Wednesday, April 1, 2015

forms of being & 7100 languages


"Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics" - this new online course about language started this week at Coursera. I watched the first videos. So good, with an atmosphere that is both personal and global. It is astonishing to explore the complexity of language, and all the different languages that are out there, each with an own set of words.

One of the course videos is about "Why isn't there only one language?". Another is: "What defines a language". Here's the course page: https://www.coursera.org/course/humanlanguage

And a second link: Ethnologue is an online database of the languages of the world: "Ethnologue contains information on 7,102 known living languages. Begin by clicking World Languages in the page header...."

While browsing Ethnologue, I remembered the language installation I once put together. The photo above is a screenshot of it, here's the moving version: "forms of being",

And here's the original publication in qarrtsiluni's "Translation" issue: forms of being

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On another note, I think I will go and revisit links from the past more often. So much out there, or rather: so much back there.



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