Category:Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist or linguistician.

I am very interested in this field, but more of as a hobby than as a career. In any case, I will document what I learn about this field in this category.

I also speak a few languages and am learning more. Below is a list of the languages I speak either fluently or with a working knowledge (and continually improving):

• English (mother-tongue)
• German (college level)
• Spanish (college level)

George Orwell's writing advice

Note: From George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

External links

• AskOxford — a free online dictionary resource from OUP
• Linguistic Data Consortium
• The Link Grammar Parser — a syntactic parser of English, based on link grammar, an original theory of English syntax.
• The Latin Library
• Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice
• Wortschatz — Search in 17 Corpus-Based Monolingual Dictionaries (by the Universität Leipzig)
• UniLang Wiki — a database of language- and linguistic-related information
• WebCorp — The Web as a Corpus
• concordancer + utils — by Ralph Meyer of Princeton

Wikipedia articles on Linguistics

• Linguistics
• Category:English_grammar
• Oxford spelling
• N-gram
• Latin declension
• Concordancer
• KWIC
• AntConc — a freeware concordance program for Linux developed by Laurence Anthony.

Lists

• Category:English words spelled with diacritics or ligatures
• Old English language (list of prepositions)
• List of English prepositions
• List of English irregular verbs
• List of frequently misused English words
• List of French phrases
• List of French phrases used by English speakers
• French proverbs
• List of German expressions in English
• List of German words and phrases
• List of Greek phrases
• Category:Latin_phrases
• List of Latin abbreviations
• List of Latin phrases
• List of Latin words with English derivatives

UTF-8

• The Unicode Character Code Charts By Script
• Unicode (UTF-8) test
• UTF-8 encoded sample plain-text file — original by Markus Kuhn, adapted for HTML by Martin Dürst.
• test page for UNICODE UTF-8 encoding — no longer maintained.
• wikipedia:UTF-8