Diacritiques

BBC Radio 4 has a new programme#[1] on language which will air once a week through August and September: Word 4 Word . It is part of the BBC Voices project and produced with the Open University, so this might be quite interesting.

Quoting Dermot Murnaghan off the Voices page:

Language is a badge. We wear it like invisible uniform that declares where we come from, what we do, whom we like to talk to and hang out with.

In the former pit villages of Northumberland, the winding gear is silent now. The wholesale closure of most of Britain’s coalmines saw to that. But what of the rich, distinctive dialect that made Ashington distinct from Bedlington, and Seaton Delaval different from market-town Morpeth? […]

“Word 4 Word” is all about local talk, about this sense of belonging as expressed through the words we use to frame our thoughts. But what we’re trying to do, too, is investigate some of the big changes that are underway in the vernacular of regional Britain. Not so much the decline of dialect as its evolution.

The first programme of this series airs (”nets”? “cables”?) today at 9 a.m. BST (that’s in just about an hour) and will be available (Real Audio — as far as I can tell they aren’t podcasting it yet) from the linked site, probably for the next week or so.

I’ll have a listen and may be reporting back on language-related radio shows. There’s quite a large variety of those around.

[1]: This is one of the few Brit-spelled words that I always want to Ami-spell. Computer science oblige.

Céline at Naked Translations knows a retired Canon — the clerical rank, not the weapon — who drew her the most marvellous sketch of a typical English church, with all the parts labelled.

I downloaded it for future reference.

Reading this post on Margaret Marks’ Transblawg, I realised I had no I idea that outside Germany, if you have someone cremated after their death, you don’t have to give the ashes a proper burial (in a graveyard, or at sea, or whatever the options are the law provides for).

The land of Saxony-Anhalt is considering relaxing this requirement, and Margaret Marks comments:

I love the way they [i.e. Germans] say people will be able to put their next of kin’s ashes on the bookshelf. This is a sort of stereotype idea of how weird it would be not to bury the ashes.

Sure enough, the very first thought that sprang to mind was, “So they really do keep grandma on the mantelpiece? That’s not a joke?”

This makes me think of the concept of “modern jackass” from a radio show the Tensor just wrote about (and that I happen to have been listening to quite intently lately…).

Oh, and I had to look up hydriotaphia.

You know, a little over a year ago, I was wondering whether blogging was an activity I should take up. I was hesitant for a while because it seemed you had to be either your own journalist, which I am not, or to spend a considerable amount of time gazing at your own navel. I was, […]

Some of Mark Liberman’s recent Language Log posts were dealing with dealing with reduced vs. unreduced vowels in the pronunciation of the articles a and the. (Reduced: [ə] and [ðə]; unreduced: [ɛɪ] (or [ɛj]) and [ði:]). In his latest post, he examined a G. W. Bush speech and found that, as other readers had claimed, […]

Trouvailles : Quel plaisir de faire violence à ce qui auripile nos oreilles. (lien) […] il se donne un genre qui m’auripile et je ne supporte pas sa façon de massacrer les chansons de nos grands chanteurs français. (lien) La n’est pas la question, mais ça m’auripile de vous entendre dire: “Attention aux motos Ecoles”, vous en avez eu […]

Continuation du billet précédent, coupé en deux pour raison de longueur excessive. Voici donc la liste des poteaux roses français : héraut » héros : Un héros de la lutte contre le SRAS élu président de l’Association médicale chinoise (lien) ôter » hauter : Mon père avait sélectionné avec soin deux sabres pour nous hauter la vie, […]

Les lecteurs/trices francophones qui ne jettent pas les gants devant les billets rédigés dans la langue de JK Rowling ont déjà rencontré un genre d’entités mystérieuses appelés eggcorns. Il est grand temps que /ser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti/ leur consacre un article en français. Le voici. L’histoire des eggcorns a débuté il y a deux ans, quand les professeurs de […]

Interesting article by Michael Erard in today’s New York Times (reg. req’d), on the book and the database The Ethnologue, which are published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L.). This is an absolutely amazing source of information for everyone who is interested in the languages of the world. Erard does not avoid to touch upon the […]

Libé parle langue dans un article de Jean-Dominique Merchet consacré à l’argot militaire (14 juillet oblige). S’il est assez vague sur sa source, «  un petit document semi-confidentiel » (à mon avis, c’est celui-ci ; voir également là) rédigé par un officier anonyme, cet aperçu de particularités lexicales — lexicalisation de termes et sigles issus du jargon bureaucratique […]