English Pangrams: A quick brown fox

This famous sentence - "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" - is an example of a pangram containing all the letters of the English alphabet. According to Wikipedia, the sentence first appeared in The Michigan School Moderator in 1995. And check out these re-imaginings of the quick brown fox: Across Genres.

You can find more examples in this Wikipedia article about pangrams. It includes English pangrams, and there are pangrams in other languages too. Here are some of the English ones:

• The five boxing wizards jump quickly. 
• Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. 
• Watch "Jeopardy!", Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game.
• Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes. 
• Foxy diva Jennifer Lopez wasn't baking my quiche. 
• Then a cop quizzed Mick Jagger's ex-wives briefly. 
• Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow!

I still think the one with the fox and the dog is best!

Shakespeare Insult Generator

I've seen several different Shakespeare Insult Generators... but this is the most fun! Here's a link:

Mr. William Shakespeare's Insult Generator

The Linguistics of LOLspeak

This video shows a presentation by two linguists from Australia, Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughan, who have studied LOLCats and the language that people use when creating LOLCats. They even include a discussion of the LOLCat Bible! If you prefer to read, you will find their work online at the Open Research Library.

Here is the video; also at YouTube.

I can has language play:

Construction of Language and Identity

in LOLspeak

Resource: Alphabet Monogram

In this animated gif, you can find all the letters of the English alphabet, and numbers too!

Linguistic Family Tree

A linguistic family "tree" drawn by Minna Sundberg, and here is a larger version:

Don't just write words. Write music.

Author Gary Provost was an influential writing instructor and the author of several writing handbooks, including 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing. I'm not sure who first created this colored graphic of his paragraphs about varying sentence length, but it's very powerful! You can find out more about Gary Provost at GaryProvost.com.

Resource: The Great Language Game

As some of you may know, my favorite courses in college were always the foreign language courses (I double-majored in Classics and Slavic). I know some of you are also keen students of foreign languages, so here's a fun game to play: listen to the audio, and see if you can identity the language being spoken!

Click to play . . . The Great Language Game

What's in a name?

You can find more tools for learning about names in this post by Larry Ferlazzo: The Best Places For Students To Learn About…Their Names.

Most Popular Baby Names for Girls Since 1960

Most Popular Boys' Names Since 1960

12 German Proverbs Translated Literally Into English

There are so many fun items on this Buzzfeed list: 12 German Proverbs Translated Literally Into English. My favorite: Klappe zu. Affe tot. — Close the lid. The monkey is dead, which means "Let’s put an end to this."

Word-Unit Palindromes

You've probably heard of palindromes, which are the same whether the letters are read from left to right or from right to left. You can read more about palindromes at Wikipedia.

There are also word-unit palindromes, where you read the sentence word by word either way. Here's an example:

"Is it crazy how saying sentences backwards creates backwards sentences saying how crazy it is?"

You can find more examples here: Word-unit palindromes by Mark Nelson. I found this example in Nelson's article:

Mind your own business: Own your mind.

Meditating Jizō-sama by Sébastien Bertrand

(image at Flickr)

Resource: 19th-Century Emoticons

I found this delightful graphic at the Dangerous Minds site; it's a brief notice published in the magazine Puck in 1881 which shows emoticons. As a big fan of the smile, of course I thought this was very charming! You might enjoy exploring the list of emoticons at Wikipedia. According to the Wikipedia article on the history of emoticons, the first use of our modern smiley can be dated to 1982. :-)

Writing Technology: The Alphabet

This fascinating animated graphic depicts the evolution of the alphabet from Phoenician (Semitic) through Greek, Etruscan, several iterations of Latin, and then later European innovations. For more, see Wikipedia: The Alphabet.

(larger version)

A linguist's guide to HULK SMASH

This delightful article by James Harbeck — A linguist's guide to HULK SMASH — gives you some grammatical insight into HULKSPEAK. The conclusion: "Hulkspeak, in short, isn't quite like what a fresh-language learner or a person with limited English skills would speak. Actually, it's what you get when someone who is fluent in grammatical English decides to keep everything in English but leave off the fancy, civilizing stuff — pronouns, conjugations that tell you tidily who is doing what, articles and other particles that refer to what is and isn't already known. It's like the "dumb jock" stereotype on steroids, but somehow sympathetic: a fantasy of ripping off the clothing of civilization and grammatical niceties and letting loose. Turn off the brains — just enough — and turn on the brawn."

Names of States

Here's a wonderful article that gives information about the names of all 50 states, plus a map showing the different types of name origins: Here's What All 50 State Names Actually Mean.

Oklahoma: From a Choctaw word, meaning "red people," which breaks down as okla "nation, people" + homma "red." Choctaw scholar Allen Wright, later principal chief of the Choctaw Nation, coined the word. 

A World of Languages

As this infographic explains, "There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 milion people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people. We represent each language within black borders and then provide the number of native speakers (in millions) by country. The colour of those countries shows how languages have taken root in many different regions."

You can see the full-sized image here.

Here is a close-up showing English. The different colors are because it is spoken on different continents!

Language Resource: European Word Translator

The European Word Translator is a mash-up using Google Translate, and a very creative one! You type a word into the "Translate it!" box, and then the translations show up on the map for the language of each country. If you're not up on your geography, you can hover over each word to see what language it is.

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

If you are interested in what happens in your brain when you read and when you write, this is the book for you: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

The author, Maryanne Wolf (see video interview below), specializes in dyslexia, and the book culminates in a discussion of how what we know about reading and writing and the human brain gives us clues to understanding dyslexia. Highly recommended!

Table of Contents:

• How the brain learned to read
• Reading lessons from Proust and the squid
• How the brain adapted itself to read: the first writing systems
• The birth of an alphabet and Socrates' protests
• How the brain learns to read over time
• The beginnings of reading development, or not
• The "natural history" of reading development: connecting the parts of the young reading brain
• The unending story of reading's development
• When the brain can't learn to read
• Dyslexia's puzzle and the brain's design
• Genes, gifts, and dyslexia
• From the reading brain to "what comes next"

And here's an interview with the author, Maryanne Wolf: Embracing Dyslexia. There's also a good article at Mind/Shift: Understanding Dyslexia and the Reading Brain in Kids.

A Whisper of Ninjas

English vocabulary: yes, it can be fun!

Language Map: Tiny Lobsters

This is one of a series of maps about differences in American English: differences in vocabulary and differences in pronunciation. So what do you call those tiny lobsters? Crawfish, crayfish, or crawdads? Oklahoma tends to say crawdad! More maps here: 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From One Another.

Ghost of Future Perfect Conditional

Here's a great grammar graphic for the holidays! :-)

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Future Imperfect Conditional," said the Spirit. "I bring news of what would have been going to happen, if you were not to have been going to change your ways."