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http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisti cTerms/WhatIsIrony.htm
http://www.geocities.com/eirig/

There are plenty of examples. Yes, irony has colloquially changed meaning, but this does not negate the prescriptivist mantra that you are incorrectly using the word.

Language Acquisition Made Practical is a method developed by Elizabeth and Tom Brewster. It's a great method because it allows you to combine technology with contextual learning.

In a way it's like the "girlfriend" comments, but it gives you a place to start in the conversation. Try it!

My take on it is that it's a pretty transparent situation--what he really wanted to be was a missionary linguist, and he never got to be that, but it's still important enough to his self-identity that he mentions it left and right. I find the whole thing a little bit dodgy, but way less so than ESR's practice of calling himself an "anthropologist" (or more precisely, "an observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture"), which in his case I think most accurately translates as "a fraud."

Anyway, here's the lesson, kids: calling yourself fancy titles that other people haven't given you tends to mess up your reputation among those in the know.

Your links are fucked. Hint: you don't type the domain shit in []'s. That's added by slashcode automatically (or not, as the user's preferences dictates.) Line breaks would be a good thing to have too, otherwise your text just looks like a jumbled mass of crap.

http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dvo rak_powerbook.jpg
http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software .asp?id=94
http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePage .html

I'm 21-years-old and typed in QWERTY for seven years starting at age 12, ultimately reaching 130+ words per minute. Rather than study for a test at uni two years ago, I decided to start learning DVORAK. For the rest of the semester lab reports were hard to write and after a week, I was a steady 40 wpm on Dvorak but my QWERTY speed dropped to about 50 wpm--after such a loss, there was no turning back! After four months exclusively on Dvorak I was at 90 wpm and by the half-year mark I was at 120 wpm. As for people who compare switching back-and-forth between keylayouts to bilingualism, they either (a) do not speak from experience or (b) do not type fast on either layout. Occasionally switching back to QWERTY is a REAL PAIN. The only words I can type fast on QWERTY include the URL to my uni's webmail page, my first and last name (email login), and email password. I've found that I only reach tolerable QWERTY speeds if I'm going back to QWERTY on a daily basis. I also think it helps to use the EXACT SAME KEYBOARD IN THE EXACT SAME LOCATION to really rev up QWERTY rates quickly. Of course, the latter statement sounds like psychobabble, but my muscle memory seems to benefit from these constants. If you haven't garnered these from DVORAK fan sites, here are some little tidbits: * 'a' and 'm' are the only keys that are not moved between QWERTY and ANSI Dvorak (more on ANSI later...) * the Dvorak home row includes aoeu ih htns - (spaces insert for readibilty) * as an OS X user, I find Dvorak much more amenable to common keyboard shortucts. Quit is cmd+Q and Close Window is cmd+w, which makes for easy muscle-memorisation on a Powerbook keyboard with the keys physically rearranged for Dvorak (http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dv orak_powerbook.jpg [geocities.com]) As for ANSI mentioned above, here's the real doozey: August Dvorak initially proposed an alternate number-row layout in his book Typewriting Behavior (1936, I think?). Rather than 12345 67890, Dvorak liked 75319 02468 (again, spaces inserted for readability). In theory, I don't know how much this helps. In practice, it's kinda useful these days since the '@' character is easily accessed with the index finger. This alternate number layout was NOT included in the standard ANSI Dvorak layout, but keymap files may be easily modified by true fanatics. On OS X, I highly recommend Ukelele (http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_softwar e.asp?id=94 [sil.org]). I'm two-weeks into learning the alternate layout and am finally getting good at it. In sum, the Dvorak layout markedly reduces finger movement for standard English text (http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePag e.html [vt.edu]); it seems to not be so helpful to developers. If you type fast on QWERTY now, you'll lose a lot of it after learning Dvorak. You may be able to get good enough at QWERTY but it won't be soon after learning Dvorak and it won't be fast and your boss will look at you funny when you're hunting and pecking. Hope this helps. Jon

Bullshit.

I don't have a PhD, and I've managed to get every font I've ever wanted installed, with far nicer results than are possible with Word (being able to kern in 1sp units (about the size of a nitrogen atom) doesn't compare to .rtf's limitation of a twip (1/20th of a PostScript (Big) point).

I'm also currently finishing up a typeface design which'll push the boundaries of what TeX can handle, and which can't be easily managed in InDesign 'cause of it's OpenType UI/feature-access limitations.

Hanging punctuation, to quote DEK's TeXbook ``is an easier problem'' and there's code for it --- you can see an example of this in use at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase --- look for Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_ pdftex makes it happen automagically in the tex engine itself, see _The LaTeX Companion, 2nd Edition_ for an example of this done for a dvips processed file.

XeTeX ( http://scripts.sil.org/xetex ) allows one to access _any_ OpenType or AAT font installed in Mac OS X and have access to _all_ of its features. There's been some discussion of making a version not tied to Apple's pdf engine.

Funny you should mention Zapfino --- here's a technique for fully taking advantage of it in TeX (well, Omega):

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77ada ms.pdf

and here's an example file:

http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typogra phy/peace_on_earth.pdf

William
(who would be glad of further translations for ``Peace on earth, good will to men.'' --- I've gotten Arabic, and am going to extend it beyond using just Zapfino)

I'm 21-years-old and typed in QWERTY for seven years starting at age 12, ultimately reaching 130+ words per minute. Rather than study for a test at uni two years ago, I decided to start learning DVORAK. For the rest of the semester lab reports were hard to write and after a week, I was a steady 40 wpm on Dvorak but my QWERTY speed dropped to about 50 wpm--after such a loss, there was no turning back! After four months exclusively on Dvorak I was at 90 wpm and by the half-year mark I was at 120 wpm.

As for people who compare switching back-and-forth between keylayouts to bilingualism, they either (a) do not speak from experience or (b) do not type fast on either layout. Occasionally switching back to QWERTY is a REAL PAIN. The only words I can type fast on QWERTY include the URL to my uni's webmail page, my first and last name (email login), and email password. I've found that I only reach tolerable QWERTY speeds if I'm going back to QWERTY on a daily basis. I also think it helps to use the EXACT SAME KEYBOARD IN THE EXACT SAME LOCATION to really rev up QWERTY rates quickly. Of course, the latter statement sounds like psychobabble, but my muscle memory seems to benefit from these constants.

If you haven't garnered these from DVORAK fan sites, here are some little tidbits:

* 'a' and 'm' are the only keys that are not moved between QWERTY and ANSI Dvorak (more on ANSI later...)
* the Dvorak home row includes aoeu ih htns - (spaces insert for readibilty)
* as an OS X user, I find Dvorak much more amenable to common keyboard shortucts. Quit is cmd+Q and Close Window is cmd+w, which makes for easy muscle-memorisation on a Powerbook keyboard with the keys physically rearranged for Dvorak (http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dv orak_powerbook.jpg)

As for ANSI mentioned above, here's the real doozey: August Dvorak initially proposed an alternate number-row layout in his book Typewriting Behavior (1936, I think?). Rather than 12345 67890, Dvorak liked 75319 02468 (again, spaces inserted for readability). In theory, I don't know how much this helps. In practice, it's kinda useful these days since the '@' character is easily accessed with the index finger. This alternate number layout was NOT included in the standard ANSI Dvorak layout, but keymap files may be easily modified by true fanatics. On OS X, I highly recommend Ukelele (http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_softwar e.asp?id=94). I'm two-weeks into learning the alternate layout and am finally getting good at it.

In sum, the Dvorak layout markedly reduces finger movement for standard English text (http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePag e.html); it seems to not be so helpful to developers. If you type fast on QWERTY now, you'll lose a lot of it after learning Dvorak. You may be able to get good enough at QWERTY but it won't be soon after learning Dvorak and it won't be fast and your boss will look at you funny when you're hunting and pecking.

Hope this helps.

Jon

The biggest pain I have is getting a single font (yeah, I don't mind a 20 MB font that works) which will work uniformly well with unicode text in different languages.

You mean, like Gentium? Or Doulos SIL?

The Unicode Font Guide for Linux should also give you some pointers.

Ulrik P.

The biggest pain I have is getting a single font (yeah, I don't mind a 20 MB font that works) which will work uniformly well with unicode text in different languages.

You mean, like Gentium? Or Doulos SIL?

The Unicode Font Guide for Linux should also give you some pointers.

Ulrik P.

I tried out Foxit, but it mangled some of the font display. Not as bad as what happens when you try and view a PDF produced via tex--dvips--ps2pdf file, but still not pretty. I wish I could use it---I loathe Acroreader bloat as much as the next fellow---but it was too much work to decipher the garbled text.

Ah, I remember what it was; it was on the Gentium type specimen. Barely legible, but certainly no good for evaluating a typeface.

--grendel drago

For printing, there's Computer Modern (now available in Unicode!) and Gentium. Neither of these are precisely public domain, but neither has any usage restrictions on them. Not to mention that both are really, really pretty.

Or were you talking about display fonts? Whole different ball of wax, that.

--grendel drago

Font licensing is a very complex issue.

These recent research reports on Writing Systems Implementation provide very good information and links on the subject

Font Licensing and Protection Details and Intellectual Property Concerns in the Development of Complex Script and Language Resources

This is part of UNESCO's Initiative Babel

Font licensing is a very complex issue.

These recent research reports on Writing Systems Implementation provide very good information and links on the subject

Font Licensing and Protection Details and Intellectual Property Concerns in the Development of Complex Script and Language Resources

This is part of UNESCO's Initiative Babel

But the Nine Billion Names Of God wasn't a learning system - the monks had figured out that just reciting all the names of God would do the trick, and printing them out on paper using an appropriate Tibetan font would do the trick. It turns out that Tibetan typography is actually rather more complicated than in the story, so simply making an X-Windows counter that runs in the background isn't going to do the job very well :-)

I kinda tend to side with you: although distro maintainers do put a lot of work into making sure Freetype is working properly across the board (this involves checking the Big Two toolkits, Qt and GTK+, and their companion desktop environments, KDE, GNOME, and XFCE, as well as OpenOffice and Mozilla, who dance to the beat of their own drums as far as fonts are concerned), every distro provides pretty darn similar software, and as long as you know what you're doing, you can get software from whatever distro working okay.

On that note, I would recommend just going with one desktop environment and one toolkit for the most part; this will make changing font settings for (almost) all programs a one-step task. I believe KDE was the pioneer in bringing things like antialiasing and subpixel decimation (for LCD monitors) to the desktop in an easy-to-control, one-step way, but GNOME is just as easily customiseable now (if not more so -- but I have no idea; I haven't used KDE for a while). From my experience (in Gentoo, at least) the GNOME control panel also changes font default and aliasing settings for Firefox, but OpenOffice is a hit-and-miss affair. Anyway, I stick with GTK+ programs for the most part, so one change in the GNOME control panel and all my programs have a fresh font.

For a really lovely serif font, try Gentium. It has almost every glyph under the sun, in one attractive style. Unfortunately, this comprehensiveness also has a drawback -- they haven't managed to design bold and italic alternates yet. But if you want to show off the international support of Linux to all your Russian, Greek, and Jewish friends, Gentium is the font for you.

Sorry, I get a little starry-eyed about fonts. It's the graphic designer in me.

"Wanting" is a verb; you're under the impression it's a noun. Your hypocritical desire to criticize someone's English is another noun, and it's the subject of this sentence too.

Summarily, we have a meandering, nonsequetorial, and run-on sentence, beginning with the word "And" no less.

Actually, not very many anthropologists these days do much linguistic work. That's partly because linguistics has developed as a separate field and partly because cultural anthropology was largely taken over by Postmodernists, as a result of which it has nearly died. Most research on "exotic" languages these days is done either by linguists or by missionaries (who want to translate the New Testament).

I am a linguist and have done extensive fieldwork, mostly on Carrier, the native language of a large region of northern British Columbia. (I also hack a little. Once upon a time I wrote the head-final shell mentioned in Charles Dodgson's comment.) Software is increasingly used for this kind of work, but for the most part it is not the sort of NLP software provided on the Morphix-NLP CD. A lot of that software is useful primarily if you've got a large corpus to work with, and it often presupposes that some basic resources exist, such as a lexicon, or at least a wordlist with part of speech information. For many languages even basic resources such as a lexicon don't exist or aren't available in electronic form, and when you're dealing with really small languages, there aren't any ready-made corpora, such as news text. If you want a text corpus, you've got to make it yourself, usually by recording people telling stories or whatever, and transcribing it. This is an important part of fieldwork, but its incredibly slow and tedious.

There are some tools designed specifically for this kind of linguistic research. One is Transcriber, a tool that assists a human being in transcribing audio recordings. One of the older tools is Shoebox a dictionary database program for field linguists, originally written to run under DOS.

Some of us have used Unix tools to extract and process information, e.g. grep to do regular expression searches. Ken Church at Bell Labs used to give a tutorial "Unix for Poets" on how to use Unix tools for linguistics. Here is his handout. For example, I've produced dictionaries of several dialects of Carrier using scripts written mostly in AWK plus the usual Unix tools, controlled by elaborate Makefiles. Some of us also use emacs a lot, not only as an editor but for doing searches. If you're interested in what kinds of software are of interest to linguists, you might check out the Computational Resources for Linguistic Research page.

It is worth mentioning that spread of the internet has made available a lot of useful material for linguistic research. There are now quite a few languages for which you can obtain a good chunk of text (say at least 100K words), and often you can find parallel text (that is, the language you're interested in plus a translation into English or another language that is useful to you). But this works mostly for relatively big languages, that is, say, languages with a million or more speakers. There are around 340 such languages, depending on how you count, about 2% of the world's oral languages.

One topic that concerns some of us is how software and other technology can speed up the process of documenting dying languages. Languages are rapidly become extinct - some experts estimate that as many as 90% of the languages currently spoken will be extinct in 100 years. [Computer languages may be proliferating at the same rate.:)] The late Ken Hale had seven languages die on him. If we don't find a way to speed up the documentation, or slow down the rate of extinction, most of those languages are going to die without very much being known about them.

We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes (usable according to their terms) for every language as part of the Ethnologue project, including artificial languages and sign languages.

As for country codes, I'm sure we can make something up. Just ask the leader of each country what they'd like for us to use for their country, work out the collisions, and compile our own standard (and issue an RFC).

You probably don't want to remove the US keyboard, as not all applications support Unicode. See this site for a keyboard layout that supports all the Latin blocks (Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional)

Not all fonts support these, although Gentium supports every possible Latinate Unicode 3.0 glyph, and up to three levels of diacretics.

The best and most complete online language reference for over 6,800 languages is "Ethnologue: Languages of the World", created by SIL International.

The Summer Institute in Linguistics has a much more comprehensive list of languages in their compendium entitled the Ethnologue (Available for perusing online.

UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations has compiled The Redbook of Endangered Languages listing many endangered languages around the world.

Another source for those interested in endangered languages is The Foundation For Endangered Languages.

For those more interested in creating languages of their own, or "conlangs" like Tolkien created, might I suggest Langmaker, Mark Rosenfelder's excellent Virtual Verduria (including his Language Construction Kit), and for those interested in Tolkiens' tongues (such as Quenya, almost unanimously considered the most beautiful conlang created) there is the very informational Ardalambion.

Hope those links will help people interested in the topics of endangered and model languages.

This is completely different from begging the question, which means that in trying to prove something, you assume it's already true.

Both of these are completely different from what the summary author meant, which is "leads to the question."

Not quite. In the Ch'ol dialect of the Mayan language, the word "linux" refers to a cooking utensil used for scraping the contents from the interior of hollow edible plants and the internal organs of animals. It was also applied to a smaller but very similar tool that was often inserted into the rectum of small children to extract impacted feces due to several endemic parasitic diseases.

BTW, most of you are undoubtedly also ignorant of the fact that the english word "gullible" is a colloquialism that is typically omitted from dictionaries.

This is from an old review of the "new" p5-90. NOC

"I have had opportunity to evaluate the Pentium P5-90 system from Gateway 2000 and was so impressed, I'm ready to buy one myself. Most people accuse me of being extravagant-saying things like "Why do you need that much power when most of what you do is word processing?" But after spending a couple weeks on the P5-90, it was very hard to go back to my 486DX2/66 system. I noticed several places where I didn't have to wait for the next screen in the other system. Things like repaginating a long document in Word, editing an embedded graphic in-place with OLE in Word, opening a Wizard enhanced dialog and making global changes would take 10-12 and even 30 seconds longer on the 486. You don't notice how long it is taking until you've seen it go faster. As loaded down as my job is, time is very important and those seconds do add up to help me get more accomplished each day in support of you-all in the field."

I recently bought one at a garage sale for 99.9% off the original $3999 price. The downside is that it has an Intel "Batman's Revenge" motherboard with a built-in battery expected to last 10 years.

(Orig. Price - New Price) / New Price * 100 = % Decrease

Stating an erroneous equation for calculating percentage does nothing to I hope this cleared up the issue.

Price changes as any other changes is calculated in relation to the original data point, NOT then new.
How would you calculate a 100% price drop by the way?
Do you have one of those original faulty Intel chips.
Math Bug by any chance?

I remember reading somewhere that there was no offical United States language, but I then decided I should check that fact and can't find any evidence for it...

However, I did find this webpage that lists languages spoken in the United States. From the site:

The number of languages listed for USA is 213. Of those, 176 are living languages, 2 are second languages without mother tongue speakers, and 35 are extinct.

Also of interest is this specific entry which lists about 1 million French Cajun speakers. So I guess that he hasn't really forgotten that he's in the United States after all...

I remember reading somewhere that there was no offical United States language, but I then decided I should check that fact and can't find any evidence for it...

However, I did find this webpage that lists languages spoken in the United States. From the site:

The number of languages listed for USA is 213. Of those, 176 are living languages, 2 are second languages without mother tongue speakers, and 35 are extinct.

Also of interest is this specific entry which lists about 1 million French Cajun speakers. So I guess that he hasn't really forgotten that he's in the United States after all...

As for the influence of english on other languages, it happens in ANY living language. English is influenced my many languages. When you go for a job, you usually send a resume (french word). If you get rejected, you might go eat a taco (spanish) or a hamburger (german). Half of America is named with Indian (Native American) words.

One language influencing another is nothing to be scared of. In reality, a thousand years from now, none of us would be able to regocnize any current languages.

Wow! I didn't know the United States was the only English-speaking country in the world! I could've sworn that the people in England spoke English. Not to mention Canada, Australia, and 79 other countries.

And he quotes some pretty weird number for English. Most estimates put English and Spanish head-to-head for native speakers in the 300M area, and English far more ahead than 470M for native + second language speakers. For example, one can look at the SIL Ethnologue and its list of the top 100 languages (counting native speakers), and they actually count more Spanish speakers than English.

My guess is that whoever gives the 470M figure has a very liberal definition of what "English" is, and includes speakers of English-based creoles.

And he quotes some pretty weird number for English. Most estimates put English and Spanish head-to-head for native speakers in the 300M area, and English far more ahead than 470M for native + second language speakers. For example, one can look at the SIL Ethnologue and its list of the top 100 languages (counting native speakers), and they actually count more Spanish speakers than English.

My guess is that whoever gives the 470M figure has a very liberal definition of what "English" is, and includes speakers of English-based creoles.

Indonesian is spoken by more than a hundred million people, but not as a first language (and there are only about 75 million speakers of Javanese).

Portuguese is probably the tricky one for most peopple - most of the speakers of Portuguese live in Brazil.

Of the Chinese languages other than Mandarin, Yue or Cantonese has about 70 million speakers, while Wu has about 80 million. (I recommend Ramsey's The Languages of China for anyone interested in Chinese languages and linguistics.)

A great source for linguistic facts is Ethnologue.

Danny

I don't know what Scientific American said, but Ethnologue is probably a better source, and they list 6,703 languages at the moment.

The Summer Institute of Linguistics's publication on the languages of th world, the Ethnologue, gives 470 million first and second language speakers. One usually sees higher numbers claimed, like 1 billion-- the SIL, however, has quite strict criteria in its work.

The Summer Institute of Linguistics's publication on the languages of th world, the Ethnologue, gives 470 million first and second language speakers. One usually sees higher numbers claimed, like 1 billion-- the SIL, however, has quite strict criteria in its work.

The Ethnologue (which is the definitive reference on such matters) reports 148,530 speakers including 7,616 monolinguals out of 219,198 ethnic Navaho (1990).

The Ethnologue (which is the definitive reference on such matters) reports 148,530 speakers including 7,616 monolinguals out of 219,198 ethnic Navaho (1990).