Languages

Prof. Tristan Brown discovered that a tea label on display at Boston’s Old South Meeting House, previously thought to be salvaged from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 is actually from the 19th century, writes Smithsonian Magazine’s Ryley Graham. “The artifact’s true origin came to light when Brown took a closer look at the Chinese text on the label,” writes Graham. “Previous translators had used Mandarin to decipher it. But Brown, noticing that one set of its characters appeared to represent the phonetic pronunciation of a foreign word, tried the translation in Cantonese instead.” 
 

Boston Globe correspondent Rose Pecci spotlights Joseph Applegate, a linguist who was the first appointed Black faculty member at MIT. Applegate “had a 60-year career in languages. By the end of his career, he knew 13 of them and was considered an expert on the Berber tongues of North Africa.”

Research led by postdoc Yevgeni Berzak examined the correlation between eye movement and language proficiency. Sandrine Ceurstemont of New Scientist notes that the team thinks results of the study could be used to “modify” text to a reader’s ability level, “catering to both second language and native speakers.”