Popular languages

The sheer stupidity out of nannycrats in Brussels is staggering. Smack in the midst of a depression, Brussels once again calls on Spain to hike taxes. Via Google translate from El Economista ...

Arabic is the most commonly spoken language after English by young people in Australia, a study has revealed, with about one in eight multilingual children using it in the home.The Australia Early Development Index, a government-backed study of more than 260,000 children in their first year of school, found that 18 percent spoke a language other than English.Despite no Arabic nation making the top 15 countries of birth for Australia's children, some 5,565 spoke the language at home, 11.8 percent of all multilingual children.

Arabic was the fastest-growing foreign language for US university study last year, with enrollments growing by more than 46 percent compared to 2006, a study released Wednesday showed.Besides English, Arabic leapfrogged Latin and Russian to land in eighth place on the most studied language list, which has been compiled 22 times since 1958 by the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Twitter on Tuesday added Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and Urdu to the growing list of languages available at the popular one-to-many text messaging service used by Arab Spring protesters."Twitter is now available in right-to-left languages," the San Francisco-based firm said in a blog post, crediting the accomplishment to thousands of volunteer translators who began working on the project in late January.

"According to a recent article in the New York Times, liberal arts colleges are dropping their foreign language requirement because of budget cuts. Recession or not, hat's good news.

From the BBC, the top 20 predictions for life in 2112 include:1) Oceans will be extensively farmed for fish, energy, algae, and natural resources, 2) Telepathic communication will become common, 3) Immortality, 4) Ability to control the weather, and 5) Only three languages (English, Spanish and Mandarin).   

By Vatalyst: Bruce Berkowitz launched Fairholme in 1999. Since then, he has earned the title “Stock Manager of the Decade” for his record of ultra high returns. In 2010, Berkowitz’s Fairholme Fund returned 25.5%, beating the market by more than 10 percentage points. In fact, Berkowitz has been able to outperform the market every year except 2003.

In a more serious vein that the post below, this is kind of interesting: The Hebrew-only speakers behaved like children just starting to read most languages – they tried to tell Arabic letters apart, managed to do it slowly but made a lot of mistakes, and used both hemispheres of their brains. The good Arabic readers, however, only used their left hemispheres to tell Arabic letters apart. [...]