Diacritiques

Via Dominique at the Petit Champignacien Illustré: The non-profit association graphê is trying to drum up support for their online petition, which asks the French state to preserve the collection and archives of the Imprimerie nationale (the national printing works), an institution that has existed since 1539 and whose premises are currently being sold off:

The historic collection it holds - due to be so dispatched - is a unique, priceless testimony of the history of the written form, from the 16th century to the present. It includes the Cabinet des poinçons, or Punch Room, holding hundred of thousands of letterform and character punches, for both western and oriental scripts; functional workshops - a foundry, presses for typography, lithography and copper-plate engraving work, stitching and binding - as well as a library with over 30,000 volumes, and the archives of the State printing works. Set up in 1539 by King Francis I, at the same time as the Collège de France, the national center of academic excellence, this collection stands as the memory of specialized know-how and expertise, and as a center for creation, now fated to disappear if its continued survival is not ensured.

Typography and its history and know-how don’t have a lobby, not even in such a relatively history-conscious place as France. The petition text is online in 26 languages.

1. Who are you callin’ ungrammatical? — a good article by Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe. The topic is, you guessed it, whom.
2. American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift — an interview with the linguist William Labov by Robert Siegel on (US) National Public Radio. Via Mark Liberman at Language Log; he also reports on the sad news concerning the public access to Prof. Labov’s research, though.
3. Le mot de la fin — this is a four-times-a-week radio editorial by the lexicographer Alain Rey. (His is the name on most of the Robert dictionaries.) About 3 min each, and available as a podcast.
4. Speaking in Minor and Major Keys [.pdf] — via Argonaut, a research paper by Maartje Schreuder, Laura van Eerten and Dicky Gilbers, who have found a correlation between musical minor/major keys and sad/happy emotional speech: “In order to investigate emotional intonation, we recorded and analyzed the performances of five professional readers reading passages from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in Dutch. In pitch contours of all speakers we found intervals between tones indicating minor modality in passages in which the sad character Eeyore is speaking and intervals indicating major modality in passages in which the happy, energetic Tigger is speaking.” A similar study had apparently been done already for Japanese.

Via mes requêtes Google :

On voit que google.be essaie de « corriger » incorrectes en incorrecta alors qu’incorrectes est bien correct. C’est d’ailleurs surprenant vu qu’il accepte phrase, langue et francaise. En dépit du fait que l’utilisateur ait choisi l’interface en anglais, le moteur de recherche doit donc bien penser qu’il s’agit de termes français.

La capture illustre aussi le fait que Google effectue désormais des remplacements morphologiques dans des langues autres qu’en anglais : bien que l’internaute ait entré phrase, le moteur trouve des pages contenant le mot phrases au pluriel. (Si on veut éviter cela, il suffit de mettre le terme en question entre doubles guillemets droits : "phrase" ne trouvera pas de pages avec le mot au pluriel.) Il reconnait aussi automatiquement francaise comme variante de française.

[Le vérificateur d’orthographe — le mien, cette fois — ne connaissait pas : l’internaute ; et incorrecta, bien sûr.]

Imagine A (male) shot and killed B. In addition, some days earlier, A tried to pull off an Internet scam. This situation could be bundled into one sentence like this: A tried to pull off an Internet scam just days before he shot and killed B. But as long as A isn’t convicted and sentenced, the […]

The project that has been maturing for a while is finally going public: this blog is getting a makeover, with new name and a new layout. The old design was seriously going on my nerves — it was time for a change. For the new one, I started from the idea of privileging legibility, with a […]

Via Language Hat, I just read about a brilliant initiative launched by Liz Henry at ALTAlk Blog: a Carnival of Blog Translation. A blog carnival is, as Liz puts it, “sort of like a travelling signpost that points to a bunch of magazine articles. It is a post that contains links to other posts written […]

Yes, yes, I know I’ve been bad — this blog is hibernating, or in fact preparing to crawl back out of its cave better and more beautiful than ever before. Things are going on behind the scenes, I assure you. This cartoon, though, made me giggle so hard that I’m breaking the silence to put […]

First my apologies for being such a spotty blogger lately. Offline life is intruding even more than it used to and makes sustained online activities a bit hard at the moment. But I will be back: with everything on my to-blog list, there is no lack of topics. In the meantime, let me just quickly point […]

Via Crooked Timber, a comic-strip style overview of the rules of cricket [.pdf] — in French. Published, in fact, by the Fédération Française de Basketball - Softball & Cricket. Not only did I understand everything (wow!), including the very strange point about the defending team being the one that tries to destroy the wicket, but […]

I spent a very pleasant day yesterday having lunch with Suw Charman (in whose IRC channel#[1] I like to hang out), Kevin Anderson of BBC World Have Your Say and Matt Mullenweg (the WordPress lead developer). They are in Paris for the Les Blogs 2 conference. The local welcome committee included Michel Valdrighi (who took […]