Link love: language (61)

It’s a couple of months since I did a language linkfest, so before it gets out of hand again here’s a selection of linguistic and word-related items I’ve enjoyed over the last while.

A dictionary of hip-hop slang.

On the history and pragmatics of ping.

The future will see fewer, and simpler, languages. (Or will it?)

The global language network.

Spelling reformers get the wrong end of the stick.

Geniorum octopodes? A pedantic guide to borrowed inflections.

The Ling Space: videos introducing linguistic topics.

How old is the nickname Mike?

Using strikethrough for communication.

Celebrating the survival of aboriginal languages.

26 language writers on their favourite portmanteau words.

What are the best things to use as a bookmark?

Bae is an adjective and a verb now.

Did Celtic languages influence English grammar?

How the language of TV shows sheds light on their structure.

If you need another reason not to listen to Nevile Gwynne.

How and why does the English language change?

The language of convenience stores.

Not all likes are alike.

A short history of the pilcrow (¶).

A short history of the octothorpe (#).

Feminism and the language of football.

13 words of the year from other countries.

Research suggests bilingualism reduces essentialist beliefs.

Authors protest the omission of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Signalling the intent to signal.

For crying in the sink, let’s euphemize!

Hawaiian pidgin word hapa (half-white, half-Asian) has ameliorated.

Why did people start peeving about “book entitled”?

Behind the scenes at Merriam-Webster.

Bringing Webster’s unabridged dictionary to market in 1864.

Wine words and their history in Australian English.

The case for dropping the term pathogen.

The hidden language of ~the tilde~.

Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious.

Hashtagification.

Men, women, and language:

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Want more? See the language links archive for 60 prior installments.

Link love: language (60)

It’s been almost three months since the last collection of language links: definitely time for another. There are lots, so get comfy and don’t read them all at once.

The Historical Thesaurus of English is now online. Bookmark this one.

A lovely language family tree.

The outstanding Psycho Babble blog winds down.

How to draw syntax trees.

16thC manuscript of very ornamental calligraphy.

Family communication.

Bats jam each other’s sonar.

The improbable muses of 18thC poets.

To Siri, with love. From the mother of an autistic boy.

Ireland’s Book Show meets Clive James.

The rapid evolution of emoji.

Begging the question of acceptability.

Language features that English could do with.

The role of language in the Hong Kong protest movement.

Korean is diverging into two languages.

Get one’s goat is an etymological mystery.

Linguists’ thoughts on vape.

The purposes of language.

An antidote to terrible grammar quizzes.

A comparative library of Beowulf translations.

Search word use and trends in thousands of films and TV shows.

What happens in the brains of simultaneous interpreters.

Why we have so many terms for ‘people of colour.’

Inversion and fronting in English syntax.

Nigga? Please.

The history of the chapter.

In praise of mechanical pencils.

Notes on translation.

US/UK English ‘untranslatables’.

The dangerously dull language of TTIP.

On accent diversity in the UK, and the status of RP.

How prehistory  – the idea and the word – developed.

Swedish Sans, a new national typeface.

The history of football’s rabona.

11 facts about the umlaut.

An interview with Steven Pinker on style.

The art of theatre captioning.

The internet is no barometer of illiteracy.

Words for book around the world.

Chirping, popping, humming, blaring. The sounds fish make.

A linguist decodes restaurant menus.

Affirming the origins of yes.

A brief history of typeface naming.

Language is fundamentally communal.

The languages shaping the world’s economy.

A new database of Saints in Scottish Place-Names.

Language use is gloriously complex, not gloriously simple.

The acronyms that aren’t.

How -isms became -phobias. On the framing of oppression.

A history of women changing their names, or not, in marriage.

What’s wrong with ‘America’s Ugliest Accent’.

The secret life of passwords.

The etymology of allergy and related words.

Research suggests the sleeping brain can understand words.

A brief bibliography of -ass as a colloquial intensifier.

Slang often has old and venerable roots.

How English became the language of science.

A new living dictionary for British Sign Language (BSL).

Finally, a short animated video on language evolution:

Want more? I’ll try not to wait so long till the next batch. In the meantime, you can always browse the language links archive at Sentence first.

Link love: language (59)

Link love is back! I took a break from this regular feature a year ago, for reasons, but never intended that break to be permanent. So here’s a selection of language-related articles and other material that caught my eye over the last while. It’s a bumper crop.

10 words that are badly broken.

How do you rhyme in a sign language?

What to say to peevers.

Podcast on accent diversity and prejudice (22 min.).

How do our brains treat metaphors and idioms?

Sending text messages in calligraphy.

When nouns verb oddly.

Ammosexual.

The defensive/impatient use of Look.

What were medieval scriptoria really like?

Timeline of 870 madness-related slang terms.

De-extinction: when words come back from the dead.

Who can save Ayapaneco?

The fevered art of book blurbing.

Google’s global ‘font family‘.

On loanwords and the Dictionary of Untranslatables.

The strange hidden logic (not hidden strange logic) of adjective order.

For a president today, talkin’ down is speaking American.

Unpacking America and Americans.

The origins of bum’s rush.

The problem of socialised male speech dominance.

Graphing the frequency of English letters and their position in words.

A good podcast on linguistic relativity.

On the birth of italics.

Crowdsourcing linguistic explanations.

Stand-up comedy in a second language.

Samuel Beckett and the voices in our minds.

Comparing the language of climate change in Germany and the US.

10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s OK to break.

The bodacious language of Bill & Ted.

Microaggressions in metacommunication.

Lovecraft and the art of describing the indescribable.

Why a painting in the White House has a deliberate spelling error.

How slang wilding was used to uphold a narrative of race and crime.

:) vs. :-) – Stylistic variation in Twitter emoticons (PDF).

Is erk related to oik?

Learning the language of love, 1777.

Interesting interview with Games of Thrones’ resident conlanger.

Also, GoT is more linguistically sophisticated than you might think.

Against editors? Make that For writers.

What goes in a dictionary when the dictionary is online?

A list of words coined (or notably used) by Edgar Allan Poe.

Recreating silent-film typography.

How to market a dictionary, 1970s-style.

That will do for now. If you’ve the appetite and time for more, you can browse the language links archive, or visit some blogs and sites linked in the sidebar – they’re all good. You can also follow me on Twitter – on the days I’m there I usually post a few links, among other things.

One last thing, lest it get lost in a list of ling-lust: the Speculative Grammarian book, which I reviewed positively last year as a feast of satirical linguistics, is now available as a PDF for $5.95 – or $4.95 for Sentence first readers.

Link love: language (58)

A quick roundup of links on language, words, and linguistics in the news and around the web over the last few weeks (plus one or two from the archives):

The linguistics of ventriloquism.

Exclamation marks in graphic design.

Linguistic maps of the world, 1741.

A monumental curse.

The importance of paragraphs.

Is this what Proto-Indo-European sounded like?

Cute little Cholera Plague: the worst baby names in history.

Ironic dictionary of literary terms.

Rickrolling in Klingon.

Jigsaw family.

A tip-top primer on reduplication.

Joseph Stalin’s passion for editing.

A lingua-licious tour of libfixes.

On anchor(man) vs. news reader.

Do marmosets take turns to communicate?

[Update: more on marmoset conversation from Margaret Wilson.]

Is it wrong to put two spaces after a full stop? (My thoughts on this.)

Dog fooding, yak shaving: hacker terms for Ada Lovelace Day.

How old is TGIF?

The rise of the text tattoo.

On criticising “poor grammar”.

A hithertofore unrecognised neologism.

Words through which the root curr- courses.

How early modern English grammar differs from today’s.

Why dictionaries define words everyone supposedly knows.

Holy Sh*t and the history of swearing (book review).

The Seeing Speech phonetics project.

Are poisonous and venomous mutually distinct?

BuzzFeed and Duolingo are crowdsourcing translation.

The Chicago Manual of Style chats with Ben Zimmer.

Accent discrimination in the UK.

Linguistic ruin? LOL! A study of teens’ instant messaging language (PDF).

The poetics of babytalk (PDF).

Are Elvish, Klingon, Na’vi and Dothraki real languages?

[language links archive]

Link love: language (57)

Here’s my pick of language links from the past few weeks. I’m overdue, so this is a bigger batch than usual. Some I’ve already tweeted. Enjoy!

A silent alphabet.

When books were shelved backwards.

Synaesthetic map of London Underground.

Poetry is not a hiding place.

Dictionaries are not gatekeepers.

The evolution of English spelling (audio).

Practical uses for books.

Jonathon Green’s slang timelines.

The dame of dictionaries.

Lesser-known back-formations.

Test your ear for foreign languages.

On the lexicon of Irish begrudgery.

Blatant and flagrant converge in meaning.

Good sense on grammar and grading.

Kevin Rudd’s hand gestures.

Is that a mild hybrid or a hybrid hybrid?

See the wood/woods/forest for the trees.

What makes English (or any language) hard to learn?

How to be a reasonable prescriptivist.

A basic emotional lexicon of Yolŋu-matha.

How would you kill the n-word?

Spurious correlations between language and culture.

So you know a linguist…

Celebrity non-English tattoos.

The obscure etymology of askance.

Did Burroughs and Kerouac really fight over the Oxford comma?

Surnames of occupation.

Using full stops (or not) on Twitter.

Benjamin Franklin sanctioned spelling wife as yf.

How do youse spell it?

The Lexicon Valley podcast is now a blog.

Where does warm the cockles of your heart come from?

A field guide to uncommon punctuation.

Language can affect the sensitivity of visual perception.

So we use sentence-initial So as a tool for managing conversation.

The typewriters authors used.

Figurative is my middle name.

Animated history of typography:

[archive of language links]

Link love: language (56)

It’s been a month, more or less, since my last set of language links. Here’s the latest batch of articles and videos I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks, or unearthed from further back:

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Glossologics, a very interesting blog on languages and word history.

Auden and the OED.

Phonetic pitfalls of shm- reduplication.

Yola and Fingalian – the forgotten ancient English dialects of Ireland.

Editing The Witches for Roald Dahl.

Journalism is home to this cliché.

Test basic spelling and apostrophe use at high speed.

The world’s most beautiful miniature books.

Rachel Jeantel’s language in the Zimmerman trial.

A brief history of yippee-ki-yay.

Familects: the secret language of families.

Europe’s new vocabulary of economic pain.

Your more/less ethnic-sounding name.

Speaking of which: Padraig versus Starbucks.

How technology threatens sign languages.

Huh? Ahh!

What to do about impactful?

While bending over backwards with idioms, don’t put your foot in it.

Why do we have both a and an?

Fascinating discussion on quotation mark history.

Forensic stylometry; or, how Robert Galbraith was revealed as J.K. Rowling.

Begging the question – why all the fuss?

Confessions of a recovering pedant.

Perthshire Cant – a secret Scottish language heading for extinction.

Digitising Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.

7 theories on the origin of dongle.

Musical training and second language acquisition (podcast).

Joseph O’Connor, like, likes like:

US accents: where and why?

[archived language links]

Link love: language (55)

The number of subscribers to Sentence first has doubled in the last few months. If you’re new here, welcome, and if you’re a veteran reader, thanks for your endurance. The blog placed respectably in bab.la’s recent poll/competition of top language professionals’ blogs. Thank you to bab.la and all who took time to vote.

My Twitter page also placed well. Its focus is on language, mixed with books, chat, general and specialist links, and miscellany. If you tweet, feel free to follow or say hello. I pop in and out most days. Blog and Twitter both made bab.la’s overall list of top language lovers, which you might like to browse for a random assortment of linguaphiles.

And so to business, or rather fun: a roughly monthly set of language-related links I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks. There’s a lot here, but I try to be picky. Some I’d have blogged separately about were I not so busy editing, so hopefully they’ll make up for the relative scarcity of new posts here at the moment.

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Does grammar matter? Stop asking silly questions.

English is no longer the language of the web.

What’s wrong with the passive voice?

How emo got political.

Suffix-ception.

A homonyms quiz.

The Ogham stones of Scotland.

Not all distinctions are equally valuable.

Unsent emails from a lexicographer.

Think similar; or, the nouning of adjectives.

The coupling of speech and gesture appears to be ancient.

Are you incentivized to avoid incent?

A bleisurely look at our fondness for blends.

The secret history of cracker.

Is the Voynich Manuscript structured like written language?

Female doctor or woman doctor? How about neither?

A brief history of swearing (podcast, 25 min.).

Çapuling: the swift rise of a new word.

Medieval pet names.

In polite defence of ‘No problem’.

Where does the phrase nest egg come from?

What is an accent?

Cyber’s new life as a standalone noun.

Standard English is a continuum, not an absolute.

The new language of social media photos.

The etymology of goblin.

Shitstorm in a (German) dictionary.

Since vs. because: on clarity and made-up rules.

Light Warlpiri, a (relatively) new language in northern Australia.

Samuel Johnson’s notes on the letters of the alphabet.

Teenage hyperpolyglot: an interview with Timothy Doner (9½ min.).

Dissecting the meaning of Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

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[archive of language links]