Linguistics

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Fwd: A Linguistic Big Bang - by Lawrence Osborne - http://www.nytimes.com/library... (via http://friendfeed.com/diction...)

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For the first time in history, scholars are witnessing the birth of a language — a complex sign system being created by deaf children in Nicaragua - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

When the Greek historian Herodotus was traveling in Egypt, he heard of a bizarre experiment conducted by a King named Psammetichus. The inquisitive monarch, wrote Herodotus, decided to wall up two baby boys in a secluded compound. Whatever came out of the boys' mouths, reasoned the King, would be the root language of our species — the key to all others. Herodotus tells us that eventually the children came up with the Phrygian word for bread, bekos. In addition to demonstrating the superiority of the Phrygian tongue, the King's inquiry proved that even if left to their own devices, children wouldn't be without language for long. We are born, Herodotus suggested, with the gift of gab. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Topography Of Language By Mark Changizi | Scientific Blogging - http://www.scientificblogging.com/mark_ch...

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"Reading and writing is a recent human invention, going back only several thousand years, and much more recently for many parts of the world. We are reading using the eyes and brains of our illiterate ancestors. Why are we so good at such an unnatural act? Here I describe trecent evidence that, although we have not evolved to be good at reading, writing appears to have culturally evolved to be good for the eye. More specifically, recent research supports the exciting hypothesis that human visual signs look like nature, because that is what we have evolved over millions of years to be good at seeing. This ecological hypothesis for letter shape not only helps explain why we are such good readers, but answers the question, Why are letters and other visual signs shaped the way they are? (...)The topological shapes of non-pictorial visual signs are, then, for the eye, not the hand. But we are still left with the question, Why does the eye like these shapes? Here is where the evolutionary, or ecological, hypothesis enters into the story. Because over millions of years of evolution our visual systems have been selected to be good at processing the conglomerations of contours occurring in nature, I reasoned that if visual signs have culturally evolved to be easy to see, then we should expect visual signs to have natural topological shapes." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The answer may lie in the following pair of facts: (I) we wish to read words, not letters; and (II) we have evolved to see objects, not object-junctions. In this light, we expect culture to select words to look like objects, so that words may be processed by the same area in visual cortex responsible for recognizing objects. (...) Evolution by natural selection is too slow to design our brains for reading, and so cultural selection has come to the rescue, designing (without any designer) visual signs for our brains. Because our visual systems have evolved to be good at perceiving natural objects, cultural evolution has created non-linguistic symbols, logographic symbols, and written words in phonemic writing that tend to be built out of object-junction-like constituents, and are thus object-like. Because culture is capable of designing for the eye, the visual signs of our culture are a fingerprint of what our visual systems like." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Wikipedia: American and British English spelling differences - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... (via http://friendfeed.com/diction...)

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Latin-derived spellings: Most words ending in an unstressed -our in the United Kingdom (e.g., colour, flavour, honour, neighbour, rumour, labour) end in -or in the United States (e.g., color, flavor, honor, neighbor, rumor, labor). Wherever the vowel is unreduced in pronunciation, this does not occur: contour, velour, paramour, troubadour, are spelled thus the same everywhere, with "contour" being an important technical term in mathematics and meteorology. Most words of this category derive from Latin non-agent nouns having nominative -or; the first such borrowings into English were from early Old French and the ending was -or or -ur. After the Norman Conquest, the termination became -our in Anglo-French in an attempt to represent the Old French pronunciation of words ending in -or, (...). The -our ending was not only retained in English borrowings from Anglo-French, but also applied to earlier French borrowings. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY one of my all-time favorites MAP OF THE WHEEL-RUTS OF MODERN ENGLISH http://www.etymonline.com by Douglas Harper (via http://friendfeed.com/diction...)

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Why Americans Celebrate Labor (and not Labour) Day (Word Routes - Visual Thesaurus) http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm... (via http://friendfeed.com/diction...)

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It's the first Monday in September, when the United States observes Labor Day by avoiding labor. Today is a holiday north of the border too, but in Canada it's called Labour Day. Labour, of course, is the accepted spelling in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries like Canada. Americans prefer labor to labour, just as they prefer color, favor, honor, humor, neighbor, and a few dozen other words ending in -o(u)r. How did the spellings diverge? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Next time I listen to someone speaking British English (which I like very much), I'll pay attention. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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TIME Magazine Corpus of American English - CORPUS PORTAL WITH COLLABORATIVE TOOLS - http://corpus.byu.edu/time/

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This website allows you to quickly and easily search more than 100 million words of text of American English from 1923 to the present, as found in TIME magazine. You can see how words and phrases have increased and decreased in usage and see how words have changed meaning over time. - by Brigham Young University - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Does Language Shape What We Think?: Scientific American - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article...

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"This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: words are very handy mnemonics. We may not be able to remember what seventeen spools looks like, but we can remember the word seventeen. In his landmark The Language of Thought, philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that many words work like acronyms. French students use the acronym bans to remember which adjectives go before nouns ("Beauty, Age, Number, Goodneess, and Size"). Similarly, sometimes its easier to remember a word (calculus, Estonia) than what the word stands for. We use the word, knowing that should it becomes necessary, we can search through our minds -- or an encyclopedia -- and pull up the relevant information (how to calculate an integral; Estonia's population, capital and location on a map). Numbers, it seems, work the same way." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

friendfeed imported Linguistics
Search Magazine — Holy Grammar, Inc.: Linguists often rely on missionaries and translations of the Bible into obscure languages to fund their work. Is that relationship getting too close for comfort? - http://www.searchmagazine.org/July-Au...

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SIL was founded in 1934 by Cameron Townshend, an Oklahoma missionary who wanted to offer linguistics training to Bible translators during summer-long sessions (SIL stands for “Summer Institute of Linguistics”). On trips to Mexico, Townshend had realized the ludicrousness of giving Spanish Bibles to Indians who didn’t speak or read Spanish. Early on, he was joined by some serious linguistic scholars, Kenneth Pike and Eugene Nida, who had credentials and ties to a world of academic respectability. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Origin of Language (by Edward Vajda) http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda...

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Yesterday we discussed the gulf that separates the creative use of language by humans from the inborn signals of animals. Bees returning from their first flight out of the hive know perfectly how to perform their complex nectar dances. With humans, the precise form of language must be acquired through exposure to a speech community. Words are definitely not inborn, but the capacity to acquire and language and use it creatively seems to be inborn. Noam Chomsky calls this ability the LAD (Language Acquisition Device). Today we will ask two questions: how did this language instinct in humans originate? And how did the first language come into being? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Data is a singular noun http://nxg.me.uk/note...

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"Can we just clear this up now: the word `data', in english, is a singular mass noun. It is thus a grammatical and stylistic error to use it as a plural. - Plural use is barbaric: amongst other crimes, it is a deliberate archaism, and thus a symptom of bad writing." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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From Merengue to Borscht: learning Russian with Soviet Army music - LexiBlog - The Official Blog of Leximo, a World Social Dictionary - http://blog.leximo.org/2009...

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Multiple personalities in a foreign language - LexiBlog - The Official Blog of Leximo, a World Social Dictionary - http://blog.leximo.org/2009...

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World's Easiest Languages To Learn - http://blog.leximo.org/2009...

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Linguistics

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