Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Computational Resources for Linguistic Research

Bill Poser, who posts at Language Log, maintains a page of goodies for computers and linguistics, with lots of links to freeware that runs on Unix systems. Unfortunately, I’ve pretty much abandoned Linux (gave away my spare computer that was running it to a friend in need), and I’m not sure how much of it will run on OS X. I know that at least one project to do GTK on OS X was abandoned, and another is in pre-alpha…

Alan Wood has a Unicode Resources Page with various utilities for Unicode on Mac OS X, some free, some not, but I’m not sure there’s anything exactly equivalent to the BabelMap or gucharmap utilities. The best bet may be the builtin Character Palette, though it seems to be limited in the scripts it has available (Ethiopic, for instance, is listed, but seems to be empty, but Gujarati is there). Still it’s pretty cool to be able to look up Japanese by Radical.

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

hat tip (again) to: language hat

Ah, hell, I’m getting tired of coming up with new ways of mocking the NYT’s arrogance.

languagehat is tearing his hair out over the paper of record’s refusal to consult a dictionary before offering its pronunciation advice:

I had just started the article “Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest” by Nicholas Wade in today’s NY Times when I had occasion to grind my teeth: “They believe they may have decoded the first word - a place name - to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo)…” What the hell? Is the Times too proud to actually consult a dictionary? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, for instance, which says “Pronunciation: ‘kE-(”)p{u”}” …

This looks interesting. Too bad I don’t have Microsoft Office 2003, and have no intention of getting it.

Translit - Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic Transliteration

Hate receiving emails from your friends written in Latin alphabet? Bored searching for a good translit engine? Not anymore!

Transliterating (decoding) email messages and text from English to Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and other non-Latin alphabets is now as easy as ABC!

Seriously. The OED software gives a word of the day when you start it up. Today’s word is *inconsciently*, which the OED defines as unknowningly. I’m pretty sure from the context sentences that should read unknowingly. Just in case, I looked up unknowningly, and as I expected, there wasn’t any listing for it.

OUP: The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) on CD-ROM version 3.1

The full content of the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), the three Additions volumes, and now almost 2,000 new words and phrases from the OED’s ongoing research programme.

This just arrived today, and I couldn’t be happier. Yeah, it don’t take much, do it?

Unfortunately, it’s not available for the Mac, so I had to install it on my Windows box, even though I do almost all my writing on my cute little Powerbook. I plannned for this eventuality, though, and last week I installed some remote desktop software on my Windows system so that I could control it and use my lovely new dictionary from afar. I just tested that, and it works perfectly.

Also unfortunate is that, although you can load the whole dictionary onto your hard drive (requires 1.7 gigs free), their software protection scheme requires that you reinstall the software every 90 days. That’s what it says anyway, although I’m hoping they mean you have to demonstrate that you still have the install disk every 90 days, not that you have to go through the whole installation process. I mean, granted that the Oxford University Press probably has good reason to suspect that their primary customers, mostly academics I imagine, can’t be trusted, what about us honest blokes who just happen to like a good dictionary now and then?

Update: After about the third 90-day reinstall, the damn thing just stopped working and no amount of uninstalling, scrubbing the registry, and reinstalling managed to fix it.  I do not recommend this product, not matter how nifty it would be if it worked.

Blinger left this in a comment, but I thought it deserved an entry. He has changed his blog and is now EFL Geek: ESL & EFL in Korea. I’ve updated the blogroll appropriately.

The English-to-American Dictionary

Somebody with some time on their¹ hands and access to the online OED could probably have some fun sorting out the folk etymology from the real here, since the authors usual reference is “somebody wrote in and told me this.”

hat-tip: Oxblog

Language Log: “Ho ho ho”, she laughed in a refined feminine way:

In Japanese manga, (according to the first link above), “masculine laughter” is “ha ha ha” or “ahahaha”, whereas “refined feminine laughter” is “ho ho ho”. This seems to be the opposite phonetic direction from English, where stereotypically feminine laughter is usually represented as something like “teeheehee”, and “ho ho ho” is what Santa Claus does. In manga, apparently “a strange laugh” is “hu hu hu” or “fu fu fu”. This would be strange in English as well, too strange to use, I think. The English convention for diabolical laughter is more like “bwahaha”.

It’s a convention, I think, but not just a manga convention. Liberman’s right that it seems to be a phonetic difference–the actual sounds are different and not just the representation. If you watch anime, for instance, the refined female characters really do laugh in a particular way, with a high-pitched /ou/ sound and a very light /h/ (they also typically cover their mouths with the back of one hand while doing this) and “hohoho” is probably how any American who heard it would transcribe it. Kodachi Kuno from Ranma 1/2 is famous for this, and I have at least one female friend who can do a quite passable imitation. I have no idea whether any Japanese women actually laugh spontaneously like this, or whether it’s a theatrical affectation like the English villanous mwa-ha-ha while rubbing the hands or twirling the ends of the moustache. The huhuhu laugh¹ is also a pretty straightforward way of writing the sound that is made. It’s diabolical laughter, but of a particular kind, generally indicating that the laugher is perverse or wicked. An Iago might laugh that way (or the mysterious priest Xellos, from Slayers) A mad scientist or other full-bore maniac would be more likely, I think, to use a mwa-ha-ha kind of laugh (spelled ba-ha-ha-ha, I would guess) while standing arms akimbo, but that may be the influence of English theatrical villain conventions.

At any rate, this seems to be quite different from, say, “cockadoodle-doo” versus “kikirikiki” where (presumably) the animal is making the same noise however the local language chooses to represent it. They really are quite different laughs, and not just different representations of the same laughs.

Read the rest of the post…there are some very interesting links.

Wormtalk and Slugspeak has announced a new version of his King Alfred’s Grammar, that eliminates the need for a special font download for letters like ð and þ