Linguistics

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The great language game: Confusing languages | Replicated Typo - http://www.replicatedtypo.com/the-gre...

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"The Great Language Game, have you heard of it? It’s an online game where players compete in matching audio clips to the correct language. The game was created by Lars Yencken earlier this year and has become very popular. Data generated by the game can be used to map what languages the players find hardest to tell apart and support what we’ve known all along: Portuguese does sound a bit slavic!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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700, now - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: Iliados: Structural Search: Perform grammatical and syntactical searches on the Perseus Greek Treebank - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014...

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"Iliados: Structural Search: Perform grammatical and syntactical searches on the Perseus Greek Treebank" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"This is a brief overview of the query language for searching the Perseus Treebank data, which has syntactically annotated ancient texts, such as Homer's Iliad. Each sentence in the texts are turned into trees, like sentence diagrams, in a format called a dependency tree. The query language for searching these trees is just the CSS3 query language, with some custom additions... " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Odd Job Man and Language! by Jonathon Green, review - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture...

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"'Slang represents humanity at its most human,” writes Jonathon Green in one of his signature declarative sentences, which leave a slight sense of the author looking around, whiskers a-quiver, to see if anyone is going to yell out “scuzzball” or “swamp-breath”, before he plunges on to supply us with a further definition: slang is the lexis of “our less admirable but absolutely unavoidable selves”." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Slang’s first compilers were chippy individualists, routinely beset by financial worries and complex marital lives. They were never grandees like the 70-odd team beavering away still on the Oxford English Dictionary in Great Clarendon Street (less than 30 yards from where I live in Oxford). They numbered Francis Grose (1731-91), the son of a Swiss jeweller, who was so fat that his servant had to strap him into bed every night; Pierce Egan (1772-1849), a boxing journalist and editor of Real Life in London; and John William Hotten (1832-73), a workaholic pornographer (The Romance of Chastisement) who died from a surfeit of pork chops, and was remembered, unfairly, by the phrase: “Hotten: rotten, and forgotten”. Even so, they shared many characteristics of lexicographers like William Chester Minor (1834-1920), one of the OED’s founding fathers, who was, quite conclusively, bonkers. As one of Jonathon Green’s mentors, Anthony Burgess, cautions: “The study of language may beget madness.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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International Dunhuang Project: #MuseumMastermind and #MuseumWeek - http://idpuk.blogspot.de/2014...

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"This week IDP UK has been taking part in Twitter’s <a href="#MuseumWeek</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; event and today for the ‘Test Your Knowledge’ <a href="#MuseumMastermind</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; day we prepared two quizzes and a bonus question. For the first quiz we asked our followers to identify the languages and scripts of manuscripts, and for the second we asked them to name the pictured buddha or bodhisattva. The bonus question was to tell us the printing date of the Diamond Sutra currently on display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery at the British Library. The answers to all our questions are shown below." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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A few of our favourite things - the complete series <a rel="nofollow" href="http://idpuk.blogspot.de/... ; title="http://idpuk.blogspot.de/... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: Sentences and Events - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"The current thesis favored on this blog is that language is a system for directing one another's attention so that we can share perceptions, real, imaginary or metaphorical. As it stands now I propose that human evolution began with the formation of communities based on cooperation and sharing. Once our ancestor moved from social to communal arrangements the normal, individualistic, Darwinian impediments to sharing gave way to the group benefits of cooperation and trust. Language became a part of the new order in which, initially, people spoke literally, pointing out perceptible details of reality." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

how does that relate to the concept of "shared intentionality" of Tomasello then? <a href="#insandili</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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We propose a novel account for the emergence of human language syntax. Like many evolutionary innovations, language arose from the adventitious combination of two preexisting, simpler systems that had been evolved for other functional tasks.The first system, Type E(xpression), is found in birdsong, where the same song marks territory, mating...

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mating availability, and similar “expressive” functions. The second system, Type L(exical), has been suggestively found in non-human primate calls and in honeybee waggle dances, where it demarcates predicates with one or more “arguments,” such as combinations of calls in monkeys or compass headings set to sun position in honeybees. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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abi içine mi doğdu acaba, çünkü yine bu dönem de sintaksla uğraşıyorum beynimi yakıp geliyorum :/ diye konuşuyordu tam da bugün - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Do “Native Americans and Russians share the same language”? | GeoCurrents - http://www.geocurrents.info/cultura...

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"GeoCurrents has extensively criticized the mainstream media for its gross misrepresentations of current linguistic research, with headlines such as “English Language ‘Originated in Turkey’”, which does little but deceive and confuse the public. The recent headline in The Daily Mail “Native Americans and Russians share the same language: Dialects reveal how ancestors migrated 13,000 years ago” is another example of such blatant inaccuracy that reveals ignorance of the subject being reported. Leaving aside the imprecise use of the term “dialect” (dialect of what? a language whose other dialects do not reveal the same thing?), the claim that “Native Americans and Russians share the same language” is nonsensical. This problem is not limited to the headline, as the very first sentence of the article states that “It’s been known for years that some Native Americans and Russians share ancestors”—a sentence that presupposes the unquestionable truth of what is in actuality a highly problematic proposition." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

This is related to "Language 'evolution' may shed light on human migration out-of-Beringia: Relationship between Siberian, North American languages", see <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/1goIze"... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Etymology - Normans vs. Saxons: cow = beef, sheep = mutton, chicken =? - http://english.stackexchange.com/questio...

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"The story goes that after the Norman invasion of England, the words in English for prepared foods took on their French equivalents. The Saxon serfs bred the cows, sheep, and swine, which when served on gilded plates to their Norman rulers were referred to as beef, mutton, and pork respectively, a practice that continues to this day. My question is, why was the humble chicken, a word which does not have a French connection, discriminated against? Why don't we refer to cooked chicken as something like poulet?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Chicken = What ever we taste that is not normal. Really.. people.. let find another tastes like subject other then chicken. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Log » "Slide down my cellar door" - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"In a 2010 NYT “On Language” column, Grant Barrett traced the claim that “cellar door” is the most beautiful phrase in English back as far as 1905 1903. I posted on the phrase a few years ago ("The Romantic Side of Familiar Words"), suggesting that there was a reason why linguistic folklore fixed on that particular phrase, when you could make the same point with other pedestrian expressions like linoleum or oleomargarine:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"…The undeniable charm of the story — the source of the enchantment that C. S. Lewis reported when he saw cellar door rendered as Selladore — lies the sudden falling away of the repressions imposed by orthography … to reveal what Dickens called "the romantic side of familiar things." … In the world of fantasy, that role is suggested literally in the form of a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, a brick wall at platform 9¾. Cellar door is the same kind of thing, the expression people use to illustrate how civilization and literacy put the primitive sensory experience of language at a remove from conscious experience." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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365 words for drunk - http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2011...

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day after march 17th ;-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Origin of the Expression "Open a Can of Worms" - http://www.todayifoundout.com/index...

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Linguists believe that the expression is actually a more modern, Americanized version of the expression “opening Pandora’s Box,” which originally was actually a jar, but mistranslations gave us “Pandora’s Box.” - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language 'evolution' may shed light on human migration out-of-Beringia: Relationship between Siberian, North American languages -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Evolutionary analysis applied to the relationship between North American and Central Siberian languages may indicate that people moved out from the Bering Land Bridge, with some migrating back to central Asia and others into North America, according to a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 12, 2014 by Mark Sicoli, from Georgetown University and Gary Holton from University of Alaska Fairbanks." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Language trees can't be reconstructed as far back as the time of these migrations, so linguists are not able to contribute to the archeological and genetic data. Resemblances between words and typological similarities can't prove that two languages are related to each other. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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HPM - Hethitologie-Portal Mainz - http://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/HPM...

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"Links Hattuscha - die Hauptstadt der Hethiter – Hittite Epigraphic Findings In The Ancient Near East – Monuments of the Hittites – »mehr" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Beggars, buggers, and bigots, part 3 | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"Unlike so many words featured in this blog, bugger has a well-ascertained origin, but it belongs with the rest of this series because it sheds light on its companions beggar and bigot. The route of bugger should be familiar by now (it is the same as before): from French, to Middle Dutch, and finally, to English. A single, most ingenious, attempt to derive bugger from Greek pygé “buttocks,” with reference to katapygón “sodomite,” has been rejected for good reason: there is no way to explain how a noun popular in Classical Greek made its way into Middle English slang. At present, everybody agrees that the source of bugger is Old French bougre, which in the Middle Ages meant “heretic,” from Bulgarus “Bulgarian.” The Bulgarians were Orthodox Christians, specifically Albigensians, and various sins, including bestiality, were imputed to them. Those rumors spread and were busily cultivated in Southern Europe before, during, and after the Albigensian Crusades (1209-1229), a bloody campaign I mentioned last week in connection with beggar and Beguines. With regard to etymology, a parallel case is Cathari, another “heretical” sect. From Cathari, known in Italy as Gazari, German has Ketzer “heretic” and Dutch has ketter, for, naturally, heretics are expected to perform all kinds of abominable acts: once a deviant, always a deviant. (Incidentally, even Old French erites, from hæreticus, meant “pervert; sodomite.”) We can see that the fate of “beggars,” “buggers,” and “bigots” is part of the history of the hapless Albigensians. I’ll return to bigot next week, but those interested in what has already been on this subject are invited to read the essay “No one wants to be a bigot” (26 October 2011); they will also find some discussion of bugger there." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: The place of the Armenian language in the Indo-European family - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2014...

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"A very interesting talk at the Library of Congress making a good case for a Greek-Phrygian-Armenian clade within the Indo-European family." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Modern Armenians are quite distinct from modern populations of the Balkans but who knows how both they and the populations of the Balkans have changed since the beginning of the Iron Age when the Phrygians established themselves in Asia Minor? The recent study by Hellenthal et al. did not find any good evidence for recent admixture in Armenians but this might be due to (i) Armenians being unmixed descendants of Proto-Armenians, (ii) Armenians being near-unmixed descendants of pre-Armenians, or (iii) the method not having enough power to detect admixture. My guess is that the relative remoteness of the Armenian highlands coupled with the heterodox position of the Armenian church hindered substantial gene flow into the Armenian population over at least the last 1,500 years." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How do British and American attitudes to dictionaries differ? | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"For 20 years, 14 of those in England, I’ve been giving lectures about the social power afforded to dictionaries, exhorting my students to discard the belief that dictionaries are infallible authorities. The students laugh at my stories about nuns who told me that ain’t couldn’t be a word because it wasn’t in the (school) dictionary and about people who talk about the Dictionary in the same way that they talk about the Bible. But after a while I realized that nearly all the examples in the lecture were, like me, American. At first, I could use the excuse that I’d not been in the UK long enough to encounter good examples of dictionary jingoism. But British examples did not present themselves over the next decade, while American ones kept streaming in. Rather than laughing with recognition, were my students simply laughing with amusement at my ridiculous teachers? Is the notion of dictionary-as-Bible less compelling in a culture where only about 17% of the population consider religion to be important to their lives? (Compare the United States, where 3 in 10 people believe that the Bible provides literal truth.) I’ve started to wonder: how different are British and American attitudes toward dictionaries, and to what extent can those differences be attributed to the two nations’ relationships with the written word?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Girl Speaks Gibberish With Perfect Accents To Show What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014...

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19-year-old Finnish YouTube user Sara is here to unveil the mystery. Although she is speaking total gibberish, her spot-on accents give us a clue as to how you might sound to someone who doesn't speak your language. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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nice... esp. for prank calling (add fake static). - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How we stopped speaking Yiddish http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...

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"In 1980, the five most common non-English languages spoken in the United States were (in order): Spanish, Italian, German, French and Polish. Thirty years later, the top five are (in order): Spanish, Chinese, French, Tagalog and Vietnamese." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"That change, documented by the U.S. Census and flagged for us by Drew DeSilver of the Pew Research Center, provides a telling window into the demographic changes in the country over the past few decades. Check out this chart that details how the 17 most common non-English languages in 1980 have fared over the past 30 years. (Click the chart for a bigger image.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Etymology of 'beggar', part 2: A connection to Beguines? | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"The final sentence in the essay posted in January was not a statement but a question. We had looked at several hypotheses on the origin of the verb beg and found that none of them carried conviction. It also remained unclear whether beg was a back formation on beggar or whether beggar arose as a noun agent from the verb. Today we will examine the ideas connecting beggar with the religious order of the Beguines." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It is exciting to read how he explores possible explanations that finally turn out to be the wrong track or can't be proved right or wrong. It must be frustrating though that it is often impossible to achieve reliable results. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Abstracta Iranica - Revue bibliographique pour le domaine irano-aryen - http://abstractairanica.revues.org/

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"Abstracta Iranica est une revue de bibliographie sélective et critique pour le monde irano-aryen, publiée en supplément annuel à la revue Studia Iranica par l’Institut français de recherche en Iran ; elle rend compte des travaux concernant tous les aspects de la culture et de la civilisation iraniennes, des origines à nos jours. Les travaux recensés sont sélectionnés parmi les publications de l’année précédente, et présentés par des chercheurs." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Man Behind The Dialect Quiz | Here & Now : Bert Vaux - http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014...

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"“It started when I began teaching at Harvard in the mid-’90s. I wanted to be able to figure out where people were from who didn’t have a noticeable accent — and that would include you. So I started researching what people know about dialects of English, and I found out that everything that was available at that time was from the ’30s and ’40s and ’60s and it was largely collected from old white male farmers. And I decided to start collecting material that was relevant to speakers then, especially to students in my class.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"“I put that on my survey originally because many of my students had strong opinions about what dinner and supper meant. But when I actually ran the survey, I found there wasn’t any coherent regional distribution. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, dinner and supper are sort of randomly spread out, with a few exceptions. One is, people in the western U.S. generally only have dinner, not supper. And then people in the upper central part of the United States — North and South Dakota and Kansas — tend to respond that they have dinner and supper, but dinner is earlier than supper.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Etymology of 'beggar', 'bugger', and 'bigot', part 1 | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"The story of beg and beggar is full of dramatic moments. Both words surfaced at the same time (the mid-twenties of the thirteenth century), but no one knows which “begat” which. If it was the verb, one wonders why beggar was not spelled begger in the first place; beggar is the oldest (and the modern) form of the noun. Begger had great currency in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, but this variant must have been due to the belief that beggar originated as an agent noun; thus, a product of folk etymology. Assuming that beggar preceded beg, the verb will end up as an example of so-called back formation, like peddle from peddler or sculpt from sculptor." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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nice... - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - The international swap trade in useful words - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"Philip Durkin, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, showed how patterns of borrowed words reflect complex patterns of cultural contacts across the centuries - with more than 50 examples. Here he looks at readers' own favourite examples." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Lots of people turned their attention to borrowings that reflect British colonialism in South Asia. Mark (@neuropathik) imagines a scene where you "take off your jodhpurs, put on your pyjamas, and sit on the verandah of your bungalow". You could add to this scene some chintz curtains, a baby in a cot wearing dungarees snuggled under a shawl, its mother with freshly shampooed hair wearing a pashmina and a bangle or two - all in all very cushy or even pukka, unless the peace is disturbed by a passing juggernaut (originally an image of Krishna dragged through the streets on an enormous cart). It is interesting how early many of these words entered English, eg chintz (1614), pukka (1619), cot (1634), shawl (1662), bungalow (1676), dungaree (1696). Many of the South Asian borrowings that have entered everyday British English have first dates in the OED in the 1600s, 1700s, or early 1800s, rather than in the high days of Empire - but they have been followed in the 20th and 21st Centuries by a new wave of borrowings, including names of dishes such as rogan josh (1934), pasanda (1961), or jalfrezi (1979), as South Asian culture and cuisine have made their impact in Britain and elsewhere in the post-colonial era. Today English in India, like every other variety, has its own distinctive words and uses, not all of which result just from borrowing. Deepti Ruth Azariah points out how common prepone (bring forward, ie the opposite of postpone) is in Indian English. In the future, maybe this will spread to other varieties?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Robert Payne Smith’s 'Syriac Lexicon' | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"Dictionary projects can famously, and sometimes fatally, overrun. In the nineteenth century especially, dictionaries for the more recondite foreign languages of past and present (from Coptic to Sanskrit) were compiled by independent scholars, enthusiasts who were ready to dedicate their lives to a particular project. This may make for an exhaustively comprehensive text; it doesn’t make life easy for a publisher who needs to know when the book is going to be finished. And from the compiler’s point of view, it’s equally difficult. The passion needed to keep you going alone in the study with your pages of manuscript, is also what makes hard to recognize when it’s time to move on to the next entry. (The etymologist W. W. Skeat, who made it a personal rule not to spend more than three hours on one word, is a shining exception.)" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The clergyman and scholar Robert Payne Smith’s Syriac Lexicon was signed up in 1859. Peter Sutcliffe in his “Informal History” of Oxford University Press says that it was “thirty-three years in the press and the death of thirty-one compositors,” although it’s not clear quite how the second part of this calculation was made. The files show a number of attempts by the publishers either to rein the dictionary in, or speed up the editor. In 1871, the Delegates came up with a version of performance-related pay, with £50 to be paid on the annual publication of each fascicle. The original files show that “if possible” had been entered and then crossed out—presumably someone had a well-founded scepticism as to any positive effect." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistics Baking Part VI: The Labyrinth | res gerendae - http://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2014...

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"Just for a change, I thought this time I’d do a cake that isn’t strictly speaking linguistic, though it’s still epigraphic: the labyrinth tablet from Pylos." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Of course, what’s simultaneously frustrating and interesting about this is that it comes from Pylos – not Knossos, the home of the famous Labyrinth, built by Daedalus and inhabited by the Minotaur. We do, however, have some texts from Knossos that might add to the picture. KN Fp 1, a list of offerings of olive oil being sent to various sanctuaries, deities, and religious personnel, includes an entry da-da-re-jo-de, interpreted pretty plausibly as Daidaleion-de: ‘to the shrine of Daedalus’. Two other tablets (KN Gg 702 and Oa 745) have the entry da-pu2-ri-to-jo , po-ti-ni-ja, also a recipient of offerings. po-ti-ni-ja is clearly Potnia, ‘mistress/lady’, following a term in the genitive: so ‘Lady of the da-pu2-ri-to‘. And this second term is generally interpreted as laburinthos, the Labyrinth." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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