It's getting to be pretty hard to keep with the language-related blogosphere. Looking quickly through recent posts at the sites on our blogroll...
At Anggarrgoon, Claire Bowern has a post on word for deceased relatives in Bardi:
loomiyoon baawa (child who has lost a parent, = orphan; cf loomi baawa, neglected child)
gambaj(oo) (mother who has lost a child, now used as a swear word by Bardi men who don't know its original meaning)
algooyarr (father who's lost a child)
jilarr (man who has lost a brother, sister or cousin)
miiraj (woman who's lost a brother or sister)
galgarr (widow or widower)
At The Audhumlan Conspiracy, Ryan Gabbro writes about a Microsoft project to infer "sentiment" from text. For some reason, "If you know, to use an example he gives, whether or not your feedback contains an adverb followed by a pronoun followed by a preposition, you can classify it slightly more accurately". Ryan thinks that's "kinda neat", but I got stuck trying to think of some sentences with that sequence of parts of speech.
At bLing Blog, Marc Ettlinger tries to figure out the difference between East and West. I'm not sure quite what he means by the "disproportionate ratio of fervor to affect", though. Does he mean that West Coast vs. East Coast linguists -- Geoff Pullum and me, for instance -- relate with a lot of fervor but disproportionately little affect? or a lot of affect but disproportionately little fervor?
At Blogalization, blogalvillager re-blogs the old "Korean tongue surgery" (non-) story. This time the source is a story in the Scotsman, from Oct. 18, 2003 edition, which in turn seems to have been a reprint of a story that went on on Oct. 17 on the Reuters wire, which I discussed here and here , and which was already discussed on blogalization last April, as I discussed here. I'm not quite sure why this has popped up again -- perhaps the Blogalization poster did a search on the Scotsman's site and didn't notice that the story was a year old?
At Blogos, Andrew discusses a plan to use machine translation at the European Patent Office, and quotes a member of the European Parliament as saying that "the average cost of a patent is about € 30,000, much higher than in the United States, and that is because 40% of those costs are taken up by language problems – the translation costs – and we are trying to get to grips with that problem.”
C. Callosum has an interesting post on ventriloquism.
At Carob (a blog), Robin posted a link to a Translation Business Practices Report from the World Bank.
At Classics in Contemporary Culture, we get a link to Tony Ortega's gossipy take on the Naughty Nabob of Nazareth.
At Close Range, Marc Moffett discusses Geoff Pullum's discussion of content clauses and complement clauses.
And there's a new (as of 9/15/2004) language-related weblog, Curves and Corners. Welcome!
That's just through the letter C; but I need to go meet some friends for dinner.
Posted by Mark Liberman at September 19, 2004 05:40 PM