John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons

John Gordon Ross header image 3

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

Language Log » Where's the bull?

Tuesday 2 June 17:24:45 UTC 2015

There's quite a fuss in China these days over a product that is called niúròu sōng miànbāo 牛肉松面包 ("beef floss bread"). The problem is that there is no beef floss in the bread. Even the ingredients state that whatever meat is in the bread is chicken. For reports and photographs, see here and here. False advertising? Another case of fakery … [Link]

Omniglot blog » French adventures

Tuesday 2 June 13:38:10 UTC 2015

My trip to France last week with members of Bangor Community Choir and Coastal Voices choir from Abergele was fantastic, and though it was only five days, it felt much longer as we fitted so much into our time there. We left Bangor at 6am on Wednesday morning and travelled to Birmingham airport by coach, picking people up in Abergele … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Chicken wages

Tuesday 2 June 11:31:32 UTC 2015

Low wage income earned in a fast food establishment, specifically at a fast food chicken place. I drink Pabst because of these oppressive chicken wages. [Link]

languagehat.com » Unicode is Kind of Insane.

Tuesday 2 June 0:21:42 UTC 2015

Ben Frederickson has a post describing some of the weirdnesses of Unicode (“Things that seem like they should be very simple are often deceptively complicated when dealing with Unicode strings … Unicode also has lots of different characters that are visually identical to one another”) but ending with this upbeat conclusion: Every change to Unicode has been a rational change … [Link]

Archive

No Comments

0 responses so far ↓

  • There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.

You must log in to post a comment.