Interesting Stuff: March 2009

Another episode of the series in which I share my personal journey of reading interesting stuff on the Internet and learning more about the world.

New music for me

So I went to Womadelaide yesterday, and in my opinion the best music on offer this year was that of Rokia Traoré. She sings mostly in the West African language of Bambara and sometimes in French, and my purchase of her album Tchamantché is the first time that music sung in an African language has been added to my CD collection.

My only disappointment with the CD is that the coverslip does not contain complete English translations of the songs. English translations are provided for those songs that are sung in French, but for those in Bambara the original lyrics are followed by what I take to be a very loose French paraphrase (often much shorter than the actual song) and then an English translation of the French. I would like to have complete English translations of all the Bambara songs, because it’s fun to follow along and learn something about another language in the process. (If anyone reading this can help out, drop me a line.)

Below is an updated list of what I’ve got in my CD collection, in approximately the order in which I acquired my first album from a given artist. I know that lists of music without links to audio excerpts can be boring, but I don’t have time to do better right now. Perhaps I’ll link to official websites and so in a follow-up post. Everything listed here is excellent music.

Interesting stuff: February 2009 (I)

I’ve been finding a lot of interesting stuff on the Internet this month. Too much to cover in a single installment, so I will post another installment for the second half of February. The quantity of stuff I’ve found is partly due to my decision to add www.physorg.com to my regular sources of news.

Nominations for upcoming installments of this series are stored on Twitter, should you want a sneak peak. Speaking of that, when I started this series there was a bug which meant only my most recent twenty or so tweets were visible; the facility to go back a page did not work. This has now been rectified, which gives me the freedom to be more prolific.

Past tense in English verbs

This is the second installment in my series about how English verbs are described in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. I’ll assume you’ve already read the first installment, in which I overviewed the forms of lexical verbs. Soon I will explain how the auxiliary verbs fit into the picture, but first I need to lay some groundwork by describing how the English language uses the past tense.

There may be errors herein, but I will correct any that I become aware of as soon as possible.

Interesting stuff #2

This is the second in a series of interesting things I’ve learned recently from the Internet. The first installment is here.

I’ve just been watching Catalyst, and learned that the People’s Choice Award in the Australian Museum’s Eureka Prizes this year has been won by Nicole Kuepper. I am happy with this because I was barracking equally for both Nicole Kuepper and Mark Walker. Read about all of the contestants here.

Now here’s my list of interesting things I learned online between the 8th and 20th of August:

The forms of verbs

In my last linguistics post, dated 8 July, I stated my intent to write a series of blog posts discussing some ideas from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum. My usual policy, when I endeavour to write a series of posts on a given topic, is to write the next installment when the last one is getting close to the bottom of the front page. According to this rule of thumb, the time is ripe.

I trust that readers are familiar with the notion that verbs come in various forms. But how many forms does a verb have? There needn’t be a unique, objectively true answer – the idea of forms and the names of forms are both tools for describing how English works, so the best answer is the one that lets us describe the language most succinctly and elegantly. In other words, it’s a question of pragmatics (in the non-linguistic sense) rather than pure theory.

The failed Twitter experiment

I recently reported that I’d started using Twitter as a way of storing links to interesting stuff on the Internet. This didn’t quite work out, partly because the format of Twitter isn’t well suited to the task (e.g. lack of editability) and partly because as soon as I had about twenty or so tweets, the oldest ones suddenly started vanishing.

[Update 25 August: I've learned that this is because of a bug affecting some but not all Twitter users whereby the option to browse archives isn't currently working. Anything that drops off page one therefore appears to vanish.]

I have therefore abandoned that particular experiment, but rather than abandon the Twitter account altogether I’ve decided to change my approach. I now intend to do a regular series on this blog of “interesting things I’ve found recently on the Internet” and use the Twitter account simply as a way of storing nominations for the next installment without cluttering up my offline bookmarks.

Anyway, here’s my very first collection of interesting things I’ve learned recently from the Internet:

Memories of Childcraft

This post picks up from the final paragraph here, in which I said that Mum recently bought second-hand copies of books that I had as a child. I was referring to the Childcraft series, published by World Book Encyclopedia.

The Childcraft series is still being published, but in a form so different from the books I had that they can scarcely be recognised (in fact, over the years they have gone through many different editions, with some changes to the titles at each revision). Reading the series was an extremely significant part of my childhood. I received them about one volume a month when I was about seven years old – as an extended birthday present – and their contribution to my quest for knowledge is incalculable.

A bit of grammar

I mentioned that there were some things on Language Log last month of personal relevance to me, and promised to extrapolate. Actually there were two things, so I’ll describe them independently to begin with and then point out the common threads.

Some more Australian vocabulary

This is the final installment in the series of posts inspired by comments I left in the archives of Lynne Murphy’s blog (previous installments here and here). I won’t mention everything that I mentioned there, and I’ll mention some things that I didn’t mention there too.

Words that mean different things in different dialects can be fun.