MARC formatting conventions and US practice put romanized forms in the ”regular” MARC fields, with parallel fields for the original scripts to support systems with the capability to handle one or both scripts. However, most library systems still cannot accept the entire Unicode “repertoire” of characters for all scripts and some still cannot accept any non-Latin scripts.

There is a core part of our linguistic competence that is fixed by biology (perhaps by low level biophysical principles), but this provides just a basic skeleton which is fleshed out in different ways on a conversation-by-conversation basis. To shift to a monetary metaphor, there are some common coins, but we also have the ability to mint new coins on the fly in collaboration with our discourse partners, to control which of those common coins are in circulation at any given time, and to coordinate and precisify the shared meanings of those common coins that are in use. As we will see, for most linguistic common coins the meaning is vastly underdetermined. I will suggest possible ways in which coins are minted and their values determined as discourse participants form dynamic communicative partnerships, resulting (if we really must deploy the term 'language') in what we might call micro-languages.

A topic like this one is hard to interpret. But for a literary scholar, that’s a plus. I want this technique to point me toward something I don’t yet understand, and I almost never find that the results are too ambiguous to be useful. The problematic topics are the intuitive ones — the ones that are clearly about war, or seafaring, or trade. I can’t do much with those.

The obvious question is how one manages to distinguish among summary, analysis, argument, and interpretation. E.g.

With the aid of a rag tag crew of adventurers, a young man rescues a princess from an evil empire and discovers his destiny to become a member of a dying order of knights.

A young man helps a rebel leader escape from an imperial prison and participates in an pitched battle to save the rebels' military base.

I assume you recognize the story, and I think most people would say the first summary is more accurate. Why? The second one is certainly not inaccurate. It simply downplays the "hero's journey" aspect and portrays the film as depicting a political and collective activity.

Founded under the editorship of the antiquary W J Thoms, the primary intention of Notes and Queries was, and still remains, the asking and answering of readers' questions. It is devoted principally to English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism.

Ordinary discourse recognizes several different kinds of things as possible objects of definition, and it recognizes several kinds of activity as defining a thing. To give a few examples, we speak of a commission as defining the boundary between two nations; of the Supreme Court as defining, through its rulings, “person” and “citizen”; of a chemist as discovering the definition of gold, and the lexicographer, that of ‘cool’; of a participant in a debate as defining the point at issue; and of a mathematician as laying down the definition of “group.” Different kinds of things are objects of definition here: boundary, legal status, substance, word, thesis, and abstract kind. Moreover, the different definitions do not all have the same goal: the boundary commission may aim to achieve precision; the Supreme Court, fairness; the chemist and the lexicographer, accuracy; the debater, clarity; and the mathematician, fecundity. The standards by which definitions are judged are thus liable to vary from case to case. The different definitions can perhaps be subsumed under the Aristotelian formula that a definition gives the essence of a thing. But this only highlights the fact that “to give the essence of a thing” is not a unitary kind of activity.

This book features a collection of essays by Donald Davidson that explore the relations between language and the world, speaker intention and linguistic meaning, language and mind, mind and body, mind and world, and mind and other minds. Davidson’s underlying thesis is that we are acquainted directly with the world, that thought emerges through interpersonal communication in a shared material world, and that language depends on communication. He also finds interconnections between his views and those of major philosophers of the past.

Writing Without Words is a project that explores methods of visually representing text and visualizes the differences in writing styles of various authors.

London-based artist Stefanie Posavec has a gift for words. Or for the lack thereof, to be exact. Her latest project, Writing Without Words, explores the literary world when its most important building blocks are removed by visually representing text.

Model theory began with the study of formal languages and their interpretations, and of the kinds of classification that a particular formal language can make. Mainstream model theory is now a sophisticated branch of mathematics (see the entry on first-order model theory). But in a broader sense, model theory is the study of the interpretation of any language, formal or natural, by means of set-theoretic structures, with Alfred Tarski's truth definition as a paradigm. In this broader sense, model theory meets philosophy at several points, for example in the theory of logical consequence and in the semantics of natural languages.

This is a straight port from the CLD (Compact Language Detector) library embedded in Google's Chromium browser. The library detects the language from provided UTF8 text (plain text or HTML). It's implemented in C++, with very basic Python bindings.

In a multilingual Semantic Web, authors might write in precise, expressive varieties of diverse languages. Do such controlled languages exist? Of 41 candidates, just 4 were (1) designed for multiple domains and genres and (2) documented enough for evaluation. A sample of Web statements on health and human rights revealed limited expressivity or precision in each language. The most expressive one avoided structural ambiguity but allowed semantic ambiguity that could frustrate human and machine comprehension. The possibility of a practical Web-scale controlled language remains undemonstrated but unrefuted.

The ideas I cite here, represented by the Hermenuetic Circle, definitely apply to TC39′s understanding of the text of ECMA-262, as well as various canonical texts in Computer Science. The committee works best when it spirals in on a solid design, avoiding local and premature optimizations and pessimizations.

VerbNet (VN) (Kipper-Schuler 2006) is the largest on-line verb lexicon currently available for English. It is a hierarchical domain-independent, broad-coverage verb lexicon with mappings to other lexical resources such as WordNet (Miller, 1990; Fellbaum, 1998), Xtag (XTAG Research Group, 2001), and FrameNet (Baker et al., 1998). VerbNet is organized into verb classes extending Levin (1993) classes through refinement and addition of subclasses to achieve syntactic and semantic coherence among members of a class. Each verb class in VN is completely described by thematic roles, selectional restrictions on the arguments, and frames consisting of a syntactic description and semantic predicates with a temporal function, in a manner similar to the event decomposition of Moens and Steedman (1988).

Proposition Bank I was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2004T14 and ISBN 1-58563-304-6.

This is a semantic annotation of the Wall Street Journal section of Treebank-2. More specifically, each verb occurring in the Treebank has been treated as a semantic predicate and the surrounding text has been annotated for arguments and adjuncts of the predicate. The verbs have also been tagged with coarse grained senses and with inflectional information. This work was done in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at the University of Pennsylvania.

The original PropBank project, funded by ACE, created a corpus of text annotated with information about basic semantic propositions. Predicate-argument relations were added to the syntactic trees of the Penn Treebank. This resource is now available via LDC.

SemLink is a project whose aim is to link together different lexical resources via a set of mappings. These mappings will make it possible to combine the different information provided by these different lexical resources for tasks such as inferencing. We also plan to use the mappings to aid in semi-automatic extension of each resources coverage, to increase the overall overlap in coverage. Currently, we are creating mappings between the following resources:

PropBank: A corpus of one million words of English text, annotated with argument role labels for verbs; and a lexicon defining those argument roles on a per-verb basis.
VerbNet: A lexicon that groups verbs based on their semantic/syntactic linking behavior.
FrameNet: A lexicon based on frame semantics.
WordNet: A lexicon that describes semantic relationships (such as synonymy and hyperonymy) between individual words.

Move is a modern and simple programming language which can run on virtually any computer. Move is primarily aimed towards people not previously familiar with programming computers.

This chapter studies the use of textual features based on systemic functional linguistics, for genre-based text categorization. We describe feature sets that represent different types of conjunctions and modal assessment, which together can partially indicate how different genres structure text and may prefer certain classes of attitudes towards propositions in the text. This enables analysis of large-scale rhetorical differences between genres by examining which features are important for classification. The specific domain we studied comprises scientific articles in historical and experimental sciences (paleontology and physical chemistry, respectively). We applied the SMO learning algorithm, which with our feature set achieved over 83% accuracy for classifying articles according to field, though no field-specific terms were used as features. The most highly-weighted features for each were consistent with hypothesized methodological differences between historical and experimental sciences, thus lending empirical evidence to the recent philosophical claim of multiple scientific methods.

The Hip-Hop Word Count is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day.

The Hip-Hop Word Count describes the technical details of most of your favorite hip-hop songs. This data can then be used to not only figure out interesting stats about the songs themselves, but also describe the culture behind the music.

This interface allows you to search the Google Books data in many ways that are much more advanced than what is possible with the simple Google Books interface. You can search by word, phrase, substring, lemma, part of speech, synonyms, and collocates (nearby words). You can copy the data to other applications for further analysis, which you can't do with the regular Google Books interface. And you can quickly and easily compare the data in two different sections of the corpus (for example, adjectives describing women or art or music in the 1960s-2000s vs the 1870s-1910s).

Accentuate.us uses statistics to predict where special characters are needed on a language-by-language basis.

William Empson's review of Raymond Williams' _Keywords_. "The book is continually interesting; never more so, from my point of view, than when it is plainly wrong; but it is usually right, I could not deny."

What does linguistics have to offer to the understanding of "public language," and vice-versa? What is the public, anyway? How does public language adapt to its material & social settings? What's the effect of new media on the language of public discourse?

At Humanities, Ammon Shea reports on the best damn thing I’ve read about in a while. It’s a dictionary, but a special dictionary. Let me explain.

Now, as everyone knows, a “perfect” dictionary is impossible. First of all, as Shea points out, any dictionary is out of date before it is finished, as it will not incorporate words or usages added to a language during the duration of editorial revision. Second, no dictionary could be truly comprehensive. Why not? Well,

One might very well say that a perfect dictionary would include all the words in a language. But if this were so, it would include not only the hundreds of thousands of common and not-so-common terms found in an unabridged dictionary, but also several million scientific words that are used by only a handful of professionals. To include all possible words would swamp the vernacular of the language in a sea of jargon and specialized terminology.

Before you start waving fingers, let me concede that these first two problems have been diminished by online practices and digital media. Using a wiki-model database and crowdsourcing, the duration between compiling and publishing can be eliminated. What’s more, since there is no scarcity of material support – no maximum amount of paper to be printed upon – online dictionaries can hold the swamp of vernacular language without bursting. For the sake of argument, let’s even grant that a suitable editorial practice can be devised to make sure that the resulting dictionary doesn’t get soppy.

Even so, there’s a third problem. There always is.

Dictionaries are intended to reflect a language as it is used, whether spoken or written, and this can never be done in anything less than an incomplete fashion. In the United States alone there are now hundreds of thousands of books being published every year. To read all of them (and many are doubtless not worth reading) and keep track of all of the word usage and meanings within would require an army of erudite madmen.

Gotcha, hasn’t he?

If we include spoken instances of the language and online text, we’d need to record and analyze every usage of every word uttered, written, painted or scrawled on every surface, sign, screen or page by everyone everywhere instantly. Such a dictionary belongs in the world of speculative fiction because the idea of a dictionary is, at its core, a speculative fiction. That’s what makes it sexy.

But let’s get back to the good news. Evidently, despite all the vexing problems mentioned above, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto is attempting to create a perfect dictionary, one that includes not only every single word in a language, but every meaning conveyed by each of those words in every context in which it has ever appeared as written by every known native speaker.

There’s a trick to it, of course. You’ve got to start with a dead language.

The lexicographic work in question is the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), currently being compiled at the University of Toronto. This team of researchers, now led by Antonette diPaolo Healey, is working from a corpus that contains every known piece of Anglo-Saxon text (some three thousand items) and is fully searchable by computer.

Four million words, each formed out of the twenty-two letters of the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, and amounting to something like thirty-three to thirty-five thousand headwords. Nothing left out, everything included.

Shea’s article goes on to explain why we need such a dictionary. Turns out there are plenty of reasons: it will shake up Old English lexicography; it represents a new standard in using electronic searching for corpus study; it collates a language from the most pedestrian materials – wills, land records – along with revered epic poetry and engravings on stone and jewelry. Toronto’s project leader, Antonette diPaolo Healey, thinks that the DOE will also be of use to social historians and economists studying topics such as class structure and early taxation.

But that’s not what interests Shea:

After listing all these reasonable arguments for why we need a dictionary of Old English [Healey] added, almost as an afterthought “Plus, it’s our language.”

It is our language indeed [...] This makes me think how odd it is that we are such ardent admirers of museums full of partially reconstructed bone fragments, taken from animals that are millions of years removed from us, and yet we find it so difficult to warm to Old English. While it is true that this is a dead language, it has died so recently (at least compared with the dinosaurs whose fossils are perennially alluring) that the corpse is still warm.

You can see the roots and traces of our language, evident even in the words that did not quite survive until the present day. Bealofus (liable to sin) did not last into our vocabulary, having been pushed out by the upstart and Latinate peccable (we apparently do not need more than a single word for this concept). But the bealoful of yesteryear became the baleful of today, and so even though bealofus lost the evolutionary battle it still tickles the familiar to see it there.

Hold up. Sure, I like what you’re saying. But isn’t the “tickle of the familiar” already there in several well-annotated etymological dictionaries of the extinct component languages that combine to form the family of modern English? And why does this product have to be our own for it to be deemed worthwhile? What if you’re not an English speaker? What if this was a dictionary of Etruscan, Nahuatl or Khitan – wouldn’t those be also equally perfect, equally valuable?

While I share the enthusiasm that motivates Shea’s rhapsody, I don’t understand his question. The value of the DOE should be obvious – it’s sort of a beautiful thing to do. Asking why we need it is like asking why we need drawings of perfect circles, why we need clocks that keep time precisely for a thousand years, why we need daredevils. It’s an embodied fantasy of completion, preciseness, perfection. There’s something archaic about that pursuit, more Pythagorean than postmodern. Perfection is beguiling.

And whatever it may be to lexicographers, the finalized DOE promises to be something everyone admires: a sheer human feat – harmless, ingenious, noble. Maybe the desire to create or witness feats of human ingenuity is a little embarrassing, but it’s also something we should like about ourselves. I mean, at the end of the day, what else is there in the human personality to counterbalance our baleful liability to sin?

It is possible, though not simple, to read and write information in languages other than English.

This document describes SPARQL/Update, an update language for RDF graphs. It uses a syntax derived form SPARQL. Update operations are performed on a collection of graphs in a Graph Store. Operations are provided to change existing RDF graphs as well as create and remove graphs with the Graph Store.

We need to partition the idea of extensibility into two parts: extending the platform vs. extending the language.

This dictionary is a collection of photographs of words, found in your everyday environment.

Multilingual RDF descriptions of human languages.

The Information Economy MetaLangage (IEML) is a formal language for the expression of semantic sets. It is designed to denote formally - or to address - concepts as semantic sets.

In a dramatic turn of international fiscal events, it would appear that well-off Chinese men are gearing up to acquire American mail order brides. (Ladies, consider the socialized health insurance!) A hacked version of Skype and some brute-force language translation make this potentially viable.

I was particularly intrigued by the “How to add the foreign woman?” link which, once automatically translated, reveals the touching story of “Qin Xiaomei and joes” wherein Qin Xiaomei and/or joes gushes “We like Jiubie reunion of lovers, the two sides across the ocean, the talk of Tongtongkuaikuai miss each other’s feelings.”

Poetry electric.

It’s enough to make me as well want to marry Qin Xiaomei and/or joes.

Related:No Related Post

The "plagiarism" flap over Barack Obama is bogus and overstated. It makes me think worse about whoever is pushing this complaint, rather than about Obama himself.

Conceivably Obama would have been wiser to introduce his recent discourse on the role of "hope" by saying, "As my friend the governor of Massachusetts has often pointed out...." But please: A candidate on the stump utters tens of thousands of words every single day. Few of those can be "original" in any deep sense. For many of the words, even the most brilliant candidate relies on help from people whose job is to think of newer and better ways to make the campaign's point.* We should be suspicious of candidates who don't seek this kind of help; it suggests that they are naive about the tradeoffs, triage, and delegation necessary to run a campaign well, let alone an Administration.

The classic campaign stump speech, in its low-rent version, is a memorized mish-mash of things the candidate has already said. In its high-rent version, it's an improvised and steadily evolving mish-mash of things the candidate has already said -- but slightly retuned with each delivery, to reflect the news and the location and the latest charge and countercharge. It's also slightly altered or enriched with each delivery, to include the latest anecdote or aphorism or snappy phrase or moving line that the candidate, or someone around him, has come across that might help push the campaign's main theme. Unless a candidate is a total robot, giving the very same speech time after time, he or she is inevitably grabbing whatever idea, illustration, or phrase is at hand. Again, not to do this is to suggest that a presidential candidate is not quite ready for the job.

Moreover, on the specific Patrick/Obama point at issue: it's not as if no one had thought of this argument (about hope and inspiration), or these examples -- FDR, JFK, MLK Jr -- before Deval Patrick uttered them. Speechwriters could hardly exist without this theme or these illustrations!

Talk about American resolve in the dark days, and you're going to talk about Lincoln and FDR -- plus George Washington at Valley Forge, if you have a little more time to fill. Talk about American national ambition, and you're going to talk about the westward movement across the frontier and the Apollo Project's race to the moon. Talk about American opportunity, and you're going to talk about the GI Bill. Talk about American resolve and determination, and you're going to talk about Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Soviet regime. Talk about the power of ideas, and... [take the home speechwriter-aptitude test! Fill in this blank. One possible answer explained here.]

The list goes on and leads to this: Talk about hope and inspiration, and you are going to use the examples both Patrick and Obama used -- and that I, as just one political speechwriter among legions, have used many times.

A plagiarism charge stings when it underscores the idea that the plagiarist is trying to mask some deficiency: The D student looks over the A student's shoulder to copy during a test. Does any sane person actually think that Barack Obama is deficient in expressing himself? His first book was a "real" book, of a quality most "real" writers would be proud to have matched. (The second one was more of a campaign book, and less in his own voice.) To the extent this flurry is designed to introduce subliminal concerns -- and, let's face it, concerns tied to racial stereotypes -- that Obama is not quite deserving intellectually, a flim-flam man, it really is contemptible.

I respect and admire Joe Biden, but his "similar" case in 1988 was completely different, and actually bad. On the stump he was telling someone else's personal story -- as it happened, Neil Kinnock's -- as if it were his own. That is not the kind of detail you just swap into and out of a stump speech to make it more powerful. Indeed, the mystery is how anyone could actually utter words -- "My daddy was a coal miner," "there I was, at Valley Forge" -- knowing them not to be true. And -- mentioning again that I respect and admire Biden -- the incident wounded him because in fact he had been a weak student in college and law school. Not, say, the president of the Harvard Law Review.

And it's different when people whose job is writing -- people who know very well that the exact phrasing of ideas is each writer's brand and property, and who have plenty of time, in private, to check and perfect the phrases on which they will be judged -- copy others' work. I'm a hawk on punishing them. But to think that this is anything like a candidate's constant search for ways to explain his message, in real time, is unrealistic and wrong. As someone has already said, in an interview or post somewhere whose insight I'm stealing, It's fine for the Hillary Clinton campaign to adopt "Fired up! Ready to go!" as its new motto, and it's fine for Barack Obama to use this way of explaining the importance of hope.

______
*(Disclosure -- or, if you choose, standing to speak: I was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter during his general-election campaign in 1976 and then for two years in the White House.)

In the trials, the attorneys disputed the applicable meaning of the term event.

Catalogue of medieval Irish narratives & literary enumerations.

A digital edition of the complete contents of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials.

It involved Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on the power of words in presidential leadership.

Each made his or her respective point clearly, calmly, and appealingly. This was not an ambush or a gotcha or a gaffe or an unintentionally revealing quicksilver exchange. It was the expression of thought-through and well expressed views. And on the merits I think it left the Clinton camp at a terrible disadvantage.

Clinton, after pointing out that Obama voted for an energy bill that was full of the special-interest tax breaks he now criticizes in speeches:So you know, words are not actions.
And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action. You know, what we've got to do is translate talk into action and feeling into reality. I have a long record of doing that, of taking on the very interests that you have just rightly excoriated because of the overdue influence that they have in our government. And you know, probably nobody up here has been the subject of more incoming fire from the Republicans and the special interests, so I think I know exactly what I'm walking into and I am prepared to take them on.

Then, after an appeal by John Edwards to the Teddy Roosevelt tradition of head-on trust-busting, this response from Obama:Look, I think it's easier to be cynical and just say, "You know what, it can't be done because Washington's designed to resist change." But in fact there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better, and I think we're in one of those moments right now. I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes -- not incremental changes, not small changes....
[T]he truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Of course each of them was right. Each expressed part of the job of a president, or any leader. Words and deeds. Talk and action. Poetry and prose. Presidents obviously do best when they can do both.

But only Obama captured what is unique about a president's role. A President's actions matter -- Lyndon Johnson with his legislation, Richard Nixon with his opening to China -- but lots of other people can help shape policies. A President's words often matter more, and only he -- or she -- can express them. Grant led the Union Army, but Abraham Lincoln, in addition to selecting Grant, wrote and delivered his inaugural and Gettysburg addresses. Long before Franklin Roosevelt actually did anything about the Great Depression, his first inaugural address ("the only thing we have to fear...") was important in itself. The same was true of Winston Churchill just after he succeeded Neville Chamberlain. It would be years before the Nazi advance would be contained, but Churchill's words and bearing were indispensable to Britain's recovery.

Certainly Hillary Clinton knows this. And she knows the political record of poetry-vs-prose matchups in the past. Kennedy vs. Nixon. Carter vs. Ford (yes, Carter was a man of healing-America poetry in those days). Reagan vs. Mondale. And of course the first Candidate Clinton against his Democratic rival Paul Tsongas and then against the first President Bush. She is playing the hand she holds, but it's worse than the other hand.

One extra thought on this point, from Jimmy Carter himself. This is the way he described the words-vs-action tension in the major speech that laid out his human rights policy, the commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977. I am partial to this formulation, because I was involved in putting it together. But I think it, like Obama's comment, is closer to what Americans expect of their president than what Hillary Clinton has been left with, the "let me handle the details" appeal. Especially what they'll expect of the next president:

We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect--a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon.
But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."

The project will produce a CD-ROM containing a fully-searchable, digital version of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language Based Mainly on Old and Middle Irish.

his page list codes for accented letters and other characters. The list is organized by type.

A major component of the proposed work concerns developing the foundations of bi-directional programming languages, in which every program denotes a pair of functions---one for extracting a view of some complex data structure, and another for ``putting ba

Taxonomy of emoji characters supported by the major Japanese characters, with proposed mappings to Unicode.

Langue represents the “work of a collective intelligence”, which is both internal to each individual and beyond the will of any individual to change. Parole designates individual events of language use manifesting each time a speaker’s ephemeral ind

Common Ground has also become extensively involved in software development, built upon the Common Ground Markup Language (CGML).

Delete! removes all the written signals which normally try to attract the passerby's attention.

With the removal of all traces of text from the photographs, the project explores the manifestation of power between large groups of people in the form of public and semi-public language.

Pulp fiction cover art with the text removed.

Make the characters say what you want them to say!

From Gillian Wearing to Angus Fairhurst - Man holding red colour.

Street signs & license plate text removed.

Tool for designing one's own icons or emoji, for use on one's blog.

Mamet couldn't write dialog like this.

This specification describes the syntax and semantics of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language, a language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents.

A dot plot visualization that conveys the number of results obtained from Google search queries for words of the form a{n}h{m}.

Using the OKN system, people in Africa, Asia and Latin America can create digital content in their own language, which is then exchanged with others through networks of existing community Access Points staffed by what OKN calls ‘Community Reporters’.

Let's all stop using the phrase "user-generated content."

Explores the design of Curl, a single, coherent linguistic basis for expression of Web content at levels ranging from simple formatted text to contemporary object-oriented programming.

A language that can be compiled to Flash, DHTML, or mod_neko, a VM embedded in an Apache plugin.

To search for your own words or phrases, or to compare the occurrence of two words in Bush’s State of the Union Addresses, please try the State of the Union Parsing Tool.

R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.

According to Ong, who wrote this book in 1981 (pre-WWW), writing is a form of technology that, through the act itself, changes the brain...

I keep this book close to me at work and usually stick it in my laptop case when I leave for home...

This book is the one that got me interested in writing systems as a part of linguistics...

Simple. Straightforward...

My well worn copy of Strunk and White has been a constant companion to me the past 30 years...

This is an excellent short review of European quest for a language to unite its disparate nations with each other and the rest of the world...