The English language is a wonderful thing, and we know some rules without knowing we know them.
‘Have you ever heard that patter-pitter of tiny feet? Or the dong-ding of a bell? Or hop-hip music? That’s because, when you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O. Bish bash bosh. So politicians may flip-flop, but they can never flop-flip. It’s tit-for-tat, never tat-for-tit. This is called ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.’ From ‘The Elements of Eloquence’ by Mark Forsyth.
We talked about the Icelandic word for “computer” at work (“tölva”, a portmanteau for something like “number witch” or “prophetess of numbers”) and I’m curious if there is one for LLMs!
I asked a LLM and it suggested “málfræðitroll” which supposedly means “linguistics troll” 👌
Short version: “málfræðitröll” means “grammar troll”. “Linguistics troll” would be “málvísindatröll”.
Don’t think “LLM” needs a fancy Icelandic word beyond translation as it still only a term of art
Also “gervigreind”, Icelandic for “AI”, has stronger connotations of “fake” than the English lang version. Round tripping the translation would result in “fake intelligence” in English
@grb090423@aby indeed!
“Correct English” is a misnomer. The way English is spoken today bears no resemblance to how it was spoken hundreds of years ago, and there is a convincing theory that the grammar and syntax of English is effectively pidgin- a vastly simplified version of what was originally spoken.
For learners, this makes English very easy to speak badly, but very difficult to speak well.
'This fall, for the first time, Yale students have the option of taking “Beginning Cherokee I.” The university is the only Ivy League institution to offer a North American Indigenous language for credit, according to Claire Bowern, a professor of linguistics who was instrumental in getting the language added to the curriculum.'
The epic linguistic map came up in conversation at work today, so today is one of those days to regularly to pause and spend some time admiring this map of North American English dialects by Rick Aschmann:
American English first and second person pronouns (2023):
I/me - first person singular
We/us - first person plural
Us all - first person plural inclusive
You - second person singular
Y'all - second person plural
All y'all - second person plural inclusive
Chat - second person, excluding the listener
@tess IME "all y'all" is typically pejorative. "All y'all better get your asses ready or we're leaving without you." "Fuck all y'all." "And that includes all y'all."
“All gendered "-men" nouns immediately become delightful when you substitute "-folk": fisherfolk, countryfolk. And even when there's a perfectly suitable gender-neutral alternative, firefighters & guards pale in comparison to firefolk & watchfolk. In this essay I will”
I love that the French word for a large public lobby or the entrance hall to a big public building (such as a train station, courthouse, city hall, etc.) is "salle des pas perdus"—literally "the room of lost steps"—because people tend to pace around a lot in those places, so their steps are essentially lost, wasted, going nowhere.
As a kid, my sister misheard that term and called it "la salle des pains perdus"—"the room of French toast"—which does sound like a much better place to hang out. I think she was on to something. #language
@rachel wooow, ça fait un bail que j’avais plus entendu cette expression, mais du coup y’a un business à ce faire dans les salle des pas perdus avec du pain perdu je suis sûr
@glynmoody This: "What worries, or rather annoys, me is the lack of basic curiosity among large-language speakers towards small languages, their very common inability to consider small languages as realms and not mere deserts in which strange sounds travel from one dune to another."
I am super excited about this mini-conference on #reproducibility in #linguistics that I am organising this evening: Four of my M.A. students will be reporting on their attempts to reproduce the results of four published quantitative linguistics papers for which the data is available, but not the code!
Colleagues, they have a lot of things to report! So, if you're in the area (Cologne), do come along! There will be #ReproducibiliTea and Christmas biscuits! 🍵 🍪 #OpenScience
@otsoa Hi and thanks for asking! Sadly, sharing is far from common in #linguistics. Here are some stats from Bochynska et al. 2023 (https://doi.org/10.5070/G6011239). Admittedly the most recent data is from 2018-2019, but my impression is not much has changed... 😢 I have been trying to ask for code when reviewing papers and have been told by editors that "they don't require reviewers to review code and will therefore not ask the authors for it". 😬 #OpenScience
As promised, here are some of the (anonymised) highlights from my students' attempts to reproduce the results of four published #linguistics studies using the authors' original data, which my students brilliantly presented at our mini-conference on #reproducibility yesterday. #OpenScience
1/ One student perfectly replicated the statistics and plots for RQ1 of the paper she chose, but could not replicate RQ2 because some data for this was missing. She contacted the authors. They never replied.
PS: if you're like me, this pix, showing beautiful beadwork by Maggie Roach (Upper Tanana Dene) brings on powerful sensory memory: just looking at this triggers the vivid smell of smoked moose hide. @ScoterD @DinjiiZhuh