Archive for the ‘Language’ Category
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill. Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the ...
Posted in First mention, Language | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
It has often been noted that English is deficient because it lacks a third-person pronoun that can refer to any person, without respect to sexual gender. Although some claim that "he" can refer to anyone in sentences like (1), most linguists agree that maleness is much more salient in these ...
Posted in Language, Whim | 3 Comments »
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
Slides and results from a talk I gave at Kalamazoo College on language identification.
My co-worker at Powerset, Chris Biemann, has a nice paper on Unsupervised Language Identification
.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Language, Science and Tech | 1 Comment »
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
Geoffrey K. Pullum's tirade about the 50th anniversary of William Strunk'sThe Elements of Style as edited by E.B. White is deliciously correct.
So, I want to tell you everything you need to know from Strunk and White, and save you the bother and expense of reading it yourself. Here ...
Posted in Language | Comments Off
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
get down in the dumps
get down in the mud
get down in the dirt
get down in the trenches
get down in the gutter
get down in the muck
get down in the cornfields
get down in the weeds
get down in the wheat
I saw the expression "get down in the wheat" for the first time today.
Posted in Language, Whim | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
I got discussing the idea of Gemütlichkeit with a friend today--actually the Danish expression "hygge"--but I was connecting it to Gemütlichkeit--and I made the claim that "homely" used to mean something like gemütlich.
And so it seems: the OED reports several senses of "homely" with gemütlich connotations. For example, "Become as ...
Posted in Language | Comments Off
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
First, take this fun quiz.
And then ...
Posted in Language, Search technology, Whim | Comments Off
Monday, June 30th, 2008
This might not be worth a post, but anyway:
Arnold Zwicky has a post at Language Log on "home" vs. "house" in (American) English, citing (among other things) the commentators in the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage saying:
A final note on home ownership: MWDEU reports that "a number of commentators have ...
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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Many of us are familiar with the commercial in which the question is asked, "How do you spell 'relief'?" And the answer is "R-O-L-A-I-D-S." According to Wikipedia, this commercial has been around since the 1970's.
I came across an earlier example from 1793, in Elder John Leland's "The ...
Posted in Language, Whim | Comments Off
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
(Ireny isn't a word, but it should be)
I've been lurking on a discussion list, which will go unnamed. Mr ALLCAPS said that everyone in group X is either a Y or a Z. Mr. Irenic suggested that there might be a third category. Mr. ALLCAPS accused Mr. Irenic of being ...
Posted in Language | Comments Off
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
America the Beautiful has interesting linguistic properties. In particular, it uses verbs in the subjunctive mood, which is quite unusual in modern English, except in fixed expressions (such as "God forbid."). The subjunctive is usually used to describe a condition that doesn't exist, or a condition that one wishes to ...
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Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
For the few who might be interested: OpenDMAP: An open source, ontology-driven concept analysis engine, with applications to capturing knowledge regarding protein transport, protein interactions and cell-type-specific gene expression (PDF).
OpenDMAP advances the performance standards for extracting protein-protein interaction predications from the full texts of biomedical research articles. Furthermore, this ...
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Language, Science and Tech | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
From 'In pursuit of the G-d shot':
Millions of people probably get great coffee every morning with a standard home machine and ground coffee from a supermarket. I was starting to worry that, with a process that has as many variables as pulling an espresso, once you're daft enough to go ...
Posted in Language, Whim | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
Great quote from Geoff Pullum at Language Log:
You know, just between you and me, I sometimes worry that there is a naive view loose out there — most students come to linguistics believing it, and there appear to be some professional linguists who regard it as central and explanatory — ...
Posted in Language | 2 Comments »
Monday, October 29th, 2007
This cross-legg'd cabbage-eating son of a cucumber!
(Sir J. Jollup in Hone Every-day Book 2, from the OED entry for cucumber.)
Posted in Language, Whim | Comments Off
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Google is now using their internal translation software for all language pairs, and my very, very brief look at their results look good. This is very idiomatic, for example:
I was amused by calculating the number of video tags football (soccer) and rugby on Dailymotion (English pages). No doubt, soccer is ...
Posted in Language, Science and Tech, Search technology | 3 Comments »
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Acccording to the AHD:
Desultory suggests a shifting about from one thing to another that reflects a lack of method: a desultory conversation.
Pronounced: deSULtory. This is one of those words I thought I knew, but I didn't when I actually looked it up. It's a good word to describe this ...
Posted in Language, Whim | 2 Comments »
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
Search on the web for "as simple as possible, but no simpler" and the web will tell you that Albert Einstein said this. Einstein said a lot of things, and a lot of things are attributed to him; knowing whether he, in fact, said a particular pithy quote is a ...
Posted in Language, Science and Tech | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
There must be an antonym for 'hype.' To hype something is to engage in hyperbole about it: Apple products have generated their share of hype. (For example: Steve Jobs said, "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.") I don't mean 'anti-hype' ...
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Language, Politics and News, Search technology | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
Here's a QA with the primary gatekeeper to the New Yorker cartoon caption contest:
Q. Did your predecessor or Bob give you any advice when looking through the responses?
A. My predecessor stared me in the eyes and warned me that reading too many captions in one sitting could make a man ...
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Books, Literature, the Arts, Language | 2 Comments »