Pinkerisms. The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes. SwM meets #Sfn11 Day One: Words, Pitch, and Rhythm. The Phrontistery: Obscure Words and Vocabulary Resources. Singin' in the rain - Diction coach. List: Seven Bar Jokes Involving Grammar and Punctuation. How Music and Language Mimicked Nature to Evolve Us. By Maria Popova How auditory cheesecake was made with mother nature’s milk, or why our brains were not designed for reading.
Speech and writing are our two most fundamental forms of communication yet, while we’re extraordinarily good at them, they remain an ever-mystifying frontier of intellectual inquiry. We’ve previously looked at how sounds evolved into shapes, 5 essential books on language, and 7 must-reads on music and the brain. Now, from evolutionary neuroscientist Mark Changizi, comes compelling new evidence to unite these three domains of fascination.
In Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man, Changizi explores the evolution of language and music as they came to separate us from our primate ancestors. The answer is that, rather than our brains being designed for reading, reading is designed for our brains. Language communities of Twitter. Eric Fischer maps language communities on Twitter using Chrome's open-source language detector.
Each color, chosen to make differences more visibly obvious, represents a language. English is represented in dark gray, which is used just about everywhere, so it doesn't obscure everything else. Norvig channels Shannon contra Chomsky. Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader's Regional Accent. While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech.
However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like ‘glass’, in which the vowel duration is short in a Northern accent and long in a Southern accent.
Participants' eye movements were monitored while they silently read limericks in which the end words of the first two lines (e.g., glass/class) would be pronounced differently by Northern and Southern participants. The final word of the limerick (e.g., mass/sparse) then either did or did not rhyme, depending on the reader's accent. Results showed disruption to eye movement behaviour when the final word did not rhyme, determined by the reader's accent, suggesting that inner speech resembles our own voice. Figures. Computational Linguistics: What Our Word Choice Reveals About Us. By Maria Popova What the pronouns you use reveal about your thoughts and emotions, or how to liespot your everyday email.
We’re social beings wired for communicating with one another, and as new modes and platforms of communication become available to us, so do new ways of understanding the complex patterns, motivations and psychosocial phenomena that underpin that communication. That’s exactly what social psychologist and language expert James W. Revealing the earliest origins of Italian language - Medievalists.net. It’s a timeless project—and a priceless opportunity: Advanced students at the University of Notre Dame are currently working with some of Italy’s top linguistics experts to assemble the most complete historical dictionary of the Italian language prior to 1375.
Notre Dame is currently the only university outside of Italy invited to contribute research to the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO) project, an initiative of the prestigious Accademia della crusca’s Opera del vocabolario italiano (OVI) branch. “It’s a kind of training that nobody else in the United States gets to do,” says Charles Leavitt, a post-doctoral research fellow who spent a year at the OVI in Florence as a Ph.D. student at Notre Dame and now manages the University’s involvement in the dictionary project.
Style: Dead, or just mostly dead? A toolkit for spotting prejudice. Have you ever read something and thought, “that’s prejudiced”, but without the ability to put your finger on exactly how?
There are speeches and writings and quotes which seem sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic or transphobic, yet there is no exact quote that can be pulled out and easily called out for what it is. This is because there are subtle ways of using language, barely perceptible, which reflect stereotyping and prejudice. In spotting these, one can call out the speaker or writer and address the grubby prejudice that lies beneath. Symbolic racism Following the Civil Rights movement and the overturning of the openly bigoted Jim Crow laws, racism in the United States took a different form: symbolic racism. Language speed: I can't speak 55. Chinese: No word for -ing. Linguistics: Say what? The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Text Symbols (and special characters)
The A-Z of Office Slanguage. Business: The modern office.
You stand by the water cooler. You play on the internet. You build piles of things, then knock them over. It’s an Attenborough-worthy environment, and as such has spawned many a new word, clambering for inclusion in the dictionaries of the future. We want your help to compile a full compendium of the office slanguage that lets us all get through the working day. Please tweet us or drop us an email… the good one’s will be added to the directory. Boundary upon amicable networking. « previous post | next post » According to on "your one stop online daily news portal" the Daily Ginger, which I will not link to for reasons that will become clear below, yesterday this happened:
RoboBee speaks honeybee dance language - tech - 19 August 2011. IT SMELLS, it buzzes, it even dances like a honeybee.
In a field in Germany, RoboBee is making its first attempts at speaking to the insects in their own language. Bees are famous for communicating using the waggle dance - walking forward while rapidly vibrating their rear. In the 1940s, biologist Karl von Frisch realised that the length and angle of the dance correlated with the distance and direction of the food source the bee had just visited. Since then, most apiologists have held that dancers tell their fellows where to find food (New Scientist, 19 September 2009, p 40) The case of the missing spamularity. « previous post | next post » A recent diary post by Charlie Stross ("It's made out of meat", 12/22/2010) poses a striking paradox.
Or rather, he makes a prediction about a process whose trajectory, as so far observable, seems paradoxical to me. Mankini, retweet among new words in Oxford English Dictionary. MANKINI is now officially part of our language after appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary. The name of the revealing male bathing costume made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen in his Borat film is joined by other new words from modern technology. They include retweet (sharing a Twitter message), sexting (sending saucy texts), and cyberbullying (bullying online or by text). Mobile.
Services Architecturaux.com - Accueil. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter. When you talk too much for Twitter.
The Secret Language Code. Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture. Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993 Listen to an Audio Recording of Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture* Teacher versus former student on Facebook. If you're a s. Cocktail Party Physics. Surely you are all familiar with that classic scene in the film The Sound of Music, in which the von Trapp children, led by their governess, Maria, perform a puppet show to “The Lonely Goatherd.” Useful words: What would you import? Be appalled; be very appalled. « previous post | next post » It is traditional for readers of The Daily Telegraph to write letters to their editor saying how "appalled" they are by the terrible abuse the English language suffers daily. Phonological processing and speaker identification. Xtreme nerdview. How language transformed humanity - Maniraptora: Tastes Like Chicken Blog.
Medicare: Kabuki. Bolting upright, he reached for his dictionary. Exposing Literary Style, One Word at a Time. The importance of language and framing, part eleventy-thousand « This is what a computer scientist looks like. The power of nouns – tiny word change increases voter turnout. Kiki or bouba? In search of language's missing link - life - 18 July 2011. Read full article. Dyslexie — A New Typeface Cleverly Designed to Help Dyslexics Read. Klingon for Beginners: A Video Tutorial! Translated phrase-list jokes. « previous post | next post » How our bits shape us: James Gleick’s “The Information” Mossflow: Prologue. English, Hebrew and the brain’s language-reading process.
The Visual Linguist: Kid's sequential drawings. The reality of a universal language faculty? A Chomsky Reader.
Adjectives. Ormulum. This Vale of Words. Events. Primed for Reading. Language blogs. Languages. Language and power. Usage. Meaning. Radiolab and NPR Present Words. The Long Tail of Language. Blog Archive » …give a dog a bad name, and shoot him. Mary Poppins And The Stripper: Time Reversal Reconsidered : Krulwich Wonders… Media Player.