How many languages can you identify from 20-second audio samples? Play the Great Language Game and find out. The game is multiple choice; selecting between two samples—say, Hindi vs. Italian—is relatively easy, but just wait till you get to the Bosnian-Serbian-Maltese-Estonian matchup.
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“Italian doesn’t have a y in native words but has no problem with the ones from English, as with Milan’s CityLife.” – Linguist Will Leben on how names and words cross borders.
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“Is the best Chinese translation for an English word a transliteration that is 100% faithful to the original?” A bilingual naming expert analyzes the Bing case study.
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Renaming the Ghetto Tracker app doesn’t even begin to solve the problem.
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Which is the name of the Burning Man camp and which is the name of a company in the S&P 1500? A scholarly (really!) comparison by Tyler Schnoebelen, a Stanford PhD and data scientist at Idibon.
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An alphabetical tour of the best libfixes, from -ana to –zilla, with stops at -kini, -licious, and -nomics, compiled and annotated by Neil Whitman.
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“Business-speak, with its heartless euphemisms and empty stock phrases, is the jargon that everyone loves to hate,” writes Joshua J. Friedman* in the Boston Globe. But hold on: It turns out that expressions like “low-hanging fruit,” “impactful,” and “at the end of the day” are “as common in sports, politics, social science, and other spheres as they are in business.” For more on the research behind Friedman’s story, see this Mark Liberman post about “impactful” and this one on “moving forward,” “low-hanging fruit,” and “at the end of the day,” both on Language Log.
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“Terminology-wise, I find it interesting that we never had cyber-phones. The mobile/cellular phone became the cell and then evolved into the smart phone, not the cyber-phone.” – On the bizarre evolution of “cyber,” from sex to security to war. (Via Wordnik.)
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A taxonomy of rules and non-rules for writers, by the estimable copy editor and journalism professor John McIntyre.
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Never mind the Eskimos: How many words do the Scots have for snow?
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From Bryan A. Garner, editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary and author of the indispensable Garner’s Modern American Usage, comes a challenging vocabulary quiz. It’s aimed at lawyers, but all 20 words are ones a well-read layperson should know. (To answer your question: I scored 19/20. And I’m not going to tell you which word tripped me up.)
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I’m betting on “red line” making it to the finals of the 2013 Word of the Year vote. Here’s a rundown of where the phrase comes from, what it signifies, and why it’s so popular in political discourse.
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I linked to the UK creative agency Asbury & Asbury earlier this month, in my post about Yahoo’s new logo. But I can’t resist sharing a couple more links to the clever work of this unusual team: Hall of Unwanted Dotcoms (“a list of 20 unclaimed addresses, all fewer than seven letters, one syllable and easy to pronounce”) and Corpoetics (“a collection of ‘found’ poetry from the websites of well-known brands and corporations”).
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* As it happens, I have a relative named Joshua J. Friedman, but he isn’t this reporter.
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