BLOG DESCRIPTION: The Word Detective on the Web is the online version of The Word Detective, a newspaper column answering readers’ questions about words and language. The Word Detective is written by Evan Morris and appears in finer newspapers in the U.S., Mexico and Japan.
On the web since 1995, The Word Detective also offers a free searchable online archive of thousands of past columns.
The Word Detective is published monthly.
MY REVIEW: This website is excellent - you need to visit it directly to search for and "find a column on a particular word or phrase."
The blog is a "sideblog," updated only once or twice a week. If you're interested in the English language, you'll enjoy it.
Sample post:
The BP spill has poisoned our tongues … our poor, crisp, British tongues Charlie Brooker in the Guardian:
Flippantly putting the grave environmental tragedy of it all to one side for a moment, the Deepwater Horizon oil leak isn’t just causing extensive damage to the Louisiana coastline. What about our accents? Our lovely British accents? Thanks to the BP link, they’ve been destroyed too. Don’t know about you, but whenever I’m around Americans, I tend to exaggerate my Britishness in a pathetic bid to win their approval. Those days are gone.
The first time I visited the US, I ran into trouble at immigration. Half the group I was travelling with decided to get drunk on the plane, which probably would’ve been fine with all the other passengers if it hadn’t been for the unrelenting cackling and yelping and removal of trousers. I was fairly drunk too, incidentally, but only because I was so terrified of flying I’d decided to blot out the whole of reality by glugging myself into an inflight coma. From my slumbering perspective the flight was a warm 15-minute snooze. To the other passengers it must’ve felt like a 30-year sentence in baboon prison.
Upon arrival, we were identified as troublemakers and hauled off one-by-one for a comprehensive bothering. Instantly I realised my only hope of avoiding instant deportation was to behave like a minor royal – not an aloof, chilly posho, but a genial gosh-what-a-wonderful-country-you-have Hugh Grant-type, one who smiles a lot while using slightly formal language. I apologised profusely by saying, “I apologise profusely.” The officer started out prickly – one of his opening gambits was, “You could be spending the night in jail, wiseguy”, which simultaneously impressed and scared me – but several minutes of profuse apologies and crikey-I’m-sorry delivered in an embellished British accent appeared to disarm him, and I was released without being subjected to gunfire.
RECENT POSTS: --OUPblog » Blog Archive » The Gender-Neutral Pronoun: 150 Years Later, Still an Epic Fail --If you mean "literal" literally, we should start lining up investors. --xkcd: Period Speech --Gene Weingarten column mentions Lady Gaga. --The BP spill has poisoned our tongues … our poor, crisp, British tongues
BLOG DESCRIPTION: Learn about the language of the Esperanto-speaking world. Enjoy posts on entertainment, language, literature, pronunciation, Esperanto language and vocabulary.
MY REVIEW: Now - THIS is how a language learning blog/website should be set up. Plenty of posts tackling various aspects of the language, plus posts featuring side by side translations of text. So on one column is English (the actual language of the blog) and the other column is Esperanto, so the reader can compare the two languages and learn, quite quickly, what's what.
Seeing this blog reminded me of the old magazine Quinto Lingo, which I loved, as it would translate the same story or article into five different languagues. It went out of print, and apparently an attempt to revive it as an online magazine in 2006 failed. Too bad.
I highly recommend this blog if you want to learn Esperanto - and if you're someone who teaches languagues via a website, I recommend this blog also, as a how-to manual.
What is Esperanto, you're asking?
Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language.[1] Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means "one who hopes" in the language itself. The language's original name was "La Internacia Lingvo."[2] Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy to learn and politically neutral language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.[3] Esperanto has approximately one thousand native speakers,[4] i.e. people who learned Esperanto as one of their native languages from their parents. There is controversy over the number of people who are fluent in Esperanto. The estimates range from 10,000 to as high as two million. The users are spread in about 115 countries.[5] This diverse and international community is evidence to most Esperanto speakers that the language is usable by people from all over the world and that it can establish communication between them.
Sample post:
What’s a Conlang? Posted by Quintus Mar 10 2010In many fiction books, such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings*, and countless movies, such as James Cameron’s “Avatar”, you will read (or in Avatar’s case, hear) languages meant not to be understood, but to add to the depth of the culture of the characters: languages created to be unique to the setting. These are called conlangs, or constructed languages*. Time and again, you will find confusing vocabulary and grammar, as well as very native-looking words, sentence structures, unique sounds, and other interesting language features distinct to the languages themselves. It’s a great way to occupy space in a book, and to make the reader with a book, or the viewer with a movie, feel alienated from a group of characters. Which, in many cases, is a good, strong feeling to convey to an innocent consumer.
Many people, such as those neat folks from learnnavi.org and realelvish.net (thanks to Faith for the correction), learning Elvish and Na’vi, respectively, are created for the purpose of understanding and speaking these languages. However, when a vocabulary is 100% invented, with no similarities to English, French, German, Latin, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Esperanto, or any other vocabularies, it becomes increasingly difficult to memorize, and thus another barrier, along with grammar, to understanding the language. Although grammar is an increasingly confusing part of any language, once you learn it, it all comes down to the vocabulary. Further, inventing an entire vocabulary isn’t an easy task, and far less fun than inventing a grammar system.
For this reason, Esperanto makes a wonderful vocabulary background for constructed languages, or conlangs.
Caution—Grammar Below:
For example, let’s say we needed a language for a book about a civilization of cloud-people with very fluid, unique speech. Let’s use the Esperanto knab’, the stem for boy, as our basis for a word in our new language. Our noun-marker could be R instead of the esperanto O, and it could come before, rather than after, the word, producing rknab. That looks a lot like the word in esperanto for boy, knabo, as well as being completely unpronounceable. So let’s apply a few more grammar rules. Let’s add a vowel between r and knab, to make it more pronounceable and to give the word more meaning. For example, an A could mean a singular word, and an E could denote a plural word. That would give us raknab for boy, and reknab for boys. Another strategy could be to use the same A or E to denote feminine and masculine gender, respectively, giving us raknab for girl, and reknab for boy. In a real constructed language, many rules would be created to obscure the original Esperanto word, while retaining its ability to be recognized. For example, in the language in my book, which I’m co-authoring with a good friend of mine, the specifics of the grammar are still being hammered out, and will continue to be for about another month. Grammar is very complex, and is a very useful tool, as well as the only tool, to make vocabulary understandable. And with Esperanto vocabulary stems, it leaves a language creator to focus on the complexities of grammar.
So, as you can see, the grammatical systems of many constructed languages (think Klingon) can get very, very confusing. But maybe the vocabulary doesn’t have to be. But what do you think? Is applying Esperanto vocabulary to unrelated words to be looked down upon? Does it generalize languages into a common framework? Is Esperanto vocabulary too centered on its grammar? Let me know in the comments below this post. (All of the authors read them, I promise!)
*I would like to note that Esperanto is a conlang, but different than the ones detailed in this entry. Although it was constructed, it was not meant to simply be something to add to the plot of a book or movie; it was meant to be a fully-bodied language, and thus was meant to be as simple as possible, rather than to give fictional characters something with which to speak. Thanks to Christophe and Tony for this correction
*I also would like to make note that Elvish, by J.R.R. Tolkin was created to be a true and speakable language. The books came afterward. Thanks to Christophe for this correction
RECENT POSTS: --Bertilo’s web site of wonders / La mirinda TTT-ejo de Bertilo --Mood in Esperanto --In times of crisis (1): Finance / Dum krizaj tempoj (1): Financo --Linguistics: where is the off button? / Lingvistiko: kie estas la malŝaltilo? --What’s a Conlang?
William Shatner, Star Trek's Captain Kirk, starred in Incubus, a horror movie in Esperanto. It can be watched at Youtube.
Bitesized Languages is not available for subscription via the Kindle, but then, it doesn't really need to be. You can subscribe to it for free and have it delivered to your mailbox.
All it is is one sentence a day, translated into English and... whatever language you've chosen. I've chosen Spanish and German (I get two separate emails.) The sentence is the same in both languages, so I"m learning both languages simultaneously, which is fun.
It's a lot easier to learn to read a language than it is to speak it. If you just want to be able to read books in the original, check out Bitesized Languages as a teaching aid.
