HTML for finance

A paper entitled "Towards A Common Financial Language" by Andrew Haldane of the Bank Of England was posted here on 14 March 2012.

The Browser's summary reads: "Stand back for a good news story – a story of how finance could transform both itself and its contribution to wider society." Haldane's speech (PDF) outlines spectacular benefits of adopting a standard language, an HTML for finance.

Data analysis applied to words

On 17 March, some editions of The Wall Street Journal carried an article entitled "The New Science of the Birth and Death of Words" (subtitle: "Have physicists discovered the evolutionary laws of language in Google's library?"). You can read a summary here.

You can play with the Google Ngram viewer yourself here.

Globish, the language of international business

Michael Skapinker has an excellent article (entitled Executives speak a language of their own) on Globish in today's FT. Mother-tongue speakers of English do need to recognise that in multicultural settings where English or Globish dominates, they are often the least well understood of all the participants. When they are also the most senior, as has long been frequently the case even if the trend is now changing, the results can be of the highest importance.

For more on Globish, go here.