The Times ran another interesting piece on dying languages this weekend, this one full of examples from various near-dead languages. My favorite illustrated how the same construct can be used for different purposes in different languages. For example, in Rotokas, a language used in Papua New Guinea, doubling a word is used to indicate repetition:

tapa = to hit
tapatapa = to hit repeatedly

kopi = a dot
kopikopi = spotted

kavau = to bear a child
kavakavau = to bear many children

But in Eleme, a Nigerian language, a similar doubling pattern is used for negation:

moro = he saw you
momoro = he did not see you

rekaju = we are coming
rekakaju = we are not coming

You'll also learn a variety of useful words for describing castrated reindeer. Worth a read.

Labels: Eleme, language, New York Times, Rotokas

Yesterday The New York Times had a good piece on endangered languages, which describes a joint effort between the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to record languages on the verge of extinction. My favorite factoid: a group of Andean natives called the Kallawaya, who speak Spanish and Quechua in daily life, have a secret language that's mostly used to describe medicinal plants.

Wordie is doing its small part to preserve language. Long after Wrigley has thrown in the towel on strappleberry, this important word will remain forever enshrined here.

Labels: language, National Geographic Society, New York Times, strappleberry

Hey grammar nazis, this one's for you.

Back in March I linked to Ficlets. I've been a steady user of the site since then, and I've published 66 short stories there so far.

When I first found Ficlets, I enjoyed a fun literary culture similar to the one here on Wordie. The other users were intelligent, thoughtful authors; the atmosphere was encouraging and clearly valued good writing. A good number of the contributors were published authors in the real world of considerable fame, and it was fun to rub shoulders with them.

In two months, that has changed dramatically. I'm not sure what happened exactly, but it seems the site has been overrun with children. Generally I'm pretty laid-back about bad writing and will just overlook it, but it's gotten to the point where nearly every Ficlet published reads more like a text message than a literary work.

In the good old days (ha ha) the serious writers would rank garbage as garbage: one star out of five. The hope was that people would get the message and step it up. Unfortunately they didn't, and they now outnumber the rest of us. To add insult to injury, the kids consistently rank the worst stories with the full five stars so the entire ranking system is useless. Most of the good writers have apparently fled in terror by now.

There's an underlying attitude here, I think. It's apathy toward all things grammar, or more. Sometimes I detect outright contempt for it. It's never capitalizing anything. It's never breaking text into paragraphs. It goes beyond not knowing how to spell; it's not _caring_ how to spell. It's waiving the single- or (already extreme) double-exclamation points in favor of eight or ten or fifteen of them.

I don't intend to use Errata as a soapbox for my frustrated rants -- though it's probably too late now -- but I'd like to hear your thoughts. I'm concerned that SMS and "IM-speak" is bastardizing communication amongst the youngest generation. Is it really that important in the big picture? Are we dealing with lasting illiteracy or a short-term fad? What does a disregard for even the simplest writing conventions mean for the future in, say, thirty years?

I've become a grumpy old man. Get off my lawn.

(originally posted on the old errata by uselessness)

Labels: ficlets, kvetch, language

If you're like me, you spend a lot of time on a handful of word-related sites. I've built some bookmarklets for my most frequent look-ups, and you may find them helpful too. They work in Firefox on Mac and Windows, and I haven't tried them in any other browsers or systems (sorry). There are two ways to use each one:

1. Loading the bookmarklet will prompt you for a word or phrase to lookup; type it in the box and click OK.


2. Highlight a word or phrase on any web page, then load the bookmarklet to skip the prompt and look it up immediately.

Let me know if you have trouble with any of these. Right-click any of the links below and select "Bookmark this link" to add it to your bookmarks menu.

• Acronym Finder
• dictionary.com
• thesaurus.com
• RhymeZone
• Wikipedia
• Wordie: Add

(Note that this Wordie bookmarklet is a modified version of angharad's original, designed to function the same way as the others listed here. It also recognizes null values and doesn't try to add them.)

And now, the pièce de résistance of this post, Visuwords.

I just discovered this site and I was flat dazzled. You can look up any word to find definitions, synonyms, antonyms, acronym meanings, and possibly more that I have yet to find. I like the snazzy interface, which effectively shows the associations between each item. The site seems to understand concepts too, and links words to other related things. Fun to play around with, and possibly a valuable time-saver when those bookmarklets just don't do it for you. It's also darn quick. Possible inspiration for your next case of writer's block?

Click the picture above to hop on over, and don't say I never gave you nothing.

(Originally posted by uselessness)

Labels: bookmarklets, language, reference, tools, visuwords

One of my favorite childhood games was the story-go-round. I first discovered it on a Boy Scout campout, as my troop gathered around the fire to toast marshmallows. Our scoutmaster would begin telling a story, but stop after a few sentences of exposition and prompt the next kid in line to continue from where he had left off. And so we'd elaborate, one by one, each improvising the next crazy direction for our story to go, until it was the scoutmaster's turn again, and he would attempt to tie up all the lose ends and conclude the tale.

I realized two things: First, Boy Scouts aren't actually very good storytellers, and eventually every plot ended up involving aliens and X-Men blowing everything up. Second, most kids don't really even like storytelling. Once the novelty of the game wore off, nobody wanted to play anymore. Except me. I'm a wordie kind of guy. It's in my blood.

I'll assume it's in your blood too, or you wouldn't be reading Errata. If that's the case, wouldn't it be great if we could use the internet to play a grown-up version of the story-go-round, where contributors actually know how to write and are passionate about doing so? Sounds like a heck of a time waster, if nothing else. Good news: we can.

I'd like to say I came up with idea, but alas. It's a new site I recently discovered, where anyone can write short stories called "ficlets." Very very short stories, actually. There's a 1,024 character limit for each one. What's fun is the ability to write a sequel or prequel to any ficlet on the site, and others can do the same with yours. Even if you don't feel like writing, it's pretty cool to read others' stories from beginning to end and see the unique ideas and writing styles presented by each author.

Enough blabbing, go check out Ficlets for yourself! And if you're interested in collaborating with me, here's a direct link to the stories I've written.

(This was originally posted on the old errata by uselessness)

Labels: ficlets, fiction, language