Bilingual book takes top honors at New Zealand Children's Book Awards
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In a comment on yesterday's "Debate words" post, I noted that Donald Trump's ratio of I-words to we-words was "off the charts" compared the other eight candidates, and several people have asked me to give all the numbers.
There's an idea Out There that such numbers are related to issues of personality and mood. This is true, but the relationships are complicated — see Jamie Pennebaker's 2009 guest post "What is 'I' saying?". So we really should classify first-person singular pronouns into what Pennebaker calls "graceful-I" vs. "sledgehammer-I" categories. And of course, various pronoun-usage rates also depend on details of topic and interactional context, as noted in yesterday's exchange of comments.
Still, let's look at the numbers.
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The Transcript Library at rev.com is a great resource — within 24 hours, they had transcripts of Wednesday's Fox News Republican presidential debate, and also of Tucker Carlson's debate night interview with Donald Trump on X.
So this morning I downloaded the transcripts, and ran the code that I've used several times over the years to identify the characteristic word-choices of an individual or of a group.
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Yesterday, Randoh Sallihall from unscramblerer.com sent this note:
Susie Dent has an ever growing Twitter following of 1,1 million unique word lovers to whom she shares her daily word of the day. Word search engine Unscramblerer.com went through Susie Dent's whole Twitter history and analyzed what are the most liked, shared and commented words of the day she has posted.
List of Susie Dent's most popular words of the day:
A spokesperson for Unscramblerer.com commented on the findings:
"Susie Dent sometimes uses current events to post a word of the day that is relevant to what is happening in the UK. This is why her most popular words of the day are likely also related to past events where she really understood the mood of the crowd. A great example of this is the word 'maw-worm' posted on Apr 12, 2022 her most retweeted word of the day ever (a dig at Boris Johnson during 'Partygate'). In general people love unique and obscure words they have never heard before. It spikes curiosity and it is really fun trying to use such words yourself. Resulting in people laughing and then asking what does 'snollygoster' mean?"
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(see in particular the second item)
If this isn't dictator status, I don't know what ishttps://t.co/A4guMzG4m1
— Bumboclott (@Bumboclott) June 29, 2023
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Sunday's post on "Listless vessels" opened with this clip:
And in the 30th comment, Yuval wrote
FWIW, both utterances of "principle" sound like 'princible' to me.
He's absolutely right — but what those two words "sound like" leaves an important theoretical (and practical) question open.
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In recent weeks and months, Language Log has been quite active in discussions on Tocharian and its relationship to other members of Indo-European. Today's post takes a different approach from this post made just yesterday and many earlier posts.
"Europe's ancient languages shed light on a great migration and weather vocabulary"
by Ali Jones, Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine (8/15/23)
Painstaking archaeological exploration is a familiar, often widely admired, method of unearthing history. Less celebrated, but also invaluable, is the piecing together of fragments of ancient languages and analyzing how they changed over thousands of years.
Historical linguists have reconstructed a common ancestral tongue for most of the languages spoken today in Europe and South Asia. English, German, Greek, Hindi and Urdu—among others in the Indo-European family of languages—can all trace their origins to a single spoken one named Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
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In an interview on Friday ("DeSantis plans to do what Trump couldn't | Full Interview with Will Witt", The Florida Standard 8/18/2023), Ron DeSantis referred to (some of?) Donald Trump's followers as "listless vessels":
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I asked several IEist colleagues:
Of all the IE languages, which one is Tocharian closest to?
Celtic?
Germanic?
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