The Lexicographer's Rules

According to The Forward, the @ symbol is referred to as “shtrudel” in Hebrew. Yes, just like the pastry roll we call a “strudel” in English. The article was written as a correction to William Safire’s column of August 19.

Michael Tan writes in the Asian Journal Online about some of the ways in which English, both American and Singaporean, are influencing Filipino speech.

In Thai Cultural Battle, Name-Calling Is Encouraged. “Korakoad Wongsinchai, an English teacher at a private primary school in Bangkok, is also not sure whether the Culture Ministry’s campaign will stem the tide of English names.…More than half of her students have English names, she said, offering this sampling: Tomcruise, Elizabeth, Army, Kiwi, Charlie and God. One apparently gourmand family named their child Gateaux, the French word for cakes.”

As a chaser, try this disjointed piece on youth slang in Thailand.

This site? The Preposition Project, where “each of 673 preposition senses for 334 prepositions (mostly phrasal prepositions) has been described by giving it a semantic role or relation name and by characterizing the syntactic and semantic properties of its complement and attachment point”? That’s exactly the kind of hard work lexicographers and computational linguists do that you don’t think of when you say to yourself, “Gee whiz! It’d be swell to make dictionaries, wouldn’t it?’

In New West, Jenny Shank has a thorough and compelling review of How I Learned English/Como aprendí inglés, a collection of stories by well-known American Latinos who learned English as a second language.