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

Wordorigins.org » What Did Old Norse Sound Like?

Monday 16 January 21:21:01 UTC 2017

My Old Norse expertise doesn’t extend to pronunciation so I can’t comment on the accuracy of this video, but Jackson Crawford’s academic credentials are quite respectable, so I’ll take his word for it. Plus, the image of a man in a cowboy hat reading Old Norse poetry is too good to pass up: Tip o’ the hat to Jim Wilton … [Link]

Language Log » Après Babel in Marseilles

Monday 16 January 20:32:39 UTC 2017

At Le Musée des Civilizations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseilles, there's an exposition called "Après Babel, Traduire", which includes a translated version of "The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility", 1/15/2009: From LLOG: From MuCEM: [Link]

Language Log » MLK day: Pitch range

Monday 16 January 16:57:07 UTC 2017

In honor of MLK day, I've replicated something that Corey Miller did for a term paper in an introductory phonetics course in the early 1990s. The point of the exercise is that any given speaker can exhibit a wide variety of different pitch ranges. 25 years ago this was a somewhat complicated business, involving digitization of tape recordings, use of … [Link]

languagehat.com » Irinarkh Vvedensky, Intrusive Translator.

Monday 16 January 16:53:21 UTC 2017

I happened on a passage in The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel which I thought was interesting enough to post here. Julie Buckler, after describing how familiar Russian readers were with even minor British authors, since from Pushkin’s time on they were made available almost immediately in the “thick journals” that provided the intellectual fodder of the Russian intelligentsia, … [Link]

Language Log » Supply spiders

Monday 16 January 12:06:01 UTC 2017

Barbara Philips Long writes: Apple and other autofill writing software have contributed a lot to eggcorns, I suspect. I enjoyed this comment about supply-siders, which called them "supply spiders": I am now imagining Carl Icahn as a supply spider. I suspect that Barbara is right to attribute this coinage to someone's autocorrect function, in which case it would be an … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » Good German

Monday 16 January 8:30:00 UTC 2017

A citizen of Nazi Germany who participated in or overlooked atrocities while denying personal moral responsibility by appeal to his submission to supposedly legitimate authority. The American CIA agents who relied on the White House legal justification of torture were nothing more than Good Germans. [Link]

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