Linguistics

"I think I have already demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Quechua people are a lost Nostratic tribe. Note that the semantic matches are impeccable and the similarity of the words is quite obvious to any open-minded observer. Indeed, the matches are much better than many of those in the LWED. The quality of examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9, in particular, is guaranteed by the fact that they represent statistically certified ultraconserved Eurasiatic vocabulary (Pagel et al. 2013). The famous items ‘mother’, ‘bark’, and ‘worm’ are among them. In many Eurasiatic languages the words for ‘bark’ and ‘skin’ are the same or look related (6, 7). This seems to be true of Quechua as well, but just in order to probe every possibility, I can offer an alternative etymology of qara ‘skin’ (8, from a different Eurasiatic root), in which case its homophony with qara ‘bark’ must be accidental. A nice match either way." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Afonso, this relatively new blog and Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis' GeoCurrents http://geocurrents.info/ are excellent sources and my favourite blogs on historical linguistics and language change in general. Asya and Martin cover a fascinating array of items, often beyond the scope of linguistics. :-) - Maitani

"This is the culmination of Rick Aschmann's years-long "hobby" of collecting dialects. It's a comprehensive and detailed map of the dialects (and sub-dialects!) of English-speakers in Canada and the United States. (...) Aschmann's site is a veritable font of information on English dialects. There's the Dialect Information Chart which tells you which vowel sounds can be found in what dialect and each dialect's "unique features." Like Mat-Su Valley Alaska, which has the unique feature of being "strongly like North Central" but with some "main Alaska dialect" mixed in. If that doesn't mean anything to you, there's a helpful parenthetical there: "See Sarah Palin." Aschmann bases his map and dialect information on the Atlas of North American English, his own research created the names of some of the dialects and made adjustments to their borders." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Fortunately, a couple of serious linguist have taken this on. - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Afonso, it is my pleasure. :-) - Maitani

"Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE. The corpus contains Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition. The transliterations and the translations can be searched, browsed and read online using the tools of the website. Funding for the ETCSL project came to an end in the summer of 2006 and no work is currently being done to this site or its contents. For more information, see the About ETCSL menu or the site map." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Phonemica is a project to record spoken stories in every one of the thousands of varieties of Chinese in order to preserve both stories and language for future generations. We are a team of volunteers working within China and abroad." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Our mission: Bringing the richness of oral Chinese to a wider audience, through the words of natural storytellers, from every corner of the world where Chinese is spoken." - Maitani

Cool! - Jessie

"Several earlier GeoCurrents posts examined the history and geography of culinary vocabulary, particularly words for ‘cheese’, ‘onion’, and ‘tea’. It has become clear that the distribution of such words in European languages tells a story of both common descent and borrowing. The role of borrowing is nowhere clearer than in the map of the words for ‘tea’. But while borrowing must have also complicated the patterns of ‘onion’ and ‘cheese’ vocabulary, major Indo-European subfamilies typically share the same root. For example, while the Romance languages generally inherited the Latin word for ‘onion’, cepa or its diminutive form cepolla, French uses a different word, which has also been borrowed into some, though not all, Germanic languages. Scandinavian (North Germanic) languages preserve the original Germanic root løk, which was also borrowed by Slavic languages, though some of them later replaced it with Latin loanwords. But a completely different picture emerges if we examine words... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Nonsequiturs-Я-Us - Jkram|ɯɐɹʞſ

"This blog is devoted to exploring and promoting the great diversity that exists in the study of language, in the past and today. Each blog post seeks to introduce a topic, idea or approach in language study — historical, current or completely new — with an invitation to all readers to engage in discussion in the comments. Everyone is welcome to contribute, regardless of academic standing, although there is an expectation that all contributions will be well informed. Controversial or unconventional views are not discriminated against, but polemical attitudes are discouraged. We want to maintain a scholarly atmosphere marked by reasoned argument, evidence and tolerance, and free of simple opinion-trading. If you would like to write a post for the blog, please get in touch with a one-paragraph description. All posts are informally reviewed before they are published, but always with the blog’s goal of promoting diversity of opinion and approach in mind. Our guidelines are very minimal:... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Das Ziel dieses Blogs ist es, die historische und gegenwärtige Vielfalt der Sprachwissenschaften aufzuzeigen und zu fördern. Jeder Blogbeitrag stellt ein Thema, eine Idee oder einen Ansatz aus der Geschichte oder Gegenwart der Sprachwissenschaften vor und lädt alle Leser ein, durch Kommentare in einen konstruktiven Dialog zu treten. Alle dürfen mitreden, ungeachtet der akademischen... more... - Maitani

"Given a suitable context, if a farmer told you that her hand was under the knife, you would probably understand that this was a sentence about an employee and a surgical operation, despite there being no mention in the sentence of a person. There's also no mention an operating room, a doctor, a hospital, or any of the other props or venues associated with surgery. But you got the meaning in the phrase "under the knife" in the same way that you got employee from hand, a clipped version of hired hand. Your understanding of these phrases is probably not based on inferring the relationship of "hand" to employee or "knife" to surgery; chances are that you know these terms because you've heard them before. Maybe the first time you heard them you had to do that kind of interpretation; or maybe you looked up the terms in a dictionary or maybe someone glossed them for you. In any case, what hand and under the knife have in common is that they're both instances of meronymy, in which a part of something is used as an expression for the whole." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"English majors may already be raising their hands or racing to the comments section to protest that this isn't meronymy; some will say that we're actually talking about metonymy, and others may chime in with synecdoche. Well, everyone's right in this game, albeit in a slightly different way. The ways in which expressions substitute parts for wholes, or features for whole entities, is a... more... - Maitani

"A striking map depicting endangered languages around the world can be found at the website of the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), the public portal of the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat) helping raise awareness of and gathering data on endangered languages. This data has been compiled by linguistic research teams at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and Eastern Michigan University in a project supported by a National Science Foundation grant. The catalogue contains comprehensive up-to-date information on all languages considered to be in danger, including the number of speakers, the age of the youngest speakers and the location of each language; the genetic affiliation to a linguistic family for every language; and an account of the documentation and data for all languages in the database. The ELP is an initiative of the newly formed Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, a coalition of international linguistic and cultural organizations, and Google. The Rosetta Project and... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Wow. I had to blink that the loss of language families. That's pretty striking. - Anika

It really is. - ᏓᏰ #team Monique from iPhone

"From what we know (or can infer) about the social life of early humans in the Middle Paleolithic period (300-30 thousand years ago), our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small nomadic bands, each consisting of a few dozen (20-50) individuals. Several such bands may have maintained regular contacts and converged into loose ethnic units (“tribes”) totalling a few hundred members, which gathered seasonally for collective purposes such as ritual celebrations, marital exchange, etc. In such conditions a single speech community, capable of maintaining a shared linguistic code (unified by cultural transmission), can hardly grow larger than a tribe. In effect, a cluster of allied bands corresponds to a linguistic unit as well as a cultural one (with a shared system of customs and laws). Such a model is supported by studies of modern societies retaining an archaic type of organisation, such as the Indigenous Australians. At the time of first European contact, the population od Australia was... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

TL;DR: Babel happens. :-) - Le Slip Anglais from Android

"Please note: All posted hyperlinks to articles included in each volume will lead readers to the Language archives available via JSTOR. Users without access to JSTOR may purchase individual articles, or participate in the "Register and Read" program of JSTOR, which provides free access on a time-limited basis to those who complete a registration form." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

http://memiyawanzi.wordpress.com/2013... - Maitani

"When you think of the acropolis, one immediately thinks of the Parthenon in majestic ruin, or perhaps the famous Caryatids on the porch of the Erechtheion. Perhaps, while you’re busy—perhaps a little too busy—admiring the architectural scenery as you progress up the sacred way, you might not notice some very very important bits of archaeology. Yes, I’m talking about those mysterious holes in the ground. One passes them without thinking, but when you start looking, they’re everywhere. Not interesting, you say? Well, let me tell you more: these are, in fact, carved-out bases for inscriptions, in which they were placed and then fixed in position by pouring molten lead into the gaps. Inscriptions, containing sources for all kinds of exciting aspects of Ancient Greek political and social history!" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"During the Easter break I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in the Postgraduate Epigraphy Course put on by the British School at Athens March 24th to April 7th, taught by Robert Pitt (BSA Assistant Director) and Graham Oliver (University of Liverpool). As many of you may know, my Ph.D. work focuses on the Ancient Greek dialects, for which the overwhelming amount of evidence... more... - Maitani

"The first week of the course was devoted to seminars in practical epigraphy and field trips around Attica and Delphi. The first stop of the Grand Tour (of epigraphy) was the mighty acropolis with its many aforementioned holes in the ground, but still with much remaining epigraphy to be reckoned with, mainly a lot of dedications. One example (IG I³ 833 + IG II² 4147) gives an excellent... more... - Maitani

"What field of linguistics should I pursue?" - Maitani

Produced by Cascadilla http://www.cascadilla.com/# "Cascadilla Press is an independent scholarly publisher of linguistics books, software, and teaching aids." - Maitani

"This is just a hobby of mine, that I thought might be interesting to a lot of people. Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins. I collect dialects. There are 8 major English dialect areas in North America, listed below the map at left. These are shown in blue, each with its number, on the map and in the Dialect Description Chart below, and are also outlined with blue lines on the map. The first 6 of these begin at the eastern seaboard and proceed west, reflecting western settlement patterns. The many subdialects are shown in red on the map and in the chart, and are outlined with red lines on the map. All of these are listed in the margins of the map as well. In the Dialect Description Chart additional features not shown on the map are provided for distinguishing the dialects." - Spidra Webster from Bookmarklet

"Code switching between Indonesian, French and English" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

I've found I can only load one language at a time. I even get confused if someone talks to me in my mother tongue if I have English loaded. - Eivind

"John Gumperz dedicated his life to language. A UC Berkeley professor emeritus of anthropology, he died at the age of 91 on Friday in Santa Barbara. Gumperz was an intellectual and adventurer — a curious, unassuming scholar who studied people and language all around the world. He used his research to fill the gaps that written language could not, focusing linguistic study on solving issues of social justice and helping people communicate across cultural boundaries. He brought this passion for language to UC Berkeley, where he taught for 35 years until his retirement in 1991. The professor pioneered research in linguistic anthropology — studying language as a social and cultural endeavor as well as a form of written communication. “He was totally unpretentious,” said lifelong friend and colleague Dan Slobin, who is a professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at UC Berkeley. “I struggled at first to make sense of him and was finally just overwhelmed at how profound his ideas... more... - Spidra Webster from Bookmarklet

"Humans favor speech as the primary means of linguistic communication. Spoken languages are so common many think language and speech are one and the same. But the prevalence of sign languages suggests otherwise. Not only can Deaf communities generate language using manual gestures, but their languages share some of their design and neural mechanisms with spoken languages." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"New research by Northeastern University's Prof. Iris Berent further underscores the flexibility of human language and its robustness across both spoken and signed channels of communication. In a paper published in PLOS ONE, Prof. Berent and her team show that English speakers can learn to rapidly recognize key structures of American Sign Language (ASL), despite no previous familiarity with this language." - Maitani

"Like spoken languages, signed languages construct words from meaningless syllables (akin to can-dy in English) and distinguish them from morphemes (meaningful units, similar to the English can-s). The research group examined whether non-signers might be able to discover this structure." - Maitani

"The conflict hinged on a single word: “gravy.” The place was Heathrow Airport, the time the mid-1970s. The airport had recently hired a group of Indian and Pakistani women to work in its employee cafeteria, and trouble had arisen between them and the British baggage handlers they served. The baggage handlers complained that the servers were rude, and the servers complained that the baggage handlers were discriminating against them. Neither group knew why the other felt the way it did. Enter John J. Gumperz. Professor Gumperz, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, who died on Friday at 91, was one of the leading authorities on discourse analysis, which studies not only who says what to whom, but also how it is said and in what context. At the time of the Heathrow incident, he was on sabbatical in England and was called in to help. Professor Gumperz, who at his death was an emeritus professor in Berkeley’s anthropology department, was a sociolinguist, whose field stands... more... - Spidra Webster from Bookmarklet

Neat! I heard about him on the radio this afternoon...they recounted the gravy thing. It's a really interesting area to work in and I'm sure his background must have helped him. - Spidra Webster

"An earlier GeoCurrents post examined birch bark documents from Veliky Novgorod, Russia. With letters scratched into the inside surface, these scraps of birch bark, well-preserved in water-logged soils near Lake Ilmen, contain a wealth of information for historians and linguists alike. One of the most fascinating puzzles of Slavic historical linguistics was posed by birch bark document #247. It is the oldest birch bark document discovered to date, dating from 1025-1050 CE, which makes it older than Ostromir Gospels, the second oldest extant Russian book (it was considered the oldest before the Novgorod Codex was discovered in 2000). This document was unearthed early on, in 1956, but for a long time its interpretation was subject to fierce debates. Particularly mystifying was the second line, given in English transliteration below:" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"As mentioned in a previous post, the writing system used for birth bark letters did not employ spaces between words or punctuation, so figuring out where one word ends and another one begins is one of the first tasks of those who try to decipher these documents. In the early years after the discovery of this document, the widely accepted analysis of this line was to break it down as follows (punctuation likewise added for clarity):" - Maitani

"The string KѢLEA/KѢLѢA was interpreted as meaning ‘of the room’, making the whole line translatable as ‘and the lock of the room, the doors of the room, the master…’. However, analyzed this way, the sentence is very odd indeed. First, two phrases have subjects but no predicates: the lock of the room what? the doors of the room what? The rest of the document reads as a description of a... more... - Maitani

"Researchers are digging deeper into whether infants' ability to learn new words is shaped by the particular language being acquired." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"A new Northwestern University study cites a promising new research agenda aimed at bringing researchers closer to discovering the impact of different languages on early language and cognitive development. For decades, researchers have asked why infants learn new nouns more rapidly and more easily than new verbs. Many researchers have asserted that the early advantage for learning nouns... more... - Maitani

"Logeion (literally, a place for words; in particular, a speaker's platform, or an archive) was developed after the example of dvlf.uchicago.edu, to provide simultaneous lookup of entries in the many reference works that make up the Perseus Classical collection. To improve the chronological range for which the dictionaries are useful, we have added DuCange (see below), and to enhance this site as both a research and a pedagogical tool, we add information based on corpus data in the right side bar, as well as references to chapters in standard textbooks. More such 'widgets' will be added over time, along with, we hope, still more dictionaries. The Logeion interface only allows for consulting dictionaries the way dictionaries were originally conceived: Type in the headword (or lemma) for the entry (transliterated Greek is an option) and the word wheel will spin to what we hope will be the right destination. Enter a minimum of three characters, and the system will attempt to suggest... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Update January 2012: We have now added a Latin-Dutch dictionary to the collection: The Woordenboek Latijn/Nederlands. One notable feature of this dictionary, for those who do not speak Dutch, is that a lot of attention has been paid to ensure accuracy of vowel length for the lexical entries. For further information see below." - Maitani

"A new paper in Science uses Bayesian phylogeographic methods to model the spatial expansion of Indo-European languages from their Anatolian homeland. An informative video shows how the authors estimate the process took place across space and time:" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Excellent talk on the topic by Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin W. Lewis, explains why Bouckaert et al. get things wrong http://geocurrents.info/site-ne... - Maitani

"A class assignment in the University of Alberta’s Native Studies program has evolved into the latest online teaching tool for children learning the Cree language. Little Bear’s Day and The Seasons are the first in what Caylie Gnyra hopes will become a large collection of e-books available free online for classroom use from kindergarten to Grade Six. Gnyra, 29, is the U of A student behind the creation of Little Cree Books. Her passion for sharing and preserving the Cree language and culture has grown out of her educational pursuits over the past number of years. Her own background is not Aboriginal, but her studies and field work have given her a better understanding of the value of Native culture. “I can definitely learn from things that other cultures have to teach us,” she said. “I believe we have a lot to learn and can benefit from listening.” When Gnyra was working toward her English degree at The King’s University in Edmonton, she began to take a serious interest in Aboriginal... more... - Spidra Webster from Bookmarklet

"I've put together the following feed aggregators for the benefit of anyone who would like to make use of them. Please remember: the content pulled together here is still governed by the licensing or copyright preferences of the originating bloggers. Always check with the original author before re-using any of this content!" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"I've long been aware that many of the languages of Southeast Asia are referred to as bahasa. Here's a list from Wikipedia:" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

" The Indonesian language, or Bahasa Indonesia The Malay language, or Bahasa Melayu The Javanese language, or Basa Jawa, also Basa Jawi The Sundanese language, or Basa Sunda The Balinese language, or Basa Bali The Tausug language, or Bahasa Sūg The Betawi language, or Bahasa Betawi The Cia-Cia language, or Bahasa Ciacia (often discussed on LLog) The Khmer language, or Phiesa Khmae The... more... - Maitani

"I had always assumed that "bahasa" was a Malayo-Polynesian word. Consequently, I was surprised when — reading the Wikipedia page in question– I learned that bahasa "derives from the Sanskrit word bhāṣā भाषा ("spoken language"). In many modern languages in South Asia and Southeast Asia which have been influenced by Sanskrit or Pali, bahasa and cognate words are now used to mean 'language' in general."" - Maitani

"The Wikipedia list of the world’s most widely spoken languages, by mother tongue, puts Punjabi in tenth place, with its roughly 100 million native speakers exceeding the figures given for German, French, Italian, Turkish, Persian and many other well-known languages. The Wikipedia article on the Punjabi language stresses its growing appeal, noting that, “The influence of Punjabi as a cultural language in Indian Subcontinent is increasing day by day mainly due to Bollywood. Most Bollywood movies now have Punjabi vocabulary mixed in, along a few songs fully sung in Punjabi.”" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"But despite Punjabi’s obvious importance, it is extremely difficult to find a map of the language on the internet. Partly this is due to the fact that Punjabi spans the India-Pakistan border, and most maps of individual languages are country-based. One can thus find many language maps of India that depict Punjabi, and virtually all language maps of Pakistan do so as well. But on... more... - Maitani

"The Silk Road, the famous network of trade routes connecting China to the West, was essential not only for the transfer of material goods, but also for the exchange of language and culture. Along with many other Central Asian civilizations, Tocharian A and Tocharian B could so come to flourish as literary languages in the wake of the spread of Buddhism in the middle of the first millennium CE. Although Tocharian was spoken in Kucha and Turfan along the northern edge of the Tarim Basin in North-West China (= present-day Xinjiang), it is not related to Chinese. Instead, Tocharian A and Tocharian B constitute a separate branch of the so-called Indo-European language family, which comprises ancient languages such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, as well as modern languages like English and Spanish." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Towards the end of the first millennium, Tocharian became extinct: it is now only known from documents that could be preserved over a period of more than 1000 years thanks to the arid climate of the Taklamakan Desert. The documents were discovered during a series of archaeological expeditions undertaken from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, and transferred to museums in China, Japan, and Europe." - Maitani

"As it happens, I was looking for something else in a bookcase when I spotted my tattered 1981 paperback of “Tales and Legends of Sistan”, an annotated publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences – and I was surprised to recognize that I can still recite a few verses of the beautiful Russian translation, and that I still remember how the book project was born, after a surprise discovery that an expat Sistani legend-teller lived, quietly, in a small town in Turkmenistan. But I realized that I knew nothing about the linguist and poet who recorded and translated these stories, some of them canonical Rustam legends from Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, and other, hitherto unknown legends also recited as historic truth, and others retold as fictionary fairy tales with their own canon." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Aleksandr Gruenberg joined the Pamir Expedition group of Anna Rozenfeld, also a native of St Petersburg but a generation older, also an iranologist, dialectologist, and folklorist, also a translator of folk tales. Anna Rozenfeld was a snowman sceptic who approached the Yeti question as a folklore-gathering exercise. The all-St.Petersburger group also included two members without any... more... - Maitani

"The attention of Gruenberg thus turned to the isolated diasporas of the ethnic groups with homelands south of the Soviet border, which could have been studied within the confines of the Soviet Union. Between 1958 and 1960, he discovered and documented Teymuri, Jamshidi, and Sistani populations in Saraghs and Kushka, in the South of Turkmenistan. And then Gruenberg got a unique... more... - Maitani