Applied Languages

Putting children in front of educational DVDs does not help boost their language skills, according to a U.S. study that focused on one product, the Baby Wordsworth from the Walt Disney Company’s Baby Einstein series.

While The Baby Einstein Co does not make educational claims, it notes on its web page that the Baby Wordsworth DVD is a “playful introduction to words and sign language.”

A study by researchers at the University of California, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, put the DVD to the test with one and two-year-olds. For six weeks, 88 children were randomly assigned to either watching the DVD a few times a week or not at all. Researchers then tested the language skills in each group based on how many words the children knew according to their parents and how well they did in a lab test.

At the end of the period, toddlers who had watched the DVD fared no better than those who hadn’t. Children in both groups understood about 20 of the 30 words highlighted in the DVD, on average, and spoke 10. Their general language development showed no difference, either.

The researchers also asked parents about their childrens’ television viewing before entering the study. The earlier a child started watching Baby Einstein DVDs, it turned out, the smaller his or her vocabulary was.

The Baby Einstein Company emphasized in an e-mail to Reuters Health that it “does not claim educational outcomes.” On its web page, it notes that its products “are not designed to make babies smarter,” but rather “to engage babies and provide parents with tools to help expose their little ones to the world around them.”

The study’s finding is in line with earlier research, said Rebekah Richert, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, who led the study, but it is unclear if the DVDs themselves are responsible. Parents who place their kids in front of the screen could be trying to remedy slow language development, or they could be using the DVDs as baby sitters, cutting back on social stimulation. “A lot of children, particularly when they’re young, seem to have these kinds of (DVDs),” Richert told Reuters Health. “My take-home message would be to encourage live interaction between parent and child.”

Although it is not well understood how watching television affects language, Richert and colleagues wrote in their report that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children younger than two stay away from the screen. Some experts have even suggested that baby videos might be harmful by impeding social and cognitive learning.

Read more: Reuters

It has happened to almost everyone. You are sitting on a train or a bus and someone right next to you is annoyingly shouting into his or her mobile phone. But those days could soon be past with “silent sounds”, a new technology unveiled at the CeBIT fair on Tuesday that transforms lip movements into a computer-generated voice for the listener at the other end of the phone.

The device, developed by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), uses electromyography, monitoring tiny muscular movements that occur when we speak and converting them into electrical pulses that can then be turned into speech, without a sound uttered. “We currently use electrodes which are glued to the skin. In the future, such electrodes might for example by incorporated into cellphones,” said Michael Wand, from the KIT.

The technology opens up a host of applications, from helping people who have lost their voice due to illness or accident to telling a trusted friend your PIN number over the phone without anyone eavesdropping — assuming no lip-readers are around.

The technology can also turn you into an instant polyglot. Because the electrical pulses are universal, they can be immediately transformed into the language of the user’s choice. “Native speakers can silently utter a sentence in their language, and the receivers hear the translated sentence in their language. It appears as if the native speaker produced speech in a foreign language,” said Wand.

The translation technology works for languages like English, French and German, but for languages like Chinese, where different tones can hold many different meanings, poses a problem, he added.

Noisy people in your office? Not any more. “We are also working on technology to be used in an office environment,” the KIT scientist told AFP.

The engineers have got the device working to 99 percent efficiency, so the mechanical voice at the other end of the phone gets one word in 100 wrong, explained Wand. “But we’re working to overcome the remaining technical difficulties. In five, maybe ten years, this will be useable, everyday technology,” he said.

Read more: AFP

Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle drew plenty of sarcastic remarks when he insisted on speaking German to a British reporter just after his election to parliament four months ago. Now, he’s making it his official mission to promote his mother tongue. “German is the language at the heart of Europe,” Westerwelle said in a somewhat poetic statement Thursday at the outset of his new global campaign for the so-called “Language of Ideas,” and he came up with reasons to learn German.

“It is the key to more than 350 German universities and colleges, to Europe’s largest economy,” Westerwelle said. “It grants access to German literature, music, philosophy, and science, to the wealth of great European cultural traditions and, not least, it is the key to realizing one’s own goals and ideas.”

Europe counts about 101 million native German speakers, according to the Foreign Ministry, and some 14.5 million people outside the country are studying the language. That number is down, however, from about 17 million only three years ago, and Berlin is noting, with some alarm, the increasing importance of English as well as efforts by Spain and China to promote their respective languages.

The new campaign aims to combine and highlight the multitude of existing language teaching and cultural projects – without actually spending more than the euro300 million ($406 million) provided by the government in 2009. They want to inspire young people worldwide to take up German and “to motivate decision makers in politics, education, business, and the media within Germany and outside to promote German as a foreign language,” the ministry said in a statement.

Westerwelle has stressed the beauty of German repeatedly ever since a somewhat notorious press conference in late September, when a BBC reporter asked him if, possibly, the foreign minister to be would answer a question in English. Westerwelle, who can speak English, rebuffed the request saying: “Just like it goes without saying that English is spoken in Great Britain it is customary to speak German in Germany.”

Germany, like France, has seen occasional efforts to ban English language imports such as “rent-a-bike,” “ticket counter,” or “coffee shop.” Earlier this month, Deutsche Bahn, the national railway – which routinely provides announcements in German and in a form of almost indecipherable English – pledged to weed out some of its borrowed vocabulary such as “kiss & ride” and “call-a-bike” after Ernst Hinsken, a Bavarian member of Germany’s parliament, complained.

While most Germans study English in school and often resort to the global language, some foreigners seem to go along with Westerwelle’s take on German. “I like German. It is amazing, it is so rational and it makes so much sense,” said Inara Vaz from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who has been studying German in Berlin for a year. She said she is still struggling, not so much with grammar, but with expanding her vocabulary. Nonetheless, it seems to be worth her while. “It is a beautiful language, it is deeper than any other language I know,” she said, a flattering declaration considering she speaks not only Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, but English, too.

Read more: The Washington Post

Microsoft Corp., in collaboration with UNESCO, has launched an initiative of its own kind to save several rare languages from being lost after they have been falling victim to the ever-changing cultural landscape.

The company has announced that it will be launching its upcoming versions of Windows, Office, and Visual Studio software suites supported with several new language packs, including Yoruba in Nigeria, Inuktitut in Canada, Oriya in India, isiZulu in South Africa, to mention a few.

Additionally, Redmond-based software giant also unleashed 59 new Language Interface Packs for its next-generation Windows 7 OS and the forthcoming Office 2010 business suites.

Microsoft is touting that the support for 95 languages incorporated with the Local Language Program would help at least a billion people to work with Windows and Office suites in their local languages.

The announcement comes as part of the celebration of International Mother Language Day 2010, an occasion observed to preserve thousands of local dialects and languages across the globe.

A recent research has claimed that a local language dies out every 14 days, succumbing to advancements in technology, thereby taking away with it centuries of cultural history, traditions that existed in oral forms only, and a huge repository of knowledge.

Read more: IT Pro Portal

It all started with what Professor Paul Frommer now describes as a “fateful e-mail.” The linguistics expert from the University of Southern California is the brains behind the language used by James Cameron’s 10-foot-tall alien tribe in the much-anticipated science fiction epic, Avatar.

“Jim Cameron’s production department at Lightstorm Entertainment was looking for a linguist that would be able to help him develop an alien language,” explains Professor Frommer. “At that time, it wasn’t even called Avatar – it was project 880 – but the e-mail was forwarded to me and I saw it and jumped on it.”

The pair worked together for four years to develop the Na’vi language. The director had already come up with about thirty words, for the characters’ names and body parts. But he was looking to the professor to give the language an authentic but exotic feel.

Crucially, it had to be a language that could be articulated. “This is an alien language but obviously it has to be spoken by human actors,” explains Professor Frommer. “It has to be sounds that human beings are comfortable producing.”

It is a unique language, with its own syntactic and grammatical rules. Its creator says some of Cameron’s original words had “a vaguely Polynesian feel”. Others have suggested that it sounds like German or Japanese. “It certainly borrows various grammatical structures, sounds, that exist in other languages – but what I hope is that the combination in this language is unique,” says Professor Frommer.

As well as creating the language, Professor Frommer taught the actors how to speak it. “I met with each of the seven principal actors who use the language beforehand. I helped them with the pronunciation, we broke things down. Professor Frommer spent hours on the set, helping the cast fine tune their alien language speaking abilities. “I gave them quite a challenge. I found that they really rose to the occasion, everybody had a great time. I knew that it had to be something that actors could deal with and handle,” he says.

The language currently runs to about a thousand words. It does not have a huge vocabulary, but Professor Frommer is still working at it. He is also still trying to master his own language. “I wish I could speak it fluently,” he says. “As for who at this point understands the grammar and such, I think probably I’m the only one. I wish that eventually that might not be the case.”

In fact, one day, Professor Frommer hopes Na’vi will match Klingon, as the “gold standard” alien language. “There’s a translation of Hamlet into Klingon,” says Professor Frommer. “There are Klingon clubs that meet all over the world. There are a very dedicated group of people who meet and try to speak it.

“If anything happened like this with Na’vi I’d be delighted.”

Read more: BBC News