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

languagehat.com » Trading Reeds and Stems.

Wednesday 20 August 20:57:09 UTC 2014

Christopher Culver has a post on a nice little linguistic find; he starts off with Eastern Mari omə̑ž ‘reed,’ a borrowing from Chuvash xămăš ‘bulrush,’ found in the Skvortsovs’ Chuvash-Russian dictionary, and continues: But a few lines above it, one finds an entry for a remarkably similar word: xămăl ‘stubble (of cereals)’. Fedotov compares this to Tatar and Bashkir qamïl … [Link]

Language Log » Chinese characters formed from letters of the alphabet

Wednesday 20 August 20:55:29 UTC 2014

Tim Cousins sent in this photograph of a sign in a local mall in Dalian, northeast China. It seems that the sign, which is written with letters of the alphabet, some of which are slightly distorted and positioned in unaccustomed places. reads: liúxíng qiánxiàn 流行前线 ("Popular Front", the name of a well-known mall in Guangzhou, which apparently has branches in … [Link]

Language Log » Geoffrey Leech, 1936-2014

Wednesday 20 August 20:28:08 UTC 2014

Geoffrey Leech, one of the giants of corpus-based computational linguistics, passed away yesterday. With the death of Chuck Fillmore in February, the field has lost two of its pillars this year. The following tribute was posted by Andrew Hardie on the blog of Lancaster University's Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). It is with great sorrow that we … [Link]

Language Log » Lorem China

Wednesday 20 August 10:35:32 UTC 2014

Brian Krebs, "Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China", Krebs on Security 8/14/2014: Imagine discovering a secret language spoken only online by a knowledgeable and learned few. Over a period of weeks, as you begin to tease out the meaning of this curious tongue and ponder its purpose, the language appears to shift in subtle but fantastic ways, … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Vine

Wednesday 20 August 7:00:00 UTC 2014

Something you do it for. Mom: Why did you do that? Boy: I do it for the vine. [Link]

Language Log » Cantonese and Mandarin interwoven

Wednesday 20 August 6:08:16 UTC 2014

Tom Mazanec noticed this ad for China Mobile by the baggage claim at the Guangzhou (Canton) Baiyun Airport a few nights ago: What in the world is going on here? As for the first line of the sign, you don't have to be Chinese to understand it. Although the vast majority of Chinese today can comprehend the first line, it's … [Link]

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