Meer dan Woorden Alleen | A Tear-off Calendar for 2021
How languages mirror the world around us.
By Alla Peeters & Petra Sleeman
Did you know that Dutch has been spoken in New Jersey (the United States) until the 20th century, that the word robot originates from Czech, that sounds can be round or sharp and that you can “write” poetry in a sign language? You could read this and much more in our colorful and diverse tear-off calendar for 2021!
The tear-off calendar for 2021 “More than words alone” was written by a team of language researchers and language teachers affiliated to the faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam. A great variety of languages which are taught at the faculty are presented in the calendar: Dutch, Frisian, English, French, Norwegian, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, New-Greek, Latin, Dutch Sign Language, but also Portuguese, Japanese, Ukrainian and some others.
By means of short, interesting, and even odd stories this calendar tells us about exciting features and structures of human languages as well as about our culture and the way we look at and interpret the world around us. In this context words are considered footprints of human history. Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interrelationships are found between languages which are, at first glance, very distant and have nothing in common.
Every week a different topic is presented. Some topics, such as Language and Culture, Language and History, Borrowings, Child language, Language contacts, Scripts and Alphabets, are present more than once. Some weeks are a kind of kaleidoscopic collection of facts, others discuss topics in-depth and present the same subject from different perspectives.
Alla Peeters & Petra Sleeman are co-authors and editors of the calendar. “More than words alone” was an initiative of IXA (Innovation Exchange Amsterdam), published by LIAS Publishing Company.
