Ordinary language and technical terminology often diverge. We've covered the "passive voice" case at length. I don't think we've discussed the fact that for botanists, cucumbers and tomatoes are berries but strawberries and raspberries aren't — but there are many examples of such terminological divergence in fields outside of linguistics. However, the technical terminology is […]
[This is a guest post by Chris Button] There are a couple of brief suggestions in Mallory & Adams' Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1997:314;379) that the Lithuanian word geležis and Old Church Slavonic word želežo for "iron", which following Derksen (2008:555) may be derived from Balto-Slavic *geleź-/*gelēź- (ź being the IPA palatal sibilant ʑ), could […]
Headline from the Bangor Daily News (Feb. 13, 2019): "Maine now holds the world record for most people calling a moose at the same time." Screenshot for posterity: Update: The headline has been changed to read, "Maine now holds the world record for simultaneous moose-calling."
Over the past few years, it's been increasingly common for computational linguists to use various kinds of "word embeddings". The foundation for this was the vector space model, developed in the 1960s for document retrieval applications, which represents a piece of text as a vector of word (or "term") counts. The next step was latent […]
At about 22:45 of the BBC discussion program The Moral Maze, Natasha Devon asserts Your browser does not support the audio element. Well it- I- again, one of the problems is language, actually, because in English, we have a very limited emotional vocabulary. When you look at other languages, they- they have a much broader amount of […]
Movie ticket for "Liúlàng dìqiú 流浪地球" ("Wandering earth"): (Source)
Further developments in the indexicality (intexticality?) of punctuation: Friend sends me a chat message that's just "Hey." Me: oh my god what's with the period has someone died (Reader, it was fine.) — Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) February 7, 2019
Jane Skinner received this from a friend who saw it in Chengdu, Sichuan:
Emma Knightley asks: My background is that I grew up in Taiwan learning Traditional Chinese and now most of what I use in my professional life is in Simplified Chinese. How exactly should the character of hē, "to drink," be written? I grew up learning that the character inside the bottom-right enclosure is 人. Now […]
Theresa May's 2/10/2019 letter to Jeremy Corbyn includes a sentence ending in a question mark that caught Graeme Orr's attention: As I explained when we met, the Political Declaration explicitly provides for the benefits of a customs union – no tariffs, fees, charges or quantitative restrictions across all sectors and no checks on rules of […]
Below is a guest post by Christian DiCanio: 2019 was named the International Year of Indigenous Languages by UNESCO. My friends and colleagues at the recent Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) have been on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media discussing what this means for Linguistics as a field. With respect to publishing, several journals […]