The following headline, from an article in the June 23, 2010 edition of the Dublin newspaper The Herald, is presented as a machine translation exercise for the reader. Using your favorite automatic translation software (Babelfish or Google translator or whichever), identify which languages may be the most difficult in which to express this thought: Woman […]
Tag: Linguistics
Please call Stella
Hear the phrase “Please call Stella” spoken by natives of Brooklyn, New York, USA, Khabarovsk, Russia, Edinburgh, Scotland, and many other places. George Mason University’s Speech Accent Archive has recordings of: a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are […]
Linguistics lesson: English pronunciation
Linguists quarrel, sometimes fiercely, about how to pronounce certain words. This 1937 film clip shows one such argument about how to pronounce, among other things, the word “tomato”:
Coffee Klatch
My great-grandfather Henry Thompsom Klatch had a beard and enjoyed the lifelong study of methods of efficiently pouring coffee. This small photograph shows him pouring coffee in his study. The angle allows the viewer to see his beard. Henry believed that he suffered obscurity because of the unusual spelling of his middle name —”Thompsom” with […]