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“Talking Leaves” The Cherokee Syllabary of Sequoyah
Editor’s note: Be sure to listen to our podcast on saving the Cherokee language—Episode 30 of America the Bilingual, “A New Generation of Cherokee Speakers Rises.”
When is an alphabet not an alphabet? When it is the syllabary of the Cherokee language. A Cherokee named Sequoyah invented it in 1821. He had seen non-Native soldiers […]
No Mourning, Por Favor—It’s Día de los Muertos
While American children are busy unloading their haul from a night of trick-or-treating, Mexican children—and their parents—are spending the day making sweet offerings and celebrations in honor of their dead. Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is an important holiday in Mexico, and one that other Latino countries and communities (including […]
Jackie Kennedy’s Prowess as a Polygot
When President John F. Kennedy traveled to West Berlin on June 26, 1963, he wanted to assure the people there—who were literally walled off from the eastern portion of their city by Communist Russia—that Americans stood with them. Ever the classicist, Kennedy drew from the ancient Romans’ statement of Civis Romanus sum¸ “I am a […]
Other Tongue: Writers Who Write in a Language Not Their Own
Most writers will tell you that it’s challenging enough to write well in their native language, let alone attempting it in another. Yet a number of well-known authors have done just that, in many cases writing not only well but brilliantly, in a language that was not their first.
There’s a name for these writers: exophonic. […]
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First, know that she has one of those glorious English accents (or what all of us who are not English would call an accent), which makes her a natural for the audio book narration that she does. Although U.S. born, Caroline grew up in England and studied literature at the University of Warwick (fyi for American ears: that second “w” is silent).
