Archive for Bibliography

Library lists

[Posted with the permission of the author, David Helliwell]
 
Almost exactly five years ago, I was dismissed on the grounds of age from my post as Curator of Chinese Collections at the Bodleian Library. I had been in office for over 41 years. The last six of those were particularly pleasurable as I was able to spend all my time organising, identifying, and cataloguing the Library’s “special collections” of Chinese books. Meanwhile, Joshua, who had been appointed to take over all my other duties, did all the hard work.

My teenage years were spent in the 1960s, and we children of the sixties, as demonstrated so well by Paul McCartney at Glastonbury this year, never grow old. We simply become less young. We also have the advantage of being able to recall what to many, if not to most colleagues in this room, is the distant past.

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Brain Mechanisms and Constructed Languages vs. Natural Languages

"Constructed Languages Are Processed by the Same Brain Mechanisms as Natural Languages." Malik-Moraleda, Saima, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 12 (March 17, 2025): e2313473122.

Significance

What constitutes a language has been of interest to diverse disciplines—from philosophy and linguistics to psychology, anthropology, and sociology. An empirical approach is to test whether the system in question recruits the brain system that processes natural languages. Despite their similarity to natural languages, math and programming languages recruit a distinct brain system. Using fMRI, we test brain responses to constructed languages (conlangs)—which share features with both natural languages and programming languages—and find that they are processed by the same brain network as natural languages. Thus, an ability for a symbolic system to express diverse meanings about the world—but not the recency, manner, and purpose of its creation, or a large user base—is a defining characteristic of a language.

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Words for "library" in Sanskrit: the future of information science

The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]).  Those are simple and straightforward.

There were several other Sanskrit words for library I used to know, such as vidyākośasamāśraya विद्याकोशसमाश्रय* that included the component vidya ("knowledge"), but they were more subtle and complicated, so they were harder for me to recall.

*knowledge treasury coming together (for support or shelter)

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Linguistics bibliography roundup

Something for everyone

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