Linguistics

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Translating untranslatable words http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"For most language learners and lovers, translation is a hot topic. Should I translate new vocabulary into my first language? How can I say x in Japanese? Is this translated novel as good as the original? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told that Pushkin isn’t Pushkin unless he’s read in Russian, and I have definitely chastised my own students for anxiously writing out lengthy bilingual wordlists: Paola, you’ll only remember trifle if you learn it in context!" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Maitani, thank you very much -- I will read it as soon as I have *time* :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The derivation of the word 'road' | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"According to the original idea, road developed from Old Engl. rad “riding.” Its vowel was long, that is, similar to a in Modern Engl. spa. Rad belonged with ridan “to ride,” whose long i (a vowel like ee in Modern Engl. fee) alternated with long a by a rule. In the past, roads existed for riding on horseback, and people distinguished between “a road” and “a footpath.” But this seemingly self-evident etymology has to overcome a formidable obstacle: in Standard English, the noun road acquired its present-day meaning late (one can say very late). It was new or perhaps unknown even to Shakespeare. A Shakespeare glossary lists the following senses of road in his plays: “journey on horseback,” “hostile incursion, raid,” “roadstead,” and “highway” (“roadstead,” that is, “harbor,” needn’t surprise us, for ships were said to ride at anchor.) “Highway” appears as the last of the four senses because it is the rarest, but, as we will see, there is a string attached even to such a cautious statement. Raid is the Scots version of road (“long a,” mentioned above, developed differently in the south and the north; hence the doublets). In sum, road used to mean “raid” and “riding.” When English speakers needed to refer to a road, they said way, as, for example, in the Authorized Version of the Bible." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: Which Came First, the Word or the Gesture? - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"Susan Goldin-Meadow is a hero on this blog because her work is both serious and original. It fills a gap in our understanding. In 2008 she presented a report on gesture that has stayed with me. It made clear that gestures are a natural way of illustrating what is not included in a grammatical structure. For example, a person might say, "The plane ride was very…" and then illustrate the ride by moving the hand horizontally while simultaneously bouncing it up and down. Ever since that presentation I have been of the fixed opinion that gesture has, from speech's beginning, accompanied spoken words. So naturally I was pleased to see that Goldin-Meadow has published a paper titled "Widening the Lens" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – B (abstract; paper). It summarizes her work." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Abstract <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rstb.royalsocietyp... ; title="http://rstb.royalsocietyp... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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(Serbo-)Croatian: A Tale of Two Languages—Or Three? Or Four? - Languages Of The World | Languages Of The World - http://languagesoftheworld.info/europe...

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"With all the media brouhaha about Croatia’s ascension, one of our key issues at GeoCurrents has been largely ignored: the issue of the Croatian language. Multilingualism is central to the European Union’s cultural diversity. The European Commission employs a permanent staff of around 1,750 linguists, 600 staff interpreters, 3,000 freelance interpreters, and 600 support staff, making it one of the largest translation and interpretation services in the world. Still, this only amounts to some 25 staff interpreters per language, as the EU now has 24 official languages; their website allows one to read and/or hear a short text in Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish—and now Croatian as well.* But basic issues about what constitutes the Croatian language are far from settled." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I think that statement has some merit. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Indo-European Linguistics » Brill Online - http://booksandjournals.brillo...

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"The peer-reviewed journal Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) is devoted to the study of the ancient and medieval Indo-European languages from the perspective of modern theoretical linguistics. It provides a venue for synchronic and diachronic linguistic studies of the Indo-European languages and the Indo-European family as a whole within any theoretically informed or analytical framework. It also welcomes typological investigations, especially those which make use of cross-linguistic data, including that from non-Indo-European languages, as well as research which draws upon the findings of language acquisition, cognitive science, variationist sociolinguistics, and language contact." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Babel's Dawn: How Can You Recognize Language? - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"This is a blog about the origins of speech, but what began? How can we tell it when we see it? Parents usually say their children have started talking when they have a couple of words. Linguists tend to look for some hint of grammar. Some experts look for a favorite generative procedure. So there is room for argument even before we come up with a single fact about the beginnings." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"...But there is a long list of "design features" that characterize human language. In the 1950s and 60s the linguist Charles Hockett worked out a list of properties that, taken as a whole, were supposedly unique to language, and the list has become one of the commonsense tests of language origins. If your theory ends up with something that includes Hockett's properties, you may be onto something; if not, not. Since Hockett's day some of these properties have been identified in animal communications. Three persist as unique to humans. They are:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Hellespont Project: Integrating Arachne and Perseus. - http://hellespont.dainst.org/startpa...

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"The Hellespont Project: Integrating Arachne and Perseus. As a partner of the German Archaeological Institute, the CoDArchLab cooperates with the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University to combine the digital collections of classical studies of both institutions. Thus one of the most comprehensive and free online collections of Greek and Roman antiquity will be available for public and scientific use." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"The basis of the Hellespont Project is the combination of text and object data using the metadata format CIDOC CRM. The CRM mapping of the Arachne database is part of other projects of the CoDArchLab carried out at the moment. The use of CIDOC CRM to map ancient text content in order to build a bridge to other types of sources is a methodological innovation." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The peculiar history of cows in the OED | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014...

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"The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has hundreds of words that relate to cows. For most English speakers, the idea that anyone would need so many words for one specific animal probably seems absurd. Especially cows. Perhaps it’s their mysterious ubiquity throughout children’s books and TV shows or just the dull empty look in their eyes, but it’s easy to assume, as a casual observer, that there really isn’t much going on there." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"On a linguistic front, however, you’d be quite mistaken. Here is just a small taste of the strange and fascinating world of cow terminology:" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Zeitschrift für Indologie und - Inhalt - Zeitschriften der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft - MENAdoc-Sammlung - http://menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/dmg...

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"Zeitschrift für Indologie und Iranistik / hrsg. im Auftr. der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. Leipzig : [Brockhaus [in Komm.], 1922 - 1936" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How children categorize living things -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Name everything you can think of that is alive." How would a child respond to this question? Would his or her list be full of relatives, animals from movies and books, or perhaps neighborhood pets? Would the poppies blooming on the front steps make the list or the oak tree towering over the backyard? The children's responses in a recent study revealed clear convergences among distinct communities but also illuminated differences among them." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Dilbilim 11: LAVANTA AKSANI: Dünyanın her lisanında bulunan, toplumun genelinde efemine addedildiği için eşcinsel taklitlerinde homofobik aşağılama vesilesi olarak kullanılan Erkek Eşcinsel aksanları, uzun süredir Sosyolengüistik'in favori konularından. Çıkan kısmın özeti kıvamında bkz. ekteki makale

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2015 konferansı <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.american.edu/c... ; title="http://www.american.edu/c... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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abi makale zaten literatür özeti - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Prêt à Analyser | Caxton - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2014...

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"The humblest text can be a fruitful hunting ground." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"This napkin is 100% recyclable (Pret’s sustainability department is militant, we’re making headway). If Pret staff get all serviette-ish and hand you huge bunches of napkins (which you don’t need or want) please give them the evil eye. Waste not want not’" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien TITUS http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/indexd...

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Babel's Dawn: Forget Communication; Study Cognition - http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_...

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"Leonard Talmy is an interesting fellow who has spent the past several decades exploring the way languages express thoughts. Can we have thoughts that we cannot express verbally? Many poets spend their lives trying to express the inexpressible. We know too that there are many ideas which can be expressed mathematically, but not verbally. How about the reverse; are there things we can think in words but not in other ways?" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"For instance, language allows us to think it terms of what grammarians call mood. Talmy calls this a topic's "reality status." That's something not included in mathematical expressions. English allows us to distinguish between, "As I am king, I will name an aircraft carrier after you," and, "If I were king, I would name an aircraft carrier after you." Equations, by contrast, are all in a neutral mood, meaning they may or may not assert something true about the world." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Historical Thesaurus of English - http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/

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"The Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the semantic development of the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It is the first historical thesaurus ever produced for any language, containing almost every word in English from Old English to the present day. Of major interest to historians, philologists, linguists, and the general reader, the Thesaurus is an unrivalled resource for the historical study of the language. It is based on a comprehensive analysis of English as found in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and A Thesaurus of Old English (for words restricted to the Old English period of c.700-1150 AD). All these words and their dates of recorded use are displayed within a detailed semantic framework, offering a fascinating picture of the development of the vocabulary of English from its origins in Anglo-Saxon times to the present." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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BBC News - English explodes in India - and it's not just Hinglish - http://www.bbc.com/news...

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"Anyone who travels beyond Delhi and Mumbai to India's provincial cities will notice English words cropping up increasingly in Hindi conversation. While some of these terms fell out of use in the UK decades ago, others are familiar, but used in bold new ways." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Picture the scene. I'm chatting to a young man named Yuvraj Singh. He's a college student in the Indian city of Dehra Dun. We're talking in Hindi. But every so often there's an English word. It's Hindi, Hindi, Hindi, and then suddenly an English word or phrase is dropped in: "job", "love story" or "adjust"." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How to Teach Old Ears New Tricks - Scientific American - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article...

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"Why We Can't Learn Like Kids Most of us English speakers can't tell the difference between Seung, Seong and Sung now, but back when we were babies we could. A large body of work shows that babies possess a remarkable ability to distinguish all sounds in all languages. But between six and 12 months of age, they begin homing in on their native language's sounds. They become experts in their own language, and as a consequence they lose their facility with the unfamiliar sounds of foreign languages. As it turns out, it's challenging to regain that ability." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Some of the best data on this phenomenon come from studies of Japanese adults learning to hear the difference between r and l. Why the Japanese? For one, because the r-versus-l problem is notorious; Japanese speakers tend to do little better than chance when attempting to tell their rocks from their locks. Second, they know they have this difficulty, and many will happily volunteer to come into a research laboratory—whereas English speakers do not care much about learning the difference between Hindi's four nearly identical-sounding d's." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Spirits of Orality http://genealogyreligion.net/spirits...

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"As university students today well know, power-point obsessed lecturers have internalized the idea, drawn from evolutionary biology, that the primary mode of perception for primates is vision. As university students today also well know, this modern pedagogical axiom can suck the life right out of a room. Back in ancient times, or in the 1980s when I first attended university, only the dullest of lecturers required anything so fancy as plastic slides on an overhead projector. Everything was oral, chalkboards were sufficient, and it was wonderful. Or at least I thought it was, the occasional droning aside. My how things have changed. Today it would be unthinkable to deliver a lecture without the aid or crutch of power-point. If the slides are especially busy, students need pay no mind to the babbling person, or reader, who advances them." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy <a rel="nofollow" href="http://occupytampa.org/fi... ; title="http://occupytampa.org/fi... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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“In the Ukraine”? “In Ukraine”? “On Ukraine”?—Clarifying the Issue - Languages Of The World | Languages Of The World - http://languagesoftheworld.info/russia-...

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"As was noted above, some Ukrainians think that the use of the definite article with the name of their country makes it sound as if Ukraine is not a sovereign state. This idea, however, is mistaken. A number of current and former names of sovereign states, including those of the two Cold War superpowers, contain “the”: the United States and the Soviet Union. Note also the Netherlands, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the People’s Republic of China. Some writers have suggested that the definite article is used with sovereign state names only if they are plural. This stipulation might be said to work for the United States, the Netherlands and the Philippines, but “the United States” has generally been conceived as a singular entity since the Civil War (before the 1860s, one would usually write “the United States are…,” whereas since that time the correct usage is “the United States is…” Other countries that take the definite article in English, moreover, are always framed as singular. A second exception seems to be island nations, like the Philippines and the United Kingdom (note that the Philippines also falls under the first category of plural toponyms, but not the United Kingdom, which is grammatically singular, a point completely missed by Zezima). The third exception appears to be names of states containing the word republic: the Federal Republic of Germany the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the People’s Republic of China (all of which are neither plural nor an island). Yet none of the three patterns explain the Soviet Union or the USSR. Thus the only reasonable conclusion is that the presence or absence of the definite article with country names is a lexical matter: the is or is not a part of a country name on an idiosyncratic basis. Therefore, there is nothing inherently offensive in saying the Ukraine." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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When it comes to numbers, culture counts -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"A new study finds that in a Bolivian rainforest society, children learn to count just like in the US, but on a delayed timetable." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Scientists have also seen this pattern in children raised speaking other languages, including Japanese and Russian. In all of these industrialized nations, number learning begins around age 2, and children fully understand numbers and counting by the age of 4 or 5." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Master Metaphor List http://araw.mede.uic.edu/~alansz...

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First Edition Compiled By George Lakoff, Jane Espenson, and Adele Goldberg August, 1989 Second Edition Compiled By George Lakoff, Jane Espenson, and Alan Schwartz Cognitive Linguistics Group University of California at Berkeley October, 1991" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; She is a favourite writer of mine, and I was lucky enough to sit on a panel with her a couple of years ago. I think it's the same Jane - I'm going to check! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Writing In The 21st Century | Edge.org - a Conversation with Steven Pinker - http://edge.org/convers...

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"All languages contain elegant, powerful, logical rules for combining words in such a way that the meaning of the combination can be deduced from the meanings of the words and the way they're arranged. If I say "the dog bit the man" or "the man bit the dog," you have two different images, because of the way those words are ordered by the rules of English grammar." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Great stuff -- I became instantly engrossed. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Enuf or Enough? Why Is English Spelling So Random? http://blog.dictionary.com/spellin...

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No Ataturk to reform it for us ;) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

LOL - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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per·e·grine [per-i-grin, -green, -grahyn] adjective 1. foreign; alien; coming from abroad. 2. wandering, traveling, or migrating.

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I didn't know that! :o - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It seems so, yes :) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How did writing begin? | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"How did writing begin? The favoured explanation, until the Enlightenment in the 18th century, was divine origin. Today, many—probably most—scholars accept that the earliest writing evolved from accountancy, though it is puzzling that such accounts are little in evidence in the surviving writing of ancient Egypt, India, China, and Central America (which does not preclude commercial record-keeping on perishable materials such as bamboo in these early civilizations). In other words, some time in the late 4th millennium bc, in the cities of Sumer in Mesopotamia, the ‘cradle of civilization’, the complexity of trade and administration reached a point where it outstripped the power of memory among the governing elite. To record transactions in an indisputable, permanent form became essential." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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