Babel No26 (February 2019)
Articles
Fundamentally flawed words – Frederick Hale on the origins and semantic history of ‘fundamentalism’
Tetun in Timor – Catharina Williams-van Klinken on the rise of a small local language in East Timor
The Changing face of English idioms – Gareth Carrol looks at what idioms can tell us about the evolution of language and its interaction with culture
BLEU machine translation – Eirini Chatzikoumi asks how we can know if Google Translate and co are actually any good
Text machina – Hannah Little looks at AI in the final part of her series on sci-fi
It’s not about cats – Stefanie Sturm, Pedro Tiago Martins, Alejandro Andirko and Thomas O’Rourke investigate what different disciplines can teach us about our capacity for language
Regular features
Ask a Linguist – Where does ‘Needs must’ come from?
Diary of a Linguist – Katie Wales’ observations on language around her
Language Games – Parlez-vous franglais?
Language in the News – What does ‘X’ mean?
Languages of the World – Rebecca Mitchell on Dari
Reviews – Michael D. Gordin’s ‘Scientific Babel’; Judy Hochberg’s ‘101 Questions about Spanish’; Robert C Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s ‘Why Only Us?’