John Gordon Ross

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 » Don't let 'bigly' catch on

Tuesday 18 October 18:34:41 UTC 2016

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoon creator and diehard Trump promoter, has taken to the semi-jocular practice of adopting the mishearing of Trump's much-loved adjunct big-league, and using bigly as if it were a real adverb ("I just watched the debate on replay. Trump won bigly. This one wasn't close"). Adams is kidding, I think, but the mishearing is very common: … [Link]

Language Log » Human parity in conversational speech recognition

Tuesday 18 October 15:41:15 UTC 2016

Today at ISCSLP2016, Xuedong Huang announced a striking result from Microsoft Research. A paper documenting it is up on arXiv.org — W. Xiong, J. Droppo, X. Huang, F. Seide, M. Seltzer, A. Stolcke, D. Yu, G. Zweig, "Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition": Conversational speech recognition has served as a flagship speech recognition task since the release of the … [Link]

Language Log » Knife and fork

Tuesday 18 October 13:56:04 UTC 2016

Nathan Hopson came across a marvelous Japanese word from the interwar period the other day: naihoku ナイホク. Nathan first saw naihoku ナイホク, a portmanteau (or just contraction?) of "knife and fork" (naifu [to] fōku ナイフ[と]フォーク) on p. 10, l. 7 of a delightful 1929 guide to the famous eateries of Tokyo (Tōkyō meibutsu tabe aru ki 東京名物食べある記): Daibu konde kitanode … [Link]

Omniglot blog » Ingenious genius

Tuesday 18 October 12:18:13 UTC 2016

The word ingenious sounds like the antonym (opposite) of genius as in- is often used as a negative suffix (invisible, indivisible, etc). However they are not. Ingenious means: – displaying genius or brilliance – tending to invent – characterized by genius – cleverly done or contrived; witty; original; shrewd; adroit; keen; sagacious. It comes from: – the Middle French ingénieux … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » doggo

Tuesday 18 October 8:00:00 UTC 2016

A big ol pupper. What the fuck is doggo? A big ol pupper. [Link]

Language Log » AND Trump's rhetorical style again

Tuesday 18 October 1:20:31 UTC 2016

Listening to Donald Trump's 10/14/2016 speech in Charlotte NC, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed in listening to his earlier speeches. He often uses a loud isolated monosyllable as a way of transitioning between phrases — and perhaps also as a substitute for the filled pauses that he almost never uses. Some of these transitional syllables are particles like … [Link]

languagehat.com » Primordial Myths?

Tuesday 18 October 0:22:52 UTC 2016

Julien d’Huy has a Scientific American piece about “how stories change in the retelling down through the generations sheds light on the history of human migration going as far back as the Paleolithic period”: The Greek version of a familiar myth starts with Artemis, goddess of the hunt and fierce protectress of innocent young women. Artemis demands that Callisto, “the … [Link]

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