Linguistics

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Languages of the World (Wide Web) - Research Blog - http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011...

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"The web is vast and infinite. Its pages link together in a complex network, containing remarkable structures and patterns. Some of the clearest patterns relate to language. Most web pages link to other pages on the same web site, and the few off-site links they have are almost always to other pages in the same language. It's as if each language has its own web which is loosely linked to the webs of other languages. However, there are a small but significant number of off-site links between languages. These give tantalizing hints of the world beyond the virtual." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » Golf - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"Before we embark on the etymology of golf, something should be said about the pronunciation of the word. Golf does not rhyme with wolf (because long ago w changed the vowel following it), but in the speech of some people it rhymes with oaf, and “goafers” despises everyone who would allow l to creep in between o and f. Here is part of a letter to the editor dated November 1893: “Among the old players of the game it is called goff. ‘Caddies’ at St. Andrew’s and such places call it gowff. I have heard respectable individuals call it goaf (like loaf). Golf (the l being sounded) is unknown in Scotland. What boots it that one old gentleman of Blackheath renown should say golf (sounding the l)? He is simply wrong.” Nothing is more important than knowing the ultimate truth. (St. Andrew’s is the Royal & Ancient Golf Club St. Andrew’s, founded in 1754. It occupies a most imposing building. If my never-to-be-fulfilled dream to organize a center for English etymology came true, I would be overjoyed to have a fiftieth part of such an edifice at my disposal. Blackheath, 1608, is the seat of the oldest golf club in England.) As far as etymology is concerned, the rift between the two schools boots not at all. Scots golf, though unrecorded, must have preceded gowf or goff. In English, including its northernmost varieties, l was lost between a vowel and a consonant, as in folk, walk, talk, chalk, half, calf, rather early (oaf itself is derived from Olaf, a doublet of alf “elf”) but inconsistently. Dutch has gone much further along this path. Since in Scotland people played golf before it became a favorite sport in England, we may assume that golf is the bookish (spelling) pronunciation, while goff ~ gouf(f) reflects the popular norm." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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English for advanced learners: Linguists examine obstacles to native-like proficiency in foreign language acquisition - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"The use of English as a second and foreign language is steadily increasing, and although English and German have common roots, even advanced German learners of English find it difficult to achieve a native-like level of proficiency in English." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I got some info for you, here: <a href="http://friendfeed.com/ira... ; title="http://friendfeed.com/ira... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Justice Breyer, Professor Austin, and the Meaning of ‘Any’ - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"I guess as a freshly minted Language Logger, I should introduce myself: I am a professor of linguistics at MIT. I work on meaning: semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and the intersections thereof. I am also a part-time denizen of the academic Dark Side, as Associate Dean of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. I blog on academic, geeky, abstruse, and personal aspects of my life on my personal blog "semantics etc.". Together with fellow LanguageLogger David Beaver, I co-edit the new kid on the block journal Semantics and Pragmatics, for which we maintain an editors' blog as well. So what's one more gig, right?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BabelStone: The Ogham Stones of the Isle of Man - http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2011...

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"The Isle of Man, situated midway between Ireland and Britain, has always been at a sea-faring crossroads, and over the centuries has been exposed to influences from many different cultures. This is well reflected in the relatively large number of monumental inscriptions that have survived on the island, which include both runestones and Ogham stones, exhibiting a mixture of Irish, British, Pictish and Norse influences." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Endangered language studied in Spain - UPI.com - http://www.upi.com/Science...

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"An endangered language in Spain may be saved through a push to encourage it among the country's Romani youth, researchers say. The language Calo is spoken by Romani people, sometimes referred to as Gypsies, in Spain, and is one of about 5,400 languages researchers believe could become extinct before the end of this century, researchers say." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Romani language standardization: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Datenbank - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2011...

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"...Das ›Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum‹ erfaßt die lateinischen Inschriften aus dem gesamten Raum des ehemaligen Imperium Romanum in geographischer und systematischer Ordnung; es ist seit seiner Begründung durch Theodor Mommsen die maßgebliche Dokumentation des epigraphischen Erbes der römischen Antike." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: The Best Papers I’ve Read - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"In his autobiography, Bastard Tongues, Derek Bickerton said that most science papers don't lead to anything, either for the author or for others. I suppose that's so, but papers as a class remain the seeds of science. That's where ideas and facts are passed around. I'm not sure how many papers I have discussed on this blog, but it is in the hundreds and some few have turned my thinking around. Others have opened horizons I didn't even realize were out there. Here's my list of the must-read papers for understanding language origins. I thought I would whittle the list down to the top ten, but I couldn't shave it quite that close." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"How Language Works When I began this blog I was in exactly the position Tecumseh Fitch describes in his text book on The Evolution of Language. Meaning was a pure mystery to me and blocked all hope of explanation. I thought of meaning as something added to language. I was saved by Giorgio Marchetti (2006). A Presentation of Attentional Semantics. Cognitive Processing, 163-194. Marchetti showed me a new way of thinking about meaning, as something language does rather than carries. Words have meaning because they pilot attention, not because they are paired with something as mystical as the soul. (See: Attention! It's a Revolution)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Shady Characters » The Ampersand, part 2 of 2 - http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011...

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"From its ignoble beginnings a century after Tiro’s scholarly et, the ampersand assumed its now-familiar ‘&’ form with remarkable speed even as the Tironian et stayed rigidly immutable." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The symbol’s visual development is perhaps best documented in a formidable piece of typographical detective work carried out by one Jan Tschichold, a graphic designer born in Leipzig in 1902.[1] Famed as an iconoclastic rule-maker and breaker, Tschichold swung from extreme to extreme in a career which rewrote the rules of book design and typography. His 1928 manifesto Die neue Typographie[2] called for the abandonment of traditional rules of typesetting in favour of rigorous Modernism. Then, arrested by the Nazis in 1933 as a ‘cultural Bolshevik’,[3] Tschichold reacted strongly to his ill-treatment at the hands of the Third Reich and repudiated his earlier work, seeing ‘fascist’ elements in the strictures of Modernism. In the process, he earned the ire of his contemporaries as a betrayer of his own principles.[4] Despite this, his work remains influential even today." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Wordorigins.org: 1916 Words - http://www.wordorigins.org/index...

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"The Oxford English Dictionary lists 372 words with first citations from 1916. On the western front that year, hush-hush weapons like tanks and blimps were being introduced. and soldiers were going over the top. In the United States, people were ambivalent about the war, preferring news about moviedom and drinking a new cola called Pepsi, while at the same time enrolling in ROTC. Doctors were worried about carcinogenic substances, superbugs, dysfunction, and intersexuality. And linguists first began talking about the proto-Indo-European language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Henry, you want to tell me which one, I mean, is there one you prefer to use? :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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nsf.gov - National Science Foundation (NSF) Discoveries - Why Context Matters in the Long and Short of Words - US National Science Foundation (NSF) - http://www.nsf.gov/discove...

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"Do you ever wonder about the stuff that makes up words? Why is a word a word, what goes into forming it, what's its history or why is it long or short? Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology do. Steven Piantadosi, Harry Tily and Edward Gibson study words for MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences to understand how humans think and communicate. Recently, they put a well-established, 75-year-old language theory to the test and found it had room for improvement. At issue was something called Zipf's law, an empirical scientific principle that says word length is primarily determined by frequency of use." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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ScriptSource - Scripts - http://scriptsource.org/cms...

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"A script is a collection of characters that share common characteristics of appearance, typical behaviours, history of development, and that would be identified as being related by some community of users. The table on the right lists scripts recognised by the ISO 15924 Registration Authority and given a four character code for identification purposes. It also includes some scripts not yet recognized by ISO 15924. The list can be sorted by clicking on the table headings. Click on the script name for more detailed information. If you know of a script that is not shown in this list it may be that the script has an alternate name. You can search for that name using the search bar at the top of this page. If you still cannot find the script, contact us." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Your English Is Showing by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/blogs...

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"If one suggests that the international literary market is also a power game where different nations set their cultural and political might against each other in bestseller lists and international prizes, one inevitably arouses a certain amount of hostility from those who like to think of literature as operating in a more idealized world of noble aspiration and expression. The hostility intensifies if one seeks to exemplify one’s ideas with reference to individual writers, to the point that I fear that my recent piece on Jonathan Franzen and the Swiss writer Peter Stamm may have generated more heat than light. At the risk, then, of turning down the heat without exactly achieving a blaze of illumination, let me offer a more general word about present developments in the international spaces where contemporary novels from different countries vie for attention." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The recent acceleration in communications and the process we’ve gotten used to calling globalization have renewed debate about the relationship between lingua franca and vernacular. The nations of the European mainland are constantly anxious that the adoption of English words and even syntactical structures may be seriously reshaping their languages. Meanwhile, in many technical fields, scientific papers are now written almost exclusively in English, with the result that certain concepts become difficult to express in the vernacular since no one is at work developing a vocabulary for them. " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Why don’t more jokes die? - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"A clip from Australian TV is rapidly becoming viral. Karl Stefanovic, a TV journalist on Australia's Today show, running out of topics in an interview with the Dalai Lama, tried to tell him a familiar Buddhism joke — a very good one, picked up the previous night from his 12-year-old son. The joke is very simple and brief: The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza joint and says, "Make me one with everything." What's either uproarious or twitchingly embarrassing about the video clip (your mileage may differ) is that the Dalai Lama simply doesn't get the joke at all; he has no idea what's going on." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Stefanovic is surely not the only person who has discovered to his cost how easy it is to underestimate the quantity of cultural and linguistic background needed if you are to reliably get the jokes that people tell. For this one, (i) you must have encountered the Buddhist idea of merging or unifying with the universe, expressed using the idiom become one with (which in other contexts is not common); and (ii) you must have encountered pizza in the American style, with loads of different topping choices, ordered using a preposition phrase headed by with (as in with pepperoni and mushroom); and (iii) you must have been in a pizzeria that has as one of the choices on its menu the indecisive glutton's non-choice consisting of a megacombo of all available toppings (by no means all pizza restaurants give you that option), so that everything is a possible topping choice." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: How Does Coevolution Work? - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"As I reported last week, the latest issue of Human Biology is devoted to language origins, with a particular focus on "genetic and cultural" approaches. In an afterword to the issue Tecumseh Fitch addresses a theme running through the whole issue, coevolution. Fitsch sees coevolution as the way to get past relying on an overly sharp distinction between biological and cultural explanations for language origins:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"There can be little doubt that both human culture and human language have a biological basis, that it is critical to our species at present, and that language shaped the evolutionary process that led to our current state. Nor should we think that biological evolution ground to a halt once cultural evolution began. Once language was in place, the chance of a human without language surviving and producing offspring was clearly limited. Thus, there must be powerful selection, in every generation since language arose, for a child to acquire language. This, at the very least, would act to eliminate alleles that disrupted language learning, generating stabilizing selection. Such elimination of deleterious mutations is one of the most important and powerful evolutionary forces and may be one reason that human children so reliably and effortlessly master language. Language, culture, and human biology are inextricably intertwined." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Shady Characters » The Ampersand, part 1 of 2 - http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011...

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"In contrast to some of the other symbols in this book, the ampersand seems at first sight to be entirely unexceptional. Another of those things the Romans did for us, the symbol started life as the Latin word et, for ‘and’, and its meaning has stayed true to its origins since then. Even the word ‘ampersand’ itself manages to quietly hint at the character’s meaning, unlike, say, the conspicuously opaque naming of the pilcrow or octothorpe. Dependable and ubiquitous, the ampersand is a steady character among a gallery of flamboyant rogues." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Things were not always thus, however. Today’s ampersand might take pride of place in the elevated names of Fortnum & Mason and Moët & Chandon, but its Roman ancestor was a different beast entirely. Born in distinctly ignoble circumstances and dogged by a rival character of weighty provenance, the ampersand would spend a thousand years of uneasy coexistence with its opponent before finally claiming victory. The ampersand’s is a true underdog story." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Interactive Ancient Mediterranean Project - http://iam.classics.unc.edu/index...

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"IAM is an on-line atlas of the ancient Mediterranean world designed to serve the needs and interests of students and teachers in high school, community college and university courses in classics, ancient history, geography, archaeology and related fields." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Nestor Online - http://classics.uc.edu/nestor/

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"Nestor is an international bibliography of Aegean studies, Homeric society, Indo-European linguistics, and related fields. It is published monthly from September to May (each volume covers one calendar year) by the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati. An Authors Index accompanies the December issue. Nestor is distributed in 30 countries world-wide. It is currently edited by Carol R. Hershenson." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism - http://www.niemanlab.org/2011...

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"New tools are at their most powerful, Clay Shirky says, once they’re ubiquitous enough to become invisible. Twitter may be increasingly pervasive — a Pew study released yesterday shows that 13 percent of online adults use the service, which is up from 8 percent six months ago — but it’s pretty much the opposite of invisible. We talk to each other on Twitter, yes, but almost as much, it seems, we talk to each other about it." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a href="#ItsAlreadyHere</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; I've been using Twitter shorthand in note taking for years now - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics :: List of unsolved problems - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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objective metric for the quality of TRANSLATION \\ why ultimate attainment in second language ACQUISITION is typically short of native speaker's ability \\ JAPANESE (related to Tamil?) still unplotted on most linguistic family trees \\ whether BASQUE language (Euskara) may be a remnant or evolved form of a Neolithic language \\ whether language provides a critical tool for making and retaining MEMORIES \\ why there are no universally used grammatical CONSTRUCTS \\ see also, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.quora.com/What... ; title="http://www.quora.com/What... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

I saw this only now. I certainly have to read it! :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Oxford Language Dictionaries Online - http://www.oxfordlanguagedicti...

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"Butterbrot das Open piece or slice of bread and butter; (zugeklappt) sandwich ein Butterbrot mit Schinken = a slice of bread and butter with ham on it/a ham sandwich für ein Butterbrot (umgangssprachlich) = for next to nothing; [buy, sell] for a song musst du mir ständig aufs Butterbrot streichen od. schmieren, dass …? (umgangssprachlich) = do you have to keep rubbing it in that …?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Oriental Institute | The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project - http://oi.uchicago.edu/researc... via Greg GuitarBuster http://friendfeed.com/greghea...

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Language Log » Straw men and Bee Science - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"If you followed my advice (in "Norvig channels Shannon contra Chomsky", 5/31/2011) and read all of Peter Norvig's essay "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning", you may have detected a certain restrained testiness in Norvig's response. The goal of this post is to give a bit of explanatory background, and to suggest why, on the whole, I share Norvig's reaction. Here's a short passage from Noam Chomsky's invited lecture at NELS 41, 10/4/2010. (Apologies for the poor audio quality — this is a recording that I made on my cell phone. Disfluencies have been edited out of this fragment — a rough but more complete transcript of the entire lecture is here.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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40 Fascinating Lectures for Linguistics Geeks | Online Universities - http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog...

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"Linguistics is kind of like The Force — it surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the galaxy together. Or at least the planet, anyway. Both this universality and frequent intersections with a diverse array of subjects — including, but not limited to, cognitive science, literature, politics, psychology, communication, anthropology and more — make linguistics a compelling, dynamic, nuanced study. The following lectures, by no means the only ones available online, represent a lovely little slice of how language permeates all things, for better and for worse." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Wordorigins.org - http://www.wordorigins.org/index...

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"This is the second installment of words for a given year. 1912 yielded 354 words with first appearances in the Oxford English Dictionary from that year. Music and psychology appear to be trending in this year. Here are the words I’ve selected:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"autism, n. This noun, and the adjective autistic, were both coined in 1912, when psychiatrists first defined the disorder." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics

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