An earthquake, a "habitable" planet and the longest glass-bottomed bridge... What's more?!

An earthquake, a "habitable" planet and the longest glass-bottomed bridge... What's more?!

On 24th August 2016, Italy suffered one of the biggest natural disasters of its history. Since L’Aquila earthquake in 2009 when 308 people were killed, Italy hadn’t suffered a calamity like this one: Nearly three hundred people got killed and more than four hundred people wounded. However, could this disaster have been less damaging? 

After Aquila’s disaster, in Italy new rules concerning building construction were established in order to gave money so as to build these new buildings in order to resist natural disasters, like this earthquake. So Europe gave money in order to build this new buildings. Nevertheless, this money never arrived, and in 2015 a study revealed that only a 14% of the buildings of the most vulnerable part of the country were conditioned by the Standards of Seismic Safety. Moreover, the villages and cities that were completely destroyed with the last earthquake, continue in the same way: absolutely destroyed. It’s for these reasons that the 6.2-magnitude quake that suffered the centre of Italy, ruining Amatrice, Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto; has been so damaging.

But nevertheless in a paradoxical way, science has made a lot of efforts trying to find a “habitable” planet, similar to the Earth where we would be able to live in some million years, and China making the longest glass-bottomed bridge, without thinking in their own planet problems. With all that I’m not saying that is bad to invest in astronomy or in making bridges of glass. However I reckon that there are more important problems like preventing an earthquake, helping the Syrian refugees, solving world famine problem…

English is evolving: New words

English is evolving: New words

English, the second most spoken language in the world, is for sure one of the languages that is evolving more and more in the recent years. Neither all the words evolve in the same way, nor at the same time, but they are constantly changing. Therefore, how and why do they change?

Languages usually change due to their speakers, but especially because of young people, who introduce a new range of vocabulary when they are speaking among them. It’s a fact that they are a very important tool in the development of the language, however not all the words that they “invent” are later accepted in the dictionaries. For instance, acronyms like WTF, LOL I don’t sincerely think that they’re going to be in the dictionaries in a few years’ time.

Another fact to take into account is the period of time that we’re living, for example now with all the social networks that we have, we usually try to make words shorter (not everybody), inciting to create short words. In addition to this, these words and also expressions are usually related with new technology and online games like for instance: good game (gg), to feed the lane or well played (wp).

In Spanish those new words have been adapted by teenagers. One interesting thing that has happened is that in the case of verbs in Spanish is that we’ve added the suffix –ar to all of them like for instance “wasapear” or “tuitear”, making verbs really easy to conjugate. In addition to this, we've also created new words that, depending on the different regions that we live, we use or we don't.

In conclusion, English is a language that changes and will change really fast (like Spanish) due to the amount of speakers that use it. In my view, I see that it is a language that will be spoken by everybody soon. It’s for this reason that I consider that dictionaries will have to admit more new words comparing to the last twenty or fifty years’ time.