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

Language Log » Text analytics applied to applications of things like text analytics

Tuesday 2 September 21:22:46 UTC 2014

South by Southwest (SXSW) uses a web-based voting method to choose panels, and so Jason Baldridge took a look at the titles submitted for Phil Resnik's "Putting a Real-Time Face on Polling" session, to … see whether some straight-forward Unix commands, text analytics and natural language processing can reveal anything interesting about them. He describes the results in "Titillating Titles: … [Link]

Language Log » Can you spell "bus"?

Tuesday 2 September 19:38:55 UTC 2014

I have commented before on the psycholinguistics of signs painted on roads: in the USA it is apparently assumed that drivers will read the words in the order in which their front wheels reach them, so that what appears to be a display with "ONLY" above "LANE" above "BIKE" is supposed to be read as "BIKE LANE ONLY". In the UK, … [Link]

Language Log » Somebody

Tuesday 2 September 12:28:55 UTC 2014

Yesterday I was skimming the digital New York Times and clicked on the second-from-the-right item in the panel below, without noticing the "paid post" superscript: This took me to an article about a new smartphone app called Somebody: Here’s how Somebody works: when you send your friend or loved one a message through the app, it doesn’t go directly to … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Case of the Muesdays

Tuesday 2 September 7:30:00 UTC 2014

After a holiday on Monday, going back to work on Tuesday feels like a Monday. You will have a case of the Muesdays. I have a case of the Muesdays. I need a nap. Or a muffin. [Link]

Language Log » More on tonal variation in Sinitic

Tuesday 2 September 2:18:11 UTC 2014

In a number of posts, we have discussed departure from stipulated tonal configurations in speech, e.g.: " sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin" href="http://languagelog.ldc.u~ rel="bookmark">Dissimilat~ stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin " " tone" href="http://languagelog.ldc.u~ rel="bookmark">When intonation overrides tone" come from and where are they going?" href="http://languagelog.ldc.u~ rel="bookmark">"Wher~ did Chinese tones come from and where are they … [Link]

languagehat.com » Latvian as Code and Oddly Named Parisians.

Tuesday 2 September 1:02:58 UTC 2014

I’ve finished Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Napoleonic Wars; Lieven not only covers the whole period from the 1812 invasion (and its origins) to the Allied entry into Paris in 1814, he is apparently the first English-language historian to do so using the rich Russian sources. As he says, Russians … [Link]

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