Most of the bloggers I read regularly fall into just a few categories:  

  • law professors or economists who comment a lot on current events and pop culture 
  • mothers at home, including but not limited to homeschoolers
  • Catholic blogs, of the canon-law-nerd, theological flavor
  • scientists and engineers commenting on technology and science. 

But that’s not all; there are a few odd ducks in there, and one of those is Language Log.  Linguistics, vagaries of the English language, law related to language use, all kinds of interesting stuff if you like phonemes, words, phrases, sentences, rhetoric, etc.  as much as I do.  

Did you ever take French?  I did, for a long time, and at one point I was fluent. (Who knows how I’d do in a conversation now; I overheard a mother and her 12- or 13-year-old son speaking French to each other just yesterday, and I tried to eavesdrop, but my rustiness and the poor acoustics combined to prevent me from understanding any of it at all.)  Anyway, if you did, and maybe if you didn’t, you’ll remember the story of l’Académie Française and its attempts to make the French stop saying English-sounding things like “software” and “email” — of course, these weren’t an issue when I was taking French in high school, I think my teacher told us the problem back then were words like “weekend.”  

Anyway, if that makes you wax as nostalgic as Proust in a bakery, Language Log has a very interesting post for youabout the Académie’s most recent decrees regarding French regional languages.  Might also interest you, as they point out over there, if you are interested in the legal status of English here in the U.S. (fact:  it is not our official language, something that I once tried to point out in a class in France during a classroom debate about the proper limits of free speech.  None of the French people there, and I think hardly any of the Americans, believed me.)

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