#LanguageHat

Anatoly Vorobey posted at FB (in Russian) about a novel I’d never heard of; I’ll translate what he wrote:

Andrew Keh reports in the NY Times (archived) about a divergence in pronunciation that astounds me as much as if you told me a lot of people pronounced New York “NYE-rock”:

A NY Times interactive story about “the world’s rarest pasta,” by Matt Goulding, is interesting on a number of counts. Of course if one likes pasta it’s great to see it being made in such an elaborate way (“Stretched by hand, a single ball of dough is…

Two unrelated things I’ve enjoyed recently that can be shoehorned in here via their relation to language and/or communication:

Boris Dralyuk, an old bloggic friend (dating back to 2012), has an essay in Poetry about looking backward:

I’m finally getting around to Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which bulbul gave me back in 2018, and I thought I’d quote this passage from the introduction (p. 11; I added a few links):

Yesterday it was Basques in Idaho, today it’s Hmong in Minnesota — Phineas Pope of MPR News says “Tuj lub players want more Minnesotans to give the Hmong sport a whirl“:

I enjoyed all of Edward Mendelson’s NYRB review (archived) of Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (a riff on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); here I will excerpt a section on a topic dear to my heart, the importance of a clear personal voice in any literary…