I’m thrilled to announce that I will be moving to #Philadelphia for a fellowship at the American Philosophical Society, where I will continue working on locating, building, and analyzing a corpus of #Tunica language documentation, as well as gathering all information I can on the history and culture of the Tunica-Biloxi people.
Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?
Blame Tolkien and time - by Eric Grundhauser December 7, 2016
"...Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures & histories to speak them... In the case of the ever-present Elvish in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men & hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm & Moria.
“When dwarves actually talk, they don’t sound Scottish at all,” says Olsen. “They sound like Arabic or Hebrew.”...As radio & film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent..."
When people tell me they read one of my books and found it “quite good”, I like to assume they’re from the US where “quite” apparently means “very” 😊
As opposed to the UK/Aus, where “quite good” is just damning with faint praise.
Unless you say it was “really quite good”. That’s when you mean “very good”.
If you say “quite good, really”, that means you’re surprised it was any good.
And if you say “Oh, I say, that is quite, quite remarkable”, you’re an 18th-century Earl confronted by a tempestuous highland beauty who is tossing her raven-black locks and flashing her sapphire-blue eyes at you because you’re enclosing her commons 😉
Where you live/grew up, what is the word for the natural path between two points that often goes near a more formal walkway/sidewalk?
The formal English word is “desire path” which always gave me the ick. In german it was technically “Trampelpfad” (trampel path) but colloquially in the areas I grew up it was usually Gänsenpfad (goose path) or “Ziegenpfad” (goat path), usually dependent on which small livestock was more common to the region. #linguistics
It seems contradictory to me that at many schools, you can get a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science in the same field. Which is it? Is the field an art or science? #RandomThoughts#Linguistics#Academia
Diseases are used for swearing in Dutch – but how does that work? @sesquiotic analyses the idiom "sjouw me de tering" in a new post on the Strong Language blog:
this is an important article for his focus on the cognitive #linguistics of protests:
«"I believe the “Cease-fire now” slogan is most important. On a college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of “Free speech.” If I were in your situation, I would say “Free Gaza, free speech”...»
I've been earwormed by this song a lot and I love the translation of the delightful lyrics, but I'm going to write the title as "Gender Queer" going forward as that is more faithful to the lyrics than the literal title "雌雄同體" (by 五月天/Mayday) and the English translation of that phrase is potentially offensive to intersex people.
Here, the ChatGPT C-LARA-Instance, Belinda Chiera, Cathy Chua, Chadi Raheb, Manny Rayner, Annika Simonsen, Zhengkang Xiang, and Rina Zviel-Girshin use the #OpenSource#CLARA platform to evaluate #GPT4's ability to perform #linguistics#NLP tasks such as #segmentation, #lemmatization and #glossing.
What's the most obscure hyper-local word or phrase you know?
For example, where & when I grew up, woodlice were knows as "cheeselogs". As far as I know, that's specific to one town in the UK. I don't know how long it was in general use, or even if it continues to this day.
Is there a #linguistic term for an interlocutor saying the last word of the previous speaker’s sentence in unison with them? Not just occasionally or when the previous speaker is having trouble recalling a word, but nearly every sentence, possibly even when that sentence is not the end of a turn? I’m looking for articles or research about this out of personal curiosity.
'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.'
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.