Monday, September 8, 2008
I just learnt the Dutch verb verstenen, “to fossilise” (used in the context of grammatical fossilisation, so it’s really a close parallel to the English). The lovely thing is that this is nearly compositional meaning: steen is “stone” (so stenen as verb would be “to stone” [don't know if it's actually used that way?]), and [...]
Thursday, September 27, 2007
I’ve started learning (modern) Greek, and I caught my first sentence in the wild this weekend. It was “I want a (cup of) tea” (θέλω ένα τσάι). What’s that to be excited about, and what is “in the wild”? Well, it means it was spoken by someone I don’t know well, in a context where [...]
It’s Māori language week (te wiki o te reo Māori) in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and although I’m ashamed of how little I can remember, here’s a few links for anyone interested. Wikipedia has a good entry on the language, with a bunch of outside links. There’s also a site for learning and a translating dictionary [...]
Via languagelog comes this magnificent retelling of a well-known story. Do listen to it, and see if you can read along at the same time.
To lighten the mood a little, here’s a magnificent malapropism coined by Fabrice in the pub last night: to smoke like a chainsaw. It currently gets one Google hit, with a title Fabrice might not appreciate.
Studying semantics doesn’t give you much to laugh at, most of the time. In fact, rather the reverse: being too aware of what words mean, you start to miss what people mean when they say them. Anyone confronted with “Oh, it’s funny because…” has probably just told a joke to a semanticist. But there are [...]
Quick links to a week’s worth of browsing: Design: flowerlike lightbulb unfurls as it warms up. [via sensory impact] Craziness: every year two Greek monasteries bombard each other with fireworks. [via Nemo Ramjet] Life/art mutual imitation: A British explorer disappears in the Amazon jungle, while looking for a lost city. Attempts to find his remains, [...]
From a talk I attended recently (slightly paraphrased, I was slow off the mark writing the quote down): > Orson Welles, > Brave New World, anybody read that > book? They have a ministry redefining language so that people can’t talk about political > concepts like going to war. I was slow off the mark [...]
I’m going to have to try and put my hands on a Mark Twain collection. I just stumbled on “The Awful German Language” and it’s spectacular rantage, as well as wonderfully quotable. Quite a lot of this applies to Dutch just as well, and my German-via-Dutch is at just the level of quasi-comprehension that he’s [...]
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Well, not me per se, but my AI and computational linguistics training seems to have been overtaken by the march of progress. I refer to Androidal Systems, Inc., whose breakthrough processor “understands the meaning of language.” Yup, the meaning of language — these folk aren’t into understatement. Universal translation, that’s what they’ve cracked. And they [...]