On good dictionaries and bad 2009/10/27
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Lexicography.Tags: dictionaries, eLex
add a comment
I had the pleasure of attending the eLex (“electronic lexicography”) conference in Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium earlier this month. As someone who works a lot with lexical databases, I was in my element at an event where everybody was talking about electronic dictionaries.
One of the issues that was discussed a lot at the conference was the question, how do people actually use electronic dictionaries? There are, of course, many different kinds of electronic dictionaries including CD-ROM ones, on-line ones, and dictionaries embedded in hand-held devices. And there are quite striking differences in how people use them in different parts of the world. I already knew that hand-held dictionaries are much more popular in Asia than in Europe, but a talk given by Hilary Nesi at the conference added a great deal of detail that I didn’t know yet.
Where multilingualism doesn’t shine 2009/10/04
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Living with languages.Tags: multilingualism, numbers
5 comments
I know this is going to sound conceited but I fancy myself as a cool multilingual type who nimbly juggles three languages in his everyday life and has no difficulty expressing himself in either. But I must admit that even I seem to have areas in my brain where there’s only room for one language. Most of them have something to do with numbers.
Tales from the land where “no” means “sometimes yes” 2009/09/10
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Uncategorized.Tags: DHO, digital humanities, DRHA
2 comments
I’ve just spent a couple of days in Belfast attending the Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) conference. This is a conference for people who work in a relatively new discipline called digital humanities – which is something not many people have heard of and, I suspect, even those who have may be unsure what it actually is. So I thought this would be a good excuse to put down some of my own thoughts about digital humanities.
Bilingual website, my arse! 2009/08/28
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Living with languages, Multilingual IT.Tags: bilingual websites, website localization
add a comment
The “Irish” version of Fianna Fáil’s website. Most of the text you see is actually English.
What do the Irish Department of Finance, Ireland’s South-Eastern Regional Assembly and the Irish political party Fianna Fáil have in common? They all have bilingual websites which aren’t really bilingual. And they’re not alone, I’ve only chosen these three pretty much randomly as examples. Take a look at the Fianna Fáil website for instance. If you click on the “Gaeilge” (“Irish”) link, you are taken to what claims to be the Irish version of their website. It turns out, though, that only the menus and other boiler-plate texts are in Irish, the rest of the content remains in English.
This is nothing unusual. It is a whole new trend in Ireland now and it allows organizations to claim they have a bilingual website when really they don’t. All they have to do is a one-off translation of the text that never changes, the website’s “furniture”. But the actual content, the text that changes often and for which people may actually want to visit the website, remains in English.
“Call me if you will change your mind” 2009/08/19
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Better life through grammar.Tags: future tense, present tense
2 comments
This is a sentence I overheard in the shop this morning, spoken with what vaguely seemed like an Eastern-European accent. It sounds weird because it is ungrammatical in English. To make it good, you’d have to change the future tense “when you will change” to the present tense “when you change”. It reminded me of how often non-native speakers get their tenses wrong in English.
Linguistic relativity: fact or wishful thinking? 2009/08/16
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Living with languages.Tags: linguistic relativity, sapir-whorf
6 comments
One of the most fascinating questions in linguistics is whether and how much language influences thought. Do speakers of different languages think differently? There are some 6,000 languages in the world and they are all different from each other, sometimes in very striking ways. The question is whether these differences in language lead to any differences in thinking.
Languages always develop towards simplicity – except when they don’t 2009/08/08
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Better life through grammar.Tags: language, language complexity, language evolution
7 comments
Somebody suggested to me recently that languages always develop towards simplicity. It is not unusual for people to think that. There is a popular opinion out there that languages start out as very complex but over time the grammar and vocabulary and pronunciation and everything becomes more simple.
“The passive voice must not be used” 2009/08/05
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Better life through grammar.Tags: agency, language, newspeak, passive, passive voice
3 comments
Somebody called Marie Murray has written an opinion piece for the Irish Times in which she berates the passive voice (The passive voice is the penultimate weapon of denial, 31 July 2009). She basically says that the passive voice is bad because it lets people get away with not admitting responsibility for their actions. But while the moral side of her argument is true and laudable, the linguistics she uses to support it is, at best, shaky.
Flags as language symbols – so what is the problem? 2009/07/29
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Multilingual IT.Tags: flag, language selector, software globalization, software localization
add a comment
Flags used as symbols for languages
Anybody who’s ever visited a bilingual or multilingual website has probably noticed a little widget somewhere in the corner that allows you to switch between all the different language versions. Very often, this language selector uses flags as graphical symbols. It seems like a simple enough idea: you click on the French flag for the French version, the Polish flag for the Polish version, the Russian flag for the Russian version, and so on. It is, however, a very bad idea, at least if you listen to most of the software globalization industry’s theoreticians. There is no shortage of articles and blog posts criticizing the practice. The classic is Jukka Korpela’s “Flag as a symbol of language – stupidity or insult?” from 1997, and you don’t have to google (or is it bing these days?) very long to find other tirades in the same vein (here, here, here, here and here). This opinion has even been sanctioned officially by the W3C Working Group on Internationalization.
Europe’s speckled carpet 2009/07/17
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Living with languages.Tags: ICML, minority languages
add a comment
This is a near-translation of an earlier blog post in Irish.
Tartu University
Recently, I attended the International Conference on Minority Languages in Tartu, Estonia. This conference is held every two years but this year was my first time there. It was an occasion for people who care about minority languages to come together and network.
Broadly speaking, a language is a minority language when it is not the main language of communication in its country. There are lots of such languages, for example Catalan, Welsh, Breton and many others most people have never heard of. Many of them are languages that are strong in a neighbouring country, such as the German-speaking minority in Italy or the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. Others are on their own completely, such as Basque or Irish.
