Diacritiques

In our ongoing series Language topics on the #wordpress IRC channel, we present the latest instalment. This morning’s discussions mainly dealt with nouns and verbs, and the purity of English.

The participants were spread out between Lausanne and Tokyo, and most but not all of them are native speakers of English (at least two are bilingual from childhood, and several more have acquired a near-native level in a foreign language). Both sexes were represented.

“Phenny”, who pitches in at the end of the excerpt, is not a human being, but a bot, capable of consulting a variety of dictionaries and carrying out Google searches.

This is a bit long, so please read on below the fold.

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… from reading an article on computer security:

The choice of a gurning picture may indicate that the worm’s writer is British. Gurning is an ancient Cumbrian practice of pulling a funny face and is famously practised in the village of Egremont at its annual crab apple fair.

I had never heard of gurning before, and neither have most of the dictionaries I checked. AMHD4 knows the word as girning (vb.: girn), and, wow, World Wide Words has an entry on it in the, er, Cumbrian spelling.

The activity it denotes is exemplified here and here — certainly topical in the context of crab apples.

• Microsoft debuts a malicious software removal tool today. (link) — Just glad I don’t have any Microsoft software on my computer any more. I might inadvertently install the malicious tool.
• Powell Surveys Devastated Area — A headline quoted from memory, from, I think, USA Today (which would have been USA Yesterday, or rather USA The-Previous-Day), which I saw at the International Press Relay (a newsagent’s) just before the events described here. Who’d have thought that Mr Powell’s surveys would turn out to be so destructive.

Si vous êtes parmi les lecteurs et lectrices de alt.usage.english, vous les avez peut-être déjà répérés. Dans le cas contraire, voici quelques mots anglais dont la prononciation pose parfois problème même aux personnes averties. Les liens pointent vers les dictionnaires Cambridge (avec API) et Merriam-Webster (avec son et ascii-API). egregious se prononce [ɪˈgriːʤəs], avec trois syllabes. […]

Putting this entry in the category “inspiration” feels quite wrong. This hasn’t been a good week, on several counts, and I’ve been suffering from a painful lack of inspiration. However, that’s precisely the reason it has to be categorised thus. In times like these, reading remains, and there may be a pinch of escapism in it. […]

Yet another English audio document in an accent other than Estuary English (also known as “BBC English ”) or what is sometimes called “General American”: Here are excerpts from several of poems by Robert Burns read in a Scottish accent. Via Blogging in Paris, from where Claude Covo-Farchi remarks on the “translation” of the film title […]

The other day, Dr Dave at unknowngenius passionately disputed something I had said earlier. My crime? Having suggested that in Terence’s line Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. the word homo should be translated as human being. I should, of course, know better than to reply to a post in which the term “PC” […]

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 […]

Language Log brings it to our attention that a hoax might be giving millions of web users the wrong idea about the history and etymology of NYC’s nickname The Big Apple. The term didn’t in fact originate with an early 19th-century immigrant from France named Eve, who (supposedly) ran a brothel and called the women […]