Newscaster broadcasting in Quechua. Photo: screen grab, TeleSur The American continent is something of a linguistic outlier. Throughout its massive expanse, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, almost no one speaks any of the thousands of native languages developed on the continent itself. Instead, most people speak just a handful of European languages, mostly English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
But one TV channel in South America is trying to help America - as in the continent, not the country - hold on to its linguistic roots by broadcasting news in one of the most widely spoken native languages in the Americas: Quechua. At the end of 2014, TeleSur, a channel supported by several South American countries that wears its left-wing populism on its sleeve, began producing occasional news segments in Quechua. Though this move is not without a bit of an ideological bent - the struggle for indigenous rights has been part of the platform that TeleSur promotes - it's also a practical move, given that there are nearly 10 million Quechua speakers in South America. Quechua actually originated before the rise of the Incan Empire, but was employed by the Incas to communicate across the lands they conquered. After the Spanish conquest of Peru and much of the rest of South America, many Spanish missionaries learned Quechua to be able to evangelize more effectively to local populations. Today, it is an official language in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Though some are reluctant to speak it, seeing it as something to be ashamed of in a context that all too often prioritizes Europeanized quasi-Spanish culture over native traditions, others are proud of the language. There is even a Peruvian woman who has become famous by singing covers of Michael Jackson songs translated into Quechua. But the Quecha newscast in particular also points to an interesting fact about broadcast speech styles in general: the way on-air speakers speak in pretty much every language is quite different from ordinary speech in that language. When we listen to a newscast given in our own native language, the difference between that speech style and normal speech is subtle, often going unnoticed (though not always - think of Ron Burgundy in Anchorman). But pay close attention and you'll hear it. But when listening to foreign languages, the difference becomes much more apparent. When I learned a foreign language, I found listening to regular conversations to be quite difficult at first. And when I listened to the news, the difference became clear right away: newscasters usually made a clear effort to annunciate every word, making sure the articulation was clear and straight forward. For me, this was a relief after trying so hard to decipher informal speech. But to native speakers, the intended effect was not just to be easy to understand, but to establish a tone of formality and seriousness, and therefore credibility. When comparing clips of newscasters in Quechua with others of everyday, colloquial speech in the language, it's clear even to non-speakers (like me) that there is a difference in the way words are enunciated. It also made it easier to hear some of the words that Quechua has borrowed from Spanish; at one point the anchor mentions "energia aeolica", Spanish for "wind energy", a term that understandably doesn't have its own version in Quechua. This is clearly something new in the language, but it may be a welcome change - there are many divergent dialects of it that make it difficult for speakers of one form to understand the other, and this move might help to standardize the language. Though we're still far from a Quechua version of Ron Burgundy, it will be interesting to see how Quechua newscasts evolve in the future. Cecily Strong delivers SNL's opening monologue in French last weekend. photo: screen grab. Last Friday, the world was shocked by a series of terrorist attacks in Paris that left at least 129 people dead, with many more wounded. Terrorists struck the Stade de France as a soccer match was playing out, as well as the well known Bataclan theater during a concert. France's president responded by immediately closing the country's borders and, over the weekend, launching a bombing campaign in Syria against targets associated with ISIS.
Immediately after the attack, people around the world began to show solidarity with the attacks. On Saturday, a day after the attacks took place, Facebook offered its users the option to change their profiles to the colors of the French flag. And Saturday Night Live, in lieu of its normal goofy opening gags, instead opted for an opening monologue by cast member Cecily Strong. Strong read a prepared statement, assuring Parisians that "Our love and support is with everyone there tonight." Then she repeated the statement, this time in a fairly convincing French. Americans are famously resistant to learning French, or anything that has to do with France. But last weekend they seemed to set all of that aside, in the name of remembrance for the victims, and perhaps, of hope for a more peaceful world. Rameses Sanguino. Photo: Youtube screen grab via LAist Learning languages has all kinds of benefits. But if a recent news story is any indication, doing so won't just give you the ability to read books in a foreign language, you might also be able to read minds.
Okay, so maybe that's a bit of a stretch. But, nevertheless, the story that inspired it is nothing if not interesting. It involves a 5-year-old boy with autism living in the Los Angeles area, who has mastered 6 languages, and may have an ability which defined broadly and without unnecessary levels of skepticism be thought of as telepathy. According to LAist, Rameses Sanguino, the 5-year-old in question, has mastered Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Spanish - and of course, English. Here's a video they've found of him speaking Chinese. He also has quite the knack for algebra. But what about his mind reading abilities? LAist reports: "Nyx [Sanguino, Rameses's mother] believes that her son may also have other mental powers, including the ability to read her thoughts. She said that she can pick a number and that Ramses will guess it correctly, as many as 38 times in a row. Neuroscientist Dr. Dianne Powell has been testing Ramses' so-called telepathy, and said that it could be linked to the fact that Ramses has autism." So if average folks like you and I try to become mind readers by learning six languages, we might not have the same success. Nevertheless - assuming Rameses' rather limited mind reading display is genuine, which is still a hefty assumption to make - could there be some common root that connects these abilities? After all, they are both forms of communication. It remains to be seen if Rameses's mind reading is the real deal, though regardless of this, his language abilities in their own right are impressive. But even if you're not convinced that language learning and mind reading are linked, there are still plenty of other great reasons to learn another language. |
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