Linguistics

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The Geography of “Cucumber” | GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/geonote...

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"Several earlier GeoCurrents posts examined the history and geography of culinary vocabulary, particularly words for ‘cheese’, ‘onion’, and ‘tea’. It has become clear that the distribution of such words in European languages tells a story of both common descent and borrowing. The role of borrowing is nowhere clearer than in the map of the words for ‘tea’. But while borrowing must have also complicated the patterns of ‘onion’ and ‘cheese’ vocabulary, major Indo-European subfamilies typically share the same root. For example, while the Romance languages generally inherited the Latin word for ‘onion’, cepa or its diminutive form cepolla, French uses a different word, which has also been borrowed into some, though not all, Germanic languages. Scandinavian (North Germanic) languages preserve the original Germanic root løk, which was also borrowed by Slavic languages, though some of them later replaced it with Latin loanwords. But a completely different picture emerges if we examine words for ‘cucumber’ (see map on the left). Here, areal patterns are more conspicuous than those of language-family relationships." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Of course you were, Mark. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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About | Qui sommes-nous | Über uns | History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences - http://hiphilangsci.net/about/

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"This blog is devoted to exploring and promoting the great diversity that exists in the study of language, in the past and today. Each blog post seeks to introduce a topic, idea or approach in language study — historical, current or completely new — with an invitation to all readers to engage in discussion in the comments. Everyone is welcome to contribute, regardless of academic standing, although there is an expectation that all contributions will be well informed. Controversial or unconventional views are not discriminated against, but polemical attitudes are discouraged. We want to maintain a scholarly atmosphere marked by reasoned argument, evidence and tolerance, and free of simple opinion-trading. If you would like to write a post for the blog, please get in touch with a one-paragraph description. All posts are informally reviewed before they are published, but always with the blog’s goal of promoting diversity of opinion and approach in mind. Our guidelines are very minimal: posts should be around 1,000 to 1,500 words and outline their topic without being overly technical or assuming too much background knowledge. Most posts should contain links to web resources and references to printed literature, although more free-ranging, speculative posts unsupported by specific references will also be accepted." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Das Ziel dieses Blogs ist es, die historische und gegenwärtige Vielfalt der Sprachwissenschaften aufzuzeigen und zu fördern. Jeder Blogbeitrag stellt ein Thema, eine Idee oder einen Ansatz aus der Geschichte oder Gegenwart der Sprachwissenschaften vor und lädt alle Leser ein, durch Kommentare in einen konstruktiven Dialog zu treten. Alle dürfen mitreden, ungeachtet der akademischen Qualifikation, aber es wird erwartet, dass alle vertretenen Ansichten gut informiert sind. Kontroverse oder unkonventionelle Ansichten werden durchaus akzeptiert, aber jede Art von unsachlicher Polemik ist unerwünscht. Wir wünschen uns eine offene wissenschaftliche und durch begründete Argumente sowie Toleranz geprägte Stimmung und wollen den Austausch rein subjektiver Geschmacksurteile vermeiden. Wenn Sie einen Blogbeitrag schreiben wollen, schicken Sie uns bitte per E-Mail eine kurze Zusammenfassung. Alle Beiträge werden überprüft bevor sie veröffentlicht werden, aber die Überprüfung unterliegt dem Ziel des Blogs, Meinungsvielfalt und Vielfalt der verschiedenen Ansätze zu förden. Wir haben nur minimale Richtlinien: Blogbeiträge sollten einen Umfang von 1.000 bis 1.500 Wörtern haben und sollten ihr Thema behandeln, ohne besonderes technisches oder Hintergrundwissen von den Lesern zu erwarten. Die meisten Beiträge sollten Weblinks oder bibliographische Angaben enthalten, aber spekulative Beiträge ohne zusätzliche Literaturlisten sind auch zugelassen." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Meronymy? : Language Lounge : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm...

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"Given a suitable context, if a farmer told you that her hand was under the knife, you would probably understand that this was a sentence about an employee and a surgical operation, despite there being no mention in the sentence of a person. There's also no mention an operating room, a doctor, a hospital, or any of the other props or venues associated with surgery. But you got the meaning in the phrase "under the knife" in the same way that you got employee from hand, a clipped version of hired hand. Your understanding of these phrases is probably not based on inferring the relationship of "hand" to employee or "knife" to surgery; chances are that you know these terms because you've heard them before. Maybe the first time you heard them you had to do that kind of interpretation; or maybe you looked up the terms in a dictionary or maybe someone glossed them for you. In any case, what hand and under the knife have in common is that they're both instances of meronymy, in which a part of something is used as an expression for the whole." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"English majors may already be raising their hands or racing to the comments section to protest that this isn't meronymy; some will say that we're actually talking about metonymy, and others may chime in with synecdoche. Well, everyone's right in this game, albeit in a slightly different way. The ways in which expressions substitute parts for wholes, or features for whole entities, is a slippery business. The figures of speech that stray from the literal to instantiate a part-whole or a feature-entity relationship constitute a significant part of what makes linguistic expression so rich, flexible, complex, and interesting. For human speakers, it's a lifelong learning opportunity and a palette from which to paint word pictures and create new expressions. For computers trying to understand language, it can be an intractable problem." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Evolution: Too Many to Communicate - http://langevo.blogspot.de/2013...

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"From what we know (or can infer) about the social life of early humans in the Middle Paleolithic period (300-30 thousand years ago), our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small nomadic bands, each consisting of a few dozen (20-50) individuals. Several such bands may have maintained regular contacts and converged into loose ethnic units (“tribes”) totalling a few hundred members, which gathered seasonally for collective purposes such as ritual celebrations, marital exchange, etc. In such conditions a single speech community, capable of maintaining a shared linguistic code (unified by cultural transmission), can hardly grow larger than a tribe. In effect, a cluster of allied bands corresponds to a linguistic unit as well as a cultural one (with a shared system of customs and laws). Such a model is supported by studies of modern societies retaining an archaic type of organisation, such as the Indigenous Australians. At the time of first European contact, the population od Australia was probably about 300-500 thousand (its exact size is a matter of debate, but most estimates range within those limits). It supported about 250 tribal groups, each with its own language (sometimes more than one). Many of those languages were further subdivided into fairly diverse dialects. While some languages could boast one or two thousand speakers, others had just a few hundred (alas, those that have survived till now too often have only a few). It seems reasonable to assume that the speech communities of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers did not normally exceed about 1000 members." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Anthology | Linguistic Society of America - The Best of Language - http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content...

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"Please note: All posted hyperlinks to articles included in each volume will lead readers to the Language archives available via JSTOR. Users without access to JSTOR may purchase individual articles, or participate in the "Register and Read" program of JSTOR, which provides free access on a time-limited basis to those who complete a registration form." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://memiyawanzi.wordpr... ; title="http://memiyawanzi.wordpr... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BSA Postgraduate Epigraphy Course 2013 | res gerendae - http://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2013...

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"When you think of the acropolis, one immediately thinks of the Parthenon in majestic ruin, or perhaps the famous Caryatids on the porch of the Erechtheion. Perhaps, while you’re busy—perhaps a little too busy—admiring the architectural scenery as you progress up the sacred way, you might not notice some very very important bits of archaeology. Yes, I’m talking about those mysterious holes in the ground. One passes them without thinking, but when you start looking, they’re everywhere. Not interesting, you say? Well, let me tell you more: these are, in fact, carved-out bases for inscriptions, in which they were placed and then fixed in position by pouring molten lead into the gaps. Inscriptions, containing sources for all kinds of exciting aspects of Ancient Greek political and social history!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The first week of the course was devoted to seminars in practical epigraphy and field trips around Attica and Delphi. The first stop of the Grand Tour (of epigraphy) was the mighty acropolis with its many aforementioned holes in the ground, but still with much remaining epigraphy to be reckoned with, mainly a lot of dedications. One example (IG I³ 833 + IG II² 4147) gives an excellent case of the use and re-use of stone, where two inscriptions found in two different volumes of an edition are actually found side-by-side, and that information that the original monument base had been re-appropriated and re-used later in antiquity." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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524486_597454650264774_2033731092_n.png (PNG-Grafik, 956 × 741 Pixel) - http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Hlt_JZ...

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"What field of linguistics should I pursue?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Produced by Cascadilla <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.cascadilla.com... ; "Cascadilla Press is an independent scholarly publisher of linguistics books, software, and teaching aids." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Code switching between Indonesian, French and English - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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"Code switching between Indonesian, French and English" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

I've found I can only load one language at a time. I even get confused if someone talks to me in my mother tongue if I have English loaded. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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A Striking New Map of Endangered Languages | GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/geonote...

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"A striking map depicting endangered languages around the world can be found at the website of the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), the public portal of the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat) helping raise awareness of and gathering data on endangered languages. This data has been compiled by linguistic research teams at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and Eastern Michigan University in a project supported by a National Science Foundation grant. The catalogue contains comprehensive up-to-date information on all languages considered to be in danger, including the number of speakers, the age of the youngest speakers and the location of each language; the genetic affiliation to a linguistic family for every language; and an account of the documentation and data for all languages in the database. The ELP is an initiative of the newly formed Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, a coalition of international linguistic and cultural organizations, and Google. The Rosetta Project and PanLex Project at The Long Now Foundation are also members of the Alliance. But anyone involved with endangered languages is invited to contribute to the database." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It really is. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Hey Feeders, I am new to this site hope i will gain a lot of information and interesting things to learn :-) and share :-) (via http://friendfeed.com/sanyams...)

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Language by mouth and by hand - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Humans favor speech as the primary means of linguistic communication. Spoken languages are so common many think language and speech are one and the same. But the prevalence of sign languages suggests otherwise. Not only can Deaf communities generate language using manual gestures, but their languages share some of their design and neural mechanisms with spoken languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Like spoken languages, signed languages construct words from meaningless syllables (akin to can-dy in English) and distinguish them from morphemes (meaningful units, similar to the English can-s). The research group examined whether non-signers might be able to discover this structure." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Novgorod Birch Bark Documents, Second Slavic Palatalization, and the Wave Model—The ‘Whole’ Story | GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"An earlier GeoCurrents post examined birch bark documents from Veliky Novgorod, Russia. With letters scratched into the inside surface, these scraps of birch bark, well-preserved in water-logged soils near Lake Ilmen, contain a wealth of information for historians and linguists alike. One of the most fascinating puzzles of Slavic historical linguistics was posed by birch bark document <a href="#247</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ;. It is the oldest birch bark document discovered to date, dating from 1025-1050 CE, which makes it older than Ostromir Gospels, the second oldest extant Russian book (it was considered the oldest before the Novgorod Codex was discovered in 2000). This document was unearthed early on, in 1956, but for a long time its interpretation was subject to fierce debates. Particularly mystifying was the second line, given in English transliteration below:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The string KѢLEA/KѢLѢA was interpreted as meaning ‘of the room’, making the whole line translatable as ‘and the lock of the room, the doors of the room, the master…’. However, analyzed this way, the sentence is very odd indeed. First, two phrases have subjects but no predicates: the lock of the room what? the doors of the room what? The rest of the document reads as a description of a crime. The second problem concerns the word KѢLEA/KѢLѢA, which was initially interpreted as a misspelled version of KELЬѢ, the genitive singular form of the word KELЬA ‘room’. Certainly, in the context of the words ‘lock’ and ‘doors’ this interpretation appeared sensible, but nonetheless it would later be proven wrong. The misspelling hypothesis, however, was immediately suspect, as misspellings, though not unknown, are relatively rare in birch bark documents. As far as document <a href="#247</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; is concerned, this analysis implied that the word was misspelled twice in two different ways. This is odd for several reasons. First, it means that both times the writer made three errors in a five-letter word, getting all the vowels wrong. Given that the spelling of the time represented pronunciation fairly closely, this possibility seems unlikely. Second, the two instances of the string KѢLEA/KѢLѢA are separated by merely one word, while alternative spellings are more typically found farther apart from each other. Third, as the author did not misspell any other words, is it then reasonable to assume that he (or she?) stumbled over this particular word? If so, why? Finally, phrases in narrative birch bark letters often start with the word A ‘and’ (a comparison to the narrative text of the Bible suggests that this is a common pattern well beyond Old Russian). If the mystery line is broken down as shown above, only the first phrase, the one about the lock, starts with A ‘and’, but not the other two phrases, those about the doors and the master (of the house)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language acquisition: Nouns before verbs? - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Researchers are digging deeper into whether infants' ability to learn new words is shaped by the particular language being acquired." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"A new Northwestern University study cites a promising new research agenda aimed at bringing researchers closer to discovering the impact of different languages on early language and cognitive development. For decades, researchers have asked why infants learn new nouns more rapidly and more easily than new verbs. Many researchers have asserted that the early advantage for learning nouns over verbs is a universal feature of human language. In contrast, other researchers have argued that early noun-advantage is not a universal feature of human language but rather a consequence of the particular language being acquired." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Logeion - http://logeion.uchicago.edu/

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"Logeion (literally, a place for words; in particular, a speaker's platform, or an archive) was developed after the example of dvlf.uchicago.edu, to provide simultaneous lookup of entries in the many reference works that make up the Perseus Classical collection. To improve the chronological range for which the dictionaries are useful, we have added DuCange (see below), and to enhance this site as both a research and a pedagogical tool, we add information based on corpus data in the right side bar, as well as references to chapters in standard textbooks. More such 'widgets' will be added over time, along with, we hope, still more dictionaries. The Logeion interface only allows for consulting dictionaries the way dictionaries were originally conceived: Type in the headword (or lemma) for the entry (transliterated Greek is an option) and the word wheel will spin to what we hope will be the right destination. Enter a minimum of three characters, and the system will attempt to suggest entries in the neighborhood. For full-text searches (where in LSJ do we find reference to Xenophon's Anabasis, where is λόγος used in any entry, not just in the entry for λόγος), use the links in the list of sources below. Full-text search is only possible for the reference works that are fully in the public domain. Below, the home page will be specified for projects that have a presence online, which may include many further options for searching. This site has been developed by Josh Goldenberg and Matt Shanahan in the summer of 2011. In addition, many thanks to ARTFL, as always, and in particular to Richard Whaling and to the DVLF crew for initial consultation. We hope you will find Logeion useful! Comments and suggestions: please email Helma Dik; or use the link above to Report a Problem. " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Update January 2012: We have now added a Latin-Dutch dictionary to the collection: The Woordenboek Latijn/Nederlands. One notable feature of this dictionary, for those who do not speak Dutch, is that a lot of attention has been paid to ensure accuracy of vowel length for the lexical entries. For further information see below." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Bahasa and the concept of “National Language” - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"I've long been aware that many of the languages of Southeast Asia are referred to as bahasa. Here's a list from Wikipedia:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"I had always assumed that "bahasa" was a Malayo-Polynesian word. Consequently, I was surprised when — reading the Wikipedia page in question– I learned that bahasa "derives from the Sanskrit word bhāṣā भाषा ("spoken language"). In many modern languages in South Asia and Southeast Asia which have been influenced by Sanskrit or Pali, bahasa and cognate words are now used to mean 'language' in general."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Atlantides: Feed Aggregators for Ancient Studies - http://planet.atlantides.org/

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"I've put together the following feed aggregators for the benefit of anyone who would like to make use of them. Please remember: the content pulled together here is still governed by the licensing or copyright preferences of the originating bloggers. Always check with the original author before re-using any of this content!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Punjabi and the Problems of Mapping Dialect Continua « Cartography « GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/geonote...

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"The Wikipedia list of the world’s most widely spoken languages, by mother tongue, puts Punjabi in tenth place, with its roughly 100 million native speakers exceeding the figures given for German, French, Italian, Turkish, Persian and many other well-known languages. The Wikipedia article on the Punjabi language stresses its growing appeal, noting that, “The influence of Punjabi as a cultural language in Indian Subcontinent is increasing day by day mainly due to Bollywood. Most Bollywood movies now have Punjabi vocabulary mixed in, along a few songs fully sung in Punjabi.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"But despite Punjabi’s obvious importance, it is extremely difficult to find a map of the language on the internet. Partly this is due to the fact that Punjabi spans the India-Pakistan border, and most maps of individual languages are country-based. One can thus find many language maps of India that depict Punjabi, and virtually all language maps of Pakistan do so as well. But on Pakistani language maps, the area covered by Punjabi has been diminishing in recent years. Maps made in earlier decades typically showed virtually all of northeastern quadrant of the country as Punjabi-speaking, whereas many recent maps retain the Punjabi label only for the core zone of this region. On these maps, what used to be the southern Punjabi area is now typically mapped as Saraiki-speaking, whereas the north is depicted as Hindko-speaking. Saraiki and Hindko, moreover, are sometimes merged together as the Lahnda language, sometimes called “Western Punjabi.” This linguistic reclassification scheme, however, is quite controversial, especially in Pakistan. Here Punjabi partisans are often irritated by the diminution of their language, whereas locally based scholars are happy to see their own speech-forms elevated to the status of separate languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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CEToM | Tocharian and the Tocharians - http://www.univie.ac.at/tochari...

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"The Silk Road, the famous network of trade routes connecting China to the West, was essential not only for the transfer of material goods, but also for the exchange of language and culture. Along with many other Central Asian civilizations, Tocharian A and Tocharian B could so come to flourish as literary languages in the wake of the spread of Buddhism in the middle of the first millennium CE. Although Tocharian was spoken in Kucha and Turfan along the northern edge of the Tarim Basin in North-West China (= present-day Xinjiang), it is not related to Chinese. Instead, Tocharian A and Tocharian B constitute a separate branch of the so-called Indo-European language family, which comprises ancient languages such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, as well as modern languages like English and Spanish." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Towards the end of the first millennium, Tocharian became extinct: it is now only known from documents that could be preserved over a period of more than 1000 years thanks to the arid climate of the Taklamakan Desert. The documents were discovered during a series of archaeological expeditions undertaken from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, and transferred to museums in China, Japan, and Europe." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Poemas del río Wang: A language hunter, a legend hunter - http://riowang.blogspot.de/2013...

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"As it happens, I was looking for something else in a bookcase when I spotted my tattered 1981 paperback of “Tales and Legends of Sistan”, an annotated publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences – and I was surprised to recognize that I can still recite a few verses of the beautiful Russian translation, and that I still remember how the book project was born, after a surprise discovery that an expat Sistani legend-teller lived, quietly, in a small town in Turkmenistan. But I realized that I knew nothing about the linguist and poet who recorded and translated these stories, some of them canonical Rustam legends from Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, and other, hitherto unknown legends also recited as historic truth, and others retold as fictionary fairy tales with their own canon." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The attention of Gruenberg thus turned to the isolated diasporas of the ethnic groups with homelands south of the Soviet border, which could have been studied within the confines of the Soviet Union. Between 1958 and 1960, he discovered and documented Teymuri, Jamshidi, and Sistani populations in Saraghs and Kushka, in the South of Turkmenistan. And then Gruenberg got a unique opportunity to study rare languages of Hindu Kush valleys right there, through a translator assignment with the Afghan Ministry of Mining Industry. Between 1963 and 1968, he conducted wide-ranging fieldwork in remote Nuristan, the legendary refuge of Alexander the Great’s troops, for the first time documenting such languages as Munjani, Glangali and Kati. (Alas, much of his field materials still awaited processing by the time of his sudden death in 1995; one dead-ended project has been a joint development, with the Afghanistan Academy of Sciences, of Dari-based alphabet systems for Balochi, Kafiristani, Pamiri, and Pashai languages)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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GIS 1/3/2013 – Deciphering Linear B after Michael Ventris | res gerendae - http://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2013...

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"It’s not often that we get to listen to a genuine, bona fide genius in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar, but that’s just what we were treated to this week. Michael Ventris’s crisp, cut-glass tones played out, announcing his decipherment of Linear B. This was of course a clip from the famous 1952 radio broadcast in which Ventris revealed that h could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the script of the Mycenaean Aegean did in fact render Greek, rather than Etruscan as he’d initially believed or any of the other fanciful suggestions which had been made over the years. This audio clip was met with swoons of delight by some members of the audience. I’d heard it before, but the frisson you get listening to it doesn’t go away. It’s no exaggeration to say Ventris is one of my academic heroes, and the fact that he was barely older than I am now when he made his most famous discovery kind of puts one’s academic contributions into perspective. The fact that he was dead 4 years later only adds to the poignancy." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"But the decipherment of Linear B didn’t end with Ventris, as our own Anna Judson explained in her paper ‘Deciphering Linear B after Michael Ventris’. For even after the decipherment of the core signs of the syllabary had been accepted, a large number of signs remained uncertain. Many of these were filled in over time, but even now fourteen signs – around a fifth of the total syllabary – remain undeciphered. Anna took us through one particular case-study: sign *56 and some of the various suggestions which have been made over the years." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Sembase - a database project for the study of Semitic roots - http://www.sembase.org/index...

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"Geographically, the Semitic languages were spoken in the Middle East (the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula). Some also spread into North Africa (Punic and Arabic) and what is today Ethiopia. They include Akkadian (along with Babylonian and Assyrian) in the East; Ugaritic, Eblaite, Amorite, Canaanite (Phoenician, Punic, Moabite and Hebrew), and Aramaic in the Northwest; Arabic, Sabaic, Hadhrami, Ma'ini, and Qatabani (among others) on the Arabian Peninsula; and Geez, Tigre, Tigrinia, Gurage, Harari and Amharic in Ethiopia (among others). Evidence indicates that all Semitic languages have developed from a common language in use long before writing (and hence unattested), which Semitists term Proto-Semitic. This would have been a member of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, along with sister languages, probably including some ancestor of Egyptian (Proto-Egyptian?). At a much earlier date there would presumably have been a Proto-Afro-Asiatic. The territory of the Afro-Asiatic languages would have been Western Asia (the Middle East), and parts of Africa, although for all we know Proto-Semitic may have originated in Africa and migrated to the Middle East. Although we think of Proto-Semitic, it would have been divided into dialects somewhat anticipating its development into the Semitic languages as evidenced by living or otherwise extant information. At all earlier stages, there would have been alien linguistic influences." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"On the other hand, some of the forgotten languages were written very early and have great importance for that reason. Unfortunately, the first alphabet used for Semitic languages was that developed for Sumerian. For some time, logograms were used so extensively that the texts do not reveal sufficient reliable information regarding the phonology. Furthermore, early phonological characters were developed initially for Sumerian, which is not a Semitic language, and does not have the same wealth of consonants. Thus the phonology of Old Akkadian (early third millenium B.C.E.), for example, cannot be said to be perfectly known. To the extent that the words represented by the ideograms became written by phonological characters, it is not always easy to know if the word is Semitic or Sumerian. And when known to be Semitic, one does not know that it was written nearly as it was spoken at the time. Some Semitic consonants were often not distinguished by the emerging phonological chracters. And there may have already been an archaizing tradition, which was considered appropriate for writing (writing something down being a somewhat formal act in itself). As for Hebrew, the earliest inscriptional Hebrew material is sufficiently limited that it cannot independently document most of the language recorded in Biblical texts. Scholars differ on the dates of composition of the various parts of the Bible, and whether or the extent to which the Biblical texts reflect a state of the language prior to those dates of composition. While some Biblical Hebrew can be assigned to the first half of the first millenium B.C.E., some is clearly only attested in the second century, and post-Biblical Hebrew even later. Furthermore, just as Old Akkadian borrowed from Sumerian, Hebrew borrowed words as well, from other Canaanite dialects, Aramaic and even Arabic. Unfortunately, since the Semitic languages are so similar, it is not always possible to know what is borrowed and what is native to a language. Attempts even to identify the language of a short inscription may depend on where it was found, and the style of the script, as much as the linguistic content, if the text does not happen to contain a clear identifying trait. The challenge can be even greater when the material is found only in unvocalized texts." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Khazarian Hypothesis and the Nature of Yiddish « Historical Geography « GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"The Khazarian hypothesis, namely that Ashkenazi Jewry derives from the Khazars, has recently been revived by Eran Elhaik, a geneticist at John Hopkins University. His article “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses” appeared in December 2012 in Genome Biology and Evolution and was widely publicized before the actual publication. The two hypotheses compared in this article depict Eastern European Jews as a group that either “emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly” (Rhineland hypothesis) or “descended from the Khazars, an amalgam of Turkic clans” (Khazarian hypothesis). According to the abstract, Elhaik “applied a wide range of population genetic analyses” and found evidence to support the Khazarian hypothesis." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Razib Khan wrote an eminently sensible critique of the genetic, historical, and geographical errors in Elhaik’s article, focusing on his unsubstantiated use of Armenians as a genetic proxy for the Khazars. The genetic affinity between Jews—and not only those of Eastern European ancestry, but other Jewish groups as well—and Armenians has been noted at least as far back as 2000, when Nebel et al. found a connection between Jewish groups worldwide and other peoples living in the north of the Fertile Crescent, such as Kurds, Turks, and Armenians. Elhaik’s use of Armenians as the proxy for Khazarian DNA which reveals a profound lack of understanding of historical geography. Razib Khan writes:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babies can hear syllables in the womb - The research lends support to the idea that babies develop language skills while still in the womb in response to their parents' voices. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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Scientists say babies decipher speech as early as three months before birth. The evidence comes from detailed brain scans of 12 infants born prematurely. At just 28 weeks' gestation, the babies appeared to discriminate between different syllables like "ga" and "ba" as well as male and female voices. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the French team said it was unlikely the babies' experience outside the womb would have affected their findings. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Anecdotal stories from my pregnant patients include a few heading to the drag races while pregnant. Each person stated how when the engines started with the very loud noise, their pregnant belly literally went to a jolted point. They had to leave the venue. Early days of ultrasound we would bang on a metal pot near the womb to make the baby change positions. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Geography of South Asian Languages | Brown Pundits - http://www.brownpundits.com/2013...

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Maps such as these are useful and informative, but please be aware that some of the comments here are linguistically confusing and get things wrong, at least partly, mixing political, historical and linguistic arguments. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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SCRIPTA: The Hunminjeongeum Society - http://scripta.kr/scripta...

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"SCRIPTA, the official journal of the Hunmin jeongeum Society, is a refereed journal published annually in September. SCRIPTA welcomes submissions from scholars of various disciplines whose work especially pertains to writing systems. Submissions should not substantially duplicate work that any of the authors have published elsewhere. " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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