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 » "Look, the bill needs fixed"
Ohio Gov. John Kasich grew up in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, just down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, and has retained many dialect features from the Pittsburgh region. Notably, Kasich, like others from the area, would say "The car needs washed" rather than "The car needs to be washed" or "The car needs washing." (The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project calls this … [Link]
Omniglot blog » Special offer from Rocket Languages
This week Rocket Languges are celebrating their 13th Anniversary with a 4-day sale starting today and continuing until Friday 17th March, or until they’ve sold 1,000 courses. During this time you can get 60% off any of their online language courses, which include: French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese (Mandarin), German, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, ASL, Korean, Portuguese and English (for Spanish … [Link]
languagehat.com » A Tsvetaeva Question.
In my reading of Tsvetaeva, I’ve gotten to the first poem she wrote to Pasternak after rapturously devouring his 1922 masterpiece My Sister, Life (see this LH post, in which the word ржи [rzhi], the oblique form of рожь [rozh’] ‘rye,’ also features), and I’ve run into a simultaneous crisis of semantics and textual criticism. It’s a magnificent poem, the … [Link]
Language Log » The pronunciation of "sudoku" in English
I find Japanese pronunciation to be straightforward and easy. But, for some reason, many people murder Japanese words borrowed into English. Take "karaoke", for example. I hear Americans pronouncing it as something like "carry Okie". How did that get started? You can listen to the Japanese pronunciation here. Cf. the UK and US pronunciations here. On "sudoku", Bean remarks: Today … [Link]
Language Log » Memes, tropes, and frames
In a workshop over the weekend at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, one of the presentations was based on a paper by Dan Kahan et al., "Culturally antagonistic memes and the Zika virus: an experimental test", Journal of Risk Research 2017. The abstract starts this way [emphasis added]: This paper examines a remedy for a defect in existing accounts of … [Link]
Language Log » Hyphenation with words containing capital letters
A truly startling (and surely unintended) hyphenation in the print edition of The Economist (March 11th) suggests that some updating of word-breaking algorithms is in order in the light of the fairly recent practice of inventing product and brand names that have word-internal upper-case letters. An article about juvenile delinquency, reporting that kids are less involved in crime in part … [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » Corn Puck
A hard round constipating turd. Induced by too much starch and not enough fiber in the diet. I'll be back. I may be a while. I gotta work out a corn puck. Good luck. I had one the other day. Tore my ass up working that thing out.
[Link]
languagehat.com » Sounds and Meanings Revisited.
David Shariatmadari has another interesting linguistics-related piece in the Guardian that begins: Scientists have just published a startling analysis of commonly used words in 4298 languages (62% of all those spoken). They wanted to find out if there were associations between particular sounds and meanings that couldn’t be put down to the fact that the languages were related, are used … [Link]
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