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Tag Archives: language(s)

Szklarska Poreba: call for submissions

Saturday, November 26, 2005

It’s that time of year again, when we take ourselves off to Poland to ski and discuss pragmasemantics. Apparently I’m programme chair again (don’t know me, confused about the name?), I suspect this is due to Reinhard reusing the email from last year’s workshop. “Relevance” is the new theme, but this shouldn’t put you off [...]

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Awoken by the cries of monkeys

Saturday, September 3, 2005

I had the rather surreal experience this afternoon of being woken up by the warning cries of (if I remember correctly) a putty nose monkey. No, I haven’t been travelling in Cameroon. Nor was I at the zoo. I was at a workshop on language evolution.

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Loosing ties and losing our grip

Monday, August 8, 2005

I promise not to go grammar-Nazi here, although I expect in the coming months I’ll be posting more often on language (it’s the topic of my upcoming PhD study, after all). But I’ve just seen yet another articulate, carefully written and obviously proofread article talk about “loosing” (in this case, “loosing who we are”). And [...]

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Linguistic map of the world

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Here’s an idea for the new media folk: how about a map of the linguistic connections around the world? Not sure quite how the visualisation would work, but it’s inspired by this Shirky article, which reinterprets proximity in terms of linguistic connection.

In the next century, as countries increasingly trade more in information than hard goods, the [...]

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Classroom assignment: design a language

Monday, June 6, 2005

Stanley Fish, at the University of Illinois, requires his students over the course of a semester to create an entirely new language. The idea (reported in his NY Times op-ed piece) is not to teach linguistics, but writing skills; composition. “Students can’t write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.” [...]

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too many particles

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

I’ve heard many times from many Dutch people that their language is the hardest in the world to learn. I have to admit to some scepticism — Polish has a case marking system that has to be seen to be believed, and English speakers can’t even distinguish the sounds used in some languages (the difference [...]

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