Education: US Department of State Scholarships for Needed Foreign Languages

The National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) program offered by the US Government's Department of State offers merit-based scholarships to US high school students to study particularly needed languages (i.e. Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Korean, Persian, and Turkish). Applicants who successfully make it through the selection process will be sent abroad for either six-week or one semester long programs.  All program related costs (e.g. travel, room, and board) are paid for by the scholarship.  More details can be found on their website (link).

(Hat Tip: Government Video)

Human Speech System: Woman's migraine causes French accent

A woman in the United Kingdom is suffering from Foreign Accent Syndrome - a rare condition caused by damage to the brain that results in changes to a person's accent. In this case, the woman went from a British accent to a French one.  The Guardian (UK, left-wing newspaper) has the story.  Fascinating.

Human Speech System: Test your lip-reading ability

Speech scientists have long known that seeing individuals can, even unconsciously, use lip-reading to assist in decoding words spoken in a conversation. (Note: lip-reading words spoken randomly, without context, is very difficult).  This entertaining and challenging puzzle (link to a Wired on-line article entitled A Classic Back-to-School Lip-Reading Puzzle) will test whether you can match a given list of names to faces in an illustration by lip-reading, given the context that each boy in the illustration is on the verge of pronouncing his name.

Enjoy!

Phonetics: The Sounds of American English

Check out this educational page on the Sounds of American English from the University of Iowa (USA) - complete with cut-away animations of what is happening in the vocal tract and videos of the face during articulation.  My wife is probably tired of hearing me point out over the years that this is exactly what is missing from educational software for learning foreign languages.  Learning to properly articulate a sound element (phoneme) is so much easier if you know what the articulators (i.e. lips, tongue, jaw) are doing!  Well done.

(Hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley)

Fun: Foreign words and phrases that have no exact English translation

English has absorbed many words and phrases from many different languages over the centuries, but there are some that haven't quite been imported yet.  A new book titled Toujours Tingo has quite a collection of very interesting, and perhaps even occasionally useful, words and phrases that exist in other languages but have no corresponding English equivalent.  The Mirror (UK tabloid) has a review.

I have no idea if the translations of these are accurate or not, but a couple that I particularly found amusing, at least the way they are presented in the book, are:

Vrane Su Mu PoPile Mozak - Croatian: crazy, literally "cows have drunk his brain"
Gadrii Nombor Shulen Jongu - Tibetan: giving an answer that is unrelated to the question, literally "to give a green answer to a blue question"

If you want a copy of the book, the details are Toujours Tingo: More Extraordinary Words to Change the Way We See the World, by Adam Jacot de Boinod, published by Penguin Books.

(Hat tip: GeekPress)

Brain Science: Infants are amazing learning machines

Live Science has the results of another study that highlights how fast and flexible learning is for an infant.

Language: Prediction of the extinction of Manchu and half the world's other languages

Here is an article on the extinction of languages over at the New York Times.