BBC News: How do you pronounce 'H'?

The British Library is carrying out a survey of how spoken English is changing: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11642588

Fred Jelinek RIP

It has been reported elsewhere (Google research blog, New York Times, Language Log, IBM Research) that Fred Jelinek passed away on September 14th, 2010. I heard Fred (at a talk in Prague I think) repeat his famous 'quote' about the accuracy of his MT system going up when the linguists left the room!

The Little Book of Sustainable Living

Produced by the Recycling Forum in the Lancaster area. Lots of interesting tips in this booklet.

David Lodge: Deaf sentence

And the other book I read on the beach (two books in a week!) was David Lodge's Deaf Sentence. Although the UK cover quotes the Guardian "Very funny" and the New Statesman "Seriously funny", I'd probably pick out the following key words: death, suicide and obviously deafness. Okay, so corpus linguistics gets a mention (page 32 in my edition).

Iain M Banks: Feersum Endjinn

While sitting on the beach recently, I read Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks, recommended by Stuart. Okay, it did have something to do with work: one of the main character's thoughts are written in SMS-style shortenings and abbreviations.

What are you doing here?

A fantastic montage of clips from Doctor Who over the last 11 doctors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtG5dK_HaGg

Thanks to Jam for spotting that one.

Libdem manifesto key concepts

And finally the key concepts for the Libdem manifesto.