Category Archives: Linguistics

你好

Posted on 16th February, 2012 by Xophmeister

My other half is Chinese, so naturally I am learning Mandarin — and some Shanghainese — from her. (What can I say: I’m the scholarly type and she’s a good teacher!) Anyway, like, I’m sure, many a Westerner embarking on … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal, Phonetics and Phonology, Random, 中文 | 2 Comments

My Friend Lily

Posted on 8th February, 2012 by Xophmeister

Here’s a curious bit of syntax.

Posted in Linguistics, Syntax | 2 Comments

The World’s Prose Mix

Posted on 23rd January, 2012 by Xophmeister

According to Wikipedia, at the time of writing there are a total of 205 sovereign states; including those that are disputed. That’s at least 205 different cultures, so the question is: Are there any concentrations of peoples in the world … Continue reading →

Posted in Ethnography, Random | Leave a comment

Apostrophe’s War

Posted on 16th January, 2012 by Xophmeister

With a title like “Apostrophe’s War”, you’ll be forgiven in thinking that this is yet another trite rant on the supposed abuse of the apostrophe in contemporary written English. However, those who know me as a linguist may think I … Continue reading →

Posted in Linguistics, Orthography and Grammatology, Rants | Leave a comment

Endianness

Posted on 10th January, 2012 by Xophmeister

In computer science, there’s a concept known as “endianness”. It refers to the order in which data is stored: “big endian” means that we start with the most significant bit and move to the least; “little endian” is the other … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Orthography and Grammatology, Random | Leave a comment

Building a Better Search Engine

Posted on 7th October, 2011 by Xophmeister

I should qualify this post’s somewhat shameless title with the fact that I am considering domain-specific applications; inspired by a question I posted on Stack Overflow. I make no pretence in ousting the Googles of this world!

Posted in Database Design, Day Job, Linguistics, NLP, Oracle, Phonetics and Phonology, PL/SQL, Software Engineering, SQL, User Experience | Tagged | 2 Comments