Chimera words addendum
Even longer ones!
Continue reading “Chimera words addendum”Category: English
English language related
Chimera words
Adventuring myself into the diaries
Does that title strike you as odd? It does me, but one of the many fun things in reading Caroline Crane Marsh’s diaries is coming across older, now obsolete (or virtually) aspects of English, as is this use of adventure.
Continue reading “Adventuring myself into the diaries”Dear Diarist, fun is where you find it! (part 1)
Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.
From the book jacket for Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti (hard cover 2024 U.S. edition)
When I read a similar description of Alphabetical Diaries in a book review, I was intrigued about both how Heti did it and what the results were like. (You can read the “B” chapter via a link on her site.)
Continue reading “Dear Diarist, fun is where you find it! (part 1)”Now that you mention them …
All that work in identifying names in Photo-Era is paying off. I have started looking at some of the aspects of how people, but especially women, are mentioned in Photo-Era.
Continue reading “Now that you mention them …”Name that name
[Updated 2023-02-17 with chart]
Finding names automatically in texts is hard! (This is a more technical post.)
Continue reading “Name that name”A new era for an old Era
I have been working on a variety of tools to explore the contents of the monthly magazine Photo-Era, which was published from 1898 to 1932. I have just made one of those tools freely available: a way to search the text of all of the issues: Photo-Era Search.
Continue reading “A new era for an old Era”Gender association of names and nouns in English
Back when I was starting to study linguistics (in the 1980s), the syntax professors (Ivan Sag and Tom Wasow) made a point of using gender neutral names in their examples, names that can be used for both males and females, like Chris (Chris Evert and Chris Columbus), rather than John and Mary, which had typically been used in examples. The other day I was curious to see if we can get an idea of to what extent a name or a noun is used for females and males using Google Ngrams. We can, and here’s what I did.
Continue reading “Gender association of names and nouns in English”The pen’s honour
or The Case of the Brain’s Watch …
Continue reading “The pen’s honour”The Wisdom of Oz™
Using natural language processing for fun.
Continue reading “The Wisdom of Oz™”