Diacritiques

Ellipsis Eclipses is the title of a work of art that will soon embellish the English town of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am mentioning it because pronouncing its name ten times a day might help people who want to improve their spoken English master the notoriously difficult lax i-sound [ɪ]. Just try it: [ɪˈlɪp.sɪs ɪˈklɪp.sɪz ɪˈlɪp.sɪs ɪˈklɪp.sɪz ɪˈlɪp.sɪs ɪˈklɪp.sɪz]…

You’d think the CIA were presenting ironclad evidence after receiving reports of interviews with an English-speaking Iraqi defector who claimed to be able to provide first-hand information on mobile biological weapons labs? You’d be wrong. Not if the interviews were conducted in English and Arabic by German intelligence officers, translated into German, and finally “translated back” into English. Here’s the original article from HustonChronicle.com.

Via Blogalization, who neglect to tell us which kind of Arabic, though.

The linguists at Language Log have coined the word eggcorn, which refers to a particular kind of lapsus. An eggcorn is created by speakers (or writers) who, when searching for a word the meaning and pronunciation of which they know but the etymology and the spelling of which they have forgotten or never learnt, come up with a form they contrieve based on recongizable lexical items that provide the meaning they are after. Eggcorn itself is an eggcorn: Someone, somewhere didn’t quite know how to spell acorn and thought that an egg-shaped seed would most likely be called an egg corn.

Identical eggcorns can (and for the known ones, turn out to) be forged many times over independently. Some may appear so sensible that people learn them from each other. But an eggcorn isn’t quite universally accepted (yet), which makes it different from folk etymology.

The Language Log linguists like eggcorns; they have fallen for their irresistible charm. Not everyone agrees, though. Mark Liberman points out that a recent article in the Guardian prefers the term “word crime”. I briefly mentioned the same article in a previous post written in French that talked about how the publication of a new edition of a well-known dictionary was heralded in the French paper Libération and in the Guardian, respectively: In the former, with a sweet interview with a lexicographer who has interesting strories to tell about the evolution of meanings and dictionary entries; in the latter, with a whingeing diatribe about the illiterate populace.

What’s the point of all this?  read the post »

ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti  has recently added a collection of free online dictionaries to its menu section on the left-hand side of this page. So why is the Académie française’s famous dictionary absent from the list? Because its online version is nothing short of a disgrace, an ergonomic nightmare, pitifully designed and unworthy of any reputable institution. If […]

BBC News held a caption competition for this picture showing Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, singing and dancing to the Village People’s YMCA at this year’s ASEAN security meeting. The winners are here. Apparently, this is a tradition the government delegates can’t avoid. Don’t miss the (low-quality) video, but careful, I found […]

Updated version following up a comment. Scroll down! Open the Iliad and you find that the Greeks referred to their goddess Hera as βοῶπις (bo-ôpis), i.e. cow-eyed. A 19th century scholar must have translated this as “ox-eyed” – the term is still around – but I frankly doubt he was on-target. Homer and his contemporaries weren’t […]

Here is Steve Bell’s (the Guardian cartoonist’s) account of Mr Kerry’s choice for a potential future vice president. It might be slightly frustrating for politically active US citizens who are deeply involved with the differences between the candidates, insofar as they are at all interested in what Europeans think. But face it, right now […]

A l’occasion du centième anniversaire du Petit Larousse, Libé pubile un entretien charmant avec le lexicographe Jean Pruvost, auteur du livre « La dent-de-lion, la Semeuse et le Petit Larousse: la biographie du Petit Larousse » qui paraît aujourd’hui même. (Tiens, je ne savais pas que dandelion, pissenlit, venait du français. L’accès à l’article devrait d’ailleurs devenir […]

Eric Idle, in his own words the “sixth nicest” Python, has recently been fined $5000 for pronouncing the word “fuck” during a radio show. He duly sat down and wrote a sweet little song dedicated to the FCC. You can download the mp3 from Monty Python themselves; the lyrics and another copy of the song […]

If you live within regional public transport distance of Paris you can visit the Louvre the way you would explore a town or, if that is more to your liking, a shopping neighbourhood: just agree on a meeting place and time and decide on the spot what to do. This is a great privilege. Feeling […]