Our easy facility with text-based modes of communicating globally began long before the digital revolution—in fact some 600 years ago—with the invention of the movable-type printing press. Contrived in Renaissance Europe by Johannes Gutenberg—a goldsmith who understood metals as well as an entrepreneurial Christian who saw a market for the Bible—he enabled the mass production of text for the broad public.

Kultur & Gesellschaft
Lingua Franca - Program podcast Folgen
Lingua Franca, presented by Maria Zijlstra, looks at all aspects of language: language old, modern, and even invented. Through interviews and prepared talks, the program features experts who analyse a single topic of interest to users and lovers of language. Examples of the sort of linguistic territory they traverse are: bi-lingual education, ebonics, the language of pornography, and the political use of words. Lingua Franca is published every Saturday.
Folgen von Lingua Franca - Program podcast
50 Folgen
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Folge vom 01.12.2012Movable type
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Folge vom 24.11.2012Script lossOur contemporary lives are full of script, with much of it spelled out as digital ephemera, read once before being discarded. By contrast though, someone is carving text into wood – for international exhibition – in order to draw attention to how about a third of the world’s alphabets are currently in danger of extinction.
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Folge vom 17.11.2012Vanuatu sand drawingThere seems no limit to the variety of ways that humans communicate; an example being the messages and stories traced by finger in the cooled ash of cooking fires, over the black soil of the volcanic islands of Vanuatu. An art form as well as a cultural treasure, the skill of ‘sandroing’ is currently being revived, though the great local knowledge that once informed them is lost to the past.
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Folge vom 10.11.2012Your 'real' nameOur names are an essential part of our personal, as well as social, identity. Then along come the complications that occur with migration—when the language environment changes—after which, there may be some confusion about what your ‘real’ name is.