Linguistics

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: New Open Access Journal: Indo-European Linguistics - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014...

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"The peer-reviewed journal Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) is devoted to the study of the ancient and medieval Indo-European languages from the perspective of modern theoretical linguistics. It provides a venue for synchronic and diachronic linguistic studies of the Indo-European languages and the Indo-European family as a whole within any theoretically informed or analytical framework. It also welcomes typological investigations, especially those which make use of cross-linguistic data, including that from non-Indo-European languages, as well as research which draws upon the findings of language acquisition, cognitive science, variationist sociolinguistics, and language contact." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - Does English still borrow words from other languages? - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"English speakers may not be famous for being au fait with foreign languages, but all of us use words taken from other languages every day." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Today English borrows words from other languages with a truly global reach. Some examples that the Oxford English Dictionary suggests entered English during the past 30 years include tarka dal, a creamy Indian lentil dish (1984, from Hindi), quinzhee, a type of snow shelter (1984, from Slave or another language of the Pacific Coast of North America), popiah, a type of Singaporean or Malaysian spring roll (1986, from Malay), izakaya, a type of Japanese bar serving food (1987), affogato, an Italian dessert made of ice cream and coffee (1992)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Greek in Italy | Project Research Blog - http://greekinitaly.wordpress.com/

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"In the course of the first millennium BC Greek sailors, traders and colonists visited and settled in the Italian peninsula in increasing numbers. The southern half of Italy became known as ‘Big Greece’, both by Romans (Magna Graecia) and Greeks (Megalē Hellas). Greek settlements in Italy are attested from the 8th century BC onwards, and there is evidence for Greek trade from even earlier. Greeks brought with them urban living, religion and wine drinking, the alphabet and its associated uses. Some cities of Italy, including Naples, Rhegium and Tarentum, remained Greek speaking even under Roman rule. Substantial archaeological and textual discoveries in the last three decades have opened up our knowledge of the Greeks in Italy and the native societies they encountered, but there has been no complete study of the impact made by Greek on indigenous languages - this project aims to fill this gap. We will consider the nature and outcomes of contact between Greeks and speakers of the various native languages of ancient Italy, investigating the changes on the languages themselves, and relating linguistic interactions to social and political factors." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Our Aims To understand the nature and long-term effects of language contact between Greek and other languages of Ancient Italy. To understand the spread of the Greek alphabet among non-Greek speaking communities. To investigate the nature of the Greek spoken in towns in Southern Italy, and compare this with developments in the rest of the Greek world. To integrate issues of linguistic contact and linguistic borrowing into the discourse of archaeologists, historians and other scholars working on Greek colonization in Italy, and to promote dialogue between linguists and other scholars." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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New Sappho Poems! | res gerendae - http://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2014...

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"The poems are, of course, not ‘new’, but the fragments were previously unknown and held in a private collection. The fragments appear to be from the first book (of nine books total) on the basis of the characteristic ‘Sapphic Stanza’ used; the ‘books’ of Sappho in antiquity were organised by the metres. Incidentally, we actually know how many verses were extant in the first book–Lobel and Page’s fragment 30, POxy. 1231, records the end of the first book (ΜΕΛΩΝ Α´) followed by a string of Greek acrophonic numerals, ΧΗΗΗΔΔ = 1320 lines, or 330 stanzas. Here we have six-to-seven new ones. It’s quite a lot, considering that we had hitherto only some 29 (some 126 lines) appreciably complete(-ish) stanzas from the first book, in addition to some bits of more scrappy stuff. The new stanzas boost that number to 36, adding an extra 26-28 mostly complete lines to what has been previously known. It gives you an idea of how significant the find is, considering how proportionally little is actually known to survive at present." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Learn Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Classical Greek & Other Ancient Languages in 10 Lessons | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2014...

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"There are innumerable translations but the original gives you [Tacitus]’ unrivalled powers of compression.” - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"For those willing to take up the challenge of reading these canonic texts in their original form, the University of Texas’ Linguistics Research Center provides an excellent resource. In addition to hosting a multitude of Indo-European volumes in their entirety, the LRC has made 10-lesson crash courses, developed by several UT-Austin academics. Lessons include a brief guide to the alphabet, background knowledge on the language’s development, and a grammar guide, all available for the following languages:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache: Brötchen/Semmel - http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/brotche...

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"Sowohl für den 2. Band des WDU (II-59), der 1978 erschien, als auch in einer 2002 durchgeführten Pilotstudie wurde nach Ausdrücken „für kleine, zum Frühstück gegessene Weizenbrötchen“ gefragt. Die Fragestellung erwies sich als zu unspezifisch, da regional insbesondere für unterschiedliche Formen unterschiedliche Bezeichnungen üblich sein können bzw. manche Formen dieser kleinen Brote gar nicht überall verbreitet sind (vgl. WDU II, S. 13f.). Im Fragebogen der vorliegenden Erhebungsrunde war deshalb nicht nur nach dem Wort für die „meist zum Frühstück gegessene kleine Backware aus Weizenmehl“ gefragt, sondern es wurden auch drei Abbildungen beigefügt." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Das erste Bild zeigte kleine längliche Brote mit einer längs verlaufenden Einkerbung. Diese werden in Österreich und Südtirol offenbar kaum angeboten, sodass die meisten Gewährsleute meldeten, dass es sie „am Ort so nicht“ gebe. Wenn sie dort aber doch bezeichnet wurden, dann entweder als Semme(r)l oder als Weckerl. Semmel wird diese Backware auch in den meisten Gebieten Bayerns sowie zum Teil auch in Sachsen und Thüringen genannt. In Oberfranken heißt sie auch Laabla; nur noch ganz vereinzelt wurden aus Franken noch Brötla und Kipf genannt. Aus den östlichen und südöstlichen Kantonen der Schweiz sowie aus Vorarlberg wurde überwiegend Brötli gemeldet, aus den anderen Gebieten der Schweiz vor allem Mütschli, daneben aber auch Weggli; allerdings zeigt schon die Suche auf verschiedenen Internetseiten, dass diese beiden Wörter für zum Teil noch weiter unterschiedene Backwaren gebraucht werden (vgl. auch Elspaß 2005, 8, Anm. 16). In Schwaben (ohne Bayerisch-Schwaben – auffällig ist hier die Übereinstimmung mit der Ländergrenze), Baden und im Elsass wurde dagegen fast einheitlich die Bezeichnung Weckle (oder Weckerle) gemeldet, aus den nördlich daran angrenzenden Gebieten in Lothringen, im Saarland, in der Pfalz und zum Teil in Unterfranken und Südhessen das Wort ohne Diminutiv, also (der) Weck. In Luxemburg, in Ostbelgien sowie im ganzen Westen und Norden (nördlich der genannten Weck- und Semmel-Gebiete) ist das Wort Brötchen verbreitet. Nur in Berlin und im Norden Brandenburgs ist das Wort Schrippe gebräuchlich." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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'Gate' named Germany's English word of the year - The Local - http://www.thelocal.de/2014012...

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"The English suffix "gate" has been named Germany's Anglicism of the Year. The quirky, linguistic award honours the positive contributions English had made to the German lexicon." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The "controversy" was really dumb, no doubt about that. The coinage Schrippengate is nice (and ephemeral) though. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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640 - A Lion in the Garden: How to Translate a Continent | Strange Maps | Big Think - http://bigthink.com/strange...

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"Many things puzzled the British student, on exchange somewhere on the Continent: what people ate, how they dressed, why they drove on the right. But nothing more so than the local language, and especially the book that tried to teach it to him. “Look at this sentence: The lion is in the garden. When am I ever going to need that?”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"In the wintry suburbia where he showed me that page, there were plenty of gardens. But the most vicious creature likely to roam there would have been a quarrelsome blackbird, or a disgruntled mole. His course book, of questionable practicality even then, has now been relegated definitively to the dustbin of philology by the handiwork of another British student." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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A treasure trove of Arabic terms http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Are the terms alcohol and kohl related? Yes, if we trace their origins. An Arabic etymological term base, the first of its kind, can provide new knowledge about Arab identity and cultural history." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Arabic is one of the world's most widely spoken languages, with an estimated 250 to 300 million native speakers. Despite this fact, there is still no Arabic etymological dictionary. However, the dictionary is on its way. Stephan Guth, Professor of Arabic at the University of Oslo, has taken the initiative to pursue this research project. "There has been a lot of etymological research, but it has not been collected anywhere," the professor explains. The plan is to establish an electronic database, EtymArab. In an upstart phase, the website will be based on words and concepts from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) only, but these are also chosen to shed light on roots and concepts that have a special importance in Arab intellectual and cultural history, from ancient times until the present day." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Please don't do nothing here: a Bengali conundrum - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"Before trying to figure out precisely what the Bengali says, I'd like to point out that, in essence, what the English says very politely is "Do not loiter" (not as strong as "No trespassing"). Telling people not to do nothing is not the same as telling them to do something." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Maitani, you're welcome. Thanks for the additional references from Masica et al. I don't know that it reflects any lack of concern or care towards the collocutor, other than being an informal construction. The attitude towards the thing referred could be translated by adding "or whatever" to the end, e.g., milnā-julnā would be "to mix or associate or whatever". On the other hand, for ghurāpherā I would rather say "turning and returning and so on", which has the added benefit of evoking the looping nature of the action. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What the bilingual brain tells us about language learning | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"One of the most common questions people ask revolves around when and how to learn a second language. One common view is that earlier is better. There is good evidence for this view. A number of studies have found that the earlier a person learns a second language, the better they perform on a number of tests. Particularly sensitive to age is a person’s ability to speak without an accent and to detect speech sounds that are not present in their native language. For example, infants can detect sounds from a language not in their environment at six months of age. By 10 months of age they lose this ability. This suggests that the ability to detect speech sounds from around the globe is available to all infants but slowly fades away. Another arena where age plays a role is in the processing of grammar. Those who learn a second language later in life do not perform as well on tests of grammar as early learners. Hence, the ability to learn grammar and speech sounds appears to be very dependent on the age that one first learns a language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Introducing Indo-European Jones | Sentence first - http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014...

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"It started on Twitter, as these things often do. I read a comment about linguists and lexicographers being to language “what grave robbers are to archeology” (the context: hatred of the newly popular because X phrase), and I tweeted it with a raised eyebrow. Jonathon Owen replied that he wished he’d been given a “leather jacket, bullwhip, and fedora” upon graduation, James Callan said he wanted to see an “Indiana Jones pastiche focused on a linguist”, and I felt it was a meme waiting to happen. So without further ado, let me introduce Indo-European Jones (or Indy for short)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World : Shots - Health News : NPR - http://www.npr.org/blogs...

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"Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas 5-year-old Australian aboriginal girls always got it right. She says . Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, says the Australian aboriginal language doesn't use words like left or right. It uses compass points, so they say things like "that girl to the east of you is my sister."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Eivind, :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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(english at first comment) Hopf! Arapça bilenler, etimologya süperleri! Filistin Arapçasının Bedevi lehçesindeki incilizce transliterasyonuyla "Sumood" ("sumuğd" diye söylendiğini tahmin edioruz) kelimesi acep bize "sebat" olarak geçen s-b-t'li arapça (ثبات ) kelimeynen aynı kökten midir? bilen eden?

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Hey ho! anyone knows if the word "Sumood" in the Bedouin dialect of Palestinian Arabic is from the same root with the Modern Standard Arabic word Sabat ( ثبات ) ? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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\o/ fiuuuu - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Arshama Project - The Arshama Letters from the Bodleian Library (eds. C. J. Tuplin, J. Ma) - http://arshama.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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"The parchment letters of the Persian prince Arshama to Nakhthor, the steward of his estates in Egypt, are rare survivors from the ancient Achaemenid empire. These fascinating documents offer a vivid snapshot of linguistic, social, economic, cultural, organisational and political aspects of the Achaemenid empire as lived by a member of the elite and his entourage. The letters give unique insight into cultivation and administration, unrest and control, privileged lifestyles and long-distance travel. Arshama’s letters to Nakhthor, two leather bags and clay sealings, entered the Bodleian Library in 1944. These pages are a result of a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries and scholars from the AHRC funded project Communication, Language and Power in the Achaemenid Empire: The correspondence of the satrap Arshama." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Arshama, “son of the house”, is known from his letters concerning a Jewish military colony in Elephantine (Upper Nile). Arshama was also a great landowner, holding estates in Egypt as well as in Babylonia where he also spent time. In Egypt, Arshama’s “house” was administered by his steward (paqyd) Nakhthor. Arshama’s letters to Nakhthor, two leather bags and clay sealings, entered the Bodleian Library in 1944. They were written on leather, folded concertina-wise and closed with string and a lump of clay bearing Arshama’s seal. Once read, they were stored in a bag. The letters are written in Aramaic, a widely diffused Semitic language used for administrative purposes in the Persian empire. Arshama’s instructions would have been spoken in Persian, written down in Aramaic, read by an Egyptian and finally annotated in Egyptian, exemplifying a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empire." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Top Minority Languages of Europe [3686 x 2174] - Imgur - http://imgur.com/KsdAM8F#

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"Top Minority Languages of Europe [3686 x 2174]" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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To me, the criteria for the choices made here are not transparent. The idea is nice, but according to the comments the results are debatable. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics :: 11 untranslatable words from other cultures - http://i.imgur.com/bV5dwSh.jpg

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It's a large jpeg image... I like the graphics, you'll be delighted to see it. Name other such words in the comments below: - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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re: "cualacino," see panapo'o :-) cuz it ain't in Garzanti, Treccani, and Hoepli. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Vexatious History of Indo-European Studies, Part I | GeoCurrents - http://www.geocurrents.info/indo-eu...

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"Debates about Indo-European origins and dispersion have played a surprisingly central role in modern intellectual history. At first glance, the ancient source of a group of languages whose very relatedness is invisible to non-specialists would seem to be an obscure issue, of interest only to a few academics. Yet it is difficult to locate a topic of historical debate over the past two centuries that has been more intellectually provocative, ideologically fraught, and politically laden than that of Indo-European origins and expansion. Although the controversies have diminished in the Western public imagination since the middle of the 20th century, they still rage in India, and elsewhere their reverberations persist. As a result, the Indo-European question is anything but trivial or recondite. To understand the significance of the current controversy, it is therefore necessary to examine the historical development of Indo-European studies in detail, paying particular attention to the ideological ramifications of the theories advanced to account for the success of this particular language family." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Part III <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.geocurrents.in... ; title="http://www.geocurrents.in... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ancient Greek Grammars Online | Dickinson College Commentaries - http://blogs.dickinson.edu/dcc...

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"Perseus digitized some Greek grammar resources early on (see below), but since then more has become available in .pdf form from thanks to Google Books and Archive.org. This survey for some reason does not include scans of books. One need in my view is for a good searchable school grammar of ancient Greek. The searchable ones currently available are of the more systematic variety, and are potentially bewildering to students and non-expert readers. Smyth and his 3048 chapters is not for everybody. The best choice in English in my opinion would be Goodell (see below). This spring DCC will be embarking on a project to digitize it properly, making it searchable, and integrating it into the notes of our forthcoming Greek commentaries. This will be done with crucial assistance from Bruce Roberson at Mount Allison University, and Rigaudon." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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via AWOL - The Ancient World Online <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ancientworldonline... ; title="http://ancientworldonline... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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That’s green, well maybe more blueish. You mean Grue? | Fathom - http://fathom.info/latest/3317

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"During my senior year at Savannah College of Art and Design, I took Language, Culture and Society with Désiré Houngues. Two cultural insights about language stuck with me. In some societies men and women speak with entirely different vocabularies but still communicate verbally with one another. The second was that some languages only have two words for color, white and black (light and dark); if a language includes a third color, it is always red. This led me to research by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist. They made the first hypothesis about how color terms enter a language in a certain order. Later, I came across the World Color Survey, which was established in an effort to continue research into Berlin and Kay’s hypothesis. The WCS makes their data available to the public, and I found that this was exactly what I needed to help answer my many questions. The result of the WCS data exploration is below, where about 800,000 individual color chips are grouped by the terms used to describe them." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Grue? aaaah, Nelson Goodman surely. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The New Journal of Linguistic Geography from Cambridge University Press | GeoCurrents - http://www.geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"It is not very often that my attention is captured by a title of an academic journal, but the newly established Journal of Linguistic Geography did just that. Published by Cambridge University Press, this journal “focuses on dialect geography and the spatial distribution of language relative to questions of variation and change”, according to the publisher’s description. Submissions in the areas of dialectology, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language in its sociocultural environment, and linguistic typology are expected to appear in the journal. The inaugural issue includes articles on settlement patterns and the eastern boundary of the Northern Cities Shift (by Aaron J. Dinkin); vowel formants in American English (by Jack Grieve, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts); Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and perceptual dialectology (by Chris Montgomery and Philipp Stoeckle); as well as a review of Areal Features of the Anglophone World (edited by Raymond Hickey. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012) written by a renowned authority on English dialectology, Peter Trudgill. The foreword to the inaugural issue is written by the journal’s editors, William Labov and Dennis R. Preston, both world-leading experts in sociolinguistics." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"As Labov and Preston note in the foreword, “the spatial differentiation of linguistic forms … is a matter of remarkable interest”—and we at GeoCurrents wholeheartedly agree. Many laymen find geographical variation in word choice fascinating; the well-known North American dialectal “Pop vs. Soda” issue has been a successful discussion starter in many of my undergraduate and continuing studies classes. Examining “the use of a form against the background of competing and complimentary forms” is one of the main goals of this new journal, as the editors encourage authors “to mobilize those facts in pursuit of the better understanding of the nature of language structure and language change”. But studies of the lexicon are not the sole interest of this journal; the editors also hope to see submissions that examine structural relationships of phonological, morphological, and syntactic nature, although papers that deal with sound-related topics, both in terms of production and perception, dominate the first issue." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - An original lexicon of emotions we don’t have words for http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/ - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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sonder -- n. "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What's your favorite word and why? <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.quora.com/Word... ; title="http://www.quora.com/Word... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Workshop on Ancient Greek Dialects https://memiyawanzi.wordpress.com/2013...

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"I’ve mentioned before a recent volume published by the Centre for the Greek Language on Ancient Macedonian. Well, I noticed a little while back that they held a Workshop on Ancient Greek Dialectology in October 2012, and what is more, they filmed all the papers and put them on YouTube (videos embedded on its page on the Θετίμα project website) so that the entire conference will be accessible for posterity. I haven’t watched all the , but the opening paper by José Luis García-Ramón is particularly good in situating the many different problems faced by Ancient Greek dialectology today, and why, in his most memorable words “when we speak about old and new questions it is a conventional formulation, because actually the important [thing] is not whether the questions are old or new but if they are clever or absurd”. Other papers deal with the more recent research prospects of Ancient Macedonian and Ancient Balkan languages in relation to Greek." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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As Easy as One, Two, Three?—Or Can the Pirahã Count? | GeoCurrents - http://www.geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"A recent article by Mike Vuolo in Slate.com rekindled the Pirahã number controversy (see also the article in The Economist and this one in The Chronicle of Higher Education). According to Vuolo, among the many peculiarities of the Pirahã language, spoken by an estimated 360 people in the Brazilian state Amazonas along the Maici and Autaces rivers, is “an almost complete lack of numeracy, an extremely rare linguistic trait of which there are only a few documented cases. The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a ‘small size or amount’, hoí, a ‘somewhat larger size or amount’, and baágiso, which can mean either to ‘cause to come together’ or ‘a bunch’. With no way to express exact integers, the obvious question is: How do the Pirahã count?”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How Do Languages Count? And Are Languages with Restricted Number Systems “Primitive”? <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.geocurrents.in... ; title="http://www.geocurrents.in... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Martin Lewis' Lecture on Indo-European Origins—And Free Trial for Maps101.com | GeoCurrents - http://www.geocurrents.info/indo-eu...

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"As long-term readers of GeoCurrents know, the site’s two authors (Martin Lewis and Asya Pereltsvaig) are currently working on a book on the origins of the Indo-European language family and the controversy that surrounds it (see the GeoCurrents “focused series” on this issue). In the meantime, Martin Lewis gave a guest lecture on “The Promise of Historical Linguistics and the Conundrum of Indo-European Origins” on October 27, 2013 at the Oakmont Sunday Symposium. The abstract of the lecture is below:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"“Historical linguistics, along with archeology and genetics, provide one of the main windows into the deeper reaches of the human past. This allows us to partially reconstruct the historical processes and geographical patterns found in times and places without written records. The most important—and most abused—issue in historical linguistics is the origins and spread of Indo-European, by far the world’s largest language family. From Nazi dreams of Aryan demigods to radical feminist visions of blood-drenched Kurgan warriors, the original Indo-European speakers have been forced into a variety of unsupportable, ideologically-derived positions. Dr. Martin Lewis, a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses the archeological and linguistics approaches that allow us to understand the first “Indo-Europeans” for what they really were.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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