Category: Linguistics
📺 Creating a Writing System | YouTube
How to create a writing system for your conlang.
📺 WIKITONGUES: John speaking Lojban | YouTube
Lojban is a constructed language that emerged in 1987 as an offshoot of Loglan, which was developed in 1955 to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the structure of a language affects the cognitive processes of its speaker). Lojbanists sought to refine Loglan's structure as a logical language, void of the subjective ambiguity inherent in natural languages. It is therefore considered to be a 'syntactically unambiguous' tongue, and has been proposed as a potential programming language and means for machine translation.
👓 I Wonder Who Wrote That Melania Trump Tweet | Huffington Post
Definitely not Donald Trump in a wig, that's for sure.
Certainly crazy, and I don’t even think they mentioned anything about her actual style or the fact that English may be a second language for her? I can’t wait to read conspiracy theories surrounding this. Is he keeping her imprisoned? Poisoning her while he keeps her “alive” on Twitter?
👓 How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk | The New York Times
What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
I’d love to see the data sets and sources they used for these visualizations.
👓 Johnson: Does speaking German change how I see social relationships? | The Economist
Different languages condition different habits of mind—but perhaps not entirely different worldviews
I wonder what this same type of research looks like for pronouns of non-binary people?
👓 A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny' | The Atlantic
It’s the audio version of The Dress.
The science is far more interesting than the meme portion at least.
👓 The Hobo Ethical Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Living a Self-Reliant, Honest & Compassionate Life | Open Culture
Who wants to be a billionaire? A few years ago, Forbes published author Roberta Chinsky Matuson’s sensible advice to businesspersons seeking to shoot up that golden ladder.
Interesting to see this code laid out in detail after having been a fan of John Sturges’ films. Also interesting to see some of the language of the time: “jungling” and “boil up”.
The Hobo Ethical Code
1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
7. When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
12. Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
h/t to @codinghorror
The hobo ethical code of 1889 https://t.co/i6TbzJK7Ou
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) May 4, 2018
Bookmarked on May 03, 2018 at 09:46PM
👓 Large Cache of Texts May Offer Insight Into One of Africa’s Oldest Written Languages | Smithsonian Magazine
Archaeologists in Sudan have uncovered the largest assemblage of Meroitic inscriptions to date
This is a cool discovery, in great part because their documentation was interesting enough to be able to suggest further locations to check for more archaeological finds. This might also be something one could apply some linguistic analysis and information theory to in an attempt to better pull apart the language and grammar.
h/t to @ArtsJournalNews, bookmarked on April 17, 2018 at 08:16AM
Trove Of Inscriptions In Sub-Saharan Africa’s Oldest Written Language Discovered:
“Archaeologists in Sudan have uncovered a large cache of rare stone inscriptions at the Sedeinga necropolis along the Nile River. The collection of funerary texts are ins… https://t.co/8qb3gkkpsa
— ArtsJournal (@ArtsJournalNews) April 17, 2018
👓 What Makes a Vowel a Vowel and a Consonant a Consonant | Today I Found Out
ou already know that vowels in the English alphabet are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, while the rest of the letters are called consonants. But did you ever ask yourself why the letters were divided into two separate groups?
🎧 Maggie Haberman | The Atlantic Interview
To make sense of President Donald Trump's first year in the White House, many have come to rely on Maggie Haberman. The powerhouse reporter for the New York Times talks with Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about how her career covering New York City politics for the tabloids has given her a unique view of Trump. To Haberman, Trump's brashness and need for approval are partly products of his distinct experience of New York City.
A fascinating interview to be sure. There’s some subtlety particularly about Donald Trump that is injected here that I wouldn’t have thought about previously. I certainly don’t have more hope as a result, but I do have a lot more nuance in how he functions and interacts with others. There is some particularly fascinating discussion on language/linguistics which impinges on some of the discussion in my article Complexity isn’t a Vice: 10 Word Answers and Doubletalk in Election 2016.
👓 Losing Count | The Paris Review
How do nonsensical counting-out rhymes like these enter the lexicon?
I’d read this a year or two ago for a specific purpose and revisited it again today just for entertainment. There’s some interesting history hiding in this sort of exercise.
I also considered these rhymes as simple counting games, but the’re not really used to count up as if they were ordinals. Most people couldn’t even come close to saying how many things they’d have counted if they sang such a song. I also find that while watching children sing these while “counting” they typically do so with a choice for each syllable, but this often fails in the very young so that they can make their own “mental” choice known while still making things seem random. For older kids, with a little forethought and some basic division one can make something seemingly random and turn it into a specific choice as well.
So what are these really and what purpose did they originally serve?
🔖 Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script
Algorithmic decipherment is a prime example of a truly unsupervised problem. The first step in the decipherment process is the identification of the encrypted language. We propose three methods for determining the source language of a document enciphered with a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. The best method achieves 97% accuracy on 380 languages. We then present an approach to decoding anagrammed substitution ciphers, in which the letters within words have been arbitrarily transposed. It obtains the average decryption word accuracy of 93% on a set of 50 ciphertexts in 5 languages. Finally, we report the results on the Voynich manuscript, an unsolved fifteenth century cipher, which suggest Hebrew as the language of the document.
Aside: It’s been ages since I’ve seen someone with Refbacks listed on their site!
👓 Mysterious 15th century manuscript finally decoded 600 years later | The Independent
Artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to make significant progress in cracking a mysterious ancient text, the meaning of which has eluded scholars for centuries.
Interesting news if it’s really true! Though I do feel a bit sad as there are some methods I had wanted to try on this longstanding puzzle, but never had the time to play with.