Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

Friday, January 20, 2012

Quote of the day

"It's good when you still find a nice old British tradition, then: a warm and flavourful ale, a black cab with a brilliant driver, or a newspaper article shot through with unconscious language prejudice."

- Johnson, explaining that you can't LOSE an accent, you can only train yourself in another one ("Only the mute have no accent.")

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Quote of the day

"Damn has the syntax of an attributive adjective but the semantics of a scowl. "

- Geoffrey Pullum, Language Log

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Quote of the day

At this point, I should repeat my long-standing conviction that speech errors, by politicians and others, are rarely if ever worth the fuss that they sometimes generate
- Mark Liberman

Friday, September 16, 2011

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Who knew (St.) Augustine was a Berber?

Language Log has a post focusing on the Berber language as spoken in Libya.  Apparently, there is a sizable (suppressed) Berber minority there.  I think I first heard about Berber in the context of an article I read as a child about the Tuareg (Tuareg is a Berber language), notable because "In Tuareg society women do not traditionally wear the veil, whereas men do."


Apparently, Berber is an Afro-Asiatic language, like Arab, Hebrew, and ancient Egyptian (which survives in daily use only among Egyptian Christians (Copts) who use it in their services like Catholics used to use Greek and Latin).

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Quote from Dave Barry, in Language Log:

"The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night."

My own explanation for this was the Hawaiians were once united with the Czechs, divorced, and in the settlement one got the vowels and the other the consonants.

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Favorite mistranslation involving goats....

This has been around for a while....a question posted to a computer oriented help group:
This is question, engish is faulty therefore the right excused is 
requested.  Thank google to translate to help.  SORRY!!!!! 
At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.   To how many times like
the wind, a pole, and the dragon?   Install 2,3 repeat, spank, vomit blows 
14:14:01.869 - INFO
[edu.internet2.middleware.shibboleth.common.config.profile.JSPErrorHandlerB eanDefinitionParser:45]
- Parsing configuration for JSP error handler. 
Not precise the vomit but with aspect similar, is vomited concealed in fold of
goat-time lumber?   goat-time see like the wind, pole, and dragon?  This
insult to father's stones?    JSP error handler with wind, pole, dragon with
intercourse to goat-time?  Or chance lack of skill with a goat-time? 
Please apologize for your stupidity.  There are a many thank you 
Hypotheses included anything from a parody to an attempted back-translation:
Often, I get a program error on install. How much do I have to configure? I tried a re-install 2 or three times, and it brings up errors.
Not the same error, but similar: are errors hidden in the program log? A problem with the calling object? JSP error handler configuration connection at runtime? Or perhaps a misunderstanding of the program?

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Chimps gone wild....

They may not be all that great at acquiring human language, but they do pretty well at those obscene gestures.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Things you didn't know about men and women.....

If this sounds odd (excerpt):
Given that men are, on average, physically weaker than women: It's hard to see how they're going to win wars without troops, and survive walking the streets without alpha females willing to protect them. Among alpha females, chivalry is dead. If beta females are chivalrous, so what? Even if beta females had the courage to pull a rapist off of her victim, would she have the fortitude? Considering that the beta female wouldn't even be physically fit enough to join the U.S. Army, it's hard to imagine her stopping a wolf pack.

it has been regendered. HT Prettier Than Napoleon

Friday, July 02, 2010

"Ae day whan he wis striddlin his cuddie doun the brae"

Perhaps translating Chinese into Scots is a sign that somebody has too much time on his hands, but I found myself oddly fascinated.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Whores and Holes - two great things that go great together

But they don't sound THAT much alike....unless they are black, and you are the NAACP.

If you're not going to click on the links to get the full story (and you should), Hallmark recalled an audio card with an astronomical theme (which included "black holes") because somebody in the NAACP thought it sounded like "black whores". You can judge for yourself if you follow the links.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Women in literature - the early years

I've been reading Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, a book about language history. A passage in it reminded me of a gurl friend of mine, who takes an interest in early female authors - although this one is well before the medieval times that interest her.

Akkadian bilingualism would have become common in the elite, and one can see evidence of this at the highest level, since Sargon's daughter Enheduanna is supposed to have composed two cycles of Sumerian hymns, and the most famous (to Innanna) has been found in some fifty copies.

This participation by women, especially princesses and priestesses, in Sumerian literature was not uncommon. They wrote funeral hymns, letters and especially love songs.

Thy city lifts its hand like a cripple, O my lord Shu-Sin
It lies at they feet like a lion-cub, O son of Shulgi,
O my god, the wine-maid has sweet wine to give,
Like her date-wine sweet is her vulva, sweet is her wine.....

(in background here, Sargon and his daughter were not Sumerian, they were Akkadian - and their language was not at all closely related, although they adopted the Sumerian cuneiform writing system for their own language and kept Sumerian culture alive)

Does anybody have any cunnilingus reference that pre-date this?



Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Trivia of the day

Maltese is the only semitic language normally written in a Latin alphabet.
- Language Log

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Bitch-slapping the educated

Language Log had a couple of interesting items recently (granted, not much different than saying "The sun rose this morning!")

One was about "begging the question", a phrase more often used these days to mean "raising the question" than what it used to mean, which was something like "assuming your conclusions" or "arguing in a circle". Anybody employing the more common usage is liable to be corrected by some pedant who wants you to know he knows the "correct" usage, but this item goes into the whole history of the item. The recommendation is just to avoid using the phrase completely to deprive pedants of their target.

The other is another rant directed at Strunk and White, which I've always enjoyed because I've been irritated myself by editors that take their mostly useless advice far more seriously than either Strunk OR White did.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Towards a richer vocabulary.....

Isn't that what they called it in the Readers' Digest? Anyway, I don't think they had
prostidude a male prostitute

If you follow the link to Language Log, you will also learn why you might enjoy "warmed spring salad greens with prostitutes".

Monday, March 08, 2010

Credited for bouncing nude.....

Pointed out an interesting case where a spellchecker caused some confusing to some linguistics professors whose blog I enjoy (and whose books I have bought), and got credited for the pointer. Thrilled!

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Quote of the Day

Jibun no toile ga ichiban, demo okusan ha hoka no okusan ga ii
(My best man learned this one in Japanese class at the U of R. I'm sure the professor is safely retired now)

Thursday, November 12, 2009

RIP Lévi-Strauss

I actually missed the news of the death of the father of anthropology at the age of 100, but there is a rather nice post in memoriam for him at Language Log:
Ultimately the work of Lévi-Strauss was as seminal as the work of Freud and Chomsky. It matters little whether any of these three is correct. In fact they are probably all wrong about their views on what is universal in the human psyche. But progress in the mind is not so much finding the truth as learning to ask useful questions that bring new rigor and satisfaction to research and researchers.