Posts Tagged ‘Spelling’
Just enough time for one more gift idea for book lovers: “Spell It Out –The Singular Story of English Spelling”, by David Crystal. In the words of the publishers, Profile Books: Seventy-five per cent of English spelling is regular but twenty-five per cent is complicated, and in Spell It Out, our foremost linguistics expert David […]
Filed under: Books, English, Language | 2 Comments
Tags: Books, christmas gifts, David Crystal, English, Language, Spelling
The “As a Linguist” blog has a new post, Wait, who just died?, on the problematic pronunciation and spelling of Colonel Gaddafi’s name. I’ve been “translating” his name (from the Italian version, Gheddafi) just about every day since the Libyan uprising began (I work with another translator on the English version of the Italian Foreign Ministry’s website). So […]
Filed under: English, Italian, Language, Translation | 3 Comments
Tags: English, Gaddafi, Gheddafi, Italian, Language, Libya, Spelling, Translation
It seems that Italy too has got problems with spelling and punctuation, though in this case at graffiti rather than local authority level. The text in black above should read “L’orgoglio non serve”. Roughly translated, “Pride doesn’t serve any purpose”, to which an Italian Lynne Truss has responded “But apostrophes do”. This picture is from a […]
Filed under: Italian, Language | 2 Comments
Tags: graffiti, grammar, Italian, Language, punctuation, Spelling
I knew this would happen – the minute I blog about spelling, I make a spelling mistake on Twitter. The tweet was about creative and tech-savvy CV ideas, as featured in the Huffington Post. An area, I commented, where Elle Woods of Legally Blond Blonde led the way with her Harvard application on video. That’ll […]
Filed under: English, Language, Writing | Leave a Comment
Tags: CVs, English, film, Language, Spelling, Writing
Spelling bees in my bonnet (1)
I work with language, so it goes without saying (I hope) that I care about spelling. That said, I don’t think texting heralds the death of the English language and I don’t fall from my chair with horror if an email or text arrives with minor spelling mistakes. Indeed, I think texting and Twitterese are new […]
Filed under: English, Language | 6 Comments
Tags: English, Language, Spelling
Words to good effect 