Language Log

An amusing "Anglo-EU Translation Guide" has been circulating widely in recent weeks. This seems to come from the same source as an old Economist column ("I understand, up to a point", 9/2/2004; discussed here), which attributed the joke to "the Dutch, trying to do business with the British", and which also gave some examples from a list "written by British diplomats, as a guide to the language used by their French counterparts".

According to Stan Carey at Sentence First:

λ♥[love] is written and sung by Christine Collins, a writer and self-described time traveller [Doctor Who fan] from the U.S. She describes it as “a convenient, terminology-dropping, non-gender-specific love song for all your linguist-seducing needs”.

"Eskimo’s kennen nog maar drie woorden voor sneeuw", De Speld, 3/21/2011 ("Eskimos now have only three words for snow") — subtitle "Klimaatverandering debet aan taalverarming" ("Climate change to blame for language impoverishment"):

Een uitgebreid taalonderzoek onder 1.000 Inuit heeft uitgewezen dat het aantal woorden dat hun taal kent voor sneeuw is gereduceerd tot drie. In 1996, de laatste keer dat een dergelijk onderzoek werd uitgevoerd, waren dit er nog tien. De trend lijkt onomkeerbaar. In 1965 kenden de Eskimo’s nog honderd woorden voor sneeuw.

An extensive linguistic study of 1,000 Inuit has found that the number of words for snow in their language has been reduced to three. In 1996, the last time a similar study was conducted, there were ten. The trend seems to be irreversible: in 1965, the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow.

(Apologies for the poor quality of my translations from Dutch…)

Those who hate text message abbreviations will be dismayed to learn of how far they have spread. Here is the sign at the gas station on the Gitksan reservation in Hazelton, British Columbia.

From The Onion News Network:

This report that French is a hoax is too funny not to pass on.

Promoted from a comment on yesterday's post "How Mubarak was told to go, in many languages", this is a protest sign from Italy showing Silvio Berlusconi getting the iconic Italian boot:

To mark 20 years of the Theoretical Linguistics program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, our friends there celebrated with remarkable panache:

This is funny, though unfair:

In an article entitled "Yuan more pun" on The Economist's "Johnson" blog (Oct 28th 2010), Lane Greene Gideon Lichfield has tracked a long string of bad puns based on the name of the Chinese unit of currency.  The Economist's Yuan groaners stretch back several years.

My latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine celebrates the fifth anniversary of Stephen Colbert's (re)invention of "truthiness" — a word we began tracking here on Language Log soon after it appeared on the premiere episode of "The Colbert Report." (See this post and links therein.) I got a chance to interview Colbert himself, and my latest Word Routes column for the Visual Thesaurus features an extended excerpt of the interview. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

BZ: I was a big supporter of "truthiness" from the early days, back when it was selected as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. I was there lobbying for it.

SC: Really? You were there, literally?

BZ: I was on the scene, yes.

SC: You're a member of the American Dialect Society?

BZ: I'm on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.

SC: Holy cow. Well then, thank you for pushing for it, because I married an English major. Getting a Word of the Year is the closest I'll ever come to having six-pack abs. That's maybe the sexiest thing I could do, to have a word recognized.

BZ: Now that it's in the New Oxford American Dictionary, that's got to be even better. You're even mentioned in the entry.

SC: Yeah. That's a real turn-on.

Read the rest here.

There's a Facebook app called "What Geek Are You?"  If you let it digest the contents of your account, and perhaps answer some questions —  I haven't tried it, and don't know the details — it decides what (kind of) geek you are. David C reports that one of his friends, who is fluent or literate in five languages, was classified as "Geek in English/Language", with this description thereby posted to his wall:

Speaking or writing are your expertise. There's nothing you can't say or write that gets your point across in an easy to understand way. You are the master of whatever extra languages you study, whether its a romantic like Spanish or French, or something completly different.

Is this pathetic incompetence, or hip irony, or perhaps both?  I'm not sure.

Years ago, I once saw a sign on a psycholinguist's door saying ‘DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT’, and I smiled at the joke. But today I happened to notice that the Jersey City corporate seal says ‘CITY OF JERSEY CITY’, and the city website is cityofjerseycity.com; I assume I am not meant to smile at that.