How Irish travellers learned Romanian

Babel Babble digest #1

Yo! It’s been a while, but I’ll spare you the details (they are rather boring, really). Instead, I want to welcome you to a bite-sized Babel Babble digest. Less of an essay, more of a newsletter, with the signature wry touch.

• Apparently, in Serbia, using Cyrillic when corresponding with customers might come off as too official and bureaucratic. While both scripts are used across the country (which was news to me, I thought Serbian was square letters only), Cyrillic might be perceived as “not corporate/not funky” enough. For another story of bi-scriptural (digraphia for you pedants) dissonance, check out this piece of Cyrillic-Latin love-hate relationship in Uzbekistan.

• One Love, a Bob Marley biopic, hired a Jamaican linguist to make sure folk speak real patois. Although I’m rather partial to both Marley and biopics, I might go and see it just for this approach. If this is 10/10 on the “using authentic language in cinema” then 0/10 would go to Peaky Blinders for having Irish-Romani characters speak not Shelta, not Romani, but… Romanian.

• A Russian governmental body has opened an investigation into Duolingo for purportedly disseminating “LGBT propaganda” through the inclusion of LGBTQ+ references in its educational materials. I might laugh at the follies of an authoritarian regime, but my own country still has a controversial anti-LGBTQ information law.

• Do Brits really talk about the weather a lot? According to a recent study into word frequency, they do! To quote the researchers, “the word “weather” occurs with the frequency of 60 per million, alongside words such as “pub” and “restaurant”, which occur with similar frequencies.”

• A Tetris-like game that relies on semantic proximity and pits you against a Machine Learning algorithm. There, I wrote the geekiest sentence of the week. And I’ve also described Semantris, a game that’s precisely that. Not to be confused with Semantle. Which one’s more addictive? That’s for you to decide.

Talk to you soon and do share anything awesome you’ve learned recently!