Linguistics

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Essay on the Origin of Languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"Essay on the Origin of Languages" (Essai sur l'origine des langues) is an essay by Jean-Jacques Rousseau published posthumously in 1781.[1] Rousseau had meant to publish the essay in a short volume which was also to include essays On Theatrical Imitation and The Levite of Ephraim. In the preface to this would-be volume Rousseau wrote that the Essay was originally meant to be included in the Discourse on Inequality but was omitted because it, "was too long and out of place."[1] In this text, Rousseau lays out a narrative of the beginnings of language, using a similar literary form as the Second Discourse. Rousseau writes that language (as well as the human race) developed in southern warm climates and then migrated northwards to colder climates. In its inception, language was musical and had emotional power as opposed to rational persuasion. The colder climates of the north, however, stripped language of its passionate characteristic, distorting it to the present rational form. In the later chapters music is used as a metaphor to convey language's transition. Chapter Nine of the Essay is an explication of the development of humankind, eventually inventing language. As this format closely adheres to that of the Second Discourse, some have discussed whether one account ought to be read as more authoritative than the other. As the text was initially written in 1754, and was sent to the publisher in 1763, it appears safe to argue that the tensions between the Essay and the Second Discourse were intentional. The third chapter of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology critiques and analyzes Rousseau's essay. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"In its inception, language was musical and had emotional power as opposed to rational persuasion." - Interesting theory. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Languages of the World: The Altaic family controversy - http://languages-of-the-world....

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So now that we've been introduced to the three language groupings that are hypothesized to constitute the core of the proposed Altaic language family -- Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages -- we can consider the evidence for and against the Altaic family proposal. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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As the article says, shared typological patterns don't provide good evidence for common descent of different languages. Also, shared vocabulary can be borrowed. I think the best evidence lies in early texts (with sufficiently big corpora so that coincidence can be excluded) in the languages in question that can be compared. E.g., the situation in Indo-European studies is extremely fortunate, as there are vast ancient corpora to be compared: The Old Indian texts, Latin and Greek Literature, and a few a bit smaller or less ancient corpora, but helpful nevertheless. I don't think there are enough comparable ancient texts available in the Altaic languages. So maybe the question whether they are cognate cannot be answered. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - The story of how we got our alphabets - video - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"From intricate and beautiful Egyptian hieroglyphs, to wedge-shaped cuneiform imprints from ancient Mesopotamia - our ancestors developed many ways of recording their thoughts and information." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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James Clackson is a renowned scholar of Indo-European linguistics. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Anglo Indian Dialect | Dialect Blog - http://dialectblog.com/2011...

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"Below is an interesting short film created from outtakes of The End of the Raaj, a recent documentary about the Anglo-Indian community. This snippet discusses the Anglo-Indian dialect, and the various words and terms associated with this sub-culture. It’s a long clip, but if you have the time, it’s worth watching:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Their saying "that's how we move" seems to be equivalent to "that's how we roll". - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Man's First Word: Amazon.co.uk: Carl Chaiet /Lynn Kearcher, Lynn Kearcher, Carl Chaiet: Books - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mans-Fi...

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Man's First Word is a children's book illustrated by Carl Chaiet and written by Lynn Kearcher which was published in 2007. The reader follows Telford, a renowned lexicographer, and Earnest, his talking bird-butler, as they travel through the Atlas Mountains of Morocco in search of the origin of language. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Translations of It's all Greek/Chinese/Hebrew/Arabic to me in many languages - http://www.omniglot.com/languag...

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"This phrase is used to indicate that something is totally incomprehensible to you. According to World Wide Words, it comes the Medieval Latin phrase Graecum est; non potest legi (It is Greek; it cannot be read). Medieval scribes, who weren't familiar with Greek, apparently wrote this phrase next to any text they came across in that language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Maybe there is a connection between these two facts. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » David Starkey on rioting and Jamaican language - by Geoffrey K. Pullum - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"A week after the riots that sprang up across a large part of England, pundits are struggling to find smart and profound things to say. One of the least successful has been David Starkey, a historian and veteran broadcaster. Speaking about the results of immigration into Britain since the sixties, he explained on the BBC 2 TV program Newsnight (video clip and story here): The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Nah, I have little time for French Revolutionaries ;) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Speaking and listening share large part of brain infrastructure - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"What areas of the brain are involved in the linguistic processes underlying speech and listening and are there large differences between these? Neuroscientists from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen are the first to have successfully investigated this question using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In what may come as a surprise to many scientists, the researchers have established that there is a large degree of overlap between the areas involved. The results are published in the journal Psychological Science." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Riot - http://www.etymonline.com/index...

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riot (n.) early 13c., "debauchery, extravagance, wanton living," from O.Fr. riote (masc. riot) "dispute, quarrel," perhaps from Prov. riota, of uncertain origin. Meaning "public disturbance" is first recorded late 14c. Meaning "something spectacularly successful" first recorded 1909 in theater slang. The verb is attested from late 14c. Run riot is first recorded 1520s, a metaphoric extension from M.E. meaning in ref. to hounds following the wrong scent. The Riot Act, part of which must be read to a mob before active measures can be taken, was passed 1714 (1 Geo. I, st.2, c.5). Riot girl and alternative form riot grrl first recorded 1992. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: What is Language About? - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"Einstein in his favorite hat. Einstein disagreed with Chomsky over how symbols work." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Sixty minutes into his Cologne lecture, Chomsky discusses the elementary unit of meaningful language. What is it? He says the standard answer is "comes from the referentialist doctrine." Tiger refers to a tiger. Chomsky surprised me by saying that this idea seems to be true for animals. A vervet monkey, for example, makes different calls in response to specific stimuli. Chomsky doesn't specify, but vervets are famous for making different calls in response to snakes, leopards, and eagles. (I don't know if referentialist doctrine really works when it comes to lion roars, wolf howls, zebra barks, etc.) But, says Chomsky, the referential doctrine does not "seem to be remotely true for the simplest elements of human language."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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John McWHORTER :: What Language Is (2011 book) . [Languages are primarily oral; insistence on the fixed form of the written word leads to pedantic objections.] - http://online.wsj.com/article...

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"All languages are "ingrown," in that they have developed organically, including convolutions -- such as grammatical gender -- that aren't strictly necessary for communication. Languages are "disheveled," in that they are messy and illogical. Every language is "mixed" showing some signs of having been influenced by the neighbors (or invaders). Languages are "intricate," in that even the languages we consider simple such as creoles, have rules that utterances must follow to be considered grammatical. McWhorter gives a rule of thumb: If a native speaker can't explain why a certain construction is used, other than to shrug and say "I don't know, that's just how it's said!" -- that's grammar. We like to think that human languages should be more like computer-programming languages: logical, orderly, efficient and goal-oriented. But they are more like our own DNA: complicated and full of junk information but at the same time gloriously mutable, able (for good or ill) to give rise to new living forms." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

That's a wonderful description. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Latin Place Names - http://net.lib.byu.edu/%7Ecata...

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"LATIN PLACE NAMES found in the imprints of books printed before 1801 and their vernacular equivalents in AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules) form" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Herbipoli - Würzburg - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Samosapedia: Best bloody diaspora desi dictionary in the world | CNNGo.com The definitive guide to South Asian lingo - http://www.cnngo.com/mumbai...

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"Part dictionary, part open encyclopedia, part gag reel -- four guys launched desi humor site Samosapedia barely a month ago, collecting terminology that celebrates the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of global desi culture and language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Exactly, then I wind up ranting about colonialism and word origins...there's a reason I am not a teacher. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Language of Food: Ice Cream - http://languageoffood.blogspot.com/2011...

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"The San Francisco midsummer fog was late in coming this year, which means Janet and I got a fantastic view of the July 4th fireworks (legal and not-strictly-legal) from the top of Bernal Hill. Hot days are rare in San Francisco, so random strangers have been smiling at each other on Mission Street and the lines are extra-long on the sidewalks in front of the ice creameries." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"You may not be aware of the close relationships among these summer phenomena. Ice cream was invented by modifying a technology originally discovered for fireworks. And the way ice creams flavors are named turns out to have a surprising relationship with the evolutionary origin of the human smile." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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This group may be interesting for you http://friendfeed.com/linguaaa

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Kneading bread for the needy - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"Initial gn- and especially kn- fared badly in all the Germanic languages. Few words began with gn-; only kn- and hn- were common. Providentially, no traces of hn- are left in our spelling, but kn- stayed (as always, inconsistently), and, as a result, we struggle with pairs like nave and knave, night and knight. Lovers of puns may add not and knot, no and know, Neil and kneel, new and knew. German has also lost gn-, so that nagen is not too different from Engl. gnaw (but no g- is written in German!), whereas Knie and kneten, for example, which look like Engl. knee and knead, are pronounced in accordance with their written image, that is, with kn-. The German examples show that kn- could have survived, and no reasonable explanation exists of why in late Middle English and early Modern English initial groups were destroyed with such severity. (After a vowel no one minds gn and kn: compare agnail, ignite, acknowledge, sickness, and the rest, but taken became ta’en and was even spelled tane; only later it was restored to its “correct” etymological form with k.) Words beginning with wr- (write, wreck, and so forth) were the first to get the ax(e), and today none of them are pronounced with w-. Relatively few people still distinguish between which and witch. The modern spelling of such words (what, where, while) has it backwards, for at one time they began with hw-, a consonantal group like any other." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Hm, that's the sort of stuff I am familiar with. I'll think about your request, maybe something appropriate will come into my mind. Fortson shouldn't be underestimated though. His introduction complies with the standards of the discipline, and even accomplished historical linguists may profit from reading it. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Endangered Alphabets Project - http://www.endangeredalphabets.com/

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"The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written. Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Eerie Beauty of Rare Alphabets <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.theatlantic.co... ; title="http://www.theatlantic.co... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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List of English words of Norwegian origin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Some words from the Norwegian language have entered into common English usage. Many of the words relate to the climate and culture of Norway, or skiing. In total English language has about 600 loanwords from Scandinavian languages. Not all of these words are definitely from Norwegian. They may be from other Scandinavian languages such as Danish or Swedish, or may come from Old Norse when it was a single language. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Ufta ufta", that's what Dirk Nowitzki sang when he celebrated his championship on the balcony of the Würzburg Residenz. Never thought it is of Norwegian origin. ;-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: How Old is Language? - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"Our universe is said to have begun in a big bang. Might language have begun the same way.\?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"In his lecture to the University of Cologne, Noam Chomsky gives language's start a window of from 50 to 100 thousand years ago. I think that is absurdly late, but part of that difference may reflect a different conception of language. On this blog, the essence of language is its ability to permit a social examination of some topic, but for Chomsky the most elementary property is that it is unbounded. In his lecture he says that any approach to language that doesn't at least capture this property cannot be taken seriously. [26:50 minutes into lecture]. "Unbounded" is not the same as infinite. Faulkner, in Absalom! Absalom! has a sentence that goes on for over 700 words. Proust has one that goes one for over 900. Once, as an exercise, I composed a sentence that was 100 words long and probably I could have made it 101 words. The critical difference in approaches seems to be what accounts for the unboundedness. I stress the sentence's topic, so that length reflects range of related attention, while Chomsky stresses computation ability, so that sentence length reflects the ability to string words together without coming to a forced stop. Probably both of us would concede the other's point. Chomsky would agree that sentences grow longer as topics grow richer, and I will agree that for sentences to keep on expanding you need the syntactical capacity to increase the sentence size without coming to a forced stop." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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List of English words of Turkic origin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Thank you for this post, Halil. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It's interesting to see that our languages are more international than our artificial national borders can be... Language doesn't ask, where Turkey starts or ends and where UK or Germany or Serbia starts and ends... A great lesson to understand this, finally! We are all ONE family :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"I" as linguistic construct :: anattā (Pāli) or anātman (Sanskrit: अनात्मन्) refers to the Buddhist notion of "not-self" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"Although Buddhism rejects the notion of a permanent self, it does not reject the notion of an empirical self (composed of constantly changing physical and mental phenomena) that can be conveniently referred to with words such as "I", "you", "being", "individual", etc. On another interpretation, Buddhism rejects any idea of the self; thus it is incorrect even to speak about an "empirical self". This is because constantly changing physical and mental phenomena all have impermanence, and anything with such impermanence does not amount to the idea of a self. One is permitted to use terms such as "I", "you", and so on, not because they refer to an empirical self, but simply because they are "convenient designations". They are used in much the same way that the word "it" is used in the sentence "It is cold". Here there is nothing that the word "it" refers to. It is merely a grammatical device which allows one to assert "there is cold", while using a substantive term." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Poemas del río Wang: A fine feast for refined readers - http://riowang.blogspot.com/2011...

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Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611): essay by Alberto Blecua (in El País’ weekly literary supplement) (translation by Studiolum) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Book Bench: Original English : The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/online...

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"As an English person living in New York, I find myself in the odd position of frequently receiving compliments for the simple feat of having a voice. Because of my exotic accent, with its lingering vowels and well-behaved consonants, I tend to be mistaken for someone far more witty, widely read, intelligent, and authoritative than I really am. This state of affairs suits me fine—I’m all for it. “Don’t lose that accent, honey,” I am often counseled by hyper-friendly barmaids and call center operatives, and I assure them I won’t." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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this: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; title="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Van Hamel wiki:*selgā - Van Hamel wiki - http://www.vanhamel.nl/wiki...

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"It hardly needs explaining that primary sources are fundamental to the study of Celtic languages and cultures. Unfortunately, finding out about text editions, translations and photographic reproductions, manuscript attestations and textual relationships can be a daunting challenge for many scholars, students or other enthusiasts grappling with their sources. Although a number of isolated projects have been published to facilitate research, both in print and online, the current state of affairs still cries out for more concerted and integrative efforts to offer auxiliary tools for the benefit of anyone with an internet connection." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Word origins and meaning: The etymological fallacy | The Economist - http://www.economist.com/blogs...

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"TODAY John McIntyre takes a long whack at an ill-thought-through catalogue of usage shibboleths, to which I commend the reader. The first example he gives could use a little more illustration here. David Bentley Hart is annoyed by the use of "transpire" meaning "happen". Now I never use "transpire" this way, for the reason that there's no need, when "happen" is so much plainer. But Mr Hart's complaint is a different one. Transpire can't mean "to happen" because its Latin pieces, trans- and -spire mean "to breathe across". Indeed they do, but Mr McIntyre points out that they've joined together to mean "to happen" for two hundred years in English." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"This is the etymological fallacy. A word need not mean exactly what its Greek and Latin roots once literally meant. A persona literally meant a mask, through (per-) which a character in a drama would speak (sonare). That's not what it means today. To decimate originally meant "to destroy a tenth of", but how often do you need to say that? It's quite all right to use it to mean "to destroy a large portion of". Circumstances stand around (circum-) a thing, and so The Economist's style book prescribes "in the circumstances" and not "under the circumstances". But the fact that many people's usage has wandered on to "under" tells us that words will do what they will do, especially if they are derived from ancient languages most people don't know." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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