Celebration of Libraries April is a big month for the celebration of books and libraries—all kinds of libraries: school, public, academic, and institutional. The celebration is kicked off with International Children’s Book Day on April 2nd. It’s always held on the 2nd of April, which is also the birthday of […]
History
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The United Nation’s celebration today fosters multilingualism for inclusion in education and society. International Mother Language Day recognizes that languages and multilingualism can advance inclusion, and their Sustainable Development Goals’ focus on leaving no one behind. UNESCO believes education, based on the first language or mother tongue, must begin from […]
It’s National Punctuation Day! Punctuation is the use of spacing and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding of reading. The word itself is derived from the Latin punctus, “point,” and the term was first recorded in the middle of the 16th Century. Punctuation hasn’t changed much since 1500 […]
Any language can incorporate foreign words and most have. Simple contact between cultures is all it takes. John McWhorter in The Power of Babel, says “intercultural contact is the very heart of human history, and thus the six thousand human languages are replete with the results of it.” And, he […]
There was no discrete dividing line between Old English, according to John McWhorter in The Power of Babel, which as spoken would have taken days to recognize as related to what we speak, and “English” as we know it. As it happened, Shakespeare wrote in a period (1500s becoming 1600s) […]
Our Americanized version of English is a conglomeration of words borrowed from different foreign languages. In fact, as John McWorter says in his book, The Power of Babel, the variety of the world’s languages is miraculous because “it is the product of a process of six thousand imperceptibly gradual transformations […]