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 » Floating world

Wednesday 20 January 14:50:17 UTC 2016

Nicola Esposito sent in the following observations and questions: What is the etymology of ukiyo 浮世, the "floating world" known in the West mostly thanks to its depictions by artists such as Hiroshige, Hokusai and others? While perusing the website of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, I discovered that the origins of ukiyo lie in a homophone of 浮世 … [Link]

languagehat.com » Lotor.

Wednesday 20 January 14:14:51 UTC 2016

Patrick Taylor, LH’s house etymologist, has a question; the following is quoted from his Facebook feed, and I’m hoping we can help solve the mystery: Yesterday, Stephen Dodson at his blog Language Hat crowdsourced an interpretion of the word sheog occuring in the novel Cloud Atlas. I was thinking about asking LH readers about a puzzling word in another novel, … [Link]

languagehat.com » Soviet Textbooks Online.

Wednesday 20 January 1:50:49 UTC 2016

This treasure trove actually includes some prerevolutionary material, such as Родная речь (1913) and Азбука-сеятель (1915), but most of it is from the postwar Soviet period; it begins with elementary-school material and moves on to higher grades. It will be a source of nostalgia for some of my readers (as it is for “krogatchevskaia,” from whose COSEELIS post I got … [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.