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 » Unicode: The brontosaurus emoji

Monday 29 August 17:35:36 UTC 2016

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "I'm excited about the proposal to add a 'brontosaurus' emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument." At least things have gotten better, now that browsers and text editors and terminal emulators have sort of started to more or less implement … [Link]

Language Log » Turkish written with Latin letters half a millennium ago

Monday 29 August 17:13:16 UTC 2016

In "Türkçe'nin 500 Yıl Önce Latin Harfleriyle Yazılışı" (7/26/16), Abdurrahman Onur Çalışır presents a Turkish text written in Latin letters together with a translation into Latin: Here's a transcription of the older Turkish, plus a rendering in modern Turkish: Turca – Ne habar scizum girlerden? Christianus – Hits nesle bilmezom tsaa dimege. Turca – Gioldassum varmı tsenumle? Christianus – Ioch, … [Link]

Language Log » The new AI is so lifelike it's prejudiced!

Monday 29 August 12:59:37 UTC 2016

Arvind Narayanan, "Language necessarily contains human biases, and so will machines trained on language corpora", Freedom to Tinker 8/24/2016: We show empirically that natural language necessarily contains human biases, and the paradigm of training machine learning on language corpora means that AI will inevitably imbibe these biases as well. This all started in the 1960s, with Gerald Salton and the … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » ybd

Monday 29 August 7:51:18 UTC 2016

your baby daddy I am like totally going to be Haile's ybd [Link]

languagehat.com » Shtisel’s Ghosts.

Monday 29 August 0:17:27 UTC 2016

Shayna Weiss’s “Shtisel’s Ghosts: The Politics of Yiddish in Israeli Popular Culture” (from the Mar. 6 In Geveb) is a fascinating look at the Israeli television drama Shtisel and its groundbreaking use of Yiddish, and at the place of Yiddish in Israel more generally: Tamar Ben Baruch, an assistant director and producer for the show, spoke with me about how … [Link]

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