Forvo is a site where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. At this time Forvo boasts of "2.609 words 2.516 pronunciations,  177 languages."

Caveat: since dialects vary widely, and any user may submit a recording, you may not get a "standard" pronunciation.

Localization is a crucial element in the process of translation because it involves the precise understanding of meaning. This is obviously a factor when communicating a message from one language to another. But it also comes into play within languages, for example from one region to another. As in this story about a chance encounter.

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The character etymologies and modern associations for the Chinese words for six common colors that are associative compounds are discussed in a recent COLOURLovers article.

90% of modern Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds: they are part semantic (a portion of the character, called a radical, provides the general meaning) and part phonetic (the other portion of the character tells you how it is pronounced). The characters for red, green, blue, and purple in Chinese are phono-semantic (all bearing the radical for silk, ?), but a few color characters are associative compounds: two or more ideographic elements combined to create another meaning.

Have you ever asked yourself: “If I can postpone something why can’t I prepone it?”

Well, you definitely can. It’s just that sometimes we are not aware of the word. Prepone is an everyday word in India, where meetings, elections, weddings, movie releases, exams, court cases, and more are preponed all the time:

prepone (pree-PON) verb tr.
To reschedule an event to an earlier time.
[Modeled after the word postpone, from Latin pre- (before) + ponere (to put).]

This item was published by wordsmith.org. Those interested in words might like to visit this site and sign up for their word-a-day.

Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth — many of them never yet recorded — will likely disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and how the human brain works.

National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project (conducted in collaboration with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages) strives to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots — the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages — and documenting the languages and cultures within them.

"Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain."

 — Lily Tomlin, actor and comedian, 1939 – 

A year ago Bulgarian, Romanian, and Irish were added to the list of official languages of the European Union, bringing the total to 23. That makes 506 language pairs, if anyone’s counting. A list of the languages can be found here.

A preview of Tony Beckwith’s latest wordplay:

They say if we bring the kit, they’ve got the kaboodle.