Category: Linguistics

Watched The Irish Language and Beauty by Dónall Ó Héalaí from TEDxBerkeley | YouTube
Language represents an essential component of humanity, revealing so much about culture, heritage, literature, and nearly every human endeavor. In his TEDxBerkeley 2018 talk titled “The Irish Language and Beauty,” Dónall Ó Héalaí shares his personal relationship with the endangered Gaelic language. Recounting ancient legends, singing a traditional Gaelic song and discussing the colonial induced displacement of indigenous culture and practices, Dónall ultimately encourages the audience to consider our own inner selves--aspects of ourselves that we fail to celebrate and hide from the rest of the world. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Dónall Ó Héalaí is an Irish actor and the founder of Celtic Consciousness, an initiative that aims to share the insights and beauty of the Gaelic language with a wider audience and use ancient Irish stories and songs as a medium for self-reflection.
Another mention of language connecting it’s speakers to the land here.
Watched Mind yer Scots - Dr Michael Dempster full interview from YouTube
Dr Michael Dempster - Full Interview. Speaking to 'The Big Night In' Dr Dempster discusses the origins of the Scots language, Scots in popular culture, place names, common attitudes and various initiatives to encourage people to use and understand their own Scots tongue.
Interesting note about the TV show Shetland and the language used and how it was affected by the BBC as a production entity.

Mention around 23 minutes about the Anglicization of Scots words that not only don’t make sense, but remove the relationship between the people and their land.

Watched We'r Needin tae Talk Aboot Wir Language by Michael Dempster from TEDxInverness | YouTube

Auditory neuroscientist Michael Dempster delivers a gripping presentation on how the mind reacts when we talk freely with the language we grew up with. This talk is delivered using the language which Miachael grew up with, Scots. He tells of some of the difficulties the Scots language has faced in the past and gives some insight into its future. Michael is an Auditory Neuroscientist who gained his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Glasgow for his work exploring neural processing fundamental to language and music perception. He is also a first-language Scots speaker. He has taught modern Scots to people from outwith Scotland and to people from Scotland who want to learn more about their own ways of speaking. Over the past year he has been working on his forthcoming book “Mind yer language? - How we talk English an how we talk Scots.”

Read Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles by Kieren McCarthy
In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language. The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having created, modified or guided the vast majority of its pages in more than 200,000 edits. The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”
Read - Reading: The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer (The Great Courses)
Lecture 36: Conclusions and Provocations
Conclude the course by reviewing the major themes and approaches you've covered and bringing together some of the details of the historical sweep of the preceding lectures. As Professor Lerer stresses, to know the history of our language is to know ourselves.
A great philosophical recap of what he’s covered.

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Read - Finished Reading: The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer (The Great Courses)
Sixteen centuries ago a wave of settlers from northern Europe came to the British Isles speaking a mix of Germanic dialects thick with consonants and complex grammatical forms. Today we call that dialect Old English, the ancestor of the language nearly one in five people in the world speaks every day.

How did this ancient tongue evolve into the elegant idiom of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain, Melville, and other great writers? What features of modern English spelling and vocabulary link it to its Old English roots? How did English grammar become so streamlined? Why did its pronunciation undergo such drastic changes? How do we even know what English sounded like in the distant past? And how does English continue to develop to the present day?
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Definitely worth multiple listens. There’s a lot of depth and nuance here and Lerer does a great job of not only relaying the history and events, but ties it together in broader themes while still showing the art of the multiple subjects he’s covering.
Read - Reading: The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer (The Great Courses)

Lecture 35: Linguistics and Politics in Language Study
Get a compelling introduction to Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics, and to the social, cognitive, and philosophical implications of his work. The legacy of Chomskyan linguistics, you'll discover, goes far beyond the technical terms of the discipline to embrace a politics of language study itself.

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Noam Chomsky 1950’s & 60’s:

  • Deductive instead of inductive approach
  • Deep/surface structures
  • Transformational generative grammar (theory about language)

Saussure: langue and parole

Chomsky used competence and performance

Aspect over tense

Bookmarked Generalized Word Shift Graphs: A Method for Visualizing and Explaining Pairwise Comparisons Between Texts (arXiv.org)
A common task in computational text analyses is to quantify how two corpora differ according to a measurement like word frequency, sentiment, or information content. However, collapsing the texts' rich stories into a single number is often conceptually perilous, and it is difficult to confidently interpret interesting or unexpected textual patterns without looming concerns about data artifacts or measurement validity. To better capture fine-grained differences between texts, we introduce generalized word shift graphs, visualizations which yield a meaningful and interpretable summary of how individual words contribute to the variation between two texts for any measure that can be formulated as a weighted average. We show that this framework naturally encompasses many of the most commonly used approaches for comparing texts, including relative frequencies, dictionary scores, and entropy-based measures like the Kullback-Leibler and Jensen-Shannon divergences. Through several case studies, we demonstrate how generalized word shift graphs can be flexibly applied across domains for diagnostic investigation, hypothesis generation, and substantive interpretation. By providing a detailed lens into textual shifts between corpora, generalized word shift graphs help computational social scientists, digital humanists, and other text analysis practitioners fashion more robust scientific narratives.
Read Tatoeba (en.wikipedia.org)
Tatoeba is a free collaborative online database of example sentences geared towards foreign language learners. Its name comes from the Japanese term "tatoeba" (例えば), meaning "for example". Unlike other online dictionaries, which focus on words, Tatoeba focuses on translation of complete sentences. In addition, the structure of the database and interface emphasize one-to-many relationships. Not only can a sentence have multiple translations within a single language, but its translations into all languages are readily visible, as are indirect translations that involve a chain of stepwise links from one language to another.