widdershins

Hey guys, I say "y'all"

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English

35% Dixie

15% Yankee

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Escher sentences

The linguists at Language Log have noticed a form of plausible gibberish they have dubbed "Escher sentences", such as:

More people have written about this than I have

The amazing thing about these sentences is that they seem utterly plausible and sensical at first glance although they are profoundly resistant to complete comprehension. Trying to dissect and understand the sentence is a similar experience of cognitive dissonance to that of trying to fully comprehend one of M.C. Escher's famously paradoxical drawings of stairs. Looking at the steps in "Ascending and Descending", following the lines, one's mind and one's eyes try to comprehend how this loop has happened, but the human apparatus itself is short-circuited by this "golden braid". Examples of similar psychosensory phenomena include Shepard tones and this picture-in-picture zoom pointed out recently at What is FliG?.

The example sentence above seems to communicate to me something like "Other people have written more about this than I have", but that's not what it says!

How can such a sentence be constructed, or understood? Is there a missing or implied word?

If it had not been pointed out, I would never have even noticed the incongruity of these sentences. Even so, I have to concentrate to see the incongruity and not apply the approximating gloss. Funny to catch the mind looping back on itself in this way.

Language learning

I get a kick out of the availability of language resources online. Even web-based, free tutorials for learning languages are out there. At Textkit, there are downloadable complete grammars, primers, and reading material in classical Greek (ancient and koine) and Latin, as well as bulletin boards for discussion with other learners. Similar sites with tutorials for beginners (but not such a wealth of reading material) exist for Russian (Master Russian), Japanese (Japanese Online), and Dutch (Taalthuis and Speak Dutch), just to name a few.

2003 word lists

yourdictionary.com, which is an extensive language website including a huge number of dictionaries and grammars, published a set of English-language word lists for 2003, including top words for the year, personal names, phrases, youthspeak, presidential mispronunciations, product names (best and worst), Internet words, etc. Of special mention is what they claim is the most frequently spoken word on the planet ("OK"), with a brief etymology.

Overused words

With a tip of the hat to Eve Tushnet and Aaron Haspel, a list of words I overuse:

fantasy
I
perpetrator
neat
terrific
stupid
plan
sure
amazingly
godforsaken
nevertheless
well
really
idiot

What is Hangeul?

I loved this terrific introduction to Korean writing.