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

Language Log » Speaking Slavic and Turkic across Eurasia

Wednesday 3 August 23:09:37 UTC 2016

[This is a guest post by Peter B. Golden. It is a follow-up to this post and the discussion about trans-Eurasian communication in Turkic languages in the comments that followed it: "The sounds of Eurasia " (8/1/16).] I have long been fascinated by the question. The same issue arises with Slavic. There, I had the advantage of speaking Russian since … [Link]

Language Log » Speech errors

Wednesday 3 August 21:49:51 UTC 2016

There are rumors that Donald Trump's campaign staff is feeling stressed — longtime ally of Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager: "Manafort not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal." — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 3, 2016 Maybe it's just lack of sleep, but Mr. Manafort's Meet The Press interview last Sunday does seem remarkably disfluent. He exhibits an unusual … [Link]

Omniglot blog » Are you a phenom?

Wednesday 3 August 16:45:11 UTC 2016

I came across an interesting word in an article about hyperpolyglots I read today (it’s an old article, but I only just found it) – phenoms, which appears in the following sentence: TIME spoke to Erard about phenoms who can speak more languages than they have fingers, whether anyone can do it and where the upper limits of human potential … [Link]

Language Log » Never not stop… uhh… Come again?

Wednesday 3 August 8:36:38 UTC 2016

One of the shows in the upcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe, by the three-man Australian musical comedy ensemble The Axis of Awesome, is called "Won't Ever Not Stop Giving Up." Yes, me too. I found myself almost wanting to get out pencil and paper to try and figure out whether they meant they were persevering or not persevering. But I was … [Link]

Language Log » "Facial expressions" in text-dominant online conversation

Wednesday 3 August 2:44:30 UTC 2016

Christina Xu has written "A Field Guide to China's Most Indispensible Meme" (Motherboard, 8/1/16). Her essay includes more than a dozen illustrations, the first of which is this one: We've seen this kind of "image macro" before; in the examples discussed in "Intentional mistranslation" (11/8/15), captions paired Chinese phrases with overly literal English translations for comedic effect. In this case, … [Link]

Language Log » Germanglish

Wednesday 3 August 1:54:47 UTC 2016

On reddit, under the title "German gift card makers have a precarious grasp of the English language": The comments on reddit are instructive: These are actually (reasonably) common German phrases translated literally ie word-for-word into English while still using (to a certain extent) German grammar. The 'precarious grasp of English' is quite deliberate and quite funny. 'Nur die Harten kommen … [Link]

languagehat.com » Melville’s Confidence-Man.

Wednesday 3 August 0:57:27 UTC 2016

A couple of days ago I finished The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, and I’m still trying to figure out what just happened to me. Not long before, I’d read Moby-Dick, and that of course was overwhelming as well, but I knew what to expect, having read it already (though not since college). About The Confidence-Man I knew only that it was … [Link]

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