MetaFilter posts tagged with language and Linguistics

Na'vi

Dumsnill — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:45:31 -0800

Paul Frommer explains the Na'vi language he created for Avatar

That's what they said

escabeche — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:14:00 -0800

The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English is a searchable collection of almost 2 million words of transcribed spoken English from the University of Michigan, including student study groups, office hours, dissertation defenses, and campus tours. Researchers use the Michigan corpus to investigate questions about usage, like "less or fewer?" (cf. this contentious Ask Meta thread) and more general topics, like "Vague Language in Academia." Browse or search MICASE yourself.

Dell Hymes, 1927-2009

fourcheesemac — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:49:31 -0800

Dell Hymes, a giant of sociolinguistic theory, has died. "He didn't have much patience for wasting your time in academic endeavors that wouldn't have a direct relevance for the world and for righting some of the inequalities in the world," [Dr. Nancy] Hornberger said. Or as Dr. Hymes himself put it, describing his approach to anthropology: "I am always interested in combating elitism and narrowness. . . . The justification for the existence of anthropology is to find out about the world, not produce third-rate philosophers." Explore In Vain I Tried To Tell You on Google Books. Prof. Hymes' Web Page at the University of Virginia Jason Baird Jackson's thoughts on Prof. Hymes' passing. And we lost another major figure in the history of Native American Studies recently as well, at nearly the same age. Karl Kroeber, 1926-2009.

Goodbye, "Leih Hou Ma," Hello "Ni Hao Ma!"

zarq — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:57:09 -0800

"Chinatown" communities across the United States (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco) are undergoing a shift in linguistic identity, as recent immigrants are more likely to natively speak Mandarin (the official spoken language of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan,) instead of Cantonese. Also see these anecdotal reports about similar changes in Vancouver and Oakland, CA. Good news for the tri-literate: signs like this may soon become commonplace. :) The Language Atlas of China The PopUp Chinese Podcast and Arch Chinese site provide basic Mandarin lessons. Also see: Mango, ZhongWen and LiveMocha

With a little persistence... and Verner's Law!... you can tackle most any problem.

languagehat — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:12:43 -0800

Verner's Law. Ari Hoptman (his website) explains early Germanic sound laws to his young friend Frankie, who has tossed aside his copy of Braune’s Gothic grammar in disgust. If you want to know what makes historical linguists tick, this is a great way to find out. Warning: links to seven-minute YouTube with two sequels; disclaimer: I myself have a copy of Braune’s Gotische Grammatik within arm’s reach and I have spent time reading the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, so I may be especially susceptible to jokes about William Jones, the Brothers Grimm, and Danish linguists. (Via Wordorigins.org, and I will quote Dave Wilton's warning about the third segment: "This last video gets pretty dry, so unless you are really interested in the mechanisms of consonant shifts in early Germanic languages, you may want to skip ahead to the last two minutes.")

500 constructed languages.

escabeche — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:03:14 -0800

Amabil amico, Con grand satisfaction mi ha lect tei letter de le mundolingue. Arika Okrent, author of the new book In The Land of Invented Languages, lists 500 constructed languages, from the well-known (Esperanto, Volapuk, Loglan) to the utterly obscure (Neulatein, Rosentalographia, Mundolingue.) MetaFilter's own languagehat reviews the book. Okrent writes about Klingonophones in Slate. Alternatively, you might choose to learn not to speak Esperanto. Previously on MetaFilter, all you wanted to know about Loglan/Lojban but were too syntactically ambiguous to ask.

Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script

homunculus — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:05:24 -0800

Scholars at odds over mysterious Indus script. The Indus script is the collection of symbols found on artifacts from the Harappan civilization, which flourished in what is now eastern Pakistan and western India between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. A new analysis using pattern-analyzing software suggests that the script may constitute a genuine written language. [Via]

Death of the dirty word

weapons-grade pandemonium — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:43:14 -0800

Why would an evolutionary biologist study words? It turns out there is an astonishing parallel between the evolution of words in a lexicon and the evolution of genes in an organism. The word two, for example, has been around much longer than most, and will likely be with us for millennia, whereas the comparatively rare and recent word dirty has undergone many mutations, and will probably be extinct in a few hundred years. Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK, tells us why on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's program As It Happens. Pull slider to 16:00 to start the seven minute interview.

Fridge magnets in seven scripts

joeclark — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 13:47:26 -0800

Fridge magnets in seven scripts – Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Korean, Arabic, Devanagari. “Memo: Pick up bread at store”

Everything you wanted to know about pre-Columbian Central America but were afraid to ask lest your heart get ripped out and offered to Quetzalcoatl

Kattullus — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:49:00 -0800

The Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies is your one-stop shop for pre-Columbian Central America awesomeness. There are so, so many wondrous things on that site, I don't quite know where to begin. I suppose John Pohl's scholarly introduction is a natural place to start. But maybe you just don't have time to read anything and just want to dive into pretty, pretty pictures. Perhaps the most user-friendly databases are Justin Kerr's photographs Maya Vases (e.g. 1, 2, 3) and Pre-Columbian Portfolio (e.g. 1, 2a, 2b, 3). From there you can delve into the collection of Linda Schele's photographs (e.g. 1, 2) and drawings (e.g. 1, 2, 3). There are more image databases but let me direct you to the collection of old Maya, Aztec and Mixtec books which are simply stunning (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 [last link pdf]). You can read more about Mayan and Mixtec codices and download high resolution versions of the entire books. There are also Maya dictionaries, glyph guides, linguistic maps and a who's who. There is also classic Mayan and Aztec poetry in translation. I'm telling you, that's not even half of what this amazing site has to offer.

metaphors be with you

nickyskye — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:18:07 -0800

Link found between physical and emotional warmth l Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty. "Our mental processes are not separate and detached from the body". Sensory metaphors l The Metaphor Observatory, top 10 metaphors of 2007.

“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” –Ben Okri

iamkimiam — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:08:55 -0800

"Political content aside, the discussion provided a lovely example of how a term from literary theory has established itself in American political discourse." via Language Log

"We may expect the following. Language will be carefully crafted. Advertisements will focus on personal narratives. The campaign will employ “attack” advertisements that emotionally sway voters. Policy will be sketchy with vague descriptions that emotionally satisfy Americans while offering scant details. The emphasis will be on creating narratives that resonate with the values, beliefs, and identities of prospective voters."
– Literary Gulag, on Lakoff, Nunberg, Westen, and the narrative of the 2008 presidential election. "Party operatives have complained, again and again, about the absence of a compelling narrative. Stanley Greenberg, Democratic pollster, has credited Republicans with a “narrative that motivated their voters.” Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, has called for a “new narrative.” Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, has acknowledged that Republicans have “captured the narrative of social class.” Robert Reich has stated that Republican success in “the art of political narrative” has “exiled Democrats from politics itself.” Or as James Carville, lead strategist for the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign has noted, “They produce a narrative, we produce a litany” (14), For more than thirty years, Nunberg contends, Republicans have diverted class resentments rooted in economic inequalities to debating “values,” thereby ensuring that moral issues become part of the “core vocabulary of American political discourse” (15-16)." And of course, what post would be complete without a Wikipedia link about this new word for the old story.

What's nu?

Asparagirl — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:21:42 -0800

A linguist and a sociologist at Hebrew Union College have teamed up to track the inroads made into American English by words and idioms from traditionally Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and Hebrew. They've created an online survey and are looking for people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds to answer a few questions about their word choices, phrasing, and pronunciation. They're also trying to determine whether certain linguistic quirks usually attributed to Yiddish's influence are actually carried over from Jewish ancestors' speech patterns and accents, or whether they're merely an artifact from growing up in or near New York City. [via]

Errin' USA

Rhaomi — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:54:20 -0800

Immediately, Herson spotted an offense—a second-floor awning outside a tarot shop that advertised "Energy Stone's." They climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached a middle-age women with a quizzical expression. "We happened to notice the sign for energy stones," Deck said, "and there happens to be an extra apostrophe. 'Stone's' doesn't need the apostrophe."

"And?" she asked, her voice flat with annoyance.

"And we wanted to bring it to your attention," Deck said.

A look inside the daring lives of Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, vanguards of the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

Gab Zamgrh?

xthlc — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:32:08 -0800

Harmanz ha haz b bargan ahn za MMARBG Ahban Bahb [brahbazazzah ] ar zambahz. Zambahz haz AAGHZ g!bz gab azzar zambahz: a, b, g, h, m, n, r, z. Zambahz maz hab gab, za Zambahz zgrabbarh Zamgrh, a gab grh a gab bag, a grammah, n zhranzazzaz. Habganna barbaga zaarz grh za bra!nz?

Inshallah

Firas — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:51:07 -0800

"Hundreds of thousands of Americans have endured tours of duty in Iraq. They are returning home with a new word on their lips. It will have an impact on the American Experiment, inshallah."

A Theory of Humor | Why something is funny, why it sometimes is not, and when it crosses a line.

iamkimiam — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 11:48:27 -0800

Theory of Humor. A scientific paper, written by Tom Veatch, describes his Theory of Humor. When is something funny? When is it not funny? When does it cross the line? Why are puns generally shitty? And the mysterious and magical powers elephant jokes have on children, revealed! A great data set to use for practice in applying the theories presented in the paper can be found here.

That hokum recording of Bruckner's

Gyan — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 05:34:39 -0800

pronunciationguide - for aspiring classical radio announcers

The story of the strange language of the Pirahã

Kattullus — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:10:40 -0800

The story of the strange language of the Pirahã is just as much a story about the state of the field of linguistics. Professor Dan Everett of Illinois State University, who lived for decades with the Pirahã, first as a missionary, then as a linguist, believes Pirahã casts serious doubt upon Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. Chomskyites have started to fight back with a reassessment of Everett's famous paper on the Pirahã, where he claimed that the Pirahã "have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition." He also claims that it doesn't have recursion, a feature of language Chomsky recently claimed was the defining feature of human speech. Dan Everett has rebutted the Chomskyite reassessment of his work. Video interview with Professor Everett. [Pirahã previously covered on MetaFilter in 2004 and 2006]

Metafilter has a front page. This is a post. Post is on the front page. Post is about language.

Gyan — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 23:00:00 -0800

Recursion and Human Thought - Why the Piraha don't have numbers

¡Soy loco por McDonald's!

Bizurke — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 13:28:36 -0800

NJ Mayor calls Spanish-language ad "offensive." Linguistics professor Geoffrey Pollum says "Wtf, mate?"

Scots' speech for the glaikit

persona non grata — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:46:10 -0800

Losh! That's a stoater of a web site!

Backs to the future?

youarenothere — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:04:02 -0800

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all the world's studied cultures -- the past is ahead of them and the future behind. The morphologically-rich language, of which you can hear samples here, may also prove useful to computer scientists due to its unique ternary logic system.

Live here and now.

moonbird — Wed, 10 May 2006 04:27:08 -0800

Living without Numbers or Time...
The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists. [via aldaily.com]

[six + fish] [man] [rings] [head of a cow?]

anastasiav — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 07:23:53 -0800

The Indus Script Mystery: The ancient people of the Indus Valley left behind a mystery in their trash heaps -- the Indus script: a set of stylized characters (possibly a logophonetic script), which may or may not have been recently deciphered. (Probably not.) Some now believe (.pdf file) it is not even a written 'language' as we understand the term.