When Marco Polo brought the first porcelain to Europe, just how did it get its name? From Roman nursery slang, perhaps.
language
Did one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fantasy novels change the meaning of the word ‘careen’?
Want to analyse Trump’s speeches? Can I suggest a concordancer, such as one of those detailed here?
Ask Google Translate to turn the Hungarian for “I am learning Hungarian” into French, and it tells you that I am learning English, in French.
Spoof was originally a card game. But why April fools? A quick trip around trickery.
Working with Latin fonts is difficult enough, but how about designing Chinese ones?
Machine translation has come on leaps and bounds, but there are still times when Google Translate and other […]
With three whole chapters about the comma alone, anyone interested in English should read this book.
Even the most radical change-monger and early-adopter also seeks comfort and their security blanket at times.
Zipf’s law seems very deeply embedded in language, and pervades many utterly non-linguistic data. We still do not understand why.
