Prentiss Riddle: Language

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New words from the Iraq war, translating Asterix, and language preservation through XML

Slate on neologisms from Gulf War II. They figure "shock and awe" is a keeper. Some of these terms already seem to have entered the popular lexicon ("regime change", "embedded" and "unilateral" journalists) while other seem to lack the metaphorical legs to have non-military applications ("FIBUA", "MOPP", "mouseholing"). Some aren't new at all but their use as military jargon is giving them new life ("cakewalk").

Literary Translation has an article on the difficulty of translating Asterix from French to English. Translating Asterix also crops up several times in John McWhorter's excellent The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. (This and the Slate article via Reenhead.)

On another topic close to John McWhorter's heart, the BBC has a brief piece on the use of digital technology in language preservation, including XML. The article suffers from the common problem of focusing on efforts to record the dead bones of a language and not mentioning the more complicated task of fostering living communities of speakers into the next generation. It makes the general digital preservation problem sound as though it were central to language survival, when in fact it is a minor annoyance next to the problem of preserving the entire immersive context on which non-lossy language transmission depends. (To add insult to injury, the article also features an illustration of a page from an English dictionary with the caption "Preserving languages for future generations".)

BBC illustration of dictionary
language 2003.04.08 link