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 » Ask Language Log: Are East Asian first names gendered?

Sunday 14 January 20:42:33 UTC 2018

The question comes from George Amis: I wonder– are first names gendered in Mandarin? That is, is it possible to tell that Tse-tung or Wai-wai are masculine names? Given the extraordinary proliferation of Chinese first names, I rather doubt it. And what is the case with Japanese first names? Here, I suspect that the names are gendered, although of course … [Link]

languagehat.com » Losing Patuá.

Sunday 14 January 19:53:49 UTC 2018

Matthew Keegan writes for the Guardian about a language used in Macau, and its dwindling number of speakers: ‘Nowadays, nobody speaks much Patuá. Only the old people speak Patuá,” declares 102-year-old Aida de Jesus as she sits across the table from her daughter inside Riquexo, the small Macanese restaurant that remarkably, despite her grand age, she runs to this day. … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » trump anthem

Sunday 14 January 9:00:00 UTC 2018

A song you think you know all the words to, but find out quickly that you do not. Hey man, you turned Nelly's "Country Grammar"into a real Trump anthem at the bar last night. [Link]

Omniglot blog » Language quiz

Sunday 14 January 8:00:05 UTC 2018

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

Language Log » Ross Macdonald: lexical diversity over the lifespan

Sunday 14 January 1:28:06 UTC 2018

This post is an initial progress report on some joint work with Mark Liberman. It's part of a larger effort to replicate and extend Xuan Le, Ian Lancashire, Graeme Hirst, & Regina Jokel, "Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: a case study of three British novelists", Literary and Linguistic Computing 2011. Their abstract: We present … [Link]

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