Archive for December, 2007
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
Spotted on the radio…
Earlier on this afternoon, I heard a cricket commentator, having heard about someone whose name he didn’t immediately recall, promise that he’d google him up. This would not be a natural usage for me, although it’s unequivocally clear what he means; it’s completely synonymous with (in my view) the more natural version to google someone, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Corpus analysis, English, Google, Languages, Linguistics, Media, Syntax, Technology by jangari
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007
Merry Solstice
It’s the 26th of December, which of course means that the planet has passed the periodic minimum representing a northern hemisphere winter¹, and for the next 6 months will gradually pitch in the other direction (well, assuming your frame of reference is the planet itself and not the sun).
I hope your solstice celebratory activities were [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Nothing in particular by jangari
Monday, December 24th, 2007
Tag! I’m It
A couple of weeks ago, Will Owen tagged me for an Aboriginal internet meme, whereby I have to list 8 answers to each of 8 questions. I started writing a lengthy post, but while I was trying to smooth out the formatting I had a hard drive failure on my near-new laptop and lost all [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Writing, memetics by jangari
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
SPQR
There’s far too little linguistics on this blog, so in an attempt to rectify this:
Late last week on the bus I was having a conversation with a friend that, after a while, broke off on a tangent about the Roman Empire’s acronym SPQR.
It’s the sort of thing that young Roman men have tattooed on their arms, [...]
16 Comments » - Posted in Languages, Latin, Linguistics, Semantics, Syntax by jangari
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
Blog Eyecandy
Since installing the self-hosted Wordpress.org software, I’ve had a few days of fiddling around with some of the features of the css stylesheet and the various php scripts that control this blog and, all in all, I’m impressed with what I’ve been able to do with it.
First and foremost, all those purty pictures that used [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in Nothing in particular, meta by jangari
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
AudioSpace
Bill Poser, of Language Log fame, has recently developed a small piece of software that calculates how much data space you need to fit whatever format, compression or length of audio file you have.
I understand it’s probably not going to be the most highly sought-after program this Saturnalia, but I, for one, have a legitimate [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Linguistics, Technology by jangari
Monday, December 17th, 2007
So far so good
Sorry about those faulty links in this post, they’re fixed now.
We’ve had a few weeks of a Rudd government since the election now, and I reckon it’s been so far so good.
He’s made a few political errors of course, like gagging Peter Garrett (but let’s face it, Garret was Latham’s recruit as an environmental campaigner, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Land, Law, Politics, The Intervention by jangari
Saturday, December 15th, 2007
Blog Migration
A few hours ago, I began the steps to migrate this entire blog entity from its current location, on Wordpress.com, to a self-hosted location with my own domain name, meaning that this blog will from now on be located here.
I thought it would take days and days to do everything, but with a little luck, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Nothing in particular, meta by jangari
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Wagiman is Good: Wikipedia
A few weeks back, Joe wrote at Transient Languages and Cultures (which, owing to a historical accident, is acronymised to ELAC), that a page I wrote on the Wagiman language for Wikipedia had been nominated as a “good article”, subject of course, to peer review.
Well as of early this morning, a painstaking month after the [...]
10 Comments » - Posted in Indigenous, Languages, Linguistics, Media, Science, Wagiman by jangari
Monday, December 10th, 2007
Literacy, semantics and a change in language
An noteworthy discussion has been brewing in the letters section of my favourite broadsheet, The Sydney Morning Herald, over the past few days. It’s about that same old question of whether or not adolescents with their “technology” (that’s supposed to be uttered with vertical fist firmly shaken) are murdering – or better – bastardising the [...]
