The Language Guy (Free subscription) | yesterday
It seems that a British borough council banned use of the phrase "brain storm." I want you to try to figure out why they might have chosen to do that. I am betting you can't. It seems that these highly empathetic people, not burned by the strictures of a Second Amendment, were worried about the harm that hearing or reading this phrase might do to the psyches of those who suffer from, well, brain storms,...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | yesterday
Mark Liberman at the Log discusses Merja Kytö's " Be/have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intransitives from Late Middle to Modern English," which "explains very clearly how English changed from be to have as the marker of perfect aspect in intransitive verbs. ... Based on tracking the use of be/have + past participle in a corpus of about 2.7 million words spanning the period from...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/24/2008
An announcement from the Jewish Institute of Religion: Yiddish. Ladino. Judeo-Arabic. Jews throughout history have spoken distinctively Jewish languages. What about American Jews? Two researchers from Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion want to find out. Linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and Sociologist Steven M. Cohen are conducting a large-scale survey of Jews and non-Jews in the United...
phonoloblog (Free subscription) | 07/24/2008
[ See the obituary on LINGUIST List. ]
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/24/2008
I'm beat from trying to copyedit and spend time with my four-year-old grandson all in the same day, so I'll just toss a couple of links out there to distract you while I catch up on my rest: A Northwest Pronunciation Guide . I love obscure local pronunciations (see here and here ), and this is a treasure trove of them. For some reason the Pacific Northwest has a particular concentration of weird spelling/pronunciation...
polyglot conspiracy (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008
Today I heard Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry say, Yet in the age of constant hyper-news, the relentless Internet and the omnipresent YouTube, advisors mostly don’t want their candidates saying anything. They want them to smile and wave. “The relentless Internet” sounds totally weird to me, and I guess it’s because it makes me picture the Internet itself [...]
polyglot conspiracy (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
I have just returned from DC, where I performed this weekend in a tap show (read about it in the Post!!), and I noticed an interesting article in yesterday’s WaPo as I was luxuriously sipping coffee and reading the paper at one of my favorite coffeeshops in the District. The article is about how police [...]
phonoloblog (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
GLOW 32 will take place in Nantes, France, April 15-18, 2009. The general call for papers is here; the theme is “On the Architecture of the Grammar: Y, if and how”. Danny Fox and Paul Smolensky are the invited speakers. There will be three workshops: one on acquisition, one on semantics, and (of course) one [...]
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
I'm going to quote the first sentence of Jenny Turner's review of Lorrie Moore's The Collected Stories : "Once upon a time, as Lorrie Moore begins, 'there was a not terribly prolific American short-story writer who, caught ten years between books with things she called Life and others called Excuses, was asked to write an introduction to her own Collected Stories .'" I want you to mull the sentence...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
Conrad ran across this pleasing item on Google Books and promptly sent it on to me, knowing I'd enjoy it, and I similarly pass it along to you: O full true un pertikler okeawnt o wat me un maw mistris seede un yerd wi' gooin to th' Greyte Eggshibishun e' Lundun, e' eyghtene hundurth un sixty two ... by O Felley from Rachde (Rachde, 1864). It took some googling to discover, via this helpful page ,...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/20/2008
Once more I turn to you, o Varied and Learned Readers, in my perplexity. For years I've been reading about Mahathir bin Mohamad, longtime prime minister of Malaysia. Without giving it any special thought, I mentally pronounced Mahathir something like [maˈha.θir] (ma-HAH-theer, with voiceless th). But when I visited his Wikipedia article , I noticed the pronunciation given was [maˈhɑ.ðe] (ma-HAH-they,...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/19/2008
Apologies for a second post about lexographical trivia, but sometimes trawling through dictionaries is too much fun not to share. This time the word my eye lit on was lespedeza , "a genus ... of herbaceous or shrubby plants of the legume family," and what struck me was the etymology: "New Latin, irregular from V. M. de Zespedes fl 1785 Spanish governor of East Florida." Irregular indeed! So I turned...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/18/2008
I was looking up something else in Webster's when my eye fell on indagate : Etymology: Latin indagatus , past participle of indagare , from indago ring of hunters encircling game, act of searching, from Old Latin indu in + Latin agere to drive more at end- , agent Date: circa 1623 : to search into : investigate An intriguing word, but it bothered me that I'd never run into it. So I checked the OED,...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/18/2008
Margaret Jull Costa . a translator from Portuguese and Spanish, has an essay on translating Pessoa that includes an exercise with a short text in Portuguese followed by a translation with pull-down menus offering choices of various English words and phrases at various points. An ingenious method that seems like a natural for the internet. Thanks, Jeremy !
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/16/2008
I learn from Arnold Zwicky's Language Log post that the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (which I wrote about here ) is facing a crisis: DSL consists of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary , together making 22 volumes in print (plus a 2005 supplement). These amazing resources are now available on-line, providing searchable electronic versions of the...
