This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.
Global English
Mind, Tory, Puck – the history of Irish words still used today in modern English
Bloomsday, the day when James Joyce fans all over the world celebrate his great novel Ulysses, fell last Saturday. To mark the occasion here’s an article about Irish words that have made their way into English.
Language change and slang
Quakes munt language too
The Christchurch earthquakes have not only changed the Canterbury landscape, they “munted” the way we speak.
Oxford Dictionary recognises bogans
They have been around for decades, wearing a mullet, black jeans and listening to heavy metal, and now the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) officially recognises bogans.
Improve your English
Pixilated and Pixelated
I don’t usually go in for pointing out typos, as I make quite enough of them myself. But this report from a newspaper last week amused me immensely.
Books, words, dictionaries and languages
How BBC comedy Episodes inadvertently went viral in Israel
As a translator, I’m always secretly delighted when free automated translators are revealed to be pretty useless at translating. This is a particularly satisfying example.
Will “Google Conversation” really converse?
Here’s another article on the same topic: over a year old, but still interesting and relevant: “One important thing to understand is that these new-generation translation tools — Google Translate and Google Conversation alike — do not do what human translators do … They match.”
James Joyce: ‘We must write dangerously.’
And on James Joyce again, Stan Carey marked Bloomsday by sharing some lines from Arthur Power’s book Conversations with James Joyce.
Cartoon
Eurozone crisis in cartoons
In this cartoon, a Greek footballer is shown wearing a German shirt—a reference to Germany’s control over the Greek economy. And as fate would have it, Germany are playing Greece in the quarter-finals of the Euro 2012 football tournament on Friday.
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