Graphic Humor 232

This section of Graphic Humor in political-economic, national or international issues, are very ingenious in describing what happened, is happening or will happen. It also extends to various other local issues or passing around the world. There are also other non-political humor that ranges from reflective or just to get us a smile when we see them. Anyone with basic education and to stay informed of important news happening in our local and global world may understand and enjoy them.

Farewell!. (CTsT)

 

How to translate an ‘untranslatable’ book

In 2009, my colleague Emily Apter approached me with a highly eccentric proposal: could I help translate a French dictionary of untranslatable words?

I said yes. I like paradoxes, and I’m also interested in how translation works, philosophically as well as practically. I’ve had a long, rich, and vexed relationship with translation—maybe more even than most people who teach Comparative Literature, as I do.

I grew up between Madrid, Tangier, Wheeling and Caracas; my household spoke English, Spanish, French, and some Arabic; Hebrew and Jaquetía, the subdialect of Spanish spoken by the Sephardic community in Tangier.   Nothing was ever just one thing, in just one language. Now I teach literature and political philosophy, and I often teach works in translation—comparing different English versions of, say, a French work, so my students can see how every translation is also an interpretation of the work.

The work that Emily proposed we translate—along with Michael Wood, a friend–was “Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles,” published in 2004. Its authors (over a hundred contributors from across Europe, Russia, the U.S., Brazil, and Morocco) set out to create an encyclopedia of philosophical, literary, and political concepts that defy easy–or any—translation from one language and culture to another.

It begins (appropriately enough) with “abstraction, abstracta, abstract Entities,” and closes with “Wunsch,” German for “wish,” or désir or souhait in French.

Five years, six translators, countless hours of disagreements and debates and drinks and debacles later, “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon”appeared from Princeton University Press. It’s more than 1,300 pages.

The project provided me, and my co-editors, with a vivid sense of the history of how people think, and how societies think differently from one another. The “Dictionary” aspires to do the same. For example: spirit is not the same as mind, but both are used to translate the German Geist. Happiness, which retains an old etymological connection tochance and happenstance (in English, at least), is different from bonheur,which doesn’t, and from German Glück and Seligkeit, which split “happiness-as-good-fortune” and “happiness as moral virtue.”

Castilian Spanish has two verb forms to English’s one, and thus two ways of saying “I am silly.” One indicates a passing condition (“Estoy tonto,” “Today, right now, I’m just silly, or foolish, or out of whack”); another a permanent and determinative condition: “Soy tonto,” “I’m a fool (and there’s nothing you or I can ever do about it).”

These may seem trivial examples, but consider the opening and closing of this well-known sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident … the pursuit of happiness.”  Are American “truths” the same as Greece’saletheia or Russians’ pravda? What about “happiness”?  Can I pursue it in America, if what I want to pursue is le bonheur? What do English and French do with the German word Dasein? It’s a word generally left untranslated in philosophy—meaning roughly existence, an existent being, life, a life form; in French it can mean something like “human reality,” the time of existence. In Italian, it’s something closer to being here. It’s a notoriously hard term to think about, and the “Dictionary” entry on it reads like a philosophical throwing-up-of-the-hands: here, this is how other languages have failed, now you try to translate it.

The project has been controversial in at least three ways.  The most obvious one: isn’t it self-defeating to translate a set of self-styled untranslatable terms? If we succeed, won’t we have failed, or at least shown that the original idea, that these terms are untranslatable in some important way, was off base?

This depends on what one means by “untranslatable.” Cassin and her team believe that an “untranslatable” word is not one that cannot be translated, but rather a word we can’t stop trying to translate, aware always that we haven’t quite hit it, that it isn’t right. This isn’t a particularly satisfactory definition, but it gets at the difference between a word like “apple” (which we might say is fantastically translatable, and has been since Eden) and a word like “happiness,” which isn’t, one person’s happiness and good fortune, and one language’s, being another’s tedium or worse.

The second: Cassin’s project began in part as a protest against the dangerous imperial spread of English. Wouldn’t it be counter-productive, if not self-defeating, to translate this very, even excessively European cri de coeur into the very language it seeks to resist?

English—commercial English, the language of tourism, of the Internet, Hollywood—has spread monochrome wings over the globe.  The extreme form of this drift toward world English is probably the pseudo-language that’s come to be called globish, or “decaffeinated English,” a sort of international-boardroom, stripped-down language divested of metaphors and localisms, in which “to chat” can become “speak casually to each other” and a “kitchen,” the “room in which you cook your food,” as the journalist Robert McCrum once noted.

Won’t a “Dictionary of Untranslatables”be a further, perverse weapon in the globalization of English?

Not necessarily. One of the goals of the project is to show English its own oddities—to show the English language, and speakers of that language, that its concepts are often borrowed from abroad. Like many immigrants these English words from abroad within English come bearing unassimilable and surprisingly valuable cultural debris that does not, cannot, or should not get worn or melted away. Rather than globalize English, this “Dictionary of Untranslatables” helps re-provincialize the language. We get a keen sense that “happenstance” lives in “happiness” when we see what happens to the word as it becomes “bonheur” or “Seligkeit.”

But in that direction we run up against the third way in which this “Dictionary of Untranslatables”is controversial. Are the editors really saying that there’s an exclusively French, or Greek or Castilian experience of truth or happiness? Doesn’t this lead to the oldest forms of linguistic nationalism, or to a form of relativism, or to defeatism?

This is not a foolish objection, but it misses the mark. Human institutions are built on terms that are more like the word “happiness” than they are like the word “apple.” Acknowledging that the concepts on which we build these institutions, our expectations, and our forms of life are tied to the languages in which they take shape and are expressed does not mean abandoning the task of making these institutions better, more equitable, more precise, and it doesn’t mean granting privilege to one experience or one identity or one tradition over others. It means agreeing that the project of building these defective institutions is an endless and often a violent one, beset by injustices that need to be expressed and imagined in words we will have to translate again and again, for ourselves and for others.

 

By Jacques Lezra, July 16, 2014

 

Jacques Lezra is Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, English and German at NYU, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.

 

Spanish? No hay problema (No problem)

Coming out of the USSR could be a disorienting experience, as then- Graduate Student Extreme found out in 1979 after seven months here as a guide-interpreter on a cultural exhibit: in my first encounter with an automatic bank teller back in the States, the newfangled “ATM” took my card, scanned it and then asked if I wanted to continue our transaction (a) in English or (b) en español. What? In Spanish?!?

Who would choose a Spanish option in suburban Washington, DC? Had Zorro taken over the neighborhood? After the prolonged suspended animation of Soviet life, it was hard to resist an Extreme impulse to to look defiantly into the camera of this big-brotherish machine and ask, “Are you KIDDING, amigo?”

Flash forward a decade to 1989, when Instructor Extreme is showing the first group of Soviet high-school exchange students a popular U.S. film, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986), as part of their orientation: the hero drives an expensive sports car into a Chicago parking garage, where he asks the smiling but non-responsive attendant, “Do you speak English?” – only to receive the taken-aback reply “What country do you think this is?”

This gets a big laugh from the young Russians, just as it had in theaters around the States. It’s America, so people speak English, of course – always have, always will.

Wrong and wrong, it so happens. If in 1979 and 1989 there was still little doubt about Anglo-hegemony, by 1999 the party was over for a homogeneous English-only national culture – and the new millennium has seen this transformation quicken its pace.

Spanish was spoken in the Americas long before English: the Columbus trip was a Spanish project, and was followed by many more Hispanic forays north and south in the New World. While the young United States emerged as an Anglophonemajority state, it did so without adopting an official language – and does not have one today.

It does have a new fastestgrowing segment of the population, however: today every sixth U.S. citizen is Hispanic, the census bureau tells us, and three decades from now non-Hispanic whites will be a minority – a situation utterly unthreatening to such utterly American icons as Bart Simpson, whose trademark exclamation is ¡Ay, caramba! (Oh gosh!/Wow!/etc.) and Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose Terminator famously wished usHasta la vista, baby! (See you later!), coining one of the most famous lines in Hollywood history.

In short, Spanish is the second most used language in the United States, spoken by some 45 million Hispanophones and six million language students, comprising the largest national Spanish-speaking community anywhere outside of Mexico. Little wonder that the 2000 U.S. presidential election saw both major candidates – the resolutely white bread/mayonnaise/Anglophone- gringos George W. Bush and Albert Gore – deliver campaign speeches in Spanish. Votes are where you find ‘em, señor.

So you are very likely to encounter Spanish and Spanish-speakers in American films, literature and on your trip to the United States – but your English textbooks haven’t factored this in yet, have they? “No problemo!” (which is actually popular pseudo-Spanish for no hay problema). Here’s Prof. Extremo’s Hispanic Starter Kit: The Top 10 Spanish Words/Phrases/Usages you’ll see/hear throughout the US – often occurring in otherwise exclusively English contexts:

1. adios [ah-dee-OHS] – goodbye

2. amigo [uh-MEE-goh], amiga [uh- MEE-guh] – friend (masc., fem.)

3. barrio [BAHR-ee-oh] – neighborhood, usually a heavily Hispanic area

4. bueno [BWE-naw] – good, all right, OK; buenos días – good morning/day

5. Comprende? [kuhm-PREN-dey] – Understand? Got it?

6. gracias [GRAH-see-uhs] – thank you

7. hombre [OM-brey] – man, guy

8. nada [NAH-duh] – nothing, zilch; de nada – you’re welcome

9. por favor [PAWR fah-VAWR] – please

10. señor [seyn-YAWR], señora [seyn- YAWR-uh], señorita [seyn-yuh- REE-tuh] – Mr., Mrs., Miss/Ms.

Hundreds of Spanish words and phrases have become dual-language terms – which is why all of the above now turn up in English dictionaries – and both the total number and their “lexical share” of the general American dialogue are growing as you’d expect: at a pace that parallels that of the Hispanic population.

So get ready to rumba, hombre. Bart Simpson’s still ahead of you! 

Text by Mark H. Teeter at 11/03/2013

(Mark H. Teeter is an English teacher and translator based in Moscow)

Check this Link:

http://www.gap360.com/learning-spanish-in-peru

 

Immigration reform could spark a $1.4 trillion boom

A study finds that granting citizenship to undocumented workers would increase pay, tax revenue and overall spending.

© Elaine Thompson-AP Photo

Adding 203,000 new jobs, $184 billion in tax revenue and $1.4 trillion to the nation’s overall economy seems like a pretty good idea for a country clawing its way out of an economic downturn.Would Americans still think it’s a good idea if that boom required granting undocumented immigrants immediate citizenship? The answer might be less than unanimous, but the folks at the Center For American Progress say it’s an idea worth considering sooner rather than later.

Five years after gaining citizenship, undocumented workers would make 25.1% more annually, according to a study obtained by The Huffington Post. That raise will “ripple through the economy” as immigrants use their income to buy goods and pay taxes.

The plan, as with nearly any mention of immigration reform in the U.S., has drawn its fair share of criticism. In his book “Immigration Wars: Forging An American Solution,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush insists that the economic benefits of a path to citizenship are outweighed by the potential damage to the “integrity of our immigration system.”

The junior senator from Bush’s state, Republican Marco Rubio, flat-out disagrees and has joined Arizona Sen. John McCain in calling for a clear and immediate path to citizenship for undocumented workers. They wouldn’t be the first or even the most high-profile Republicans to make that call, either.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan made immigration a priority of his presidency by instituting the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which National Public Radio recently spotlighted for granting amnesty and, eventually, citizenship to undocumented workers who had been in the country since 1982.

How did that work out? Ask the Department of Labor, which reports that immigrants granted citizenship under Reagan’s plan got a 15.1% bump in pay immediately afterward.

But what if Americans just aren’t ready for such a sweeping change in immigration policy? Then they’re going to have to wait a whole lot longer for a payout while they make up their minds. The Center For American Progress study showed that delaying the citizenship process could put off benefits for both workers and the greater economy by a decade or more.

 

Top 10 Longest Words in the English Language

Sometimes a picture says a thousand words; sometimes a word says a thousand letters.  There are a few instances in the English language where a word is not constructed for the sake of communication so much as to break a world record, for spectacle’s sake.  In that way, the English language is much like the Olympics; here are ten words that really go the distance.

Note: the following are words in the non-strictest sense, being that some are technical terms, some have been coined, while others actually appear in the dictionary.  Depending on which school of thought you subscribe to, lists may very on the basis of “what constitutes a word” (and some may argue simply that letters constitute a word).

Additional note: tying for the #7 spot is the word “hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian.”  It also contains 30 letters.  Let its omission be justified by saying this list, in and of itself, is hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian (i.e. “that which pertains to extremely long words”).

 

10.  Honorificabilitudinitatibus

This 27-letter word coined by Shakespeare, in his comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, is a testament to the Bard’s own intralexiconic skills. Meaning “the state of being able to achieve honors,” the word is the longest one in the English language with alternating consonants and vowels (Take a look for yourself….yep.).

9.  Antidisestablishmentarianism

Containing 28-letters, antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest proper word, consisting of proper and compatible root and affix attachments.  After all the Lego blocks have been snapped together, the word comes to mean “the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment (i.e. the separation of church and state, as in the movement that took place in 1860’s England).”  The word has a dated relevance, or else is the greatest living thing in a world history nerd’s vocabulary.

8.  Floccinaucinihilipilification

This 29-letter word, pieced together from Latin stems, means simply “the deeming of something to be trivial.”  One letter more than antidisestablishmentarianism, and just as big of a mouthful, it is a valid dictionary entry with a usefulness that is much greater than anything it might be placed beside contextually.  Some readers might even be able to maintain a floccinaucinihilipilification for this list.

7.  Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism

This 30-letter word is a technical one for a type of inherited disorder.  An individual with such a disorder resembles someone with Pseudohypoparathyroidism Type 1A, but doesn’t possess a deficiency in calcium or PTH levels (which mark the essential differences between Pseudohypoparathyroidism 1A and Hypoparathyroidism).

To put it far more basically, the word is much more fun to say than to have.

6.  Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

This 34-letter word, which was coined by song-writers Richard and Robert Sherman in the musical film Mary Poppins, is completely made-up, the sum of word parts that don’t even follow proper prefix/suffix placement protocol; the “-istic” following “fragil-” is a suffix, which should signify a word’s end.  However, it is followed by the prefix “ex-,” where a new, separate word should begin.  Nonetheless, it is just another example of a phrase being irretrievably carried off by and imbedded within the culture into which it was born.  Just as how words are invented all the time in rap culture, and swallowed up by a constantly-evolving (or devolving) language system.

The word, containing definable roots, means something like “Atoning for educability through delicate beauty.”  Miss Poppins, however, would insist the word means “something to say when you have nothing to say.”

5.  Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

The term refers to a kind of lung disease caused by a finely-powdered silica dust.  This word, containing 45 letters, does appear in the dictionary, but was created primarily just for the sake of a long word.  An equivalent of what the word is going for, albeit by taking the long way home, is a condition simply called silicosis.  Any doctor diagnosing the former is obviously getting paid by the hour.

4.  Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic

http://www.xtranormal.com/xtraplayr/12412110/hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

This 52-letter word was engendered by Dr. Edward Strother in order to describe spa waters of Bath, England in a single word.  The sum of individually-meaningful parts, the word altogether means roughly, “equally salty, calcium-rich, waxy, containing aluminum and copper, and vitriolic.”  Of course this word has very few applications elsewhere.  Unless maybe you were talking about some kind of 9V-battery-powered robotic chicken wing.

3.  Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelito-katakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoio-siraiobaphetraganopterygon

This word, which shan’t be uttered twice, is a transliteration of a word coined by Greek author Aristophanes in his comic play Assemblywomen.  Containing 171 letters, it is the longest word appearing in literature and refers to a fictional dish; the word quite literally is just the smooshing together of the 17 ingredients contained within (including sharks, pigeons, honey, and various unappetizing animal parts).  Don’t expect to see this listed on any menu, as there surely wouldn’t be enough room to list anything else.

2.  Methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylleucylphenyl-
alanylalanylglutaminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamyl-
glycylalanylphenylalanylvalylprolylphenylalanylvalylthreonyl-
leucylglycylaspartylprolylglycylisoleucylglutamylglutaminyl-
serylleucyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucylisoleucylglutamy-
lalanylglycylalanylaspartylalanylleucylglutamylleucylglycylisoleucyl-
prolylphenylalanylserylaspartylprolylleucylalanylaspartylglycylproly-
lthreonylisoleucylglutaminylaspfraginylalanylthreonylleucylarginy-
lalanylphenylalanylalanylalanylglycylvalylthreonylprolylalanyl-
glutaminylcysteinylphenylalanylglutamylmethionylleucylalany-
lleucylisoleucylarginylglutaminyllysylhistidylprolylthreonylisoleucyl-
prolylisoleucylglycylleucylleucylmethionyltyrosylalanylasparaginy-
lleucylvalylphenylalanylasparaginyllysylglycylisoleucylaspartyl-glutamylphenylalanyltyrosylalanylglutaminylcysteinylglutamylly-sylvalylglycylvalylaspartylserylvalylleucylvalylalanylaspartylvalyl-prolylvalylglutaminylglutamylserylalanylprolylphenylalanylarginyl-glutaminylalanylalanylleucylarginylhistidylasparaginylvalylalanyl-prolylisoleucylphenylalanylisoleucylcysteinylprolylprolylaspartylalanyl-aspartylaspartylaspartylleucylleucylarginylglutaminylisoleucylalanyl-seryltyrosylglycylarginylglycyltyrosylthreonyltyrosylleucylleucylseryl-arginylalanylglycylvalylthreonylglycylalanylglutamylasparaginyl-arginylalanylalanylleucylprolylleucylasparaginylhistidylleucylvalyl-alanyllysylleucyllysylglutamyltyrosylasparaginylalanylalanylprolyl-prolylleucylglutaminylglycylphenylalanylglycylisoleucylserylalanyl-prolylaspartylglutaminylvalyllysylalanylalanylisoleucylaspartylalanyl-glycylalanylalanylglycylalanylisoleucylserylglycylserylalanylisoleucyl-valyllysylisoleucylisoleucylglutamylglutaminylhistidylasparaginy-lisoleucylglutamylprolylglutamyllysylmethionylleucylalanylalanyl-leucyllysylvalylphenylalanylvalylglutaminylprolylmethionyllysylalanyl-alanylthreonylarginylserine

What you just stared at is the 1913-letter chemical name for tryptophan synthetase, a protein (an enzyme, to be exact) with 267 amino acids.  Of course, it’s completely impractical to actually utter this prankster’s approach to making huge words (the largest one in print), and just looking at it for too long might even lead you to believe there are words and phrases hidden in there like a word search (if you look closely the word “party” shows up a few times, as does something resembling “asparagus”).  Of course, when you cut-and-paste such a word (rather than risk missing even a single letter, for accuracy’s sake), you risk looking like an ass by not thoroughly combing through that contrived brick-o’-letters.

1.  [Titin’s Chemical Name]

This 189,819-letter word shall not be printed in its entirety, partially because it is literally too big to print (without filling the space of a short novella that is), and would be a waste of time and hard drive space.  Along the same lines as the last example, it is a derivation of the chemical components that comprise the protein; abridged, the word is “Methionylthreonylthreonyl…isoleucine,” really not worth seeing sprawled-out if for a single-purpose novelty (the only real purpose a chemical name could possibly serve).

Written By Ryan Thomas

Read more: http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-longest-words-in-the-english-language.php#ixzz1sJrG8BP5

 

Facebook Makes Headway Around the World

Sergey Brin, a Google founder, takes issue with people who say Google has failed to gain a foothold in social networking. Google has had successes, he often says, especially with Orkut, the dominant service in Brazil and India.

Mr. Brin may soon have to revise his answer.

Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

With his typical self-confidence, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old chief executive, recently said it was “almost guaranteed” that the company would reach a billion users.

Though he did not say when it would reach that mark, the prediction was not greeted with the skepticism that had met his previous boasts of fast growth.
“They have been more innovative than any other social network, and they are going to continue to grow,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “Facebook wants to be ubiquitous, and they are being successful for now.”

The rapid ascent of Facebook has no company more worried than Google, which sees the social networking giant as a threat on multiple fronts. Much of the activity on Facebook is invisible to Google’s search engine, which makes it less useful over time. What’s more, the billions of links posted by users on Facebook have turned the social network into an important driver of users to sites across the Web. That has been Google’s role.

Google has tried time and again to break into social networking not only with Orkut, but also with user profiles, with an industrywide initiative called OpenSocial, and, most recently, with Buzz, a social network that mixes elements of Facebook and Twitter with Gmail. But none of those initiatives have made a dent in Facebook.

Google is said to be trying again with a secret project for a service called Google Me, according to several reports. Google declined to comment for this article.
Google makes its money from advertising, and even here, Facebook poses a challenge.

“There is nothing more threatening to Google than a company that has 500 million subscribers and knows a lot about them and places targeted advertisements in front of them,” said Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital, a venture firm that has invested in Twitter and other social networking companies. “For every second that people are on Facebook and for every ad that Facebook puts in front of their face, it is one less second they are on Google and one less ad that Google puts in front of their face.”

With nearly two-thirds of all Internet users in the United States signed up on Facebook, the company has focused on international expansion.
Just over two years ago, Facebook was available only in English. Still, nearly half of its users were outside the United States, and its presence was particularly strong in Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries.

The task of expanding the site overseas fell on Javier Olivan, a 33-year-old Spaniard who joined Facebook three years ago, when the site had 30 million users. Mr. Olivan led an innovative effort by Facebook to have its users translate the site into more than 80 languages. Other Web sites and technology companies, notably Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, had used volunteers to translate their sites or programs.

But with 300,000 words on Facebook’s site — not counting material posted by users — the task was immense. Facebook not only encouraged users to translate parts of the site, but also let other users fine-tune those translations or pick among multiple translations. Nearly 300,000 users participated.

“Nobody had done it at the scale that we were doing it,” Mr. Olivan said.
The effort paid off. Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the United States. And while the number of users in the United States doubled in the last year, to 123 million, according to comScore, the number more than tripled in Mexico, to 11 million, and it more than quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million.

With every new translation, Facebook pushed into a new country or region, and its spread often mirrored the ties between nations or the movement of people across borders. After becoming popular in Italy, for example, Facebook spread to the Italian-speaking portions of Switzerland. But in German-speaking areas of Switzerland, adoption of Facebook lagged. When Facebook began to gain momentum in Brazil, the activity was most intense in southern parts of the country that border on neighboring Argentina, where Facebook was already popular.
“It’s a mapping of the real world,” Mr. Olivan said.

Facebook is not popular everywhere. The Web site is largely blocked in China. And with fewer than a million users each in Japan, South Korea and Russia, it lags far behind home-grown social networks in those major markets.

Mr. Olivan, who leads a team of just 12 people, hopes to change that. Facebook recently sent some of its best engineers to a new office in Tokyo, where they are working to fine-tune searches so they work with all three Japanese scripts. In South Korea, as well as in Japan, where users post to their social networks on mobile phones more than on PCs, the company is working with network operators to ensure distribution of its service.

Industry insiders say that, most of all, Facebook is benefiting from a cycle where success breeds more success. In particular, its growing revenue, estimated at $1 billion annually, allows the company to invest in improving its product and keep competitors at bay.

“I think that Facebook is winning for two reasons,” said Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a board member of Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Mr. Gordon said that Facebook had hired some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley, and he said that the company’s strategy to create a platform for other software developers had played a critical role.
“They have opened up a platform, and they have the best apps on that platform,” Mr. Gordon said.

With Facebook’s social networking lead growing, it is not clear whether Google, or any other company, will succeed in derailing its march forward.
Says Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog, “Google can’t even get to the first base of social networks, which is people interacting with each other, much less to second or third base, which is people interacting with each other through games and applications.”

By MIGUEL HELFT (NYT. July 7, 2010)

 

Poet Cordelia Brown dies at 29

San Francisco writer Cordelia Brown knew she was gambling with death when she stopped taking her epilepsy medications two years ago. But she told her mother she had no choice.

It was for her art, she said. She wanted her head clearer for poetry.
“Sharpen yourself like a knife and plunge into the sky,” Ms. Brown wrote in her 2008 book of poems, “Asylum.” That perfectly fit her approach to life: from overcoming a childhood automobile accident that nearly killed her to later journeying to India to teach English to Tibetan monks and living in a remote artists colony in the Venezuelan Andes mountains.

On May 1, at age 29, Ms. Brown faced her own apparent premonition of the nearing end with a peace beyond her years.
“Starting over – sinking into the night – my slate is clean,” were the last words she posted on her Facebook page before going to sleep.
And then, sometime that night, she died of an epileptic seizure.

The epilepsy was the only holdover effect of the accident in 1994 near Cloverdale, when a car driven by a 13-year-old girl slammed into the Brown family Ford Explorer, injuring six family members on their way to a Christmas vacation. Cordelia, then 14, was the most seriously injured, and was hospitalized in critical condition with head injuries.

Her gentle spirit, which shone through in her probing brown eyes and easy laugh, will be missed by not just her family, but poets and other artists through Northern California, friends and relatives said.
“My daughter was a stunning, beautiful woman, inside and out,” said her mother, Josie Brown of Petrolia (Humboldt County). “After the accident, she had to learn everything all over again – how to walk, how to swallow, how to do her studies. But she did it all.”

What Ms. Brown came away with from the experience, other than the epilepsy from injuries to her brain, her mother said, was “a quickening sense of living. She felt like she had a lot to do.”
And she did.

Ms. Brown was born in Homer, Ala., where her parents, Josie and John Brown, raised cattle and ran a travel guide business. When she was 6, the family moved to Petrolia, where the Browns still raise cattle and organic vegetables – and where Josie Brown runs the nearby Lost Coast Camp summer program for children.

After graduating from Mattole Triple Junction High School in Petrolia one year early, Ms. Brown first went to Spanish language school in Costa Rica and then worked at an orphanage in Nicaragua. She took to traveling and teaching English all over the world, and between jaunts she came back to San Francisco long enough to earn a bachelor’s degree in linguistics at New College of California in 2004.

In 2005, by then fluent in Spanish, she earned a certificate at UC Berkeley for teaching English as a second language. She went from there to the artists colony in the Andes, and when she returned two years ago she devoted herself to producing her only poetry book.

“When she came back, she had such a strong passion to do a lot of writing that she stopped taking the series of epilepsy medications she was taking,” her mother said. “She thought they were clouding her brain and she wanted to concentrate.
“I think she knew her life wasn’t going to go on and on,” because of her condition, Josie Brown said. “Cordelia wasn’t thinking about that accident any more, it was all behind her. She was doing her art.”

David Ulansey, a friend and professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, said he wasn’t sure whether the last words Ms. Brown posted on her Facebook site were “premonition or synchronicity, but they have been very healing for us.”
“Cordelia was a real force of nature,” he said. “She and her poetry radiated sensitivity and insight about the details of things that in the end make all the difference.”

Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, May 15, 2009

 

School fights to revive native Canadian language

OHSWEKEN, Ontario (Reuters) – In a grey, shed-like building on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in southern Ontario, Esenogwas Jacobs is getting her kindergarten students ready to head home for the day.

“Gao dehswe,” Jacobs says, calling her students to the door.

“Gyahde:dih,” she adds, it’s time to go.

Her students answer with assertive “ehes.”

No one speaks a word of English.

“I just use Cayuga with them,” Jacobs said. “Mostly they can respond back in Cayuga, so it’s pretty cool.”

The eight children of this kindergarten class carry on their shoulders the hopes for preserving the language of the Cayugas, one of the six nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy of southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States.

Since the 19th Century and until recently, Canada has pushed for the assimilation of its native population, sending aboriginal children to boarding schools where they were taught the language, culture and spirituality of Canadian society.

While the effort to assimilate aboriginal people into Canadian culture failed, the schools, the last of which closed in 1996, were effective at stunting aboriginal languages.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to set up a commission to look into the schools, which could lead to a statement of apology similar to one issued by Australia to its aboriginal people this week.

Less than a quarter of aboriginal people in Canada use their ancestral tongue, the government says. The number of fluent Cayuga speakers has dropped from 376 in the 1970s to only 79 today.

“The number of speakers, they’re dying off all the time, like every year,” said Elva Jamieson, who learned the language as a child from her family, but wasn’t allowed to speak it at school. “It gets lonely when you don’t have someone to talk to.”

Jamieson is a teacher at the Gaweni:yo High School, part of the same Cayuga language immersion program that also includes Jacobs’ kindergarten class, as well as a parallel Mohawk language program.

“I think the language speaks to their spirit,” Jamieson said of the 35 pupils at the high school, located about 70 miles southwest of the Ontario capital Toronto. “They’re able to grasp it and go with it.”

While the linguistic knowledge of native speakers like Jamieson is irreplaceable, Gaweni:yo — which means “nice-sounding words” — is helping to slow the erosion of the Cayuga language, and young people are becoming a viable population of fluent speakers.

The most dedicated meet up regularly to chat in Cayuga and practice new words and some even use Cayuga as the primary language at home.

Jacobs, 24, herself a graduate of Gaweni:yo, tries to speak only Cayuga with her boyfriend, another graduate, and she spends evenings visiting with elders to learn new words.

The program has been running since 1986, but this is the first year that it has included a kindergarten class. Many of her young students are the children of fellow Gaweni:yo graduates and Jacobs encourages them to use Cayuga at home, too.

While the dominant language on the reserve is still English, Jacobs is happy with the progress. The language is going through a rebirth, she said. “It feels good knowing these kids are coming up.”

LANGUAGE LOST

Not far from Jacobs’ kindergarten, a group of adults are also studying Cayuga in a crowded community centre classroom. One of them is Oklahoman Sally White, a descendant of the Seneca-Cayuga – a tribe that separated from the Cayuga of Six Nations in the 18th century.

The Seneca-Cayuga spoke a similar dialect, but their language has now been declared extinct, which means a man from Six Nations must go to Oklahoma each year to perform their traditional ceremonies.

“Without him, I don’t think we would have (our ceremonies),” said White, who hopes to learn enough Cayuga to teach the basics to her husband and other members of their community. “It’s just about gone. We’re losing a lot.”

But saving dying languages costs money and for many Canadians the price of immersion programs such as the one at Six Nations may be too steep.

Canada’s Conservative government, elected two years ago, has cut a 10-year, C$173 million ($173 million) language revitalization program, leaving the immersion programs at Six Nations dangling by a thread. School officials do not know if there will be funding to continue past the current year.

The death of the language would be a tragedy, according to linguist Marianne Mithun, who spent 10 years studying the decline of the Cayuga language at Six Nations.

“The loss of language is a devastating loss of identity,” said Mithun, a University of California Santa Barbara linguist who specializes in aboriginal languages in North America. “It is the disappearance of their heritage, a blacking out of their intellectual and cultural history.”

While Cayuga still has enough mother-tongue speakers to document how the language should be spoken, a process that is taking place on Six Nations through video and audio archives, Mithun worries that once all the elders die, the living language will only be a pale shadow of what it once was.

“When you get to see a language like Cayuga, you just see other ways of looking at the world,” said Mithun, commenting on the language’s literal nature. “If we care about understanding the human mind, then we’re really missing the boat if we let these languages slip.”

* By Julie Gordon (15 Feb 2008)

 

How the Guinness Book of Records Can Help YOU to Learn any Foreign Language

Meet Jorge Fernandez Gates

At only 18 years of age, Jorge Fernandez Gates can speak, read and write in 11 foreign languages. They are not all related languages either. Some already under his belt include Mandarin Chinese, Catalan, Galician, English, French, German, Swedish, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch.

Not only that, but Jorge only started learning foreign languages a little over 5 years ago, which means he’s been “picking up” a foreign lingo at the rate of two foreign languages per year. His goal is to get into the Guinness Book of Records by mastering at least 25 foreign languages.

Already recognized as the “youngest polyglot in Peru”, in several interviews given primarily in his native Spanish, he discusses some techniques he (and you) can use to develop fluency in whatever foreign language you’re striving to acquire.

He says, “For me, foreign language learning is a hobby, I can’t control it, at any moment I could open a dictionary to look up a new word for my vocabulary.”

His principal ally in the quest to master enough foreign languages to make the Guinness Book of Records is the internet which he credits with up to 70% of his foreign language learning success.

He cites in particular Radio Bucharest online at: (http://www.multilingualbooks.com/online-radio.html) that features both live and pre-recorded radio programming in 38 European and Asian languages as well as 18 African continental languages, and online language courses as aids in helping him to familiarize himself with foreign languages.

Other tactics he has frequently employed include:

– Talking with the staff in ethnic restaurants
– Watching television programs in or about target languages
– Using the radio as a key listening and comprehension development resource “to help accustom your ear to the pronunciation of the language”
– Using the internet to listen and study foreign languages

A major concern he has had was that “one day his brain would explode” from the constant linguistic input or that he would linguistically get “his wires crossed” and become totally confused. A neurologist he consulted assured him that “there are no limits” to the brain’s capacity to take in and store knowledge.

Jorge Fernandez gives these “keys” as essential to his linguistic accomplishments:

– Learn the foreign language grammar “forwards and backwards”
– Acquire a basis vocabulary of high-frequency words and phrases
– Never stop augmenting new vocabulary in your new language – He tries to learn at least two new words each day
– Practice your new language with friends, language teachers or whomever you can regularly

And just what started it all?

“I’m not a good student and as punishment my Mother decided to take away my cell phone and prohibited me from chatting online. I couldn’t go out, so to keep from spending the entire day sleeping I enrolled in a French course.” Then things began to change for him. “I liked it and decided to take Italian too.” He later discovered a course in Romanian on the internet and “loved it”.

To “prove” his language abilities, family members have gone with him to Chinese restaurants to have him converse with the cook and contacted TV programs and foreign language professors to verify his linguistic skills in other languages.

So began the linguistic journey of Jorge Fernandez Gates. So as not to create a “Babel” in his brain, he restricts himself to “calmly learning only two languages” at a time per year. You can listen to journalist Rosa Maria Palacios do a 26 minute video interview with him (in Spanish) on his language-learning adventures at: http://www.youtube.com/

Prof. Larry M. Lynch is an English language teaching and learning expert author and university professor in Cali, Colombia. Now YOU too can live your dreams in paradise, find romance, high adventure and get paid while travelling for free. For more information on entering or advancing in the fascinating field of teaching English as a Foreign or Second Language send for his no-cost pdf Ebook, “If You Want to Teach English Abroad, Here’s What You Need to Know”, by sending an e-mail with “free ELT Ebook” in the subject line. For comments, questions, requests, to receive more information or to be added to his free TESOL articles and teaching materials mailing list, e-mail: lynchlarrym@gmail.com

 

The greater utility of the Blogs

There are millions of Blogs that exist, today, and, we can appreciate three general aspects well differentiated, and they are:

1. Blogs financed by businesses of communication. Radios, Television, Newspapers, magazines, etc.
2. Blogs of diverse advertising businesses
3. Blogs Personal of common people.

In the first case, we see that the ones that write are wage-earning people, that are dedicated to write as part of their work and they enjoy a great infrastructure and machinery to make their blogs.

In the second case, we see large, medium or small businesses (including the personals) are dedicated to develop their blog on the base of a group of products or specific services.

In the third case (where I find me), we do not receive money by writing, neither we have greater infrastructure, only our PC and our personal knowledge, which along with our preferences in themes to treat, and to publish.

But, for me, more important in many personal blogs, is, to identify its authors, at least in its basic data, and if we are interested in someone we can go to look in their mind, according to what comments or articles are publishes.

I believe that the personal Blogs will be able to be more efficient, among serious people that want to develop some theme or to share ideas or news that occur in our experiences around the world.

See you later.
CARLOS Tiger without Time

 

Alex the African Grey

THE last time Irene Pepperberg saw Alex she said goodnight as usual. “You be good,” said Alex. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” “You’ll be in tomorrow?” “Yes, I’ll be in tomorrow.” But Alex (his name supposedly an acronym of Avian Learning Experiment) died in his cage that night, bringing to an end a life spent learning complex tasks that, it had been originally thought, only primates could master.

In science as in most fields of endeavour, it is important to have the right tool for the job. Early studies of linguistic ability in apes concluded it was virtually non-existent. But researchers had made the elementary error of trying to teach their anthropoid subjects to speak. Chimpanzee vocal cords are simply not up to this—and it was not until someone had the idea of teaching chimps sign language that any progress was made.

Even then, the researchers remained human-centric. Their assumption was that chimps might be able to understand and use human sign language because they are humanity’s nearest living relatives. It took a brilliant insight to turn this human-centricity on its head and look at the capabilities of a species only distantly related to humanity, but which can, nevertheless, speak the words people speak: a parrot.

The insight in question came to Dr Pepperberg, then a 28-year-old theoretical chemist, in 1977. To follow it up, she bought a one-year-old African Grey parrot at random from a pet shop. Thus began one of the best-known double acts in the field of animal-behaviour science.

Dr Pepperberg and Alex last shared a common ancestor more than 300m years ago. But Alex, unlike any chimpanzee (with whom Dr Pepperberg’s most recent common ancestor lived a mere 4m years ago), learned to speak words easily. The question was, was Alex merely parroting Dr Pepperberg? Or would that pejorative term have to be redefined? Do parrots actually understand what they are saying?
Bird brained
Dr Pepperberg’s reason for suspecting that they might—and thus her second reason for picking a parrot—was that in the mid-1970s evolutionary explanations for behaviour were coming back into vogue.

A British researcher called Nicholas Humphrey had proposed that intelligence evolves in response to the social environment rather than the natural one. The more complex the society an animal lives in, the more wits it needs to prosper.
The reason why primates are intelligent, according to Dr Humphrey, is that they generally live in groups. And, just as group living promotes intelligence, so intelligence allows larger groups to function, providing a spur for the evolution of yet more intelligence. If Dr Humphrey is right, only social animals can be intelligent—and so far he has been borne out.

Flocks of, say, starlings or herds of wildebeest do not count as real societies. They are just protective agglomerations in which individuals do not have complex social relations with each other.

But parrots such as Alex live in societies in the wild, in the way that monkeys and apes do, and thus Dr Pepperberg reasoned, Alex might have evolved advanced cognitive abilities. Also like primates, parrots live long enough to make the time-consuming process of learning worthwhile.

Combined with his ability to speak (or at least “vocalise”) words, Alex looked a promising experimental subject.
And so it proved. Using a training technique now employed on children with learning difficulties, in which two adults handle and discuss an object, sometimes making deliberate mistakes, Dr Pepperberg and her collaborators at the University of Arizona began teaching Alex how to describe things, how to make his desires known and even how to ask questions.

By the end, said Dr Pepperberg, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not reached his full potential. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. He knew the names of 50 objects and could, in addition, describe their colours, shapes and the materials they were made from.He could answer questions about objects’ properties, even when he had not seen that particular combination of properties before. He could ask for things—and would reject a proffered item and ask again if it was not what he wanted. He understood, and could discuss, the concepts of “bigger”, “smaller”, “same” and “different”. And he could count up to six, including the number zero (and was grappling with the concept of “seven” when he died). He even knew when and how to apologise if he annoyed Dr Pepperberg or her collaborators.
And the fact that there were a lot of collaborators, even strangers, involved in the project was crucial. Researchers in this area live in perpetual fear of the “Clever Hans” effect. This is named after a horse that seemed to count, but was actually reacting to unconscious cues from his trainer. Alex would talk to and perform for anyone, not just Dr Pepperberg.
There are still a few researchers who think Alex’s skills were the result of rote learning rather than abstract thought. Alex, though, convinced most in the field that birds as well as mammals can evolve complex and sophisticated cognition, and communicate the results to others. A shame, then, that he is now, in the words of Monty Python, an ex-parrot.

Sep 20th 2007
From The Economist print edition

 

STOP TERRORISM, YES TO THE PEACE AND THE WORLD’S SOLIDARITY

We Should Fight for contributing ours “granite of sand” in the construction of a world to pacify and supportive. A world that always says STOP to terrorism.

Therefore, to achieve a world environment to pacify, I believe that we must to begin for ourselves, in our daily life, in our house, with our family, with ours neighboring, our friends, our coworkers.

Likewise we are supportive WITH THE PEOPLE POOREST around of the world. We must give them real supportive and disinterested love, so we are better persons, more solidarity and we will be contributing to build a better world where there be not place for any type of terrorism.

See you later.
Carlos Tiger without Time

 

Languages spoken in the world and Mathematical poetry

There are about 1,500 different languages spoken in the world today.

In the early 1940’s when it was first being organized, officials (ONU) proposed that all diplomats be required to speak a single language, a restriction that would both facilitate negotiations and symbolize global harmony.

Over the years, there have been no fewer than 300 attempts to invent and promulgate a global language, the most famous being made in 1887 by the polish oculist L.L. Zamenhof. The artificial language he created is called Esperanto, and today more than 100,000 people in twenty-two countries speak it.

United Nations ambassadors are now allowed to speak any one of five languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish,  or French.

Today who speak mathematics fluently, as measured by the millions and by the historic consequences of their unified efforts, is arguably the most successful global language even spoken.

Though it has not enabled us to build a tower of Babel, it has made possible achievements that once seemed no less impossible: electricity, airplanes, the nuclear bomb, landing a man on the moon, and understanding the nature of life and death.

Matthe Arnold said: “ Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.”

In the language of mathematics, equations are like poetry: They state truths with a unique precision, convey volumes of information in rather brief terms, and often are difficult for the initiated to comprehend. And just as conventional poetry helps us to see deep within ourselves, mathematical poetry helps us to see far beyond ourselves – if not all the way up to heaven, then at leapt out to the brink of the visible universe.

In attempting to distinguish between prose and poetry, Robert Frost once suggested that a poem, by definition, is a pithy form of expression that can never be accurately translated. The same can be said about mathematics: It is impossible to understand the true meaning of an equation, or to appreciate its beauty, unless it is read in the delightfully quirky language in which it was penned.

· Summarized and adapted of “Mathematical Poetry” of Dr. Michael Guillen

 

THE BLOG NOBODY READ

Somebody said: The Blog nobody read are Blogs that speak about the sincere love, friendship and have a speech like this:

Get up early, work hard, keeping update. Get up the next day and do it again.

Keep doing it and smile at challenges. Curse at idleness.

Be true to your dream. Don’t stop until you achieve it. Then dream another dream. And work to achieve that.

Give your family a better life and the world a better life, too.

Leave signs of significance. Don’t forget the spiritual life (It’s eternal)

I hope that everybody can love one another, and welcome to my blog.

See you later.
CARLOS (Tiger without Time)

 

The BLOG traveler, Does Road when is walking

It is very interesting the evolution of the Blogs, like group, as a new massive media, using modern technologies and the evolution of the Internet.

If we concentrate on those people that make a serious Blogs, to communicate us, direct or indirectly, some news, ideas, comments, experiences or simply to entertain us with some video or photos.

Besides the fact to be able to share new know-how or experiences of people of everywhere around the world. And, in a diversity of themes that would be very long to mention.

All this new form of modern communication, of people with access to Internet, that each day they are more. So, how everything in this life, it has a good side and it has a bad side.

The good side is that without doing long and costly travel, we can know people of almost everywhere around the world and to learn their form of seeing the world and to learn his culture and form of living.

Also the Blogs can be like our curriculum of personal presentation to other people. According to our design of Blog we will get up people that have something interests in what we publish, and so will be born a fruitful friendship.

The bad side is that we can convert ourselves, in people that they are in a room with a PC, and they forget of the physical relations. Very important is the physical contact for to get good human relations.

Besides being able to make the mistake of idealizing to the people that know for Internet. Therefore, always the personal contact is decisive.

Thus, paraphrasing a great poet, the Blogs have begun to walk, they are Blogs travelers and they do road when It’s walking, and, now, when we return our view behind, we see distant and obsolete the starting point; therefore, not only, we leave wakes in the sea, but we leave wakes in the cyberspace.

See you soon,

CARLOS (Tiger without Time)

 

The ADVENTURE of ENGLISH. The BIOGRAPHY of A LANGUAGE

ENGLISH is the collective work of millions of people throughout the ages. It is democratic, ever changing, and ingenious in its assimilation of other cultures.Nearly two billion people understand today

English runs through the heart of world finance, medicine, and the Internet, and it across our world. And it seems set to go on.  Yet it was nearly wiped out in its early years. In this thoroughly researched and ground-breaking book, Melvyn Bragg shows us the remarkable story of the English language, from its modest beginnings around A.D. 500 as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its current position as a truly established global language. From the beginning English was battle hardened in strategies of survival and takeover.

After the first tribes arrived it was not certain which dialect if any would become dominant. Out of the confusion of a land, the majority of whose speakers for most of that time spoke Celtic, garnished in some cases by leftover Latin, where tribal independence and regional control were ferociously guarded, English took time to emerge as the common tongue. There had been luck, but also cunning and the beginnings of what was to become English’s most subtle and ruthless characteristic of all: its capacity to absorb others. 

Along the way its colorful story takes in a host of characters, locations, and events. From Anglo-Saxon tribes, the Norman invasion in 1066, and on to the arrival of such early literary masterpieces as Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer’s bawdy Canterbury Tales. With anecdotes only a novelist as accomplished. The tales of Henry VIII”s battles with the church over bootleg Bibles, and the influence of William Shakespeare, who alone contributed 2,000 new words to the language. With its spread to North America, English expanded with the songs of the Creole slaves, with Lewis and Clark’s expedition West, which coined hundreds of new terms as the explorers discovered hitherto unknown flora and fauna. From street slang and Dr. Johnson’s dictionary to the role of English in India. 

Embracing elements of Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Gullah. This process continues, day by day, to change, along with the English language. 

Singlish in Singapore is a good example. English was used in Singapore for a hundred fifty years and when it went independent in 1958, Singapore made it the official language of business and government, partly because English united the diverse population of Chinese, Malays and Indians and partly because of its commercial and financial importance. But alongside official English you also hear Singlish, which grows and develops despite the efforts of the government to root it out. Some scholars believe that Singlish indicates the way in which future Englishes will develop. In so many ways it fits the tongues and the traditions and the vocal rhythms of the people of Singapore much better than official English and could threaten to replace it. And is it not yet another dialect of English? 

The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English. And a new form of English has just appeared back at base –Text English.This appeared in an issue of the Guardian early in 2003, under “English as a Foreign Language”:

Dnt u sumX rekn eng lang v lngwindd? 2 mny wds & ltrs?nt we b usng lss time&papr? ?we b 4wd tnking +txt? 13 yr grl frim w scot 2ndry schl sd ok…….I cdnt bleve wot I was cing!:o -!-!- !OW2TE. Sh hd NI@A  wot  gr was on abut. Sh 4t her pupl was ritng in “hieroglyphics.” 

This is yet another English and totally comprehensible to its users, who are mostly young and therefore influential on the future of the language.  “I love you” is now more commonly the text “I luv u”.  

·          It was summarized of Book “The Adventure of ENGLISH. The BIOGRAPHY of A LANGUAGE” by MELVYN BRAGG, 2003