linguistics
gregladen | August 25, 2016Have you ever wondered how "Dick" became short for "Rick"?
Probably not. But it turns out that the reason, if the following video is accurate, is interesting.
I have two questions for the historical linguists in the room. First, is there a name for this rhymification effect? Is is common? Is it confined to certain regions or cultures? Is it linked to Cockney in some way?
OK, that was a lot of questions, but really, all the same question. My second one is simpler: Where does the phrase "Swinging dick" come in? It is a Britishism for, I think, Square Mile money managers and investors.…
gregladen | June 1, 2010I'm very please that my discussion of the "we can't ever know what a word is" Internet meme has elicited a response from Mark Liberman at Language Log. (here) Mark was very systematic in his comments, so I will be very systematic in my responses.
1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by "word" and by "language X", questions like "how many words are there in language X" are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers.
This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques,…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2010tags: !Kung, ÇʼOÇKung, beatbox, beatbox girl, performance art, linguistics, streaming video
This woman is ridiculously awesome: she beatboxes for the camera. I have never seen anyone better than her. Which of course, makes me wonder if she might be the one Westerner who is able to learn to speak the !Kung language, ÇʼOÇKung, fluently?
Any linguists out there who might know if she has been contacted about learning to speak the !Kung language?
razib | January 19, 2010At least that was my take home message from a new paper in PLoS One, Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure:
Background: Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used.
Methodology/Principal Findings: We conducted a statistical analysis of .2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures— a database of structural…
razib | November 17, 2009The relationship between language families and historical population genetics has a long history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries anthropologists were wont to substitute and synthesize the connections discerned in linguistic relationships with those of presumed biological affinities. This resulted in great hilarity. Older works sometimes labeled the Finns a "Mongoloid" people because of their Uralic language. But once the physical substrate of genetic inheritance (DNA) was ascertained some correspondences did emerge.
The figure to the left is from an L. L. Cavalli-Sforza paper, Genes,…
gregladen | March 7, 2009I recently posted about the work by Pagel and colleagues regarding ancient lexicons. That work, recently revived in the press for whatever reasons such things happen, is the same project reported a while back in Nature. And, as I recall, I read that paper and promised to blog about it but did not get to it. Yet.
So here we go.
The tail does not wag the dog
The primary finding of the Pagel et al. study is this: When comparing lexicons from different languages, meanings that shared a common word in an ancestral language change over time more slowly if the word in question is used more…
gregladen | March 4, 2009And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and a little patient. This is because a handful of words, including Who, You, Two, Five, Three and I exist across a range of languages as close cognates, and can be reconstructed as similar ancestral utterances in ancestral languages.
It's like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight…
purepedantry | July 9, 2008Kenneth Chang, guest-blogging at TeirneyLab, laments the use of the word "organic" in both the contexts of organic chemistry and as a term for natural foods:
Organic derives from Greek, organikos. The original meaning was, logically, something related to an organ of the body. The meaning later generalized to "characteristic of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms."
Nowadays, the most prevalent meaning of organic is in the supermarket -- natural, without artificial ingredients, grown without chemical fertilizers -- a fuzzy notion codified by 27,000 or so words of federal…
purepedantry | May 9, 2008Language Log has a fascinating article about creole languages and birdsongs:
Zebra finches are among the songbirds who learn their songs by imitating adults, just as human children learn their language by interaction with those who already know it. Male songbirds raised in isolation, without any conspecific adult models during the critical period for song learning, are handicapped for life: they develop only an ill-organized, infantile "subsong". From the example of abused or feral children like Genie, we know that something similar happens with human children.
In both cases, this raises a…
purepedantry | May 5, 2008A post over at the Scientist blog laments the difficulty in getting people to acknowledge the English-language bias in science:
Many, perhaps most, scientists are grateful that English has become the international language, but an informative protest comes from Prof. Tsuda Yukio of Japan, who has taught in the U.S.
"Today one speaks of globalization. It's really Americanization....the dollar economy and communication in English. Isn't it appropriate to think about egalitarian communication and linguistic equality? .... When I told Americans that the reign of English causes linguistic…
grrlscientist | October 11, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, linguistics, evolution, irregular verbs, languages
When I was an undergrad, I almost took a degree in linguistics because I was so fascinated by languages, especially by the rate and patterns of change that languages undergo. So of course, I was excited to read two fascinating papers that were published in this week's issue of Nature. These papers find that individual words evolve in a predictable manner and this rate of evolution depends upon their frequency of use. Further, this predictability can be defined mathematically.
To test this hypothesis, one group…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007You would think that language as a general phenomena in the human species is genetically prescribed, but the peculiarities of individual languages -- such as whether a people uses a particular phoneme or not -- is the result of historical or geographical factors.
Dediu and Ladd, publishing in PNAS, have shown that is true with one exception: whether the language spoken by a population is tonal or not may be related to the genetic structure of that population. (A tonal language is one in which particular phonemes can mean different things depending upon the tone in which they are spoken. An…