MIT claims to have found a “language universal” that ties all languages together Language takes an astonishing variety of forms across the world—to such a huge extent that a long-standing debate rages around the question of whether all languages have even a single property in common. Well, there’s a new candidate for the elusive title of “language universal” according to a paper in this week’s issue of PNAS. All languages, the authors say, self-organise in such a way that related concepts stay as close together as possible within a sentence, making it easier to piece together the overall meaning. Language universals are a big deal because they shed light on heavy questions about human cognition. The most famous proponent of the idea of language universals is Noam Chomsky, who suggested a “universal grammar” that underlies all languages. However, other researchers argue that there are vanishingly few candidates for a true language universal. Self-organising systems Then, the researchers compared these scores to a baseline. The family tree
Words People Commonly Misuse - Words That People Say Wrong - The Real Definition of Literally 10. Electrocute What you think it means: To receive an electric shockWhat it actually means: A severe injury or death as a result of an electric shock Being electrocuted means you are in some serious shit: like, either dead or close to it. 11. What you think it means: An abundance or a lot of somethingWhat it actually means: An overabundance or an excessive amount of something A plethora is not just a bunch of something, it's an overabundance, or way too much of something that creates a problem. 12. What you think it means: To do something frequentlyWhat it actually means: To do something in a scheduled or predictable manner If you regularly make a lot of the mistakes on this list, it doesn't mean you say these words incorrectly with frequency. Wil Fulton is a staff writer for Supercompressor.com. Want more of the Culture you actually care about delivered straight to your inbox?
The Twisted Genius of Soldier Humor - Jokes in Wartime Advertisement - Continue Reading Below The night before a potentially dicey mission to the heart of Taliban-controlled territory, U.S. soldiers run through their battle plan using a room-sized map of a remote village drawn on a plywood floor. Capt. Frank Phillips calls the ball, placing soldiers along the winding road etched with marker and calling out the woman's names assigned to each maneuver. Planning a mission like this is serious business. I grab a copy of the printout of the mission plan for confirmation. "I watched it again while we were planning this," Phillips told me with a straight face. As I learned over the years covering combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, humor—often dark, absurd, and/or twisted—is essential for the preservation of sanity at war. A couple of years ago I was embedded with a company at combat outpost Pirtle King in eastern Afghanistan, a small base subject to regular hounding from snipers tucked in the mountains surrounding them on all sides.
Worst food-writing cliches As someone whose job is basically to eat Korean chicken wings and then write about how good they are, I’ll readily admit there are times when I’ve crossed the line from waxing poetic about food into just beating metaphors out of a dead horse (metaphorically of course). Anybody who’s written about restaurants for a living has surely fallen prey to dull, empty language from time to time. Even Anthony Bourdain has typed the phrase “cornucopia of flavor” at some point. But then he hurled his laptop out of a train window in disappointment. These are the 17 food-writing cliches currently circulating that hurt our eyes -- and souls -- to have to read. Gooey/Oozes When describing something that’s meant to be eaten, it’s a good rule of thumb to steer away from language that a dermatologist would use to describe a boil. Intimate dining area The ambiance of a restaurant can be romantic, sure. Addictive Jennifer Bui/Thrillist Flavorful/Tasty “Yum, this food is soooooo foody! Saddle/sidle up to the bar
Irony - Examples and Definition of Irony Irony Definition Irony is a figure of speech in which words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words. It may also be a situation that may end up in quite a different way than what is generally anticipated. Types of Irony On the grounds of the above definition, we distinguish two basic kinds of irony i.e. verbal irony and situational irony. Difference between Dramatic Irony and Situational Irony Dramatic irony is a kind of irony in a situation, which the writers frequently employ in their works. Common Examples of Irony Let us analyze some interesting examples of irony from our daily life: I posted a video on YouTube about how boring and useless YouTube is.The name of Britain’s biggest dog was “Tiny”.You laugh at a person who slipped stepping on a banana peel and the next thing you know, you slipped too.The butter is as soft as a marble piece. Irony Examples from Literature Example #1 “Go ask his name: if he be married. Example #2
The real secret to learning a language online One of the founding miracles of the Internet was that it connected people around the world. But without a common language, that connection didn’t mean much. The Internet mirrored an increasingly globalized society in which not being able to speak a language could mean being locked out of a culture. Unsurprisingly, the Internet spawned early attempts at machine translation, like Babelfish, which eventually led to tools like Google Translate—a big, data-driven application that’s good enough to take for granted. But what about actually learning a foreign language? The Internet has long had its share of tools to help people learn another language, and increasingly those tools are going mobile and taking advantage of new understandings about how we learn. That’s important because most people can’t afford to immerse themselves in another language—at least not physically. Duolingo, founded by Luis von Ahn, the inventor of reCAPTCHA, intends to make language education universal and accessible.
11 Stellar British Swear Words That Americans Should Borrow Lucire Living: How to pronounce 'Moët' - Carolyn Enting solves the champagne pronunciation riddle - The global fashion magazine It’s the fashionista’s tipple of choice, but how is Moët pronounced? Carolyn Enting solves the riddle that’s often crept up at fashion weeks It may be the preferred fashionista tipple, but the pronunciation of Moët & Chandon has caused many red faces and hot debate. I will never forget my first visit to the exclusive Moët & Chandon lounge at Australian Fashion Week. Upon receiving my first free glass of bubbles I enthusiastically declared the ‘Mo-aye was fabulous,’ only to be shot down by an acid-tongued fashion editor who said, ‘It’s Mo-wett darling.’ Sufficiently mortified, but not enough as to not enjoy my drink, I set forth to find out just how to pronounce it. Throwing the question out for debate at social gatherings, dinner parties and unsuspecting wine waiters it became a hotly contested topic but I was none the wiser. None of these theories is correct. The correct way to pronounce it is ‘Mo’wett’. Moët is indeed French champagne and was founded in 1743 by Claude Moët.
Language - The War Behind All Wars : Waking Times Alex Vandenberg, ContributorWaking Times The war behind all wars is a war on words; a war on language. For instance, in today’s world independence is overshadowed by “inter-dependence”, incessant talk of “democracy” overlooks our constitutional republic, “pooling” is now a substitute for sovereignty, “globalization” takes precedence over nation-states, economic growth has morphed into “sustainable development”, “liberty is co-mingled with “freedom”, and constitutional declarations of war have been replaced with the “approval” or “authorization” for war. The reason for the turnaround is that a modification of vernacular is necessary to bring about a global transformation of society. George Orwell, being thoroughly versed in the nefarious techniques of statists, knew of the need for a new grammar system for the “proles” and spoke of it in his work 1984. “By 2050- earlier, probably- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. Real alchemy was about turning lead into gold.
Dictionary of Newfoundland English Search Edited by G.M Story, W.J Kirwin and J. D. A Widdowson. Second Edition with Supplement In 1998 and 1999 the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2d ed, published by the University of Toronto Press, was prepared for inclusion in Memorial University's Heritage Web Site. What "Orwellian" Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term In all of our minds, the word "Orwellian" conjures up a certain kind of setting: a vast, fixed bureaucracy; a dead-eyed public forced into gray, uniform living conditions; the very words we use mangled in order to better serve the interests of power. We think, on the whole, of the kind of bleakness with which George Orwell saturated the future England that provides the setting for his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Almost seventy years after that book's publication, we now use "Orwellian" to describe the views of the political party opposite us, the Department of Motor Vehicles — anything, in short, that strikes us as brutish, monolithic, implacable, deliberately stripped of meaning, or in any way authoritarian. We use the word so much, in fact, that it can't help but have come detached from its original meaning. Here to restore sense to our usage of the most common word derived from the name of a writer, we have the Ted-Ed video at the top of the post. Related Content:
Did human grammar(s) evolve? In order to hypothesize about the evolutionary origins of grammar, it is essential to rely on some theory or model of human grammars. Interestingly, scholars engaged in the theoretical study of grammar (syntacticians), particularly those working within the influential framework associated with linguist Noam Chomsky, have been reluctant to consider a gradualist, selection-based approach to grammar. Nonetheless, these scholars have come up with an elaborate and precise theory of human grammars. It has recently been shown that this syntactic theory can in fact be used, precise as it is, to reconstruct the stages of the earliest grammars, and to even point to the constructions in present-day languages which resemble/approximate these early proto-grammars (Ljiljana Progovac, 2015, Evolutionary Syntax). Importantly, the layer upon which the whole sentence rests is the inner, foundational (eat fish) layer, which can therefore be reconstructed as the initial stage of grammar.
24 words that mean totally different things now than they did pre-Internet (Nathaniel Grann/The Washington Post) Technological change, as we know very well, tends to provoke linguistic and cultural change, too. It’s the reason why, several times a year, dictionaries trumpet the addition of new and typically very trendy words. But more interesting than the new words, I think, are the old words that have gotten new meanings: words such as “cloud” and “tablet” and “catfish,” with very long pre-Internet histories. [Is the Internet ruining proper English? Anyway, this is all a very long way of saying that Dictionary.com’s 20th birthday is more interesting than most: To mark the occasion, the online dictionary has compiled a list of words whose meanings have changed since it launched two decades ago. On one hand, the list shows how technology has shaped language over time. Bump Then: “to encounter something that is an obstacle or hindrance.” Block Then: “to be placed in front of something, such as a road or path, so that people or things cannot pass through.” Canoe Like
Human language may be shaped by climate and terrain Why does the Hawaiian language flow melodically from vowel to vowel, whereas Hungarian is peppered with consonants? It may have something to do with the climate and terrain where those languages developed, a new study of more than 600 languages from around the world suggests. Previous research has shown that some other species’ vocalizations are shaped by their environment. How much, if any, acoustic adaptation occurs in human languages is unclear, says Ian Maddieson, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. A subtle, but clear pattern emerged: Languages in hotter, more forested regions such as the tropics tended to be “sonorous,” employing lower frequency sounds and using fewer distinct consonants, whereas languages in colder, drier, more mountainous places were consonant-heavy, the team reported today at the 170th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in Jacksonville, Florida.