Linguistics

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Evolving English: Language can be intense - Quiz - http://www.bl.uk/evolvin...

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Same here, did abysmally on the Egghead level! :-P - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I am going to try this :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices - http://www.bl.uk/evolvin...

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In this ground-breaking exhibition, the roots of Old English, slang dictionaries, medieval manuscripts, advertisements and newspapers from around the world come together - alongside everyday texts and dialect sound recordings. Follow the social, cultural and historical influences on the English language... and see how it’s still evolving today. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

I saw this advertised in a pizza place, I think I'll pop along after the new year. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Taegan Goddard's Political Dictionary - http://politicaldictionary.com/ (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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good resource with definitions and citations for the phrases in question; it is particularly useful for outlanders such as me when trying to understand American politics. Recommended! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Mele Kalikimaka! - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say; on a bright Hawaiian Christmas day. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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""Wait, what?" you may be asking yourself. "Mele" for "merry", OK — obviously /l/ is the closest thing to /r/ in Hawaiian, we're used to that from stereotypes (and even facts) about Japanese and other varieties of "Engrish". But where did that kalikimaka come from?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What’s on your mind? | Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/note...

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"People use status updates to share what’s on their minds, to tell others what they’re doing, and to gather feedback from friends. The different ways people use status updates form some interesting patterns. In this study, we looked at the usage of words in different “word categories” in status updates. This led us to discover some patterns in how people use status updates differently, and how their friends interact with different status updates." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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:D Eivind: A peak in positive emotions at 7 a.m.? I will never understand humans. edit: probably all the insincere "good mornings" :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How The King James Bible 'Begat' English Idioms : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2010...

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"In Begat, David Crystal sets out to prove that the King James Bible has contributed more to the English language than any other literary source." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Parts of the Old Testament, yes. I dislike the New Testament, even as a piece of literature. :-) (with the exception of Wulfila's Gothic bible, but that's different) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The devil to pay - http://www.phrases.org.uk/meaning...

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"Meaning: Impending trouble or other bad consequences following from one's actions." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"'Paying' is the sailor's name for caulking or plugging the seam between planking with rope and tar etc. 'Paying the devil' must have been a commonplace activity for shipbuilders and sailors at sea. This meaning of 'paying' is recorded as early as 1610, in S. Jourdain's Discovery of Barmudas: Some wax we found cast up by the Sea... served the turne to pay the seames of the pinnis Sir George Sommers built, for which hee had neither pitch nor tarre." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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This figure of speech isn't dead – it's just resting | Mind your language | Media | guardian.co.uk - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media...

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"By condemning the commonplace metaphor, the Plain English Campaign betrays a lack of sensitivity to the power of everyday language" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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My thoughts exactly, Henry. To simply teach people to read and write would be a good idea for Germany as well. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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List of extinct languages of Europe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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This is a list of extinct languages of Europe, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers and no spoken descendant. In some cases however, it is not known whether a language has a spoken descendant or not. For example, because of the uncertain origin of the Albanian language — aside from its being an Indo-European language — and because little remains of the ancient languages in question, there is dispute whether Dacian, Thracian or Illyrian have a spoken descendant, Albanian. And because of the scarcity of the evidence, it is not known whether Basque is a descendant of the Aquitanian language. Although the Pomeranian language has a spoken descendant, the Kashubian language, the other dialects of Pomeranian are extinct. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ok, well just down the road and first right then! :-P ...But I just wondered if you had come across them in your reads etc. But It's a great list, I do like this and the other link. I'm pleased I found it and just like all the best finds, it was accidental! :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Words of the Year, 2010 - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2010...

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"There are buzzwords and there are great words." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Can't learn a foreign language? Not true, say scientists The brain can learn a new word 160 times in less than 15 minutes. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science... (via http://friendfeed.com/mind-br...)

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thanks Ami lida - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation"—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.[1][2][3][4] People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I have a friend with this interesting condition. Hers is based more on texture, taste and color. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What happened to shit, fuck and cunt during Victorian times… « Chasing Linguistics: searching for answers on language. - http://chasinglinguistics.wordpress.com/2010...

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"The Victorians DID kill swearing" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The best words are those that evoke reactions. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Google Labs - Books Ngram Viewer - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph...

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Counting on Google Books - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/article...

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"Humanities scholars may someday count as a watershed the paper that appeared on Wednesday in Science, titled "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books." But they'll have certain things to get past before they can appreciate that." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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by Geoffrey Nunberg - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Humanities research with the Google Books corpus - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"In Science today, there's yesterday, there was an article called "Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books" [subscription required] by at least twelve authors (eleven individuals, plus "the Google Books team"), which reports on some exercises in quantitative research performed on what is by far the largest corpus ever assembled for humanities and social science research. Culled from the Google Books collection, it contains more than 5 million books published between 1800 and 2000 — at a rough estimate, 4 percent of all the books ever published — of which two-thirds are in English and the others distributed among French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. (The English corpus alone contains some 360 billion words, dwarfing better structured data collections like the corpora of historical and contemporary American English at BYU, which top out at a paltry 400 million words each.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Data Mining meets Diachronic Linguistics :: Centuries of Social and Cultural Trends in Massive Database . [easy plots via Google Ngram Viewer] - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph...

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"Language analysts sifting through two centuries of words in the millions of books in Google digital library found a new way to track the growth of words. In the journal Science, scientists at Harvard, MIT, Google and the Encyclopedia Britannica unveiled a database of two billion words and phrases drawn from 5.2 million books published during the past 200 years. With this tool, researchers can measure trends through the language authors used and the people they mentioned. Analyzing the computerized text, the researchers reported they could measure the hardening rhetoric of nations facing off for war by tracking increasing use of the word "enemy." Others are using the database to chart social and emotional concepts over 200 years. The digital text captured the evolving structure of a living language. The data sets consist of short phrases—up to five words—with counts of how often they occurred in each year back to 1500." [corpus includes other major languages] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://topics.wsj.com/art... ; title="http://topics.wsj.com/art... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

plot above shows "men (blue), women (red)." Another interesting one is simply "God" in English which shows radical decline since 1840 according to WSJ but by extending the plot to 1500 the peak is around 1660... looks like it's slightly upticking recently: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.... ; title="http://ngrams.googlelabs.... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Fwd: Culturomics: using the Google Books database to discover linguistic and cultural trends http://www.nature.com/news... (via http://friendfeed.com/jamreil...)

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via Jamreilly - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Flavorwire » Literary Smackdown: Chaucer vs. Shakespeare - http://flavorwire.com/135515...

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"In his new book All in a Word, linguist Vivian Cook examines both the history and meaning of words through an assortment of games, lists, puzzles, and quotes. Of the more than 100 entries, we found ourselves geeking out the most over <a href="#53</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; “Chaucer’s Words” and <a href="#68</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; “Majestic Radiance (Shakespeare’s New Words)”. While Cook notes in both instances that the famed writers probably didn’t invent the words listed, as much as make the first recorded use of the language around them, it’s interesting to see who’s responsible for what. Click through to check out our handy chart; we’ve even bolded some of the words that we found the most entertaining." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
What's in a (species) name? - Boing Boing - http://www.boingboing.net/2010...

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"Meet Lepidocephalichthys zeppelini, a newly identified species of fish, named after Led Zeppelin. Why? An Auburn University graduate student thought the fish's pectoral fin looked like Jimmy Page's double neck guitar." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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In my Evolution and Systematics class, we went over a lot of funny species names. Some of them are terribly clever! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Knowing Geoff Nunberg's 2010 Word Of The Year : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2010...

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"If you were ranking those "word of the year" selections for importance against all of the year-end best-of and top-10 lists, they should fall somewhere between "10 biggest fashion faux pas" and "best celebrity tweets." They're either idle exercises or publicity gambits for dictionaries, and the short lists run to the blends, malaprops and stunt words that word geeks are drawn to — like vuvuzela, webisode and guidette. They're actually not even that interesting as words. They're the cat pictures of the English lexicon." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Why Can Some Blind People Process Speech Far Faster Than Sighted Persons? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article... (via http://friendfeed.com/anibalm...)

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via Anibal M. Astobiza - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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World Oral Literature Project - http://www.oralliterature.org/

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"An urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.admin.cam.ac.u... ; title="http://www.admin.cam.ac.u... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Economist Debates: Language: This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think. - http://www.economist.com/debate...

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Defending the motion: Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of psychology, Stanford University: "Exciting empirical advances over the past decade have at last provided us with scientific answers about how languages shape thinking with regard to perception, mathematics, navigation, the sex of nouns, social judgments and prejudice." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Spoken vs. Written English: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://thelanguageguy.blo... ; title="http://thelanguageguy.blo... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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YouTube - Understanding Geordie - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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See if you can understand or even follow this amusing comical look at the Geordie accent it seems even Windows speech to text cannot follow the local dialect - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Some of the vowels, particularly a and u, are pronounced as in German, yet I scarcely understand anything of it. Sorry to learn of his condition. :( - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics

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