An Idea For Discussing Vocabulary on Twitter

Read this article in English | 11-05-2010| Spanish Words

If you’re learning a language, teaching a language or translating between two languages, you have little discussions about vocabulary all the time.

Could Twitter be a good place for translators and language learners to learn new vocabulary?

A good place to follow each other on real-time, 140-character lexical adventures?

I think it could.

The other day, @alunjohn tweeted me about the Spanish word ‘bitácora‘ (‘blog‘ in English): “@matthewbennett I was always find the word “bitácora ” an odd one!”

Twitter vocabulary conversations

Now ‘bitácora‘ and ‘blog‘ are both perfectly acceptable words in Spanish to refer to a blog. It depends on who you ask. Many Spanish newspapers and blogs use the word ‘blog‘ and others use the word ‘bitácora‘.

I usually use ‘bitácora‘ because I think it’s right to try and use native words in a language where there’s a choice and because I’ve always used ‘bitácora‘ here in Murcia when talking about blogs with a close friend of mine who is a tenured journalism lecturer at Murcia University – and whose specialist subject happens to be Journalism and New Technolgies.

Then I thought: “Twitter could be a great place for sharing small linguistic adventures every day to discover new words and etymologies” and tweeted about it. @Mtranslator, @parkbenchps, @ArnaudJacobs, @_Zotikos_and @debra47 , all replied and offered interesting thoughts, which led to:

“Maybe we could use a hashtag like #lingo-es-en, #word-fr-de or #vocab-fr-es for following vocabulary tweets.“

Lack of space is a first-order problem with only 140 characteres, as @alunjohn wisely pointed out: “why not #eng-sp #sp-eng?“

Quite right.

If we further develop @alunjohn’s brevity with the two-letter language codes we normally use for websites and file naming (‘es’ instead of ‘sp’ for Spanish, ‘en’ instead of ‘eng’ for English), we can save even more characters and add further clarity: #eng-sp becomes #en-es, for example, which would lead us to things like:

French – English > #fr-en

Dutch – Chinese > #nl-zh

This would also allow for different language variants from the different regions of the world:

Spanish Spanish + British English > #es-es-en-gb

Additionally, we could follow more specific vocabulary fields (typically medicine, law or finance) and do things like:

#es-en-lex, #es-en-med or #es-en-$$

What do you think? Is it worth the effort?