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
Omniglot blog » Klunen
I learnt an interesting word from a Dutch friend today – klunen – which refers to the action of walking on the ground in ice skates, something you might do while you’re skating along a frozen canal and come to a bridge you can’t go under, either because it’s too low, or the ice under it is too thin, so … [Link]
Wordorigins.org » callow
Callow is a word that dates back to the beginnings of the English language, but it has shifted in meaning significantly over the past eleven-hundred years. Today it means ‘inexperienced, green,’ and it often appears in the phrase callow youth. But way back when it was associated with aging, for in Old English the word calu meant ‘bald.’ [Link]
World Wide Words: Updates » New online: Heliotrope
'Heliotrope' has had a long and rather complicated history. [Link]
World Wide Words: Updates » New online: Ditty bag
'Ditty bag' is an old seafaring term. Its history takes us to India. [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » basicism
the professional art of being basic "Your level of basicism is too high"
[Link]
Language Log » mark.liberman.121 is not me
Earlier today, someone set up a Facebook account https://www.facebook.com/mark.liber~ with a version of my FB profile picture, and began communicating with people as if they were me. My actual FB page is https://www.facebook.com/mark.liber~ which I don't use much except to look at things that people tell me about. This is apparently a phishing enterprise. The impostor asks people for their … [Link]
languagehat.com » Reports of the Death of Irish Have Been Exaggerated.
Or so says Nicholas Wolf, who teaches courses in Irish history at New York University, in this piece for the Irish Times; it starts off with some irrelevant stuff about how “speakers of Irish well into the nineteenth century held that the language possessed such a tremendous antiquity that it had been spoken by Adam and Eve,” but gets down … [Link]
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