Language

Latinos and Latino activists will celebrate the second "Noche de Accion Latina" in Annapolis today to support the passage of two bills in the 2001 legislative session. The bills would require language translation in Maryland's court system and other state agencies, as well as translation of important documents into any language spoken by at least 3 percent of the state or regional population. The event is sponsored by Maryland Latino Coalition for Justice, a statewide advocacy organization.

I speak your language. Now, may I rip you off?" Everyone appreciates a familiar face or voice, especially in new surroundings. The only problem is familiarity can breed fraud. Immigrants long have been welcomed upon entering the United States by those who communicated with them in their native tongue. It might have been a distant cousin, someone from the same city in the old country or a local company wanting to do business. Such bonding is understandable and helps a successful transition.

The County Council has approved an updated master plan for water and sewer service that preserves language requiring disclosure statements to buyers of homes near three former landfills in the Route 7-Bush Road area.The language applies to about 550 planned homes in a development called Harford Town and 57 already constructed in the Hidden Stream subdivision. The two developments are on 134 acres bounded by Abingdon Road, Route 7 and Bush Road. Harford Town and Hidden Stream are being built by Morris Wolf.

If Spanish has been the the loving tongue for Julio Iglesias, he hasn't done badly in other tongues, either.His first English-language album, 1984's "1100 Bel Air Place," sold more than 3 million copies and spawned the hit single "To All the Girls I've Loved Before," a duet with Willie Nelson.That last fact, you might think, would be good reason for Mr. Iglesias to pick a Nelson song as the title track for his new English-language album, "Crazy."Except, "I didn't know 'Crazy' was a Willie Nelson song," Mr. Iglesias says with a laugh.

THE PEOPLE who teach English to non-English speakers around the world met in Baltimore last week. Some 6,000 educators, researchers and linguists from 96 countries considered such topics as "Perception of final consonants by Hmong speakers" and "Using multimedia tools in collaborative learning." But the underlying talk was of war. The organization, Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), had sent President Bush a letter urging that he refrain from invading Iraq. "Your present approach to problem-solving," said TESOL, "is in conflict with our goals as educators.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The football stadium is packed. The home team heads toward a score and then a referee's bad call stops the momentum. Some fans respond in unison with an obscenity.A mother drags her two young children through a grocery store. One keeps lagging behind, picking items from shelves. Finally, the mother yells at the child. Her coarse vocabulary echoes down the aisle.There's a widespread feeling in America that our language is, to put it politely, going to heck.Nowadays, profanity and vulgarity slip out during normal discourse.

Miriam Isaacs, a professor on a quest to save a dying language, wrote the Yiddish phrase schoen madel on the blackboard and asked, "What's that?One of her students said "beautiful girl," and the linguist responded with a touch of Yiddish humor of the kind that has cheered the world for centuries: "Right. Many a child has been afflicted with that saying. Usually they want something from you when they tell you that."A humorist -- such as Leo Rosten, author of "The Joys of Yiddish" -- Isaacs doesn't pretend to be. But her occasionally light approach helps advance a serious personal mission in Elementary Yiddish 101, a new for-credit course she offers to a tiny few at Baltimore Hebrew University."

In Anne Arundel County middle schools, sixth-graders can take a buffet-style language class, trying a taste of French, Spanish, Russian, German, even sign language, to see which, if any, they want to study more later."

JERUSALEM - It was a dead language, an 8,000-word relic. And as 19th-century Jewish pilgrims began settling the hills and valleys of what would become Israel, the status of Hebrew seemed like that of the crumbling Roman aqueducts strung across the landscape - interesting to study but unfit for restoration.Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, felt that way, wanting no part of a language that you couldn't even use to buy a train ticket. Use German or English, he said, or both.That left it up to lingual zealot Eliezer Perlmann, who arrived in Jerusalem from Lithuania in 1882, changed his name to Ben Yehuda and took up the cause of Hebrew.