John Gordon Ross

Almost everyone uses language, so inevitably almost everyone thinks they are an expert in it. I don’t consider myself an expert, though most of my work requires at least language competence and sometimes actual skill, but I do follow the blogs featured on this feeds page.

(If you are wondering where the translation-related feeds have all gone, I have put them on their own page.)

Most of the blogs represented here are in English, most of the time, but don’t be surprised to find other languages used. Go with the flow – I occasionally find myself pleasantly surprised at how much I can grasp in languages I have never seen before.

Language On the Net

languagehat.com » Imaginary Books.

Thursday 27 March 23:36:38 UTC 2014

Adam Smyth has a very enjoyable LRB review of The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed , by Georges Minois, translated by Lys Ann Weiss (Chicago, 2012). The book doesn’t sound great (“There are ways to articulate complexity, and Minois’s isn’t generally one of them”), but the review is a delight, full of lists of names: Many accounts … [Link]

Language Log » English "-ing" ending in Korean

Thursday 27 March 21:14:26 UTC 2014

Rich Scottoline sent in the following photograph of a box of crackers that he happened across in a Nonghyup food store in South Korea: 참 (1. truth; 2. really, truly)ING –> cham-ing –> charming Romanization: Cham-ing (Revised Romanization), Ch'am-ing (McCune-Reischauer) Cham-ing is straight up what it looks like: a Korean transmogrification of "charming". But it's also playing on the Korean … [Link]

Omniglot blog » Gender-neutral German

Thursday 27 March 11:39:47 UTC 2014

According to an interesting article I found today in The Guardian, moves are afoot in Germany to try to introduce gender-neutral language. The German Justice Ministry has apparently issued an edict which requires state institutions to use gender-neutral language, which is quite challenging, especially when it comes to job titles and words referring to groups of people. Usually the masculine … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » technocamping

Thursday 27 March 7:30:00 UTC 2014

A vacation from digital technology. No e-mail, computers, cell phone etc. "I'm going technocamping. You won't be able to contact me for a couple weeks." [Link]

Language Log » Washirweng

Thursday 27 March 2:20:31 UTC 2014

John Considine found this circa 1880 advertisement in the Hong Kong 2013 catalog of Bernard Quaritch (with the note that "We have not been able to locate any other example of this kind of trade card"): The characters to the right and left of the English give the name and address of the laundry. Even though the right vertical line … [Link]

languagehat.com » Crimean Words.

Thursday 27 March 0:31:13 UTC 2014

I’m getting close to the end of Orlando Figes’s The Crimean War: A History (see this post), and I was thinking of posting about the words for items of clothing related to the war; fortunately Sashura, aka Alexander Anichkin, saved me the trouble with Crimean words in English at his blog Tetradki. Besides the trio of balaclava, raglan, and cardigan … [Link]

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