Michael Erard
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"Language"
Out of the blue today dropped this awesome review of Babel No More from Kirkus Reviews:
BABEL NO MORE
The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Author: Erard, Michael
Erard (Um…: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, 2007) reports the results of his attempts to locate people who are [...]
Continue Reading →Before too long, this blog and the whole website are going to have a different look, and I’m going to ramp up my posting frequency in a bid to gain eyeballs and attention before Babel No More comes out.
I’d really love to be asked someday what threads run through Um… and Babel, because part [...]
Continue Reading →My essay in the New York Times today is the product of a month’s worth of naptimes. The baby’s, that is, not my own. I have to say, though, that my dreams over the first year of his life have been so vivid and intense, every night packed with dreamtime craziness, probably because the [...]
Continue Reading →Veteran US diplomat Richard Holbrooke died yesterday after being hospitalized and going into heart surgery to repair a torn aorta, and today the newspapers are full of eulogies and obituaries. But I’m interested in reports of what his last words were. According to the Washington Post:
As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family [...]
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Historical polyglots: Jeremiah Curtin, Joseph Mezzofanti, Barthold Niebuhr, Johann Baratier, Conon Gabelentz, and Georg Gabelentz.
I love the Even More Amazing trope of these descriptions (which I need to rename): there was this guy, but he couldn’t match this guy, and even more incredible was this guy, who was surpassed by this guy. (All guys, [...]
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Dick Hudson sent me this WSJ article about Ellen Jovin, who is trying to outdo Katherine Russell Rich (of Dreaming in Hindi fame) and Deborah Fallows (of Dreaming in Chinese fame) by learning 13 languages in 3 years. From the article, I gather that’s Italian, Chinese, German, Russian, French, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, [...]
Continue Reading →I wrote a review of the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style for Design Observer, pointing out how thoroughly they’ve departed from their bookish bibliocentrism and embraced, as never before, the digital reality. Apparently I noticed some things that no one had seen before, such as this fact:
The words “electronic,” “software,” [...]
Continue Reading →Whatever Twitter is for, it does (depending on whom you follow) create some interesting juxtapositions of themes. Today’s juxtaposition was language acquisition (this Perri Klass piece from the NYT about babbling) and language attrition (also from the NYT, a piece by Gina Kolata about correlations between memory decline and age of retirement, as [...]
Continue Reading →Reading Richard Boyd’s 1979 essay, What is a metaphor a metaphor for?, where he says this:
Experts play a crucial role in reference for theoretical terms (and relatively esoteric terms generally) precisely because it is they who provide nonpassive epistemic access to the referents of those terms.
Which is a nonpassively esoteric way of saying [...]
Continue Reading →I’ve been watching Iver’s phonological development closely and wondering what his first word will be, but after reading around in the child phonology literature, I realized that he already has a first word, and that we hear it every day. It’s “ka.”
Children’s first words often aren’t like adult words; they’re called “nonsense words,” “protowords,” [...]
Continue Reading →Linguists made out well in the MacArthur Fellowships, with awards going to Carol Padden, a sign language linguist at UC-San Diego, and Jesse Little Doe Baird, a Wampanoag (or Wôpanâak) language preservationist. I interviewed Padden for a sign language story in 2005; I was writing for the New Scientist about a spontaneous sign language that [...]
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One of the best (and, sadly, only) stories I’ve read in a while about interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan is this piece by Neil Shea on NPR/Foreign Policy. What’s so great about it is the way he shows how progress (if that’s the word to use) on the ground depends not on the number [...]
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