Link love: language (53)

To keep at bay the ever-present danger of running out of things to read on the internet, here’s a selection of language-related links I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks.

For hardboiled hacks and editors: Grammarnoir 5.

How pointing makes babies human.

Cucumber map of Europe.

Animated pop-up books.

Kán yu andastánd wot aim seiing?

A classical alphabet in rhyming form.

The genealogical etymology of scalawag.

Instead of awesome.

Fadfixes.

The psycholinguistics of CAPTCHAs.

Anzac, possie, furphy: words from Gallipoli.

Paper vs. screens: the reading brain in the digital age.

GloWbE, a new 1.9b word corpus of global web-based English.

Real rules vs. grammar myths (PDF).

Our many synonyms for death.

On newspapers’ use of illegal immigrants.

What’s the collective noun for collective nouns?

Language structure is partly determined by social structure.

Analysing elephant signals and gestures.

Copyediting principles.

Language, like immigration, is “thoroughly untidy”.

How Vesalius’s anatomical metaphors broke the mould in 1543.

Archive of the indigenous languages of Latin America.

Twitter language map of Melbourne.

Endless rewriting.

Killer Bs.

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[Archived language links]

Link love: language (52)

Time for another language linkfest. They grow quickly when I turn my back, one link giving rise to another. Anyway, it’s the usual mixum-gatherum of items relating to language, linguistics, words and books. Happy reading.

How to save wet books.

Cataloguing -og vs. -ogue.

“In love with he.”

How trustworthy are our intuitions about words?

Raising a deaf child.

Lip-reading: seeing at the speed of sound.

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”

Multilingual swearing preferences.

Silencing Irish.

Punk, brat, jerk, barbarian: the origins of 10 insults.

A vanishingly unlikely language peeve.

“My linguistics dreams are intense and vivid.”

Helllloooo, wooord lengtheningggg.

Wikipedia’s language distribution.

March forth and enjoy / 269 / Grammar Day haiku.

NBC pronunciation standards of the mid-20th century.

Dr Seuss and the OED.

On synaesthesia: “T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures.”

Manufacturing moral panic over linguistic integration.

Pronouncing skeletal.

8 new and necessary punctuation marks.

Literary graffiti from around the world.

Mammet, Muppet, and other puppetry words.

Mapping the languages used on Twitter in New York.

Word usage mirrors community structure on Twitter.

John Wallis and language invention.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.

A philosopher burns his Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Cyberlinguistics: recording the world’s vanishing voices.

A dictionary – and cultural record – of Iu-Mien.

Which is worse,, a double comma or an unclosed bracket? (such as this

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[Archived language links]

Link love: language (51)

A more-or-less-monthly roundup of links on language, grammar, usage, writing, linguistics and such things. Browse at will and click your fill.

Do animals have accents?

Irish language used in space.

Why tongue twisters are hard to say.

Digital Dütsch: the rise of Swiss German writing.

From corpus to dictionary: how lexicographers use databases.

A history of -ise vs. -ize.

If and when you say if and when.

Grammar rules and the persistence of ignorance.

Morality, dictionaries, and the Voice of Authority.

Men and women use uptalk differently.

The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks (*happy dance*).

Wet your whistle and whet your appetite.

How to write an academic introduction.

Laughter among deaf signers.

Why pick on adverbs?

The grammar of newspaper headlines.

When physicists do linguistics.

Is decimate the peeve to beat all peeves?

How not to test English language competence.

The Alphabet Man and his twig letters.

How did X and O come to represent affection?

Kick ass: a once-vulgar phrase goes mainstream.

Prepositions are not what they’re claimed to be.

Mother languages and identity in Zimbabwe.

Mapping languages in England and Wales.

Documenting Aramaic before it disappears.

On coherence in speech and its lack in academic writing.

Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password.

The man who couldn’t speak – and how he revolutionized psychology.

Take A Minute To Watch The New Way We Make Web Headlines Now.

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[language links archive]

Link love: language (50)

I suddenly notice I’ve done 50 of these. To mark the occasion, here’s a bumper set of 25 luscious language-related links. Happy browsing.

Firn, crud, sastruga: a flurry of words for snow.

Keep on the grass: a library lawn.

Punning: more than a mere linguistic fillip.

Fisher Price synaesthesia.

Why borking caught on as an eponym.

A report on the American Dialect Society’s words of the year.

(And on that subject, see Keanu Reeves.)

Words of the year in other languages.

The problems with Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

The language of lullabies.

In praise of books.

Suppletion, or, How come the past of go is went?

What’s a Z really worth? Re-evaluating Scrabble scores.

Shooting dead people in ambiguous headlines.

Adjective, participle, or gerund?

Problems with parallelism.

Poo or poop?

Silenc: visualising text without its silent letters.

Language diversity and death in New York.

Copy editors killed in style war violence.

The rebirth of Australia’s indigenous Kaurna language.

Typographic myth-busting: What’s a ligature, anyway?

On linguistic chauvinism and integration.

Teach yourself morphology.

The evolution of British Sign Language (a short, personal documentary).

[previous language linkfests]

Link love: language (49)

A new batch of language links, and (since they are roughly monthly) probably the last this year.

The origin of strop.

The anticlimactic linebreak.

How computers understand speech.

Is ranga (= red-haired person) offensive?

We listen with our hands too.

Edinburgh’s mystery book sculptor returns.

Preaching the incontrovertible (on that/which) to the unconvertible.

Youse had better get used to it.

The enormity of a usage problem.

Computers’ trouble with prepositions.

Are online dictionaries finding their ideal format?

Brain-eating zombie nouns.

Crowd-sourcing scientific terms in sign language.

The global language of procrastination.

Why do new words survive?

Hyperforeign stollen.

A brief history of taxi words.

A well-intentioned rant about hyphens.

English and Hinglish in India.

That’s so random: the evolution of an odd word.

Rare book dispenser at the Monkey’s Paw.

English is not a Scandinavian language.

The value of editing: a Twitter chat.

Replyallcalypse and other libfix tech disasters.

20 rules for writing detective stories.

The origin of language in gesture–speech unity.

The recursiveness of language linkfests.

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If you yearn for more links and cannot wait till 2013, try the archives.

Link love: language (48)

It has been one month since my last confession confection of language links. Here, then, is a bumper assortment of linguistic treats for your weekend enjoyment:

Why English is like a wayward child.

Nouning: is accepting it a big ask?

The slang of Irvine Welsh.

Why do sign language interpreters look so animated?

Conlanging for hire.

Mumbling is macho.

When can right be an adverb?

Yolngu kinship terms and pronouns.

IPA vs. respelling.

‘Tis the season to shun holiday clichés.

A pinny for your thoughts.

Dummy prepositions.

The irrelephants of style.

Formality and the T-V distinction.

How to write with a baby.

A giant wall of colourful books.

Communal toilet ambiguity.

Mesonoxian.

English words from Indian languages.

The etymology of bully.

7 ancient writing systems yet to be deciphered.

A dictionary of Ghanaian English.

Academic writing advice from Steven Pinker.

The new semiotics of punctuation.

No such thing as Scotch-Irish?

Analysing gender and speech variation on Twitter.

Is there a case for publically or economicly?

Deciphering proto-Elamite.

A new (internal) corpus of NYT usage.

The biological origin of linguistic diversity.

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[language links archive]

Link love: language (47)

It’s time – past time – for a roundup of language-related items I enjoyed over the last few weeks. So here they are:

Is malarkey Irish?

The world’s oldest message in a bottle.

“Grammar gotcha” and political speech.

Vices of modern prose (from a century ago).

Briticisms in American English.

When foreign words and native accents meet.

Linguistic advice for pseudo-Elizabethan romancers.

A short history of Wow! from 1513 to now.

Literature vs. traffic (art installation).

Why handwriting matters.

“Spudger.”

Is funner grammatical?

Dialectal differences in sign languages.

An immodest proposal to reform the English writing system.

Noah Webster’s designs for American orthography.

France ≠ twirling a moustache: how British sign language is changing.

Good debate on language rules, usage, and authority.

Mononymy: when people use just one name.

How the Beatles used and influenced the English language.

Non-singular only is not debatable.

Are some languages faster than others?

A dictionary of Demotic Egyptian has been published.

Translating Finnegans Wake into Chinese.

Booklet on the recently expired Cromarty fisher dialect of Scots (PDF).

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Note: some of these I’ve already shared on Twitter, and some that I’ve tweeted didn’t make the list. Them’s the breaks.

[lots more links]