This morning I read the news headline MIT claims to have found a "language universal" that ties all languages together; the actual paper is "Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages" by Futrell et al in PNAS, and you can read it here. The basic point is that languages like to put words with dependencies on each other ( ( Read more... )

Because I am a big dork, I spent the hour and a half glued to my computer screen reading the liveblogs of Apple's iPad announcement. Woo, it's a big iPod touch, not that I have one of those. (My iPod is, um, in black and white.) It looks pretty, but I'm not sure I need anything in that size. It isn't as powerful as an actual computer (so it shouldn ( Read more... )

Hi. I really like stories about linguistics. So I find it very exciting that there are so many stories about Spock and Uhura and languages and linguistics. And it occurred to me (after being gently prodded by a few S/U fen) that maybe I should write up a little bit about what linguistics was, so that people who want to write stories involving it ( Read more... )

It's very hot again today. We ended up going to a movie, as the movie theater has air conditioning. (No, we didn't see Star Trek again. Pout.) We saw Un Baiser, S'il Vous Plaît, being billed in English as Shall We Kiss?. Um. Apparently the word isn't as obscene as my French teachers assured me, as it was all over the movie. (Maybe only the verb is ( Read more... )

Thanks for all the anniversary well-wishes! So I got lysimache for her birthday a textbook on comparative Germanic (Old English and Its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages) that purports to be for undergrads who know neither German nor linguistics, and I have to say, I think the author's forgotten what people who don't know German ( Read more... )

Look, another meme! It's fun!

From gblvr:

1. Choose ten 'ships, and write quotes by or about each of them.
2. Strike them out when people guess the correct 'ship.
3. Googling is cheating!(For added fun, name the languages in which I have numbered the pairings. It's mostly I-E, except when it's not. This is not, strictly speaking, a necessary part of ( Read more... )

Question: Should I spell for r-droppers or not?

Okay, so, I'm writing this story, and there's a word that is pronounced [va:d@] (the @ is a schwa; I've never figured out how to post IPA Unicode). It is the Polari word for "to look." Polari is/was almost never written, and so there's no consensus as to the spelling. The book I have lists spellings ( Read more... )

I don't understand why a large number of fan reactions to Doctor Horrible are surprised. I'm not. Seriously, people, if you call yourself a fan of Joss Whedon presumably you know the kind of things he writes. I still liked it ( Read more... )

Today the dog won Final Jeopardy again. I suppose that means I did a good job giving her animal-related answers ( Read more... )

In the car today, that Feist song came on the radio, and I commented as to how I thought a feist was a kind of dog, because I remembered the scene in the first Robin Hobb book where Fitz has to save the feist.

And, lo, dictionary.com says "Chiefly South Midland and Southern U.S. a small mongrel dog, esp. one that is ill-tempered; cur; mutt ( Read more... )