Linguistics

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Northern Cities Vowel Shift: How Americans in the Great Lakes region are revolutionizing English. - Slate MagazineL - http://www.slate.com/article...

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"On July 4, 1960, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard rang in Independence Day with a dire Associated Press report by one Norma Gauhn headlined “American Dialects Disappearing.” The problem, according to “speech experts,” was the homogenizing effect of “mass communications, compulsory education, [and] the mobility of restless Americans.” These conformist pressures have only intensified in the half-century since the AP warned “that within four generations virtually all regional U.S. speech differences will be gone.” And so as we enter the predicted twilight of regional American English, it’s no surprise that publications as venerable as the Economist now confirm what our collective intuition tells us: “Television and the Internet are definitely doing something to our regional accents: A Boston accent that would have seemed weak in the John F. Kennedy years now sounds thick by comparison.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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via Victor Ganata <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/131qXb"... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Historical Dictionary Project - The Academy of the Hebrew Language - http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/English...

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"The Academy is the premiere institution for the scientific study of the Hebrew language, and at the forefront of its activities is the Historical Dictionary Project, which was formally established in the 1950s. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was the first to create a historical dictionary: The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, 1908-1959, which brought together Hebrew from different eras. Nonetheless, one man alone cannot truly complete such an enormous project." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"As early as 1937, the president of Va’ad HaLashon (“The Language Committee”), Prof. N.H. Tur-Sinai, proposed the establishment of “a large endeavor which prepares an academic dictionary of our language, in all of the periods and evolutions that it has endured from the moment it is documented, until today". Later, with the establishment of the Academy, it was decided that the Historical Dictionary Project would be its central scientific undertaking. The overarching goal of the HDP is to present the history and development of the Hebrew lexicon, from the earliest occurrences of words down through their most recent documentation. Whereas similar historical dictionary projects in Europe merely brought citations from texts of recent centuries, the Academy’s HDP is based upon Hebrew texts up until 1100 CE, and large selections of literature from the periods thereafter until the founding of the State of Israel. It was decided to begin with texts from the post-biblical period, and thus the database reflects more than 2000 years of Hebrew writing." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Grammar sticklers may have OCD - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"It used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other people’s grammar were just plain annoying. Now there’s evidence they are actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder/oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Researchers are calling it Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome, or GPS." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"“If you mark out sentence-final prepositions with a red pen and regularly change the passive voice to active, that’s more socially acceptable than repetitive hand washing, the incessant touching of doorknobs and parking meters, or refusing to step on sidewalk cracks.”" :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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DCblog: On pronouncing Shakespeare (the name) - http://david-crystal.blogspot.de/2012...

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"A correspondent has written to the Shakespeare's Words website to ask how the name of Shakespeare would have been pronounced at the time. This is a tricky one, as proper names often don’t follow the general spelling/pronunciation rules of the language - think of Cholmondley pronounced 'chumley', for instance! And there are many variations of the spelling of Shakespeare's name. According to David Kathman, who collated them all, we have the following:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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" Literary references (1593-1616 Shakespeare 119 Shake-speare 21 Shakspeare 10 Shaxberd 4 Shakespere 4 Shakespear 3 Shak-speare 2 Shakspear 2 Shakspere 1 Shaksper 1 Schaksp. 1 Shakespheare 1 Shakespe 1 Shakspe 1" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » I been, I seen, I done - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"The forms in the title are substandard but ubiquitous in conversational English, and the universally understood reference to the genre called whodunit (it originated about seventy years ago) testifies to its partial victory. I have often heard the question about their origin and will try to answer it, though my information is scanty and to the best of my knowledge, a convincing theory of whodunit (the construction, not the genre) is lacking, which does not augur well for a detective story." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Speech Accent Archive | George Mason University http://accent.gmu.edu/index...

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"The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I think it's more about the skills of these particular people, than the 'general' Polish accent. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Of Hipsters, Hippies, and Hepcats : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm...

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"In two recent articles, The New York Times has reported on culture wars involving "hipsters": locals in the Long Island town of Montauk are suffering from "hipster fatigue," while in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the hipsters are battling with new parents and their babies. All of this raises the question: where did the term hipster come from? Does it have something to do with hippies? And what about the even older term, hepcat?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The origins of hip and hep are the subject of much dispute. Some have sought a West African etymology, from Wolof hipi or xippi, meaning "to open one's eyes." Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower dismantled this idea in a 2004 piece for Slate. As Sheidlower writes, the notion that this word was brought over from Africa by slaves is an appealing one, but the evidence for such a trajectory is sorely lacking. In fact, there's no evidence at all for hip or hep meaning something like "informed about the latest trends" until the early 20th century. The earliest citation for hip in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1904 ("At this rate it'll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?"), and the hep variant dates to 1908 ("What puzzles me is how you can find anybody left in the world who isn't hep"). [Update: Jonathon Green notes that his Green's Dictionary of Slang antedates hep to 1905, from Helen Green's At the Actors' Boarding House.]" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Data is a singular noun - http://nxg.me.uk/note...

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"Can we just clear this up now: the word ‘data’, in english, is a singular mass noun. It is thus a grammatical and stylistic error to use it as a plural." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Even better here (Wikipedia s.v. data <<a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ;[1 November 2012]) 'Data in computing (or data processing) are represented in a structure'. ' Data are typically the results of measurements'. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ideas Illustrated » Blog Archive » Visualizing English Word Origins - http://ideasillustrated.com/blog...

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"I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an expert to really understand what that means for my day-to-day use of the language. Simply reading about word history didn’t help me, so I decided that I really needed to see some examples." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Using Douglas Harper’s online dictionary of etymology, I paired up words from various passages I found online with entries in the dictionary. For each word, I pulled out the first listed language of origin and then re-constructed the text with some additional HTML infrastructure. The HTML would allow me to associate each word (or word fragment) with a color, title, and hyperlink to a definition." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Scripto - http://scripto.org/

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"A free, open source tool enabling community transcriptions of document and multimedia files" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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could be useful for the image files from the Loeb Greek and Roman classics <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/11k18b"... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Two English apr-words, part 1: ‘April’ - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"The history of the names of the months is an intriguing topic. Most of Europe adopted the Roman names and some of them are trivial: September (seventh), October (eighth), November (ninth), and December (tenth). (Though one would wish the numerals to have reached twelve.) But there is nothing trivial in the division of the year into twelve segments and the world shows great ingenuity assigning names to them." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Anglo-Saxons sure were fond of their eths. I guess they used them all up back then :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Prof G. Lewis Jarring Lecture on Turkish - The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success - http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/jarring...

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In October 1932 the word collecting began. Every provincial Governor presided over a collection committee, with the duty of organizing the collecting of words in use among the people. Within a year, over 35,000 such words were recorded. Meanwhile, scholars had been combing through dictionaries of Turkic Languages and more than 150 old texts in search of words that had fallen out of use or had never been in use in Turkey - these totalled close on 90,000. In 1934 the results of both activities were published in a book called Tarama Dergisi - Combing Compendium. Although the compilers had conscientiously put question-marks against some words of which they were not certain, enthusiasts did not feel inhibited about using any word found in it, and for a while the result was chaos. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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A great read, probably dry for most of you, but posted mainly for Maitani and other Turks. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z - http://kottke.org/12...

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"A large collection of expressions compiled by John Cowan in which languages are explained in terms of other languages. Like so:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Cool! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Not a Euphemism - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"I write about euphemisms for Visual Thesaurus every month, and I love collecting and discussing evasions, dodges, lies, and straight-up malarkey, such as the terms sea kitten and strategic dynamism effort." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"It's supposed to hit 106°. Already 90° at 10am. I think the tortoises stay inside today. No, that's not a euphemism." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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AVESTA Encyclopædia Iranica | Articles - http://www.iranicaonline.org/article...

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Excellent article comprising the current state of historical and linguistic research on the Avesta - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Avesta table: contents of the Avesta according to the Dēnkard <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.iranicaonline.... ; title="http://www.iranicaonline.... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Higgs boson metaphors as clear as molasses - Ideas - The Boston Globe - http://bostonglobe.com/ideas...

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"Perhaps no field of human endeavor relies more on metaphor than science. The Big Bang. Atomic “orbits.” Evolution—is it a ladder, a tree, or a bush? This is what happens when language is called upon to describe something whose origins lie elsewhere—in physical realms either too vast or too small for our everyday perception, in discoveries driven by math and measurements. For connoisseurs of science metaphor, the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, or something that looks just like it, was a mother lode. The tiny subatomic particle was both tremendously important to science and very alien to nonphysicists. As a result, every announcement—from news stories to the statements of scientists themselves—was couched in elaborate metaphor trying to make an unfamiliar thing somehow familiar. And these metaphors sometimes piled on to the point where the effect was more goofy than illuminating." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Anyone trying to explain the significance of the highly unstable Higgs particle first needed to explain the “Higgs field”—an invisible field that is theorized to permeate the universe, endowing objects with mass as they move through it. The decades-long search for the Higgs boson, which culminated in a July 4 press conference announcing the discovery at the Swiss physics laboratory CERN, was a search for a measurable way to prove that such a field might exist." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Hints of East/Central Asian admixture in Northern Europe - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2012...

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"A little more than a year ago, I noticed an interesting pattern in North Europeans: they all tended to be shifted towards East Asians in PCA plots: With respect to the Asian- and African- shift of West Eurasian populations, I note that northern Europeans (and Basques) are less African-shifted than southern Europeans, and, at the same time they are more Asian-shifted: the 16 least Asian-shifted populations have a coastline in the Mediterranean (excluding the Portuguese), while the 16 least African-shifted populations do not (excluding the French)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Continuing the Search for Indo-Europeans by Razib Khan <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blogs.discovermaga... ; title="http://blogs.discovermaga... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Nicholas Ostler on the History and Diversity of Language | FiveBooks | The Browser - http://thebrowser.com/intervi...

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"The scholar of language tells us about the progress of the spoken word from 3000 BC to today, how two languages disappear every month, and the 50,000-word novel written without using the letter “e”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"I try to look at things from a historical perspective rather than just what’s happening in this decade or century. I look at the progress of languages over centuries and millennia – my book Empires of the Word starts in 3000 BC and ends in modern times. Each of us only lives two or three generations, so it’s quite difficult for us to get that perspective without really striving for it. When it comes to languages, we tend to be familiar only with the one that we use on a daily basis. When we are also conscious that in the last century or two that language has spread out all over the world, it gives us a very foreshortened perspective. What I’m trying to do is to correct that." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - Hobson-Jobson: The words English owes to India - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"In 1872 two men began work on a lexicon of words of Asian origin used by the British in India. Since its publication the 1,000-page dictionary has never been out of print and a new edition is due out next year. What accounts for its enduring appeal?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Take the entry for the Indian word dam. The dictionary defines it as: "Originally an actual copper coin. Damri is a common enough expression for the infinitesimal in coin, and one has often heard a Briton in India say: 'No, I won't give a dumree!' with but a vague notion what a damri meant."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Why Do We Say That Someone Is "Hot"? Scientific American - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article...

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"What do a chilly reception, a cold-blooded murder, and an icy stare have in common? Each plumbs the bulb of what could be called your social thermometer, exposing our reflexive tendency to conflate social judgments—estimations of another’s trust and intent — with the perception of temperature. Decades of fascinating cross-disciplinary studies have illuminated the surprising speed, pervasiveness and neurobiology of this unconscious mingling of the personal and the thermal." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Would be interesting to learn whether similar metaphors are being used for expressing those emotions, sensations, perceptions, ... in other languages which are not likely to be influenced by our "western" ways of expressing/experiencing emotions. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Back to the fishbowl (1): ‘Herring’ - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"The fish known as Clupea harengas has two main names. In the Scandinavian countries, it is called sild or something similar (this name made its way to Finland and Russia). In the lands where the West Germanic languages are spoken (English belongs to this group) the word is herring, also with several variants, for example, German Hering (the spelling Häring is quite obsolete), Dutch haring, and so forth. The rarely used English word sile “young herring” is a late adaptation of sild. The origin of both sild and herring is doubtful." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It was reason enough to post this article. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Sound change: Who are the culprits? « Zompist’s E-Z rant page - http://zompist.wordpress.com/2012...

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"I just finished William Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors, which is a detective story. No, really. You don’t expect a linguistic tome to have the literary quality of suspense, but this book does. It’s organized around the central puzzler of historical linguistics: why does language change? Why do people bother with sound changes, especially when everyone agrees that they’re destructive if not positively evil? It takes the whole book to create a framework to answer the question." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The leaders of sound change are almost always women; they’re often a generation ahead of the men. / Women keep advancing a sound change in a linear fashion; men’s advance is stepwise. The obvious interpretation is that men don’t pick up the change from their contemporaries, but from their mothers. / . . . Nonstandard variants often peak in adolescence. So older speakers may retreat from a change." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Shady Characters » Miscellany № 12 - http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2012...

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"Emoticons are, it turns out, rather older than I had thought. Last month the photo blog Retronaut posted images of an 1881 issue of Puck magazine depicting proto-smileys constructed from parentheses, stops and other typographic marks, just like their modern counterparts." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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That is my impression, too. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Why do humans talk? - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"Human languages are not biological organisms, despite the temptation to talk about them as “being born,” “dying,” “competing with one another,” and the like. Nonetheless, the parallels between languages and biological species are rich and wonderful. Sometimes, in fact, they are downright eerie. Recently, for example, it was shown that the areas of the world that are richest in their biodiversity are also among the most diverse in the number of languages spoken by their indigenous people. Absolutely no logical reason exists for such a correlation: there is only one species (Homo sapiens) that has language, but the members of that species that live in places they share with many other species tend to have similarly rich diversity of language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It's true that the definition of species is not set in stone and has evolved over the history of biology, for those examples of dogs and big cats, it has to do with the ability to reproduce—chihuahuas, pit bulls, and Bernese mountain dogs can all interbreed and spawn fertile hybrid offspring. I'm assuming the reason those big cats are considered separate species is that, while they may be able to physically interbreed and conceive hybrid offspring, either their offspring is sterile, or it would never really happen in vivo because of behavioral (as opposed to genetic) incompatibility. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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DAMOS: Database of Mycenaean at Oslo - Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas - http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk...

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"The earliest written evidence of the Greek language is comprised of inscriptions from ca. XIV-XII B.C., written in a syllabic script which we call Linear B and was deciphered only in 1952. The language of the inscriptions is referred to as Mycenaean Greek. This project aims at creating a complete, annotated and searchable corpus of the texts written in Linear B." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Linear B is a syllabic script not related to the later Greek alphabet. It belongs to a family of writing systems used in the Aegean area in the II and I millennium B.C., of which just Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary of the I millennium (mostly used for writing the Cypriot Greek dialect, but not only) have been deciphered. The language of the documents is the only attestation of a Greek dialect in the II millennium B.C. and presents several archaic features." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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