Saturday, November 25, 2006

Language Log: Morphemedar

Language Log: Morphemedar

When I read about the pattern apparently established by "gaydar" using the reanalysis of ra(dio)-dar, that word seemed very familiar even though it was the first time I saw it. And then came to mind Arkadiy Gaydar (Аркадий Гайдар), a Russian writer of the leninist era. Looking it up on Google, I found 1,130,000 ghits for Гайдар against the 930,000 ghits for the English spelling. This made me think of the usefulness of a phonetic search engine. Using finite state transducers from Xerox PARC, I had built one long time ago (1994) - it ended up being used in telephone directories to look up names by knowing approximate spelling (or just how to pronounce them...)