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
languagehat.com » Shakespeare’s World.
Roberta Kwok reports in the New Yorker about a website where anyone can contribute transcriptions of bits of manuscripts from Shakespeare’s time: The first-known records of many words are in Shakespeare’s plays, but it’s not always clear which he invented and which were already commonplace. The handwritten material of Shakespeare’s contemporaries is “more or less hidden,” according to Laura Wright, … [Link]
Omniglot blog » Tell me all about it
According to an article on Science Daily, a good way to remember something you’re learnt is to tell someone else about it, or to test yourself on it. A study got students to watch films, then asked them to describe what they’d seen afterwards. Those who told someone about the films just after watching them remembered the core and peripheral … [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » Joke Insurance
When two mates have a mutual understanding to laugh at each others jokes, no matter how lame or awkward said joke is, therefore lessening the social failure of the bad joke. I was talking to some girls the other day when I cracked a 'your mother' joke. Luckily, I had joke insurance with Chris so I still ended up getting … [Link]
Language Log » Particle amnesia
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson] I know you've written a lot about character amnesia in the greater Sinosphere. But I think I witnessed the related, but significantly different, phenomenon of (grammatical) particle amnesia (or perhaps, "drift") during a recent trip to Hawaii. As you know, Hawaii has a large nikkei* population. This is especially true in and … [Link]
Language Log » Coffee Yao, Finger Chen, Doy Chiang, and colleagues
Thorin Engeseth noticed that, at the end of the Taiwanese video game "Detention", there are some interesting adopted Western names among the people involved in the game's creation — especially Coffee, Finger, and Smiler: 
Lord knows how or why they picked all of these particular names. For the record, though, here are the original Chinese names: zhìzuòrén 製作人 ("producer") Yáo … [Link]
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