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.

On aurait pu croire que les recommendations de la CIA ne pussent être mises en doute quand elles se basent sur des rapports d’interrogatoire concernant un transfuge irakien parlant anglais qui prétend être en mesure de fournir des informations de première main sur des laboratoires mobiles d’armes biologiques . Ben, c’est raté. Pas si lesdits rapports proviennent de temoignages recueillis en anglais et arabe par des enquêteurs allemands, traduits en allemand et ensuite retraduits en anglais.

Via Blogalization qui néanmoins ne nous dit pas quelle variété de la langue Arabe.

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?  lire le billet »

Pourquoi notre collection de dictionnaires en ligne (regardez à gauche … faites défiler la page … vous les voyez ?) ne comporte-t-elle pas de lien vers le célèbre dictionnaire de l’Académie française ? Parce que le site de sa « version informatisée » est une honte à l’ergonomie cauchemardesque, au graphisme indigne. Si vous utilisez un navigateur dont […]

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, le célèbre comique et membre de Monty Python, a récemment été obligé par la FCC (l’équivalent étatsunien du CSA français) à payer une amende de $5000 pour avoir prononcé le mot « fuck » sur les ondes de la radio. En réaction, celui qui se décrit lui-même comme, parmi les (six) Pythons « le le […]

Hier, avec un ami, nous avons eu l’occasion de visiter l’exposition temporaire « Les Arts de l’Islam » au Louvre. C’est une exposition d’objets d’une qualité spectaculaire, stupéfiante, renversante – j’ai envie d’insérer un dictionnaire de synonymes ici. Certes, la présentation laisse à désirer sur certains points, notamment l’éclairage, qui crée des reflets, et la pauvreté […]