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Rescued debate

Yesterday Sharon Klein wrote to ask about the 2010 debate on Language and Thought hosted by The Economist: Some colleagues in other departments (notably in philosophy) have been asking to talk about the hypothesis, linguistic relativism, and the actual research around the issues. While I can (and have begun to) collect relevant papers for a […]

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Nouns, verbs, and ontological metaphors

Federico Escobar pointed me to an essay by David Brooks, "The 2016 Sidney Awards, Part I", NYT 12/27/2016: Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns. For example, in one passage from the 18th-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses […]

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Will "Arrival" bring linguistics into the popular consciousness? A guest post by Luke Lindemann

The movie "Arrival" has been in theaters for three weeks now, and it has already grossed $100 million worldwide. That's an impressive box-office draw, and it can't all be due to linguists and their friends attending. Clearly this contemplative film, with a field linguist as the heroic protagonist, is resonating with audiences. But what does that mean […]

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"Arrival" arrives

"Arrival" hits the theaters this weekend, and I'd heartily recommend it to all Language Log readers. The film, despite its science-fiction trappings, does a remarkably good job of depicting how a linguist goes about her work. I've posted about the movie a few times before even seeing it, based on the trailers: "'Language is messy,' […]

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Trump translated

In "Trump’s Tower of Babble:  How the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explains Donald Trump’s rantings — and why the rest of the world is so confused" (Foreign Policy, 8/30/16), Christopher M. Livaccari and Jeff Wang allege: Questions about the meaning of Trump’s words… may be a type of category mistake. Trump and his supporters seem to be […]

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Style or artefact or both?

In "Correlated lexicometrical decay", I commented on some unexpectedly strong correlations over time of the ratios of word and phrase frequencies in the Google Books English 1gram dataset: I'm sure that these patterns mean something. But it seems a little weird that OF as a proportion of all prepositions should correlate r=0.953 with the proportion of instances of […]

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Ecology and phonology

Ian Maddieson and Christophe Coupé, "Human spoken language diversity and the acoustic adaptation hyothesis", ASA 2015 Bioacousticians have argued that ecological feedback mechanisms contribute to shaping the acoustic signals of a variety of species and anthropogenic changes in soundscapes have been shown to generate modifications to the spectral envelope of bird songs. Several studies posit […]

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Scots words for snow

Several people have sent this in: "Scots 'have 421 words' for snow", BBC News 9/23/2015: Academics have officially logged 421 terms – including "snaw" (snow), "sneesl" (to begin to rain or snow) and "skelf" (a large snowflake). The study by the University of Glasgow is part of a project to compile the first Historical Thesaurus […]

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Political vocabulary display

In a comment on "The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", D.O. wrote "It seems that we are missing (at least I was missing) a key piece about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Bush's speaking style. Mr. Bush is using significantly more words than Mr. Trump". What he means is not that Bush talks more than Trump […]

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One for Diogenes

The philosopher Diogenes of Sinope was eccentric, to say the least — he begged for a living, slept in a large ceramic jar in the marketplace, and discarded the wooden bowl that was his only possession, deciding that it was excess baggage. He refuted the Platonic definition of human as "featherless biped" by exhibiting a plucked […]

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The BDLPSWDKS Effect

Today's xkcd:

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Reverse Debates

From the last year's Foundational Questions Institute conference, a String Theory supporter (Raphael Bousso) is asked to argue against String Theory on behalf of Loop Quantum Gravity, while one of the founders of Loop Quantum Gravity theory (Carlo Rovelli) takes the String Theory side, in opposition to his own point of view: This works out well, making […]

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Fake word history of the month

Jason Torchinsky, "A very common word was invented by Dodge", Jalopnik 12/15/2014: Dodge is known for producing many things, most notably cars, minivans, and sometimes large, lingering clouds of tire smoke. Oh, and the K-Car. But one thing I didn't realize was that they're also in the word business, coining an extremely common word way back […]

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