Linguistics

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You’re probably using the wrong dictionary « the jsomers.net blog - http://jsomers.net/blog...

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"Webster’s dictionary took him 26 years to finish. It ended up having 70,000 words. He wrote it all himself, including the etymologies, which required that he learn 28 languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He was plagued by debt to fund the project; he had to mortgage his home." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The site has plugins to add it to Firefox's search box: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://machaut.uchicago.e... ; title="http://machaut.uchicago.e... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Sentence first | An Irishman's blog about the English language. - http://stancarey.wordpress.com/

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"In his excellent natural history of language, The Power of Babel, linguist John McWhorter describes dialects – and it’s all dialects – as “developed far beyond the call of duty”. He’s referring to the way languages tend to become structurally and idiosyncratically baroque:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Review on LINGUIST List <a rel="nofollow" href="https://linguistlist.org/... ; title="https://linguistlist.org/... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistic Diversity in Northern California http://languagesoftheworld.info/geoling...

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"In 1929, anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir wrote: “Few people realize that within the confines of the United States there is spoken today a far greater variety of languages … than in the whole of Europe. We may go further. We may say, quite literally and safely, that in the state of California alone there are greater and more numerous linguistic extremes than can be illustrated in all the length and breadth of Europe”. Today, it is safe to narrow down Sapir’s observation even further to Northern California or even just San Francisco Bay area, one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the United States. And while Sapir was only thinking of indigenous Native American languages, we will examine linguistic diversity in terms of “heritage languages”, an umbrella term for both immigrant languages and those of Native Americans." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fragmentary Latin Grammarians (FLG) http://www.corpusgl.eu/

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"Fragmentary Latin Grammarians (FLG) is a project dedicated to gathering, for the first time, all Latin grammatical texts which are preserved exclusively in fragmentary form. Our primary purpose is to compile a complete list of the authors of such texts, be they grammarians, teachers, erudites or any other author who may have written works on grammar, regardless of their position in society or their literary activity. These authors have been frequently quoted by late Latin grammarians and their ideas contributed to the evolution of ancient linguistic thought. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in this field, but a complete corpus is not available and modern editors are confronted with the daunting task of locating the quotes within texts, delimitating them and only then analysing them." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Monthly etymology gleanings for May 2014 http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"Why do words change their meaning?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"To answer this question I need a thick volume titled Historical Semantics. Unable to provide such a volume in the present post, I’ll give two examples from our recent experience. Everybody knows that kid is a young goat and a child. The sense “child” appeared much later. It was first slang and then became a regular item of everyday vocabulary, though we still say that so-and-so has no children or that children under five are not admitted, rather than kids. Since we more often speak about young boys and girls than about young goats, dictionaries now sometimes list the sense “kid” before the original one. A person who is twenty years old is no longer a kid except when he (probably always a he) burns tires or throws bottles at cops. Then newspapers speak about drunken kids who misbehaved after their team had lost (or won). Hence a new meaning: kid “a criminal of college age.” We seldom notice how such shifts occur." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Tracing Indo-European Languages Back to Their Source—Through the False Mirrors of the Popular Press Read more: http://languagesoftheworld.info/bad-lin......

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"A recent article “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family” published in Science (vol. 337, pp. 957-960) by a team of evolutionary anthropologists and biologists headed by Dr. Quentin D. Atkinson has created an uproar both in the popular media and the blogosphere.* This article purports to supply novel quantitative evidence for the Anatolian hypothesis, which locates the Indo-European homeland in what is now the Asian part of Turkey, as opposed to the more commonly accepted Kurgan theory, which places it in the Pontic-Caspian steppes of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine. Before I continue with our detailed critique of the Science article itself, I must first examine the media reports on the supposed findings of Atkinson and his colleagues. It is one thing for an unconvincing, error-filled report to appear in an academic journal, and quite another for it to be immediately trumpeted in the major newspapers and magazines as constituting nothing less than a major scientific breakthrough." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Adam Gopnik: How Much Really Gets Lost in Translation? : The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/reporti...

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"Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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What is often untranslatable: flavor, taste, color, texture, sonics, rhythm, intonations, connotations, etc. -- all of which add to the rich semantics of expressions. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Preserving Endangered Jewish Languages - Languages Of The World | Languages Of The World - http://languagesoftheworld.info/uncateg...

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"Among the many endangered languages around the world are several languages and dialects once spoken by Jews in various parts of the diaspora, including Europe, Iran, India, and the Caucasus region. Not all Jewish languages have been discovered and described, and a few have probably passed away unnoticed. Sarah Benor, a professor at Hebrew Union College who specializes in Jewish languages, puts the number of endangered Jewish languages at around two dozen. The assimilatory tendencies in the Americas; the horrors of World War II; the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union; the rise of nationalism in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East; and—ironically—the creation of the State of Israel, which promoted Hebrew at the expense of other Jewish languages, all led to the weakening and even demise of many mixed Jewish languages, such as Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, and others. In Israel, Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic were associated with Sephardim Jews who have generally had a lower socio-economic status than Israelis of European background. But even Yiddish, the language of the more socio-economically powerful Ashkenazim Jews, was looked down upon in Israel." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Welcome to Classical Language Toolkit’s documentation! — Classical Language Toolkit 0.0.0.5 documentation - http://cltk.readthedocs.org/en...

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"The Classical Language Toolkit is an extension of the NLTK and will offer natural language processing support for Classical languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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15,000 images of Persian manuscripts online - Asian and African studies blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-a...

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"Asian and African Studies have just uploaded more than 15,000 images of Persian manuscripts online. This is the result of two years' work in an ongoing project sponsored by the Iran Heritage Foundation together with the Bahari Foundation, the Barakat Trust, the Friends of the British Library, the Soudavar Memorial Foundation and the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"A leaf from the Saddar (‘100 doors’), a popular compilation of 100 rules for Zoroastrians which range from justifying instant death for sodomy to the treatment of good and evil animals, and the avoidance of different forms of pollution. This copy, dated Samvat 1631 (AD 1575), is in Persian language, but transcribed in Avestan (Old Iranian) script, together with a Gujarati translation (BL IO Islamic 3043, f 137r) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Little triumphs of etymology: “pedigree” | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"If I find enough material, I may tell several stories about how after multiple failures the ultimate origin of a common English word has been found to (almost) everybody’s satisfaction. The opening chapter in my prospective Decameron will deal with pedigree, which surfaced in English texts in the early fifteenth century. Many competing spellings have been recorded: pedigre, pedigrew, petigree, and their variants with -ee, -tt-, and -y- (the latter in place of -i-). Although no word resembles it, the French or Latin origin was proposed early on. The first students of English etymology realized that pedigree must be a compound and tried to recover the disguised elements. Strangely, unlike cap-a-pe(e), pedigree has never been spelled as a word group." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Perhaps those elements are par and degrés “by degrees,” with an allusion to descending from one generation to another? Not a fanciful guess, but what happened to r, the last sound of par or per? Or is the sought-for etymon degrés des pères “the rank or degree of forefathers”? But in pedigree the proposed elements appear in reverse order! Or Latin petendo gradum “deriving (seeking, pursuing) the descent”? Or a pede gradus, “like the Jesse window at Dorchester or others of that kind” (with reference to the Jesse tree showing the genealogy of Jesus)? In that etymology, pede, the dative of Latin pes “foot,” was taken to mean the stem of the tree; an analog would be German Stammbaum “genealogy, family tree, pedigree,” literally, “stem tree.” Or pied de greffe, that is, “the stem of the graft” = “the stem on which later branches were grafted”? Or “the table of degrees” (= of relationships)? Or pee de crue “the foot of the increase”? Or Greek país “child” and Latin gradus “degree”? C. A. F. Mahn, the reviser of the 1864 edition of Webster’s dictionary, who mentioned this etymology in a special publication (I have not seen it anywhere else), referred to A. Wagner. Such irritating references were all over the place in the past. I have no clue to the source and would be grateful to those of our readers who could tell me where A. Wagner (and which of the great multitude of A. Wagners) proposed that truly hopeless etymology." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Judaeo-Spanish aka Ladino - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Judaeo-Spanish, also spelled Judeo-Spanish and Judæo-Spanish, and commonly referred to as Ladino, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in the former territories of the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa) as well as in France, Italy, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Morocco and the UK, today it is spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, most of the speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Israel and Turkey. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Some semantic shifts found in motion verbs | Christopher Culver - http://www.christopherculver.com/languag...

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"Having studied the inventories of motion verbs in Mari (and other Uralic languages) and Chuvash (and other Turkic languages), I’ve come to pick up on a lot of semantic shifts across languages that most speakers of said languages take for granted." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Many educated people are aware that in the suppletive paradigm of English ‘to go’, the past tense ‘went’ is taken from a separate verb ‘to wend’, the stereotypical example of which is the phrase ‘to wend one’s way’. However, few people ever stop to think that originally, in Old English, wendan meant ‘to turn’. Thus we find the shift ‘he turned’ > ‘he went’." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: PLOS ONE: Computational linguistics - http://www.plosone.org/browse... via Sean McBride http://friendfeed.com/seanmcb...

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Online Resources for Ancient Names | Dr. Platypus - http://pursiful.com/2010...

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"A very useful collection of links to online resources" <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ancientworldonline... ; title="http://ancientworldonline... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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iLatin and eGreek - Ancient Languages and New Technology, February 1, 2014 - Classical Studies - Faculty of Arts - The Open University - http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts...

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"A Council of University Classics Departments Teaching and Learning Symposium hosted by the Open University, UK and supported by the Institute for Classical Studies" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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ölmüş dili öğrenip napıcaksınız yae - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » Linguistic diversity in Greater Tibet - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"Arif Dirlik called my attention to a wonderful article entitled "'Speak Tibetan, Stupid': Concepts of Pure Tibetan & the Politics of Belonging" in the Lhakar Diaries. At the heart of the article is this powerful 16-minute video entitled "Linguistic Diversity on the Tibetan Plateau":" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Lhakar diaries <a rel="nofollow" href="http://lhakardiaries.com/... ; title="http://lhakardiaries.com/... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Greek Lexicon Project — Faculty of Classics - http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/researc...

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"The Faculty of Classics is home to a project for a new Ancient Greek-English Lexicon, suitable for students, but also taking account of the most recent textual and philological scholarship. We are not only replacing out-of-date terminology with modern and precise English and omitting obsolete readings and interpretations, but also re-examining the source material used in other dictionaries and examining the new material which has been discovered since the end of the nineteenth century." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Finally a long over-due potential replacement for the outdated Liddle&Scott \o/ - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: The Mystery of Language evolution (Hauser et al. 2014) - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2014...

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Marc D. Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert C. Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard Lewontin - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log recommends a work setting forth a different approach (which sounds fascinating to me): Karl Lashley, The Problem of Serial Oder in Behavior (1951). Here is the pdf: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://t.s-f-walker.org.u... ; title="http://t.s-f-walker.org.u... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Monthly etymology gleanings for April 2014 | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"In tracing the origin of words, we often have to deal with sound symbolism and sound imitation. Sound effects are also the glue of organized speech. Old Germanic verses depended on alliteration (and were chanted), folklore is chanted all over the world, Greek, Latin, and Germanic poets distinguished between long and short syllables, and, until recently, European poetry was based on rhyme. But free verse seemingly has no phonetic foundation. Is it poetry? The question does not quite belong to this blog, so that I will confine myself to a brief response. Free verse is not devoid of a phonetic base, namely intonation. It is possible to read any piece of prose in such a way that it begins to sound like poetry. Conversely, one can read even well-organized poetry like prose. But traditional poetry, just because it used special devices, could often be attractive without being “clever,” while free verse, in order to impress, has to contain deep or original thoughts. Since few people have them and since for producing free verse one does not need any technical skills, it often degenerates into a string of trivialities parading as emotions. Paradoxically, the fewer devices poets have at their disposal, the harder it is to compose anything memorable and the poorer the outcome is. But rhyme, alliteration, assonances, and the rest do not always disguise banality. Fortunately or unfortunately, in order to produce good poetry (the same holds for any good art), one needs talent, a rare commodity, regardless of style." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Talking Brains: New book on language production!: The Oxford Handbook of Language Production ed. by Matthew Goldrick, Victor Ferreira, and Michele Miozzo - http://www.talkingbrains.org/2014...

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"The Oxford Handbook of Language Production provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary review of the mechanisms involved in language production, examining their computational, linguistic, cognitive, and brain bases. Chapters in the Handbook examine all forms of language production (spoken, written, and signed) and how language production mechanisms interface with the wider cognitive system. Authors of the chapters discuss a wide array of levels of representation, from sentences to individual words, speech sounds and articulatory gestures, extending to discourse and the broader social context of speaking." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Writing in English, Novelists Find Inventive New Voices - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2014...

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"In “The Other Language,” the title story of Francesca Marciano’s new collection, an Italian teenager named Emma falls in love with English. The attraction has a lot to do with the person speaking it, an intriguing English boy at the Greek beach resort where Emma is staying with her family, but it’s hard to separate the strands of desire. Is the boy her entry ticket to English, or vice versa?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

On the Languagehat blog there is a good critical comment by Dmitry Pruss <a rel="nofollow" href="http://languagehat.com/di... ; title="http://languagehat.com/di... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Craig Melchert's Homepage - http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people...

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"A. Richard Diebold Professor of Indo-European Studies & Professor of Linguistics Dept. of Linguistics and Indepartmental Program in Indo-European Studies UCLA" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

He is an outstanding scholar of Indo-European, particularly Hittite studies. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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http://www.avesta-archive.com/

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Like, Degrading the Language? No Way - by John McWhorter http://www.nytimes.com/2014...

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"IF there is one thing that unites Americans of all stripes, it is the belief that, whatever progress our country might be making, we are moving backward on language. Just look at the crusty discourse level of comments sections and the recreational choppiness of text messages and hit pop songs." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"However, amid what often seems like the slack-jawed devolution of a once-mighty language, we can find evidence for, of all things, a growing sophistication." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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