The New Sesquipedalian

In response to a New Yorker article, Will Leben wrote this piece on the importance of metaphor and ambiguity. Way to not beat around the bush, Will!

How badly does English orthography need a facelift? This article describes somebody whose life work is adding a single letter to the alphabet.

Recent PhD recipient Tyler Schnoebelen‘s work on Twitter (specifically variation in Tweets by social category) was noticed in this Boston Globe article. Sesquicongrats to Tyler and company!

Somewhere in the arctic…

Here are a few interesting articles from over the summer:

An article in the New York Times from July discusses evidence supporting Greenberg’s colonization theory.

Dan Jurafsky was mentioned in this article in the Stanford News from July.

H. Samy Alim (w Smitherman) wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times from September on the language of Obama.

Chris Manning got mentioned in this special piece (in orange) from the September/October issue of the Stanford Magazine.

An interesting take on one state’s response to issues related to global warming. Read it here, in Scientific American.

Referred to us by Lauri Kartunnen is a group of grannies who sing in Udmurt (Votyak), a Finno-Ugric language closer to Hungarian than to Finnish. Here is a bit of their song transliterated and translated, along with a link to the video.

Kyrdz’alom zhon-zhon-zhon,
Ektom mi kuazh-kuazh al’i.
Kyrdz’alom zhon-zhon-zhon
Van’my tshoshen.

We are singing extremely strongly.
We are dancing soulful, so soulful!
We are singing extremely strongly,
Because we are together!

Bas van Fraassen (Princeton) will be coming to talk with the Truth, Objectivity, and Constructivism workshop on Monday at 5:00pm in 160-328. He will be talking about his 2008 book, Scientific Representation. He will introduce the main themes of the book before we open it up for discussion (which will end at 7). Join us for what is anticipated to be a lively interaction!