Language Log

John McIntyre at You Don't Say considers a hypothetical Museé des Peevologies. The curator's job is apparently open, or will be once a founding donor is located.

Just a pointer to Jan Freeman's "On Language" column — she was subbing for Bill Safire — in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, about Ambrose Bierce's advice on English usage in Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults (1909), which Jan characterizes as "often mysterious, perverse and bizarre". With examples.

Looking back to our discussion here of all-dude conversations, here's a report of an all-girl exchange. It's all in the prosody and the shared culture.

Languagehat has a fascinating posting about a new book by Tomasz Kamusella on how language, ethnicity, and nationality have come to be so tightly aligned in Central Europe. It's a great big, expensive book, so if you're interested in the topic you might want to start by checking out the quotes and links languagehat provides.

John Wells has been posting a lot of nice stuff recently on his daily phonetics blog. The current page (no permalinks yet, alas) discusses epenthesis in toponyms and similar forms — why are graduates of Harrow "Harrovians" while people from Congo are "Congolese"? And what about "Kittitian" from St. Kitts, and "Torontonian", and "tobacconist", and so on? (Some relevant socio-historical information can be found in "Who let the 'n' in?", 1/22/2006; and "Chinian, not Chinese?", 1/26/2006. You may also be interested in the theological implications of such sound-pattern irregularities.)