(no subject)

Dear flist: I haz a curiosity about languages, and I'm looking for data from folks who speak languages other than English. So, if you do, would you be willing to answer a couple of questions about whether two sentences are grammatical or not for me? (It's sort of a fussy point, so I suspect you probably need to be fairly fluent to have a grammaticality judgment.)

( sentences and poll under the cut )

I'll probably post a link back to this post on Monday for people who are away for the weekend, and if there's interest, I can write something up next week about what about the data I'm looking at and why it's interesting to me.

(no subject)

So, my homepage at work is the library's website, for presumably obvious reasons, so whenever I need to pull up the internet (often), I am treated to whatever the library has chosen to inform me of, which is how I heard about the library's project to tag their dvd collection in delicious. And hey, I said to myself - this sounds like a cool project, I like delicious, maybe I'll check it out.

It is so bad. So so bad. I refuse to believe there were actual librarians with actual degrees involved in this. There are 1000 movies tagged, and 4400 tags. 4000 of those tags are unbundled. So, to see how they've chosen to tag the works of John Smith, you have to open up the complete tag list to see whether you should be looking for actor:JohnSmith or John_Smith or John-Smith or Smith_John or.... Which of course is some AJAXy thing, and it hangs my browser for about 20 seconds to load, and I have a faster connection and more processing power than most people. (There was an incomplete attempt to bundle 'actors' and 'directors'. No 'genre', 'theme', or 'language' bundle.) A significant number of tags were used only once.

Luckily, they also give the username/password for their del account, which I'm not sure is, you know, wise, but it does mean that I can fix it. >:)