tools. The idea for the speech device began when he accompanied his grandmother to the hospital, he says, and saw a severely speech-impaired Parkinson’s disease patient.
ARSH SHAH DILBAGI: I researched about everything I could about all the speech impediments. That research went on for a long time. And after that, I decided, OK, there are problems that I found out with the currently available solutions.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: He says devices now on the market, like the one used by one of his favorite authors, Stephen Hawking, all require a laptop computer, they can be invasive, and they are, of course, expensive, well beyond vast majority of people, especially in India.
SUMMARY: “Language Matters,” (link to full video) a new PBS documentary, explores how linguistic heritage and traditional cultures around the world are at risk of being lost forever. Jeffrey Brown talks to the show’s host, poet Bob Holman, about the fight to revive languages on the brink.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And finally tonight: to languages around the world at risk of being lost.
That’s the subject of a new documentary premiering on some PBS stations this week and now streaming online.
Jeffrey Brown has our look.
NARRATOR: You are listening to a song sung in a language called Amurdak, a language spoken in northern Australia. There is virtually only one person left on our planet who speaks Amurdak.
His name is Charlie Mangulda.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): A language nearly gone from an aboriginal community on Australia’s Goulburn Islands.
The new PBS documentary “Language Matters” explore tongues around the globe at risk of being lost forever and what is lost with them.
GWYNETH LEWIS, National Poet of Wales: We are being narrowed and homogenized by the loss of languages that we’re not even aware of.
JEFFREY BROWN: Predictions are dire that, by the end of this century, more than half of the world’s 6,000 languages will be gone.
BOB HOLMAN, Host, “Language Matters”: Every language has poetry, although it’s very different from culture to culture. And as I began to learn about how these languages are disappearing, that kind of poetry is also going. The entire inner life of a people is disappearing when their language vanishes.
Steven Pinker explains why you don't have to follow bogus grammar rules.
Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing.
In his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century., Steven Pinker basically outdoes Strunk and White. The celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist and psycholinguist explains how to write in clear, "classic" prose that shares valuable information with clarity but never condescension. And he tells us why so many of the tut-tutting grammar "rules" that we all think we're supposed to follow—don't split infinitives, don't use the passive voice, don't end a sentence with a preposition—are just nonsense.
"There are so many bogus rules in circulation that kind of serve as a tactic for one-upmanship," explains Pinker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. "They're a way in which one person can prove that they're more sophisticated or literate than someone else, and so they brandish these pseudo-rules."
Unlike past sages of style, Pinker approaches grammar from a scientific perspective, as a linguist. And that's what leads him to the unavoidable conclusion that language is never set in stone; rather, it is a tool that is constantly evolving and changing, continually adding new words and undoing old rules and assumptions. "When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum," writes Pinker in The Sense of Style.
Indeed, Pinker notes with amusement in the book that in every era, there is always somebody complaining about how all the uncouth speakers of the day are wrecking the Queen's English. It's basically the linguistic equivalent of telling the kids to get off your lawn. Why does this happen? "As a language changes from beneath our feet, we feel the sands shifting and always think that it's a deterioration," explains Pinker on the podcast. "Whereas, everything that's in the language was an innovation at some point in the history of English. If you're living through the transition, it feels like a deterioration even though it's just a change."
Thus, Pinker notes that in their classic book, The Elements of Style, published in the mid-20th century, Strunk and White instructed writers not to use the verb "to contact." Look how that turned out for them.
The same framework allows Pinker to explain why so many grammatical "rules" that we all think we have to follow are, in fact, bogus. His outlook is refreshingly anti-authoritarian: You don't have to follow supposed grammar rules, he says, unless there is actually a good reason for following them.
Here, then, is a brief but highly liberating list of glorious rule-breaking activities that Pinker says you should feel free to engage in:
Do split infinitives. For Pinker, the idea that you cannot split infinitives—for example, the classic complaint that Star Trek was wrong to describe the Starship Enterprise's mission as "to boldly go where no man has gone before"; it should have been "to go boldly" or "boldly to go"—is "the quintessential bogus rule."
"No good writer in English has ever followed it consistently, if you do follow it it makes your prose much worse," Pinker explained on Inquiring Minds.
Indeed, according to Pinker, this is a rather striking case in which the alleged prohibition seems to be mostly perpetuated by urban legend or word of mouth. It doesn't even seem to be seriously asserted as a rule by any supposed style experts. "This rule kind of levitates in mid-air, there's actually no support even from the style manuals," adds Pinker.
SUMMARY: After spending several years away from home, poet Natalie Diaz felt a calling to return to her reservation to help preserve the Mojave language, which is rapidly being lost.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Next, a story of poetry, basketball and the preservation of a native language. It begins with a trip down the Colorado River.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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