m. c. de marco

At Language Log: Mark Liberman contemplates the question, Is irony universal? The answer: if it’s in Pirahã, it must be everywhere.

The SFWA blog begins a series on how linguistics can help you by Juliette Wade with how articulatory phonetics can help you:

I had an alien with a long muzzle and tongue, so I decided that there were a lot of different kinds of “l” and “r” sounds in this language.

Via the Double-Tongued Dictionary: Lexicographer Grant Barrett contemplates children’s nursery rhymes. Here, for example, is the truth about the Three Little Pigs:

I do recall most of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. There are three pigs, and a wolf who is trying to get inside their houses, and in response to his demands, the pigs say the memorable phrase, “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.”

Language Log has a funny grammar police video up.

Via Language Log: a Guardian story about former missionary Daniel Everett’s life-changing study of Pirahã, which cost him two faiths and a marriage:

“It’s wrong to try and convert tribal societies,” he says.

I was checking for updates to WordNet, a thesaurus program that I use, when I found a similar tool on-line: Wordage. There’s no explicit information there about the dictionaries behind the Wordage interface, but I suspect WordNet was involved. Wordage looks very handy, especially compared to the current state of WordNet usability.

WordNet is now at version 3.0 and has a rudimentary web interface. Matters are not so promising if you want to download the dictionary for offline use.

I’ve been working on my constructed language recently, so it’s about time to post this link from the livejournal conlangs community. But for a better list of references I recommend wikipedia, especially Essays on Language Design.