Linguistics

friendfeed imported Linguistics
The Mechanic Muse - The Jargon of the Novel, Computed - NYTimes.com - Ben Zimmer - http://www.nytimes.com/2011...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"We like to think that modern fiction, particularly American fiction, is free from the artificial stylistic pretensions of the past. Richard Bridgman expressed a common view in his 1966 book “The Colloquial Style in America.” “Whereas in the 19th century a very real distinction could be made between the vernacular and standard diction as they were used in prose,” Bridgman wrote, “in the 20th century the vernacular had virtually become standard.” Thanks to such pioneers as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the story goes, ornate classicism was replaced by a straight-talking vox populi." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

The Language Log coverage: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://languagelog.ldc.up... ; title="http://languagelog.ldc.up... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Scots Words and Place-Names - http://swap.nesc.gla.ac.uk/about;j...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Scots Words and Place-names (SWAP) aims to engage the Scottish public in talking about the Scots words that they use and hear around them. Any examples of words, their meanings, how they are used and where they are used will help. We also want to know about the names of places which use Scots words: how they are pronounced; if people know what they mean; whether they appear on maps or are known through word-of-mouth; even how they look (through uploading pictures). The results of the SWAP project will add to the word collections of Scottish Language Dictionaries and help to form new dictionaries of the Scots language. They will also contribute to our knowledge of Scots place-names. The information we gather on place-names will be used to populate a comprehensive glossary of Scots place-name elements and to supplement the dictionary-based research which was used to create it." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

2 other comments...

Is crowdsourcing dumbing down research? <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk... ; title="http://www.guardian.co.uk... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Are all agglutinative languages related to one another? - Prof. Dr. Alfréd Tóth - http://www.szabir.com/blog...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

In linguistics, languages can be compared to one another either by genetic or by typological classifications. Genetic relationship means that all the languages compared are (supposed to be) genetically related to one another like the members of a family. An example is the Germanic language family, which contains amongst other languages German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, the two Norwegians, Icelandic, Färöic etc. Typological relationship means that certain languages – that are not or not necessarily genetically related to one another – share certain (mostly syntactic) features. Examples are Biblical Latin, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese because they are all topic-prominent (Tóth 1992). - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

4 other comments...

what if you're a celiac, do you then have to become mute? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Wilhelm von Humboldt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt (22 June 1767 – 8 April 1835) was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice of education. In particular, he is widely recognized as having been the architect of the Prussian education system which was used as a model for education systems in countries such as the United States and Japan. Humboldt was born in Potsdam, Margraviate of Brandenburg, and died in Tegel, Province of Brandenburg. His younger brother, Alexander von Humboldt, was equally famous, as a naturalist and scientist. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
The power of Creole - Boston.com - http://articles.boston.com/2011-07...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Beneath Haiti's problems lies a deep conflict with its own language. An MIT professor has a bold plan to fix that." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

4 other comments...

Take people their native language and you take them their culture. That is behind this "policy" all over the world. As ONE example more, the people of genuine tribes in USA was not allowed to speak their native language. Now they have to recover troublesomely their language, history and customs. It's a perfide way to uproot people to be able to dominate, manipulate and rule them easier... - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Most Frequently Looked-up Words on NYTimes.com, 2011 - http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Decoding Your E-Mail Personality - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2011...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"IMAGINE, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out e-mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It’s a safe bet he never would have guessed that eight years later a multibillion-dollar lawsuit might hinge on whether he capitalized the word “Internet,” or whether he spelled “cannot” as one word or two." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail — or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author’s idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Type IPA phonetic symbols - online keyboard - http://ipa.typeit.org/

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"This IPA keyboard allows you to type pronunciations of English words as they appear in English dictionaries. " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

IPA for all languages: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ipa.typeit.org/ful... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Claire CARDIE :: detecting fake online reviews with 90% accuracy . [Machine learning and computational linguistics] - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

Apparently there is an intriguing correspondence between the linguistic structure of deceptive reviews and fiction writing. (Business owners can plant fake reviews that either praise their own business or slam their competition.) Researchers trained a computer on a subset of true and false reviews, then tested it against the rest of the database. The best results, they found, came from combining keyword analysis with the ways certain words are combined in pairs. Adding these two scores identified deceptive reviews with 89.8 percent accuracy. \\ Reported at the 49th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Oregon -- 24 June 2011. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
PALI :: Tripitaka (second century BCE) . [online searchable database] - http://www.bodhgayanews.net/pali...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"This is a database version of the Pali Canon (in Pali) based on the digitised text prepared by the Sri Lanka Tripitaka Project. The advantage of using this version of the Pali Tipitaka is that it makes it easy to search for individual words across all 16,000+ pages at once and view the contexts in which they appear." Links on the right sidebar are excellent well-known resouces. \\ Thanks very much to @maitani who pointed out this site: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://fiindolo.sub.uni-g... ; title="http://fiindolo.sub.uni-g... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

4 other comments...

thank you :-)) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
DCS Digital Corpus of Sanskrit - http://kjc-fs-cluster.kjc.uni-...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"DCS, the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit, is a searchable collection of lemmatized Sanskrit texts. It offers free internet access to a part of the database of the linguistic program SanskritTagger, which has been under constant development since 1999. " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

5 other comments...

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bodhgayanews.n... ; title="http://www.bodhgayanews.n... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
GRETIL - Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages and related Indological materials from Central and Southeast Asia http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

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

3 other comments...

GRETIL e-library <a rel="nofollow" href="http://gretil.sub.uni-goe... ; title="http://gretil.sub.uni-goe... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Language Log: Contrastive focus reduplication in Zits - http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"A few years ago, there was a paper: Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell, "Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the Salad-Salad paper) ", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22(2) 2004. The abstract begins:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

2 other comments...

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://languagelog.ldc.up... ; title="http://languagelog.ldc.up... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Kiki or bouba? In search of language's missing link - life - 18 July 2011 - New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/article...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Through the looking glass, Lewis Carroll's Alice stumbles upon an enormous egg-shaped figure celebrating his un-birthday. She tries to introduce herself: "It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?" "Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully. "Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "My name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"More than 2000 years before Carroll suggested words might have some inherent meaning, Plato recorded a dialogue between two of Socrates's friends, Cratylus and Hermogenes. Hermogenes argued that language is arbitrary and the words people use are purely a matter of convention. Cratylus, like Humpty Dumpty, believed words inherently reflect their meaning - although he seems to have found his insights into language disillusioning: Aristotle says Cratylus eventually became so disenchanted that he gave up speaking entirely." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Latin Color Bibliography: Color in Ancient Greek and Latin - http://latincolor.blogspot.com/2011...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"John Lyons. 1999. In Alexander Borg (ed.), The Language of Color in the Mediterranean. An Anthology on Linguistic and Ethnographic Aspects of Color Terms. Almquist & Wiksell International: Stockholm, 38-75. [40] "The vocabulary of color was frequently used by structuralists, in the heyday of structural linguistics, to illustrate what was meant by the imposition of structure (or form) upon a conceptual or experiential continuum (cf. Hjelmslev 1953; Gleason 1961; Lyons 1963, 1968:56-58). The principal reason for choosing color for this purpose was that the notion of an a priori undifferentiated denotational continuum being differently structured in different languages is for this area of the vocabulary, unlike many others (such as the vocabulary of knowledge and understanding, or of tastes and smell), both readily interpretable and, at first sight at least, eminently plausible."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

"Blue is black with green, like the sea." <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metafilter.com... ; title="http://www.metafilter.com... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Reader Response: What’s Wrong with Whorf? | ausciencemag - http://ausciencemag.wordpress.com/2011...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"“Linguistic relativity” or (strong) Whorfianism states that a language precludes its speakers from expressing and understanding (!) concepts and ideas beyond the vocabulary and architecture of the language. As such, language not only determines thinking and perception, it imprisons them! Whorf’s ideas were a result of racism, which was very normal in his days. He was convinced that primitive peoples with no access to modern thought (expressed in his own complex language) are not able to understand anything beyond their primitive language which clearly reflects their primitive ways of life." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? - Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought - by Daniel Casasanto <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.sol.lu.se/comm... ; title="http://www.sol.lu.se/comm... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
First evidence that birds tweet using grammar - life - 26 June 2011 - New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/article...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans aloneMovie Camera have evolved grammatical rules. Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as syntax – says Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University, Japan. "Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in their songs," he says." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

11 other comments... | Show last 10...

I love this sort of research- very fascinating. Thanks for posting, Maitani! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
List of English words of Persian origin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"As Indo-European languages, English and Persian have many words of common Proto-Indo-European origin, and many of these [cognate] words often have similar forms. Examples of these include: English (Mother) and Persian (Mādar), English (Father) and Persian (Padar), English (Daughter) and Persian (Dokhtar), English (Sister) and Persian (Khwāhar), English (Brother) and Persian (Barādar) and English (Name) and Persian (Nām). However, this article will be concerned with loanwords, that is, words in English that derive from Persian, either directly, or more often, via one or more intermediary languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

2 other comments...

This is pretty cool. I always wondered where 'azure' came from and assumed it was Arabic. So many words! I'm just in the L and I'm floored. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Compositionality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Anything that deserves to be called a language must contain meaningful expressions built up from other meaningful expressions. How are their complexity and meaning related? The traditional view is that the relationship is fairly tight: the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituents—once we fix what the parts mean and how they are put together we have no more leeway regarding the meaning of the whole. This is the principle of compositionality, a fundamental presupposition of most contemporary work in semantics." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

12 other comments... | Show last 10...

It's basically the linguistic form of reductionism. It works in most cases, but there are certain circumstances where a more comprehensive understanding is called for. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
A Worldwide Wiki - http://www.idiomizer.com/idioms...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Different cultures have different ways of saying the same thing You can't have your cake and eat it too On ne peut pas avoir le beurre et l'argent du beurre Man kann nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten tanzen No se puede tenerlo todo Нельзя сидеть сразу на двух стульях Ne možeš imati i ovce i novce 魚和熊掌不可兼得" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Test Your Vocabulary - http://testyourvocab.com/#

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Check the box for each word you know at least one definition for. (Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of.) Tip: on Windows computers, you can navigate and select checkboxes with your keyboard using tab and space." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

“One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.” Evelyn Waugh <a rel="nofollow" href="http://testyourvocab.com/... ; title="http://testyourvocab.com/... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Place names in the Oxford English Dictionary : Oxford English Dictionary - http://www.oed.com/public...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"As any Scrabble player knows, dictionaries of English tend not to include entries for names—of people, organizations, or places. For the lexicographer names in general, and place names in particular, pose all kinds of problems. To begin with, a place name cannot really be defined. A common noun denotes a class of items with a set of shared characteristics that can be outlined in a dictionary definition, but a place name works more as a label, a way of referring in speech or writing to a single, particular place. On a practical note, there is the question of which names to cover. The names of countries, cities, and towns might be obvious candidates, but what about villages and hamlets, hills and rivers, or buildings, streets, and fields? Would we stick to the names of places in Britain, or would we want to cover names in all countries where English is spoken? We use the names of places in non-English speaking countries in English all the time: should we include them too? Then, of course, for a historical dictionary like the OED there is the task of tracing the origin and development of each name, a specialist endeavour involving detailed local knowledge, access to unpublished documents, and extensive fieldwork." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

2 other comments...

Material world: the language of textiles <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.oed.com/public... ; title="http://www.oed.com/public... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Martin Hilpert's motion chart resource page - http://omnibus.uni-freiburg.de/~mh608...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Below you find some resources for making motion charts from diachronic corpus data. Motion charts are linguistic flipbooks that allow you to see how a given process of language change played out over time. The charts are based on data from Mark Davies' Corpus of Historical American English; I used the R package googleVis (Gesmann & de Castillo 2011) to make them. If you want to find out more about linguistic motion charts, you can watch the video clips on the bottom of this page: the first is a demo of what you can see in the charts, the other two are tutorials on how to create them. You can download an R workspace here that contains sample data files and that allows you to recreate the charts on this page. If you find this information useful, or if you come up with your own linguistic motion charts, I'd be happy to hear from you!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://omnibus.uni-freibu... ; title="http://omnibus.uni-freibu... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Words of the World by The University of Nottingham - http://www.wordsoftheworld.co.uk/

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"From Nazi to Chocolate, words play a vital role in our lives. And each word has its own story. But where do they come from? What do they mean? How do they change? Some of these questions will be answered by "Words of the World" - a series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Modern Languages and Cultures. In addition to exploring the words themselves, we'll explore a little about the varied research our experts are working on. The project is created by film-maker Brady Haran, whose other work includes the successful Periodic Table of Videos, Test Tube and Bibledex." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

when's Stephen Fry's docu on language coming out? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Language Log » Rare causative spotted - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

""Switching strength on and off", Nature 6/9/2011: A material has been designed to switch back and forth between a strong, brittle state and a weak, ductile one. Hai-Jun Jin at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang and Jörg Weissmüller at the Technical University of Hamburg in Germany made their composite by imbibing nanoporous gold (pictured) with an electrolyte. When the applied electrical potential shifted, the material showed distinct and reversible changes in strength, flow stress and ductility." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"I'm used to seeing imbibe used with the subject actively taking in a (usually alcoholic) fluid, and the object being the fluid taken in, e.g. While a few locals inside the bar imbibed an afternoon cocktail, people hurried by chatting on their cell phones, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings. And of course there's a figurative usage, in which some more abstract substance stands in for the fluid: The idea meant a lot, because her father, who had brought her to the United States from Ukraine when she was 11, had imbibed the American dream of a country hideaway, and it was only a modest inheritance after his death in 2006 that allowed her to achieve it. So I figured that the use in Nature was a causative version of imbibe, by analogy with things like "the water boiled" vs. "Kim boiled the water", or "water poured out of the jar" vs. "Kim poured water out of the jar"" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

Linguistics

Warning!