Linguistics

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Dil Hizmetleri - Language Services http://www.linguaaa.com/ Çeviri,Simültane ve Ardıl Tercüme,Web Sitesi Yerelleştirme,Altyazı,Seslendirme,Yazı / Editörlük,Yabancı Dil Eğitimleri - Translation,Interpretation,Web localization,Subtitles,Voiceover,Writing / Editing,Language Education (http://ff.im/La4b9 üzerinden) (http://friendfeed.com/aysea üzerinden)

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Language Log » The future and the past - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"Tom Chivers, the Telegraph's assistant comment editor, has posted some comments of his own on the linguistic side of a recent British parliamentary controversy ("Nadine Dorries, linguistic pioneer", The Telegraph 9/12/2011). David Cameron said something about Ms. Dorries that some perceived as offensive; he later apologized to her, and she responded: I don’t for one moment believe Mr Cameron meant to insult me with his “frustrated” remark. […] He has since apologised fulsomely." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

on the meaning of FULSOME - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Shakespeares Words | Home - http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Default...

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"Welcome to the new website of Shakespeare's Words, the online version of the best-selling glossary and language companion. The site integrates the full text of the plays and poems with the entire Glossary database, allowing you to search for any word or phrase in Shakespeare's works, and in particular to find all instances of all words that can pose a difficulty to the modern reader." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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This is excellent! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"What kind of word is "gotten"? It makes me shudder." - - Hey, at least Americans aren't the only ones with minor, ill-informed language pet peeves. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"I am increasingly hearing the phrase "that'll learn you" - when the English (and more correct) version was always "that'll teach you". What a ridiculous phrase! " - - Yeah, I think someone is missing the joke in that statement. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages of the World: Birch Bark Letters, part 1 - http://languages-of-the-world....

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"This past summer a certain anniversary might have slipped you by: July 26 this year was the 60th anniversary of the first birch bark document discovery in Novgorod, Russia. While birch bark has been used for writing in various cultures (e.g., some Gandharan Buddhist texts have been found written on birch bark and preserved in clay jars), it is the documents from Novgorod that are particularly celebrated and for a good reason: like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Novgorod birch bark documents changed our understanding of the Old Novgorod dialect, Slavic philology and linguistics in general and of the early Northern Russian culture. In a series of postings, I'd like to examine Novgorod birch bark letters and what we have learned from them." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Birch Bark Letters, part 3 <a rel="nofollow" href="http://languages-of-the-w... ; title="http://languages-of-the-w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Jabal al-Lughat: Why German is strange - http://lughat.blogspot.com/2011...

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"Following up on comments to the previous post, some readers may be interested in the following list of the top ten rarest typological features of Northwestern European languages (on WALS), ordered from most to least unusual:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I think that "Standard Average European" approach is more accurate. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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530 - Men of Kent or Kentish Men? Two Strange Cases of Mappable Local Identities | Strange Maps | Big Think - http://bigthink.com/ideas...

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"Transcript of an extract from BBC Radio 4 entertainment interview show Chain Reaction (first broadcast on 26 August 2011). Intersperse with a good deal of [live studio laughter]." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Well, the first ever English cherry orchard is now a building estate, still can't remember the exact location or name, but there is a small plaque commemorating it's location on the estate. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Ship and the rings it leaves in etymological waters (Part 1) - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"We are in deep waters here. A first puzzle is that ship has exact cognates in Frisian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and Gothic, but nowhere outside Germanic. The ancient Indo-Europeans called their floating vessel something else, and we know what they called it. The modern echo of that word can be seen in Latin navis (from whose root we have navigation; and remember Captain Nemo’s Nautilus “little ship” and the Argonauts?), as well as in several other languages. So why ship?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Some other dictionaries avoid revealing this miserable truth to their users" - - Ahh, so true. I think more people would be more intrigued by etymology if they knew how much controversy and uncertainty there is in so many words, so many very common words (including most linguists, who, in my experience, tend to be pretty dismissive of etymology). I think a lot of linguists don't see the point of having etymological knowledge because they just think "If I need to know the origin of a word, I'll just go to the damn dictionary!" But that ill prepares you for understanding the complexity involved in contested etymologies. I really like Liberman for this reason. He doesn't gloss over controversy and he acknowledges doubt. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Miriam Makeba - The Click Song (1979) - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch... via Ilenesally http://ff.im/LauQJ

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

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Up to now I have only thought of this possible way to find something. :-) But that about the taboo is what fascinates me, too. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Mark Buchanan :: Quantum minds: why we think like quarks (2011) . [particles behavior applies surprisingly well to how humans think: fuzzy non-classical logic and Hilbert space] - http://www.newscientist.com/article...

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"Quantum probabilities have the potential to provide a better framework for modelling human decision making. But the strange links go beyond probability to the realm of quantum uncertainty. The structure of human conceptual knowledge is quantum-like because context plays a fundamental role. Around a decade ago, computer scientists Dominic Widdows, now at Google Research in Pittsburgh, and Keith van Rijsbergen of the University of Glasgow realised that the mathematics they had been building into search engines was essentially the same as that of quantum theory. Widdows, working with Trevor Cohen at the University of Texas, has shown that quantum operations in semantic Hilbert spaces are a powerful means of finding previously unrecognised associations between concepts." see also <a rel="nofollow" href="http://research.google.co... ; title="http://research.google.co... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Widdows' _Geometry and Meaning_ (2004) got great reviews for its clarity in the field of natural language processing. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.puttypeg.net/b... ; nice quantum twist to the notion of contextual semantic distance. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages of the World: The human and the frog - http://languages-of-the-world....

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"Imagine a bewitched frog, waiting to be kissed in order to turn back into a human. Given a choice between a prince and a princess, who will the enchanted frog kiss? If you are an English speaker, the answer is the princess, right? At least, that's the story that English-speaking children grow up with: a princess kissing a frog who turns into Prince Charming. But things get more complicated if we start looking at renditions of this fairy tale in other languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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That's a nice little story, Anika. It's great your kids are educated bilingually. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Memiyawanzi - Reading Lists - http://memiyawanzi.wordpress.com/

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Reading lists for studies in Indo-European linguistics in general, and Greek and Latin linguistics in particular. Indo-Aryan isn't covered here. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What’s in a Name : The Last Word On Nothing - http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2011...

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"The best thing that ever happened to the Big Bang is its name. For scientists, the acceptance of a scientific concept depends on its explanation of existing data, its prediction of observable phenomena, the observation of those phenomena, and the duplication of those results. But for non-scientists—well, for scientists, too—the popularity of a concept can come down to a show biz maxim: You gotta get a gimmick." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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There is no access to the site at the moment, but I hope it will be re-established soon. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Did you know that in Turkey, "meme" means "tits"? The Philoso-Raptor told me so. http://ff.im/K1uWC

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Did you know 'it' means dog in Turkish¿ Or am means vagina? Can means life. Okey, not funny as meme. I admit. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Lol thats a crazy site, not to be confused with the Turkic URL KnowYourTits.com - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Large Corpora used in CTS - http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/list...

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"The website <a rel="nofollow" href="http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk... ; was originally designed to host comparable English and Russian corpora, but in time we have accumulated a variety of large corpora supported by a uniform search interface: "Leeds CQP", which is a CGI Perl frontend to IMS Corpus Workbench. Tools developed to work with corpora are listed on a separate page." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk... ; title="http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Jesse ANDERSON :: Shakespeare and the Infinite Monkey Theorem . [million monkeys sitting at a million typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare -- more than half complete ! ] - http://www.jesse-anderson.com/2011...

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"I have virtual, computerized monkeys that output random gibberish. This is supposed to mimic a monkey randomly mashing the keys on a keyboard. The computer program I wrote compares that monkey’s gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote. If it does match, the portion of gibberish that matched Shakespeare is marked with green in the images to show it was found by a monkey. The table shows the exact number of characters and percentage the monkeys have found in Shakespeare. The parts of Shakespeare that have not been found are colored white. This process is repeated over and over until the monkeys have created every work of Shakespeare through random gibberish." [Mersenne twister, Bloom Field membership, Hadoop] - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Personal names around the world - http://www.w3.org/Interna...

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"How do people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications of those differences on the design of forms, databases, ontologies, etc. for the Web?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Examples of differences: Given name and patronymic In the Icelandic name Björk Guðmundsdóttir Björk is the given name. The second part of the name indicates the father’s (or sometimes the mother’s) name, followed by -sson for a male and -sdóttir for a female, and is more of a description than a family name in the Western sense. Björk’s father, Guðmundur, was the son of Gunnar, so is known as Guðmundur Gunnarsson. Icelanders prefer to be called by their given name (Björk), or by their full name (Björk Guðmundsdóttir). Björk wouldn’t normally expect to be called Ms. Guðmundsdóttir. Telephone directories in Iceland are sorted by given name. Other cultures where a person has one given name followed by a patronymic include parts of Southern India, Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Malay name Isa bin Osman the word 'bin' means 'son of' ('binti' is used for women). If you refer to this person you might say Mr. Isa, or if you know him personally, Encik Isa (Encik is an Indonesian word rather like Mr.)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2011...

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"Ten years ago, David Foster Wallace admitted in “Tense Present,” one of his best and most charming essays, to being a “SNOOT,” which he defined as a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.” He outed himself while writing in Harper’s on Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a book, he says, that serves to confirm its author’s “SNOOTitude while undercutting it in tone.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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DCblog: On being persuaded about convince - http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2011...

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"A correspondent sends in the following passage from the Times (30 July): 'In Adam Sage’s article about Dominique Strauss-Kahn (July 23) he says that Triston Banon’s mother "convinced her not to make a formal complaint". No, she didn’t: she persuaded her. You convince someone of the truth of something, but you persuade them to take a course of action. ... It is a classic example of a new construction that is acceptable or at least unexceptionable to some and repugnant to others.' And he adds, a mite confused: Can I tell my students it's OK to use convince to do something?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"This is purely a grammatical issue. There's no problem when these verbs are used with a following that construction. There is a difference in meaning, but that is a different point. Compare: (1) I persuaded John that he should go to the cinema. (2) I1 convinced John that he should go to the cinema." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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etymology :: O.K. > okay (1838, 1888) . [always wondered about this ;-] - http://dictionary.reference.com/etymolo....

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"Only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for "no go," as if spelled "know go"); in this case, "oll korrect." Further popularized as an election slogan by the O.K. Club, New York boosters of Democratic president Martin Van Buren's 1840 re-election bid, in allusion to his nickname Old Kinderhook, from his birth in the N.Y. village of Kinderhook. Van Buren lost, the word stuck, in part because it filled a need for a quick way to write an approval on a document, bill, etc. The noun is first attested 1841; the verb 1888. Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh "it is so" (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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My bad on this one. I didn't see that half the entry was hidden behind the "expand" button. At least one alternative history is mentioned, which is better than what a lot of dictionaries do. I'm just so used to dictionaries being overly-confident in their etymologies that I jumped the gun. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Professor Wright and Professor Skeat - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"From time to time I mention the unsung heroes of English etymology, but only once have I devoted a post to such a hero (Frank Chance), though I regularly sing praises to Charles P.G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary. Today I would like to speak about Joseph Wright (1855-1930). He was not an etymologist in the strict sense of this term, but no article on the origin of English words can do without consulting The English Dialect Dictionary he edited. This multivolume masterpiece contains thousands of local words, whose existence reveals unsuspected and unexpected ties between the words all of us know and their “provincial” kin. Wright first attempted to offer tentative etymologies in his entries, but then, most wisely, gave up this practice. The descent of the words with which he dealt is often so obscure that guesses would have done the users only harm. Sometimes the source of a rural word is evidently French or Scandinavian, but in most cases no clue suggests itself. Those who are in the habit of looking up origins in our “thick” dictionaries may have noticed how often the etymological comments there run no further than “dialectal” or “slang,” as though such references meant anything. English contains thousands of words about whose origin absolutely nothing is known, because many of them came from the creative brain of an imaginative person now dead for centuries, or the coinage was triggered by a sound symbolic impulse or a joke (word creation and humor is a most promising topic). Too bad, we are usually unable to reconstruct the evanescent processes that resulted in the birth of a word, short-lived and geographically restricted or durable and used in several counties." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The life of Joseph Wright should serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to understand the meaning of the phrase self-made man. A Yorkshire lad (born as the seventh son of a wool weaver), who became fully literate by the age of fifteen, ended up as an Oxford professor of comparative philology, the author of exemplary textbooks of Greek, Gothic, Old and Middle High German, Old and Middle English. But, as noted, his main achievement was The English Dialect Dictionary (it ends with a book-length supplement on English dialect grammar), a mammoth enterprise, which he, not a rich man, partly financed and which he considered to be his main contribution to linguistics. He married his former student ([Elizabeth] Mary Lea, 1863-1958), who later co-authored his books on the history of English, though, according to her own statement, she was mainly responsible for collecting data. In 1932, that is, soon after her husband’s death, she brought out a two-volume book titled The Life of Joseph Wright, 720 pages in all, supplied with a splendid index. Not only is this book valuable because it is based on the author’s unique knowledge of the subject but also because Mary Wright quoted numerous documents and letters in it. Even the slightly hagiographic tone of the exposition does not spoil it. In her book Rustic Speech and Folklore, she also recounts their walks and scholarly pursuits in Yorkshire. For Joseph Wright, Standard English was a foreign language, and after a stroke he tended to relapse more and more into the dialect of his childhood and youth. But even much earlier his little son used to tease him when he heard his father pronounce a word like Puck with the vowel of put. Mary Wright reported that the last word of her dying husband was dictionary. One need not concoct a pseudo-psychological story around this episode. Joseph Wright was not only aware of Mary’s compiling his biography but he also helped her do the work, and dictionary was his “last will and testament.” His mind was unaffected by the pneumonia that carried him away, and he wanted to remind his wife that the production of the dictionary should be described as the defining event of his life." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Two-year-old children understand complex grammar - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2011) — Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have found that children as young as two years old have an understanding of complex grammar even before they have learned to speak in full sentences." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The study suggests that infants know more about language structure than they can actually articulate, and at a much earlier age than previously thought. The work also shows that children may use the structure of sentences to understand new words, which may help explain the speed at which infants acquire speech." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: File:Knowledge of German EU map.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... via Spidra Webster http://ff.im/KiyGi

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This was the one I tried to read, Halil, but it didn't make me any wiser: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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what's the original wikipedia link from which this image was taken? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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50 years of language study began on Martha's Vineyard : The Martha's Vineyard Times - http://www.mvtimes.com/marthas...

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"Martha's Vineyard was the site of a groundbreaking 1961 study in sociolinguistics, the field of research that looks at language in its social context — and it has everything to do with Vineyard pride." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I read a book on this; very fascinating subject matter. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Root haughtiness - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"A root haughtiness constraint in English derivational morphology? The latest Partially Clips strip:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"There's a lot we don't know about lexical word formation." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics

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