Linguistics

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New words | Cambridge Dictionaries Online blog - http://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/categor...

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1) gastrocrat noun a wealthy foodie; 2) groomzilla noun informal, humorous a man who is neurotically obsessed with planning his wedding; 3) biotic virus noun a non-native plant that invades an area and over time replaces a native plant; 4) astroturfing noun creating the false impression that a lot of people support a particular viewpoint, especially online. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

gender pollution noun the phenomenon whereby women entering a career renders that career less desirable for men - what misogynist invented this word? :( - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Estimating the date of composition of the Homeric epics - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2013...

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"The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature, but when they were produced is not known with certainty. Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works. Our analysis compared a common set of vocabulary items among the three pairs of languages, recording for each item whether the words in the two languages were cognate – derived from a shared ancestral word – or not. We then used a likelihood-based Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the most probable times in years separating these languages given the percentage of words they shared, combined with knowledge of the rates at which different words change. Our date for the epics is in close agreement with historians' and classicists' beliefs derived from historical and archaeological sources." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved. To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended. (...) Over thousands of years, tiny variations in the way that we produce sounds have meant that early languages have morphed into many different descendents. Dr Klein explains: "These sound changes are almost always regular, with similar words changing in similar ways, so patterns are left that a human or a computer can find. "The trick is to identify these patterns of change and then to 'reverse' them, basically evolving words backwards in time." (...)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Once the *recursive* features of language evolution are deduced, one can chain forward from the present (cf. prediction in physics), as well as simulate back to initial conditions (e.g. stochastic MCMC). By relying on probabilistic models of sound change, the authors zoom past symbolic representations of languages. My guess for first ever uttered sound: "Duh!" (maybe "wut" :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Walk a mile in my shoes - This idiom means that you should try to understand someone before criticising them.

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The Other Side of Noam Chomsky's Brilliant Mind | Alternet - http://www.alternet.org/culture...

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"An excerpt from the new book "Power Systems" explore's Chomsky's contributions to the raging academic debate on linguistics and how children learn to speak." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Well, that gets technical, but there’s very exciting work going on refining the proposed principles of universal grammar. The concept is widely misunderstood in the media and in public discussions. Universal grammar is something different: it is not a set of universal observations about language. In fact, there are interesting generalizations about language that are worth studying, but universal grammar is the study of the genetic basis for language, the genetic basis of the language faculty. There can’t be any serious doubt that something like that exists. Otherwise an infant couldn’t reflexively acquire language from whatever complex data is around. So that’s not controversial. The only question is what the genetic basis of the language faculty is." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Merriam-Webster Unabridged - http://mwudev.m-w.com/blog...

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"Anyone reading this likely has a thing for dictionaries. Am I right, dear reader? If so, I suspect that you may be among those who love dictionaries enough to be intrigued by the new all-electronic Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged but who at the same time feel a kind of melancholic longing for the cluttered columns on filament-thin paper, for a book with a heft that resists the bedtime snuggle, instead demanding the dignity of a hard surface strong enough to support its considerable girth. I know just how you feel. (It won’t surprise you that lexicographers also tend to have a thing for dictionaries of the traditional kind.) And I’m writing with words of comfort: Aside from the matters of portability and affordability, which clearly speak in favor of the electronic platform, this dictionary’s search capabilities make it a veritable Garden of Lexicographic Delights bounded only by the user’s own creativity. Yes, dear reader: a veritable Garden. Hmm. You look a bit skeptical—you say you like to explore your dictionaries by flipping pages with your fingers? Perhaps a tour would be helpful, you say? Why, sure. I’d love to. This way, please." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Saudade | Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"Saudade is a Portuguese word that has no direct translation in English. (...) The "Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa" defines saudade (or saudades) as "A somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to thinking back on situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived." (...) Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses. (...)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Yes i am from Portugal. Can i add you on my facebook as a friend? serraz@gmail.com (my contact) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages mapped: what do people speak where you live? | UK news | guardian.co.uk - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news...

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"The 2011 census reveals the main language spoken in 34,753 'output areas' across England and Wales, each of 1,500 people. While only 0.3% of the population cannot speak English, 4m people do not speak it as their main language. This shows the country's patchwork quilt of languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Here in Cardinal Nation, mostly baseball. ;-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Nostratic languages - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Nostratic is a hypothetical language family, the exact composition and structure of the family varies among proponents. The hypothesis is controversial and has varying degrees of acceptance amongst linguists worldwide. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Not sure I fully understand this... - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - Manx: Bringing a language back from the dead - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"Condemned as a dead language, Manx - the native language of the Isle of Man - is staging an extraordinary renaissance, writes Rob Crossan." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"But the grim prognosis coincided with a massive effort at revival. Spearheaded by activists like Stowell and driven by lottery funding and a sizeable contribution (currently £100,000 a year) from the Manx government, the last 20 years have had a huge impact. Now there is even a Manx language primary school in which all subjects are taught in the language, with more than 60 bilingual pupils attending. Manx is taught in a less comprehensive way in other schools across the island. In an island where 53% of the population were born abroad, it's perhaps surprising that there seems to be as much enthusiasm among British immigrants for Manx language as there is among native Manx people." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Alaska Native Language Center | Snow - http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/snow/

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"The claim that Eskimo[1] languages have numerous words for "snow" has often been repeated and has become familiar to the general public in addition to linguists and anthropologists. The point to be made seems to be that "Eskimo" has some indeterminate number of words -- and the numbers given vary in different sources -- for a substance that is described in English and most non-Eskimo languages with a much smaller number of words. The existence of snow terms in Eskimo is most often used to show the relationship between the vocabulary of a language and the physical environment in which that language is used. For some reason it is always the Eskimo example that is brought out to illustrate this situation and not the fact that painters may use a wide array of color terms and carpenters know a lot of words pertaining to nails and other hardware. The Eskimo example has entered the realm of popular mythology, having turned into a scholarly equivalent of the urban legend about the poodle in the microwave: everyone is familiar with the story but the exact details are a little sketchy." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"When Boas in 1911 first presented his Eskimo snow terms, it was not in the section of the introduction called "Influence of Environment on Language" as one might suppose but rather in a less enlightening section called "Limitation on the Number of Phonetic Groups Expressing Ideas." The point of the discussion is to show that languages classify things very differently, "that the groups of ideas expressed by specific phonetic groups show very material differences in different languages, and do not conform by any means to the same principles of classification." Boas gives the example of English, where water in various states is denoted by independent, unrelated words, such as lake, river, brook, rain, dew, etc., although another language might conceivably express them by means of derivations from one term. Boas next gives an example comparing snow terms in "Eskimo" to English with its water terms. He gives four "words," aput 'snow on the ground,' qana 'falling snow,' piqsirpoq 'drifting snow,' and qimuqsuq 'snowdrift.' These forms appear to come from a variety of Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, but the source is not given.[2] Boas goes on to say that the same language has a variety of terms for seals." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Geography of the “Onion” Vocabulary « Cultural Geography « GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"As pointed out in an earlier GeoCurrents post, examining the history and geography of just one word across languages can reveal fascinating and instructive patterns. In this post, we will take a closer look at the words for ‘onion’—as well as its relatives, leek, garlic, scallion, and shallot—in a number of European languages. Starting with ‘onion’, the GeoCurrents map on the left reveals three main groups of cognates, but crucially, none of them correlates with main subgroupings within the Indo-European language family (or with the family as a whole), even though ‘onion’ can be thought of as a pretty basic word. Closely related languages may have very different words for ‘onion’, while distantly related or even unrelated tongues may feature cognates for this meaning. The important lesson to draw from this is that the distribution of cognates for any single meaning (and by extension a relatively small set of such meanings, such as a Swadesh list) may tell an interesting story, but it is often one of both common descent and borrowing." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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;-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Phylogenetics implies Austro-Asiatic are intrusive to India : Gene Expression - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp...

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"Most people in South Asia speak one of two varieties of language, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. These two are not particularly closely related. Indo-Aryan is an Indo-European language, as is evident in the plethora of obvious cognates with other Indo-European dialects. I have a minimal fluency in Bengali, the easternmost of the Indo-European languages, and quite a bit more fluency with English, one of the most westernmost, and it was evident to me rather early on (e.g., grass vs. gash, man vs. manush, nose vs. nak). In contrast to me Dravidian languages are peculiar because the accent and cadence are clearly South Asian, but they are utterly impenetrable (though there are many loan words into Indo-Aryan from Dravidian)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"But in this post I’m going to explore the genetic relationships of the people who speak a subgroup of Austro-Asiatic languages indigenous to India, that of the Munda. The traditional question has always been whether the Austro-Asiatic languages are from India, or, whether they are from Southeast Asia. More precisely, did the Munda culture come to India, or is the Munda culture a relic of the original Austro-Asiatic domain in eastern India?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Altaic and Related Languages? « Cartography « GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"Today’s language-family maps take up the controversial issue of Altaic. Several decades ago, many linguists grouped the Altaic languages with the Uralic languages, but that thesis is no longer tenable. Now many linguists are expressing doubt about the Altaic family itself. Languages placed within this group have a number of common features, but such features seem to many experts to result from borrowing. The farther back in history one goes, the less similar the main branches of the Altaic family appear. To the extent that this is true, Altaic cannot be regarded as a legitimate language family. I have therefore included a conventional map of Altaic, based closely on the Wikipedia language-family map found here. But I have also posted maps of the three main branches of Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic), which may well be first-order language families themselves. Note again that the mapping is approximate at best, and refers to the situation pertaining in the mid-twentieth century rather than that of today. I have again closely followed the Wikipedia original map, although I did add a small Turkic area in northeastern Bulgaria. I wanted to add one as well in northern Cyprus, but the area is too small to be indicated given the tools that I am using." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Some scholars have suggested that Japanese and Korean together form a language family of their own, but support for this thesis is also scant. Japanese is usually regarded as the main language of the much more restricted Japonic family. In addition to Japanese, this family includes the languages of the Ryukyu Archipelago, such as Okinawan. These tongues are often classified as dialects of Japanese, but by purely linguistic criteria they are languages in their own right. I have thus added a small dot to the map of the Japonic languages to indicate Okinawan. Note that the Wikipedia original map ignores the Japonic category and instead classifies Japanese as an isolate, or a language that sits alone rather than forming part of a larger family. (On the classification of Japanese, see here and here.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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World Maps of Language Families « Cartography « GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"For teaching a class on the history and geography of the world’s major language families, good linguistic maps are essential. Unfortunately, serviceable maps that depict only language families are difficult to find. Most images available online show a combination of families and sub-families, splitting Indo-European, for example, into its main divisions. Such a portrayal is of little use for demonstrating the significance of the Indo-European family, which encompasses languages spoken by almost half the people of the world." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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World Maps of Language Families, Continued <a rel="nofollow" href="http://geocurrents.info/c... ; title="http://geocurrents.info/c... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC - North Yorkshire - Voices - Glossary - http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyo...

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Eeh by gum, a glossary fer tha. Yes, it's a Yorkshire dialect glossary for you - feel free to tell us any essential words we've left out. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Kirk features in place-names - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Endangered Languages Project - ELP is seeking to engage a qualified artist or designer for the creation of an original logo that will complement the existing ELP brand and reflect ELP’s vision, values and guiding principles. Learn more. - http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

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The Endangered Languages Project (ELP) is a newly launched global online network for language communities, linguistic scholars and others interested in the revitalization of at-risk and Indigenous languages. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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ROMANI Project - Manchester - http://romani.humanities.manch...

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"Proto-Romani is believed to have emerged not in the Northwest of India, as is sometimes reported in popular literature (and as was indeed suggested by some nineteenth-century scholars), but in Central India (see already Turner 1926). It shares a number of early developments that are confined to the forerunners of the Central Indian languages, such as šun-'to hear' from Old Indic (Sanskrit) śr̥n- (see Map 2), jakh 'eye' (via *akkhi) from Old Indic akṣi- (Map 3), or the phonological shape of the nominalising suffix -ipen (as in sastipen 'health'), from Old Indic -itvana (Map 4). This combination of features emerged during the early transition stage from Old to Middle Indic, sometime after 500 BCE, and proves that Proto-Romani began its history as a Central Indian language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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When Did Roma Leave India?—New Discovery or Corroboration of Old Theories? « Europe « Places « GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...?

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"As was highlighted in a previous GeoCurrents mini-series on the history of English, popular media reports on scientific issues involving human history, migrations, and languages habitually pick studies whose claims contradict the current consensus; such studies are further sensationalized, while other work on the topic is generally ignored. An additional example is the popular media reports on a genetics study on the exodus of the Roma people (Gypsies) from India, recently published in Current Biology (“Reconstructing the Indian Origin and Dispersal of the European Roma: A Maternal Genetic Perspective”, 22(24): 2342-2349). According to a short article by Sindya N. Bhanoo in the New York Times, titled “Genomic Study Traces Roma to Northern India”, this “wide-ranging genomic study appears to confirm that the Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago”. In actuality, the article in Current Biology makes no such claims. Instead, its contribution is much more modest. The main focus of the article is the different groups of Roma in Europe. The researchers examined genetic data from approximately 200 Roma individuals from the Iberian Peninsula, particularly their mtDNA (which traces maternal descent), which showed genetic similarity to the Roma from the Balkans region. Their conclusion is that the Roma of Spain and Portugal migrated via Southeastern Europe, contrary to popular views that some of the Roma came to the Iberian Peninsula via North Africa. A large part of the study concerns the issues of genetic affinities among Roma groups, the degree of admixture with neighboring populations, and migration routes followed since the first arrival in Europe." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Europe invents the Gypsies - article by Klaus-Michael Bogdal on Eurozine <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.eurozine.com/a... ; title="http://www.eurozine.com/a... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): The most common English words - http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Here are some additional interesting bits from that interesting analysis of all of the words in Google Books (23 GB of text!). There were almost 100,000 distinct words, mentioned a total of 743,842,922,321 times. The embed above shows the 50 most common (the "count" is in billions of mentions). Note the paucity of nouns." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Why hello Peter Norvig again (source data for that post). - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Stopping to Consider Language Acquisition - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/blogs...

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"As is my wont, when I began reading Interpreting Imperatives by Magdalena Kaufmann (now at the University of Connecticut) I started with a part that many would probably skip: the preface. There are all sorts of things to be learned from a preface to a book in one’s own field. The author is the former Magdalena Schwager, who did her Ph.D. at Frankfurt and moved on to Göttingen, and is now married to Stefan Kaufmann of Northwestern. One of her mentors was Ede Zimmermann. And then suddenly I stopped in surprise when I saw what she said about the respected German linguist Arnim von Stechow, her first semantics teacher:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The verbs cease and stop are almost synonymous verbs of discontinuation in many of their uses, but while cease takes infinitival complements as well as gerund-participial complements (so both The battery ceased to function and The battery ceased functioning mean “The battery commenced not functioning after previously having functioned”), stop takes only gerund-participial complements (so we get The battery stopped functioning but not *The battery stopped to function)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How come the past of 'go' is 'went?' | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2013...

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"Very long ago, one of our correspondents asked me how irregular forms like good—better and go—went originated. Not only was he aware of the linguistic side of the problem but he also knew the technical term for this phenomenon, namely “suppletion.” One cannot say the simplest sentence in English without running into suppletive forms. Consider the conjugation of the verb to be: am, is, are. Why is the list so diverse? And why is it mad—madder and rude—ruder, but bad—worse and good—better? Having received the question, I realized that, although I can produce an inventory of suppletive forms in a dozen languages and know the etymology of some of them, I am unable to give a general reason for their existence. I consulted numerous books on the history of the Indo-European languages and all kinds of “introductions” and discovered to my surprise that all of them enumerate the forms but never go to the beginning of time. I also turned to some of my colleagues for help and came home none the wiser. So I left the query on the proverbial back burner but did not forget it. One day, while feeding my insatiable bibliography and leafing through the entire set of a journal called Glotta (it is devoted to Greek and Latin philology), I found a useful article on suppletion in Classical Greek. Naturally, there were references to earlier works in it. I followed the thread and am now ready to say something about the subject." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"This introduction might seem unnecessary to our readers, but I have written it to point out two things. First, it sometimes happens that finding an answer to what looks like an elementary question proves a difficult enterprise. Second, the episode has a sobering aspect. The main work on the origin of suppletion is a “famous” book written more than a hundred years ago, and it had important predecessors. “Everybody,” as various authors say, knows it. Well, apparently, the book’s fame is not universal, and one can devote long years to the study of historical linguistics and stay outside the group defined by the cover term “everybody.” Nothing like a question from a student, friend, or reader to prick one’ vanity! And now to business." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Early StBoTs Online « Memiyawanzi - https://memiyawanzi.wordpress.com/2013...

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"I may just be terribly slow on the uptake, but I only today noticed that Harrassowitz Verlag has drastically discounted to clear the first thirty-two volumes in the Studien zu den Boğhazköy-Texten (StBoT, or StBoTs [ʃtubots], as we used to call them), and the remaining out of print volumes are available to download as PDF files at Hethitologie Portal Mainz." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Hethitologie Portal Mainz <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.hethport.adwma... ; title="http://www.hethport.adwma... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Mo Koz Kreol Morisien | Paul Choy - http://www.choy.mu/?p=247

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"Mo Koz Kreole Morisien is a comprehensive, step by step, guide to speaking the Mauritian Creole language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Using an easy to follow format, that requires no previous experience of a foreign language, I will guide you through everything you need to know to develop a conversational knowledge of this wonderful language, from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Includes fun quizes to check your developing knowledge, language and pronunciation tips to perfect your understanding, and a word list of over 2000 of the most commonly used words." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What is Beowulf? - Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"Some of our readers may be aware that the British Library holds the unique manuscript of the Old English epic poem Beowulf (Cotton MS Vitellius A XV). Want to find out more? Then check this link, which supplies answers to some of the more frequent questions (How old is the manuscript? Who owned it? Why is the manuscript damaged?), and also contains a short film containing footage of the manuscript." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Beowulf in Hungarian ... and French ... and Telugu ... <a rel="nofollow" href="http://britishlibrary.typ... ; title="http://britishlibrary.typ... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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