Diacritiques

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).  read the post »

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 new articles have shifted focus from the US to the UK situation and go on to consider how disregard for accents that deviate from what is perceived as neutral or standard pronunciation, tagged as exemplary, or simply one’s own may be related to negative emotions: rooted in disgust or reinforced by shame.

 read the post »

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, it’s a very pleasant-looking WordPress install.

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 […]

a site in turmoil damn Internet Explorer stand fast, dawn is nigh This is my reply when asked how I spent last night and most of the preceding day. Others, in comparable situations, have had similar reactions.

Generally, it’s called a hiatus in Blogese. Despite temperatures of over 30°C (or maybe because of the ozone pollution levels caused by the heat) I managed to catch what is called Sommergrippe in German — summer flu. It hit me pretty fiercely (I’m still coughing), and I can’t blog when my mind is feverish and […]

A visually pleasant Flash animation about the words of English, ranked by frequency word. It is based on the British National Corpus. If I am not mistaken, the first common noun is time, ranked 66th. Via James @ The Bloomers.

/ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti/ is definitely taking the risk of becoming, quite unintentionally, something like a Language Log commentary column. It is a little humiliating to admit that I can’t seem to be able to keep up with the Language Log linguists, and today I probably ought to have retired to the bed with a cup of hot […]

As you probably know, there is a law in France, called “loi Toubon” after the former minister of culture who sponsored it, that requires all product descriptions and adverts (“be they in spoken, written or audio-visual form”) to be in French. If several languages are present (read: if the slogan is in English) the French […]