The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English is the product of a research project begun in 1997 to answer these questions: · What are the characteristics of contemporary academic speech—its grammar, its vocabulary, its functions and purposes,...

Anyang, one of the ancient capitals of China, is now home to the National Museum of Chinese Written Language, as reported in a story by Xing Daiqi:According to Xinhua, the museum, with an initial investment of 400 million yuan ($58 million), covers an...

Is the husband of your wife's sister your brother-in-law? I would have said "no" and been pretty sure I was reflecting standard usage, but it turns out I would have been wrong. Bill Poser at the Log has a post about this, sparked by "a news item in...

Someone at MetaFilter linked to "In the Shadow of the Patriarch," a long, long New Republic article by Enrique Krauze on "Gabriel García Márquez and the demons of his time." I'll confess up front that I've only read the first of its nine pages, and...

Volta: A Multilingual Anthology "contains seventy-five poems in seventy-five languages. Seventy-four of these poems are translations of one poem, the seventy-fifth." You can read the English poem (the original) at wood s lot for November 18, 2009,...