Linguistics

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (19 September 1774 – 15 March 1849) was an Italian cardinal and famed linguist and hyperpolyglot. Born and educated in Bologna, he completed his theological studies before he had reached the minimum age for ordination as a priest; he was ordained in 1797. In the same year, he became professor of Arabic at the University of Bologna. He later lost the position for refusing to take the oath of allegiance required by the Cisalpine Republic, which governed Bologna at the time. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

Extra link about another hyperpolyglot, but slightly more controversial, as looks like he made some mistakes: Ziad Youssef Fazah (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) (Arabic: زياد فصاح) is a Lebanese polyglot. Fazah himself claims to speak 59 languages and maintains that he has proved this in several television shows, where he "successfully" communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages.[1] The Guinness Book of World Records, up to the 1998 edition, listed Fazah as being able to speak and read 58 languages, citing a live interview in Athens, Greece July 1991.[2] ~~~ However, in Viva el lunes, a Chilean TV program featuring Ziad Fazah, he failed to understand beginner level phrases in Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Persian, Greek and Hindi. He even wrongly recognized Russian as Croatian in being unable to comprehend what "Какой сегодня день недели?" ("What day of the week is it today?") means. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Top 10 Most Spoken Languages In The World - http://listverse.com/2008...

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

Language is perhaps the most important function of the human body – it allows us to get sustenance as a child, it allows us to get virtually anything we want as an adult, and it allows us many hours of entertainment through literature, radio, music, and films. This list (in order of least to most spoken) summarizes the most important languages in use today. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

13 other comments... | Show last 10...

I wasn't surprised by the inclusion of Bengali, I learned that from _Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts_ <a rel="nofollow" href="http://amzn.to/hhDSKn&quo... ; (probably from an earlier edition) as a child. :-p - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
500 - It's 10:15 in Germany. Do You Know Where Your Isoglosses Are? | Strange Maps | Big Think - http://bigthink.com/ideas...

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

"Germans have a reputation for punctuality. Is that why they have so many ways of telling the same time? If it's 10:15 in the germanosphere (1), you'll have at least four options of expressing that particular moment. Those four options are all regional variants, so that, in German, you can tell with some degree of certainty which general area someone hails from by the way they tell the time at quarter past ten (2)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

13 other comments... | Show last 10...

I admit I wandered off that point a bit. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
The language of Billingsgate Market on Vimeo - http://www.vimeo.com/10347796

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

The infamously coarse language of London fishmongers made "Billingsgate" a byword for crude or vulgar language.[4] One of its earliest uses can be seen in a 1577 chronicle by Raphael Holinshed, where the writer makes reference to the foul tongues of Billingsgate oyster-wives. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; ~~~ Billingsgate Language (Grose 1811 Dictionary). Billingsgate Language: Foul language, or abuse. Billingsgate is the market where the fishwomen assemble to purchase fish; and where, in their dealings and disputes, they are somewhat apt to leave decency and good manners a little on the left hand. ~ Definition taken from The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, originally by Francis Grose. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.fromoldbooks.o... ; title="http://www.fromoldbooks.o... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Watch the video, it's very amusing. But not for the easily offended, as it does contain some swearing! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Australian English in the twentieth century : Oxford English Dictionary - http://www.oed.com/public...

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

"Australian English differs from other Englishes primarily in its accent and vocabulary. The major features of the accent were established by the 1830s. In the period between colonial settlement (1788) and the 1830s, when the foundation accent was being forged, new lexical items to describe the new environment, especially its flora and fauna, were developed either from Aboriginal languages (coolibah, wombat, wallaby, waratah, and so on) or from the ‘transported’ English word stock (native bear, wild cherry, and so on). Many more vocabulary items were later added in response to the nineteenth-century process of settlement and pastoral expansion. All of this seems at once predictable and inevitable—this is the way a colonial society imposes its linguistic footprint on a subjected land." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Thanks Maitani,Very interesting reading and well written. On top of all this, Australia was a harsh and difficult country so Australian character was shaped by this, leading in part to our propensity to colourful idiom. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
1,600 Sayings, phrases and expressions - with their meanings and origins explained. - http://www.phrases.org.uk/meaning...

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

The Meanings and Origins of Phrases, Sayings, Idioms and Expressions - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

:-) This is also very useful for non-native-speakers. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Home sweet office - The Boston Globe - http://www.boston.com/bostong...

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

"As the snow comes down and the shoveled mounds pile up, commuters from Atlanta to Boston have been “working from home” — or wishing they were. And if the idea has its skeptics — among bosses and parents alike — the phrase itself has never raised any eyebrows. But as someone reminded me a couple of storms ago, “working from home” is a relatively new way of describing the situation; older language watchers remember when we said “working at home,” not “from home.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Of course, prepositions in English do change over time, often in ways that befuddle traditionalists. “Forbidden to” is the usual combination, but “forbidden from” is gaining ground despite its vocal critics. There are 20-year-old Americans who don’t even know that “bored of” is a recent twist on the old standards “bored with” and “bored by.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Language Log » The passive in English by Geoffrey K. Pullum - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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

"Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on. Our grumbling about how these people don't know their passive from a hole in the ground, we have received mail from many people who want a clear and simple explanation of what a passive clause is. In this post I respond to those many requests. I'll make it as clear and simple as I can, but it will be a 2500-word essay. I can't make it simpler than it is. And there is no hope of figuring out the meaning of grammatical terms from common sense, or by looking in a dictionary. Passive (like its opposite, active) is a technical term. Its use in syntax has nothing to do with lacking energy or initiative, or assuming a receptive and non-directive role. And the dictionary definitions are often utterly inadequate (Webster's, for example, is simply hopeless on the grammatical sense of the word). My 2500 words will at least explain things simply and accurately. If not, then the whole of your money will be refunded." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
My Soul Speaks in Three Languages by Alegria Imperial - tanka from English to Spanish and Iluko - http://qarrtsiluni.com/2011...

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

"...tri-lingual in English, Spanish and Iluko, the language (dialect) I was born with but hardly spoke and never wrote with from my early teens, when I moved to the city for university, until two years ago when it reawoke, first in a Yahoo group and later in a website I stumbled upon. Iluko, a dialect of the northern-most edge of the Philippine archipelago, traces its roots to Austronesian languages. Like most of the major Philippine dialects (87 of them not counting sub-tongues), Iluko tends to be metaphorical and thus poetic. Melded in its spirit is Spanish, introduced by the colonizers 400 years ago — not only as a language but a culture and a soul, both of which we, Filipinos but specifically Ilokanos, can hardly discern on the conscious level. English sort of flowed in only in the past century, easily so because the Spaniards had by then changed our alphabet from what was believed to be Sanskrit to Roman. I believe that when I write I do so from three cultures uniquely one, uniquely mine. But I began explaining all three when one day, I took a break from the haiku that I usually post in my personal blog and in reply to someone who got to my blog, searching for the word willow in Pilipino, I wrote as follows." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

Iranian poetry on qarrtsiluni: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://qarrtsiluni.com/20... ; title="http://qarrtsiluni.com/20... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Susie Dent - http://www.google.co.uk/images...

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

Susie Dent (born 21 September 1967 [1] in Woking, Surrey) is an English lexicographer, best known as the resident dictionary expert and adjudicator on Channel 4’s long-running game show Countdown. As of January 2009, she is the longest serving member of the current on-screen team, having first appeared on the show in 1992. Dent was educated at the Marist Convent in Ascot.[2] She subsequently studied Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford and German at Princeton University, New Jersey, after which she worked as a language teacher in the United States and for a German publisher before going to work for the Oxford University Press (OUP). She now works as a writer and contributor to discussions of language issues and words in the news: the Language Corner column in the UK MSN Encarta online encyclopedia site is one of these.[3] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

As well as her native English, she is fluent in French and German. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Archaic Greek in a modern world - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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

"An endangered Greek dialect which is spoken in north-eastern Turkey has been identified by researchers as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its startling closeness to the ancient language, as Cambridge researcher Dr Ioanna Sitaridou explains." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

3 other comments...

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

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Intro to Language: Russell’s Theory of Descriptions - http://commonsenseatheism.com/...

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

"It seems natural that sentences have meaning in virtue of the things to which their words refer. But earlier, we explored why reference alone cannot account for meaning in language, and last time we explored why reference can’t even seem to account for singular terms like “this” and “Charlie Chaplin.” Specifically, we looked at four puzzles that Bertrand Russell addressed with what came to be called his Theory of Descriptions.1 Russell built up his theory around the word “the,” another problematic word for any Reference theory of meaning. (To what does “the” refer?)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Consider: (1) The author of Hamlet was English." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Popular Linguistics - http://popularlinguisticsonline.org/home...

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

"Popular Linguistics is a monthly online magazine with articles on linguistics- and language-based theory, news, application, findings, and field reports. Popular Linguistics is committed to diversity in its scope of reporting, covering both the scientific and applied sides of linguistics, while maintaining a neutral stance towards debates occurring within the field." - 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
Fwd: Let's Bury the Not-a-Word Myth - Culture - GOOD - http://www.good.is/post...

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

Snorklewhacking ! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Geoffrey K. Pullum http://users.utu.fi/freder...

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

and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong - Less Wrong - http://lesswrong.com/lw...

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

"Personally, I think it quite justified to use the word "wrong" when:" ... - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com... ; title="http://wiki.lesswrong.com... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

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

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

A neologism (pronounced /niːˈɒlədʒɪzəm/, from Greek νέος (neos 'new') + λόγος (logos 'speech') is a newly coined word or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language[citation needed]. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event. The term neologism is first attested in English in 1772, borrowed from French néologisme (1734).[1] In psychiatry, the term neologism is used to describe the use of words that only have meaning to the person who uses them, independent of their common meaning.[2] This is considered normal in children, but a symptom of thought disorder (indicative of a psychotic mental illness, such as schizophrenia) in adults.[3] People with autism also may create neologisms.[4] In addition, use of neologisms may also be related to aphasia acquired after brain damage resulting from a stroke or head injury.[5] - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

3 other comments...

Just a joke. That's Sarah Palin's new word which she totally made on purpose, like Shakespeare used to do. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
The year in language - The Boston Globe - http://www.boston.com/bostong...

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

"From a lexicographer’s point of view, the best language story of 2010 was the recent paper in Science about “culturomics.” The authors define this term as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” but what they literally did, working with Google Books, was take the full text of a huge number of books — about 4 percent of all titles ever published — and crunch the words as data, on the model of the Human Genome Project." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"One amazing finding: They estimated “that 52% of the English lexicon — the majority of the words used in English books — consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.” They found vast quantities of words like aridification, slenthem (a musical instrument), and deletable, none of them in normal dictionaries. Time to get crackin’, fellow lexicographers!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Turfanforschung - http://www.bbaw.de/forschu...

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

"Die alten Kulturen an der Seidenstraße, zu der viele Völker und Glaubensgemeinschaften ihren Beitrag geleistet haben, treten in ihren eigenen Schrift- und Bildzeugnissen am klarsten hervor. Die vielfältigste und reichste Sammlung dieser Dokumente stammt aus der Oase von Turfan. Sie umfasst Textzeugnisse des Buddhismus, des Manichäismus und des Christentums sowie Dokumente des klösterlichen und wirtschaftlichen Alltags, Briefe und andere Texte in über 20 Sprachen und Schriften. Hauptaufgabe des Akademienvorhabens ist die Edition des türkischen und iranischen Teils der Berliner Turfansammlung." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

2 other comments...

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

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
The empires of American English | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp...

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

"Over the past few days a website which maps American English dialects has gone around the blogs (I found it via Kevin Zelnio). Michelle has some suggestions for improvements of the map in Ohio. Here’s a cropped and resized dialect map:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Here are some books on American sectionalism and history which I’ve found very useful: - Albion’s Seed - What Hath God Wrought - The Rise of American Democracy - Clash of Extremes - The Cousins’ Wars - The Age of Lincoln - Throes of Democracy - American Colonies - The Scotch-Irish" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Home : Oxford English Dictionary - http://www.oed.com/

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

"Welcome to the new OED Online. If you or your library subscribe, dive straight in to the riches of the English language. If not, click on the images below to sample some topical words, see What's new, or take a look at our new feature section, Aspects of English." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

1 other comments...

Has anyone tried to log in yet? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Ancient Greek language survives in small community | A Blog About History - History News - http://www.ablogabouthistory.com/2011...

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

"As few as 5,000 people speak the dialect but linguists believe that it is the closest, living language to ancient Greek and could provide an unprecedented insight into the language of Socrates and Plato and how it evolved." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

3 other comments...

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

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Fwd: North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns - http://aschmann.net/AmEng... (via http://friendfeed.com/marebv...)

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

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Reference Management | Paperpile - http://paperpile.com/

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

"Paperpile is your one-stop shop to find, organize, cite and share scientific papers." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Maybe I'll have a look into this. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Comment

friendfeed imported Linguistics
TYPOTOPO - http://typotopo.com/

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

"Welcome to TYPOTOPO. This site represents the space where typography and topography overlap: explorations of type in virtual environments, experiments in mapping, and innovations in textual display. TYPOTOPO examines how the act of reading evolves when letters and words, viewed both as text and image, are placed in interactive and dynamic environments. TYPOTOPO explores typographic information spaces and the possibilities for playful, expressive letterforms." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Linguistics

Warning!