Thesaurus

The second best way to enhance your English vocabulary is to read a thesaurus.

The best way is to read music reviews. Here’s what Robert Christgau has to say about Yo La Tengo’s Electr-O-Pura:

Brimful of punk, fuzz, feedback, noise, and the lovingly amped squelches of fingers sliding off strings, their seventh album is a subcultural tour de force, luxuriating so sybaritically in guitar sound that I’m reluctant to mention that the tunes are pretty good. That’s why it’s the best record they’ve ever made, though.

I thought that “sybaritically” is a typo.

Obnoxious Firefox Licensing

Mozilla Firefox comes in many localized versions for many different languages, which is a good thing.

Mozilla Firefox has built-in spell-checking, which is also a good thing.

So, for example, if you download the installer for English (US) or for Lithuanian and install it and go write an email in GMail or edit a Wikipedia article in one of these languages, you’ll immediately see your spelling errors. This makes perfect sense.

But if you download an installer localized for English (UK), Catalan or Hebrew, you won’t see your spelling errors. The Firefox binary has spell-checking capabilities, but the installer doesn’t include the actual dictionary. Firefox-compatible dictionaries for these languages exist, and they are licensed as Free Software (GPL or LGPL), and you can add them manually after installing (right-click -> Languages -> Add Dictionaries), but here comes the ridiculous part: The guys behind getfirefox.com refuse to include those dictionaries in the installer. The reason, apparently, is that to be included in the installer, the dictionary must be 300% compatible with Firefox’s license, because Firefox is tri-licensed as GPL/LGPL/MPL, and a dictionary that is GPL-only is not good enough.

It is hard enough to convince people to install Firefox in the first place; convincing them to install additional dictionaries, plug-ins, add-ons etc. tends to frustrate them even more. Contrary to the belief which is popular among Firefox power users, most people are not add-on junkies and don’t right-click everywhere. So, even though Firefox users in London, Barcelona and Jerusalem can see Firefox menus in their respective languages, they have dead-weight spell-checking code on their hard drives, because they didn’t get a spelling dictionary in the installation, and many of them don’t even know that a Firefox-compatible spelling dictionary for their language exists.

Is this obnoxious licensing requirement really required? Isn’t Free Software licensing supposed to make distributing software easier?

When i told my wife Hadar about it, she said that it is as ridiculous as the stuff i tell her about DRM.

See also:

• Mozilla bug 487596 – Hebrew localized installer doesn’t include Hebrew spelling dictionary
• Dictionaries discussion at the Mozilla Developers Wiki

Mistyping

I saw a Hebrew speaker typing the word “mistypiping” in an email. She meant to type “mistyping”. Unintended contextual humor.

I told her that “typo” is the usual English word. “Mistyping” exists: it appears in Merriam-Webster’s list of words with the mis- prefix and Oxford English Dictionary says that it exists since 1977. But it is obviously rare.

She eventually wrote “typo”, but wasn’t too happy about it. She said that it’s the first time that she sees the word “typo”, and it would be much harder for her to understand it if she received it in an email.

If you love Esperanto, you must be really happy now to be reading this, as this is exactly how Esperanto works, or at least supposed to work: as few roots as possible and as much regularity in prefixes and suffixes as possible.

Reality – Forbiding

Swimming Forbiding

Well, at least it’s not forboding.

More China

Tackling Qingdao’s invading algae, BBC News today:

Locals say the algae has never been so thick here – agricultural and industrial pollution are thought to be responsible.

But China, embarrassed by the most vivid proof yet of its environmental problems, says the algae is a natural occurrence, and blames the sea for being too salty, the sun for being too hot.

At a news conference earlier in the day one official suggested that algae could be good for you.

“The Japanese eat it,” she said.

There’s a problem with Engrish: When an English sentence that a Chinese or a Japanese person says has blatant grammar mistakes or very weird words, then it’s clear that he may not be communicating what he meant. But what if the grammar is correct, but the content is weird? You’ll never know.

Gangsta bank!

The phattest bank in the world: Da Afghanistan Bank!

Breach

At 01:45 am i received this SMS from a number i didn’t recognize:

hey amir. the police arrived and breached into the car while we found the person who work in nds and left is car here.-Y. Y.

The sender wrote his full name and it is Israeli; it is kept for privacy. NDS is the company in which i still work.

I already slept, so i ignored the beeps from the phone and only read it in the morning. First i was panicky – police? car? breach?, then i was angry – why does he bother to write in English if he can’t?

My car was parked outside and everything was OK. I called him and he didn’t have any idea what was it about. Maybe he works for the leasing company. I don’t know.

Why can’t people just write in their own natural mother tongue? I work in an environment where English is the default and sometimes it is understandable, because it is an international company, and you can’t expect that a CC’d guy in India or Florida will understand Hebrew. But sometimes it goes way over the top.

I to twist only began to teach English

Vegetarian spam again. I just can’t stand the beauty of it and i have to share. More importantly: Please! Anyone! Spam experts! There must be software that creates such texts for spamming – what is it called? Where do i get it? The grammar it uses is wrong English, but there seems to be some kind of logic behind it – i want to learn it!

Will there be time to give the pair of answers?recently glanced in the guest book and such saw here gibberish: phentermine fioricet cheapest fioricet and news fioricet phentermine fioricet or buy fioricet online canada fioricet buy whether there are here people which will be able to render support on this not easy business I ask to forgive me for the e construction of suggestions is faithful not always, I to twist only began to teach English, by nationality to twist I Georgian, understand as in schools of my country teach this wonderful from languages :( all while on, time, think in my absence will get new reports
Ps. I found some references which to me interesting steel buy fioricet online canada fioricet buy and searched through google on demand : fioricet buy fioricet effects,? here this site with the heap of Linkov.
what is ?

English Poetry

Hadar asked me to entertain her.

So i read aloud lyrics from Neil Young’s Zuma to her. No music – just recited poetry.

They are quite beautiful to read aloud. Try it.

It’s really fine poetry. Simple to understand, rhymes well. It’s something with which people can easily identify. Hadar said that she didn’t realize that he writes songs about love, too. Me neither.

I sincerely hope that these lyrics will be studied in English classes everywhere. The English language deserves it.

Like this I feel

Talking about Hebraisms in English … I just received a lovely email:

if a user is use BPE than after 3 month he will contact us ( once per life ) to get a license

“Is use” should be “is using” and “than” should be “then”, but the best part is “once per life”.

I am not mocking the person who wrote it. It is wrong to demand that everyone would know English; English is not inherently better or more important than any other language. Contrariwise: I think that email between speakers of one language should be written in that language and not in English, unless there’s a very good reason for that; thus – ideally – Hebrew speakers should write email in Hebrew, and so there would be no reason to make mistakes.

This is just a nice example of a Hebraism. Or maybe not even a Hebraism, but just a non-Anglicism. I somehow understood what the guy meant by “once per life”; I am not sure that everyone would understand it.

Mother Tongue

HLA says on my new Hebrew blog: “It must be noted that it is much more fun for me to read in Hebrew.”

I’m glad to optimize for fun (PDF file).

But it must be noted, that it is not easier for me to read in Hebrew than it is in English. And it is not easier for me to read in Russian than in Hebrew or in English. I can read these three pretty much equally well. And it’s not necessarily good.

I hardly have a mother tongue.

Russian is probably still the best shot if i have to name my mother tongue. When i made my contribution to English Speech Accent Archive (requires QuickTime for audio), i was classified as a Russian speaker; it was academic, but rather artificial. When i speak Hebrew i sometimes makes funny mistakes, Russianisms; being a linguist i become aware of them, but a moment too late. The most common such mistake must be saying phrases such as “We went with my my friend to a movie.” It usually means “I went with a friend to a movie” – two people. In Russian it is perfectly correct to say it – Мы ходили с другом в кино, but in Hebrew and English it is weird. Occasionally i say “да, я, но” instead of “yes, i, but”.

But then i also have occasional Hebraisms slipping into my Russian and English speech and Anglicisms slipping into Hebrew and Russian.

When i read texts about politics and and news in Russian, it feels differently. I can say that it feels more lively and expressive, but i can’t say that it’s easier.

So i hardly have any mother tongue.

Which is probably not that good.

Fob

I studied a new English word! Ya mama!

The word is “fob”. Definition in Merriam-Webster:

1 : WATCH POCKET
2 : a short strap, ribbon, or chain attached especially to a pocket watch
3 : an ornament attached to a fob chain

I learnt it from UK’s new airport security measures. It allows “keys (but no electrical key fobs)”. Among other things it means that you can’t take you disk-on-key a.k.a USB flash drive and probably any other USB gadget into the plane cabin.

Several strange things:

1. In that sense, fob should have meant “key holder“, but it doesn’t – see above.
2. The first two native English speakers that i asked about this whole thing didn’t know what am i talking about. They heard the word “fob” from me for the first time. (They are both Americans, however.)
3. The 1947 edition of the Oxford Pocket Dictionary marks this word as “historical”, but the latest Merriam-Webster does not.
4. Blogger’s spelling checker recognizes “fob”, but not “fobs”.
5. Most importantly: Are these security regulations written for Average Joe Tourist? Or are they intentionally obscure?

Jule

Serbian	Јун	Јул
Hebrew	יוני	יולי
Russian	Июнь	Июль
English	June	July

In all languages there’s a difference of one letter. So why doesn’t English have June and Jule or Juny and July?

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Oh (edit): I totally forgot the original, which is very important:

Latin

Iūnius

Iūlius