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

languagehat.com » Sophist.

Sunday 21 January 22:26:45 UTC 2018

Stephen Halliwell’s TLS review of Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire , edited by Paweł Janiszewski, Krystyna Stebnicka, and Elzbieta Szabat, starts with two paragraphs explaining the term “sophist” that I thought were useful (and entertaining) enough to post here: In his extraordinary work On the Death of Peregrinus, which recounts with malicious relish the career of … [Link]

Language Log » Decreasing definiteness in crime novels

Sunday 21 January 19:37:28 UTC 2018

In a series of posts over the last few years, I've documented gradual declines in the frequency of the English definite determiner "the" in a wide variety of text sources: State of the Union addresses, Medline abstracts, the Corpus of Historical American English, Google Books (from both American and British sources), and so on. Both in conversational speech and in … [Link]

Language Log » Using Chinese nonstandard characters to talk cute

Sunday 21 January 13:25:02 UTC 2018

Nikita Kuzmin told me about a trend among young Chinese to exchange certain characters with other phonetically close characters in their Internet writings, so that the words sound more "cute". Here are some examples of such substitutions: jiègè 介個 — zhège 這個 ("this") pényǒu 盆友 — péngyǒu 朋友 ("friend") nánpiào 男票 — nán péngyǒu 男朋友 ("boyfriend") xièxiè 蟹蟹 — xièxiè … [Link]

Urban Word of the Day » sarah huckasplain

Sunday 21 January 9:00:00 UTC 2018

Defending someone else's bullshit. Tonight at 6, Sarah Huckasplains alternative facts. [Link]

Omniglot blog » Language quiz

Sunday 21 January 8:00:34 UTC 2018

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

languagehat.com » Zhitkov and the Modernist Novel.

Sunday 21 January 1:54:14 UTC 2018

I’m finally reading Boris Zhitkov‘s Викто~ Вавич (Viktor Vavich), and my thoughts on reading the opening paragraphs were as follows, in this order: “No wonder Pasternak liked it; this is a modernist novel; this guy has definitely read Bely.” Here is the opening (my translation, then the Russian): The sunny day poured across the city. At noon the empty streets … [Link]

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