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 » Erotic phonemes

Sunday 23 October 22:02:10 UTC 2016

An unusually large number of people have suggested that I should post about the latest SMBC comic. Since I'm on the other side of the world, with slow and erratic internet, I'll just post the link, and note that (implied pornography aside) it would be good phonetics assignment to replace Zach's letter strings with IPA symbols. [Link]

Language Log » The history of Trumpian "big league" (now even bigger league!)

Sunday 23 October 12:19:30 UTC 2016

Donald Trump, as we have discussed a few times now, is fond of using big league as a post-verbal adjunct, though it's often misheard as bigly. (See: "Bigly," 2/26/16; "The world wants 'bigly'," 5/5/16; "Don't let 'bigly' catch on," 10/18/16.) On the night of Wednesday's presidential debate, UC Berkeley's Susan Lin helpfully shared a spectrogram of the relevant utterance from … [Link]

Language Log » Some visualizations of prosody

Sunday 23 October 11:46:41 UTC 2016

This post presents some stuff I did last March — I thought I had blogged about it but apparently I only put it into these lecture notes. It came up in some discussions today in Shanghai, because I thought that maybe similar visualizations might help explore prosodic differences between the speech of English native speakers and Chinese learners of English. … [Link]

Omniglot blog » Language quiz

Sunday 23 October 11:22:23 UTC 2016

Language quiz image Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken? [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » four-wheeling

Sunday 23 October 9:00:00 UTC 2016

When your head bobs around when you about to fall asleep when sitting upright. It is given this name because it looks like you're driving offroad. The security guard was fired for four-wheeling at his post. [Link]

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