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 » What do the words mutton, sheep and robot have in common? Translation!

Tuesday 9 September 17:53:46 UTC 2014

Photo: andrea via Flickr Here’s a guest post from Nina Porzucki. Two translators on a ship are talking. “Can you swim?” asks one “No” says the other, “but I can shout for help in nine languages.” Okay, not the best joke, and even though translation won’t exactly save you from drowning it is something that is all around us and that … [Link]

Omniglot blog » Patterns

Tuesday 9 September 11:48:45 UTC 2014

Recently I’ve been learning Serbian, Russian and Czech with free apps produced by Hallberg Ryman, who make them for quite a variety of languages for Andriod and iPhone/iPad. They are working well for me and I would definitely recommend them. They use a flashcard/SRS-based system to teach you vocabulary arranged into categories such as numbers, colours, clothing, food, etc. Within … [Link]

Language Log » Envisioning Real (-ity TV) Utopias

Tuesday 9 September 10:16:52 UTC 2014

I suspect that Utopia on Fox (see also Alessandra Stanley, "A World, From Scratch: In 'Utopia,' on Fox, Real People Build an Unreal World", NYT 9/8/2014) is not the sort of thing that Eric Olin Wright had in mind. Wright's "Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias" (Soundings, 2007) laid out "five guidelines for these kinds of discussions of emancipatory alternatives to … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » interwhine

Tuesday 9 September 7:00:00 UTC 2014

When two or more people gather to complain or bitch about their problems. "Whenever my co-workers are together, they always interwhine.""Interwhining is not unusual at our annual family reunion." [Link]

languagehat.com » You Get No Gotten in the New Yorker.

Tuesday 9 September 1:01:39 UTC 2014

Ben Yagoda has a piece at Lingua Franca about one of the New Yorker‘s weird stylistic tics I don’t think I’d noticed: Among the various quirks of The New Yorker‘s house style, maybe the quirkiest is the insistence on got as the past participle of get—that is, to write had got instead of had gotten to mean “become” or “obtained” … [Link]

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