The Class of 2010
By Ana Marie Pamintuan, The Philippine Star

There were no superstar entertainers, politicians or billionaire alumni at the commencement exercises of the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Science in Diliman last Friday.

The commencement speaker was UP history professor Maria Serena Diokno, one of the daughters of the late Jose Diokno.

A special award was given to National Scientist Lourdes Jansuy Cruz, a biochemist and marine scientist, who bested some 1,000 nominees worldwide and became the first Filipino to receive (together with four scientists from other countries) this year’s L’Oreal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science.

The award, given at UNESCO headquarters in Paris last month, carries a $100,000 prize, which Cruz plans to invest in a piece of land for her rural livelihood incubator program for Aetas. The UNESCO award also cited her work with indigenous communities.

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Lean, unlovely English
By Tim Cavanaugh, Reason.com

One of the best things that ever happened to the English-speaking peoples was when a rapacious army of Scandinavian-derived Frenchmen conquered the right little tight little island about a thousand years ago, shot the king of England in the eye, and more or less banned the native tongue for a hundred years or so. Spoken English was limited to common people, written English ceased to exist for a while, and when the language came back into official usage it was a French/English hybrid that was a vastly richer, more powerful, and easier to use language (among other things, it no longer had three genders and declined nouns) that has resisted all attempts by grammarians to put it back in a box.

You can tell a person is ignorant when he or she complains that the works of Chaucer are too hard to read because they're in “Old English.” Chaucer wrote in Middle English, the same basic language we use, which you can get the hang of with a few hours of application and a good dictionary. Old English was a different language, closer to Old German than to what we speak, and its literature consisted of haunting but crude verses about killing people.

As if to prove that point, a new and apparently complete dictionary of Old English is now available. Because the project was funded with $1.8 million in U.S. taxpayer money, it is the subject of an article by the lexicographical adventurer Ammon Shea in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ house magazine. Shea makes a compelling case for the strengths of Old English.

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Iceland’s volcano a mouthful to say
By Tom Watkins, CNN

CNN—An event as big as a volcano that disrupts transportation around the globe might be expected to have its name added to the English lexicon, perhaps meaning “to cause widespread disruption,” an English-language monitor said Tuesday.

“People talk about a ‘Krakatau,’ right?” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor, in a telephone interview. He was referring to the 1883 eruption of a volcano in Indonesia that unleashed a tsunami that killed more than 34,000 people.

Payack’s Austin-Texas-based monitor analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on culture, with an emphasis on English.

“Tsunami” itself has gained in usage since the 2004 South Asia event that left 245,000 people dead or missing across the region, said Payack.

“When prices collapsed economically, the first thing that they called it was an ‘economic tsunami,’” he said.

But what happens when that volcano's name is Eyjafjallajokull, as in the Icelandic volcano whose ash clouds have grounded thousands of flights worldwide?

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Pardon my French
By Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

Éric Zemmour, slight, dark, a live wire, fell over his own words, they were tumbling out so fast. He was fidgeting at the back of a half-empty cafe one recent evening near the offices of Le Figaro, the newspaper where he works, notwithstanding that detractors have lately tried to get him fired for his most recent inflammatory remarks about French blacks and Arabs on a television show. Mr. Zemmour, roughly speaking, is the Bill O’Reilly of French letters. He was describing his latest book, “French Melancholy,” which has shot up the best-seller list here.

“The end of French political power has brought the end of French,” Mr. Zemmour said. “Now even the French elite have given up. They don’t care anymore. They all speak English. And the working class, I’m not talking just about immigrants, they don’t care about preserving the integrity of the language either.”

Mr. Zemmour is a notorious rabble-rouser. In his view France, because of immigration and other outside influences, has lost touch with its heroic ancient Roman roots, its national “gloire,” its historic culture, at the heart of which is the French language. Plenty of people think he’s an extremist, but he’s not alone. The other day Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, sounded a bit like Mr. Zemmour, complaining about the “snobisme” of French diplomats who “are happy to speak English,” rather than French, which is “under siege.”

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China has many “dirty words”
By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING—In 1972, comedian George Carlin wrote a monologue titled, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” When a version of this riff was broadcast the following year on a jazz radio station, it set off a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the right of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate indecent material on the airwaves.

Nothing is quite so clear-cut in China, especially when it comes to the murky realm of Internet censorship. China does, of course, have its own version of the dirty words (many, many more than the seven identified by Carlin), but the list itself is confidential.

Trying to figure out what is banned and what is not has taken on new urgency in the aftermath of Google's withdrawal from China over censorship concerns and the strong stance of the Obama administration on Internet freedom.

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Singapore highlights initiatives to raise English proficiency

“Developing the environment, use of technology among initiatives to raise English proficiency”

Speech By Mr. S. Iswaran, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Trade and Industry and Ministry of Education, at the Opening Ceremony of the Inaugural APEC-RELC International Seminar held on Monday, 19 April 2010 at SEAMEO Regional Language Centre.

The theme of today’s seminar is Language Education: An Essential for a Global Economy. We live in extraordinary times, amidst immense changes to societies and economies which have propelled countries into uncharted waters. Technology has redefined communication and removed barriers; multi-lateral trade agreements have reshaped and revitalised parameters for business and commerce; the transfer of knowledge and skills has rejuvenated the socio-cultural climates of countries around the world and the opening up of air routes engenders new possibilities for growth and exchange. In the light of these exponential changes, it is timely for us to consider how the world communicates and the relationship between language, learning and the global economy.

The convergence of cultures, societies and economies created by the forces of globalisation in recent years has meant that we have to grapple with a constantly-evolving body of knowledge. More than that, the globalisation of systems and cultures also gives rise to an inevitable convergence of values and attitudes – and the currency with which people address this. As the links between people across the world grow, there is an increasing need for us to learn not just to communicate in multilingual and multicultural situations, but also to comprehend and to co-operate effectively. English has become the global language that enables us to do this.

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Taiwan must invest now in more language study
Editorial, Taiwan News
             
The rise of economic clout and global influence of the People’s Republic of China undoubtedly is pushing Taiwan to become more deeply integrated into the so-called “great Chinese economy” due to the PRC’s emergence both as a labor-intensive “workshop” and export platform and a fast growing potential industrial and consumer market.

The pressure of this reality lies behind the rush by President Ma Ying-jeou’s rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government for rapid signing of a controversial “Cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement” with Beijing this summer.

But the inescapable reality of such pressures does not mean that the passive strategy of “complete liberalization” of the KMT government is the only option.

Indeed, many advocates of a Taiwan-centric strategy believe that Taiwan can accelerate all aspects of “globalization” to balance the threat of PRC domination.

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Learning a new lingo
By Tan Shiow Chin, TheStar.com.my

One of the advantages of being brought up in Malaysia is without doubt, our multilingual ability.

Most of us are relatively fluent in at least two languages, and most likely know a smattering of words in a couple of the other common languages in the country.

Many can probably claim to be able to speak three or four languages well, particularly if we include the various dialects of each language.

So, why should any Malaysian bother picking up yet another language, particularly one that is not commonly spoken here?

Well, there are two reasons that stand out.

Firstly, opportunity in terms of education and business…

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