Canadian word nerds, rejoice. Two decades after the last Canada-specific dictionary was published, a new one is on its way. Editors Canada has taken on the project, with John Chew, head of the North American Scrabble Players Association, as editor-in-chief. Quill and Quire reports that the letter Q, a small portion of which is online now, could be released this summer. While lexicographers usually start with M, Chew plumped for Q because it includes Indigenous and Inuktitut words and many medical and scientific words. Here's more.
'Librarian Andrew Gray has made a “very surprising” discovery. He analyzed five million scientific studies published last year and detected a sudden rise in the use of certain words, such as meticulously (up 137%), intricate (117%), commendable (83%) and meticulous (59%). [...] The explanation for this rise: tens of thousands of researchers are using [...] LLMs tools to write their studies or at least “polish” them.'
I desparately need an emergency #Linguistics service to challenge my new-to-me-and-maybe-stupid idea that #pierogi (the most delicious food) and #pierogue (the boat) are relatives.
It‘s just too plausible, they are little ships!
I can live with being one of today‘s lucky 10‘000, just tell me it‘s true!
If you miss the Twitter API for your corpus research, you might find some consolation in this little app that I put together. It’s very much a DIY effort, so please do report bugs and suggest improvements. What it does though is enable you to download up to nearly 1,000 tweets per run from a search results page. Here goes. @linguistics#linguistics
The Second Zodiac Cipher Took 50 Years To Decipher. Now You Can Read How It Was Done
A new white paper details the long and sometimes grueling process. Dr. Katie Spalding 4.15.24
"...So why did this second message take so much longer to decipher? It seems that, after having his first attempt decrypted so quickly, the Zodiac killer upped his game – a lot. “It is clear that the complications introduced by Zodiac led to much delay in its solution,” the trio write. “If the cipher were simply one of the well-understood classical systems, such as homophonic substitution, transposition, or polyalphabetic substitution […] then traditional cryptanalysis and application of powerful cipher solving tools would have broken it.”
Instead, what faced hopeful criminal chasers was a slew of confounding tactics...And on top of that, as before, there were plenty of spelling mistakes to account for, further muddying the decryption process..."
President Joe Biden and Donald Trump don't want to use their opponents' names, instead favoring nicknames and circumlocutions like"the former guy" and "Sleepy Joe." For @TheConversationUS, Roger J. Kreuz takes a look at Biden's rhetorical tactic — the Voldemort effect, or a cardinal principle of advertising: never mention your competitor by name. He also examines Trump's approach of othering via mispronouncing names and tapping into xenophobia.
The phrase "#LoadedForBear" means to be prepared to deal with a difficult or challenging situation.
The origin of the phrase dates back to hunting with muskets, where hunters would load their guns with extra gunpowder to have enough firepower to take down a #bear, the most ferocious and hardest to kill predator in North America.
Just posted about how I disagree with the (often condescending) insistence on using French grammar in English for French borrows like "attorney general". #Linguistics#Grammar#Writing
"As Mali’s relationship with French — the language of its former colonial ruler, France — has grown more fraught, an effort to use AI to create children’s books in Bambara and other local languages is gaining momentum."
Question for teachers out there: If you're learning to teach a foreign language, what resources or material do you learn from? Does it differ if you're a native speaker teaching others to speak your language?
I am not looking for tools for me to learn languages. I am trying to understand the meta-education which goes into language teaching.
In addition to executive function, bilingual individuals and children show advantages in metalinguistic awareness. This is the ability to think about language as abstract units and associations.
I just ordered the book Xenolinguistics by Douglass Vakoch. I can buy it on Kindle for 27.95, Hardback for 170.00 bucks on sale, or 48.00 in paperback.
Theoretical linguists must be making bank or somebody does not want just anyone reading this book.
Maybe he is teaching a university class with it or something.
Meanwhile, baby girl writer over here just wants to know how to talk to the aliens. 🙋♀️🙆♀️🤷♀️
Abstract: The known languages of the Americas comprise nearly half of the world's language families and a wide range of structural types, a level of diversity that required considerable time to develop. This paper proposes a model of settlement and expansion designed to integrate current linguistic analysis with other...
Founder effects identify languages of the earliest Americans (open access) (doi.org)
Abstract: The known languages of the Americas comprise nearly half of the world's language families and a wide range of structural types, a level of diversity that required considerable time to develop. This paper proposes a model of settlement and expansion designed to integrate current linguistic analysis with other...