Sidebar
Linguistics
UPDATE, 2024/JAN/17: this address has been locked so mods only can post. Use the new one. ___________ This comm is being moved to !linguistics@mander.xyz (Lemmy link) or /m/linguistics@mander.xyz (Kbin link). Same old topic, same old rules, same old mod. Different instance, focused on sciences. That's it. A few additional points: * Since the new instance only defederates other two instances, access shouldn't be a concern. * I'll keep modding both addresses concurrently, until 19/February/2024 ([August Schleicher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Schleicher)'s birthday), to give people enough time to migrate. In the meantime you can post in either but I'd like to ask users to use the !linguistics@mander.xyz address instead. If you believe that it's worth keeping !linguistics@lemmy.ml as a separated community, *and* wishes to moderate it, please say so in this thread. Or wait until the migration is over and ask lemmy.ml admins, whichever you prefer.
I've tried looking for this project all over Libgen, Internet Archive and similar sites, but could not find it anywhere. I was only able to come across a Reddit post with the physical copies of the book.
Interesting paper, about the alleged ability of LLMs\* to judge the grammaticality of sentences - something that humans are rather good at. Eight phenomena were tested, and LLMs performed extremely poorly. \*LLM = large language model. Stuff like Bard, ChatGPT, LLaMa etc. I'd argue that they aren't actual language models due to the absence of a semantic component, as shown by the article.
I'm creating this thread to hopefully promote a bit more activity in the community. If you want to talk about something Linguistics-related, but for some reason you don't want to create a new post just for that, feel free to post it here instead.
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/4507295 > Institution: MIT > Lecturer: Prof. Norvin A. Richards > University Course Code: MIT 24.900 > Subject: #linguistics > Description: > This class provides some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Throughout the course, we examine a number of ways in which human language is a complex but law-governed mental system. Much of the class is devoted to studying some core aspects of this system in detail; we also spend individual classes discussing a number of other issues, including how language is acquired, how languages change over time, language endangerment, and others.
Even if not solid research, I think that this article is worth sharing as food for though. The author mentions Duncan's five faces of poverty (material, social, spiritual, aspirational and identity), then focuses on the later two, and proposes that language also plays a role in social poverty. Superficially it might seen that the author proposes "replacive bilingualism" (i.e. linguicide) as a solution for this problem; he doesn't, he is mentioning it to highlight how individuals seek to address this linguistic poverty. Make sure to give a check to the references cited - there's a lot of good stuff there.
news.mit.edu
The article shows a case of language contact (Tsimané vs. Spanish) triggering the conceptual split of a colour into two.
The word éxito in Spanish (and cognates in other iberian romance languages) has the meaning of success, but it is a cognate of English "exit". According to Wiktionary, they all come from Latin "exitus", which is a participle of "exire", which literally means "to go out/outside, to exit, to leave". Also on the Wiktionary page for this word is someone asking about this apparent semantic shift in Spanish, which got me wondering as well. Further googling only told me that it's not just Spanish but also Galician and Portuguese, possibly more. Does anyone have information on how this shift developed? Or is the written evidence we have so poor that it might just as well have suddenly acquired the current meaning overnight as gradually over several generations and we wouldn't be able to tell?
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Linguist Marina Yaguello traces the myths, legends, and religious narratives that have shaped humanity's understanding of the origins of language.
theconversation.com
The languages in the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world’s population. This group includes a huge number of languages, ranging from English and Spanish to Russian, Kurdish and Persian. Ever since the discovery, over two centuries ago, that these languages belong to the same family, philologists have worked to reconstruct the first Indo-European language (known as Proto-Indo-European) and establish a “language family tree”, where branches represent the evolution and separation of languages over time. This approach draws on phylogenetics – the study of how biological species evolve – which also provides the most appropriate model for describing and quantifying the historical relationships between languages. Despite numerous studies, many questions still remain as to the origin of Indo-European: where was the original Indo-European language spoken in prehistoric times? How long ago did this language group emerge? How did it spread across Eurasia?
www.youtube.com
A great video explaining why the standard English vowel transcription system is outdated. [Invidious link](https://yewtu.be/watch?v=gtnlGH055TA)
Fluency in ‘inglese farlocco’ has become necessary in Italy as hybrid words and off-kilter meanings proliferate.
phys.org
As Evile and Pesetsky show in a newly published paper, "whom of which" obeys very specific rules, whose nature contributes to a larger discussion about sentence construction. The paper, "Wh-which relatives and the existence of pied piping," appears this month in the journal Glossa. "It seems to be brand new, and it's very colloquial, but it's extremely law-governed," says Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT.
I was discussing this with my fiance, and she agreed with me in that she also speaks English in this manner. I have found that, at least personally, I tend to speak several common homonyms in English in distinct ways: bear/bare, they're/there, where/ware. It's difficult to describe the differences in a concise way, but I'll do my best, and maybe use IPA where applicable, assuming I'm not using them incorrectly? The traditional pronunciation of **bare** is [ˈbɛr]. I would completely agree with this, and while the dictionary might also say **bear** is pronounced this way, I would argue that I often hear it more as [ˈber] — a more closed sound with the lips pulled back in a smile. Sure, sometimes people will lazily say both in the same manner, but if I say [ˈber], the listener is going to recognize in a vacuum that I am speaking of the furry mammal, not the term to describe a naked person. Similarly, **there** is rendered as [ðɚ]. **There** is a perfect rhyme with **bare**. I agree with this. However, **they're** is given the treatment of being a contraction of "they are", and it similarly has that closed sounded [e] instead of [ə]. Am I crazy, or does anyone else out there experience English this way?
www.newsweek.com
without the filler: >Excavations have been taking place at Boğazköy-Hattusha for more than century under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). >Around 30,000 clay tablets have been found at the site to date, which have shed light on various aspects of life during the Hittite period, according to the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. The tablets contain inscriptions in cuneiform—what is generally considered to be the oldest known writing system. Developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, cuneiform is a script that was used to write several languages of the ancient Near East. >Most of the inscriptions found at Boğazköy-Hattusha record the extinct Hittite language, which is the oldest attested member of the Indo-European family. Other languages, such as Luwian and Palaic, are also represented at the site. >However, excavations conducted this year, led by professor Dr. Andreas Schachner of the DAI's Istanbul Department, surprisingly uncovered a recitation of a previously unknown extinct language. The language was hidden on a cuneiform tablet containing a ritual text written in Hittite. The Hittite ritual text refers to the lost tongue as the language of the land of Kalašma, an area that likely corresponds to where the towns of Bolu or Gerede in northern Turkey are located today. >"The new language was written in cuneiform," Schachner told Newsweek. "It is the same writing system the Hittites used. The text is part of a longer text starting in Hittite. As it continues it says at one point: 'Continue in the language of the Land [of] Kalašma.'" >"The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages," Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, said in a press release. >The recently discovered language remains largely incomprehensible. However, Professor Elisabeth Rieken with the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, a specialist in Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the Kalasmaic tongue belongs to the Indo-European family, according to Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. EDIT: a more readable article with some other details here - https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/
piped.video
This video offers a nice introduction on the comparative method, used to reconstruct languages without direct attestation, and then talks a bit about the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. It's full of examples and rather accessible, even for people not well-versed in Historical Linguistics (or even Linguistics).
This is a question I've been wondering for a while, but no matter how much I search, I just can't find any relevant results. I'm hoping that the people of this community can provide some resources about this topic, or if nothing else some interesting conjecture or discussion. The sort of specific inspiration behind this question was thinking about how autistic people are a source of very innovative language use, and are often more likely to acquire and never unlearn "wrong" forms of words or grammar. A handful of linguistic traits that I've seen pathologized in autistic people where I live are more or less accepted in the speech of some other speech communities around the world. So, given some people's beliefs on the role of autistic people in prehistory, could a historical speech community looking to adopt distinctive speech patterns, turn to its neurodiverse population for inspiration? But I'm also curious about disabilities or disorders aside from autism. How have things like deafness/hearing impairment, blindness/visual impairment, facial paralysis or motor issues, dyslexia, intellectual disability, limb loss, and so forth, affected spoken language, written language, and signed language, as used by language communities as a whole? With regard to sign language, I've heard that the high rate of blindness among the Deaf community of Honduras' Bay Islands resulted in the development of a tactile form of the local village sign. I'm sure that given the rate of disability prior to modern medicine, probably especially among venerated elders, that some amount of language development in the world must have been motivated by accessibility in the same way as BISL — or at the very least caused by inaccessibility, i.e. mishearings or mispronunciations due to disability getting passed on to abled acquaintances. So yeah. Even though most of the world has for a pretty long time now been pretty ableist, and this is reflected in many languages' vocabularies, I'm still wondering if there are any linguistic clues that our abled ancestors did in fact try to take good care of their disabled brethren. This is what the archaeological record seems to show, so how about the linguistic record?
It's sometimes claimed that languages spoken by societies with large numbers of non-native speakers, and large heterogeneity of their native speakers, tend to simplify themselves over time. This study contradicts the claim, based on data for morphological complexity from 1k+ languages.
Phrases like [*know one's \[general subject of interest\]*](https://media.kbin.social/media/c6/89/c6898656a4b020f7a37658e7c88ec1a6af87f3041470dc4c21db813d635a0717.webp) are very annoying to me because they seem rather self-centered. I am obviously fine with *[knows his way around](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/know_one's_way_around)* or *[Know Your Customer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer)* because the use of possesive pronouns is appropriate. On the other hand, *[now I know my ABCs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ABC_Song#Composition_and_variations)* is atrocious because the modern Latin alphabet obviously does not and never did belong to a single person, and has been used by billions of people in the last few centuries. Do you know other English phrases with unnecessary posessive or personal pronouns? Do they exist in other languages? Is there a name for this linguistic phenomenon? Where do I complain? ~/s~
The study involved linguists and geneticists, and estimated the family to be around 8100 years old, with five main branches splitting off 7000 years ago or so. That fits neither the Kurgan/Steppe hypothesis nor the farming/Anatolian one. Instead the authors propose a hybrid hypothesis, with PIE spreading initially from the southern Caucasus; and then an IE branch going north, into the steppes, and spreading from there. Personal note: that further hints that the similarities noticed between the [NW Caucasian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Caucasian_languages) languages and the current PIE reconstructions aren't just a result of coincidence; they might be areal features. I wouldn't be surprised for example if what's currently reconstructed as \*e \*o was originally vertical, something like \*\*ə \*\*a (Ubykh style).
From what I’ve seen, writing was independently invented somewhere between 3 to 6 times. With so many languages and linguistic communities, why have so few independently invented writing?
blog.juliosong.com
I'm a mathsy scientist, not a linguist, so I'm coming at this from a different angle, but I find this blog by a linguist gives a great informal overview of applied category theory in linguistics. Similar concepts from a mathematician's angle is here: https://www.math3ma.com/blog/language-statistics-category-theory-part-1 I really enjoy how complementary these perspectives are
www.nature.com
The article provides a global analysis to model patterns of current and future language endangerment. In other words, it's trying to explain and predict *where* and *how* language loss happens, by measuring stuff. Interesting excerpts of the article: >Our best-fit model explains 34% of the variation in language endangerment (comparable to similar analyses on species endangerment. That's actually rather good, considering the global scale of analysis for something as messy as human beings, and how local political factors can revive or kill languages. >Five predictors of language endangerment are consistently identified at global and regional scales: L1 speakers, bordering language richness, road density, years of schooling and the number of endangered languages in the immediate neighbourhood. I feel like linguists handling minority languages should already know thing by "gut feeling": small community, with lots of nearby languages, well-connected to other communities, being drilled by the government = threatened linguistic community. However, it's still great that the article is grounding that "gut feeling" into data.
phys.org
Link for the study: [A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122084119) The conclusion itself is nothing new, but there are some interesting tidbits, such as about 1/5 of the gene-language relations being a mismatch.
It's a script attested from 2200~1700 years old inscriptions found in Central Asia, between what's today Kazakhstan and Afghanistan (both included). Discovered in the 1950s, but now freshly discovered inscriptions from Tajikistan (the Almosi inscriptions) encouraged people to take a further look at the decipherment, alongside older inscriptions (such as the Dašt-i Nāwur trilingual; written in Greek, Bactrian, and the unknown script). This is specially interesting for those interested on Tocharian studies, as the language being deciphered might be potentially spoken by Tocharian speakers who migrated south.
scitechdaily.com
“Our study found that Mexican American people who spoke only Spanish had worse neurologic outcomes three months after having a stroke than Mexican American people who spoke only English or were bilingual ..."
www.youtube.com
Caution is advised when watching this video, as not all linguists buy the idea of zero morphemes/phonemes/etc.; for some the zero is just a neat theoretical trick, as it simplifies some descriptions. And some outright avoid the concept. Even then, I feel like this video should be fairly informative and enjoyable for people in general.
www.youtube.com
King Charles speaks with a rather posh Received Pronunciation, much like Queen Elizabeth II did. In the meantime, William and Harry use a more Standard Southern British pronunciation. The changes described by Lindsey can be summed up as: * PRICE - [aɪ] vs. [ɑɪ] * DRESS - [e] vs. [ɛ] * CHOICE - [ɔɪ] vs. [oɪ] * SQUARE - [ɛə] vs. [ɛ:] * HAPPY - [ɪ] vs. [i] * [ɫ] vocalisation, colouring nearby vowels - negligible vs. noticeable * word ending /t/ - [t] vs. [ʔ] * /t/ flapping into [ɾ] - rare vs. more frequent * /t/ before front high vowel affricating into [ts] - actually attested for both sides * unstressed syllable elision - King Charles did this quite a bit before rising to the throne, but William does it all the time * rising intonation on statements (uptalk) - almost non-existent in RP, fairly common in SSB * /θ/ as [f] - avoided in RP, present in SSB * word ending /k/ as [k'] - avoided [?] vs. common Personal observation: the changes in the vowel sets remind me in spirit [the Great Vowel Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift), as it seems that DRESS lowering is pressing PRICE to go back, and in turn PRICE is forcing CHOICE to raise.
This paper describes an IMO rather interesting approach towards fake news, through their morphological content: the words from each piece of news (real and fake) were grouped into categories, then the researchers made a statistical analysis of the usage of those categories in real and fake news. And they found out that: * fake news tend to use more foreign words, adjectives and nouns * real news tend to use more W-words (who, what), determiners, prepositions and verbs I think that their findings are damn useful. Perhaps not to *detect* fake news, but to *understand* how they work on a discursive level. For example, the usage of foreign words in fake news caught my attention - perhaps they're used to mask the underlying meaning of the utterance? While real news are focused on describing events, and thus rely more on verb usage?
This will probably interest people who are just tipping their toes into Phonetics, as well as language leaners.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
There's a general tendency across languages to order the adjectives connected to the same noun the same way; for example, usually adjectives referring to colour or other innate attributes are closer to the noun than the ones dealing with subjective attributes. This tendency is so strong that made some linguists (and psychologists) believe that this order might be actually innate. This study contradicts that. Excerpt from the conclusion: >Taking these findings together, we have argued that there is no universal hierarchy for adjective ordering imposing a hard constraint which then translates into one rigid, unmarked order.
Fun scientific paper talking about the odd rarity of \*b in the current Proto-Indo-European reconstructions. It doesn't propose *why* this happens, but it claims that most PIE instances of \*b might be actually from a later stage of the language, that the author calls "Indo-Celtic" (the common ancestor of all IE languages *minus* Anatolian and Tocharian; also known in the literature as "core PIE").
Hello ! Just find out (and subscribed to) this Linguisitics community existed (wasn't referenced in sh.itjust.works before today) For information, few days ago, I created a Liguistics Humor community, to talk non seriously about linguistics subjects. Link is here: - For Lemmy users: [!linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works](/c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works) - For kbin users: [/m/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works](/m/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works) - Direct instanciated link (if above does not works for you): https://sh.itjust.works/c/linguistics_humor - Remember if you get a 404 page, to first go search for the community on your instance search page: `https://sh.itjust.works/c/linguistics_humor`, after that, links should work Rules here says to "Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims"; on linguistics humor, that will be allowed ! On the other side, talking seriously will not be allowed, and will be redirected here (I've added a link to this community in the description) Feel free to participate (and ask/suggest anything about it)
Those puzzles are fun to solve, so why not give them a try? Feel free to use this post to share hints or the solution as you've found it, but please use spoilers to do so. The first three puzzles boil down to "retro-engineering" tidbits of the the grammar of three languages (Ubyx, Alabama, N|uuki). The fourth one is to deduce the words for familiar relationship used in Arabana. The fifth one is historical linguistics, deducing the sound changes from Proto-Chamic to Phan Rang Cham and Tsat. [Check this link](https://ioling.org/problems/by_year/) for the puzzles of previous years, solutions, as well as versions in other metalanguages (in case you feel more comfortable solving them in another language than English).
This paper provides some actual data on the bouba-kiki effect, where certain words are non-arbitrarily associated with certain meanings, by analysing the frequency of sounds used in words conveying a specific meaning (as "bone", "stone", etc.). It takes cognates and areal effects into account.