English Recordings

When Members of Parliament (MPs) published a set of new proposals in early January on ways to improve the integration of immigrants in the UK, one of the most controversial concerned speaking English. The report form the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration, chaired by the Labour MP Chuka Umunna, proposed that: All immigrants should be expected to have either learned English before coming to the UK or be enrolled in compulsory ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes upon arrival.
The assumption here is that migrants don’t speak English, or not well enough to integrate within British society. However, this disregards the fact that English is a global language, spoken by up to two billion multilingual people around the world. It is a case of what the linguist Adrian Holliday termed “native-speakerism” – the belief in the linguistic superiority of “native speakers” and the consequent discrimination of those who are considered “non-native speakers”. But the distinction between native speakers and non-native speakers is often not just based on actual language skills, but, far more disturbingly, on assumptions based on ethnicity.
An example of the sensitivities around this issue were clearly on display during a Channel 4 news report on the MPs’ report on January 5th. The report included brief interviews with two women currently living in the UK, one from Somalia and the other from Gambia. They were meant to represent examples of the particular category of migrants requiring compulsory English language classes under the new proposals. But both women spoke good English when answering the interviewer’s questions about the current lack of English class provision.
The two women were from Sub-Saharan Africa, were of an ethnicity that was visibly different from that of a typical white British person and, in the case of the Gambian woman, wore clothes that marked non-Judaeo-Christian cultural and religious affiliations. They not only represented migrants needing English language tuition but prototypical migrants, exhibiting suitably “exotic” traits that identified them as such.

What is remarkable from a modern perspective is how slowly and methodically it spread. Although the plague did make occasional long-range jumps, as in its travel along trading routes such as the Silk Road and via ships, its progression throughout Europe averaged only about two kilometers per day, slow even by the standards of foot travel at the time. Even though the bubonic plague rarely transmits directly from person to person, the disease traveled alongside humans – via the fleas who fed on rats on ships, on farm animals, people, and in clothing – and so it made its way through the networks of humans and the various animals that accompanied them. The slow movement of the plague tells us how limited the mobility and range of contacts of most humans were in the Middle Ages. Modern pandemics are quite different: they spread remarkably quickly, with diseases jumping continents typically within a matter of days or weeks. A measles outbreak among unvaccinated adults and children sparked via interactions at an American theme park in southern California in 2014 appeared in schools hundreds of miles away days later. Ebola was carried by health workers from Sierra Leone in 2015 to cities in Europe and North America within a week of their exposure. Beyond immediate insights into the spread of diseases, the understanding of how contagion and diffusion depend on the structure of our networks will serve as a starting point for comprehending the more complex spread of ideas, financial contagions, inequality in employment and wages, and lots of other subjects concerning how our networks work.

The bubonic plague, or Black Death, spread across Europe, slowly but steadily, from 1347 to around 1352. The culprit, Yersinia pestis, is a pathogen carried by fleas who ingest it when feeding on an infected host. It blocks the fleas’ intestines causing them to become starved for nutrients, which leads them to feed voraciously and infect their subsequent hosts. Fleas are adept at living on rats, other animals, and humans – with some resistant hosts serving only as carriers and others quickly dying once bitten and infected. It is a horrifying disease: beginning like a flu with weakness and fever, but turning into extensive hemorrhaging. The dying tissues turn black, giving the plague its nickname of Black Death. The sanitation of the era, a lack of understanding of contagion, and close proximity of humans and many animals meant that the disease was amazingly virulent in the growing cities of the Middle Ages. It cut the populations of Paris and Florence roughly in half within a couple of years, with even larger death tolls in cities like Hamburg and London. It is believed to have made its way along the Silk Road from China to Constantinople, and later from Genoese trading ships to Sicily by 1347, where it quickly wiped out roughly half of the island’s population. It continued to spread, hitting parts of Italy, and then Marseille, before spreading through France and Spain, and eventually getting to the northern countries a few years later. Overall, it is estimated to have killed more than 40 percent of Europe’s population, as well as 25 million people in China and India before even reaching Europe.

When a human infant is born into any community in any part of the world it has two things in common with any other infant, provided neither of them has been damaged in any way either before or during birth. Firstly, and most obviously, newborn children are completely helpless. Apart from a powerful capacity to draw attention to their helplessness by using sound there is nothing the newborn child can do to ensure his own survival. Without care from some other human being or beings, be it mother, grandmother, sister, nurse or human group, a child is very unlikely to survive. This helplessness of human infants is in marked contrast with the capacity of many newborn animals to get to their feet within minutes of birth and to run with the herd within a few hours. Although young animals are certainly at risk, sometimes for weeks or even months after birth, compared with the human infant the very quickly develop the capacity to support themselves. It would seem that this long period of helplessness is the price that the human species has to pay for the very long learning period which fits man for survival as a species.
It is during this very long period in which the human infant is totally dependent on others that it reveals the second feature which it shares with all other undamaged human infants, a capacity to learn language. For this reason, biologists now suggest that language is ‘species specific to the human race, that is to say, they consider the human infant to be genetically programmed in such a way that it can acquire language. This suggestion implies that just as human beings are designed to stand upright rather than to move on all fours, so they are designed to learn and use language as part of their normal development as well-formed human beings.

--Already recorded, thanks!--

Jamaica
Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean.The island lies about 140 kilometres (87 mi) south of Cuba, and 191 kilometres (119 mi) west of Hispaniola. Its capital city is Kingston; other towns include Montego Bay, St. Ann's Bay and Spanish Town.
The Taino indigenous people, originating in South America, settled on the island between 4000 and 1000 BC. When Christopher Columbus arrived during his second voyage to the Americas in 1494, there were more than 200 Taino villages. Jamaica became a Spanish colony.
In 1655, Jamaica was conquered by the British. It became independent again in 1962.
The official language of Jamaica is English and the population also speaks Jamaican Creole English.
The island is known for reggae artist Bob Marley. The popular sprinter Usain Bolt is also a celebrity from the country.

The meat is not ready yet, is it?
I'll take care that the meat is cooked properly, shall I?
I go swimming every Friday, don’t I?
I am right, aren’t I?
I am playing well, aren’t I?
My parents have dinner in the cafe, don’t they?
I have a good idea, don’t I?
They had a lot of time last year, didn’t they?
Check that the meat is completely cooked before you serve it up, won’t you?

These are yours, aren’t they?
Everybody took the test, didn’t they?
Somebody has come, haven’t they?
No one knows this young writer, do they?
We’ve never been there, have we?
They found nobody, did they?

Let him have a rest, will you?
Let him have a rest, won’t you?
Let me decide, will you?
Let me decide, won’t you?
Let’s have breakfast, shall we? and don’t shout at parents, will you?

Archaeological discoveries have led some scholars to believe that the first Mesopotamian inventors of
writing may have been people the later Babylonians called Subarians. According to tradition, they came from
the north and moved into Uruk in the south. By about 3100 B.C, they were apparently subjugated in southern
Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, whose name became synonymous with the region immediately north of the
Persian Gulf, in the fertile lower valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here the Sumerians were already well
established by the year 3000B.C. They had invented bronze, an alloy that could be cast in molds, out of which
they made tools and weapons. They lived in cities, and they had begun to acquire and use capital. Perhaps
most important, the Sumerians adapted writing (probably from the Subarians) into a flexible tool of
communication.

Archacologists have known about the Sumerians for over 150 years. Archacologists working at Nineveh in
northern Mesopotamia in the mid-nineteenth century found many inscribed clay tablets. Some they could
decipher because the language was a Semitic one (Akkadian), on which scholars had already been working for
a generation. But other tablets were inscribed in another language that was not Semitic and previously
unknown. Because these inscriptions mad reference to the king of Sumer and Akkad, a scholar suggested that
the mew language be called Sumerian. But it was not until the 1890's that archaeologists excavating in
city-states well to the south of Nieveh found many thousands of tablets inscribed in Sumerian only. Because
the Akkadians thought of Sumerian as a classical language (as ancient Greek and Latin are considered today),
they taught it to educated persons and they inscribed vocabulary, translation exercised, and other study aids
on tablets. Working from known Akkadian to previously unknown Sumerian, scholars since the 1890's have
learned how to read the Sumerian language moderately well. Vast quantities of tablets in Sumerian have been
unearthed during the intervening years from numerous sites.

Glass is a remarkable substance made from the simplest raw materials. It can be colored or colorless, monochrome or polychrome, transparent, translucent, or opaque. It is lightweight impermeable to liquids, readily cleaned and reused, durable yet fragile, and often very beautiful Glass can be decorated in multiple ways and its optical properties are exceptional. In all its myriad forms - as table ware, containers, in architecture and design - glass represents a major achievement in the history of technological developments.
Since the Bronze Age about 3,000 B.C., glass has been used for making various kinds of objects. It was first made from a mixture of silica, line and an alkali such as soda or potash, and these remained the basic ingredients of glass until the development of lead glass in the seventeenth century. When heated, the mixture becomes soft and malleable and can be formed by various techniques into a vast array of shapes and sizes. The homogeneous mass thus formed by melting then cools to create glass, but in contrast to most materials formed in this way (metals, for instance), glass lacks the crystalline structure normally associated with solids, and instead retains the random molecular structure of a liquid. In effect, as molten glass cools, it progressively stiffens until rigid, but does so without setting up a network of interlocking crystals customarily associated with that process. This is why glass shatters so easily when dealt a blow. Why glass deteriorates over time, especially when exposed to moisture, and why glassware must be slowly reheated and uniformly cooled after manufacture to release internal stresses induced by uneven cooling.
Another unusual feature of glass is the manner in which its viscosity changes as it turns from a cold substance into a hot, ductile liquid. Unlike metals that flow or "freeze" at specific temperatures glass progressively softens as the temperature rises, going through varying stages of malleability until it flows like thick syrup. Each stage of malleability allows the glass to be manipulated into various forms, by different techniques, and if suddenly cooled the object retains the shape achieved at that point. Glass is thus amenable to a greater number of heat-forming techniques than most other materials.

If the statement above came from some cable TV documentary it would be easy to dismiss it as scaremongering. However, it actually comes from a report published by Britain’s Ministry of Defence. The comment refers to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), popularity known as ‘’drones’’ Military UAV’s serve two purposes: spying and killing – many do both. Drones come in all sizes: the smallest are the size of a laptop, the largest has a wingspan of over 100 metres. This giant is designed to fly nonstop for five years! Most are fixed-wing aircraft but some of the small ones are more like helicopters and hover. These ‘’quadrotors’’ are amazingly manoeuvrable being able to fly through or around almost any obstacle.