Every individual's speech is variable. And when we look beyond the individual, we see variation across space, time, style, and social structure — among other dimensions. And these variations are generally gradient rather than abrupt, although standardization efforts by national or regional governments may try to eliminate the variation. For millennia, scholars have noted and […]
Daron Acemoglu, "The Simple Macroeconomics of AI": ABSTRACT: This paper evaluates claims about the large macroeconomic implications of new advances in AI. It starts from a task-based model of AI’s effects, working through automation and task complementarities. It establishes that, so long as AI’s microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the task […]
Is monolingualism a normal, natural, necessary state of affairs for human beings? Can you imagine a world in which there were only one language? How is that even possible? These are questions that come to mind after reading Gina Anne Tam's deeply thought provoking "Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China", […]
A guest post for The Digital Orientalist (4/10/24), under The Magic of Philology and Indexing, Polyglot Asian Medicines (Foundational Resources and Digital Tools), by Michael Stanley-Baker, Christopher S.G. Khoo and Faizah Zakariah (all three are based at academic institutions in Singapore), "Tracking Drug Names Across Language, Time, Space and Knowledge Domains to Produce New Visions […]
[Prefatory note: The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attended from 2016 to 2018. She has been employed for several years as an adviser to students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) […]
[Basic information about Kalmyk (Mongolic language) and Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) below.] For researchers of Julius Klaproth or those interested in Kalmyk language, I'm preparing to catalogue this Kalmyk-German glossary believed to have belonged to Klaproth. Any suggestions as to which book it is a glossary of? pic.twitter.com/SfSPyvZR3W — Royal Asiatic Society (@RAS_Soc) April 4, 2024
According to the CCP, India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh is now part of the PRC's "South Tibet", in other words, of China, so is to be named "Zangnan" — says nobody except the PRC. India rejected China's renaming of about 30 places in its northeastern Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh on Tuesday, calling the […]
My basement is full of unpublished manuscripts. I call it the "Dungeon", because it is dark, dank, and crowded with books and papers — much worse than my office, which has achieved a fabled reputation for its crampedness — and very cold in the winter, though it does have a wonderful bay window on the […]
President Joe Biden is known for having overcome a serious stuttering problem as a child — see e.g. "Biden’s Stutter: How a Childhood Battle Shaped His Approach to Life & Politics", or "Joe Biden's history of stuttering sheds light on the condition". It also seems clear that the techniques that he developed to overcome the […]
To situate the Scythians linguistically, before delving into their history and culture, let us begin by noting: The Scythian languages (/ˈsɪθiən/ or /ˈsɪðiən/ or /ˈskɪθiən/) are a group of Eastern Iranic languages of the classical and late antique period (the Middle Iranic period), spoken in a vast region of Eurasia by the populations belonging to the Scythian cultures and their descendants. The dominant ethnic groups among the Scythian-speakers were nomadic pastoralists of Central Asia and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Fragments of their speech […]
Below is a guest post by Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat: Ferrara et al. [1] report on the results of a study of several specimens of kohau rongorongo, the enigmatic, undeciphered texts of Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui). These texts, inscribed on wood—mostly driftwood that washed ashore on the island—may have numbered in […]
Preface Because surnames of immigrants in a melting pot like America often end up getting distorted, bowdlerized, prettified, and otherwise transformed from what they were in their original homelands, we cannot take their current form as gospel linguistic truth. Nonetheless, people who encounter them cannot avoid taking them at their face value, which may cause […]