jwgh is running a little poll about the past tense of "plead": is it "plead" (pronounced and sometimes spelled "pled",) or is it "pleaded"? And is "pleaded" becoming more common?

I'm not really a linguist, but I decided to run a little experiment using the Google Books Ngram viewer. This lets you chart the frequency of particular words or combinations ( Read more... )

A couple nights ago on Le Late Late Show avec Craig Ferguson à Paris, Craig was talking to Eddie Izzard about stand-up performances. Eddie Izzard has been doing his routine entirely in French in Paris, even though he doesn't consider himself fluent in the language. Craig asked him whether this has given him a different perspective on whether a ( Read more... )

Here's a movie with Esperanto in it that I never expected to have Esperanto in it: The Road to Singapore, starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. I only caught the last 30-40 minutes, so I'm not sure what Singapore had to do with the story, since they were on a fictional South Pacific island. Apparently, Hollywood in the '30s and '40s used Esperanto ( Read more... )

Linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum is planning an anti-Strunk and White Elements of Style rally at Brown, although he's been told he's not allowed to include a book-burning. Still, it might be interesting. It's at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, April 13th. If anyone goes, it might be an interesting LJ post.

I'm curious about how well he'll do.

On the BBC website, there are some peoples attempting American accents. They're sort of passable, but with weird bits that creep in: Rs that shouldn't be there, odd stress patterns. Not as bad as, say, the American accents in early episodes of Doctor Who ( Read more... )