Linguistics

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British Museum - Clay tablet with a cuneiform letter and its envelope - http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore...

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"This tablet is one of thousands found at the site of Kültepe (ancient Kanesh). They were all written by merchants who, from around 1900 BC, had come to Kanesh from the city of Ashur in Assyria and established a karum (trading centre). The karum at Kanesh is the best known but a number of other colonies were established across Anatolia." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Sign languages help us understand the nature of metaphors - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"A recent study of the use of metaphors in spoken language and various sign languages shows that certain types of metaphors are difficult to convey in sign language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The idea I find most captivating, not here but it came to mind reading this, is that language developed as a way for distributed parts of the brain to communicate with each in a more complex way. This would push "language" way down the inheritance tree. It's both cool and makes sense :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Networks uncover hidden lexical borrowing in Indo-European language evolution - http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

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"Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary is borrowed. Borrowing is a distinctly non-tree-like process—akin to horizontal gene transfer in genome evolution—that cannot be recovered by phylogenetic trees. Here, we infer the frequency of hidden borrowing among 2346 cognates (etymologically related words) of basic vocabulary distributed across 84 Indo-European languages. The dataset includes 124 (5%) known borrowings. Applying the uniformitarian principle to inventory dynamics in past and present basic vocabularies, we find that 1373 (61%) of the cognates have been affected by borrowing during their history. Our approach correctly identified 117 (94%) known borrowings. Reconstructed phylogenetic networks that capture both vertical and horizontal components of evolutionary history reveal that, on average, eight per cent of the words of basic vocabulary in each Indo-European language were involved in borrowing during evolution. Basic vocabulary is often assumed to be relatively resistant to borrowing. Our results indicate that the impact of borrowing is far more widespread than previously thought." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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On Language - The King’s Tongue Twisters - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2010...

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"“My Fair Lady” had “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” “Singin’ in the Rain” had “Moses supposes his toeses are roses.” To cinema’s pantheon of tricky diction, we can now add, “I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter.” Audiences for “The King’s Speech” can hear Colin Firth as Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), practice this tongue twister as part of the speech therapy conducted by Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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My Fair Lady is one of mine and my mums favourite films. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Nigeria harnesses Pidgin English power | Education | Guardian Weekly - http://www.guardian.co.uk/educati...

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"Work has started to study and standardise a language spoken by millions but denied official status, raising hopes for education and communication across West Africa" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Some kind of Pidgin may have been the origin of many a language... :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Cornish language no longer extinct, says UN | BBC News 07 Dec 10 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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They have their own political party, can't remember the exact name off the top of my head. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Mebyon Kernow (Cornish for Sons of Cornwall, often abbreviated to MK) is a left-of-centre political party in the United Kingdom. The main objective of MK is to establish greater autonomy in Cornwall, through the establishment of a legislative Cornish Assembly. Mebyon Kernow have four elected councillors on Cornwall Council, and 18 on town and parish councils.[3] The party has had no MPs elected to the UK Parliament, but for the first time had candidates running for all six Cornish constituencies in the 2010 election. They gained a total of 5,379 votes. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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As I was going through the Times… « Glossographia - http://glossographia.wordpress.com/2010...

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"Recently, there has been a “Puzzle Moment” in the science section of the New York Times, with an eclectic mix of articles combining scientific pursuits with cognitive and linguistic play of various sorts. One that caught my eye is ‘Math Puzzles’ Oldest Ancestors Took Form on Egyptian Papyrus’ by Pam Belluck [1], which is an account of the well-known Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. The RMP is an Egyptian mathematical text dating to around 1650 BCE, and is one of the most complete and systematic known accounts of ancient Egyptian mathematics. It’s a fascinating text, written in the Egyptian hieratic script rather than the more famous hieroglyphs, and it gives us considerable insight into the economy, social organization, and technical practices of the Second Intermediate Period." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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OUPblog » Blog Archive » The Lion, the Witch, and the Wordbook - http://blog.oup.com/2010...

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"Many dictionaries and guides are careful to warn readers about the difference between a faun and a fawn. However, anyone familiar with the tales of C. S. Lewis is unlikely to confuse these two shy inhabitants of woodland glades, since the goat-footed, part-human faun of classical Roman mythology is the first strange creature we encounter when reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Those who know the film/movie version will be flocking back to the theaters this month to see more fantastical creatures in Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Alongside these—in a mythological mix which is said to have irritated Lewis’s friend Tolkien—we find the dwarf of Germanic legend and the ogre of old French tales, as well as the merman, the werewolf, the bogle (Lewis uses the old northern spelling boggle), and the wraith. Among the retinue of the White Witch are three entirely unfamiliar types of creature, the orknies, ettins, and wooses. These are not simply inventions, as we might suppose, but adaptations of ancient Old English words. Orknies (Old English orcneas) and ettins (Old English eotenas, a kind of giant) appear in the poem Beowulf, and the wooses or wood-woses (Old English wudewasan) are also of Anglo-Saxon origin. All have linguistic parallels in Tolkien’s world: the orcs, ents, and woses of Middle-earth." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Antarctic dictionary: a complete guide to Antarctic English, by Bernadette Hince - http://books.google.com/books...

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Google Books - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

I am not yet sure, but the lemmata seem to refer to Antarctic-related English words of all sorts. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Anthropology in Practice: The Evolutionary Roots of Talking With Our Hands - http://www.anthropologyinpractice.com/2010...

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"Gestures are an integral part of language. Arbib, Liebal, and Pika (2008) believe that gestures, via pantomime and protosigns, may have played a large role in the emergence of vocalization (protospeech) leading to the development of protolanguage (1054). Their hypothesis is based on the structure of the brain, specifically a mirroring of structures in the brain: near Broca's area, a region of the brain said to be involved in language production, is a region "activated for both grasping and observation of grasping" (1053). The proximity of a grasping region to a language region is intriguing. Individuals who have suffered damage to Broca's area have difficulties with language production. They can often understand others perfectly, but they have difficulty responding in all but the simplest of ways. Arbib and colleagues suggest that because damage to Broca's area also impedes the emergence of signed languages as well, the region should be understood in relation to multimodal language processes and not just vocalization. They believe this creates a strong case for understanding the place of gestures in the evolution of language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends - Wordorigins.org - http://www.wordorigins.org/index...

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"Did you ever think that Ring Around The Rosie makes reference to the Black Death of the Middle Ages? Or that the whole nine yards refers to the length of a machinegun ammo belt? Or perhaps that Eskimos have 500 words for snow? If so, then you have been taken in by a linguistic urban legend. Like classic urban legends, these linguistic legends are popular and pervasive. Instead of propagating cautionary tales about the dangers of modern life, linguistic urban folklore propagates stories and “facts” about language." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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So its origin is still not known? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Books that didn't make the exhibition #2 - Evolving English - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/evolvin...

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"Elisha Coles (1640?-1680) was a schoolmaster in London. The aim of his 1676 dictionary was to give brief definitions for ‘hard words’. However, he does much more than this. The entries sometimes tell us the origins of a word (Lozenge is from French, Logomachy from Greek), or that a term is an ‘Old Word’ (St Loye for St Louis). There are also numerous number of dialect words (Lowk is noted as being a North Country term for ‘to weed corn’) and placenames (Aberfraw, A town in Anglesey). I see that the copy of The New Oxford Dictionary of English that I use at home also includes placenames in this way." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"For me, the most interesting section is the table of words ‘whose sound is the same, but their sense and orthography very different’, which appears before the main A-Z sequence. Examples include: ‘Fair, comely’ vs. ‘Fare, diet’ and ‘Guilt, conscience’ vs. ‘Gilt, with gold’. I wonder whether Hallow/Hollow, Nether/Neither and Room/Rome were genuinely pronounced the same in 17th-century London, or whether they were just prone to getting confused?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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A whole nother language - The Boston Globe - http://www.boston.com/bostong...

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"Embrace your inner American!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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me too :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Urban Dictionary: 2010 Word Of The Year - http://www.urbandictionary.com/woty...

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"Here are the ten finalists for Urban Word of the Year 2010. Click thumbs up to vote for your favorite." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I didn't know about the video ... My reaction would be exact like HungryBear :-)) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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"A bahuvrihi or bahuvrihi compound (from Sanskrit बहुव्रीहि, bahuvrīhi, literally meaning "much rice") is a type of nominal compound that refers to something not specified by the compound's parts. It is common in compounds referring to a possessor of a specified object: a bahuvrihi compound XY tends to mean someone or something which has a Y, and that Y has the characteristic X. For instance, a sabretooth (smil-odon) is neither a sabre nor a tooth: it is an extinct feline with saber-like fangs. In linguistic terms, a bahuvrihi is headless or exocentric: its core semantic value is implicit rather than explicit, so that the compound is not a hyponym of the head." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I think it helps that Turkish is an agglutinative language. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Rosetta Stone (software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Rosetta Stone is proprietary language-learning program developed by Rosetta Stone Inc. Both its title and logo refer to the Rosetta Stone, an artifact inscribed in multiple languages that helped Jean-François Champollion to decipher Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The company is headquartered in Arlington County, Virginia.[1] The Rosetta Stone software uses a combination of images, text, and sound, with difficulty levels increasing as the student progresses, in order to teach various vocabulary terms and grammatical functions intuitively, without drills or translation. They call this the "Dynamic Immersion method". According to the company, the software is designed to teach languages the way first languages are learned. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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They have a free trial that allows you to try a few lessons of, I think, any language they offer. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - How the ancient Welsh language helped shape English - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"From arctic birds to nicknames, the influence of Wales on the English language has been underestimated, says a Celtic Studies expert." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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"Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Ancient Scripts: Brahmi - http://www.ancientscripts.com/brahmi...

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"The Brahmi script is one of the most important writing systems in the world by virtue of its time depth and influence. It represents the earliest post-Indus corpus of texts, and some of the earliest historical inscriptions found in India. Most importantly, it is the ancestor to hundreds of scripts found in South, Southeast, and East Asia." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: A Click of the Tongue: Scientific American - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article... (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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"Amanda Miller sits facing an old woman in Upington, South Africa, one hand on a cylindrical probe that she holds underneath the woman’s chin. “Speak,” Miller says in the woman’s native language, N|uu, and as the words flow out, an ultrasound screen flickers with the video of a tongue in motion. Linguists are using the same technology that images fetuses to study endangered languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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Manchu is a Tungusic language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the Xibe language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to Manchu, Xibe speakers, who live in far western Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus.[1] Manchu is an agglutinative language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony. It has been demonstrated that it is derived mainly from the Jurchen language though there are many loan words from Mongolian and Chinese. Its script is vertically written and taken from the Mongolian alphabet (which in turn derives from Aramaic via Uyghur and Sogdian). Although Manchu does not have the kind of grammatical gender that many Indo-European languages do, some gender-related words in Manchu are distinguished by different stem vowels; in such cases, "a"s are sometimes used to indicate masculine ones, as in ama "father", and "e"s are sometimes used to indicate feminine ones, as in eme "mother". - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Altaic is not my field, but I assume scholars don't agree on that. As far as I am informed, the evidence they have is quite difficult to exploit. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Compound (linguistics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes (the other word-formation process being derivation). Compounding or Word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of language to form new words by combining or putting together old words. In other words, compound, compounding or word-compounding occurs when a person attaches two or more words together to make them one word. The meanings of the words interrelate in such a way that a new meaning comes out which is very different from the meanings of the words in isolation." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Biblia Hebraica et Graeca: Written Hebrew & the Composition of the Bible - http://bibliahebraica.blogspot.com/2010...

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"Too often our discussions of how and when the biblical books were composed fail to take into account the historical evidence for written language and text. That is, we rarely consider when the technology of writing was actually available for use composing the biblical texts. The tradition that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, for example, still has to explain how he could have written much of it in good 8th-7th century Judean Hebrew from his 13th century home in the wilderness. If Moses wrote the Pentateuch, what did he write the original in? Hebrew wasn’t an option then. Proto-Canaanite? Akkadian? Egyptian?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Don't dig too deep, you'll ruin the whole thing :D - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Uto-Aztecan | A website for Uto-Aztecan Studies - http://uto-aztecan.org/uanist/

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"Welcome to Uto-Aztecan.org, a website devoted to the comparative study of the Uto-Aztecan (UA) language family. Located in the southwestern United States and western Mexico, UA consists of some 30 related Native American languages descended from a common parent language that linguists now call Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA). Hopi, Ute, Pima, and Aztec/Nahuatl are among the better known of UA languages. The valuable works of many linguists are listed in the bibliography and some are discussed in the introduction accessible above and will be cited here increasingly over time, but the initial offerings are portions of the book, A Uto-Aztecan Comparative Vocabulary (by brian stubbs), available on this website, intended to encourage and facilitate the comparative study of Uto-Aztecan languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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An admirable project. I wish its contributors good luck in finding the time and the means to continue it! Btw, non-Uto-Aztecanists who are interested in linguistics may find interesting resources in the bibliography. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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

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"A causative form (abbreviated caus) is, in linguistics, (a) an expression of an agent causing or forcing a subject to perform an action or to be in a certain condition--salient cause, (b) an expression of a subject involved in a non-volitional event that registers the changes of its state--salient effect, (c) an expression of a grammatical modality in perfective (sequential) or subjunctive (hypothetical) or realis (non-hypothetical) state--perceptual salient." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"In Persian, causative form of the verb is made by adding ân(i)dan to the present stem: * xordan (to eat) → xor (present stem) → xorândan (to cause/make to eat) * xandidan (to laugh) → xand (present stem) → xandândan (to cause/make to laugh)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics

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