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)

Phrases

hacks 

ad hoc implementations

Web 3.0 

semantic web

screen scraping 

a technique in which a computer program extracts text data from the display output of another program (see: "web scraping")

Other

idempotent 

(adj) describing an action which, when performed multiple times, has no further effect on its subject after the first time it is performed

outro (sometimes "outtro" or "extro") 

a literary term used to indicate the conclusion to a piece. It is the opposite of an intro.

fauxtography 

faked or staged photographs (aka "Photoshopping")

soupçon 

(from French) a very small amount; a hint; a trace

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
• Oxford spelling
• N-gram
• Category:Latin_phrases
• List of Latin abbreviations
• Latin declension
• Category:English words spelled with diacritics or ligatures
• Concordancer
• KWIC
• AntConc — a freeware concordance program for Linux developed by Laurence Anthony.

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