Linguistics of the Gaelic Languages 2013: a conference report

Oh, the things I do for fun at weekends! For example last weekend, I attended the Linguistics of the Gaelic Languages conference in University College Dublin (19 – 20 April 2013). This was a small but focused event, with 20 to 30 people attending to discuss latest research on Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Here is my report.

European Data Forum 2013: a trip report

Impression from EDF2013 by LOD2project on Flickr

I’ve decided to enliven this blog a little by using it as an outlet for trip reports to conferences and other work-related events I travel to. Which is funny because my first trip report will be from a conference I didn’t have to travel to at all (unless a fifteen-minute walk from my front door counts as travelling): the European Data Forum (EDF) held in Dublin’s Croke Park Conference Centre on 9 and 10 April 2013.

This was an occasion for information professionals to meet and discuss, well, data. You might think that that sounds too vague. Surely, what can anybody have to say about data in general except that it is the stuff that computers eat? A lot, actually. In the last couple of years, something has changed about the way we understand data: what it is, how we produce it, how much of it we produce, and how we use it. I will summarize this under two broad headings: big data and open data.

The linguistic relativity of up and down

In this article, I am going to give a nice and simple example of how learning a new language causes you to start perceiving the world differently. By doing so I will provide support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (in its weak form), which is a hypothesis that claims that the language you speak predetermines, to some extent, how you think. I will demonstrate this on my favourite toy language, Irish.

English as a programming language

The first programming language I ever learned was called BASIC. This is ancient history now but back when I was a kid, BASIC was the gateway drug for any aspiring computer geek. As a programming language, BASIC was quite, well, basic – it consisted of a small number of keywords like DATA, READ, LET and PRINT (yes, you were supposed to write them in uppercase), you had to number your lines (which you were recommended to do in increments of 10 so you could insert additional lines later) and I’m not sure if it could even do loops. If it could, it probably had to be done with the GOTO command followed by a line number, which even back then had the elegance of a bucket of sludge.

In the cold embrace of false friends

One of the most bizarre experiences you can have as a language learner is when you attempt to learn a language similar to one you already know. I’ve had two such experiences lately.

Three plus one things to know about grammar

I don’t always reblog stuff from elsewhere, but when I do, it’s for a good reason. This article from Language Log (‘Reference to humans with this and that’ by Geoffrey K. Pullum) deserves to be reblogged because it neatly illustrates three interrelated points about grammar which, in my opinion, every self-respecting linguist should either agree with or be able to argue coherently against.

How to hurt people with machine translation

A story flashed through the media in Ireland recently that caught my linguistic-technological interest. The newspaper Irish Independent published an interview on 1 February 2012 with a Polish immigrant called Magda (not her real name) who is receiving unemployment benefit in Ireland – which she is perfectly entitled to on account of being an EU citizen. Magda is presented in the interview as a shameless freeloader; somebody who has come to Ireland only to claim unemployed benefits. At one stage, she is reported to describe her unemployed life in Ireland as a ‘Hawaiian massage’.

It turned out later that this interview was a mistranslation into English from an original interview in Polish published in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Nowhere in the original text does Magda describe her life in Ireland as a Hawaiian massage. What she actually says is that she has taken a course in Hawaiian massage and is planning to open a massage business. She also says that she has a problem with being unemployed, hates living at the state’s expense and wants to get out of that situation.