Linguistics

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Language Log » Lera Boroditsky, call your office - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"Dinosaur Comics for 3/9/2011:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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WALS provides such a treausure of data in maps and otherwise :-) <a rel="nofollow" href="http://wals.info/index&qu... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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"Tsakonian is found today in a group of mountain towns and villages slightly inland from the Argolic Gulf, although it was once spoken farther to the south and west as well as on the coasts of Laconia (ancient Sparta). There was formerly a Tsakonian colony on the Sea of Marmara (or Propontis; two villages near Gönen, Vatika and Havoutsi), probably dating from the 18th century, whose members were resettled in Greece with the 1924 population exchanges. Propontis Tsakonian appears to have died out around 1970." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa: Indian voices from 1913-1929: Gramophone Recordings from the Linguistic Survey of India - http://staefcraeft.blogspot.com/2011...

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"George Grierson pioneered the vast Linguistic Survey of India in 1894, an immensely useful resource for anyone working on languages of the Indian subcontinent. A set of recordings were also made as part of the survey, which were recently uncovered in the British Library. These recordings are now freely available from the University of Chicago's Digital South Asian Library at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dsal.uchicago.edu/... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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‘A New Etymology for Hamlet? the Names Amlethus, Amlođi and Admlithi - http://res.oxfordjournals.org/content...

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"The Hamlet-name may have been associated with players several centuries earlier than has hitherto been thought. It is well-known that Hamlet is related to Amlethus, found in Gesta Danorum, by Saxo Grammaticus. However, the etymologies of both Amlethus and the linked Icelandic name, Amlođi, have remained unclear. One possibility, explored in this article, is that these derive from the player-name, Admlithi, found in the Irish tale, Togail Bruidne Da Derga. Admlithi could have been transmitted to Saxo either as a player-name, or as a nautical noa-term (perhaps denoting a dangerous sea whirlpool, such as Coire Brecáin), or both; and it may have carried some small hint of its meaning with it on its journey into Gesta Danorum and beyond." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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

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"This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which reveals hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns. (Click on that button, in fact, and a multitude of pilcrows will appear, one at the end of each line of text.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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So it is supposed to be not an ancient coinage but an engineers' joke; nice. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Bilingualism key to the survival of a language - physicsworld.com - http://physicsworld.com/cws...

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Physicists in Spain are challenging the idea that two languages cannot continue to exist side-by-side within a society. But while the findings may spell good news for some languages, it still leaves doubts over the long-term survival of more isolated languages such as Welsh and Quechua. Jorge Mira Pérez, who led the research, became interested in the issue of language survival because of the situation in his own region of Galicia in north-west Spain where the population contains speakers of both Spanish and the local language, Galician. Teaming up with his colleagues at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Mira Pérez used a mathematical model to investigate whether these two languages could continue to coexist in the years to come. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

So the English language may survive due to all the immigrants who are now bilingual! :-P - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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þorn.info | All about the letter þorn - http://evertype.com/blog...

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"Readers of þorn.info may have recognized the manuscript image in the masthead as being from the Beowulf manuscript. Here is an example showing more context:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Infants raised in bilingual environments can distinguish unfamiliar languages - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2011) — Infants raised in households where Spanish and Catalan are spoken can discriminate between English and French just by watching people speak, even though they have never been exposed to these new languages before, according to University of British Columbia psychologist Janet Werker." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"A bilingual home environment may cause a temporary delay in the onset of both languages. The bilingual child's comprehension of the two languages is normal for a child of the same age, however, and the child usually becomes proficient in both languages before the age of five years." <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.aafp.org/afp/9... ; title="http://www.aafp.org/afp/9... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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On Language - The Future Tense - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2011...

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"“Eureka!” That was the cry of the New York Times executive editor A. M. Rosenthal in early 1979, when he hit upon an idea for a new column to run in the front of the magazine. Rosenthal tapped William Safire, then a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The Times, to create a column exploring the vagaries of the English language. As Safire later recalled, Rosenthal figured the series “could be sustained for a year, maybe.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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:-) Otherwise it wouldn't be linguistics! :-) Well, we have computational linguistics and the like to stay in or at least lean towards the middle :-) I very much like new approaches. Sometimes one gets lost focusing on 'the basis' instead of 'the core'. I better cite the paragraph that caused my comment: "From the vantage point of Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, the 2010s are shaping up to be like the 1610s. “The vast and growing archives of digital text and speech, along with new analysis techniques and inexpensive computation, are a modern equivalent of the 17th-century invention of the telescope and microscope,” " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Paul Thibodeau + Lera Boroditsky :: METAPHORS We Think With, Role of Metaphor in Reasoning (2011) - http://www.plosone.org/article...

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"The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make “well-informed” decisions. Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: Birdsongs and Speech - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"The March issue of Bioscience contains a brief piece by yours truly (Edmund Blair Bolles) on the similarities between the evolutionary history of birdsongs and human speech. You can find the article by itself here." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

the article: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.babelsdawn.com... ; title="http://www.babelsdawn.com... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Α α, , Α α, , Α α, - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper...

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"Henry George Liddell. Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by. Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1940. The National Science Foundation provided support for entering this text." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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John SEARLE :: Computer only simulates human understanding . [on IBM Watson and the Chinese room argument, 2011] - http://online.wsj.com/article...

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"As in the original Chinese room [argument, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ;], the symbols are meaningless to Watson, which understands nothing. The reason it lacks understanding is that, like me in the Chinese room, it has no way to get from symbols to meanings (or from syntax to semantics, in linguistic jargon). The bottom line can be put in the form of a four-word sentence: Symbols are not meanings. Of course, Watson is much faster than me. But speed doesn't add understanding. This is a simple refutation of the idea that computer simulations of human cognition are the real thing. Watson did not understand the questions, nor its answers, nor that some of its answers were right and some wrong, nor that it was playing a game, nor that it won—because it doesn't understand anything." see also <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/wx0KX"&... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

The field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as "the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false." --remark attributed to Patrick J. Hayes \\ more on the subject, video lecture by Roger Penrose <a rel="nofollow" href="http://youtu.be/f477FnTe1... ; (2010 Google Tech Talk). - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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German language finds English voice | World news | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world...

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"Leaken' wins Anglicism of the Year award and sets off debate among linguists" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Other contenders for the prize were, perhaps inevitably, technology-related. Coming in second place to "leaken" was "entfreunden", a literal translation of the brutal term "to unfriend", which has become common parlance on social networking sites. The all-pervasive influence of Facebook can also be seen in the introduction of the verb "liken" to the German language, rather than plain old "mögen", which also made the list of Anglicisms of 2010." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » 100+ Eskimo words for snow? Not so. - http://blog.oup.com/2011...

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"Having just moved to Toronto, Ontario from Berkeley, California, one thing that is on my mind, as well as on my front yard, is snow. Crunching through the drifts on my way to the subway, or when I walk my dog Dexter, gives me a lot of time to contemplate the unfamiliar white stuff. One of those thoughts is how familiarity with snow figures into one of the more persistent false beliefs about language—the one that says, “Eskimos have X number of words for snow,” with X being a number ranging from several dozen to as many as four hundred. What makes this myth interesting isn’t that it is false and persistent—there are lots of those beliefs, from the innocuous “elephants are afraid of mice” to the insidious “President Obama was born in Kenya”—rather, this myth is interesting because it plays into misunderstandings about language and the workings of the mind." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Interesting! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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New Yorkese in the Time of Twitter -- New York Magazine - http://nymag.com/news...

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"A lot of meaning can fit into 140 characters. Pick a favorite sentence from your favorite novel, and it’ll probably survive Twitter’s constraints. (Results will vary, of course: Hemingway fans could squeeze two in under the limit; aficionados of Cormac McCarthy will have a tougher go.) But even a real, typical tweet—written by a lesser stylist avidly mashing truncated platitudes into a smartphone—can convey more than the medium’s limitations would suggest. This becomes especially true when you consider a bunch of people’s tweets together, as a new academic paper shows." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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No true Scotsman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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No true Scotsman is an intentional logical fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion. When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it. ~ The term was advanced by philosopher Antony Flew in his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking: Do I sincerely want to be right?.[1] Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." [Brighton is not part of Scotland.] The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. [Aberdeen is part of Scotland.] This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing." —Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking (1975) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I tihnk so; weekly, entertaining, informative. I only mentioned it because on the day you posted this I'd only just listened to episode 292 which had a segment called "Name That Logical Fallacy", the answer to which on this occasion was "No True Scotsman". As it turns out: just one of life's coincidences. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Regional Accents :: Hear Evolving English / Add your own to the VOICE MAP . [British Library] - http://www.bl.uk/evolvin...

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"We need your voice. By adding your voice you can help with research into how language works. We hold recordings that capture the sounds of spoken English all over the world. We are asking people all over the world to read a children's story: Mr. Tickle by Roger Hargreaves. It's been chosen for the range of English sounds it contains when read out loud." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Session: Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Tell Us About Mind and Brain (2011 AAAS Annual Meeting (17-21 February 2011)) - http://aaas.confex.com/aaas...

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"More people in the world are bilingual than monolingual. Historically, the component disciplines that comprise the language sciences have focused almost exclusively on monolingual speakers of a single language and largely on English as the universal language. In the past decade, there has been a shift in these disciplines to acknowledge the consequences of bilingualism for characterizing language, understanding the way languages are learned and used, and identifying the consequences of negotiating life in two languages for cognitive and brain processes. Recent studies show that bilingualism confers advantages to cognitive control at all stages of life, from infancy to old age; that contrary to popular belief, being exposed to two languages from early childhood does not create confusion but instead modulates the trajectory of language development; that signed and spoken languages produce a form of bilingualism that is similar to bilingualism in two spoken languages; and that the continual activity of both languages affects brain function and structure. Despite the excitement surrounding these discoveries, we do not understand how exposure to and use of two languages creates the observed consequences for bilingual minds and brains. Addressing these questions requires a language science that is both cross-disciplinary and international. The aim of this symposium is to illustrate the most exciting of these new discoveries and to begin to consider their causal basis." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Indo-Aryan languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"The Indo-Aryan languages (within the context of Indo-European studies also Indic[1]) constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family. The largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani (Standard Hindi and Urdu, about 240 million), Bengali (about 230 million), Punjabi (about 90 million), Marathi (about 70 million), Gujarati (about 45 million), Oriya (about 30 million), Sindhi (about 20 million), Nepali (about 14 million), Sinhala (about 16 million), Saraiki (about 14 million) and Assamese (about 13 million) with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million. They form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which consists of two other language groups: the Iranian and Nuristani." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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Wordorigins.org: Main Street / High Street / highway - http://www.wordorigins.org/index...

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"The use of Main Street and High Street is an example of the divergence of North American and British English. While both terms can be found on either side of the Atlantic, the former is more common in North America and latter in the UK. Both are terms for the principal road in a town, and both have become metonyms for aspects of urban life. In this case, the divergence appears to be the result of a Darwinian selection process—the need for new street names in North America opened up a lexical niche that coincided with a shift in the meaning of the adjectives main and high, which favored main as the choice for the new roads." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"As street names, High Street is the older, dating to the Old English heahstræte, which appears in land charters from c. 1000. In Old English usage, the word was usually applied to Roman roads, roughly corresponding to the modern use of highway, which also dates to Old English, heiweg. The earliest use of Main Street cited in the OED is in John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary Worlde of Wordes, where “a maine street” glosses rióne. The next appearance in the OED is from the diary of Massachusetts jurist Samuel Sewall in 1687, where he reports “a great Uproar and Lewd rout in the Main Street.” Other than Florio’s gloss, the early citations are all North American, with the next British citation in the dictionary from the 1741–43 diary of clergyman John Wesley. While relying on OED citations as evidence of geographic distribution is often problematic (Sheidlower), in this case it is clear that from early on Main Street has been predominantly a North American term. The earliest citation in the OED where Main Street is unambiguously the name of a road, as opposed to a descriptor, is from 1810." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Is It Time to Welcome Our New Computer Overlords? - Ben Zimmer - Technology - The Atlantic - http://www.theatlantic.com/technol...

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"Oh, that Ken Jennings, always quick with a quip. At the end of the three-day Jeopardy! tournament pitting him and fellow human Brad Rutter against the IBM supercomputer Watson, he had a good one. When it came time for Final Jeopardy, he and Rutter already knew that Watson had trounced the two of them, the best competitors that Jeopardy! had ever had. So, on his written response to a clue about Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, Jennings wrote, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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good trace on that hilarious rip :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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ROMLEX: Romani Lexical database - http://romani.kfunigraz.ac.at/romlex...

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"ROMLEX is not a Romani dictionary in the usual sense. ROMLEX is a lexical database. It contains data that are representative of the variation in the lexicon of all Romani dialects, and offers almost complete coverage of the basic lexicon of the Romani language. At present, data are available online covering many Romani dialects. These are accompanied by translations into English and, depending on the Romani dialect, into other European languages as well. By providing an electronic resource of the highest quality, which can constantly be updated, the ROMLEX database can serve as a foundation for future dissemination of Romani literary resources and Romani language literacy itself." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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Berto: Philosophy Monkey: Steven Pinker - The Social Role of Innuendo and Indirect Speech - http://berto-meister.blogspot.com/2011...

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"Well, as Steven Pinker shows in the awesome animated lecture below, there is a fascinating logic to the way in which we communicate, part of which includes a theory of mind about other people, a theory of plausible deniability, a theory of shared knowledge, and an ever-so-fragile set of social hierarchies whose integrity is best preserved by certain kinds of indirect speech." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

A very interesting RSA Animation (the hyena made me laugh out loud :)). - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I was supposed to meet up with a friend today, cancelled from last week due to bad weather, so we agreed to take a rain check, and shockingly for London, it's raining again today. So got me wondering, where does the phrase "rain check" come from? As it was a poor choice of words due to the rain.

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I was very surprised to learn it's actually an American phrase that comes from baseball! :o - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

rain check — a ticket given to a spectator at an outdoor event providing for a refund of his or her entrance money or admission at a later date, should the event be interrupted by rain; an assurance of a deferred extension of an offer, especially an assurance that a customer can take advantage of a sale later if the item or service offered is not available (as by being sold out); or a (sometimes vague) promise to accept a social offer at an unnamed later date. The latter two meanings derive from the first, which OED states was first used in 1884; its first written entry into non-baseball usage is cited as 1930.[63] "To deal with frustration among holiday shoppers hunting for its Wii game console, Nintendo Co. and retailer GameStop Corp. are launching a rain check program." — Tribune wires, Chicago Tribune, 19 December 2007.[64] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics

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