John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons

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Language Stuff

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

the world in words » Shakespeare’s coined words are just the start of his contributions to the English language

Wednesday 13 August 18:36:26 UTC 2014

Shakespeare's Globe, LondonShakespeare’s Globe, London You must have read or listened to tons of stories about William Shakespeare, and how he’s still relevant. Stories about kids performing his plays. Prisoners performing them. Who knows, maybe even astronauts have recited bits from Hamlet on the International Space Station. If they haven’t yet, they will one day. Shakespeare is bigger than this world; he’s universal. … [Link]

languagehat.com » Emendation via Degustation.

Wednesday 13 August 17:37:05 UTC 2014

From G.W. Bowersock’s NYRB review of two books on the history of food (and I’m as pleased as Bowersock is that the subject is finally being taken seriously): Petronius’ depiction in the first century AD of a banquet at the house of the pretentious parvenu Trimalchio remains one of the great satires of gourmandise in Western literature. A cookbook of … [Link]

languagehat.com » The Story of “Dob.”

Wednesday 13 August 14:10:22 UTC 2014

Bruce Moore (a former director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, currently editing the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary) discusses the meanings and history of the Australian slang verb dob in an extract from his book What’s their Story? A History of Australian Words (Oxford University Press Australia, 2010), quoted in this Ozwords post: The verb dob has … [Link]

Language Log » Educational UM / UH

Wednesday 13 August 12:19:49 UTC 2014

Apologies for temporarily turning this into Conversational Filler Log – but I realized that my assertion in this morning's post ("UM / UH geography") about the effects of years of education was based on some analyses that I'd done but never posted. So here they are: the basic effect is that people with a 4-year college degree or better have … [Link]

Language Log » UM / UH geography

Wednesday 13 August 10:52:50 UTC 2014

From Jack Grieve, a few minutes after we discussed this issue at the 10.30 coffee break here at Methods in Dialectology XV in Groningen: Attached is a locally autocorrelated map based on the percent of um vs uh (i.e. um/(um+uh)) in a few billion word of geocoded tweets of 2013 (about 40,000 tokens each). Red are areas where "uh" is … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Nanu Nanu

Wednesday 13 August 7:00:00 UTC 2014

A slang term which means hello or hi made famous in the t.v.series Mork & Mindy back in the late 1970's early 1980's "I am Mork from Ork, Nanu Nanu." [Link]

Language Log » Can't find on Google

Wednesday 13 August 4:24:11 UTC 2014

Max Pinton sent in this menu and said he "thought it was a refreshing approach": Cheezburger, where this menu was posted, gave it the title "Google Failed, but This Restaurant Probably Won". Actually, Google didn't fail. For chǎo shuǐlián 炒水蓮, which is straightforward, Google Translate, Baidu Fanyi, Bing Translator, and even iciba correctly give "fried lotus", so there's no excuse … [Link]

languagehat.com » Garnett and Tolstoy.

Wednesday 13 August 0:29:09 UTC 2014

Translator Rosamund Bartlett (also author of a biography of Tolstoy) has a very interesting piece in the Financial Times on the history of Tolstoy translations; the centerpiece is an account of how the woman who practically defined Russian literature in English got her start: Within months of its completion in 1893, Tolstoy’s philosophical magnum opus The Kingdom of God is … [Link]

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