Interesting Snippets

Although the majority of tweets are in English, a market research firm has estimated that 11 % are in Portuguese, 6 % in Japanese, 4 % in Spanish, and 18 % in other language. Small local languages such as Haitian Creole, Maori, and Wolof are even present on Twitter

In the Pacific campaign, the Navajo provided US Marines with an unbreakable code, a combination of their own language and special code words, the latter being used for military terms that had no obvious translation within the Navajo lexicon. The Navajo language has no link with any European or Asian language, and consequently the Japanese had no hope of deciphering it. According to Major General Howard Conner: “Without the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” Their contribution was not acknowledged until 1968

There are a staggering number of articles in the United States (over 180,000 of them) and tens of thousands in many European countries, Japan, Australia and India. As we saw in our last post, there are also far fewer in much of the rest of the world. In fact, there are only a few countries in Africa that contain more than 1000 articles. …

While 90% of Internet surfers in the EU prefer to access websites in their own language, 55% at least occasionally use a language other than their own when online according to a pan-EU Eurobarometer survey… However, 44% of European Internet users feel they are missing interesting information because web pages are not in a language that they understand and only 18% buy products online in a foreign language

On Thursday, teenagers around the world discovered that they weren’t, like, the first generation to use OMG. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which listed the acronym among its newest crop of word additions, that distinction goes to British Navy Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher. In 1917, Fisher wrote this sentence in a letter: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G.(Oh! My God!)­—Shower it on the Admiralty!” He sent the letter to Winston Churchill.

There are over 100 African languages with 1m or more speakers… some of the languages exist in written form only in missionary dictionaries, which may have missed some of the finer points. “This will be the first time for these 100 or so languages to be written at scale,” says Gikunda, a Meru. The opportunities for enhancing local cultures are innumerable. Meru is a language with 1.3m speakers centred on Mount Kenya. Gikunda argues that websites in Meru will deepen the understanding of Meru culture: how to take care of cattle and goats, how to look at the night sky, how to get married, or buried, the Meru way. A new technology will turn into a recovery of a world that existed before.

Meru will have to wait its turn. For now, Google is concentrating on Africa’s so-called Tier One languages: Swahili, Amharic, Wolof, Hausa, Afrikaans, Zulu, and possibly Setswana and Somali (in addition to English, Arabic, French and Portuguese). This is Google as an anti-Babel, with the utopian goal of a future in which all information is available in anyone’s language. The tragedy for many African languages is that there is not nearly enough written down: millions of words of text are needed to create a database for statistical-based translation. The hope is that as the global is pulled down, the indigenous is pulled up. “At the moment, indigenous knowledge is trapped,” says Gikunda.