Sunday, September 30, 2007

This week in Language Scraps 9/24/07—9/30/07

Welcome to This week in Language Scraps. I'm not crazy about the name, so feel free to suggest alternatives in the comments. But in what will be a regular weekend post, I'll briefly review the week's postings to Language Scraps, Monday-Sunday. I hope this will encourage more participation, spark more conversation, and generally make Language Scraps a more dynamic place. (I'll refer to my posts in the third person so as not to give the impression that my posts have any sort of primacy.) Anyhow, let's get to it.

Monday was a busy day:

- Rikker dissected the "language gene" and the connection between human speech and bat echolocation
- Rikker homed in on eggcorns, a type of creative language mistake
- Torben shared an English translation of Charles Baudelaire's poem Correspondences
- Torben directed us to William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell on Google Books
- Torben brought Language Scraps to a grinding halt by wondering whether we are too prolific for our own good

Wednesday:
- Rikker broke radio silence with reCAPTCHA, using anti-spam tools to digitize public domain books
- Torben stumbled upon the Phonetics Flash Animation Project
- Scott linked us to his excellent essay about postmodernity and revelation

Thursday:
- Torben excerpted an article on the Semiotics of Smoke
- JGrotegut posted a paper on the eyes of the skin and the language or architecture

Saturday:
- Torben informed us of the Modern Language Association website and its language maps of the U.S.

Remember: comment! question! discuss! disagree! All that good stuff.

6 comments:

Torben B said...

Rikker,
thanks so much for posting this. It helps tons!

Scott Abbott said...

Nice review of the week. That should stiffen our resolve (if it doesn't intimidate us).

I very much like the name "language scraps." Torben would have to explain why he chose it; but here are my reasons for liking it.

It indicates a non-systematic approach to the topic, opens it to interdisciplinarity, gives voice to the photographer as well as the linguist, to the magician as well as the philologist, to the literary critic as well as the physical anthropologist.

Scott Abbott said...

And one more thing: Like Rikker, I'd love to see more actual discussion, disputation, and even personal disclosure here.

Information is critical. What we make of it even more so.

Grabloid said...

I really like the weekly recap thing...

Torben B said...

How about "weekly rescrap?" Corny? Lame? Brilliant?

Rikker said...

"Weekly rescrap" got a genuine laugh out of me, but I'm not sure that's a good sign...