Linguistics

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Slang is good for you - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"Slang is good for you Some people say that it isn’t. They think it’s vulgar, sloppy, repetitive. They think it’s casual speech out of place in semi-formal discourse, Chuck Taylors with a jacket and tie. They think it betrays an unbecoming emptiness of mind. At the same time — and, need I mention, inconsistently — they point out that we already have plenty of words, and slang is redundant, misplaced creativity. “Use the words you’ve got,” they say, “not the words you want.” No one cares to hear about how dissatisfied you are with the language you’re given. That’s what they say." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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No excrement, Edwin. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What malapropisms reveal about how the dictionary in our head might be organized: Lexicon Valley - Slate Magazine - http://www.slate.com/article...

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"Ever since Richard Brinsley Sheridan created the chronically misspeaking character of Mrs. Malaprop in his 18th-century romantic comedy The Rivals, we’ve had a convenient word with which to point out other people’s linguistic inferiority. But is saying “epitaphs” when you really mean “epithets,” as Mrs. Malaprop did, really a sign of ignorance? In fact, there’s much more to malapropisms than you might think. Listen as Bob Garfield and I discuss what a common speech error reveals about the way that our mental lexicon—that is, the dictionary in our head—is likely organized." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"You'll find every Lexicon Valley episode at slate.com/lexiconvalley, or in the player below:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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focus - http://www.etymonline.com/index...

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focus (n.) 1640s, from L. focus "hearth, fireplace" (also, figuratively, "home, family"), of unknown origin, used in post-classical times for "fire" itself, taken by Kepler (1604) in a mathematical sense for "point of convergence," perhaps on analogy of the burning point of a lens (the purely optical sense of the word may have existed before Kepler, but it is not recorded). Introduced into English 1650s by Hobbes. Sense transfer to "center of activity or energy" is first recorded 1796. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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@Terra, does that mean the root word of oda (room) comes from adak? Since rooms are individual focuses of all homes... - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Applying information theory to linguistics - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"The majority of languages -- roughly 85 percent of them -- can be sorted into two categories: those, like English, in which the basic sentence form is subject-verb-object ("the girl kicks the ball"), and those, like Japanese, in which the basic sentence form is subject-object-verb ("the girl the ball kicks")." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The reason for the difference has remained somewhat mysterious, but researchers from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences now believe that they can account for it using concepts borrowed from information theory, the discipline, invented almost singlehandedly by longtime MIT professor Claude Shannon, that led to the digital revolution in communications. The researchers will present their hypothesis in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ancient DNA and Sumerians | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp...

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"A few months ago someone asked me (via email) which populations I would love to get typed (genetically that is). There is one population which did not come to mind at the time: the Sumerians. Why? Because these are arguably the first historic nation. The first self-conscious ethnic group which operated by the rules which we define as the fundamentals of literate civilization. Strangely, they are an ethno-linguistic isolate. My own assumption until lately has been that this is not too surprising, in that prior to the rise of expansive civilizations (Sargon of Akkad) there was much more linguistic and ethnic diversity than we currently see around us. Or, was evident even in the early Iron Age. In other words, the ancient Fertile Crescent may have resembled the highlands of Papua, with Hurrians, Akkadians, Gutians, Elamites, Sumerians, etc., all speaking mutually unintelligible dialects which diverged very far back in the mists of antiquity." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"I am no longer quite so sure about this model. That is largely due to the possibility that there was a great deal of demographic change between the Mesolithic and the Bronze Age, with successive waves of layering and replacement. My rough model is that a few groups of farmers may have expanded to swallow up thousands of hunter-gatherer groups. These homogeneous farmer societies eventually would diversify, because they were not united by the institutional forces which cemented later imperial regimes, in particular, literate elites which had a sense of consciousness which extended deep into the past because of written records. Therefore, the diversification would presumably have been similar to what we see with Romance languages, or Indo-Aryan, branching out from an common root language which replaced many competitors rapidly. Without writing and large scale polities the divergence would be more rapid, and there would be many more tips on the phylogenetic tree." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Economical English: the hidden connections between homonyms | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012...

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"English is famous for being littered with synonyms. Sometimes the number of words we have for a single thing seems almost greedy (not to mention extravagant, hedonistic, decadent, lavish, immoderate, ostentatious, and sybaritic). The dual threads of Germanic and Romance languages that form the basis of the English lexicon are largely to blame for its profligacy, as well as that cheerful habit that Anglophones have of adopting terms from other tongues." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"On the other hand, English can also surprise us by being peculiarly economical, employing one word to mean several things almost as often as it uses dozens to mean just one. Sometimes, the multiple origins of the English language account for instances where two very distinct definitions are found for a single word. For example, we have the Germanic route to thank for an ear of corn (Ahre), but the Latin for the organ we use for hearing (auris). A wax seal on a document, meanwhile, came to us from Latin (sigellum), while the marine mammal owes its name to the Germanic (compare Old Norse selr)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Daniel EVERETT :: Language: The Cultural Tool (2012 book contra Chomsky) . [also TV documentary on Pirahã research, The Grammar of Happiness] - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...&

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"In 2005 Everett shot to international prominence with a paper <a rel="nofollow" href="http://goo.gl/KsoV3"... ; claiming that he had identified features of the Pirahã language that challenged Noam Chomsky’s influential theory that human language is governed by "universal grammar," a genetically determined capacity that imposes the same fundamental shape on all the world’s tongues. That paper, published in the journal Current Anthropology, turned him into something of a popular hero, embraced in the press as a giant killer who had felled the mighty Chomsky -- but denounced by some fellow linguists as a fraud promoting dubious ideas about a powerless indigenous group while refusing to release his data to skeptics." Book reviewed <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.nytimes.com/20... ; title="http://www.nytimes.com/20... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What is the strangest change in meaning that any word has undergone? | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012...

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"Most of the words in everyday English have been in (and occasionally out of) circulation for centuries. A study of them in a historical dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary, which charts chronologically the story of a word from its birth to the present day, can reveal startling changes in meaning. A pedant was in the sixteenth century a schoolmaster, while the OED gives ‘strong and vigorous’ as one of the earliest meanings of nervous (as in full of nerves, or sinews). There are many other such examples. Promiscuous used to mean confused or undistinguished, while the first punk, in the sixteenth century, was a prostitute." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"gay" changed in a generation - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The nuanced relationship between language and different types of perception - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Speaking more than one language can improve our ability to control our behavior and focus our attention, recent research has shown. But are there any advantages for bilingual children before they can speak in full sentences? We know that bilingual children can tell if a person is speaking one of their native languages or the other, even when there is no sound, by watching the speaker's mouth for visual cues. But Núria Sebastián-Gallés of Universitat Pompeu Fabra and colleagues wanted to know whether bilingual infants could also do this with two unfamiliar languages. They studied 8-month-old infants, half of whom lived in either Spanish- or Catalan-speaking households and half of whom lived in Spanish-Catalan bilingual households." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The researchers looked at whether the infants could discriminate between English and French, two unfamiliar languages, using only visual cues. They found that the bilingual infants could tell the difference between the two languages, while the infants who lived in single-language households could not. These findings suggest that infants who are immersed in bilingual environments are more sensitive to the differences in visual cues associated with the sounds of various languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"There is little that irks British defenders of the English language more than Americanisms, which they see creeping insidiously into newspaper columns and everyday conversation. But bit by bit British English is invading America too." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Poor Nunberg would have exploded in the 1600s when every word and phrase of the language was a 'Britishism.' - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language use is simpler than previously thought - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2012) — For more than 50 years, language scientists have assumed that sentence structure is fundamentally hierarchical, made up of small parts in turn made of smaller parts, like Russian nesting dolls. But a new Cornell University study suggests language use is simpler than they had thought." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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You're welcome :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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O’zapft is! 18 essential German words and phrases for Oktoberfest | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012...

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"From 22nd of September, millions of people will travel to Munich, like every year, to attend the world’s largest fair. Until the 7th of October, Munich will once again be hosting the Oktoberfest, which boasts a long tradition. It first took place in 1810, when Crown Prince Ludwig (later King Ludwig I) married Princess Therese of Bavaria. To celebrate the royal wedding, a horse race was held in an open space which is now called the Theresienwiese, named after the bride Princess Therese. It is truly a festival of superlatives with 6.9 million visitors in 2011 alone. In the same year, 7.5 million litres of beer and 522,821 roast chickens were consumed. Over the years, Oktoberfest has developed many traditions and it is quite an experience. Let’s have a look at a few of the most important terms you need to know to find your way around." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

I'd love to try it one time, but I think I'll have to wait until it stops being so popular. I need some space, and I can't plan a year in advance :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » What’s in a literary name? - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"Names and naming are topics of perennial interest, but until recently there were few general discussions of names as a literary feature. This is strange, since questions about names keep coming up in criticism. How are character names chosen? Are literary names always meaningful, or are some characters named quite casually? Does each genre have a list of first names available only for that sort of writing? Corydon, a stock-name for a shepherd, is obviously pastoral, whilst Hodge is clearly georgic. (Thomas Hardy wrote of the farm labourer ‘personified by the pitiable picture known as Hodge’.) Is it necessary for fictional characters to be named at all? After all, in romances a name can be withheld for much or all of the story. When it does emerge it may not be a full name. (Full names, complete with surname, have a history of their own and deserve a dedicated blog post in their own right.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Some novelists and poets have been specially interested in naming – Spenser, Milton, Dickens, Joyce, and Nabokov, for example. It’s well known that Edmund Spenser conveys much of the meaning of The Faerie Queene through his character names, which have a grammar of their own. Sansfoy, Sansloy, and Sansjoy exhibit related deficiencies – faithless, lawless, joyless. So too the sisters Perissa and Elissa contrast an excess and deficiency of desire. Great writers are brilliant in naming as in everything else. They make naming enter into their plots, as when Milton changes the fallen angels’ names in Paradise Lost as a consequence of their Fall – using Satan only for the fallen character, Lucifer for the unfallen. In Finnegans Wake, the ever-changing names reiterate acrostic patterns that are one of our best guides to Joyce’s universal themes – besides being a source of much of the fun. The universal Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker ranges through history and geography, becoming now Haroun Childeric Eggeberth, now Hung Chung Egglyfella, now Howth Castle and Environs." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Emoticons at 30 (Or Is It 45? Or 125? Or 131?) : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm...

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"This week, there have been many celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the emoticon, the now-ubiquitous use of punctuation marks to mark emotion in online text. On September 19, 1982, at 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posted a message to a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board, proposing that :-) be used for marking jokes and :-( for non-jokes. Though Fahlman should get full credit for these pioneering smiley and frowny faces, there were in fact much earlier pioneers in expressive typography." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Today, the Emoticon Turns 30 :-) by Megan Garber <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.theatlantic.co... ; title="http://www.theatlantic.co... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Obrigado! Takk! Di ou mèsi! Celebrating World Gratitude Day across time and language | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012...

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"How many ways can we say ‘thank you’? In English alone, there are plenty. The Oxford English Dictionary first cites the simplest, thanks, in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598. The OED also treats us to some oldies (gramercy [c. 1330], thank thee [1631], thankee [1824]) and contextualizes some goodies (British colloquialism cheers stumbled out of the pub and into wider use in 1976). Other common synonyms range from reverential (bless you) to perfunctory (much obliged, much appreciated) to jovially informal (thanks a million, ta)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"For as many languages there are in the world, there are at least as many ways of expressing appreciation. On 21 September, a World Gratitude Day celebration with Oxford Dictionaries is an international journey through language that includes stopovers in France (merci), Spain (gracias), Germany (danke), Italy (grazie), and beyond. Join us as we explore different ways of saying ‘thank you’ around the world in the interactive map below." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Douglas BURNS :: Language, Thought, and Logical Paradoxes . [1974 PDF, 54 pages] - https://docs.google.com/viewer...

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"This book is an attempt to approach to the problem of paradoxes from within the reference of Theravada Buddhism. In 1970 Dr. Burns spent nine months in meditation practice. For over seven months of this period he was a monk and a disciple of the Venerable Ajahn Chah. The spirit of logical analysis combined with introspective awareness is reflected in this present writing. His other main Buddhist works are Buddhism and Depth Psychology and Nirvana, Nihilism and Satori. In 1977 Dr Burns mysteriously disappeared while exploring a national park in the south of Thailand. He was in his mid thirties at that time." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What’s in a Name? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-b...

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"As Shakespeare wrote in Romeo & Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"And some dinosaur names are real doozies: Tyrannosaurus rex, Pachycephalosaurus, Parasaurolophus, the list goes on and on. And children memorize those names like they are sugary treats – I should know, as I was obsessed with dinosaurs when I was young." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Invented languages | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012...

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"Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo ‘a star shines on the hour of our meeting’" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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the fırst invented language by Muhyî-i Gülşenî, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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With a Nasal Drawl - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/blogs...

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"What do Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Neil Diamond, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Joseph Mascis Jr. have in common? A nasal drawl. Or so they say." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Twain grew up in Hannibal, Mo.; Fields in Philadelphia; Diamond in Brooklyn; Paltrow in Southern California, and Mascis in Amherst, Mass. No matter, you can tell them all by their nasal drawl. Or can you? If you want to say something specific about a person’s pronunciation but aren’t too comfortable with phonetic terminology, you can say “nasal drawl” and people will understand. It means—well, it’s hard to say what it means, but it means the person’s pronunciation is a little funny and not particularly high class." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Do birds and fowls fly? - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"My immediate concern in this post is the origin of the word fowl – not because it is such an important word but because attempts to find its “motivation” are instructive. In the past, fowl had the form fugol and meant “bird.” Dutch and German vogel ~ Vogel have retained the old meaning, and their Scandinavian cognates sound very much like fugol (compare Old Icelandic fugl). Engl. bird has no cognates either in Germanic or outside it and is usually dismissed in dictionaries as a word of unknown origin, though conjectures on its etymology abound. If my reconstruction is right, bridd “young bird” (such are the oldest attested form and sense of bird) meant “a born creature; animal” and is related to Engl. birth and Scots birky “child; fellow.” But why fugol was pushed from the center of the vocabulary to its periphery remains an unsolved mystery and in a way, the demotion of an old respectable word is a greater riddle than the emergence of bridd/bird. In present day English, fowl occurs mainly in connection with edible birds. However, such phrases as the fowls of the air (admittedly archaic), water fowl, and especially the alliterating triad neither fish, flesh, nor fowl (often reduced to neither fish nor fowl), remind us of the ancient sense of this noun." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Strangely, in many languages, the word for “bird” defies etymologists. Such is, among many others, Latin avis. The most appealing connection seems to be between avis “bird” and ovum “egg,” but it has been called into question, and for good reason. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting a line from Henry Cecil Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, which I often use and like very much: “…it is doubtful whether ‘egg’ or ‘bird’ is the primary meaning of the base” (the entry ovum; the reconstructed base, or root, is ówjon, in which both vowels are long). This is what editors sometimes call unconscious humor. While stating his opinion, Wyld did not hear that he rephrased the famous question about the chicken and the egg. Which comes first?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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New Demotic Dictionary Translates Lives of Ancient Egyptians - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...

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"Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile. But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Thus Wrote 'Onchsheshonqy - An Introductory Grammar of Demotic by Janet H. Johnson <a rel="nofollow" href="https://oi.uchicago.edu/p... ; title="https://oi.uchicago.edu/p... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English - http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/style-a...

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Since there are so many librarians thought I should post this one ;-) Don't say: libary | Do say: library Comment: As mentioned before, English speakers dislike two [r]s in the same word. However, we have to buck up and pronounce them all. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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New Linguistics Journals at De Gruyter Mouton - http://www.degruyter.com/page...

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"De Gruyter just added over 100 journals to its extensive and high quality journal collection, and to celebrate the good news, we are pleased to offer you a free taste of our newest titles in linguistics - all articles published in 2011 and 2012 are now available for free!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"f you are a librarian and would like to activate free online access for your library network, please contact us directly at service@degruyter.com." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ten facts about the word 'chocolate' | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012...

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"On 13 September we celebrate the birthday of arguably one of the most famous producers of chocolate in history. Milton Hershey, who was born 155 years ago today, opened the doors of his US chocolate factory in 1900, and his chocolate bars and kisses came onto the market shortly thereafter." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"But where did chocolate, as we know it today, come from?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Isidore of Seville's Etymologies: Who's Your Daddy? - Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), the bishop of Seville from about 600 to his death, is better known as an author than as an administrator. His most famous work is the Etymologies, a work of tremendous influence throughout the Middle Ages. One eleventh-century manuscript (Royal 6 C. i), probably copied at St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, is now available on the Digitised Manuscripts website." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The Etymologies is famous for its sometimes quirky explanations of the history of words. In some cases, when Isidore takes the word apart based on what it sounds like, the explanation that results can be extremely engaging, if not necessarily true. The Latin word for 'beggar' (mendicus) is now believed to derive from an earlier word meaning 'deformity' or 'lack'. Isidore, however, speculates a much more charming story, of a 'custom among the ancients' to 'close the hungry mouth and extend a hand, as if speaking with the hand' (manu dicere)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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