Category Archives: language

language is bluffing

Posted on Monday, 2004 August 09 by Anton

One David Mortensen observes: . . . language is a code employed only by code-breakers: that none of us knows the language we speak as a fully explicit system. Instead, we bluff our way through, filling in the gaps in our knowledge … Continue reading →

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inochi mijikashi

Posted on Friday, 2004 August 06 by Anton

LanguageHat tells of seeing Kurosawa’s 生きる Ikiru (1952) for the first time, and provides the words of the song “Life is Short”.

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if it vents like a duct . . .

Posted on Thursday, 2004 August 05 by Anton

The truth about duck tape? (Languagehat)

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a kind of sprachbund

Posted on Saturday, 2004 July 03 by Anton

Wikipedia tells more than you might imagine asking about the heavy metal umlaut. (Cited by Desbladet in a comment on John Holbo‘s blog.)

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foo

Posted on Tuesday, 2004 June 08 by Anton

Bad advice, running around loose. In utterly unrelated news: This week I shared an office with someone who sounds to me as if she’s from some unfamiliar part of Australia but is in fact from Derby. Learn something every day.

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should be better than the crowd

Posted on Saturday, 2004 May 29 by Anton

Michael Quinion of World Wide Words has a book out.

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and more to come

Posted on Friday, 2004 May 28 by Anton

Brian Micklethwait took a mess of pictures of the EU complex in Brussels. One that caught my eye shows the words “European Parliament” in eleven languages, leading me to ask myself what rule decided the sequence. It appears to be … Continue reading →

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