A couple for my fellow linguistics geeks

[liv]

jae found a most excellent wild specimen of the kind of headlines that always get trotted out as examples in popular books about language: Rob Ford beating claims merit police probe, lawyer says [link, just to demonstrate it's real and not made up, not because the article is particularly worth reading.] Apart from "says" at the end, every single word in that sentence is both a noun and a verb.

I've tried the Babelfish game on it and very quickly got nonsense, but not really funny nonsense. Still, even as good a machine translator as modern Google translate struggled to identify who did what to whom. It's a perfect Necker cube of a sentence, though; I only wish that sub-editor had phrased it as: Lawyers: Rob Ford beating claims merit police probe for ultimate garden path perfection.

And one of the links that floated to my attention recently was a rather good piece by Zeynep Tufekci about Orality and Twitter. A very nice counter, both scholarly and accessible, to the complaint that the internet is destroying literacy! I like the argument very much, that what the internet is actually doing is preserving and giving visiblity to genuine oral language rather than written language and language that's trying to imitate prestige dialects.