Linguistics

The article provides a global analysis to model patterns of current and future language endangerment. In other words, it's trying to explain and predict where and how language loss happens, by measuring stuff.

Interesting excerpts of the article:

Our best-fit model explains 34% of the variation in language endangerment (comparable to similar analyses on species endangerment.

That's actually rather good, considering the global scale of analysis for something as messy as human beings, and how local political factors can revive or kill languages.

Five predictors of language endangerment are consistently identified at global and regional scales: L1 speakers, bordering language richness, road density, years of schooling and the number of endangered languages in the immediate neighbourhood.

I feel like linguists handling minority languages should already know thing by "gut feeling": small community, with lots of nearby languages, well-connected to other communities, being drilled by the government = threatened linguistic community. However, it's still great that the article is grounding that "gut feeling" into data.

Link for the study: A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories

The conclusion itself is nothing new, but there are some interesting tidbits, such as about 1/5 of the gene-language relations being a mismatch.

It's a script attested from 2200~1700 years old inscriptions found in Central Asia, between what's today Kazakhstan and Afghanistan (both included). Discovered in the 1950s, but now freshly discovered inscriptions from Tajikistan (the Almosi inscriptions) encouraged people to take a further look at the decipherment, alongside older inscriptions (such as the Dašt-i Nāwur trilingual; written in Greek, Bactrian, and the unknown script).

This is specially interesting for those interested on Tocharian studies, as the language being deciphered might be potentially spoken by Tocharian speakers who migrated south.

“Our study found that Mexican American people who spoke only Spanish had worse neurologic outcomes three months after having a stroke than Mexican American people who spoke only English or were bilingual ..."

Caution is advised when watching this video, as not all linguists buy the idea of zero morphemes/phonemes/etc.; for some the zero is just a neat theoretical trick, as it simplifies some descriptions. And some outright avoid the concept.

Even then, I feel like this video should be fairly informative and enjoyable for people in general.

King Charles speaks with a rather posh Received Pronunciation, much like Queen Elizabeth II did. In the meantime, William and Harry use a more Standard Southern British pronunciation.

The changes described by Lindsey can be summed up as:

• PRICE - [aɪ] vs. [ɑɪ]
• DRESS - [e] vs. [ɛ]
• CHOICE - [ɔɪ] vs. [oɪ]
• SQUARE - [ɛə] vs. [ɛ:]
• HAPPY - [ɪ] vs. [i]
• [ɫ] vocalisation, colouring nearby vowels - negligible vs. noticeable
• word ending /t/ - [t] vs. [ʔ]
• /t/ flapping into [ɾ] - rare vs. more frequent
• /t/ before front high vowel affricating into [ts] - actually attested for both sides
• unstressed syllable elision - King Charles did this quite a bit before rising to the throne, but William does it all the time
• rising intonation on statements (uptalk) - almost non-existent in RP, fairly common in SSB
• /θ/ as [f] - avoided in RP, present in SSB
• word ending /k/ as [k'] - avoided [?] vs. common

Personal observation: the changes in the vowel sets remind me in spirit the Great Vowel Shift, as it seems that DRESS lowering is pressing PRICE to go back, and in turn PRICE is forcing CHOICE to raise.

This paper describes an IMO rather interesting approach towards fake news, through their morphological content: the words from each piece of news (real and fake) were grouped into categories, then the researchers made a statistical analysis of the usage of those categories in real and fake news. And they found out that:

• fake news tend to use more foreign words, adjectives and nouns
• real news tend to use more W-words (who, what), determiners, prepositions and verbs

I think that their findings are damn useful. Perhaps not to detect fake news, but to understand how they work on a discursive level. For example, the usage of foreign words in fake news caught my attention - perhaps they're used to mask the underlying meaning of the utterance? While real news are focused on describing events, and thus rely more on verb usage?

This will probably interest people who are just tipping their toes into Phonetics, as well as language leaners.

There's a general tendency across languages to order the adjectives connected to the same noun the same way; for example, usually adjectives referring to colour or other innate attributes are closer to the noun than the ones dealing with subjective attributes. This tendency is so strong that made some linguists (and psychologists) believe that this order might be actually innate.

This study contradicts that. Excerpt from the conclusion:

Taking these findings together, we have argued that there is no universal hierarchy for adjective ordering imposing a hard constraint which then translates into one rigid, unmarked order.

Fun scientific paper talking about the odd rarity of *b in the current Proto-Indo-European reconstructions. It doesn't propose why this happens, but it claims that most PIE instances of *b might be actually from a later stage of the language, that the author calls "Indo-Celtic" (the common ancestor of all IE languages minus Anatolian and Tocharian; also known in the literature as "core PIE").

Those puzzles are fun to solve, so why not give them a try? Feel free to use this post to share hints or the solution as you've found it, but please use spoilers to do so.

The first three puzzles boil down to "retro-engineering" tidbits of the the grammar of three languages (Ubyx, Alabama, N|uuki). The fourth one is to deduce the words for familiar relationship used in Arabana. The fifth one is historical linguistics, deducing the sound changes from Proto-Chamic to Phan Rang Cham and Tsat.

Check this link for the puzzles of previous years, solutions, as well as versions in other metalanguages (in case you feel more comfortable solving them in another language than English).

This paper provides some actual data on the bouba-kiki effect, where certain words are non-arbitrarily associated with certain meanings, by analysing the frequency of sounds used in words conveying a specific meaning (as "bone", "stone", etc.). It takes cognates and areal effects into account.

This book lists cross-linguistic tendencies in phonetic inventories. It's a bit old, but a good read for anyone who:

• is into Phonetics and Phonology;
• wants to analyse the underlying pressures behind phonetic inventories (e.g. "why does language A have the sound X, instead of Y?")
• is building one's one constructed language, under a naturalistic approach

In the light of Unabomber's passing away in prison, people are reviewing how he was captured, and how linguistics played a role on this.

Linguistic analysis of his Manifesto yielded the following pieces of info:

• "rearing children" - typical for a Northern USA dialect
• "clew", "wilfully" - back then, used mostly around Chicago; so the author likely spent his formative years around the place
• "broad", "chick" - narrowing down the expected age range to middle-aged
• "anomic", "chimerical" - highly educated speaker

The article also mentions a few other cases of linguistic analysis being used to identify other people, such as JK Rowling as the Cuckoo's Nest author.

The title is click-baity (e.g. what's an "ancient language"?), but the content is still interesting regardless.

A few highlights:

Acc. to the author Great Andamanese ("GA") speakers have been culturally isolated from speakers of other languages for millenniums. It has been described as a dialect continuum, but it's being replaced by Hindi and showing clear signs of language death.

What's unusual about its usage of body parts in the grammar is not the usage itself, but its frequency and how it does it. Excerpts from the article:

If the blood emerged from the feet or legs, it was otei; internal bleeding was etei; and a clot on the skin was ertei. Something as basic as a noun changed form depending on location.

My breakthrough was to realize that the prefix e-, which originally derived from an unknown word for an internal body part, had over eons morphed into a grammatical marker signifying any internal attribute, process or activity. So the act of seeing, ole, being an internal activity, had to be eole. The same prefix could be attached to -bungoi, or “beautiful,” to form ebungoi, meaning internally beautiful or kind; to sare, for “sea,” to form esare, or “salty,” an inherent quality; and to the root word -biinye, “thinking,” to yield ebiinye, “to think.”

This should be a great resource for beginners interested on Historical Linguistics, specially Indo-European studies. Each "lesson" provides a few pieces of information about either one Indo-European language, focusing mostly on historical and cultural information, but they provide a lot of links for people willing to understand one or more languages better.

(And yes, the banner of this community was proudly stolen from that page.)

This paper is '98 and it contrasts the then prevailing theories, in contrast with dialectal and historical evidence, arguing that the origin of periphrastic "do" was a habitual aspect marker.

Two of the earlier hypotheses that the author addresses and criticise:

Contact with Celtic languages - the feature would be borrowed from other languages that English interacted with. Specially prominent due to distribution, as do-periphrasis appeared first on the Western dialects. However unlikely, given that Celtic substratum influence in English was relatively minor.

Some invoke more complex pathways, such as a potential early Germanic-Celtic creolisation; the author claims that this is unattested.

Causative 'do' - occasionally attested in Old English, and frequently in Middle English. I'll adapt the 5a example to highlight the construction:

• I do to-you know[=witan]... that those devil-idols to-you are harm-bearing

Here the usage of "do" would initially mean something like "make", "cause to", "have". For another example [from my own], consider "I did her tell me what was going on" - the "do" has some meaning but it's rather messy, and dependent on the sentence. (Does that "did" mean "encouraged?" "forced?" "asked?")

The author sees the following problems with this hypothesis:

• Origin - do-periphrasis originated in the Western dialects, but those were the one that used causative do the least.
• Motivation - it's harder to claim that an optional causative "do", with no independent semantic value, would eventually evolve into the do-support currently used.

Other hypotheses addressed were the usage of 'do' as a perfective aspect marker and verbal ellipsis. And then the author actually addresses the hypothesis he believes to be correct, linking current do-support to the habitual aspect; for example, in the sentence "I do browse Lemmy", that "do" can be understood as both an emphasiser and as conveying "by rule, usually".

Hey everyone, new mod here. I'd like to hear you on a few things, in order to make this community grow:

1. Who should be the primary target audience of this community?

We could tailor it primarily for layperson or for people with deeper Linguistics knowledge. Or we could simply let it roll.

2. Which type of moderation do you guys like? Stricter or laxer?

A stricter moderation would include rules like "quote your sources", "no crack theories" (proto- or pseudo-scientific hypotheses lacking methodological rigour), stuff like this; it would also mean that I'd discourage off-topic a bit further.

3. "Almost no crown or cross" rule: yes, no, indifferent?

By "almost no cross or cross" I mean that posters would only be able to talk about politics and religion as much as necessary for the subject of Linguistics. For example you'd be still fine posting something like this, but you wouldn't be able to discuss here the Marxist side of the matter, only the Linguistic one. Just an example, mind you.

4. How much do you know about Linguistics?

Are you a grad, undergrad, informed layperson, or just curious? Are there areas that you feel confident on, like Sociolinguistics or Phonetics or something like this?

5. Which type of content do you want to see here?

Papers? Videos? Discussions? Historical Linguistics? Sociolinguistics? Phonetics and Phonology? Since mods are IMO responsible to nurture a community, I don't mind looking for stuff to post here, but I'd like to know which one.

Thank you!

EDIT: I'm reading all your comments, even the ones that I didn't reply to, OK?

I just posted a paper, but I think that this should be more approachable for people here. It shows a rather interesting pattern between Germanic languages (English, German, Icelandic, Gothic...) and most other Indo-European languages, caused by a sound change. A few examples using Latin vs. English:

• pēs (foot) vs. foot
• trēs (three) vs. three
• canis (dog) vs. hound; see German "Hund" dog for reference
• decem (ten) vs. ten
• gelū (ice) vs. cold
• frāter (brother) vs. brother

Note how the consonants look like they went a "merry-go-round" from one language to another:

• Latin fricative vs. English voiced stop
• Latin voiced stop vs. English voiceless stop
• Latin voiceless stop vs. English fricative

That's all caused by the regular sound changes explained in the Wiki link.

This paper from Silvia Luraghi explores the origin of PIE grammatical gender system, as well as proposing how it appeared in the language, in a way that accounts for the following discrepancy:

• Hittite - two genders system: animate and inanimate
• Late PIE - typically three genders system: masculine, feminine, and neuter

The animate and inanimate genders would've been inherited by late PIE as the masculine and neuter genders respectively, while the feminine would be the result of a derivational suffix *-h₂ being attached to words, and eventually triggering agreement. Note that the typical IE feminine /a/ (you see it in Latin/Romance and Slavic languages, for example) is believed to be from *h₂, as it's the a-colouring laryngeal.

I know that this paper might be a bit too deep for most folks here to parse, so if you feel intimidated, don't be afraid to ask for help.

TIL via this reddit post: "The Tunitcha mountains of Arizona may be related to the word "Khan" (as in Genghis Khan)"