Language Module

A useful thing for some (other) linguist to do would, I think, be to set up a website for cataloging bad arguments in favor of UG. I’ve just run across a beauty.
I’m writing qualifying papers this summer, some of which are about Syntax, and I thought it might be a good idea to start [...]

An actual quote from a blog about language:
The fact that “one of the only” is a common phrase, found everywhere, does not make it acceptable English.
So what, one wonders, would make anything “acceptable English” for these people? Is there any mechanism for making something “acceptable English” OTHER than the fact that it “is a [...]

Admittedly not from a linguistic source, but cool nonetheless:
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Now if only we could get Sociolinguists in the habit of repeating that to themselves with their morning coffee every day…

Mark Changizi is something of a sensation after his recent SciAm appearances, so I picked up one of his papers - the one about economical hierarchy organization in dictionaries.
This is a really interesting bit of work - one of those “why didn’t anyone consider this before?” kinds of things. Of course, people have thought [...]

Well this was inevitable, I suppose. Estonia is throwing a “language beauty contest,” evidently spurred by the urban myth that it once came in second to Italian in an Italian language beauty contest.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it gets first prize this time.
Honestly, what is the point of a language [...]

Ben Fry has a cool graphic illustrating some word frequency data from the Enron Email Dataset. The graphic itself isn’t very useful (Fry admits this in the caption), but it’s certainly interesting as an attempt to make you feel “inside the information,” Matrix-like.

Via Omniglot I’ve learned of a new internets resource called Forvo. It’s a pronounciation repository.
Forvo is the place where you’ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. You can also help others recording [...]

There is now a Welsh and a Scotts Gaelic corpus available for download from Language Engineering Resources for the Indigenous Minority Languages of the British Isles and Ireland Project of Lancaster University. Kewl.

LanguageHat has a post called Chechens don’t lightly curse that’s about just what it says. Chechens, apparently, take cursing very seriously - to the point that telling someone to “fuck their mother,” a common expression in Russian, is a killing (or at least a fighting) matter in Chechen. Or, so says Anatol Lieven [...]