"Every language is a cultural asset of humanity," is how Tasaku Tsunoda expressed his motivation for costarting a project in 2002 to teach the extinct Warrongo language to the Aboriginal people of the Warrongo tribe of northeastern Australia.

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LONDON: India is falling behind China in its attempts to increase the use of English, risking squandering a key economic advantage, a new report
says.

A "huge shortage" of teachers and quality institutions means China may now have more people who speak English than India, says the study by the British Council, Britain's international cultural relations body.

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One of the biggest omissions in Japanese textbooks, classes and one-on-one lessons is gendered language. Ignore it and at some point you will wind up sounding like a little Japanese girl — or a guy — when you didn't intend too.

What exactly is "gendered language"? This refers to how males and females speak differently from one another within a language. It is a feature of other languages (Spanish, for one), but the Japanese version differs as it refers to gender roles and is not "grammatically gendered" — meaning that if you are a boy and speak like a girl, there is nothing grammatically incorrect about it. You would just sound like a girl, and that's no fun.

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...After receiving a Ph.D. in history in France, Park began working at the national library in Paris in 1967, where she discovered the dust-covered "Jikji Simche Yojeol." The book, printed by the Buddhist monk Baekun in 1377, is an anthology of the teachings of the Buddha for meditation. At a global symposium of Asia experts in 1972, Park proved that it was printed 78 years earlier than Johannes Gutenberg's 42-Line Bible printed in 1455. Her findings gained international recognition.

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Jikji Simche Yojeol: The world's oldest extant movable metal print book

Resembling glasses but lacking lenses, the headset uses a tiny projector to display images on a user's retina.

NEC said it planned a version that used real-time translation to provide subtitles for a conversation between people lacking a common language.

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Sometimes you just want to wring someone's neck (kubi wo hinetteyaru). Oh, only figuratively, I mean. And having wrung — verbally, that is — you feel like a new man or woman, totally refreshed. This may even clear the air, or, in Japanese, sukatto suru, and be the basis for a passionate makeup.

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19 September, 2009 - The 9th Dzongkha Development Commission (DDC) Conference, that ended yesterday, has made a series of recommendations to promote and simplify the national language so that people not only speak it but also find it easier to read and write it.

In total, the 75 experts and members attending the conference made 62 recommendations ranging for simplifying the language, making the curriculum uniform and interesting to future policies and plans.

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A Hangeul copy of an ancient Chinese book that contains the notes of the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910) scholar Kim Si-seup has been discovered.

The book was originally written by a Buddhist master from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and dates back to the 16th century.

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PUNE, India : Christian and Hindu leaders in India as well as scholars from around the world have praised the performance of a Jesuit priest in convening the recent 14th World Sanskrit Conference.

Father Noel Sheth, a lecturer in Indian religions, served as chief convener of the History of Religion section at the meeting in Kyoto, Japan, the first Catholic priest so honored. The International Association of Sanskrit Studies had invited the University of Kyoto to host the triennial conference this year, held Sept. 1-5.

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A best-selling edition of the Bible is being rewritten after attempts to make it more politically correct ended in ridicule.

Publishers of the New International Version previously tried to make the holy text of Christianity “gender accurate” by changing phrases such as “sons of God” to “children of God” and “brethren” to “brothers and sisters”.

They also described the Virgin Mary as “pregnant” rather than “with child”, and removed mentions of people being “stoned”.

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Aug 30, Colombo: Ven. Kirama Wimalajothi Thero presented 47 volumes of Sinhala translations of Pali Scriptures to the President Mahinda Rajapaksa at Temple Trees on August 28th.

Following an ancient tradition of handing over Buddhist scriptures and books to the ruler of the land by the Buddhist clergy, the Venerable Thero handed over the translated volumes to the present day ruler, President Rajapaksa in a ceremony on Friday.

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Since at least the fifth century, generations of Buddhists have memorized and chanted the Diamond Sutra, a short Mahayana Buddhist scripture. The work, which offers meditations on illusion and perception, was originally written in Sanskrit and first translated into Chinese in 402 A.D. Despite the text’s longevity, Stanford religious studies professor Paul Harrison’s latest research suggests that previous translations may have incorrectly interpreted certain words in a way that affects the entire meaning of the text.

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This year it will be announced that China now has more English speakers than any other country in the world. And such is the demand for their services that top teachers have become big stars

"Where are you from? Do you speak English?" It's a familiar phrase near the Forbidden City in Beijing, or along the capital's Nanjing Road, as Chinese people try a standard opening gambit to spark up a conversation with a foreigner. Many visitors baulk at being approached so baldly, and are worried that it could be a scam. Very occasionally it is a con – and tourists should be wary when some nice young people offer to bring them to a tea house – but mostly the youngsters are desperate for access to real live Anglophones who can help them improve their conversational English.

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SHANGHAI - TOURISTS visiting Shanghai for next year's World Expo could be confused by signs on wet floors reading 'Slip Carefully!' So authorities in China want to make sure they never see them.

The Shanghai government, along with neighbouring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, published a 20-page guide book this week to standardise signs and eliminate notoriously bad, and sometimes amusing, English translations.

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Victoria University senior lecturer Galumalemana Alfred Hunkin told a 2009 Diversity Forum discussion that the future for Pacific languages rested in a simple approach: ‘use it or lose it’.

‘If we don’t work on preserving our languages now, they will be lost forever’, said Mr Hunkin, the chair of the forum hosted by the Ministry for Pacific Island Affairs and the New Zealand National Commission for UNESCO in Wellington today.

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