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

Omniglot blog » Escroquerie

Friday 15 April 15:16:18 UTC 2016

An interesting French word I learnt yesterday is escroquerie [ɛskʁɔkʁi], which means a swindle or fraud. It comes from escroquer (to swindle). A related word is escroc (villain, baddy). It probably comes from the Italian word scroccare (to eat or live at others’ expense) [source]. Other English equivalents of escroquer include scrounge, sponge, cadge and blag. Are there others? What … [Link]

languagehat.com » Wayzgoose.

Friday 15 April 12:49:22 UTC 2016

The excellent archivist Leslie Fields (whose work you can read about here) has reminded me of the excellent word wayzgoose, which I’ve always loved; a moment’s work showed me that 1) I have never mentioned it on LH, and 2) the OED just updated their entry last December, so without further ado, here ’tis: wayzgoose, n. Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈweɪzɡuːs/, U.S. … [Link]

Language Log » More political text analytics

Friday 15 April 12:31:14 UTC 2016

I spent a few minutes this morning getting transcripts for all 12 Republican and all 9 Democratic debates, and over the next few days I'll do some additional Breakfast Experiments™ on the results. One trivial thing is a complete type-token plot, from texts constructed by concatenating all the transcript pieces attributed to each remaining candidate across all the debates: Unsurprisingly, … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Fancy Bitch

Friday 15 April 7:00:00 UTC 2016

A classy, elegant, self-sufficient woman who carries herself with dignity and pride and takes no shit from any bitch, male or female. Mila Kunis was an immigrant who came to America, with alomost nothing. She worked hard to achieve what she wanted in life and now she is a fancy bitch! [Link]

Language Log » Head shop

Friday 15 April 2:48:12 UTC 2016

Here is a nice piece of Japanglish from Joseph Williams: As you can see, this Japanese sportswear store (close to Ueno Park in Tokyo) translates honten 本店 ("main shop; flagship store") as "head shop," which in English means a place to buy drug paraphernalia. There were no bongs for sale. Looking on Google, Joseph found that this mistake is very … [Link]

Language Log » Manchu illiteracy

Friday 15 April 2:39:43 UTC 2016

Devin Fitzgerald, who works on Qing manuscripts at Harvard, posted an image on Twitter showing some of the difficulties that pre-conquest Qing archivists had with Chinese characters: Devin notes: "The corner has the first lines of the Bǎi jiā xìng 百家姓 ("Hundred Family Surnames"). Here are the first eight surnames, in two rows of four characters each: Zhào Qián Sūn … [Link]

Language Log » Prolific code-switching in Vietnamese

Friday 15 April 2:33:16 UTC 2016

Michael Rank writes: I'm intrigued by a sign in the window of a Vietnamese restaurant in Shoreditch, ultra-hipster area of east London which also has lots of inexpensive, unpretentious (mainly) Vietnamese restaurants. I don't know any Vietnamese, I assume Can Tuyen (please forgive lack of diacritics) means "wanted" or "job available" or similar and that there are perfectly good words … [Link]

languagehat.com » Afterword: The Death of the Translator.

Friday 15 April 0:11:26 UTC 2016

George Szirtes saith: 1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est un autre, said the translator. Try next door. […] 6. A poet and a translator walk into a bar. Give me a beer, says the poet. I suppose you’d better give him a beer, says the translator. Via, … [Link]

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