Digenis.org

The Interrobang: when you just have to express surprised queries or excited questions with one punctuation mark.

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Wordie is a new Web 2.0 service that defines itself as being ‘like Flickr, but without the photos’. It’s basically a place for word collectors to catalog their lexical specimens (i.e., make a list of words they like, dislike, think sound funny, etc.). This practice is probably of very little interest to most of the population, but I as a list-maker and word-collector I’ve already signed up.

I’ve started to build my list of favourite and interesting words. As a matter of fact, the service lets you create multiple lists under one account, so I’ve created two: my main collection of English words and a second list of Russian words.

According to their site, it was less than a month ago that this service was just an idea in its creator’s head. At the time of writing this entry there are 2,158 users and 76,683 words in the database. As it’s still such a young service, I don’t expect it to be perfect while it’s still in Papmers, but I do have a few suggestions to make the site better:

1) Hire a graphic designer. This is probably what most would suggest right off the bat. I’m usually a fan of low-fi design, but Wordie leaves my eyes tired and bored. They don’t have to go all hardcore 2.0 with gradients, reflections, soft shadows, starbursts, and the sort, but a little splash of colour and some nicer menu interfaces would do a lot of good. It would also add a little flare if users had their own avatar, a feature common in most forums and 2.0 services. This could actually be implemented really easily through Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar).

2)Build a stronger sense of community The easiest way for Wordie to do this would be by creating contacts, groups, pools, and other features which would allow users to meet, interact, and socialise with other users.

3)Allow for accented unicode characters, please. This is probably pretty controversial as it could potentially create multiple entries for the same word if different users choose to spell it different ways.

But if you think about it, there are some words that just need a diacritic. For example many English words of French origin, such as: résumé vs. resume; divorcé vs. divorce; exposé vs. expose; chargé vs. charge; and worst of all pâté, pâte, and pate. And in reality, these will be such a minute percentage that it probably won’t create a problem. These diacritics aren’t there for no reason; for Pete’s sake, it’s a site about words, let’s do it right.

4) Allow users to specify which dictionary services are listed to look up words. Right now Wordie displays next to words 8 sources: Ninjawords, The Free Dictionary, Etymonline, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online, Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia, and Google. Quite frankly, several of them are pretty much your standard dictionary and only offer redundancy. Continue listing these as default, but allow users to choose to specify themselves which references are listed if they so desire.

5) Include functionability for non-latin foreign languages. I applaud the creators for using UTF-8 encoding, but right now the Wordie guidelines state that ‘the word must exist in at least one language. If that language is not based on the standard Latin alphabet, transliteration must be done intelligently’. Why must we transliterate? I tested it out and I can add Russian words to my lists just fine using Cyrillic characters. Wordie could be of great use to language learners who want to keep lists of new words they learn.

6) Make a word stream badge on your own site. It would be great if someone would create a tutorial for making a ‘badge’ that would display your most recent Wordie words on your blog or personal website, similar to a Flickr badge. This can done already since you can subscribe to RSS feeds of word lists, but I’m sure the average user hasn’t got a clue how to do it.

I’m sure that these and many other issues will be addressed in the near future.

John, the site’s creator, has set up a blog to track the life of Wordie.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. This Wikipedia page lists similar sentences in many languages. Also, don’t mix up homophones and homonyms with homographs, of which I’m particularly fond.

The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, has revived talks of reforming the Kazakh alphabet to use a Latin script rather than Cyrillic. After the collapse of the USSR several other former Soviet republics did the same (Turkmenistan, Moldova, and Uzbekistan in the mid 90’s; Azerbaijan in 2001) in order to cut some of their ties to Russia.

According to an October 19th US State Department press briefing, the US Board on Geographic Names has decided to change the official US English spelling of the Ukrainian capital from Kiev (pronounced Ke-yev) to Kyiv (pronounced Keev). The new version reflects the Ukrainian transliteration of the name, while the old spelling came from the Russian transliteration.

The population of Ukraine is split in two, with half of its citizens being Russian-speakers and half being Ukrainian-speakers. Of course, it would seem that the State Department has now taken sides…

Many people see this as a US tactic to woo Ukraine further to the West, the direction that President Viktor Yuschenko has been taking the country since he came to power after the 2004 Orange Revolution. Call it what you like, but supporters say that the US is just coming in line with the spelling standards of international organizations like the UN and NATO.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey says, “…I don’t think this decision has anything reflective in it.” But if we’re putting all politics aside, what about the scores of other cities with English spellings far off from their native pronunciations? Why is Myanmar still referred to as Burma in the US? Will Moscow ever become Moskva? Will Munich become Munchen?

Though Kyiv will now be used on all maps produced in the United States, it would seem that not everyone is ready to board the ship just yet. According to this article in the International Herald, the Associated Press will continue to spell the Ukrainian capital as Kiev.

I suppose only time will tell if this change will stick.

According to the US Patent and Trademark Office website, Microsoft is attempting to patent the selection and conjugation of verbs by a computer program. Other sources reporting this news weren’t sure what Microsoft had up their sleeve, but I dug around the patent filing, pulled some URLS out of the xeroxed diagrams, and figured out that it’s just a feature they’re trying out on their Encarta Encyclopedia Homework Help site.

It’s nothing impressive really… In fact, it’s quite ridiculous; just think of it as a HTML version of 501 Spanish Verbs. Would textbook verb conjugation tables count as prior art? And what about similar online programs like verbix.com?

Hopefully Microsoft’s patent application will be denied. It kind of reminds me of the old Onion article where Microsoft tries to patent ones and zeroes.

A professor at the University of London says that cows have regional accents.