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Meta
Category Archives: language
hypercorrection implies correction
Most of us English-speakers were told as children that it’s wrong to say me and him went to the park, and we should instead say he and I. And many of us grow up extending the lesson to where it … Continue reading
umbra Saturni
the view from Saturn’s shadow My latest finding of “dictionary translation”, at a pet store: ONE-STORY CAT CAVE UNE CAVERNE À CHATS D’HISTOIRE I’d make it caverne à chats à une étage. Funny that I missed this three years ago … Continue reading
divided by two common languages
Me: “Hamachi sashimi.” Cashier: “It depends on what kind of fish, sir.”
Posted in food, language
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one, um . . .
Number Systems of the World: lists of number-words from 0 to 100, ranked, somewhat arbitrarily, by “complexity”. (Cited by LanguageHat.) To me the most remarkable is Alamblak (#7) whose number-words are all compounded from the words for 1, 2, 5 … Continue reading
Posted in language
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how’s your German?
I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes … Continue reading
Posted in language, mathematics, neep-neep
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pun history
There are scholars of slang who hunt for earliest documentable uses. Does anyone do the same for puns? In 1971, Larry Niven and David Gerrold published a novel The Flying Sorcerors. Recently for the first time I found that pun … Continue reading
Posted in language
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