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Evaluate World Peace

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Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett – review | Books | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books...
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"Native speakers of Pirahã, in the Amazon lowland jungle, have no words for left or right, they use the same term for blue and green, and their definitions of red, black and white turn out to be similes, rather than dedicated words." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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It is quite obvious that Everett's core assertion (to be true, I am not sure whether he asserts it directly or whether he wants us to draw that conclusion or whether the media want to interpret it like this), that speakers of Pirahã don't participate in a universal grammar or language acquisition device or language instinct, is just wrong. The argument against him, in Chomsky's words: &quot; It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar. That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like &quot;and&quot; that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Actually, I doubt very much that a language like that could exist.&quot; An interview with Chomsky can be found here: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/T6m13"&... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Are We “Meant” to Have Language and Music? | The Crux | Discover Magazine - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux...
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&quot;What do ironing and hang-gliding have in common? Not much really, except that we weren’t designed to do either of them. And that goes for a million other modern-civilization things we regularly do but are not “supposed” to do. We’re fish out of water, living in radically unnatural environments and behaving ridiculously for a great ape. So, if one were interested in figuring out which things are fundamentally part of what it is to be human, then those million crazy things we do these days would not be on the list.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;At the top of the list of things we do that we’re supposed to be doing, and that are at the core of what it is to be human rather than some other sort of animal, are language and music. Language is the pinnacle of usefulness, and was key to our domination of the Earth (and the Moon). And music is arguably the pinnacle of the arts. Language and music are fantastically complex, and we’re brilliantly capable at absorbing them, and from a young age. That’s how we know we’re meant to be doing them, i.e., how we know we evolved brains for engaging in language and music.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Noam Chomsky: Meet the universal man - 14 March 2012 - New Scientist. ____ Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky.
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The Republican-dominated House of Representatives is now dismantling measures of control over environmental destruction that were instituted by Richard Nixon. That shows you how far to the right they have gone. Today Nixon would be a flaming radical and Dwight D. Eisenhower would be off the spectrum. Even Ronald Reagan would be on the left somewhere. These are interesting, important things happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world that we should be very much concerned about. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
I am in awe of this man. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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In Paraguay, Indigenous Language With Unique Staying Power - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...
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&quot;ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — Legislators on the floor of Congress deliver speeches in it. Lovers entwined on Asunción’s park benches murmur sweet nothings with its high-pitched, nasal and guttural sounds. Soccer fans use it when insulting referees.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;“Only 54 of nearly 12,000 schools teach Portuguese,” said Nancy Benítez, director of curriculum at the Ministry of Education, of the language of Brazil, the giant neighbor that dominates trade with Paraguay. “But every one of our schools teaches Guaraní.”&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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OUPblog » Blog Archive » The Seasons, part 1: spring and fall - http://blog.oup.com/2012...
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&quot;One expects the names of the seasons to reflect changes in nature and in human activities related to the agricultural cycle and the growth of plants. Although, in principle, this expectation is most reasonable, such names are not always transparent. We may begin with two easy examples. Fall “autumn” goes back to the phrase fall of the leaf. Nothing could be more natural. The noun spring is an obvious congener of the verb spring “leap, bound.” It signifies rising, whether it be of a place where a stream has its source or of the period when the year starts. Springtide and springtime clarify the calendar sense even further. The German for “spring” is Frühling, from früh “early” (-ling is a suffix). English speakers may not realize how spring and fall were coined (children are usually surprised when they hear the explanation), but no German will have doubts about Frühling (compare Engl. firstling “the first product or offspring”). Frühling appeared in German only in the fifteenth century, and it has a synonym Frühjahr (Jahr “year”). Their analogs Spätling and Spätjahr “autumn” (spät “late”) have not been accepted by the Standard.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;The origin of some other terms is also clear; yet a word that has existed in the language for many centuries may change its pronunciation so drastically that light at best comes from the earliest recorded form. Today only the ecclesiastic sense of Lent is current, but in the past it was the main word for “spring.” Lent surfaced as lencten, that is, lengten: the season got its name because in spring days lengthen. Below, we will return to the second syllable of the Old English noun (-ten). Here it will be enough to mention German Lenz, a cognate of Engl. Lent, and its exact counterpart. German dialects have preserved -g- after -n-: compare Langsi, Längsi, and so forth. Lenz is a common German family name. Those who had the good (and nowadays rare) luck to study physics at school will remember the Joule-Lenz Law.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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HINDI FOR LANGUAGE LOVERS | More Intelligent Life - http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog...
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&quot;There is, for a foreigner, no immediate usefulness in learning Hindi. As Robert Lane Greene rightly says, when opening the debate on which is the best language to learn, &quot;Hindi does not even unite India&quot;. I've spoken Hindi all my life and I can tell you that it doesn't help in Kolkata, where they insist on speaking Bengali. In Bangalore, home to Kannada, it is all but pointless. And it can be downright dangerous to try Hindi on Chennai’s Tamilians, who see it as an imposition from the north. Nor is it much use when currying favour with Indian businessmen—they are likely to be insulted you think they don’t speak English. Even restaurant menus tend to be written in English, while taxi meters use roman numerals.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Halil- I believe so, yes. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Oscanists Go To London « Memiyawanzi - http://memiyawanzi.wordpress.com/2012...
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&quot;This last term here there were ongoing lectures on Oscan, and because the British Museum has some Oscan inscriptions which we were reading, it made sense to make a field trip down to London to see them. The most important Oscan artifact which the British Museum holds is the Tavola di Agnone (Rix Sa 1) which appears to be a list of prescriptions for sacrifices in a grove of Ceres (l.1-2 L.sg. húrtín kerríiín). My own picture that I took of it at the museum was corrupted on my camera disk, but I was able to find a reasonable picture through Google images. This is just as well, as the presentation of the tablet in the BM only has the recto visible, hiding the verso text underneath. It’s a fun text, although somewhat syntactically uninteresting, since after the incipit statús. pús. set. húrtín. / kerríiín. “That which is set up in the grove of Ceres…” the remainder of the text, at least on the verso, is a list of theonyms in the dative case, each followed by statíf, a word of uncertain interpretation, but probably etymologically related to the statús of the first line. I won’t get into the difficulties of it here, but those interested can see the bibliography s.v. statíf in J. Untermann Wörterbuch des Oskisch-Umbrischen (Heidelberg 2000, pp.701-702). Among the names listed there are cool things like futreí kerríiaí ‘to Ceres’ daughter [Persephone]‘ (l.4) just after kerrí herself (l.3), diúveí regatureí (l.12) perhaps ‘Jupiter the rain-bringer; Iuppiter Pluvius‘ and hereklúí kerríiúí ‘Cereian Hercules’.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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It was a member of the Italic Languages, which comprised Latin and Faliscan in one subgroup and Oscan, Umbrian, Volscian and others in the second subgroup. With the exception of Latin, the other languages are only sparsely attested, mainly in ancient inscriptions. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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“Arabic is a language, Persian is a sweetmeat; Turkish is an art.” Persian proverb - http://www.ottomansouvenir.com/Turkish...
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&quot;It has been an axiom that one could travel the caravan routes from Istanbul to Peking [Beijing] speaking only Turkish,&quot;' one of the world's oldest living languages. It &quot;took shape, almost certainly in the steppe country to the west and north of the Great Wall of China, at some date which we cannot now determine, but certainly long before the start of the Christian era.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Wow...I am very flattered:) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Language Log » “Passive voice” in the comics - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...
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&quot;The trickiness of wishes is a common theme, but this is the first time that I've ever seen an explicit within-fairy-tale grammatical analysis. And the fisherman even uses the technical term &quot;passive voice&quot; correctly, at least in the sense that &quot;One wish will be granted&quot; is indeed passive! But as usual in such fairy tales, the potential wisher has focused on the wrong problem.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;The Starhorse's offer would be trickily ambiguous in pretty much the same way if it were phrased in an active-voice form: &quot;Release me at once, and supernatural powers will grant one wish&quot;. The most important trickiness in this case has to do with who does the wishing, not who does the granting. This vagueness is also a matter of unclear agency, and perhaps that's why Mr. Malki's fisherman thinks of the passive voice — in which case, alas, it's purely accidental that the main verb of the clause in question actually happens to be passive.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Modality in Jokes | The Fun of Language and the Language of Fun - http://olgakagan.blog.com/2012...
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&quot;Some jokes and riddles play with the range of interpretations available to modals. These are auxiliary verbs expressing necessity and possibility, such as can, may and must. This post is devoted to the kinds of necessity and possibility that modals can express, and to jokes that are based on the resulting ambiguity and/or indeterminacy.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Modality in Jokes, Part 2: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://olgakagan.blog.com... ; title="http://olgakagan.blog.com... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Au revoir, mademoiselle! | Europe | Languages Of The World - http://languagesoftheworld.info/socioli...
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&quot;French government has recently announced that the word “mademoiselle” would no longer be used in its official documents. Up until now, women were forced by government departments, banks, and private companies to categorize themselves as either “madame” or “mademoiselle”, according to their marital status. But this is a loaded question as it can also be used by men trying to establish a woman’s availability. In France, a man is a Mr. (“monsieur”) regardless of his marital status. France is now following the lead of several other Western countries in abolishing the marital status as part of a woman’s name/title: Germany, for example, banned the use “freulein” from official use in 1972, and English-speaking countries allow a marital-status-neutral form “Ms.”. Reactions to this French measure differ from “victory for feminists” to “feminism gone wild”, but in this post I would like to focus on languages that make the marital status an issue related to a woman’s name, and not just the title or form of address.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Whoever perpetuates those traditions is wrong imo. But we shouldn't forget that the underlying ill is the suppression of women, financially, legally or by the means of social pressure, of which these traditions are merely ramifications; you can't directly infer the real relations from them. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: Online Keilschrift-Bibliographie - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2012...
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&quot;Die in der Zeitschrift Orientalia des Päpstlichen Bibelinstituts erscheinende Internationale Keilschriftbibliographie (KeiBi) ist seit ihrer ersten Ausgabe im Jahre 1940 (Orientalia N.S. Bd. 9) zu einem unentbehrlichen Hilfsmittel für Forschung, Lehre und Studium der altorientalistischen Disziplinen geworden. Jedoch, wie in allen gedruckten, über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg erscheinenden Bibliographien, ist die Recherche darin nicht ohne Mühe. Dies zu erleichtern präsentieren wir die KeiBi-Daten in Form einer Datenbank, in der alle erschienenen Ausgaben gleichzeitig durchsucht werden können.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Original Link, University of Tübingen: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://vergil.uni-tuebing... ; title="http://vergil.uni-tuebing... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Which Shortening Is Best? Ibid., Op. Cit., Loc. Cit., Etc. - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/blogs...
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&quot;Although I have complained about the misuse of citation software, it’s not as though I believe the quaint and perhaps dying method of hand-composing citations to be a cure-all. At least the software mangles the format consistently, which allows a copy editor to put certain gaffes right by means of global searches. In contrast, when homemade notes fail to follow a system, they fail in myriad ways, so any editor determined to impose order is faced with endless drudgery. Recently a group of academic book manuscript editors I belong to discussed one particular aspect of notes preparation: whether and how to standardize the shortening of citations after their first, full mention.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Law, as a discipline, is trying to move away from such Latinisms. The half-way house is 'See note 14', which means tracking back, but at least is more explicit. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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MIT linguist explain the parallels between Old Japanese and modern English. Unique languages, universal patterns - http://web.mit.edu/newsoff...
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&quot;How modern English resembles Old Japanese, and other surprising convergences between far-flung tongues. (...) “There is this very interesting tension in language between diversity and uniformity,” “Human languages are diverse in stunning ways. Each one has some unique property that distinguishes it from 6,500 or maybe 7,000 other languages. But when you look as a linguist, you begin to notice that there are uniform properties shared by languages.” English and Japanese may be different, but, as Miyagawa shows in his book, when it comes to denoting a direct object, they have performed a kind of grand historical flip-flop: Each has adopted rules that the other language has abandoned. In Old Japanese, in the eighth and ninth centuries, direct objects existed without the particle –o attached to them. In the sentence “Ware-wa imo omou,” or, “I think of my wife,” the word “imo,” or “wife,” lacks a particle. Instead, particles were used to mark points of emphasis: In Old Japanese, “kono tosi goro-o” means “during this year.” By contrast, Old English, dating to the same time, used case markings (the equivalent of the –o particle) to specify that all direct objects take the accusative case, a rule derived from the structure of Latin. (...) In this grammatical regard, at least, “Old Japanese is modern English,” Miyagawa says. “And Old English and Latin are modern Japanese. It is really quite remarkable.” - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)

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New blog post on DOST 'friend' http://mittani.blogspot.com/
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&quot;dost was one of the first few Hindi words I encountered, and like so many words in Hindi, it has been borrowed from Persian (in Modern Persian it has become dust, as far as I know). I don't know in how many contemporary languages it has become a loanword as well, but at least I often read it in Turkish internet posts. Its meaning alone makes me love the word – but for a person interested in historical linguistics, there is a lot more to it – a long history dating back to, roughly estimated, 3,000 BCE, and a rich variety of descendants of the original Proto-Indo-European word in various Indo-European languages. But how can we know that word and what it meant?&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)

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The Homer Multitext: Homeric Papyri and the Homer Multitext - http://homermultitext.blogspot.com/2010...
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&quot;The publication of ancient papyrus texts has always been central to the goals of the Homer Multitext project. The Homeric papyri are, with the exception of some ancient quotations, the oldest surviving witnesses to the text of Homer. The medieval manuscript tradition of Homer begins with the tenth century CE manuscripts of the Iliad known as D (Laurentianus 32.15) and Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus 454). Some papyrus fragments predate the medieval tradition by as many as 1200 years. In a 2001 article [Dué 2001a; on-line version], I argued that the multiformity of the Homeric texts, as evidenced by the earliest quotations of Homer and the Ptolemaic papyri, calls for a new approach to editing the texts of Homer. Building on the work of Gregory Nagy (especially Nagy 1996a), who was himself building on the insights of Parry and Lord into the oral traditional nature of Homeric poetry, I suggested that a web-based, “multitext” edition would be truer to the complexity of the transmission of the Homeric poems, which are oral-derived texts composed in performance. The texts as we now have them are the product of many singers over the course of many generations. What Parry and Lord’s work shows us most essentially is that there is not one original text that we should try to reconstruct. Instead of reconstructing an “original text,” the aim of the Homer Multitext, now at last becoming a reality after a decade of research and planning, is to present a series of complete, historically contextualized texts, together with images, and a variety of tools with which users can compare and analyze these historical documents.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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World Wide Words E-magazine: 18 Feb 2012 Weird Words: ALAMAGOOZLUM - http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl...
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&quot;Weird Words: Alamagoozlum&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;It’s a wonderful word, one of the best of the exotics that came out of North America in the nineteenth century. It’s still to be found, though you’re likely to encounter it in the company of the Corpse Reviver, the Fogcutter, the Monkey Gland and the Widow’s Kiss. The original alamagoozlum was maple syrup. The name may have been a blend of French-Canadian and American terms, since it’s conjectured it was created from à la (as in à la mode) and goozlum, with a ma thrown in to make it bounce better in the mouth. The goozlum or goozle was the throat, windpipe or Adam’s apple, possibly a variant form of guzzle.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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But why? Or more accurately how does does it serve this present life? History is effective but not when it becomes a blind rage of reckless raking together of everything that has ever existed, the minutiae. Such is the problem with science. Fwd: Digital Dictionaries Help Save Vanishing Languages http://news.discovery.com/tech... (via http://friendfeed.com/dcfemel...)
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Shawn, certainly you have a point here. But then, each language is a mental cosmos and a linguistic system of its own, so imo in principle each language is worth exploring, from a linguist's point of view, and maybe also from the point of view of cultural researchers. If no one takes the trouble to do research on those languages, it turns out this project was nothing but &quot;raking together&quot;. I am afraid that will happen to most of the languages recorded here. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)

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Texting affects ability to interpret words - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...
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&quot;ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2012) — Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people's linguistic ability to interpret and accept words.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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is it an urban myth about the person who wrote their exam paper in text language? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Linguistics :: If the Rosetta Stone had never been discovered, would computers now be able to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs? - http://www.quora.com/Cryptog...
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&quot;A lot of Machine Learning is still very limited by a human's ability to teach a computer to mimic the kind of Pattern Recognition we do as humans when it comes to language cognition. Some people have an innate ability to identify visual patterns in writing systems like Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Linear A -- and some of these intuitive leaps and associations can look a bit like voodoo without a very large data set and a lot of time to study exactly what caused the connection or if the connection is even valid. Computational Linguistics has definitely come far enough, though, that we could certainly do a statistical analysis of the hieroglyphs and determine things like word boundaries, and which symbols are more likely to be ideograms, sound indicators, or both. When the language is dead and you don't know what the hieroglyphs represent (phonograms, logograms, ideograms, a combination thereof) and you don't know the subject matter of the text, raw computing power isn't going to help you much.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)

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languagehat.com: DIDICOI. - http://www.languagehat.com/archive...
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&quot;My wife and I have been enjoying a DVD of the delightful British detective series Midsomer Murders (thanks, Eric!), and the episode we watched last night, &quot;Blood Will Out,&quot; taught me a new word, didicoi. It's apparently a purely U.K. term, because none of my U.S. dictionaries have it, not even the imposing Webster's Third New International, but the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has it: &quot;didicoi ... a Gypsy or other nomadic person. Origin C19: perh. an alt. of Romany dik akei 'look here'.&quot; The etymology doesn't look very convincing on the face of it, but after all they do say &quot;perhaps,&quot; and it's often hard to figure out where such dialect terms come from. At any rate, I was wondering if my non-Yank readers are familiar with it, and if so whether it has a derogatory connotation or is a reasonably neutral term. It's certainly an enjoyable word to say.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)

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Out of Africa? Data fail to support language origin in Africa - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...
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&quot;ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2012) — In the beginning was the word -- yes, but where exactly? Last year, Quentin Atkinson, a cultural anthropologist at Auckland University in New Zealand, proposed that the cradle of language could be localized in the southwest of Africa. The report, which appeared in Science, was seized upon by the media and caused something of a sensation. Now however, LMU linguist Michael Cysouw has published a commentary in Science which argues that this neat &quot;Out-of-Africa&quot; hypothesis for the origin of language is not adequately supported by the data presented. The search for the site of origin of language remains very much alive.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;Atkinson based his claim on a comparative analysis of the numbers of phonemes found in about 500 present-day languages. Phonemes are the most basic sound units -- consonants, vowels and tones -- that form the basis of semantic differentiation in all languages. The number of phonemes used in natural languages varies widely. Atkinson, who is a biologist and psychologist by training, found that the highest levels of phoneme diversity occurred in languages spoken in southwestern Africa. Furthermore, according to his statistical analysis, the size of the phoneme inventory in a language tends to decrease with distance from this hotspot.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Balderdash: A no-nonsense word - http://blog.oup.com/2012...
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&quot;Unlike hogwash or, for example, flapdoodle, the noun balderdash is a word of “uncertain” (some authorities even say of “unknown”) origin. However, what is “known” about it is probably sufficient for questioning the disparaging epithets. We can dismiss with a condescending smile all kinds of imaginative rubbish (balderdash?) proposed by those who believed that knowing one or two old languages is enough for discovering an etymology, but one such guess is curious. According to it, the English noun goes back to Hebrew Bal, allegedly contracted from Babel, and dabar. The “curiosity” consists in the fact that there is a German verb (aus)baldowern “to nose out a secret or some information” (aus- is a prefix), from the language of the underworld. It goes back to Yiddish, ultimately Hebrew, ba’al-dabar “the lord of the word or of the thing” (ba’al has nothing to do with Babel). Thus, a fanciful etymology suggested for one word in English fits a German word of similar structure.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Shawn, you mentioning bazinga reminded me that it is like how I use Pallawatsch (balawatsch). :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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I'm Just Sayin': There Are Anachronisms In 'Downton' : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2012...
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&quot;PBS's hit series Downton Abbey has been praised for its subtle and witty dialogue. But a few anachronisms have slipped into the characters' conversations, and spotting them has become a hobby for many fans.&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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They're called the <a href="#GOP</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; <a href="#Justsayn</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Odd man out, a militant Gepid, and other etymological oddities - http://blog.oup.com/2012...
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&quot;I usually try to discuss words whose origin is so uncertain that, when it comes to etymology, dictionaries refuse to commit themselves. But every now and then words occur whose history has been investigated most convincingly, and their history is worth recounting. Such is the word odd. Everything is odd about it, including the fact that its original form has not survived in English. Odd appeared as odde in the fourteenth century. It was a borrowing from Scandinavian, where oddr meant “spear point” and metonymically “spear.” But next to oddr Old Icelandic oddi “triangle; a ‘tongue’ of land” existed. From “triangle” the meaning “an odd number,” as opposed to “an even number,” developed. The compound oddamaðr (ð has the value of th in Modern Engl. the, this, that) meant “the third man, he who gives the casting vote” or simply “an odd man,” that is, the third, fifth, and so forth. It is from oddamaðr that English has “odd man (out).” Icelandic oddatal “odd number” has the same structure as oddamaðr; tal is related to Engl. tell “count,” as in tell the beads and others (compare also the noun teller). Icelandic vera í odda continued into English as to be at odds, and this is also why heroes fight against overwhelming odds. Odd in twenty odd years, three hundred odd (any number between 300 and 400) has the same source. Even oddball, coined apparently in America close to the middle of the twentieth century, harkens back to the Old Scandinavian word. Such are the odds and ends of etymology. Some dictionaries devote separate entries to the adjective odd and the plural noun odds, but there is no need to do so. The singular — the odd — occurs in whist and golf; since the meaning of the odd is “handicap,” it resembles the plural in the common phrase odds-on. Odd is an ideal playing ground for puns. Is odd couple “an extra pair” or “two people who don’t match”? An odd trick in whist is not a peculiar trick but the seventh, the first the winners count toward the score (incidentally, the terminology of games is not the same in Great Britain and the United States).&quot; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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Thanks, Mr Ramazan :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - - (Edit | Remove)
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