Posts tagged with ‘languages’

Testing the myth that Germans can’t say the word “squirrel”

Even though English and German are both in the same language family, English has a lot of words borrowed from other languages… words like “squirrel”, which comes from French. And there’s something weird about the consonant-vowel sound arrangement of “squirrel” that just gets Germans all tongue-tied.

Learn more here

Watch a clip from the 1995 O. Henry World Pun Championship

John Pollack’s performance at the 18th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. Pollack is in polka-dots; the audience in stitches.

Morning music: The Fresh Prince theme song, run through Google translate

In an interesting language experiment, the lyrics to the Fresh Prince theme song are translated through Google Translate into various languages and then back into English.

And here’s some guy saying the longest word in the English language

At a whopping 189,819 letters long, the name of this protein is officially the longest word in the English language and this guy spends a full three hours saying it. 

Watch this Microsoft program turn spoken English into spoken Mandarin in real time

Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough via machine translation that converts his spoken English words into computer-generated Chinese language. The breakthrough is patterned after deep neural networks and significantly reduces errors in spoken as well as written translation.

Submitted by Dive

And now, here’s JRR Tolkien reading a poem in Elvish

Here’s a 1952 recording of J.R.R. Tolkien reading “Namárië,” an Elvish language poem that appeared in Fellowship of the Ring.

Via