A selection of language-themed links for your listening, viewing, and (mostly) reading pleasure.
How to say chorizo.
History of the asterisk.
Emoji time 🕙 is meaningless.
Bookselling in the End Times.
Neopronouns: a beginner’s guide.
New Covid-inspired German words.
The linguistic construction of terrorists.
Boyo-wulf: Beowulf translated into Cork slang.
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books, editing, language, language history, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: books, dictionaries, etymology, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, usage, words | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
A fresh batch of linguistic items for your listening, viewing, and reading (lots of reading) pleasure. There are a few new language podcasts on the scene, but I’ll save those for a separate post.
On gibberish.
The etymology of Triscuit.
On capitalizing Black and White.
Free ebook: Making Sense of “Bad English”.
A brief history of strange English street names.
The social value of linguistic creativity in a pandemic.
2 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: accents, dialect, language, language change, language history, linguistics, links, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Language links ahoy. If you’re looking to pass an hour or a few with some linguistic reading and audiovisual material, see what takes your fancy from the selection below (there are lots more after the fold). A couple of them are even about you know what.
Forest dialect words.
Viral language and racism.
What counts as a slur, and why?
The Iron Curtain lives on as an isogloss.
Newly published: the Mother Jones style guide.
Science Diction: a new, bite-sized etymology podcast.
Irish English as the new EU working language [my annotations]
Emoji are to digital messages what gestures are to speech.
Solving the mystery of honeybee dance ‘dialects’.
When translation means editing the machines.
The newly launched Opie Archive.
12 Comments | language, linguistics, link love | Tagged: dialect, emoji, language, language podcasts, lexicography, linguistics, links, podcasts, translation | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
For your reading (and listening and viewing) pleasure, a selection of items on language and linguistics that caught my eye (and my ear) in recent weeks:
Endangered alphabets.
How children use emoji.
The rise of ‘accent softening’.
Settling a grammar dispute (or not).
Finding room for unnameable things.
En Clair: a podcast on forensic linguistics.
The z in Boyz n the Hood as a key cultural signifier.
Macmillan’s unique Thesaurus now has its own website.
How bite configuration changed human speech (Discussion).
A brief visual history of British and Irish languages.
Leave a Comment » | language, linguistics, link love | Tagged: dialect, dictionaries, language, language change, language history, linguistics, links, slang, translation, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Happy new year to readers and visitors of Sentence first (which, I just noticed, turned ten last year). If you’re into language or linguistics, you should find a few things to interest you below. Don’t eat them all at once.
Why was writing invented?
Why do we call it a paperback?
Black English and who gets to use it.
The emotional portmanteau pentagram.
Morph: a blog about languages and how they change.
Tweetolectology: exploring language change via social media.
Using machines to understand ancient languages.
13 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, slang, sociolinguistics, translation, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
It’s past time for a linkfest, so here’s a selection of items from the world of language and linguistics that caught my eye in recent months.
Normally I include some audio material, but I’ll save that for a post on podcasts in the hopefully-not-too-distant future. In the meantime, happy reading.
Word aversion.
White emoji, black skin.
Losing your native language.
Icelandic: a lively linguistic fossil.
The globe-trotting history of golazo.
Irish English for the non-Irish (PDF).
Saving Stephen Hawking’s synthetic voice.
How grammar superstitions can unravel good writing.
How the Brothers Grimm changed historical linguistics.
Something interesting is happening to exclamation marks!
6 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: dialect, etymology, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
For your reading, listening, and viewing pleasure, here are some language-related links that have caught my eye in recent weeks, or rather months – it has been ages since I did a linkfest.
If you want a more regular supply, follow my Twitter account @StanCarey, where I often share these first.
Why writing matters.
EU English after Brexit.
Stealth marketing for editors.
The drit, or dirt, on metathesis.
Clotilde Olyff’s pebble alphabet.
Towards a new vocabulary of nature.
Emily Wilson’s radical Odyssey translation.
Editing can make all the difference to a book.
Why white people should never rap the n-word.
How Irish nature words connect us to history and place.
How the suffix -tron captured the spirit of a technological age.
What happens in the brain when an adult learns to read.
9 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: dictionaries, editing, language, language history, linguistics, links, research, science, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
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