Linguistics

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For The Origins Of Pie, Look To The Humble Magpie : The Salt : NPR - http://www.npr.org/blogs...

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"This is the month when the stately, voluptuous turkey takes a place of pride on most dinner tables. But when it comes to dessert, it's worth considering the relevance of another bird — the humble magpie." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/Ok5ka"&... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture...

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"David Crystal set himself the challenge of covering the history of English in 100 words. He explains what his list tells us about the origins and evolution of our mother tongue – and we also invite you to get creative with our poetry competition." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Story of English in 100 Words <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Sto... ; title="http://www.amazon.com/Sto... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The cool twists of language | David Bellos | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment...

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"Guardian letter writers have been enjoying dissecting the word 'cool' – it may have had a surprising path to its modern meaning" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Over time words and expressions change in sound, in spelling and in use, sometimes at a snail's pace and sometimes almost overnight – as contributors to the Guardian's letters page have recently reminded us with reference to "cool". A change in meaning may follow a comprehensible if always tortuous path (from the coarse cloth, or bure, on the tables of medieval clerks to the modern bureaucrat, for example), or it may switch at a stroke into its opposite. Rien, the French word for "nothing", for example, is derived from the Latin rem, which means "something" (in the accusative case). By what path can a word get from meaning "something" to meaning "nothing"? It's like asking how anything can be "hot" and "cool" at the same time. Obviously, they can be – especially if you don't even know whether the jazz throbbing through the speakers is hot, cool, or just loud." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Turkic Languages http://www.turkiclanguages.com/

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The Turkish Suffix Dictionary <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dnathan.com/la... ; title="http://www.dnathan.com/la... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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LL-MAP: A Map Annotation Project | LL-MAP - Language Maps and Language Data - http://llmap.org/

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"LL-MAP is a project designed to integrate language information with data from the physical and social sciences by means of a Geographical Information System (GIS). The most important part of the project will be a language subsystem, which will relate geographical information on the area in which a language is or has been spoken to data on resources relevant to the language. Through a link to the Multi-Tree project, information on all proposed genetic relationships of the languages will also be made available and viewable in a geographic context. Ultimately, the system will include ancillary information on topography, political boundaries, demographics, climate, vegetation, and wildlife, thus providing a basis upon which to build hypotheses about language movement across territory. Some cultural information, e.g., on religion, ethnicity, and economics, will also be included." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"LL-MAP is a joint project of Eastern Michigan University and Stockholm University, in collaboration with several projects and archives in the USA, Europe, and Australia. Collaborators include PARADISEC, The Alaska Native Language Center, The Tibetan-Himalayan Digital Library, and The WALS Project, as well as noted documentary linguists. Technical development will be directed by The Institute for Geospatial Research and Education (IGRE) at Eastern Michigan U. The project is funded by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Phineas Gage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Phineas P. Gage (July 9?, 1823 – May 21, 1860)[n 2] was an American railroad construction foreman now remembered for his improbable[n 3] survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior – effects so profound that friends saw him as "no longer Gage". - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Whoa. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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DCblog: On reading me loud and clear - http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2011...

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"A correspondent, having encountered such usages as 'Do you read me?' and 'I'm reading you loud and clear' in radio interaction, wonders what is meant by 'read' instead of 'hear'. It's an interesting example, as these are well-used expressions used in films and television where radiotelephony is a part of the plot, but they must seem odd to learners of English. For a start, the collocation of read and loud is unusual. And if it's radio, what is being read?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Loud and clear was a collocation long before radio telephony. The first recorded use of it is in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass: 'I said it very loud and clear; I went and shouted in his ear.' That's how it stayed, resisting prescriptive criticism (that it should be loudly and clearly). And it remains the number one choice, beating the phonetic alphabet alternative (Lima and Charlie) and the fascinating 'I read you five by five'." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » “Don’t you know it’s not just the Eskimo” - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"Last month, in the post "'Words for snow' watch," I reported that Kate Bush's new album (out Nov. 21) is called 50 Words for Snow. I wrote, "It's unclear at this point exactly how Eskimos will figure into Bush's songwriting, but it's safe to say they'll be in there somewhere." Today, thanks to NPR's stream of the album, I've listened to the ethereal title track, and the Eskimos are indeed in there, but perhaps not in the way you'd expect." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I didn't even know there was going to be a new Kate album this month! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages of the World: Buried treasures of Cairo Genizah - http://languages-of-the-world....

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"Since the Middle East has been one of the cradles of writing (see map below), Semitic languages are attested in a written form from a very early date: texts in Eblaite and Akkadian written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform are dated from around the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE. Other writing systems used for early Semitic languages were alphabetic in nature. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, South Arabian, and Ge'ez alphabets. Because of this wealth of written documents in Semitic languages, we know a great deal about the history and development of these languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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+++ - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Account from a field linguist in Amazonia | Blog Sorosoro - http://blog.sorosoro.org/en...

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"Working in the field in northwestern Amazonia has been the most striking experience of my life. From the summer of 1973 to the spring of 1998, I made several stays in communities who speak languages of the eastern branch of the Tukano family: Bará, Barasana, Edúuria, Karapana, Makuna, Tatuyo, Tuyuka." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"These groups are located in the region of Vaupés, Colombia, near the Brazilian boarder. They live on the banks of a river whose dark tea colored waters flow along stretches of thin white sand: the Piraparaná. There, traditional housing, with common homes (malocas) sheltering several nuclear families, generalized multilingualism, the rituals, and material culture, remain preserved and handed down from one generation to the other." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Noam Chomsky: On Knowledge and the Mysteries of Language - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Professor Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor of Linguistics at MIT, discusses his conception of knowledge and language. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Like Chomsky alot. Sometimes I even understand him :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery (SPSD) - http://projectegghead.com/passage...

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"The Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery (SPSD) is a database in which we the English-loving citizens of Internet can store countless examples of all the interesting language patterns and elements we are able to categorize. Some will be figures of speech, others grammatical-syntactic structures, others rhetorical maneuvers. As long as a pattern can be named, consistently identified, and exemplified--and interests somebody, for whatever reason--it deserves a place in the SPSD." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"One motive behind the creation of the SPSD (a practical motive--beyond unadulterated nerdiness) is a true faith in the power of systematic exemplification. My career involves trying to teach young people to write well: if I want them to write great sentences, they must be exposed to great sentences, again and again; and if I want them to understand, identify, and use a grammatical construction or figure of speech or literary device, they must be exposed to examples of it, again and again and again. The effects of their exposure will be magnified if those examples are amassed, analyzed, grouped--presented systematically--especially if I am careful to include each relevant variation and apparent exception in my example-set. Basically: If students see 15 back-to-back examples of a pattern, they will be more likely to understand, imitate, and internalize that pattern, than if they only see a circumstantial instance every-so-often (which seems to be the norm in education--"Oh, and here's another example of anaphora ... you remember? like in that one poem we read at the beginning of the semester? ... Don't remember? Whatever."). Anybody who's tried to produce a great example-set will know that a great example-set is damned hard to produce. The SPSD should make it easier. " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Digital Dictionaries of South Asia - http://dsal.uchicago.edu/diction... (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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"The South Asia Language and Area Center at University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the Triangle South Asia Consortium in North Carolina are creating and disseminating electronic dictionaries. For each of the twenty-six modern literary languages of South Asia, a panel of language experts identified key dictionaries currently in print and selected at least one multilingual dictionary for each language. For the more frequently taught languages, a monolingual dictionary also has been chosen. After identifying the best available resources, the chosen dictionaries have been converted to digital formats." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages of the World (Wide Web) :: directed graph . [2011, Google Research] - http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011...

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"To see the connections between languages, start by taking the several billion most important pages on the web in 2008, including all pages in smaller languages, and look at the off-site links between these pages." Enlarged gif image, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/... ; title="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/... ; \\ For another 2011 result based on the languages used in tweets, must see <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/NJuWt"&... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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World Languages Mapped by Twitter | The Atlantic - http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global...

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"Twitter is a linguist's dream come true: it compiles millions of messages in hundreds of languages daily, making the question "Who speaks what languages where?" easy to answer. That is the question taken up by self-described "map geek" Eric Fischer. He has created a map of the world's languages used on Twitter by pulling together data collected by Google Chrome. (...) It’s as if someone took one of those composite satellite maps -- you know, impossibly showing the whole world at night, the darkness broken by hubs and strings of artificial light ... and gave it the power of speech." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Thanks! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Arrant Pedantry » Blog Archive » Till Kingdom Come - http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2011...

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"The other day on Twitter, Bryan A. Garner posted, “May I ask a favor? Would all who read this please use the prep. ’till’ in a tweet? Not till then will we start getting people used to it.” I didn’t help out, partly because I hate pleas of the “Repost this if you agree!” variety and partly because I knew it would be merely a symbolic gesture. Even if all of Garner’s followers and all of their followers used “till” in a tweet, it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar of usage." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Neither did I, Maitani. I'm surprised they manage to pick up so many of our words as they ran screaming away :-P - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) - http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/

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"The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is the largest structured corpus of historical English. The corpus was created by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, with generous funding from the US National Endowment for the Humanities. It is also related to other large corpora of English that we have created. COHA allows you to quickly and easily search more than 400 million words of text of American English from 1810 to 2009. You can see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency, how words have changed meaning over time, and how stylistic changes have taken place in the language. It's a lot more than just frequency charts for individual words and phrases (like with Google Books / Culturomics) -- although those types of searches can be done here as well, and yield essentially the same results as Google Books. The following are just a small sample of an unlimited number of queries, but they should give you some idea of what the corpus can do. As you click on the links below, pay attention to how the form to the left has been filled out, and then feel free to modify the search form to find what you are interested in." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Mark LIBERMAN :: Statistical check on whether it's really true that "words are getting shortened" . [disproving Ralph Fiennes' claim that Twitter is "eroding" language (2011)] - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"I grabbed the text of Hamlet, the text of a number of P.G. Wodehouse stories, and the 100 most recent tweets from the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's independent student newspaper. The mean word length in Hamlet was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP's tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters. The business about word lengths is the easiest to check of the article's assertions about linguistic decay, and it's false. Trivially and transparently so, as such plaints usually are." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Per Durst-Andersen :: What Languages Tell Us About the Structure of the Human Mind . [Cognitive Computation 2011] - http://www.springerlink.com/content...

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"Languages seem to fall into three communicative types. They all talk about reality, but they do not understand it in the same way: (1) some (Russian, Chinese and Hindi) talk about the situation common to the speaker and the hearer, (2) others (Georgian, Turkish and Bulgarian) about the speaker’s experience of that situation and (3) still others (Danish, Swedish and English) also involve the hearer’s experience of it. The choice among a third-person, a first-person or a second-person perspective is a semiotic choice, but it appears that the same kind of choice is made at other areas relating to perception and cognition. If one collects the three linguistic descriptions of ‘our world’, one gets access to the way in which our mind is organized and how it functions: people seem to have two different kinds of vision, and visual stimuli are processed in three stages corresponding to input (experience), intake (understanding) and outcome (a combination of what was experienced and what was understood)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

This is an older paper available online, but mainly concerns the Russian language: Per Durst-Andersen, Towards a Multifunctional Grammar. ‘Language, Reality and Mind’ in a Grammatical Description (pdf) <a rel="nofollow" href="http://download2.hermes.a... ; title="http://download2.hermes.a... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages of the World: Metaphor, synecdochy and language change - http://languages-of-the-world....

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"In the previous posting, I discussed various figures of speech, such as metaphor, metonymy and synecdochy, which make our everyday speech more colorful, more creative, more poetic even. However, the same figures of speech are also responsible for many instances of historical semantic change, that is cases when words change their meaning. Let's consider a few of them here." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Mina, I love that, too. It is outstanding how Asya Pereltsvaig describes these treasures of language. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: How Language Began - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"As I see it there were several stages in speech origins. The first was a long period of vocalizing in which emotions were shared but not named. Then came a word/phrase period, followed by true sentences (subject + predicate). These first languages were likely very concrete and only later developed metaphorical and abstract capabilities." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Totally agreed, Henry. :-)) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Arrant Pedantry » Blog Archive » Whose Pronoun Is That? - http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2011...

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"In my last post I touched on the fact that whose as a relative possessive adjective referring to inanimate objects feels a little strange to some people. In a submission for the topic suggestion contest, Jake asked about the use of that with animate referents (“The woman that was in the car”) and then said, “On the flip side, consider ‘the couch, whose cushion is blue.’ ‘Who’ is usually used for animate subjects. Why don’t we have the word ‘whichs’ for inanimate ones?”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (one of my favorite books on language; if you don’t already own it, you should buy it now—seriously.) says that it has been in use from the fourteenth century to the present but that it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that grammarians like Bishop Lowth (surprise, surprise) started to cast aspersions on its use." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Chavacano language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"Chavacano or Chabacano, sometimes referred to by linguists as Philippine Creole Spanish, is a Spanish-based creole language spoken in the Philippines. The word "Chavacano" is derived from the Spanish word "chabacano", meaning "poor taste," "vulgar," "common," "of low quality," "tacky," or "coarse" for the chavacano language which was developed in Cavite City, Ternate and Ermita, and also derived from the word chavano which was coined by the people of Zamboanga[citation needed]--Explanation. Six different dialects have developed: Zamboangueño in Zamboanga City, Davaoeño Zamboangueño / Castellano Abakay in Davao, Ternateño in Ternate, Caviteño in Cavite City, Cotabateño in Cotabato City and Ermiteño in Ermita." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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El español criollo de Filipinas quiere borrar su imagen ordinaria <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.google.com/hos... ; title="http://www.google.com/hos... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Linguist Llama - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"As the Wikipedia article explains, the schwa symbol ə is sometimes used to denote "an unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound, … transcribed with the symbol <ə>, regardless of … actual phonetic value"; though as far as the IPA is concerned, schwa is just a "mid-central vowel, … stressed or unstressed"." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Merriam-Webster's dictionary of ... - Merriam-Webster, Inc - Google Bücher - http://books.google.com/books...

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SUBJUNCTIVE (p. 876 ff.) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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... and I have had my difficutlies with the french subjunctive - and to tell the truth, I never got it... - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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