IJ, EI, Y.
Nico Muhly is an American composer (the biography section of his blog won me over by announcing "His name is pronounced [ˈni ko] [ˈmju: li]") currently resident in the Netherlands, whose language he is learning, and this post describes his response to it ("what I get is a sort of childlike pornography: hoog, sneeuwt, poesje, standplaats") and mentions the "old school diagraph" IJ/ij, adding that he asked a Dutch woman "if it was one letter or two and she couldn’t really answer. It’s fascinating." So it is; check ou

THE BOOKSHELF: FOWLER CLASSIC.
I have loved H. W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ever since I snagged a beat-up copy of the 1926 first edition at a library sale almost forty years ago. I was never interested in the successive revisions, first by Ernest Gowers and then (actually a rewriting) by Robert Burchfield; they diluted Fowler's dry wit and vigorously stated opinions without producing a guide I considered truly modern and usable. Now Oxford has come out with

THE HISTORY OF HELLO.
A pleasantly discursive Cardus post by Nate Barksdale examines the history of "hello" as a telephone greeting:Hello streamed into the gap created by an unprecedented social scenario, gaining popularity and, little by little, respectability. By the 1920s, Emily Post had given up on banning hello from her version of proper speech and simply tried to tame its former brashness: "On very informal occasions, it is the present fashion to greet an intimate friend with 'Hello!' This seemingly vulgar salutation is made acceptable by the tone in which it is said. To shout 'Hullow!' is vulgar, but 'Hello, Mary' or 'How 'do John,' ea

COMMONER, CLEVERER, ET AL.
Arnold Zwicky at the Log has a post about "inflectional (commoner) vs. periphrastic (more common) comparatives and superlatives," a topic on which there is a huge literature; it was sparked off by a correspondent who asked whether commoner shouldn't be more common (adding, winningly, "I ask, fully expecting to be proven incorrect"), and Zwicky quite properly chastises "belief in One Right Way, in this case the assumption that an adjective or adverb takes inflection or periphrasis, but not both as alternatives. If you also judge X to be not what you would say, then it must be wrong and the periphrastic

THE LOUSY LINGUIST.
Chris, who writes the blog The Lousy Linguist ("Notes on linguistics and cognition"), describes himself as "a rogue linguist who has worked in academia, government consulting, NLP, and the branding and marketing industry. I used to be a graduate student in linguistics specializing in the syntax-semantics interface and verb classes (can you say 'Ay-Bee-Dee' boys and girls?)." Why, yes I can, being one myself (ABD stands for "All But Dissertation"), and I'm pleased to discover this lively blog via Language Log, which links to Chris's