Linguistics

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BBC News - Nobel Prize: How English beat German as language of science - http://www.bbc.com/news...

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""If you look around the world in 1900, and someone told you, 'Guess what the universal language of science will be in the year 2000', you would first of all laugh at them. It was obvious that no one language would be the language of science, but a mixture of French, German and English would be the right answer," says Princeton University's Rosengarten professor of modern and contemporary history Michael Gordin." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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There were still a few books on Regelungstechnik floating around my institute when I was in university, but most people of my generation aren't literate enough in German to easily make use such textbooks. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Ashoka Project on the Bibliotheca Polyglotta - http://www2.hf.uio.no/polyglo...

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"This Library contains an edition of Ashoka’s inscriptions ordered into ten types1 as seen in the meny on the left. The texts are so far based upon Hultzsch (1925). The page will also publish the rest of the known inscriptions, and, further, images and secondary materials on the topic for both edicational needs and research. The development of the library is a cooperation between indological milieus at Texas University, Austin, and at Oslo University. Below is a project description which is the basis of the cooperation. Other contacts are also being made to build the site further. The persons involoved so far are: Joel Brereton, Donald R.Davis, Oliver Freiberger, Janice Leoshko, Patrick Olivelle, Texas University; Ute Hüsken, Jens Braarvig, Oslo University." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Bibliotheca Polyglotta - http://www2.hf.uio.no/polyglo...

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"The Bibliotheca Polyglotta (BP) is a multilingual corpus of historically important texts. As such it is a resource to access the global history of concepts as displayed in a number of languages, and it demonstrates how concepts diffuse historically into new languages, and thus into new cultural contexts. The BP is in a phase of being constructed, and contains so far the following libraries: - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"One can search any word or phrase in the corpus or in a chosen set of texts and have the search results written out, and further access any search result in its sentence by sentence multilingual mode by clicking on the reference in the search result. Every sentence in the BP has a Permanent link as a unique identification. The permanent link may be extracted by clicking on "Permanent link" on the bottom of the screen, and may be used as a reference to access the multilingual record which it refers to." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Barrier of Meaning « Another Word For It - http://tm.durusau.net/?p=56846

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"The author discusses the “AI-problem” with Stanislaw Ulam. Ulam makes reference to the history of the “AI-problem” and then continues:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://phdtree.org/pdf/46... ; title="http://phdtree.org/pdf/46... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language and History in Southeast Asia: An Interview with Gérard Diffloth | Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University - http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/2014...

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"Professor Gérard Diffloth is a leading figure in Southeast Asian linguistics, specializing in the languages of the Austroasiatic family that includes Khmer, Vietnamese and many other languages spoken not only in the countries of Southeast Asia, but also northeast India, Southern China and the Nicobar Islands. His main work has been concerned with elaborating the linguistic history of the region. He and Nathan Badenoch are working on a group of small and endangered languages spoken in northern Laos. This interview arises out of an exchange on this project and other work related to it during Prof Diffloth’s recent stay as a Visiting Scholar at CSEAS." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: The History Of The English Language In One Chart http://zite.to/1rN4adQ via Sean McBride http://friendfeed.com/seanmcb...

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.online-literat... ; title="http://www.online-literat... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

this diagram is confusing me. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Evolution: Twos and Troops: Sifting the Evidence - http://langevo.blogspot.de/2014...

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"Jakobson’s remark about a possible connection between Russian čët and četýre is discussed in Blažek (1999: 212-213) and especially in Greenberg (2001). Both authors mention earlier, more sketchy treatments of the problem, and they both add more Slavic material to the Russian words originally listed by Jakobson (which were čët, čëtka ‘even number’, četá ‘pair, union’, and čeť ‘quarter’). Blažek also notes an interesting potential cognate in Ossetian, an Indo-European language spoken in the north-central Caucasus (Ossetian is the only living descendant of the Northeast Iranian languages once spoken by the Scytho-Sarmatian inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe belt). The word in question is cæd ‘pair of oxen yoked together’, as if from Proto-Iranian *čatā (the Digor dialect of Ossetian has preserved a more conservative disyllabic form of the word, cædæ)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Blažek does not follow up Jakobson’s suggestion (presumably because he favours a different etymology of ‘four’, proposed by Schmid 1989; see pp. 213, 215, 331 in Blažek’s book). Greenberg, however, regards it as convincing and develops it further. Like Blažek, he considers the predominantly South Slavic *četa ‘troop, military unit’ (hence Serbo-Croatian Četnici ‘Chetniks’) to be part of the word-family of čët, and tries to explain the accentual difference between the end-stressed word četá (< *četa̍) in Russian and the root-stressed South Slavic forms – Bulgarian čéta, Serbian/Croatian čȅta, Slovene čẹ́ta (< *čèta) – in order to defend their common origin." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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On Dr Zhivago, Genitive Case of Adjectives, and the 1918 Russian Orthography Reform - Languages Of The World | Languages Of The World - http://languagesoftheworld.info/writing...

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"Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is one of the better-known works of Russian literature in the West. In a recent article about the novel in the London Review of Books, Frances Stonor Saunders writes: “‘Zhivago’, in the pre-revolutionary genitive case, means ‘the living one’. On the novel’s first page a hearse is being followed to the grave. ‘Whom are you burying?’ the mourners are asked. ‘Zhivago’ is the reply, punningly suggesting ‘him who is living’.”" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"I have been asked to comment on the first sentence of that quote: has the Russian system of cases changed in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917? After all, political upheavals often bring with them changes in the more superficial aspects of language, such as the orthography and the vocabulary, but grammatical innovations being decided on by a revolutionary government’s decree? That would be a much more peculiar event." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Peculiar Journey of "Orange" : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - by Ben Zimmer - http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm...

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"In the latest installment of the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, I take on a word that every child knows, orange, and reveal its hidden history. It's a remarkably well-traveled word, and its travels tell us a great deal about the cultural history of many of the world's great civilizations. You can listen to the podcast here:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The question that immediately came up had a less-than-obvious answer: Which came first, the color orange or the fruit orange?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Announcing the Arethusa Annotation Framework http://sites.tufts.edu/perseus...

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"Developers Gernot Höflechner, Robert Lichtensteiner and Christof Sirk, in collaboration with the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts (via the Libraries and the Transformation of the Humanities and Perseids projects) and the University of Leipzig’s Open Philology Project, have released Arethusa, a framework for linguistic annotation and curation. Arethusa was inspired by and extends the goals of the Alpheios Project, to provide a highly configurable, language-independent, extensible infrastructure for close-reading, annotation, curation and exploration of open-access digitized texts. While the initial release highlights support for morpho-syntactic annotation, Arethusa is designed to allow users to switch seamlessly between a variety of annotation and close-reading activities, facilitating the creation of sharable, reusable linguistic data in collaborative research and pedagogical environments." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Evolution: Even and Odd - http://langevo.blogspot.de/2014...

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"This game is not only simple, but also as old as the hills. The Romans played it, and so did the Greeks and their gods. It was played with whatever could be concealed in one’s hand: astragaloi (“knucklebones”), nuts, coins, or pebbles. The game, in some ways ancestral to roulette, was called pār impār ‘equal-unequal’ in Latin. The Greeks called it artiasmós, or ártia ḕ perittà ‘even or odd’, or zugà ḕ ázuga ‘pairs or non-pairs’. It was so popular among the Greeks that a special verb, artíazō, was coined to mean ‘play at even and odd’." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language Evolution: Word of the Month: Proto-Indo-European ‘Four’ - http://langevo.blogspot.de/2014...

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"The Proto-Indo-European numeral ‘four’ had several intriguing properties. It was the largest non-complex cardinal number that agreed grammatically with a noun it modified. Consequently, it was inflected for gender and case, like any ordinary adjective. It shared that property with the words for ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘three’. For obvious semantic reasons, their declension was defective: ‘one’ was normally singular, ‘two’ was declined only in the dual number, and ‘three’ and ‘four’ only in the plural." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The basic forms of the numeral ‘4’ (as reconstructed in handbooks) were the animate “count plural” *kʷetwores and the inanimate (neuter) “collective plural” *kʷetwōr (from earlier *kʷetwor-h₂). There is some uncertainty about the accentuation of these forms: some reconstruct them with PIE stress on the first syllable, others on the second (the comparative evidence is not unambiguous)." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Linguistic Utopia :: John QUIJADA's invented language strives to be maximally precise and very concise, The New Yorker (2012) - http://www.newyorker.com/magazin...

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Utterly amazing from a DMV guy... worth reading if you are interested in analytical philosophy: what the practice of early Wittgenstein might mean in a "conventional" language, to the implications of the private language argument, then back to trying to express the ineffable in ordinary experience. For gaps in meanings, along the way we get to actually encounter Lakoff at his Berkeley home: metaphor is in the idea and can't be wished away with grammar (ontology embedded in language as revealed by the taxonomy behind word units). [Thanks @maitani for showing me this article :-] - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Even before _Philosophical Investigations_, Wittgenstein had thought about the verification problem of whether a mentioned color in a conversation was in fact the same to participants, cf. Blue and Brown notebooks. (Only the rotational shift in their color wheels needs to be consistent during the conversation :-) -- but more generally see "trippy" <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.quora.com/Wha... ; title="https://www.quora.com/Wha... ; So, so much for conciseness, and what were we talking about? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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From Bactria to Taxila | A database of ressources on Hellenistic and Imperial Central Asian studies - http://frombactriatotaxila.wor...

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"The web is a fantastic tool, whose applications and implications are progressing at an exponential rate. So are the studies on Hellenistic and Imperial Central Asia, that really have begun to develop in the 70s and are increasing since the last twenty years. Websites dealing with ancient Central Asia exist, as well as digitized version of books, articles and reviews on the subject. But, even at the dawn of the “semantic web”, they are dispatched and thinly spread, the consequences being a great difficulty for everyone to find them and, often, the frustration to find digitized sources in a later stage, way after it would be needed." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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via Ancientworldonline <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ancientworldonline... ; title="http://ancientworldonline... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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One planet, one language: Science fiction versus earth linguistic diversity - http://www.slate.com/blogs...

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In fact, as you look at language-users in science fiction, from the Kzinti of Larry Niven's Known Space to the bugs of Starship Troopers to all the aliens in Star Wars and beyond, though they may command a vast space-faring empire across many cubic light years of territory and billions if not billions of billions of sapient speaking beings, they never seem to command more than a handful of languages. By contrast, on our lone watery rock in a measly little corner of the galaxy, we Earthlings have thousands of languages with perhaps tens of thousands of dialects . Looks like sci-fi writers have really screwed up, huh? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It still cracks me up that Futurama ran with the fact that a Frenchman like Jean-Luc Picard spoke English and had an English accent and concluded that French was no longer a living language. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How languages evolve - Alex Gendler - YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Babel's Dawn: A Breakthrough Paper - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"The story of language and its origins that has been emerging on this blog is fairly simple: Members of the human lineage began using words when a population became communal enough to trust one another with shared knowledge. Those first language users differed from their ancestors in the nature of their community, not in the acquisition of some new verbal skill. Once populations of language users became competitive, selection pressures to enrich language functions grew stronger and new verbal abilities did evolve. The competition à enrichment cycle persisted and continued to produce expanded verbal abilities." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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More on Basic and Extended Syntax <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.babelsdawn.com... ; title="http://www.babelsdawn.com... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Origins of Yiddish—A Response to Philologos, Part http://languagesoftheworld.info/histori...

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"The Jewish Daily Forward has recently published a four-part essay by “Philologos” on the origins of Yiddish (see here, here, here, and here). While the essay is well-researched and superbly written, I do feel that some clarifications, corrections, and a more in-depth look at some aspects of this problem are in order. Inspired by both Philologos’ original essay and the Jewish Passover tradition revolving around the number four, this response is quadripartite. I begin by summarizing the four (!) hypotheses relating to the origin of Yiddish reviewed by Philologus." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Kendra, if it interests you, I really recommend having a look at Asya's article. She is absolutely on top of things, and at the same time entertaining. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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CLICS Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications - http://clics.lingpy.org/main...

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"CLICS is an online database of synchronic lexical associations ("colexifications", see here for more information) in currently 221 language varieties of the world. Large databases offering lexical information on the world's languages are already readily available for research in different online sources. However, the information on tendencies of meaning associations they enshrine is not easily extractable from these sources themselves. This is why CLICS was created. It is designed to serve as a data source for work in lexical typology, diachronic semantics, and research in cognitive science that focuses on natural language semantics from the viewpoint of cross-linguistic diversity. Furthermore, CLICS can be used as a helpful tool to assess the plausibility of semantic connections between possible cognates in the establishment of genetic relations between languages." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"In the context of CLICS, we use the term colexification (coined by François 2008[PDF]) to refer to the situation when two or more of the meanings in our lexical sources are covered in a language by the same lexical item. For instance, we would say that Russian рука colexifies ‘hand’ and ‘arm’, that is, concepts that are semantically related to each other. Roughly spoken, colexification can correspond either to polysemy or semantic vagueness in lexical semantic analyses. Since we have not performed such analyses that would allow us to further discriminate between the two, we chose colexification as a label that deliberately does not make a commitment with regard to this distinction. However, we offer measures to rule out effects of accidental homonymy." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Your Brain on Metaphors - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/article...

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"It sounds like a question that only a linguist could love. But neuroscientists have been trying to answer it using exotic brain-scanning technologies. Their findings have varied wildly, in some cases contradicting one another. If they make progress, the payoff will be big. Their findings will enrich a theory that aims to explain how wet masses of neurons can understand anything at all. And they may drive a stake into the widespread assumption that computers will inevitably become conscious in a humanlike way." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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If you are interested in the topic, you should read the two articles; they complement each other. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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PLOS Biology: How Could Language Have Evolved? - http://www.plosbiology.org/article...

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"The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language “phenotype.” According to the “Strong Minimalist Thesis,” the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Recursive concatenation of 0 and 1 will, under proper interpretation, yield Borges' infinite library of all books, from the past and into the future. Sound familiar? - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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From marvellous to awesome: how spoken British English has changed | Science | The Guardian - http://www.theguardian.com/science...

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"A study called the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 reveals how our use of language is evolving. Is British English succumbing to American influence?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I like to listen to these various dialects and accents, too. It is just a matter of finding the time for it all. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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xkcd: Writing Skills - http://xkcd.com/1414/

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"I'd like to find a corpus of writing writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)–and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Language Log on Needs more Sexting <a rel="nofollow" href="http://languagelog.ldc.up... ; title="http://languagelog.ldc.up... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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languagehat.com : Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch Online. - http://languagehat.com/franzos...

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"I was just informed (thanks, Valery!) that if I followed etymonline on Facebook I would know that “he posted today that Wartburg’s Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch is now available/searchable online.” I have now “liked” the FB page, and I pass on to you both the suggestion and the link — I presume there are other people than me out there who 1) are interested in French etymology and 2) didn’t already know." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Wartburg’s Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch <a rel="nofollow" href="https://apps.atilf.fr/lec... ; title="https://apps.atilf.fr/lec... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Carried Away: 9 Words About Wind - http://dictionary.reference.com/slidesh...

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A handful of words that we use to talk about wind are variations on names from classical mythology. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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