Prompted by a recent PC and Pixel cartoon, Mark Liberman over at Language Log gives a quick overview of the state of ‘linguistic profiling’ technology. (”As you can see, the best of the systems are doing pretty well at recognizing languages, but not so well at distinguishing one dialect from another.”)
What’s especially interesting about the [...]
Posts under ‘literature’
Airport shibboleth
Leo Spitzer on the origin of the word “Environment”
Towards the end of his epic history of the concept of “milieu”, Leo Spitzer briefly goes over the origin of the closely-related English word, “environment” – which was coined, it turns out, by Thomas Carlyle in an article on Goethe, published in Miscellanies (1827).
And “what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines in [...]
Robert Frost on the Pound-Abercrombie duel that never was
Peter Howarth’s November 6 LRB review of Robert Frost’s recently published Notebooks mentions the first draft of his unpublished play about the duel to which Ezra Pound challenged the poet Lascelles Abercrombie in 1913, “after Abercrombie had proposed that modern poetry could learn from Wordsworth’s interest in contemporary speech” — a suggestion that could have [...]
