Ultimately, some linguists and computer scientists argue, technology will collapse the world’s language barriers. Imagine walking down the street in Cairo, speaking English into your cell phone, and having your words come out in Arabic.

That future might not be far off. Reliable and ubiquitous translation technology “is really only a matter of time,” according to Nicholas Ostler, author of the forthcoming book, “The Last Lingua Franca: English until the Return of Babel.” Yorick Wilks, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, is more specific, predicting in an email that adequate machine translations “will almost certainly be available as phone apps within a decade.”

That prospect is understandably alarming to many educators, who point to a mountain of persuasive studies showing that bilingualism bolsters creativity and cognitive development, as well as cultural awareness and sensitivity.

One of the more shocking aspects of Japan to first-time visitors is just how low-tech the country really is.  While most of us imagine Japan as a neon-jungle, of sorts, replete with robots, and almost unimaginable electronics prowess, the truth is that much of the country’s infrastructure, as well as many government (and private!) bureaucratic processes have barely changed since the 1960’s.  Personally, I was completely shocked by the wide-spread computer illiteracy back 12 years ago.  While the population has gotten a lot more internet-savvy in the meanwhile, they are still playing catch-up with the rest of the region.  Additionally, certain main-stays of Japanese life, such as lack of central heat/air in most houses, the lack of standardized addressing systems (which, mind you, has become a lot more bearable now that GPS is available), and the fact that ATMs close for nights and weekends tend to strike foreign visitors as surprisingly backwards for a nation known for pushing the envelope in robotics technology (not to mention the ever-so-important advances in toilet technology — the toilet in my house has a motion sensor to automatically raise the lid when you come in, auto flush, seat warmer, bidet, etc. — I am not making this up!).

Police stations without computers, 30-year-old “on hold” tapes grinding out tinny renditions of Greensleeves, ATMs that close when the bank does, suspect car engineering, and kerosene heaters but no central heating.

A dystopian vision of a nation with technology stuck in an Orwellian time warp? Not at all. These are aspects of contemporary, low-tech Japan that most visitors miss as they look around the hi-tech nation that its government, electronics industry and tourism board are keen to promote….

Many of Japan’s older men - who are those most likely to run a business - have a marked preference to stay offline even in the office, says Tokyo-based entrepreneur Terrie Lloyd.

“There is a clear cut-off for Japanese bosses who know how to use PCs and mobile web-capable devices and those who don’t,” he said.

“The easiest way to tell is whether they have an e-mail address on the all-important name card. If they’re over 50 and don’t have an e-mail address, it’s a dead giveaway that you either use the phone or forget about contacting them.”

Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind….

There is even a Chinese word for it: “tibiwangzi”, or “take pen, forget character”.

A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters.

As a result, Li says that she has become almost dependent on her phone.

“When I can?t remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down,” she says.

This is actually not a new problem — it has been around since the widespread use of PCs — but it gets booted around in the East Asian press every few years.  An interesting related problem is that Chinese/Japanese people who study abroad often end up temporarily forgetting large swaths of characters due to the lack of continual passive enforcement from the environment.  While such is easy enough to rectify (usually by lots of free reading in one’s L1, or by going home), it can cause for embarrassing moments, such as when a Japanese friend in my college days came by my room to borrow a Japanese dictionary from me… to be able to understand a letter he received from his parents…  Seriously…

Linguists all over the world have yet to live down the ill-informed ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who 70 years ago claimed that language constrains thinking to the point of some cultures/people having no ability to conceptualize time lines, for instance.  The hypothesis was all-the-rage for a while, until common sense prevailed, and it became apparent that: 1) speakers of languages without overt tense markers nevertheless quite ably distinguish between present, past, and future; and 2) the evidence upon which Whorf based his hypothesis was often faulty and/or lacking.  Nevertheless, the idea managed to penetrate popular culture to the extent that I still come across this idea amongst laymen (which usually just makes me want to smack my head against a wall, but fortunately, a bit of gentle dissuasion is enough to get people to give up on the notion).  Still, it’s an intriguing notion, and has some intuitive appeal.  Given the vast diversity of human language, it would seem that the way we express ourselves verbally would at some level shape the way we see the world… Some support for this idea has come from studies on color perception (e.g., blue and green are seen as the same color in many, many languages) and the like…

Today’s must-read article is somewhat of a (toned-down, thank goodness!) revision of the hypothesis.  Guy Deutscher offers up the intriguing thought that language does indeed shape some aspects of thought, but instead of acting as a limitation on conceptualization, it acts to dictate what is and isnt necessary to express…

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they mayallows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

He makes a good case, and regardless, it’s an interesting article.  Read it all!

Your weekend treat: everything you ever wanted to know about dating in Japan. The fun comes, of course, from the fact that everything here has a kernel of truth in it. Starts slow, but stick with it….

 Happy news for Arabic learners at the American University in Cairo (which will soon include one of my current students!), via The Chronicle…

Downtown Cairo isn’t the easiest place for foreign students to get used to. It’s crowded, noisy, and polluted; the traffic is dangerous; and women face sexual harassment regularly. But students at one of the most prestigious Arabic-language programs in the Middle East have insisted that this bustling, sometimes uncomfortable experience is exactly what they want.

The Center for Arabic Study Abroad—a premier language program financed primarily by the U.S. Department of Education—has just relocated to the American University in Cairo’s downtown campus….

In 2008 the center moved to the university’s new $400-million, 260-acre campus, located in a developing eastern suburb of Cairo. There students found all the amenities that were missing from the crowded downtown campus, including an Olympic-size swimming pool and a state-of-the-art library.

But, says the center’s director, Martha Schulte-Nafeh, “From Day 1 the CASA students said: We don’t want to be here.”

At issue here is the fact that it’s an English-language campus, which works against those who go there to study Arabic.  We have the same issue amongst Japanese learners at my current university (i.e., students come to learn Japanese, but, as the university is English-medium, it can be difficult — especially for lower-level learners — to find real opportunities for practice with non-English speakers.  These issues of use in a multi-lingual community are simply up to the individual to negotiate (e.g., one of my students related that she and her foreign roommate trade off each day on which language they communicate in), but it’s nice to see that AUC is being proactive in trying to offer the most efficient learning environment possible for their students.

For most of us, the squat toilet is nothing more than a staple of horror stories about old-fashioned French service stations or the exploits of adventurous backpackers in far-flung parts of India.

But this basic form of plumbing, also known as a Turkish toilet or Nile pan, could be coming to a shopping centre near you - and all in the name of cultural sensitivity.

–Personal aside…  I do recall one time when my parents came to visit me in Japan.  They had just arrived to the train station after a 4 hour trip from Tokyo, and, of course, dove immediately to the restrooms.  My dad came out, made a beeline for me, inquired how long it would take to get to my house (about 15-20 min.), and then said, “when you get a chance, Son, I would love for you to explain what those ‘holes in the bathroom floor’ are for….”

If the liberal media are suggesting we need to elect linguists who never make such silly mistakes, well then they have some explaining to do. Vice President Biden could barely pronounce the President’s name for a few months and had difficulty counting the number of letters in the word “jobs” (which he said was a three-letter word).

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Sarah Palin’s used “refudiate” in a recent tweet, evidently melding “repudiate” and “refute.” (Recall she attended five colleges before getting a degree.) But she quickly re-tweeted, “English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words.”

Quite right is Ms. Palin, alas, for once.

It’s hard to say how many words Shakespeare coined, but it runs into the thousands. More impressive is his massive vocabulary.

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Well, Palin’s about half right, which is probably more right than English professors tut-tutting her.

It is no surprise that the writers of the OED would seek examples in the most famous archive available in English — often Shakespeare. But that doesn’t mean Shakespeare coined those words. Indeed, graduate students in literature often built resumes off of locating earlier instances of words “credited” to Shakespeare in the OED.

More importantly, if you think about it, Shakespeare would have little interest in inventing words in his plays. He was seeking to entertain. Why would he have his characters use words that no one in the audience would know? Shakespeare’s plays are a repository of words that reflect the vocabulary of the day — he is not some forerunner of today’s avant-garde language poet.

Scientists have used a computer program to decipher a written language that is more than three thousand years old.

The program automatically translated the ancient written language of Ugaritic within just a few hours.

Scientists hope the breakthrough could help them decipher the few ancient languages that they have been unable to translate so far.

Ugaritic was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria and consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932.

Not a language related post, but nonetheless interesting.  The one child policy has long been reviled by many both inside and outside of China, and any adjustments to the policy could cause a seismic social changes in China…

For years, China curbed its once-explosive population growth with a widely hated one-child limit that at its peak led to forced abortions, sterilizations and even infanticide. Now the long-sacrosanct policy may be on its way out, as some demographers warn that China is facing the opposite problem: not enough babies.