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lang/ling blogs and fun stuff
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lang/ling blogs and fun stuff
Language Log
Mark Liberman's dangerously absorbing language and linguistics blog, with years' worth of archives to trawl through.John Wells' phonetics blog
What it says on the tin. Eclectic, informative, amusing, frequently updated.BBC Pronunciation Unit blog
Keeps you up-to-date with how foreign and idiosyncratic placenames and personal names in the news are pronounced.The Language Feed
Sally Morrison's 'weekly roundup of language news articles found around the web'. Features e-mail alerts service.Lingformant
Blog on 'the science of linguistics in the news', by Vili Manula. Available as RSS.phonoloblog
Claims to cover 'all things phonology'.blogos
News and views on languages and technology.Linguablogging
By the bespectacled Billy Clark.Text-to-speech synthesis
Provided by AT&T. Type in your message and hear it played back in a range of voices and languages.More text-to-speech synthesis
Rhetorical Systems' online TTS synthesiser. Choose from English (in a range of accents, including a Scottish one), Greek, German or Spanish.And yet more text-to-speech synthesis...
... this time from NeoSpeech, demonstrating the TTS system selected as the new voice of Steven Hawking.Highlights from Dennis Klatt's history of speech synthesis
Might not sound like much fun, but some of the synthesised speech demos are worth a listen.Linguistic 'humour'
No responsibility taken for the quality of content! Actually some of this is quite funny.Hear how Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa might have spoken
Matsumi Suzuki, director of the Japan Acoustic Lab, claims to have "analyzed the skeletal structures of the historical figures' faces" and extrapolated how their voices might have sounded on this basis. Suzuki was also involved in the development of BowLingual, an even sillier idea that bagged him an Ig Nobel Prize in 2002.Mel Blanc's vocal folds in action
The man who did the voices for Bugs Bunny, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Pie and Porky Pig performs some of his repertoire with a laryngoscope down his throat, courtesy of YouTube.WordSpy
Paul McFedries' blog listing current neologisms. Lots of good quotes about language, too.The Word Detective
Evan Morris' site on 'words and language in a humorous vein'.Sounds of the World's Animals
Find out what a pig sounds like in Vietnamese and how Estonians mimic crows.Language and Words: Trivia and Useless Facts
Most of these 'facts' are to do with quirks of English spelling and mildly interesting etymologies, but they could come in handy in a pub quiz.Forensically Speaking
An informal introduction to forensic phonetics and linguistics via Audio-Lex's newsletter.Speculative Grammarian (SpecGram)
'The premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.'Molecules with silly or unusual names
This list, compiled by Paul May, a senior lecturer in chemistry at the University of Bristol, starts with 'arsole' and doesn't really improve over the next three innuendo-laden pages.Henry's 'Silly Thoughts on Linguistics' Page
And here was me thinking students were worked hard at MIT... Some of the links are broken, thankfully.Hoover the Talking Seal
Not an instruction, but a link to an article on the world's most loquacious pinniped. Includes baffling sound clip.Joel Tropp's Jive Server
Translates standard English to 'jive talk' at the click of a mouse (please read the disclaimers before using it!).Engrish.com
Bringing (blinging?) you Engrish favourites from Japan and around the world.Page maintained by Dom Watt
Last updated: 13.3.07