Linguistics

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Java, C, and Python: the etymology of programming languages | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012...

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"As a software developer for most of my adult life, I have a CV that is covered in acronyms and initialisms representing technologies I have mastered. Well, to be more honest, some technologies I have mastered, others I have used a lot, and a few I’ve had brief exposure to but which look good on my CV. Mine is a typical collection from a veteran of the dotcom era, a mishmash of Web technologies representing most of my industry’s fads from the last couple of decades." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » The oddest English spellings, part 21: Phony from top to bottom - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"I have written more than once that the only hope to reform English spelling would be by doing it piecemeal, that is, by nibbling away at a comfortable pace. Unfortunately, reformers used to attack words like have and give and presented hav and giv to the irate public. This was too radical a measure; bushes exist for beating about them. Several chunks of orthographic fat are crying to be cut off. One of them is the digraph ph. Dictionaries still cite phantasy and fantasy as admissible variants, but hardly anyone feels offended by fantasy, and probably no one is so steeped in classical scholarship as to advocate the spelling phantastic. (For more than a century there has been no progress in the movement of spelling reformers, but certain things should be said again and again for the record, even if they fall on deaf ears; “one doesn’t always fight to win.”)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Along with so many other learned spellings, ph appeared in English during the Renaissance. The digraph made sense (I am not saying “was needed”; it just made sense) in Greek words like orphan and physician and perhaps in names like Philip. But the scribes of that epoch inherited from their medieval predecessors the pernicious belief that the more letters one wrote in a word, the more the reader would be impressed. The easiest trick was to double consonants (and they doubled like a house on fire), but ph served their purpose too. So turph ‘turf’ and other monsters began to embellish manuscripts and books. The emergence of ph, apart from complicating spelling, introduced a good deal of confusion. For example, Anglo-French Estevene became Stephen (Greek Stephanos), while the shorter form and the family name (Steve, Stevenson) have v. However, don’t expect logic from English; Stephanie is spelled with ph and pronounced accordingly." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: How some Bantu got clickin' (Barbieri et al. 2012) - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2012...

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"Some Bantu languages spoken in southwestern Zambia and neighboring regions of Botswana, Namibia, and Angola are characterized by the presence of click consonants, whereas their closest linguistic relatives lack such clicks. As clicks are a typical feature not of the Bantu language family, but of Khoisan languages, it is highly probable that the Bantu languages in question borrowed the clicks from Khoisan languages. In this paper, we combine complete mitochondrial genome sequences from a representative sample of populations from the Western Province of Zambia speaking Bantu languages with and without clicks, with fine-scaled analyses of Y-chromosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms and short tandem repeats to investigate the prehistoric contact that led to this borrowing of click consonants. Our results reveal complex population-specific histories, with female-biased admixture from Khoisan-speaking groups associated with the incorporation of click sounds in one Bantu-speaking population, while concomitant levels of potential Khoisan admixture did not result in sound change in another. Furthermore, the lack of sequence sharing between the Bantu-speaking groups from southwestern Zambia investigated here and extant Khoisan populations provides an indication that there must have been genetic substructure in the Khoisan-speaking indigenous groups of southern Africa that did not survive until the present or has been substantially reduced." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Miriam Makeba - The Click Song <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/LauSd"&... ; <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; title="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babies' ability to detect complex rules in language outshines that of adults, research suggests - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2012) — New research examining auditory mechanisms of language learning in babies has revealed that infants as young as three months of age are able to automatically detect and learn complex dependencies between syllables in spoken language. By contrast, adults only recognized the same dependencies when asked to actively search for them. The study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig also highlights the important role of basic pitch discrimination abilities for early language development." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Auditory perception at the root of language learning (2012) <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.pnas.org/conte... ; title="http://www.pnas.org/conte... ; see <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/14bRLi"... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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friendfeed imported Linguistics
Deevy Bishop :: What CHOMSKY doesn't get about child language . [_The Science of Language_ (2012 interviews), Statistical learning v. Universal grammar] - http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2012...

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"If grammatical structure cannot be learned, it must be innate. But different languages have different grammars. So whatever is innate has to be highly abstract -- a Universal Grammar. And the problem is then to explain how children get from this abstract knowledge to the specific language they are learning. The field became encumbered by creative but highly implausible theories, most notably the parameter-setting account, which conceptualised language acquisition as a process of "setting a switch" for a number of innately-determined parameters. Evidence that children’s grammars actually changed in discrete steps, as each parameter became set, was lacking. Reality was much messier. [S]tatistical learning and connectionism were not given serious consideration by Chomsky; they were rapidly dismissed as versions of behaviourism that can’t possibly explain language acquisition." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Auditory perception at the root of language learning (2012): infants as young as three months of age are able to automatically detect and learn complex dependencies between syllables in spoken language -- by contrast, adults only recognized the same dependencies when asked to actively search for them. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.pnas.org/conte... ; title="http://www.pnas.org/conte... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The World Atlas of Language Structures | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology & the Max Planck Digital Library - http://wals.info/

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"The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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PLoS ONE: Origin of the Words Denoting Some of the Most Ancient Old World Pulse Crops and Their Diversity in Modern European Languages - http://www.plosone.org/article...

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"This preliminary research was aimed at finding the roots in various Eurasian proto-languages directly related to pulses and giving the words denoting the same in modern European languages. Six Proto-Indo-European roots were indentified, namely arnk(')- (‘a leguminous plant’), *bhabh- (‘field bean’), * (‘a kernel of leguminous plant’, ‘pea’), ghArs- (‘a leguminous plant’), *kek- (‘pea’) and *lent- (‘lentil’). No Proto-Uralic root was attested save hypothetically *kača (‘pea’), while there were two Proto-Altaic roots, *bŭkrV (‘pea’) and * (‘lentil’). The Proto-Caucasianx root * denoted pea, while another one, *hōwł(ā) (‘bean’, ‘lentil’) and the Proto-Basque root *iłha-r (‘pea’, ‘bean’, ‘vetch’) could have a common Proto-Sino-Caucasian ancestor, *hVwłV (‘bean’) within the hypothetic Dené-Caucasian language superfamily. The Modern Maltese preserved the memory of two Proto-Semitic roots, *'adaš- (‘lentil’) and *pūl- (‘field bean’). The presented results prove that the most ancient Eurasian pulse crops were well-known and extensively cultivated by the ancestors of all modern European nations. The attested lexicological continuum witnesses the existence of a millennia-long links between the peoples of Eurasia to their mutual benefit. This research is meant to encourage interdisciplinary concerted actions between plant scientists dealing with crop evolution and biodiversity, archaeobotanists and language historians." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Cornish for Beginners - Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"Do you ever wake up in the morning, and think to yourself, "I wonder what's the medieval Cornish word for unicorn?" If you belong to that select (and special) band, you might be aware that the British Library holds a 12th-century copy of a Latin-Old Cornish glossary, which contains the names of various birds, animals and fish, and other objects from daily life." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Sounds corny :) (I was so hoping the origin of that word was related to Cornish, but it looks like it's from 'corn fed') - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Words denoting pulse crops in European languages - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2012...

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"The attested Proto-Indo-European root-words directly linked to pulse crops are further testimony that Proto-Indo-European society was well-acquainted with agriculture (47), and was not predominantly nomadic and pastoral, as initially thought by the proposers of the Kurgan hypothesis (48)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How language change sneaks in - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2012) — Languages are continually changing, not just words but also grammar. A recent study examines how such changes happen and what the changes can tell us about how speakers' grammars work." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Historical linguists, who document and study language change, have long noticed that language changes have a sneaky quality, starting small and unobtrusive and then gradually conquering more ground, a process termed 'actualization'. De Smet's study investigates how actualization proceeds by tracking and comparing different language changes, using large collections of digitized historical texts. This way, it is shown that any actualization process consists of a series of smaller changes with each new change building on and following from the previous ones, each time making only a minimal adjustment. A crucial role in this is played by similarity." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What Color is this? in 9 languages | The CrowdFlower Blog - http://blog.crowdflower.com/2012...

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"I’ve always wanted to re-do some of the scientific studies of the past, like the World Color Survey. While I don’t have plane tickets or time to travel the world, I do have access to CrowdFlower’s 4 million contributors to re-test hypotheses about the universality of color-naming. Four years ago, we showed English language speakers random colors and asked for the color names. Four years later, with CrowdFlower contributors now in every country of the world, the experiment becomes much richer. The question is not only “Where does blue end, and red begin?”, but do people from different countries have different concepts of color boundaries? Search Colors Here:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The color-wheel above (thanks D3 and Dawn) contains 4,000 colors (we collected many more, but didn’t want to crash everyone’s browsers). Mouse-over the color-wheel to see the names of the colors in nine different languages, with translations into English. You can also filter by language using the search box and country flags, so you can see the differences between where Russians vs. Chinese vs. Japanese see red. On the whole, it looks like countries have extremely similar conceptions of color. Type “blue” into the search box, click on the different countries, and you can see the overlap. There are outliers though. Some narrower colors – such as “purple” – are used much more in Japan than in Russia. The use of certain modifiers such as “light” are used pretty uniformly across the color spectrum in English, but much more prevalently in the Blue-Green region in Japanese. What do you see in the data? You can download the raw data here. Like last time, find something interesting in the data and we’ll post it here! And stay tuned for more blog posts on when big crowd meets old science." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Riddled with irregularity - http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazin...

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"Languages are extremely diverse, but they are not arbitrary. Behind the bewildering, contradictory ways in which different tongues conceptualise the world, we can sometimes discern order. Linguists have traditionally assumed that this reflects the hardwired linguistic aptitude of the human brain. Yet recent scientific studies propose that language “universals” aren’t simply prescribed by genes but that they arise from the interaction between the biology of human perception and the bustle, exchange and negotiation of human culture." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Language has a logical job to do—to convey information—and yet it is riddled with irrationality: irregular verbs, random genders, silent vowels, ambiguous homophones. You’d think languages would evolve towards an optimal state of concision, but instead they accumulate quirks that hinder learning, not only for foreigners but also for native speakers." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Lexicity - the first and only comprehensive index for ancient language resources on the internet - http://lexicity.com/languag...

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"Learning an ancient language is difficult, but it becomes more difficult if one isn't part of a high school or college class or doesn't have access to the more advanced resources of a university library. The natural solution is the internet, where some of those advanced resources are housed and where there is an abundance of materials intended to facilitate one's study." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"However, there are a few problems when turning to the internet. First, if one is a novice in a language, it can be difficult to discern between resources that are actually useful and that are just filler. This problem is compounded when one has never learned an ancient language of any kind, as is often the case when students begin to study Latin or Greek. Another problem is that the resources can be very difficult to find. While contemporary dictionary and lexical projects are usually very accessible, there are other ancient language resources which are buried in the depths of Google searches, having been created long ago for an audience which has since moved on. If the resources can't be found, they as good as non-existent for frustrated students." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Arrant Pedantry » Blog Archive » Relative What - http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2012...

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"A few months ago Braden asked in a comment about the history of what as a relative pronoun. (For my previous posts on relative pronouns, see here.) The history of relative pronouns in English is rather complicated, and the system as a whole is still in flux, partly because modern English essentially has two overlapping systems of relativization." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"In the late Old English and Middle English periods, writers and speakers began to use interrogative pronouns as relative pronouns by analogy with French and Latin. It first appeared in texts that were translations from Latin around 1000 AD, but within a couple of centuries it had apparently been naturalized. Other interrogatives became pressed into service as relatives during this time, including who, which, where, when, why, and how. All of these are still in common use in Standard English except for what." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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British Museum, Asia section, Indian languages.

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I have Tibetan on my international keyboard. I love the artistic flare that they used in the different scripts. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Halil, these are wonderful. So much to explore here! Thanks a lot! :-))) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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A Linguist's Serious Take On 'The A-Word' : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2012...

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"Nunberg says the word originated in World War II as a GI's term for an officer who thinks his status "entitles him to a kind of behavior — to either abuse his men, or makes him more important than he really is." When GIs came home, they brought the word with them, and movement radicals began to use it." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Me neither. Without thinking about it, I assumed that it was kind of "natural" to use that metaphor (or metonymy?) in certain circumstances. Also, I didn't know that the German word is a calque from English. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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IELEX : Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database - http://ielex.mpi.nl/

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"The Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database (IELex) is an initiative of the Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture research group to make available a database of cognate judgements in the Indo-European languages. The provenance of every lexeme and every cognate judgement in the database is recorded and available for review." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): The first written words of the English language - http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.de/2012...

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"I didn't know that the earliest known example of written words of the English language are preserved not in a book or manuscript, but in a medallion - the Undley Bracteate, which dates to the 5th century:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Sounds like someone got the syllables of Gog and Magog mixed up (Maga and Gagoga) :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Metathesis - http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~ehume...

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"Metathesis is the phenomenon whereby two sounds that appear in a particular order in one form of a word occur in the reverse order in a related form of the word. For example, in the Austronesian language Leti, the linear ordering of the final consonant and vowel of a word can differ depending on a number of factors. One factor is whether the following word begins with a single consonant or a consonant cluster (or geminate consonant). In the first case, the order of the segments is vowel, consonant, as in ukar lavan 'finger + big = thumb, big toe'. In the second case, you get the order consonant, vowel: ukra ppalu 'finger + bachelor = index finger'. While metathesis is not as common as other processes affecting sounds in language, such as assimilation or deletion, it does, nonetheless, occur as a regular phonological process in synchronic systems in a wide range of languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"What is this project about? The goal of this research project is two-fold. The first is to provide a more solid empirical basis for the study of metathesis. To achieve this, we are developing a database of reported cases of metathesis. Portions of this database are already available on this website, particularly cases involving consonant/consonant metathesis. (Note that not all reportedcases of metathesis are actualcases of metathesis, as noted in some of the language listings.) The second aim of this project is to come to a clearer understanding of the nature of metathesis and, with this knowledge, develop a constrained and predictive theory of metathesis. See across for a link to research and publications on metathesis by OSU researchers. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9809732 to Elizabeth Hume. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Even That Would Be a Grammar - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/blogs...

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"Sometimes when I admit to being a grammarian, and to having the grammatical structure of Standard English as a research interest, people will ask me how that could possibly be a job. We all know the rules, don’t we? Mustn’t begin a sentence with a conjunction; shouldn’t split infinitives; can’t end a sentence with a preposition (though we all do! ha! ha!); have to put apostrophes in certain places: What’s to study?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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by Geoffrey Pullum - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum - Homepage - http://cil.bbaw.de/cil_en...

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"Inscriptions, as direct evidence from the ancient world, are among the most important sources for investigating Roman history and everyday life in all their aspects. In every period when the legacy of the classical world has been consciously sought out, inscriptions have therefore been collected and edited. From the Carolingian period we have a collection of Latin inscriptions in the codex Einsidlensis; above all in the Renaissance scholars put great efforts into preserving inscriptions in comprehensive corpora. The collections made in earlier periods, by such famous names as Cola di Rienzo or Scaliger, no longer met the different scholarly standards of a modern critical edition and, as the number of inscriptions grew steadily, they were soon out of date. In the following period individual researchers, for example Gaetano Marini, put in admirable efforts but were unable to deal with the quantity of material. In 1815 the ›Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences‹ therefore formed the plan of publishing the classical inscriptions, first Greek, then Latin, in comprehensive collections." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Under the direction of Theodor Mommsen, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum was formed in 1853 and the first volume appeared ten years later. By the outbreak of the First World War the majority of Latin inscriptions from the classical period which were known at that time had been published. This project of Mommsen's, continued by his students in collaboration with scholars from the countries where the inscriptions were found, was internationally recognised as a major achievement. Thereafter financial problems, the isolation of Germany after the First World War and the political situation in East Germany after the Second World War all had a negative impact on the work of the CIL. Thanks to the CIL's high standing in the international scholarly world, many researchers and institutions in West Germany and further afield took on financial and scholarly responsibilities in the epigraphic research after 1945. The CIL at first operated as an independent project within the Berlin Academy of Sciences, then, from 1955 to 1991, it was attached to various institutes of the academy. After a complicated transitional phase the project has been, since 1994, under the aegis of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Since the reunification of Germany the collaboration with colleagues abroad which in earlier times had been taken for granted has also been intensified. At present, the CIL cooperates not only with German epigraphers, but also with researchers from Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Romania." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Proto-Indo-European homeland in Neolithic Anatolia (Bouckaert et al.) - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2012...

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"A new paper in Science uses Bayesian phylogeographic methods to model the spatial expansion of Indo-European languages from their Anatolian homeland. An informative video shows how the authors estimate the process took place across space and time:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Excellent talk on the topic by Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin W. Lewis, explains why Bouckaert et al. get things wrong <a rel="nofollow" href="http://geocurrents.info/s... ; title="http://geocurrents.info/s... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Indo-European Languages Originated in Anatolia, Biologists Say - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...

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"Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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David Crystal: the story of English spelling | Books | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books...

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"The internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before. People are voting with their fingers." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Then the French arrived, with their own ideas. Out went some of the old forms and in came new ones. Cwen became queen; mys became mice. Medieval scribes continued to spell words as they were pronounced, but as English had many regional accents, the result was a huge amount of variation. More than 60 spellings of night are known from the middle ages – nite, nyght, nicht, nihte … Things couldn't carry on like that. As government became more centralised, the need to develop a standard system became urgent. But whose standard? That of widely-read authors such as Chaucer? The emerging civil service? The English translations of the Bible? The printers? The modern system emerged out of all of them." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Lolz! Oxford Dictionary Adds Ridic New Words Mashable Lolz! Oxford Dictionary Adds Ridic New Words | The top source for social and digital news - http://mashable.com/2012...

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Hey, tweeps. Done any photobombing lately? You know, while you lifecasted your date night with that ripped Wikipedian; he said he was an ethical hacker, but turned out to be a douche who just wanted to talk vajazzling. Totes ridic, right? Lolz. If every word in the above paragraph makes sense, congratulations: You’re on the cutting edge of the English language, according to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. This Internet-based sibling to the storied Oxford English Dictionary released its latest batch of new words Thursday, and it’s a doozy. In addition to the above, you can now officially use “dogfooding” (the act of testing your own software) and “inboxing” (sending any sort of private message) as verbs. UX, UI and NFC were all high-tech jargon yesterday; they’re Oxford-approved today. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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:-o - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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