Linguistics

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New light shed on how children learn to speak - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Researchers have discovered that children under the age of two control speech using a different strategy than previously thought." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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""We were very surprised to find that the two-year-olds do not monitor their own voice when speaking in the same way as adults do," says Ewen MacDonald, a former Queen's research associate and now associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark. "As they play music, violinists will listen to the notes they produce to ensure they are in tune. If they aren't, they will adjust the position of their fingers to bring the notes back in tune. When we speak, we do something very similar. We subconsciously listen to vowel and consonant sounds in our speech to ensure we are producing them correctly."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Etymological dictionary of the German language (Open Library) by Friedrich Kluge - http://openlibrary.org/books...

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Translated by J. F. Davis. Published 1891 by Bell in London. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

An online searchable scan of the good old Kluge Etymological Dictionary! :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts: January 2012: The Written World - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"The Written World, presented by Melvyn Bragg and featuring items from the British Library, aired this week on BBC Radio 4. Among the British Library's treasures discussed in the programmes are the Codex Sinaiticus (one of the two oldest manuscripts of the Bible), the St Cuthbert Gospel (the oldest intact European book), and Beowulf (the greatest epic poem in Old English)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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You're welcome, Jasmine. Glad you enjoy this. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Etymology + Entomology :: First computer BUG documented - http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h...

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"The term was use during Thomas Edison's life to mean an industrial defect. In Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity, an 1896 handbook, the term "bug" is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus. In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a primitive computer). On 9 September 1947, when the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay <a href="#70</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; in Panel F. The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log. The entry reads: "First actual case of bug being found." The word went out that they had "debugged" the machine and the term "debugging a computer program" was born." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Echoes of power :: Language effects and power differences in social interaction (2011) - http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3670

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"One could reasonably suppose that signals manifested in language might provide information about roles, status, and other aspects of the group's dynamics. To date, however, finding such domain-independent language-based signals has been a challenge. We show that in group discussions power differentials between participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to. Starting from this observation, we propose an analysis framework based on linguistic coordination that can be used to shed light on power relationships and that works consistently across multiple types of power -- including a more "static" form of power based on status differences, and a more "situational" form of power in which one individual experiences a type of dependence on another. Using this framework, we study how conversational behavior can reveal power relationships in two very different settings: discussions among Wikipedians and arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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In Hindi, there is also a quite intricate system of linguistic forms which have to be used in order to express a certain degree of reverence, respect or the lack of it. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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odamaki: Missing “people” - http://wodamaki.blogspot.com/2011...

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"One Middle English word that I wish had survived into Mondern English is thede, "people, nation, country, Gentile nation." Can you imagine how useful hip-hop artists would find it as a rhyme for weed? Scots kept the word theed a bit longer that the southern Anglic languages, the only citations in the Dictionary of the Scots Language being from the text Golagros and Gawane (about which more can be learned at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bartleby.com/2... ; title="http://www.bartleby.com/2... ;) and then threw the word away too. Thede is the native reflex of the word from which Middle Dutch dūtsch and German deutsch were built. Just look at this savory list of cognates from the OED:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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You're right, but I'd say his arguments are quite convincing. Particularly interesting is that possible relationship between PIE *teuteH- and Hittite tuzzi. Unfortunately, the link to Ivanov's paper is invalid. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Stephen Fry on Language ~ Kuriositas - http://www.kuriositas.com/2011...

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"Fry expresses some of his ideas about the English language and the way that it is used today - and these might surprise you. He describes how over time he threw off the mantle of the pedant and followed some of the greats of literature, like Shakespeare and Wilde, in their (more or less, depending on your opinion) subtle approach to English." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Seasonal linguistic pun - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"Condescending Literary Pun Dog" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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hehe - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dinosaur Comics - December 22nd, 2011 - awesome fun times! - http://www.qwantz.com/index...

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"T-Rex's sentence in the first panel is a snowclone! There's a bunch of them here on Language Log, which is also just about where the word originated! NOW YOU KNOW" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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rar. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: New Book from the Oriental Institute: Grammatical Case in the Languages of the Middle East and Europe - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2011...

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"Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization (SAOC) volume 64 contains twenty-eight studies of various aspects of the case systems of Sumerian, Hurrian, Elamite, Eblaite, Ugaritic, Old Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew, Indo-European, the languages of the Bisitun inscription, Hittite, Armenian, Sabellic, Gothic, Latin, Icelandic, Slavic, Russian, Ouralien, Tokharian, and Etruscan. The volume concludes with a paper on future directions." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » All’s well that ends well - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"The year 2011 is coming to an end. Strange that we say “come to an end,” even though a year, unlike a rope, a street, and even life, in which it is hard to make ends (or both ends) meet, can have only one end, but such are the caprices of usage. In any case, the end of the year is close at hand. Those interested in such tricks may recollect that year sometimes needs neither the definite nor the indefinite article when we speak about this time of year, and so it has been for centuries. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 opens with the line: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold…” Likewise, end feels quite comfortable without an article in the phrase stand on end. Next Wednesday will be devoted to December’s “gleanings,” but to celebrate the season, today I am offering a short essay about the word end; by contrast, January will start with the verb begin." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"“End” is a more abstract concept than, for example, “edge” or “border,” and, although it is not an immutable law, in language abstract notions tend to develop from concrete ones. The first recorded sense of Old Engl. ende “end” was “extremity, final limit,” but there must have been other senses. In Gothic, a Germanic language known from a fourth-century translation of the New Testament (the language has been dead for a long time), andeis, a cognate of end, glossed Greek telos “termination, completion; result,” and exactly the same meaning of end surfaced in thirteenth-century English. Possibly, it existed earlier but found no reflection in texts or at least in extant texts. Telos also referred to many more things that happen “in the end”: “final solution; tax; prize” and, especially important, “aim, goal” (hence English learned words like teleology and pseudo-Greek coinages like telegraph, telephone, and television, from tele-“at a distance far off”). In English, end “purpose” surfaced only in the fourteenth century, and again we may suppose that this late attestation is an accident of transmission rather than of semantic history. We still say to that end and the end justifies the means. The sense “remnant” has been preserved mainly in the idiom odds and ends and in candle end. Yet looking through books reveals a few curious idioms. There is fiddlestick’s end (preceded by fig’s end) “rubbish, nonsense,” and pack up one’s ends and awls (with a pun on awl ~ all) means “pack up all one’s belongings.” Perhaps in fiddlestick’s end, end should be glossed as “tip,” for to have something at one’s fingers’ tips had (or has?) a variant to have something at one’s fingers’ end. As the OED and other dictionaries tell us, in East End, West End, and the ends of the earth we have a survival of the sense “quarter, region.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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This column will change your life: the language police | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeand...

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Think of the word "atrocity", and certain appalling behaviours spring to mind. Add "barbaric", and the picture gets worse. How about a barbaric atrocity that's "detestable" and provokes "horror"? At this point, it's surely time for a UN intervention. We must act to halt this outrage! Except that all the words just quoted come from discussions of the uses and abuses of English. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Cypriot Turkish - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Emanating from Anatolia and evolved for four centuries, Cypriot Turkish is the vernacular spoken by Cypriots with Ottoman ancestry, as well as by Cypriots who converted to Islam during Ottoman rule. It is understood by expatriate Cypriots living in the UK, United States, Australia and other parts of the world. Cypriot Turkish consists of a blend of Ottoman Turkish and the Yörük dialect spoken to this day in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey. In addition it has absorbed influences from Greek, Italian and English. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Glad to learn about this. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Memiyawanzi: A Gateway to Sindarin - http://memiyawanzi.wordpress.com/

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"This is almost most certainly old hat to some folks, but as a testament to why I should not allow myself to simply enter and browse bookshops for no particular reason, I wandered into the downtown Waterstone’s the other day, thinking to buy a science-fiction novel, and discovered there instead among a display of Tolkien books (for whatever reason Tolkien is considered science-fiction to Brits) A Gateway to Sindarin, a grammar of the language written by David Salo, the primary linguistic consultant for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film adaptions." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The book is written as a descriptive reference grammar from the extant (published) texts in the language (which are conveniently collected in Appendix 1), along with glossaries Sindarin-English and English-Sindarin (Appendices 2 & 4), and follows the expected format of a work of the particular genre. But it is more than just a reference grammar, but also contains a sketch of the history of the Elvish language family, and a historical phonology of Sindarin." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How to reconstruct the Indo-Europeans | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp...

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"As must be obvious, I think now that the spread of Indo-European languages had some demographic impact. It wasn’t analogous to the spread of English to Jamaica, or the existence of French as an official language in Congo-Brazzaville. Because of this, I now believe it is possible in the near future that scientists will reconstruct the genome of the original Indo-Europeans. How?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Definitely not me. I attended a seminar/tutorial last term where we tried to tackle the question of the "Urheimat" from the linguistic and the archeological perspective. I am mainly interested in historical linguistics, but the urheimat topic is quite fascinating, especially in the light of modern genetic research. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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American Dialect Society To Choose Word Of The Year : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2011...

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"Lovers of the English language are coming together to select the coolest word or phrase. Last year, app was voted the word of the year by the American Dialect Society. Now that group of etymologists, writers, historians and other language experts are considering new words for 2011. Linguist Ben Zimmer talks to Renee Montagne to offer his picks for 2011." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

goodevening maitani - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Deb Roy: The birth of a word | Video on TED.com - http://www.ted.com/talks...

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Found via Languagehat:: "Deb Roy, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, gives a talk on how he's wired his house for video and recorded everything said around his infant son for three years, giving him the ability to analyze (for instance) exactly what enabled him to learn the word water. Then he explains how he used similar techniques to analyze the relationship between everything available on TV and what people say in social media. It's pretty mind-boggling stuff, and if you have twenty minutes to spare it's well worth your while." <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.languagehat.co... ; title="http://www.languagehat.co... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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same here :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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544 - Alphabet Maps of Great Britain and Ireland | Strange Maps | Big Think - http://bigthink.com/ideas...

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"If you’re in the north of England and you’re in a town ending in -by, you’re in former Danish-ruled territory [1]. If the toponym starts with beau- or bel-, it was probably named by Normans [2]. And if it contains the prefix Avon- or the suffix -combe, it is one of many place names of Celtic origin that dot the islands on this map [3]." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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You're very welcome, Afonso. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Death of a simile - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"Throughout my whole life it has been the standard British English metaphor for Sisyphean tasks, the jobs that are endless because by the time you get to the end you need to start over: It's like painting the Forth Bridge." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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:-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babies track word patterns long before word-learning starts - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"From the moment they're born, babies are highly attuned to communicate and motivated to interact. And they're great listeners." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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:-))) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Saami - Samisk - Sámi: Sami language - Sámigiella - Samisk språk - http://saamiblog.blogspot.com/2009...

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"Saami alphabet - samisk alfabet Saami Loanwords in Old Norse ADAM HYLLESTED University of Copenhagen Samisk – Norsk Ordbok Buorre beaivi! New focus on Sami language Nordsamisk (North Saami alphabet and language) Sami Language and alphabet Samisk Språk Video Samisk alfabet Samiska i ett nytt årtusende Samisk bibliografi fra Nasjonalbiblioteket Kart som viser Samiske stedsnavn øst for Femunden, Hedemark, etter opptegnelser av Johs. Falkenberg 1942-43 Samiske stedsnavn i Esanden-distriktetet, Tydalen i Sør-Trøndelag. Etter opptegninger av Johs. Falkenberg 1942-43 On Germanic-Saami contacts and Saami prehistory SIIDA: Mánáidsiiddut Interneahtas - Bures boahtin! Sami and Finnish languages related Uralic languages Map Uralic Languages Sami (Sámi/Saami) language Kåfjordsamisk : Folk og slektninger Finsk-ugriska språk och kulturer ”Vowel Reduction in Skolt Saami in Connected Speech” by Zita McRobbie-Utasi" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Say it again, Alice - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"The linguist Zellig Harris (he was Noam Chomsky's mentor and doctoral adviser) drew an important distinction between imitation and repetition. You can imitate the sound of anyone saying anything, even in a language you know nothing about, and you might even do it quite well, but you can only repeat something in a language that you know. When you repeat, you use the sound system (or at least, you can use it) in your own usual way. You know the phonemes of the language, and you know what is just linguistically insignificant low-level phonetic detail that you don't need to replicate. You know which utterance in your language you're repeating, and your target is to say that, and you have some license about doing it in your own voice, your own pronunciation of the language. It's not at all clear that Alice, the aggressive engineer in the Dilbert strip, has got this right:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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interesting :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Monthly Gleanings: November 2011 - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"River and its kin. Middle English rivere goes back to the Old French word that meant both “river” and “river bank.” It is usually traced to the unattested Vulgar Latin feminine form riparia, from Latin riparius “of, pertaining to a bank” (Latin ripa “bank”). Indo-European dictionaries, which revel in roots and extensions, reconstruct the root rei- “scratch, tear, cut” with the extension -p. Reip- (the etymon of ripa) ended up meaning “that which is cut out by a river.” The English verb rive (from Scandinavian) may be a cognate." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice…. “Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle; “nine the next and so on.” “What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice. “That is the reason they are called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked, “because they lessen from day to day.” This was quite a new idea to Alice." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages of the World: It's not all black and white - http://languages-of-the-world....

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"As was discussed in earlier postings, the cross-linguistic range of color terms is quite complex and languages differ as to how the treat the color spectrum (e.g., see how Hanunoo does it). But interestingly, not all uses of color terms are to denote color per se." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"However, as Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen rightfully note in their The Myth of Continents, "It does not require an especially discerning eye to realize that there is nothing red about indigenous Americans or yellow about East Asians -- or that blacks are not really black and whites are far from white." (p. 120)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » The phonetic taste of coffee - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"All sources inform us about the Arabic-Turkish home of the word coffee, though in the European languages some forms were taken over directly from Arabic, so that the etymological part of the relevant entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias needs modification. There is a possibility of coffee being connected with the name of the kingdom of Kaffa, but this question need not bother us at the moment. The main puzzle is the development of the form coffee rather than its distant origin. The OED is, as always, helpful, but particularly instructive is the array of variants found in a book with the funny title Hobson-Jobson. Far from being a book of humor, it is a wonderful dictionary of Anglo-Indian words. In its pages we find recollections about a very good drink called Chaube (1573), Caova (1580), cohoo (1609) and, surprisingly for such an early date, coffee (also 1609), cahue (1615), coho, and copha (1628). The route to Europe is supposed to be from Arabic quahwa via Turkish kahveh. Later coffee became the standard form in English. But, as we can see, there was no real progression: in 1609 some people said cohoo, while others already knew coffee. The cause may be that the Arabic and the Persian pronunciations competed, one being prevalent on the coast of Arabia, the other in the mercantile towns. The writers quoted above were mainly English, Dutch, French, and Italian. All of them recorded the foreign word according to their speech habits, though some may have repeated what they had heard from their countrymen. (Incidentally, the transliteration of the Turkish word as kahveh and the Arabic as qahwah may not be quite right, for the so-called round gaf of the Turkish word, as this consonant is known among the Anglo-Indians, sounds very much like Arabic q. I would be grateful to specialists for either corroborating or refuting this statement. Perhaps there are dialectal differences of which I am unaware.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a href="#etymology</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics

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