language games
Wonderful article from the Wall Street Journal on the nature of language….
Of course, just because people talk differently doesn’t necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental [...]
I could care less?
by any other name…
The romantic side of familiar words | Language Log |
The fact is, then, that a large proportion of these “most beautiful English words” that aesthetes like to cite owe their claim to beauty entirely on a fancied resemblance to the words of other languages, rather than any inherent “English” phonaesthetic virtues. To show how great [...]
compréhensible
Salut! I’ve been putting in beaucoup heures of etuding French this year. But it seems, there really was no point to it. I just needed a google phone. I wander if anyone will bother to learn languages in the future? Somehow, I feel cheated…
nomenclature
lost in translation
Here a Latin scholar talks about some of the errors in translation he has found in the work of tattoo artists
Every couple of months the department gets another Latin translation request for either a tattoo or a slogan of some sort.
Most of them would be inane in English, so I suppose I should applaud the [...]
office talk
On the nature of gossip as a subject of anthropological research
From The NY Times
Could adults gossiping in the office be more devious than the teenagers in “Gossip Girl”?
If you have a hard time believing this, then you must have skipped the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Perhaps you saw “ethnography” and assumed [...]
Babel
From Slate
Speakers at the United Nations are supposed to deliver their speeches in one of the organization’s six official languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. U.N. interpreters then translate the lecture into the other five languages. If the speaker doesn’t use an official language—either as a political statement or because he doesn’t [...]
blue language
I remain immune to twitter, for the same reason I have never tried heroin – I fear addiction and the wasted years of enslavement to an empty, purposeless life. I have that already. Yet, amusing twitter memes are invading the net like cockroaches in a Sydney restaraunt. This site, Cursebird allows you to see every [...]
you will do as i say, even if its impossible
Management can be a difficult job. It is lonely at the top, particularly when you’re a sociopath. Here are some quotes from a magazine, (the name of which has been lost in the mists of the digital ether, so I am unable to attribute at this stage) that ran a contest to find the management [...]
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