ghoti

Word play – Minimum
Academic life – it’s all about publish or perish, and quality over quantity

The bottom line in academia is publish or perish … but … . I have a friend who says publish anything anywhere but in the long run that is academic suicide. Publishing a junk paper in a junk journal is selling yourself short academically. And there are some who think publishing a lot is important.…
If you can’t even get your Japanese right how are you expected to get your English correct

My kids watch this show on NHK called Cooking Idol Ai My Mine. Great show about a girl who is a real live cooking show host. Shows like these truly give kids imagination and creativity. But I was really disappointed in the looseness of their script writing in this dialogue shown the other day: Child:…
Understanding translation through corpus

Do we really need to know grammar to understand language? What if we can have billions and billions of words of data to work with and put it through a computer? Well, that is pretty much what corpus linguistics is. Here is a nice article about how Google Translate works. It may not be full…
What is meta-text information … and how to get rid of it?

Most of us use word processing software like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or OpenOffice Writer to create doucments these days. Although we see the words on the page we seldom realise how much more information is included to make the words look like they do: the type of font; size; decorations; etc. This is what…
Online Word Document cleaner to plain-text

Here is a nice quick simple Word “cleaner” script with source code by Jonathan Hedley. Straightforward and does what is necessary. But troublesome if one has hundreds or even thousands of documents to convert. I am still looking for a solution here.
Language death and the preservation of Australian indigenous cultures

Before British colonialisation began there in 1788, around 250 aboriginal languages were spoken in Australia by an estimated one million people. Only a few dozen languages remain and the communities number around 470,000 people in a nation of 22 million. It is often said that language is culture. So 250 languages spoken means the existence…
A Very Short Introduction to Corpus Linguistics

I have a made a short online intro for corpling here. I hope you find it useful.
A simple guide to using Antconc

I have created a file about using Antconc, a concordancing program by Laurence Anthony at Waseda University. You can find it here. The latest version was created on 5 March 2011.
Making a text file manually

To make a text file open a text editor (e.g., Notepad in Windows or TextEdit in Mac). Manually type or paste some text into the main window and save. Saving from a word processor like Microsoft Word may not give a “clean” output, that is, some of the letters or punctuation may not render as…