Category: Linguistics

👓 How the media should respond to Trump’s lies | Vox

Read How the media should respond to Trump’s lies by Sean Illing (Vox)
A linguist explains how Trump uses lies to divert attention from the "big truths."
I like that he delves into the idea of enlightment reasoning here and why it doesn’t work. This section of this article is what makes it a bit different from some of the interviews and articles that Lakoff has been appearing in lately.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

I take your point, but I wonder if Trump is just kryptonite for a liberal democratic system built on a free press.  ❧

The key words being “free press” with free meaning that we’re free to exert intelligent editorial control.

Editors in the early 1900’s used this sort of editorial control not to give fuel to racists and Nazis and reduce their influence.Cross reference: Face the Racist Nation from On the Media.

Apparently we need to exert the same editorial control with respect to Trump, who not incidentally is giving significant fuel to the racist fire as well.
November 20, 2018 at 10:11AM

A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning, and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true.  ❧

November 20, 2018 at 10:12AM

🔖 ❤️ GeorgeLakoff tweet on neutral language in journalism

Liked a tweet by George Lakoff on TwitterGeorge Lakoff on Twitter (Twitter)

Reply to Ben Werdmuller on social media resharing

Replied to a tweet by Ben WerdmullerBen Werdmuller (Twitter)
“The single change social networks could make that would have the most positive impact is to remove all kinds of resharing. Force people to speak in their own voices or not at all. Using other peoples' language to express yourself forces you to evaluate the world on their terms.”
I’ve been awaiting the percolation of your prior thoughts. For additional reference Manton Reece may have some thoughts as this lack of repost functionality is relatively central to how micro.blog works.

🎧 Lectures 33-34 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 33-34: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 33: Language Death—The Problem
Just as there is an extinction crisis among many of the world's animals and plants, it is estimated that 5,500 of the world's languages will no longer be spoken in 2100.

Lecture 34: Language Death—Prognosis
There are many movements to revive dying languages. We explore the reasons that success is so elusive. For one, people often see their unwritten native language as less "legitimate" than written ones used in popular media.

🎧 Lectures 31-32 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 31-32: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 31: Language Starts Over—The Creole Continuum
Just as one dialect shades into another, "creoleness" is a continuum concept. Once we know this, we are in a position to put the finishing touches on our conception of how speech varieties are distributed across the globe.

Lecture 32: What Is Black English?
Using insights developed in the course to this point, Professor McWhorter takes a fresh look at Black English, tracing its roots to regional English spoken in Britain and Ireland several centuries ago.

Reply to Ben Werdmller on linguistics

Replied to a tweet by Ben WerdmullerBen Werdmuller (Twitter)
“Have there been any studies on whether using other peoples’ phraseology rather than your own to describe your opinions changes how you think? I have a really dark theory, but I want to understand if there’s science first.”
Not my direct area of expertise, but I suspect this area was born with the popular Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in linguistics which may give you a place to start. There hasn’t been a lot of hard proof provided for it to my knowledge however.

🎧 Lecture 30 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 30: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 30: Language Starts Over—Signs of the New
Creoles are the only languages that lack or have very little of the grammatical traits that emerge over time. In this, creole grammars are the closest to what the grammar of the first language was probably like.

🎧 Lectures 28-29 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 28-29: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 28: Language Starts Over—Creoles I
Creoles emerge when pidgin speakers use the pidgin as an everyday language. Creoles are spoken throughout the world, wherever history has forced people to expand a pidgin into a full language. (finished at 8:23am)

Lecture 29: Language Starts Over—Creoles II
As new languages, creoles don't have as many frills as older languages, but they do have complexities. Like real languages, creoles change over time, have dialects, and mix with other languages.

🎧 Lectures 26-27 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 26-27: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter John McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 26: Does Culture Drive Language Change?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that features of our grammars channel how we think. Professor McWhorter discusses the evidence for and against this controversial but widely held view.

Lecture 27: Language Starts Over—Pidgins
This lecture is the first of five on how human ingenuity spins new languages out of old through the creation of pidgins and creoles. A pidgin is a stripped-down version of a language suitable for passing, utilitarian use.

🎧 Lecture 25 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 25: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 25: A New Perspective on the Story of English
We trace English back to its earliest discernible roots in Proto-Indo-European and follow its fascinating development, including an ancient encounter with a language possibly related to Arabic and Hebrew.

🎧 Lecture 24 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 24: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 24: Language Interrupted
Generally, a language spoken by a small, isolated group will be much more complicated than English. Languages are "streamlined" in this way when history leads them to be learned more as second languages than as first ones.

🎧 Lecture 23 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 23: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 23: Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty
A great deal of a language's grammar is a kind of overgrowth, marking nuances that many or most languages do without. Even the gender marking of European languages is a frill, absent in thousands of other languages.

🎧 Lectures 20-22 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 20-22: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 20: Language Mixture—Words
The first language's 6,000 branches have not only diverged into dialects, but they have been constantly mixing with one another on all levels. The first of three lectures on language mixture looks at how this process applies to words.

Lecture 21: Language Mixture—Grammar
Languages also mix their grammars. For example, Yiddish is a dialect of German, but it has many grammatical features from Slavic languages like Polish. There are no languages without some signs of grammar mixture.

Lecture 22: Language Mixture—Language Areas
When unrelated or distantly related languages are spoken in the same area for long periods, they tend to become more grammatically similar because of widespread bilingualism.

👓 Robert Lowth | Wikipedia

Read Robert Lowth (Wikipedia)
Robert Lowth FRS (/laʊð/; 27 November 1710 – 3 November 1787) was a Bishop of the Church of England, Oxford Professor of Poetry and the author of one of the most influential textbooks of English grammar.
An interesting character with an outsize influence on modern English grammar. Dave Harris is sure to appreciate this.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Lowth seems to have been the first modern Bible scholar to notice or draw attention to the poetic structure of the Psalms and much of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament.  ❧

October 16, 2018 at 10:55AM

Lowth’s grammar is the source of many of the prescriptive shibboleths that are studied in schools,  ❧

October 16, 2018 at 10:56AM

His most famous contribution to the study of grammar may have been his tentative suggestion that sentences ending with a preposition—such as “what did you ask for?”—are inappropriate in formal writing.  ❧

October 16, 2018 at 10:56AM