Okay, here we go! Giving social media another try with #Mastodon since I started to miss the academic community that social media used to provide for me.
I'm Nele, a #linguistics postdoc at the University of Oslo, working on the language of fake news in English. I'm also affiliated with Lund University through my work on the London–Lund Corpus 2 and spoken language.
That's (mainly) what I'll be posting about. Here we go again!
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” 👌
Hey, Mastodon, I have a student who needs some #Scottish English speakers to do an online linguistics experiment. Can you help out? Boosts appreciated, or you can just click the link if you qualify!
'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
I just moved to a new instance, so here's a new #introduction
I'm the host of the Grammar Girl #podcast. You may have hit my website searching for something like "semicolons." I love #writing books, #teaching online courses, and I founded the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
Hello! We're a bunch of linguists, lexicographers, authors and editors who enjoy swearing and writing about swearing on Strong Language: https://stronglang.wordpress.com/
Interested in the linguistics and culture of swearing, profanity, taboo language, etc.
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
I ended my time on Duolingo in the #NewYear, after finding out they sacked a bunch of translators and are now relying on AI to generate sentences for learning. Essentially, they are just generating the content via AI and having a limited number of translators "check the work" before putting it up into their programs.
I also noticed that, the longer I went on in my Duolingo program, the quality of the learning seemed to decrease dramatically, and after learning about the AI thing, it started to dawn on me that this could be part of the reason for that. But even if it isn't related, the fact that they are making this move toward AI only means in the future, the learning WILL decrease in quality whether we like it or not, and that's no fun at all.
So No Thanks, #Duolingo. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Hello, dusty Mastodon account! I have a new newsletter out today! I talk about the difference between an accent and a dialect, and you can learn why ordering a pancake in some parts of #Germany will get you a jelly donut.
Africa’s linguistic diversity goes largely unnoticed in research on multilingualism (theconversation.com)
sharing it here because it mentioned SEA as another under-studied multilingual region, and we share the same issues:...
The Role of Myth in Language: From Lingua Adamica to Babel (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
Linguist Marina Yaguello traces the myths, legends, and religious narratives that have shaped humanity's understanding of the origins of language.