we want umlauts

Bewteen games ish hab gefragt: "Woher kommst du eigentlich?"
"Ish? Ish bin Türker. Komm' aus Istanbul. Dub bis Amerikaner?"
"Ursprunglish, ja- Kalifornien.- aber ish hab schon lange Zeit in Deutschland gelebt."
"akso, und was machst du hier? Erasmus?"
"nee- bin kein student mehr- also, beruflich bin ish journalist-"
"aksooo, journalismus- große zeitung- ? New York Times??"
"nööööö, das wäre sau toll, aber nee- nix so wie New York TImes"

the one and only TARARTRAT, the rest here

Berlin for Paris apartment swap

I'd like to swap my apartment in Berlin for one in Paris for July and August, or July OR August. I've posted a description of the apartment on Craigslist, with more pictures on pp at Wordpress.

the rise and fall of the genitive case

On Bremer Sprachblog, Anatol Stefanowitsch has an interesting post on the aspects of language that interest scholars, in particular the way grammatical structures offer points of comparison between languages - AND an amazing atlas of languages which presents this highly complex subject visually, now available online at the World Atlas of Language Structures:

What is WALS?

WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).

WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1110 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.

FBI tackles language exam cheats

FBI visits Cambridge University to discuss beating language exam cheats

7 April 2008

An FBI specialist is to address European language experts on new forensic technology for detecting cheating in language exams.

The presentation, held at the international conference of the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE), will outline how, as language tests become increasingly important for employment, study and immigration, they also become the target of cheating.

Rachel Lunde Brooks from the FBI in Washington is an applied linguist who has studied forensic linguistic techniques. She will explain how, even if cheating is undetected in the exam room, responses can be analysed by computer using sophisticated authorship attribution formulae. This can indicate whether a candidate’s answers have been the result of cheating.

the rest here

plots

Kevin Connolly has very kindly sent me a new improved plot of the gender mnemonics data using Excel 2007


which really is awfully nice.

would they had blotted a thousand...

Barbara and I eventually reconciled ourselves to the fact that in buying our tickets we had sent about $20 to a place from which it would never return, and agreed that walking home and talking to each other would be much more interesting than struggling on with the film-watching. And our topic as we walked home was a linguistic one: What exactly was the line of dialog that should have first alerted us to the fact that we were going to have to write off our $20 and the whole cinematic evening? For it was almost entirely the dialog that stuck in our respective craws.

Was it when the mustachioed detective gave the speech that began "Let me see if I've got this straight…", and tried to grasp the fact that he was being told that the serial murderer was going to strike again?

Was it when Professor Arthur Seldom (played by John Hurt) said "I doubt if Heisenberg would have agreed" and Martin the graduate student (Elijah Wood) perked up and said "The physicist?" (No, you dork; Luther Heisenberg, the lawnmower repair guy in the village.) Surely we should have left earlier than that bit.

Maybe the bit where Kurt Gödel's name comes up, with the professor and the student utterly failing to separate the concepts of (i) falsity, (ii) unprovability, (iii) incompleteness, (iv) paradoxicality, (v) improbability, and (vi) unknowability?

No, before that; when Elijah stands up to interrupt a lecture about there being no certain truth and says "I believe in the number pi." That is where we should have stood up and said "I believe my partner and I are going to leave this cinema and walk home."

Geoff Pullum on The Oxford Murders, the rest here

Gute Bücher

Walked toward Mehringdamm planning to buy plastic sandals. Stopped by the new used book store, Gute Bücher, in what used to be the Thai grocery store, near the corner of Mehringdamm and Yorckstrasse. The owner was opening up for the day, setting out books on tables outside. I said I had finished the book I had bought the other day and would bring it back so he could sell it again.

'Which book was that?'
'Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel.' It's not exactly the case that I couldn't put it down, since I had to put it aside for all kinds of reasons, but I finished it, which is more than can be said for most of the books I start. It has a glowing comment on the cover by Philip Pullman, 'one of the greatest ghost stories in the language,' which seems strong for a book that gets steadily less frightening as one reads on. The story is that of a medium who is pursued by fiends.

The owner and I, anyway, talk on. His name is John Russell. He explains that he wanted to live in Germany, and it's hard for Americans to get permission. So for a while he and his friends ran an online bookstore, and they all managed to survive selling books online. He then got the idea of having a small shop, which you can afford to do here, he explains, because it's so cheap: he's paying 500 euros a month for the shop, on a year-and-a-half contract. He's not sure if it was a good idea, it's just about breaking even but it's much more work. The main thing is, though, that it allows him to stay in the country.

I am very impressed by this. Every so often I pass empty commercial premises for rent and think of opening a shop and then don't.

   Between the idea
   And the reality
   Between the motion
   And the act
   Falls the Shadow

I come home and get an e-mail from a reader asking why there is little display of emotion in The Last Samurai.

mens conscia something something something tristatur