Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

The most interesting linguistics book I picked up last year was Trask’s Historical Linguistics, but I’ve avoided blogging about it because I planned on giving it to two of my word-nerd friends for Christmas and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Now that they safely have their copies (and both of them have really been digging it–just yesterday one of them emailed me to ask about when the palatalization of c from /k/ to /t?/ before front vowels in Latin occurred[1. According to Palmer’s The Latin Language, “no unequivocal examples before the 6th c. AD.“), I’m free to blog about it. I hope to have a substantive post on how it neatly illustrates an important point about science and scholarship some time this evening, but now to work.

Over at Tenser, said the Tensor an interesting post about Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao:

Unlike some other stories I’ve written about in which the linguistics is secondary, The Language of Pao is first and foremost about a particular idea from linguistic theory–it’s a novel-length exploration of a particularly strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (hereafter SWH), the idea that our patterns of thought are affected by the features of the language we speak.

I mean to post on this a while back, but I couldn’t find the version of this anecdote that I had seen. Now OxBlog has turned it up, in an obituary in NYT Magazine:

The most widely circulated tale — in many renditions it is even presented as a joke, not the true story that it is — was his encounter with the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin. During a talk on the philosophy of language at Columbia in the 50’s, Austin noted that while a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative. From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, ”Yeah, yeah.”

The Foreigner – Japan: So You Want To Learn Japanese.

Cruel, but funny.

Just to show what a geek I am, the laughing girl spot illo is Yukino Miyazawa from _Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou_ by Tsuda Masami.

grice’s maxims
Maxim of Quantity:

1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.

Maxim of Quality:

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Maxim of Relevance:

Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).

Maxim of Manner:

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.

via The Tensor

IPA transcription systems for English

For the Unicode deprived:

SAMPA computer readable phonetic alphabet