Link love: language (70)

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.

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Link love: language (69)

As usual I’ve left it late to do a linkfest, so I have a bumper crop of 50 language links for you this month. There are more podcasts than usual, so you can spare your eyes and treat your ears between reads.

54 Irish curses.

Slang family trees.

The tragedy of Google Books.

Interactive speech synthesiser.

How etymology can help your spelling.

Podcasts about language and linguistics.

The thing is is that ‘is is’ is surprisingly common.

Free e-book (PDF): Applied Sociolinguistics (1984), ed. Peter Trudgill.

Language use and names in classical Rome (podcast).

‘Good grammar’ comes from privilege, not virtue.

Samtaims ai vonder if inglis spiiking piipöl…

Language and feral children (podcast).

Link love: language (68)

Before the year runs away from me – it’s about to sprint out of sight – I want to catch up here on the links I’ve been gathering (and in some cases tweeting) over the last few weeks. It’s the usual mix of articles, posts, podcasts, and pictures, all of a linguistic theme. Click at will.

Pseudo-anglicisms.

‘This is not your language.’

The etymology of slang – finally.

The art of editing (podcast, 39 min.).

The race to save Hawaii Sign Language.

What whistled speech tells us about the brain.

People with no language (hat tip to John Cowan).

Mr Slang – of GDoS fame – now has a podcast.

Link love: language (67)

A selection of items and bite ’ems of linguistic interest found around the internet in recent weeks. Some are short, some long; all are good, or at any rate interesting. Three are from The Toast, because it’s toast <sniff>.

Nifty is a nifty word.

The birth of a book cover.

The linguistics of Black Lives Matter.

On the use – and overuse – of the dash.

How a modern multilingual army works.

Nicknames and gender in medieval England.

Mom and dad as new internet slang.

A short history of swearing.

Emoji aren’t a language – they’re more like gesture.

What what3words (now official in Mongolia) tells us about words.

Link love: language (66)

I haven’t done language links in a while, so I’ll share this set before it grows to an even more unwieldy size. The series is a sample of the links I share more regularly on Twitter, plus a few I haven’t. Happy reading.

Upside-down N.

A typeface made of trees.

How to make text look futuristic.

The language faculty that wasn’t.

The case for Black over African American.

A book known to the world only in translation.

Why does Britain have such bizarre place names?

Nouns that become verbs act as vivid linguistic shortcuts.

Gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.

We don’t just see the world differently – we hear it differently too.

Link love: language (65)

It’s almost two months since my last batch of language links: definitely time for another. It’s a smaller pile than usual, and some of them are short. But if you’re still pressed for time, think of it as a lucky dip.

Ootland.

Drownded.

The Water Glossary.

The early history of Ms.

A guide to air punctuation.

Profanity as Weltanschauung.

The rise of non-binary pronouns.

The rules of totesing are totes intch.

Inside the minds of real-time translators.

Where did the Australian accent really come from?

What’s the difference between language and dialect?

The internet is legible to speakers of just a few languages.

There’s a village in Bali where everyone knows sign language.

Seamus Heaney on his early sense of ‘verbal music’.

What do we visualise when we read fiction?

MRI scanner video of a woman singing.

Dictionaries and how we use them.

Of Mice and Men, a found poem.

A bad year for blasphemers.

Pronouncing Diplodocus.

The revival of smeuse.

And cheeseling.

Beware of writing tics.

Shakespeare Confidential.

Why do we say Once upon a time?

Wherefore pleaseth archaic English?

Journal of Language Evolution – a new publication.

How far back in time can we find evidence of deafness?

On the sociolinguistic significance of Martin Luther King Jr.

Murder in 1876 over the pronunciation of Newfoundland.

Irish isn’t ‘compromised’ – it just needs more support.

Monco – a useful new language corpus.

Why designers love the ampersand.

Back to prep(osition) school.

Star Wars style guide.

The smell of Latin.

Compassion fade.

Of Oz the Wizard – The Wizard of Oz in alphabetical order:

Older language links here.

Link love: language (64)

A recurring series asks, ‘Will you still read me, will you still tweet me, when I’m sixty-four?’ I hope at least that you find a few items of interest in this batch of language-related links from recent weeks.

The story of Ogham.

On holding one’s head.

Oliver Sacks and the OED.

A 17thC irony mark, revived.

A short guide to Hindi profanity.

On the use of mate in Australian English.

A survey of spoken Irish in the Aran Islands.

Who were the first people ever recorded in writing?

Finding new language for ‘unmanned’ space missions.