And Chinese for “Skype” Is…
The Skype communication service has probably set a record for the fastest movement of a brand name to a common verb ("I’ll Skype you...
Should linguists do politics?
The French linguist Claude Hagège has called for greater diversity in European language policy, (thanks to Transblawg for the link) suggesting that a Slavic...
Language war
Translators are commonly imagined a pretty quiet bunch, a community of people sitting in front of their keyboards, day after day, worrying about how...
Battles won on the playing field
Scrutinizers of the spread of international English may like to note the two part series on "The Ascent of English" in The Financial Times...
Doug Piranha software
Can you automatically detect affect in linguistic media such as speech and text? In December, I mentioned a Scottish company that claims to identify...
Lack of French language technology?
First the call from Noel Jeanneney (see my post on this, and Mark Liberman for further well-informed and useful comments) for a European search...
In memoriam Minitel
Jean Véronis has drawn attention to the fact that SMS spelling can be used to query the Yellow Pages (YP) in France.
Prsone n sembl...
The French disconnection
Old European holdings, New World prism. Mark Liberman of Language Log recently questioned the back story to Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s call to resist Google’s plan...
Proper Names
The Adamic power to name things has gone novaburst in the last 50 odd years since people all over the world started hitting computer...