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 » A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)

Sunday 5 February 23:02:04 UTC 2017

Message in a store window @ 826 Valencia, San Francisco: The note begins straightforwardly with Mandarin: wǒ ài nǐ yīnwèi 我愛你因為 ("I love you because") But then it shifts into a kind of Cantonese-Mandarin hybrid, or so I thought. nei5 hai6 ngo5 ge3 你係我嘅 is Cantonese for "you are my". They write the second syllable of the word beginning with … [Link]

Language Log » Ask Language Log: Turnbull, Trumble, ?

Sunday 5 February 16:35:56 UTC 2017

Graeme Orr asks: This relates to US-Australian relations, thrown into mirth if not disarray by a now infamous phone call. Afterwards, Mr Spicer mistook our PM's surname twice in a press conference. Australian social media heard Spicer as calling our PM Turnbull 'Trumble'. But I distinctly hear it as 'Trunbull', a simple transposition error of a name Spicer probably only … [Link]

Language Log » Inaugural addresses: SAD.

Sunday 5 February 14:42:42 UTC 2017

A few days ago, I posted some f0-difference dipole plots to visualize the contrast between Barack Obama's syllable-level pitch dynamics and Donald Trump's ("Tunes, political and geographical", 2/2/2017): Obama 2009 Inaugural Address Trump 2017 Inaugural Address For another take on the same contrast in political prosody, I ran a "Speech Activity Detector" (SAD) on the recordings of the same two … [Link]

Omniglot blog » Language quiz

Sunday 5 February 9:23:13 UTC 2017

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 » Bowling Green Massacre

Sunday 5 February 8:00:00 UTC 2017

One of the worst terrorist attacks that never happened. I will never forget where I wasn't during the Bowling Green Massacre. [Link]

languagehat.com » Pisemsky’s Thousand Souls II.

Sunday 5 February 3:00:46 UTC 2017

I’ve finished Alexei Pisemsky’s Тысяча душ [One Thousand Souls] (see this post), so I thought I’d provide a few final thoughts. The novel is in four parts; he started writing it in 1854, under the heavy censorship of that period, and finished it under the much freer conditions that prevailed after the Crimean War. Even so, the fourth and most … [Link]

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