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Week in review

Jonathan Cole — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:22:48 +0000

This post contains a weekly selection of links related to English language today. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting related websites. A new weekly review post will be posted every Friday. Please contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include.

News

Language rated above green issues.
‘More than half of people in Wales feel securing the Welsh language’s future is more important than protecting the environment.’

Will China and India embrace the English language?
‘In a world where over a billion people are currently learning English, native-speakers are losing their status as guardians of the language and dispensers of pedagogical expertise.’

Why is lilac pronounced “Li-LOCK”? Debate rages, expert explains.
‘Local customs and colloquialisms trump whatever rule is in print.’

Da Vinici Code expert needs your text messages.
Linguistic crime busting!

The impact language has on immigration and integration.
‘Thanks to her diligence, Dr Pons-Sanz was able to clean up the list of English terms that people believe came from Old Norse.’

Sleep can improve your word power.
‘Reading bedtime stories to children could help to improve their vocabulary, new research suggests.’

Blogs and columnists

You can quote them.
‘The whole nine yards. It is a phrase rather than a word that is the most prominent etymological riddle of our time. The phrase is both a magnet for fervid speculation and a goal that can be targeted with powerful modern research techniques.’
Picked up from Language Hat.

In the land of invented languages.
‘… one can have a language removed from the socioeconomic and political baggage of natural languages (especially appealing to those who deplore the international influence of English).’

Analysis: the implications of dialect in (the game) Dragon Quest IV.
‘The inclusion of dialects in video games stirs about some interesting implications.’

Feel the fear and do it anyway (or, the privatization of the English language).
‘Today I received an email from the lawyers of author Susan Jeffers, PhD., notifying me that I’d infringed on her trademark by inadvertently using the phrase “feel the fear and do it anyway”’.

Some thoughts on the lost art of reading aloud.

Language Wars.
‘It is fascinating how intensely invested people are in language use … There are those who are appalled by changes in the spelling and meaning of words.’

Cultural understanding, open mind key to upgrading English proficiency.
‘Without realizing this simple truth, as has been said by different voices in the past, no amount of increased investment in English, or no development in teaching technique, is ever likely to improve English in Korea. Korea must “un-Koreanize” itself first to tackle the issue.’

Give Verbs a Chance.
Do you use too many nouns?

10 blogs to improve your mastery of language and editing.
Picked up from Fritinancy.

A Degree in English.
In the New York Times: ‘This all sounds very exciting, but these stories of linguistic derring-do obscure the fact that Latin diplomas have outlived their usefulness … I love Latin, but when the last American diploma is finally converted to English I will say, “Ita vero.” Right on.’

Good grammar might derail your career.
‘I can remember in sixth grade when we spent weeks parsing sentences. There was a moment of self-awareness when I thought to myself, “If I let anyone see how much I like this, I’ll never get invited to good parties.”‘

Will Shakespeare’s come and gone: does the bard’s poetry reach us like August Wilson’s? Come on — really?
‘At what point do we concede that substantial comprehension (of English) across the centuries has become too much of a challenge to expect of anyone but specialists?’

Quote of the day from Booker Rising: on Obama’s accent.

Which Words Do You Love and Which Do You Hate?
Out with ‘moist’and in with ‘discombobulate’!
Picked up from BoingBoing.

Websites

Automatic translation from Gmail.

Fun

Business letter generator (OK, perhaps not that much fun).

English to English video

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Week in review

Jonathan Cole — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:36:58 +0000

News

Immigrant women take action for language access.
‘More than 150 languages are currently spoken in New York City alone.’

Are we ready to say bye to books?
More on the new Kindle DX.

While immigrants in Illionois (USA) are struggling to find English learning opportunities, the citizens of Oklahoma (USA) will have the opportunity to make English the official language of their state government.

U.K. chef is ’sorry’ after language rap.

Mind your language, Amartya Sen tells Mulayam Singh Yadav.
‘Now, one way of excluding people from doing English is to keep the division between the English-speaking haves and the non-English speaking have-nots.’

Blogs and columnists

Golf’s colorful language goes with any green.
‘… most of the terms (in golf linguistics) deal with making fun of your partners’ shots.’

Beyond logic: language and discourse.
Don’t be put off by the opening quotes – three interesting anecdotal pieces here.
‘… those persons of Chinese ethnicity raised in and around British school systems (and more likely to listen to the BBC than to VOA) were predisposed to public praise of the “Queen’s English.” And yet privately they betrayed a preference for the American superpower style of the English language.’

Liberal arts? Think again
Out of work with an English degree. On a positive note, the article has an interesting list of the degrees most requested by U.S. employers in 2009.

Euphemisms, clichés abound in today’s discourse.
‘Another of my cherished clichés, which is becoming increasingly popular, is shovel-ready.’

One of the toughest job-interview questions ever.
At least two interesting statements made in this post: there is no such thing as a representative sample of the English language, and ‘look, the English language only has a million words.’

The etymology of food, part I: Why nothing rhymes with orange.

Useful

There are some new Google search options (also explained in video media clip).

Fun

Wikipedia as a screensaver.

USA Networks launches Letter Matrix iPhone game.

Eddie Izzard and the history of the English language.

Week in review

Jonathan Cole — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:16:03 +0000

News

‘It was my daughter who made me accept Poet’s job.’
A gay Scottish mother has broken the mould of Poet Laureate forever.

13 high schoolers reading millions of words.

Pandemic primer: The P word means broad spread, not necessarily bad disease.

Newspaper champions vs. new media.
‘But the fundamental problem … is that readers are increasingly getting their news from the web, where advertising revenues have not remotely reached the level needed to support in-depth beat reporting and investigative work’.

The new Kindle DX.

‘Amazon Kindle will soon be able to offer “every book ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds”’.

Kindle DX images from the presentation in New York.

One millionth English word could be ‘defriend’ or ‘noob’.

Baby twins ‘talk’ with simple sign language.

UK: English as a second language for almost 900,000 pupils.

USA: African immigrants spend more hours watching English language media than African language media, most probably due to availability of in-language options (marketing oriented report).

Blogs and columnists

What should we call digital reading?

Do all the published dictionaries of English get the part-of-speech information wrong for the majority of the prepositions, the majority of the purported subordination conjunctions, and a whole slew of alleged adverbs? You can find out tonight (8th May) if you are in London.

Can we please ban ‘LOL’?

Technology and books: Is the novel too much for our technology-addled brains?

Seeking to save the planet, with a thesaurus.
The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is “global warming”… the term turns people off.

An invention that could change the internet for ever. The internet’s Holy Grail? A global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does. Also related, is Googlespeak killing creativity?

Caution! Merge Ahead: How two words become one.

What Is Twitter About in One Word?

Unusual suspects. Are dated catch phrases really a communication problem?

Fun

The longest words in English.

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Week in review: 1 May, 2009

Jonathan Cole — Fri, 01 May 2009 09:37:06 +0000

News

Vast language, gene study unveils our history.
When people move, they borrow words from the people where they settle. Those new words inserted into older languages can tell us when the newcomers arrived.

The French have a beef with the English.
French influence on the English language came after the Norman invasion of England in 1066. William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, brought with him Norman French.

Foreign accent syndrome.
A man from Yorkshire claims to have started speaking in a broad Irish accent after waking up from a brain operation. Why?

All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad held at Dublin City University.
More than 80 transition-year and fifth-year students took part in Ireland’s first All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad.

The joy of exclamation marks!
Exclamation marks used to be frowned upon. Now look what’s happened! We use them all the time! Hurrah!!! But what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?

Gadget jargon still confuses many.
WAP, dongle, and cookie are some of the least understood words by the British public, according to a survey.

Your ancestors durst to speak the English language.
Do you recall how hard it was to learn the rules of English grammar when you were a kid? Count your blessings that you aren’t old enough to have studied Elements of English Grammar with Progressive Exercises in Parsing, first published in 1828 in Boston.

Brain reads word-by-word.
Reading may be fundamental, but how the brain gives meaning to letters on a page has been fundamentally a mystery. Two new studies fill in some details on how the brains of proficient readers handle words.

American newspaper circulation declines 7% in last six months.

Blog posts and columnists

Of loos and language.
(From New York Times opinion column). ‘America works, every day, its youthful ambition still boundless. England, having seen everything go pear-shaped, relieved of the burden of running a ropey world, boozes and says it’s sorry and prefers a lie-in.’

“Metrosexual”: Real Men Wear Pink!
“Metrosexual” was introduced to society by Mark Simpson. As a writer for The Independent, Simpson published an article on November 15, 1994 titled “Here Come the Mirror Men”

In Defense of Common English.
A look at a number of popular books which deal with modern English. ‘When linguists try to share their insights and scholarship, the results are rarely boffo.’

Sites

English Vocabulary via Greek and Latin Roots.
Discussing the fascinating Greek and Latin roots of English vocabulary words.

Orwell on Politics and the English Language.
‘…one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.’

Fun

Funny: European Union agreement to adopt English language.
‘As part of the negotiations the British government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement…’

The English Language WordClock.
Counting down to a million words in the English language! Ok, we know it is impossible to put an exact figure on the number of words in the English language, but hey, who doesn’t love a countdown?

History of communication cartoon
(picked up from The English Blog)

Funny commercial.

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Week in review

Jonathan Cole — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:54:49 +0000

News

Email language apparently reflects your age and social status.

The recently launched World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

How does the brain form sentences?
‘Forming a grammatically correct sentence may seem to require advanced cognitive skills, but it turns out that our creative language capacity might rely on a less sophisticated system than is commonly thought’.

Assimilating culture – what language tells us about immigration and integration.

Lip-reading computers can detect different languages.

Blog posts

What’s become of the English language?
‘Years ago, when I worked for police departments as a dispatcher we used 10 codes. 10-44 meant an officer was asking for lunch. I always liked to try to speak English as much as I could, and not use the 10 codes. For example instead of saying 10-4, which meant okay, I would just say okay. Seemed simple enough to me’.

Well, well, well.
‘Again, I am puzzled when I ask someone how they are and they reply “I’m good!” – as though I had enquired about their moral welfare. What’s wrong with the “I’m well, thanks!” that I grew up with?’

Other

7 English Words and their Biblical Hebrew origins.

A brief history of the English language.

50 euphemisms for job termination.

How Winston Churchill learned English.

Keep English simple.
‘Or as Galen, a doctor and philosopher who lived almost 2000 years ago, put it, “The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms’.

Fun

Blog of unnecessary quotation marks.

Do you speak English?

Do You Speak English – Watch more funny videos here

Week in review

Jonathan Cole — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:06:23 +0000

News

An Amazon tribe converts the missionary.
50 years of ‘stupid grammar advice’.
Sussex University row regarding cuts to linguistics courses.
Bilingual babies get an early edge.
What is the half life of the word ‘throw’ and is it likely to sound different in 1,000 or 10,000 years?

Blog posts

Slang dictionary oddity, in 1874.
‘If English had a decent writing system there would be no use for spellchecking software’.
Learn a few interesting ways to search Google, in this post on how to make Google your English teacher.
Having comma trouble?
Tautology, not all bad.

Fun

Lingo2word is a site that ‘translates’ text message lingo into plain English.
Learn a language, 10 words a day.
Want to impress people with your knowledge of business-speak? Try this out.
The learning English film project.
The importance of learning a second language.