Free Republic

Here at GPS, we love deep data dives. We also revel in the fact that America continues to be the melting pot that it has always been. So we were interested to see a piece on Slate.com last week analyzing the most common languages spoken in each state using U.S. census data. This first map is predictable – other than English, Spanish is the most spoken language in almost all U.S. states. But watch what happens when you remove Spanish from the equation. Now there is the melting pot. In Michigan, Arabic clocks in as the third most commonly spoken...

The program, a linguistic time machine of sorts, can quickly crunch data on some of the earliest-known "proto-languages" that gave rise to modern languages such as Hawaiian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, and others spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific. The speed and scale of the work is key here, as proto-languages are typically reconstructed through a timely and painstaking manual process that involves comparing two or more languages that hail from a shared ancestor. "What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about...

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

Voter guides tongue-tied DUE TO MIX-UP, SOME RECIPIENTS FACE UNEXPECTED LANGUAGE BARRIER By Kim Vo Mercury News Charles Rogers speaks English, but his state voter guide came in Spanish. His son's arrived in an Asian language. And Rogers can't borrow his wife's -- she never got one. ``I like to have a pamphlet and sit and read. I study it for about a month before I make up my mind,'' the Sunnyvale homeowner said of the booklet that details candidates' statements and proposition arguments. ``It's really inconvenient to have something you can't understand.'' It wasn't clear Friday how widespread the...

Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols met with World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef in the Philippines before he and Timothy McVeigh carried out their plot, investigative reporter Jayna Davis said Wednesday. "Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef met personally in the Philippines on the island of Mindanao in the early 1990s to discuss, of all things, bombmaking," Davis told ABC Radio Network host John Batchelor. On Wednesday, an Oklahoma jury returned a 161 count murder verdict against Nichols. He is expected to face the death penalty. But the bizarre Yousef-Nichols tie-in did not come up in the trial. Davis said she...

English alternatives at home on rise The Census Bureau found that nearly one in five Americans speak a language other than English while at home. By Michelle Dynes rep2@wyomingnews.com Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle CHEYENNE - Some 47 million Americans ages 5 and older used a language other than English at home in 2000, according to a new Census Bureau report. This translates into nearly one in five Americans compared with roughly one in seven 10 years earlier. Most speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, with Russian rising fast. The Spanish-speaking population rose by 62 percent over the past decade to...