Why we need more linguistics in schools 2010/02/02
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Better life through grammar.Tags: conversational maxims
2 comments
The art of advertising is, at least to some extent, the art of deception, and language is the tool of that deception. Let me illustrate that with this label I found on the back of a cider bottle I bought recently. It says:
The traditional type of cider press was called a rack & cloth press. This was used to crush the pomace and extract the apple juices. These cider juices were then left to ferment in their own wild yeast.
An ordinary Joe Public will probably think ‘ah that’s nice’ and enjoy his cider in the knowledge that what he’s drinking has been made in the good old traditional way. A linguist, however, will ask: why is this worded in the past tense? Surely, if they did actually make the cider in this way, they would have worded it in the present tense? So what, then, is the purpose of the past tense here? (more…)
Why Wikipedia works but Wiktionary doesn’t 2009/11/14
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Lexicography.Tags: wiktionary
3 comments
It’s a truism to say that Wikipedia has been a resounding success. Not only does it have a large community of contributors but it also has an even larger community of readers: people who actually go to Wikipedia to get information. Wiktionary, on the other hand, has been more of an “unmitigated failure”, in the words of the lexicographer Patrick Hanks that I’ve overheard at the eLex conference in Belgium this October. Sure, Wiktionary does have an active contributor community, like Wikipedia does. But it has not achieved the status of the “go-to place” for lexical information, like Wikipedia has for factual information. It seems to me that, by and large, people don’t actually go to Wiktionary to find out about the meanings, usage and translations of words. People tend to prefer proprietary dictionaries (some of which are also available online for free). The question is, why?
On good dictionaries and bad 2009/10/27
Posted by Michal Boleslav Měchura in Lexicography.Tags: dictionaries, eLex
2 comments
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
6 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.
