Watch Your Language Blog

Whomever: a made-up word used to trick students

Language Log posts a clip of the whoever vs. whomever debate from last week’s episode of The Office, along with links to the serious debate that followed. (SUZANNE)


October 25, 2007

 

Don’t “throw mama from the tambien.”

It’s that time of the year; final submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film have poured in from a record number of sixty three countries, after much controversy in some cases. Of course, I’m interested in films in languages I’m familiar with, but this is also an opportunity to explore other languages I’ve always wanted to learn. (Too bad South Africa didn’t submit a film this year; I’ve been fascinated with Xhosa lately.)... More


October 23, 2007

 

Steven Pinker and the Parasitic Gaps

All of us here at Living Language are fascinated by languages, but not all of us are linguists. Most of us came here with a genuine love for the study of languages, and for teaching them to others. We do have two linguists in our midst, though, so the words “universal grammar” or “parasitic gaps” sometimes seep into our office conversation, and whenever that happens, I feel like a fish out of water. I decided long ago that I’d need to become at least an armchair linguist if I wanted to keep up.... More


October 19, 2007

 

“Wedded” Under Pressure

Two Harvard scientists predict that irregular verbs that do not take the -ed ending in the past tense are prone to “regularization”:

Lieberman and Michel’s group computed the “half-lives” of the surviving irregular verbs to predict how long they will take to regularize. The most common ones, such as “be” and “think,” have such long half-lives (38,800 years and 14,400 years, respectively) that they will effectively never become regular. Irregular verbs with lower frequencies of use — such as “shrive” and “smite,” with half-lives of 300 and 700 years, respectively — are much more likely to succumb to regularization.... More


October 17, 2007

 

To hyphenate, or not to hyphenate?

Ah, the English language, that tricky orthographic beast. Even our punctuation is troublesome. Apparently, the hyphen is losing its place in dictionaries.... More


October 11, 2007

 

But is it still legal to parse?

Apparently, the local government in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, has outlawed the use of the gerúndio because of its apparent tie to inefficiency, indicating that something is in the process of being done, but has yet to be finished. (Technically, the gerúndio is translated as the “gerund,” but its grammatical function is closer to that of the English present participle.)... More


October 9, 2007

 

Bamboozle the buffalo

Turns out, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence. This baffled me at first, but the linguists at Language Log have some explanatory paraphrases that clear things out:... More


October 4, 2007

 

Finally kids get the blame for things they do to their parents—and languages

Ideas sprout like mushrooms after the rain; one of these good ideas, that has finally generated quite a few mushrooms in the last several years, is the awareness that at least 50% (some say 90%) of the world’s 7,000 or so languages are about to die in the course of our century and the realization that we should do something to save them. Check out this recent article in the rainmaker New York Times and this much more entertaining Colbert report to get a perspective on what’s going on. Centuries are getting shorter as we speak (we keep talking about it in this office—weeks just fly by and it’s the Monday-morning editorial meeting again), so linguists have been quite busy in the last fifteen or so years getting the word out about this imminent loss to our humanity. They are also grouping together to “save” as many of those dying languages as they can, which mostly means painstaking documentation, digital archiving and description, and much more rarely, actual revitalization, which of course takes more than a digital recorder and a notebook. ... More


October 1, 2007