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 » Geographic idiom chains

Friday 27 March 21:29:22 UTC 2015

From James Kirchner, in response to "The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility", 1/15/2009 (as featured on 3/25/2015 in the Washington Post): I found years ago that in Stuttgart, Germany, people said, "Es ist mir ein böhmisches Dorf," meaning, "It's a Czech village to me," (literally a Bohemian village). Then I went to work in the Czech Republic, where, as you … [Link]

languagehat.com » A Gray Wrinkled Vastness.

Friday 27 March 21:18:32 UTC 2015

I’ve finally started Wolf Hall , as various readers have been urging me to do for some years now, and I’m as gripped by it as I expected to be. I’ve come down with a bad cold, so I won’t try to say anything clever about it, I’ll just quote the last paragraph of the first chapter (“Across the Narrow Sea, … [Link]

Language Log » Bring the calvary

Friday 27 March 12:23:54 UTC 2015

David Donnell's friend from Urbana drew his attention to the trailer for Furious 7, where Dwayne Johnson pronounces cavalry as ['kæl.və.ɹi]: Your browser does not support the audio element. Michelle Rodriguez: Hey, did ya bring the cavalry? Dwayne Johnson: Woman, I AM the calvary. David comments: Now, before I actually viewed the trailer, I argued that such ‘phoneme inversions’ [please … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » or naw

Friday 27 March 7:30:00 UTC 2015

a slang phrase usually said after asking a question. a:"Do you want ice cream or naw?" (nah can also be used) [Link]

languagehat.com » Don’t Try So Hard.

Friday 27 March 0:19:00 UTC 2015

Anne Trafton of the MIT News Office had a report last July on an interesting study: In a new study, a team of neuroscientists and psychologists led by Amy Finn, a postdoc at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, has found evidence for another factor that contributes to adults’ language difficulties: When learning certain elements of language, adults’ more highly … [Link]

Language Log » We're back

Friday 27 March 0:07:03 UTC 2015

Yesterday afternoon, a popular link from the Washington Post (Ana Swanson, "The equivalent of “It’s all Greek to me” in 30 other languages", Wonkblog 3/25/2015) caused a spike in LLOG page views; this happened to cause a disk drive to fill up, because the back-end database server was keeping binary logs of all transactions; this caused and/or uncovered various other … [Link]

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