Entries by Haran Rasalingam
‘Basic’: the biggest insult of 2015
You know what it means to call someone “basic”, right? You are basic if you pride yourself on possessions or preferences that you consider to be cool or aspirational, but which are in fact commonplace or obvious. Being basic is liking what it is typical to like. On the evening of Sunday 7 June, an […]
How to transliterate to Tamil script
The Tamil transliterator is a tool I developed to enable me to convert Tamil written in the Roman alphabet into Tamil script. Some understanding of the Tamil sound system will help you to use the tool. It is important to note that, although you are using the Roman alphabet, you must use the letters in […]
Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice
What’s heartbreaking about the trend for destructive speech patterns is that yours is the most transformational generation – you’re disowning your power. This article is from theguardian.com by Naomi Wolf Patriarchy is inventive. The minute a generation of women has figured out how to not be enslaved by Ideology A, some new cultural pressure arises in […]
Hearing words, writing sounds: examining the author’s brain
This article is from theguardian.com by Richard Lea. The novelist Kamila Shamsie measures out her life as an author in chapters, punctuated by a familiar ritual. “Usually at the end of writing every chapter I’ll print out and read aloud,” she says. It’s something she’s been doing since university, she continues, citing the Kashmiri poet […]
The World’s Most Spoken Languages And Where They Are Spoken
This post is from http://www.iflscience.com/ by Morenike Adebayo This beautifully illustrated infographic, designed by South China Morning Post’s graphics director Alberto Lucas Lopéz, shows the most spoken known languages in the world and where they’re spoken by the 6.3 billion people included in the study.
Did Wittgenstein use silly points to make profound ones?
Fiddle, fish, fence, flick, grope, glance, poke, prod, nurdle, tickle, turn, squirt, biff, bash, slash, smash … just a few of the options open to a batsman. No wonder the philosopher of language and cricket fan was impressed. This article is from theguardian.com by James Gingell. Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is said, loved cricket. Curious, perhaps, […]
Vape is the new selfie: what the 2014 word of the year says about our times
Oxford Dictionaries has crowned ‘vape’ word of the year, with ‘normcore’ and ‘contactless’ as runners-up. But what do these choices tell us about who we are – and where we’re going? This article is from theguardian.com by Steven Poole. Lindsay Lohan, Katy Perry, Barry Manilow and Ronnie Wood all do it, and now it’s Oxford […]
‘Lost’ first languages leave permanent mark on the brain, new study reveals
MRI scans show Chinese babies adopted by French-speaking Canadian families retain ‘unconscious’ knowledge of their mother tongue. This article is from theguardian.com by Holly Young. “Lost” first languages leave a permanent mark on the brain, a report this week has found. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in […]
English is not the lingo of the successful British exporter
Our reluctance to learn other languages is not just arrogant: it’s holding back the UK’s economic performance. This article is from theguardian.com by Katie Allen. As François Hollande reshuffled the French cabinet last week, he was handed a report warning of hundreds of thousands more job losses. For a president grappling with political crisis and […]