Linguistics

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DCblog: On rofling - http://david-crystal.blogspot.de/2012...

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"A correspondent writes to tell me about a usage that he’s heard among young people college-aged and in their early twenties in America. It’s rofl, the texting acronym for ‘rolling on the floor laughing’. I’ll quote the bulk of Ariel’s message:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"You can also use to rofl to mean to fudge, or to make it up as you go. As in, ‘What's the plan on Friday?’ ‘We'll rofl it.’" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Middle English Thorn New Yorker Magazine : The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/online...

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"A rare excitement ran through the The New Yorker’s copy department last week when it was discovered that a line of Middle English poetry quoted in a piece by Peter Hessler about standing in police lineups had a thorn in it. Usually a thorn, like a splinter, is something you want to remove, with tweezers, or maybe a sterilized needle, but this thorn was something we wanted desperately to insert." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Thorn is an obsolete letter from the Anglo-Saxon alphabet representing the sound we now write as “th”: it looks like the letter “p” with the vertical stroke extending above as well as below the protuberance. In fact, a thorn looks pretty much like a thorn, as in one of those prickly things on the stem of a rose. You will not find it on your keyboard unless you are J. R. R. Tolkien. I hadn’t seen one since graduate school—which was exactly the context in which Peter Hessler was using it, in a throwaway reference to “Gawain and the Green Knight.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Anglo-Saxons and hand-saex - The Globe and Mail - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...

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"As an invitation to explore the wonders of Old English, hand-saex is certainly arresting." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Mooom, don't you ever *knock*?!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Μεθώνη Πιερίας Ι | Θετίμα - http://ancdialects.greeklanguage.gr/

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"Το σύνολο των 191 κεραμικών με επιγραφές, χαράγματα και εμπορικά σύμβολα προέρχεται από την ανασκαφή του ‘Υπογείου’ της Μεθώνης Πιερίας, της αρχαιότερης σύμφωνα με την παράδοση αποικίας Ελλήνων από την Ερέτρια στον βορρά, και είναι μοναδικό για δύο λόγους: πρώτον, γιατί τα περισσότερα από τα αγγεία χρονολογούνται περίπου μεταξύ 730 και 700 π.Χ., εποχή από την οποία σώζονται ελάχιστα παραδείγματα ελληνικής γραφής· δεύτερον, γιατί στη Μακεδονία ενεπίγραφα ευρήματα, εγχάρακτα ή γραπτά, είναι εξαιρετικά σπάνια. Η μαρτυρία των ενεπίγραφων κεραμικών της Μεθώνης είναι ανυπολόγιστης αξίας για τις κλασικές σπουδές και συμβάλλει καθοριστικά στις συζητήσεις σχετικά με:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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+1 Memurus ✐, den da ayni durumdayim :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Corpus-based word frequency lists, collocates, and n-grams - http://www.wordfrequency.info/ via Meryn Stol http://friendfeed.com/meryn...

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Do thoughts have a language of their own? Inner Speech as a Language [updated] - http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post...

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"The gap between outer langue and inner speech is greater than that between outer langue and outer speech. (...) We are little gods in the world of inner speech. We are the only ones, we run the show, we are the boss. This world is almost a little insane, for it lacks the usual social controls, and we can be as bad or as goofy as we want. On the other hand inner speech does have a job to do, it has to steer us through the world. That function sets up outer limits, even though within those limits we have a free rein to construct this language as we like. (...) Although inner speech is not idealism, in some ways it seems to be a more differentially defined universe than outer speech. Linguistic context is even more important than in outer speech. One reason is that meaning is so condensed on the two axes. But a second is that inner language is so pervaded with emotion. (...)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The importance of private language is that it sheds light on what a human being is. We are inherently private animals, and we become more so the more self-aware and internally communicative we are. This zone of privacy may well be the foundation for the moral (and legal) need people have for privacy. In any case the hidden individuality or uniqueness of each human being is closely related to the what the person says to him or her self. (...) Inner speech is both the locus and platform for agency. (...) We choose internally in the zone of inner speech, and then we choose externally in the zone of practical action and the outer world. The first choice leads to the second choice. (...) We could make and break habits by first modelling them in our internal theater." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Derek and Clive are muppets - It's those theatre #muppets!! Love them :o) #funny - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Or those guys who remind Femella of that house show - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

filthy old men no? For some reason it said linguistics on the youtube site so that's why I shared to Maitani's secondary stream :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » After ‘shrimp’ comes ‘prawn’ - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"Several people pointed out to me that I cannot distinguish a shrimp from a prawn, and I am afraid they are right. The picture copied for the shrimp post had the title “Shrimp cocktail,” but the shrimp there are too big and are really prawns. In any case, I decided to atone for my mistake and write a post on the etymology of prawn. This plan was hard to realize, because the origin of prawn is really, that is, hopelessly unknown: the word exists, but no one can say where it has come from. It is strange that more or less the same holds for shrimp and shark, though both are less opaque. There must have been some system behind calling those sea creatures. The fishermen who coined such names had a reason to call a shrimp a shrimp and a prawn a prawn." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The ham of the sea... - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How Language Works. The cognitive science of linguistics | Indiana University - http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/

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"One way to define linguistics is as the study of language itself, which can be contrasted with language behavior. Language behavior is studied by people in the fields of psycholinguistics, language development, natural language processing, and computational linguistics, and there is often an attempt to keep these fields distinct from linguistics "proper". I believe that it is more productive to see all of these fields as making up "the language sciences" or "language science", and it is really this meta-field that is the topic of this book." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - Nepal's mystery language on the verge of extinction - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The last of the Kusundan's - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ancient language discovered on clay tablets found amid ruins of 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace - Archaeology - Science - The Independent - http://www.independent.co.uk/news...

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"Archaeologists have discovered evidence for a previously unknown ancient language – buried in the ruins of a 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"The tablet revealed the names of 60 women – probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer programme. But when the Cambridge archaeologist – Dr. John MacGinnis - began to examine the names in detail, he realized that 45 of them bore no resemblance to any of the thousands of ancient Middle Eastern names already known to scholars." - So the names are the evidence. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Cypro-Minoan syllabary (Linear C) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (abbreviated CM) is an undeciphered syllabic script used on the island of Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550-1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Sir Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on Minoan Crete, which CM is thought to be derived from. Approximately 250 objects bearing Cypro-Minoan inscriptions have been found, including clay tablets, votive stands, clay cylinders and clay balls. Discoveries have been made at various sites around Cyprus, as well as the ancient city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

The inscriptions have been classified into four closely related groups by Emilia Masson[1]: archaic CM, CM1 (also known as Linear C), CM2 and CM3, although some scholars disagree with this classification.[2] Little is known about how this script originated, or what language was used to write in CM. However, its use continued into the Early Iron Age, forming a link to the Cypriot syllabary, which reads as Greek and has been deciphered. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linear B - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. The script pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries. A recent finding of the oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1450 BC.[1] Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Cydonia,[2] Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae,[3] disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

The script appears related to Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, and the later Cypriot syllabary, which recorded Greek. Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and a large repertory of ideographic signs. These ideograms or "signifying" signs stand for objects or commodities, but do not have phonetic value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linear A - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Linear A is one of two scripts used in ancient Crete before Mycenaean Greek Linear B; Cretan hieroglyphs is the second script. In Minoan times, before the Mycenaean Greek dominion, Linear A was the official script for the palaces and religious activities, and hieroglyphs were mainly used on seals. These three scripts were discovered and named by Arthur Evans. In 1952, Michael Ventris discovered that Linear B was being used to write the early form of Greek known as Mycenaean. He and others used this information to achieve a significant and now well accepted decipherment of Linear B, although many points remain to be clarified. By contrast, Linear A has not been deciphered since the language of Linear A has not been discovered. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Though the two scripts – Linear A and B – share some of the same symbols, using the syllables associated with Linear B in Linear A writings produces words that are unrelated to any known language. This language has been dubbed Minoan and corresponds to a period in Cretan history prior to a series of invasions by Mycenaean Greeks around 1450 BC. Linear A seems to have been used as a complete syllabary around 1900–1800 BC, although several signs appear earlier as mason marks. It is possible that the Trojan Linear A scripts that were discovered by Heinrich Schliemann and one inscription from central Crete, as well as a few similar potters' marks from Lahun, Egypt (12th dynasty), come from an earlier period, ca. 2100–1900 BC, which coincides with the construction of the first palaces. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » The Oddest English Spellings, Part 20 - http://blog.oup.com/2012...

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"Why don’t good and hood rhyme with food and mood? Why are friend and fiend spelled alike but pronounced differently? There is a better way of asking this question, because the reason for such oddities is always the same: English retains the spelling that made sense centuries ago. At one time, the graphic forms we learn one by one made sense. Later the pronunciation changed, while the spelling remained the same. Therefore, the right question is: What has happened to the pronunciation of the words that give us trouble?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Everybody has heard that vowels can be short or long, but those who have not studied Greek or Latin should beware of such terms. According to the formulation English speakers learn pat, pet, pit, and pot have short vowels, as opposed to pate, Pete, spite, and spoke. However, those are conventional terms inapplicable to today’s pronunciation. Some idea of what length or at least duration means can be gained from words like father and spa. They indeed have “long a.” Flaw and saw have “long o” in the pronunciation of the speakers who distinguish between Shah and Shaw; too has “long u.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: ΛΟΓΕΙΟΝ Online - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2012...

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"Logeion (literally, a place for words; in particular, a speaker's platform, or an archive) was developed after the example of dvlf.uchicago.edu, to provide simultaneous lookup of entries in the many reference works that make up the Perseus Classical collection. To improve the chronological range for which the dictionaries are useful, we have added DuCange (see below), and to enhance this site as both a research and a pedagogical tool, we add information based on corpus data in the right side bar, as well as references to chapters in standard textbooks. More such 'widgets' will be added over time, along with, we hope, still more dictionaries." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Logeion <a rel="nofollow" href="http://logeion.uchicago.e... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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that student's essay has not any family belonging to not-in-the-list words. i am not clear about two things.first what is not-in-the-list words and why Range analysis gives??? for it. should i only consider AWL families and divide it by total families for lexical richness of an essay. plz reply soon.

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i want to calculate lexical rich of students' essay by Range. this program tells that one has to add AWL families and not in the list families to divide by total numbers of families. in my analysis by Range i got AWL families but for not-in-the-list the Range gives only ? question mark. what does that mean? does it mean

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Geoffrey PULLUM :: Creation myths of generative grammar and the mathematics underlying Syntactic Structures (2010) - https://docs.google.com/viewer...

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appeared in The Mathematics of Language, pp. 238-254, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI). The paper outlines the work of Emil Post on generative grammar which preceded Chomsky's famous 1957 monograph. It's very surprising how some prevalent historical claims are in fact false! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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First Name Popularity in England and Wales over the Past Thousand Years - http://www.galbithink.org/names...

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"The frequency distribution of personal given names offers important evidence about the information economy. This paper presents data on the popularity of the most frequent personal given names (first names) in the UK over the past millennium. The popularity of a name is its frequency relative to the total name instances sampled. The data show that the popularity distribution of names, like the popularity of other symbols and artifacts associated with the information economy, can be helpfully viewed as a power law. Moreover, the data on name popularity suggest that historically distinctive changes in the information economy occurred in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Given Name Frequency Project <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.galbithink.org... ; title="http://www.galbithink.org... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language and Linguistics in Lewis Carroll’s Works | The Fun of Language and the Language of Fun - http://olgakagan.blog.com/2012...

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"Lewis Carroll, or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a mathematician, a logician and a deacon. His knowledge of logic and amazing sensitivity to properties of natural language make his works full of jokes and passages that are based on various linguistic phenomena. As a semanticist, I can say for sure that almost any topic in semantics and pragmatics that is taught in introductory courses can be illustrated with a quotation from Carroll’s works. But the stories about Alice are not only relevant to the study of meaning; they also involve a play with syntactic and phonological rules. I would like to dedicate several posts to the ways in which Carroll plays with language in his works." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I like Carroll's wordplay. My HS trig teacher used to quote a lot of Carroll to get us to understand some concepts. Didn't help me, but it was fun. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - Being bilingual 'boosts brain power' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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The US researchers from Northwestern University say bilingualism is a form of brain training - a mental "work out" that fine-tunes the mind. Speaking two languages profoundly affects the brain and changes how the nervous system responds to sound, lab tests revealed. Experts say the work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides "biological" evidence of this. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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yes, found this very striking - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The slow explosion of speech | TLS - http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls...

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"If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language was a list of one-word interjections like Yuck, Wow, Oops, Hey!, No, and Huh?, would you say that these people were of a different species, not quite human? Would they be like today’s apes that simply don’t have it in them to fully acquire a modern human language? Or would they be the same as us only less well equipped for communication, like the eighteenth-century man who is every bit human but happens not to have been born in a world with telephones? If the latter were true, then language would be more technology than biology, more something we build than something that grows. It’s clear that the earliest humans did not possess language as we know it. The question is whether this was because language as we know it hadn’t yet been invented." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"In James R. Hurford’s towering account of our species’ path from being once without language to now being emphatically with it, he proposes that just such a monophrase language of the Yuck/Wow variety was an important early human achievement. And, Hurford argues, while our earliest forms of language had no grammatical rules by which words were combined to form sentences, they were far from primitive call systems. This doesn’t mean that those well-fashioned grunts would have had meanings as complex and as specific as some advocates have argued. The archaeologist Steven Mithen (in his book The Singing Neanderthal, 2005) speculates that the holistic messages that predated language might have meant things like “Go and hunt the hare I saw five minutes ago behind the stone at the top of the hill”. These “Flintstone-type examples”, laments Hurford, “give language evolution a bad name”. Hurford is a dyed-in-the-wool linguist and insists on being well informed about what it is that we are trying to explain. “You can’t understand the evolution of grammar”, he says, “without grasping something of the real complexity of grammar.” Accordingly, large chunks of this long book take the real complexity of grammar and almost bludgeon you with it." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Bilingualism fine-tunes hearing, enhances attention - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) — A new Northwestern University study provides the first biological evidence that bilinguals' rich experience with language "fine-tunes" their auditory nervous system and helps them juggle linguistic input in ways that enhance attention and working memory." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Halil, it is nice that you find the topic interesting, too, no need to apologize, of course. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational | Wired Science | Wired.com - http://www.wired.com/wiredsc...

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"To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics

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