Diacritiques

As you can see on the left, I have taken a leaf, no, a page out of rogblog and added links to “word of the day” services. The Robert link is much less slick than the others, though, and I will have to change the code every few days by hand. Is there really no French web site that provides a snippet of javascript people can link to if they are interested in words? I’m not specifically asking Les Dictionnaires Le Robert to do so; anyone at all would be quite all right. (Or are all French dictionary publishers so territorial about their copyrighted content that they resist this great way of opening the doors to knowledge?).

My choice of “démocratie” was inspired by this post (in French) by Laurent at Embruns. It links to a commented excerpt from a text by José Saramago in this month’s Le Monde Diplomatique’s paper edition. I am very fond of Saramago.

Be that as it may, what about a word of the week feature on this blog? I am tempted to publish regular installments of words or idioms I come across in French or English. The pleasant thing about blogging is that I’m entitled to be whimsical. Wotw — mdls in French — let’s give it a try.

So the first one is … cat vacuuming, also known as waxing the cat, a term from the world of science fiction writing. Deirdre provides the explanation.

#wordpress is an irc channel, ie a real-time discussion forum, for users of the WordPress blogging software. Its raison d’être is to provide help, advice and support, and it counts people from all over the world among its regulars, confused beginners and lead developers alike.

Conversation doesn’t stick to blogging or programming questions, though. What follows is an account of the events of the 10th of August, in what is the morning here in France. (Note to those not familiar with chatrooms: The participants are referred to by the nicknames they have chosen; nickname1: nickname2: [something] means that the person named nickname1 says something in reply to nickname2.)  read the post »

The Tensor at Tenser, said the Tensor (if I’m going to link to him or her in the future I will have to find a better naming scheme) has an enjoyable post on pseudo-IPA in advertising.

You will have to be able to view phonetic symbols in your browser. Look up to this site’s logo and check: Can you see the (phonemic) transcription of serendipity twice, big and small, in different fonts but otherwise identical? Or are there boxes or gibberish showing up in the small version? Here’s the ultra-short tutorial to get your computer IPA-ready:

 read the post »

Thanks to the great people who give advice on and write plug-ins, add-ons and hacks (yes, that’s the term) for the WordPress software that runs this blog, ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti has acquired a few new features: At the bottom of the left column, there is a window you can use to send me an instant message via the […]

Analyse Brassens est de retour! J’y ai fait référence dans le passage sur vénus callipyge dans le billet qui parle d’épithètes homériques et autres. (Oui, l’article est en anglais, mais faites défiler et regardez la fin!) Mais leur base de données a connu un accident vasculaire cérébral, me semble-t-il, vite signalé au webmèstre. Il l’a […]

I half-misquoted Adolf Muschg in the last post; at the very least, I was being imprecise. His actual words were “[Die Rechtschreibreform] ist unnötig wie ein Kropf.” Unnötig (unnecessary), not überflüssig (superfluous). Former German federal president Roman Herzog, however, did call it “überflüssig wie ein Kropf” (as superfluous as a goiter). Meanwhile on […]

I finally caught up with my favourite blogs. How hard it is to get back on top of your reading after missing just ten days’ worth of blogging! Anyway, here are some commentaries inspired by the latest crop. Mark Liberman and Eric Bakovic continue Language Log’s campaign against the regrettably pervasive phenomenon of accent prejudice. Their […]

Eric Bakovic, one of the linguists who make Language Log the great, inspiring place it is, has started his own linguistics blog, phonoloblog | all things phonology. The contributors are, again, linguists and are going to address phonology in particular. This promises to be a very interesting addition to the linguistic segment of the blogospere. Plus, […]

This is a followup to my previous post on eggcorns, ie not universally accepted variant spellings created by an individual by way of a process similar to folk etymology (“étymologie populaire” voir ici). Here is a new one: peace core. 3,360 gHits, a few of which are puns or refer to at least one bible study […]

Two days ago, at the age of 95, Henri Cartier-Bresson died. On the Libération site, there is a well-selected collection of links to online exhibitions of his work. What I find most interesting is that at this time of obituaries, the press is full of prints of photographs of, rather than by him. One […]