Pages tagged linguistics:

Mining The Thought Stream
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/15/mining-the-thought-stream/
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Oldest English words' identified
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7911645.stm

'Oldest English words' identified
Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.
Some of the oldest words in the English and other Indo-European languages have been identified, scientists believe.Reading University researchers say "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the oldest in use and date back as much as 40,000 years.
UNESCO Culture Sector - Intangible Heritage - 2003 Convention : UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00206
UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
Google Mapで、「消滅の危機にある言語」の使用地域が見られるページ (UNESCO website)
362 - Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension « Strange Maps
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/362-greek-to-me-mapping-mutual-incomprehension/
"When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese it’s the language of Heaven."
http://phd.pp.ru/Texts/fun/english-poem.txt
http://phd.pp.ru/Texts/fun/english-poem.txt
reak
A poem demonstrating the many variant forms in English.
Pronunciation
A poem of tricky words that highlight exactly how daunting English is to the non-native speaker. This shit is crazy.
Schott's Vocab - Schott’s Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/
miscellaneous vocabularies explained in nytimes context
"Each day, Schott's Vocab explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note."
more schott on ny times
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice - ChronicleReview.com
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm
criticism of 'The Element of Style'
Eloquent rant against Strunk & White.
'The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.'
HA! On the other hand I would strongly recommend reading a book whose style is intentionally derived from this one: 'The Elements of Programming Style' by Kernighan and Plauger. Yes, *that* B.Kernighan.
Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery | Wired Science from Wired.com
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/indusscript.html
holy shit
Information about artifical itelligence
read later
Google Translator Toolkit
http://translate.google.com/toolkit/list#translations/active
Let's you view original and translated text side-by-side and easily edit the machine translation.
Translatation service from Google
N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse » Nieman Journalism Lab
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/ny-times-mines-its-data-to-identify-words-that-readers-find-abstruse/
People don't know what "louche" means?
"As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior."
the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009
TweetPsych
http://tweetpsych.com/
blah, analyzes your account
Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html
By Lera Boroditsky
ong time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered
Interesting recent work on Linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis related ideas in cognitive linguistics
Python Package Index : topia.termextract 1.1.0
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/topia.termextract/
This package determines important terms within a given piece of content. It uses linguistic tools such as Parts-Of-Speech (POS) and some simple statistical analysis to determine the terms and their strength.
Term extraction and POS tagging in Python. Wonder how well the POS tagger performs.
Content Term Extraction using POS Tagging This package determines important terms within a given piece of content. It uses linguistic tools such as Parts-Of-Speech (POS) and some simple statistical analysis to determine the terms and their strength.
The Linguistics of ReTweets | Dan Zarrella
http://danzarrella.com/retweet-linguistics.html
Research in to link occurrence, average syllables per word and readability grade levels of retweets vs. regular tweets.
Interesting. Linguistic analysis of tweets and retweets: http://tr.im/qsxn (via @NiemanLab) [from http://twitter.com/mkeagle/statuses/2420004728]
Thinking literally - The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/thinking_literally/?page=full
BBC - Today - The death of language?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8311000/8311069.stm
An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.
A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families by Giles Turnbull - The Morning News
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/a_common_nomenclature_for_lego_families.php
"Thousands of different Lego exist, yet when your seven-year-old asks for “a clippy bit,” you know exactly what to hand him. Giles Turnbull surveys a caucus of children." Giles brings utter joy again. (via infovore)
"This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words? Hence, a survey. I asked fellow parents to donate their children for a few minutes, and name a selection of Lego pieces culled from the Lego parts store."
Cute.
The various names that kids call lego pieces. Roland Barthes would smile. s/z
Difficult languages: Tongue twisters | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108609
What is the hardest language?
n all dem anglophones
Frankly it's amazing that anyone learns any language. Maybe Esperanto wasn't such a bad idea after all.
In search of the world's hardest language
The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/chinese-language-ever-evolving/
We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.
Lexical Analysis of 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidiential Debates - Who's the Windbag?
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/debates/
Lexical Analysis of 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidiential Debates
wow - this is impressive. Lexical Analysis of Pres debates: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/debates/ [from http://twitter.com/pollyrt/statuses/963468907]
Diagramming the Obama Sentence - The Millions
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2009/02/diagramming-obama-sentence.html
interesting
Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong : NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102518565
About the creative (descriptive) use of language
An interesting discuss on language and how images have different meaning to different people and cultures
Lera Boroditsky's take on how language transmit culture. I'd also love to read her essay, "How Does Language Shape the Way We Think" in the anthology What's Next (Vintage Books, June 2009)
Through Juliet's lips, Shakespeare said "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." But the Bard may have been wrong — names do matter. Language researchers say your sense of the rose depends on what you call it.
Lera Boroditsky asks us to describe a bridge - "What explains the difference? Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German — die brucke — is a feminine noun, and the word for "bridge" in Spanish — el puente — is a masculine noun, native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender" (wikipedia notes that "For the Burning Man festival, she once built a banana vehicle" ;)
A history of Klingon, the language. - By Arika Okrent - Slate Magazine
http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/
Totally serious - a little mad but interesting
A history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and the people who speak it.
The closest thing to 'hello' in the Klingon language is 'What do you want?' Awesome. http://bit.ly/LPtZS [from http://twitter.com/ellaminnowpea/statuses/1803100377]
Many Eyes: Obama Inauguration Speech Word Tree
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/obama-inauguration-speech-word-tree
visualisiert Text in Baumdiagramm
obama word tree
interactive map to explore the speech
Stanford School of Engineering - Stanford Engineering Everywhere
http://see.stanford.edu/see/lecturelist.aspx?coll=63480b48-8819-4efd-8412-263f1a472f5a
Artificial Intelligence | Natural Language Processing
Natural Language/Artificial Intelligence Lectures
Photo Gallery: An Etymologist's View of the World - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-37310.html
maps with the actual names translated
Photo Gallery: An Etymologist's View of the World
BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | New lingua franca upsets French
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7844192.stm
Article on Globish (to go with podcast)
Meray sent me this!
New lingua franca upsets French
This article demonstrates the new trend in specialized English classes for business. The term 'globisch' reflects the globalization of business since the terms that are used are not an exact English. It is considered a dialect, which some of us may find ourselves teaching or interpreting at some point.
Globish has only 1,500 words and users must avoid humour, metaphor, abbreviation and anything else that can cause cross-cultural confusion.They must speak slowly and in short sentences.
Bernstein manifesto
Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition - robertfortner's posterous
http://robertfortner.posterous.com/the-unrecognized-death-of-speech-recognition
The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. Words never meant very much to computers—which made them ten times more error-prone than humans. Humans expected that computer understanding of language would lead to artificially intelligent machines, inevitably and quickly. But the mispredicted words of speech recognition have rewritten that narrative. We just haven’t recognized it yet. In 2001 recognition accuracy topped out at 80%, far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Adding data or computing power made no difference. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University checked again in 2006 and found the situation unchanged. With human discrimination as high as 98%, the unclosed gap left little basis for conversation.
In passing, interesting-looking thing about why computers can't understand language.
link to scientific article which shows low accuracy of 2006 products
Speech recognition flatlined at 80% accuracy in 2001, and you'd be forgiven for concluding it will never get better: http://bit.ly/aoSCO0 – iconmaster (iconmaster) http://twitter.com/iconmaster/statuses/14370926269
The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. Words never meant very much to computers—which made them ten times more error-prone than humans. Humans expected that computer understanding of language would lead to artificially intelligent machines, inevitably and quickly. But the mispredicted words of speech recognition have rewritten that narrative. We just haven’t recognized it yet.
Does Language Influence Culture? - WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5
Does language profoundly influence the way people see the world? http://bit.ly/cAtxU8 (via @SteveAkinsSEO @lindahollier)
This is an interesting article describing the differences of understanding in different languages.
Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.
Add: http://bit.ly/aRLx4F @nedkumar: ..how language influences the way people see the world. Lost in Translation http://bit.ly/ba7GUV
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871