Blog Profile / Mr. Verb
| URL : | http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Linguistics / Grammar | |
| Posts on Regator: | 887 | |
| Posts / Week: | 3.3 | |
| Archived Since: | March 17, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Immigrants learning English
Just passed on by a member of Team Verb. We have mountains of evidence that immigrants to this country are doing everything they can to learn English, and here's yet more evidence for the point:
4th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas
Had never actually been to Iceland (beyond the airport) but am here now for the 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics in Reykjavík. Amazing in every way... and the weather has been mostly better than in Madison. I can't believe...Show More Summary
DARE, safe for the moment
You've seen the news by now — anywhere from the Log to the local news —that the Dictionary of American Regional English has secured enough funding to keep going. The good news actually trickled in over a couple of weeks but it's all come together now. Show More Summary
Morphology FAIL
I was on the train today (yes, a train, here in America!) and caught sight of this billboard. It was for a car, maybe a Buick??? Well, I was so riveted by the bizarreness of the morphology that I didn't really register the product (one...Show More Summary
Good clean fun
I've been a little surprised in the past that this blog has been nominated for awards like the one below. Don't get me wrong, it's cool and all, but we aren't really about language learning. In fact, we don't fit any category I've seen on any of those contests. Show More Summary
HPSG Man, by the Dead Tongues
Wow. Via Twitter, thanks to Jason Baldridge, retweeted by the one and only Ben Zimmer.
#lingchat
It seems pretty clear that our readers are overwhelmingly on Twitter — we've been exactly as slack about getting followers on Twitter as we have about getting people to read this little corner of the web, which is to say we've done nothing...Show More Summary
I heart baseball
So glad that it's baseball season finally. Not just for the game - also for the wonderful announcers.Tonight's gem:He's gonna nonchalant a ground ball. Ahhhh. I love baseball.
The Dictionary of American Regional English needs your help. It's serious.
Here's a line you should never, ever read in the paper: Editor Joan Houston Hall said she’s issued layoff notices, effective July 1, to the staff of the respected dictionary, which includes more than 60,000 words compiled by UW-Madison researchers during the past 48 years. Show More Summary
Linguistics flowchart: What field?
This is floating around fb at the moment (yes, click to embiggen).... I saw it first on the Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft page. The poster itself is from Cascadilla, the only source a linguist needs to stay stocked with excellent posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers and gifts. Show More Summary
How dare you!
The napkin that the flight attendant handed me with my coffee on my flight to San Francisco yesterday had a Seagram's logo on it, along with this:It's good to be you. TM That's ambiguous!!! I took it the wrong way at first: I thought...Show More Summary
ConLangs make TED: Dothraki
Some folks here have been talking about David Peterson's recent TED talk on constructed languages, here. I didn't know about the Language Creation Society. More generally, TED is a kind of interesting gauge on what's popular, and I'm always curious about when they cover language/linguistics and why. To the image below, I'd just say, maybe, maybe not. HT to KW.
"Irritating nouns-as-verbs"
Henry Hitchings has a piece in the NYT this morning called "Those Irritating Nouns-as-Verbs", here. It's about stuff of the type "do you have a solve for this problem" and "let's all focus on the build" (his examples). I was all setShow More Summary
Calling multilinguals ...
Noted linguist and novelist Rosina Lippi has an intriguing request out... here. She's got this scenario: one character tells another character that there’s a list of about ten phrases he can say in fifty different languages or dialects of languages. Show More Summary
MOOCs
Things have been too quiet around here lately, but that has its place too, I guess. One of the linguistics blogs we don't call attention to often enough is Faculty of Language. They have a really good new post on MOOCs. Well, 'good' in the sense of informative and likely right. Show More Summary
Pikin' to the Dusties
I had forgotten all about Boontling - when I lived in the Bay Area it was something everyone knew about. But now it's endangered. Sigh. I guess calling it an invented "language" is slightly overstating the case - it sounds like it's just lexical substitution - but it's a lot more extensive than you'd expect, not to mention truly cool. (HT to JJ for the story.)
To produce science and to produce scientists
I have no clue whether readers of this blog know or follow Josh Schimel, who does Writing Science (and a book by the same name). He has a really nice piece here on a question that's been eating at me lately. It's not the title of the...Show More Summary
Language and immigration
The most recent round of talk about immigration reform has again brought language and immigration to the fore, and Chris Hayes has posted an important point, here (and graphic from there, from the Migration Policy Institute and you can...Show More Summary
MOOCs and Thomas Friedman's "Revolution hits the universities"
If you care about higher ed in the United States, you've probably already read and even discussed Thomas Friedman's recent op-ed in the NYT, Revolution hits the universities. If so, you need to read this piece in Inside Higher Ed by Kris Olds, a member of the UW–Madison faculty. Show More Summary
Onion Makes Strong Verb Joke!
We at Mr. Verb particularly like verb jokes, so it's nice to see the Onion (American's Finest News Source) make one. This was in the National News Highlights section, January 10, 2013:Adrian, MI - After a week of precipitation, Kelly Knoke has started using "snew" as the past tense of "snow," just to mix it up a little. Show More Summary