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Linguistics
- www.livescience.com 2,500-year-old slate containing drawings of battle scenes and paleo-alphabet discovered in Spain
Archaeologists discovered the stone tablet at a Tartessian site in southwestern Spain.
I'm sharing this here mostly due to the alphabet. The relevant region (Tartessos) would be roughly what's today the western parts of Andalucia, plus the Algarve.
Here are the news in Spanish, for anyone interested.
The number of letters is specially relevant for me - 32 letters. The writing system is a redundant alphabet, where you use different graphemes for the stops, depending on the next vowel; and it was likely made for a language with five vowels, so you had five letters for /p/, five for /t/, five for /k/. Counting the "bare" vowels this yields 20 letters; /m n s r l/ fit well with that phonology, but what about the other seven?
- www.nytimes.com Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?
After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren’t as embedded as we think.
- Baudolino: Lying About the Future Produces History - Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, speaks about his latest book, Baudolino, including translation
YouTube Video
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- xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/15125500
> xkcd \#2942: Fluid Speech > > https://xkcd.com/2942 > > explainxkcd.com for \#2942 > > Alt text: > > Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
- neurosciencenews.com How 'Not' Changes Everything: Brain Interprets Negated Adjectives - Neuroscience News
Researchers found that negating adjectives with "not" affects how our brains interpret their meaning, mitigating rather than inverting their definition.
YouTube Video
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- First languages of North America traced back to two groups from Siberiaphys.org First languages of North America traced back to two very different language groups from Siberia
Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, has used her pioneering work in the field of language history to learn more about language development in North America. She has found that it can be traced back to two language groups that originated in Siberia. Her paper is pub...
YouTube Video
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- archive.is New Linguistics Technique Could Reveal Who Spoke the First Indo-European Languages
Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where and when the first Indo-European languages were spoken and what kind of lives those first speakers led
- edition.cnn.com Irish names you’re probably saying wrong and how to pronounce them | CNN
Find out how to pronounce common Irish names with our audio guide, plus read our Irish language hacks so you figure out names yourself.
- www.bbc.com How climate change is altering Sami language
North Sami, a language spoken in the Arctic, has more than 300 words for snow and a special word for "frightened reindeer". Can it survive in a warmer world?
- www.bbc.com Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent
Isolated for six months one winter, a group of scientists changed how they spoke.
> they were taking part in an unusual experiment, which involved tracking their own voices over time. This was done by making 10-minute recordings every few weeks. They would sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen. Food. Coffee. Hid. Airflow.
> One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract.
I'm not actually sure what sound change they're describing there. Can anyone explain with examples or IPA?
edit: Cheers for the answers (turns out I misunderstood which part is the vocal tract)
- The End of the Slavic Linguistic Unity (in French, but with English subtitles)
YouTube Video
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- arxiv.org Human languages with greater information density have higher communication speed but lower conversation breadth - Nature Human Behaviour
The authors document wide variation in information density and speed of communication across the world’s languages. They find that higher-density languages communicate information more quickly but with more sustained focus than lower-density languages.
- bigthink.com Esperanto: The artificial language that aimed to unite humanity
A language for the world has been the dream of many thinkers for millennia. Esperanto was created to fill that role. Here is its story.
- www.theguardian.com Sloshed, plastered and gazeboed: why Britons have 546 words for drunkenness
Combine ribald humour with peculiar sentence construction and a genuinely horrifying drinking culture, and what do you get? A dictionary’s worth of ‘drunkonyms’
- www.cambridge.org A Vasconic inscription on a bronze hand: writing and rituality in the Iron Age Irulegi settlement in the Ebro Valley | Antiquity | Cambridge Core
A Vasconic inscription on a bronze hand: writing and rituality in the Iron Age Irulegi settlement in the Ebro Valley - Volume 98 Issue 397
- www.nature.com The decimal point is 150 years older than historians thought
Origin of the powerful calculation tool traced back to a mathematician from the Italian Renaissance.
- ruhua-langblr.tumblr.com Duolingo Sucks, Now What?: A Guide
Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have: "I just want an...
- www.vox.com Rizz, the word of the year, explained
The evolution of a viral term, according to the "Livvy rizzed up Baby Gronk" guy.
- daily.jstor.org What Is Punctuation For? - JSTOR Daily
Between the medieval and modern world, the marks used to make writing more legible changed from “pointing” to punctuation.
- yt.artemislena.eu The Linguistics Iceberg Explained
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/duncanclarke Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duncansclarke/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/duncanc_ Discord: https://discord.gg/6rCbemyhRy Explaining the story behind the most interesting linguistic theories, artifacts, and languages. This completes the cogniti...
- Why is /æ/ raising so unknown?
Hi, I'm a casual linguistics nerd (no degrees), speaking Philippine English with heavy American influence.
My accent of English has pre-nasal /æ/ raising and I've caught myself raising it in other places like before /g/.
When I look at English language learning videos (out of curiosity) I have not found anyone mention /æ/ raising in them.
Why is this case?
- [PDF] A compendium of the comparative grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin languages (August Schleicher)
I'm sharing this mostly as a historical curiosity; Schleicher was genial, but the book is a century and half old, science marches on, so it isn't exactly good source material. Still an enjoyable read if you like Historical Linguistics, as it was one of the first successful attempts to reconstruct a language based on indirect output from its child languages.
- [Sci.News] Post-Neolithic Diet-Induced Dental Changes Led to Introduction of ‘F’ and ‘V’ Soundswww.sci.news Post-Neolithic Diet-Induced Dental Changes Led to Introduction of ‘F’ and ‘V’ Sounds | Sci.News
A class of speech sounds that is now present in nearly half of the world’s languages -- labiodentals, produced by positioning the lower lip against the upper teeth, such as in ‘f’ or ‘v’ -- are a relatively recent development, one brought about by post-Neolithic diet-induced changes in the human bit...
Link for the Science research article. The observation that societies without access to softer food kind of avoided labiodentals is old, from 1985, but the research is recent-ish (2019).
- Question: Terms for language anachronisms
What are the terms for language anachronisms?
I had a conversation about a year ago with someone about anachronisms in language. We both felt that there were terms for these things, but could neither recall nor find (via web search) satisfying answers. This came up again recently in a different discussion in a Lemmy community, and it's driving me a little nuts. Help me Linguistics-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope.
So we have the term "skeumorphism," which refers to oramental anachronism. I may be using "anachronism" incorrectly, but it's the hammer I have. Skeumorphisms, in computers, refer to the graphical representations of things, but not the underlying concepts. There are similar linguistic anachronisms that I feel also have specific labels:
- "disks" which are still in use, but are largely being replaced by solid-state, rectangular SSDs; but most people still call all persistent storage devices "disks."
- "film" to refer to movies, regardless of the media (increasingly digital and having nothing to do with film).
- "rice" to refer to the process of fancifying something, like computer desktops
- "desktops" to refer to computer GUI window managing interfaces
- "files" and "folders" in computers
Are these all the same category of things? Is there a term for them?
- www.sprakradet.no Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
Norwegian is spoken by a majority close to 100 % in the kingdom of Norway (which at present contains around 5 million inhabitants), although a few...
- theconversation.com Why AI software 'softening' accents is problematic
While AI now allows us to erase accents, is this really a good idea? Besides, who doesn’t have an accent?
Même texte en français ici. I'll copypaste the English version here in case of paywall.
Accents are one of the cherished hallmarks of cultural diversity.
Why AI software ‘softening’ accents is problematic
Published 2024/Jan/11\ by Grégory Miras, Professeur des Universités en didactique des langues, Université de Lorraine
“Why isn’t it a beautiful thing?” a puzzled Sharath Keshava Narayana asked of his AI device masking accents.
Produced by his company, Sanas, the recent technology seeks to “soften” the accents of call centre workers in real-time to allegedly shield them from bias and discrimination. It has sparked widespread interest both in the English-speaking and French-speaking world since it was launched in September 2022.
Far from everyone is convinced of the software’s anti-racist credentials, however. Rather, critics contend it plunges us into a contemporary dystopia where technology is used to erase individuals’ differences, identity markers and cultures.
To understand them, we could do worse than reviewing what constitutes an accent in the first place. How can they be suppressed? And in what ways does ironing them out bends far more than sound waves?
How artificial intelligence can silence an accent
“Accents” can be defined, among others, as a set of oral clues (vowels, consonants, intonation, etc.) that contribute to the more or less conscious elaboration of hypotheses on the identity of individuals (e.g. geographically or socially). An accent can be described as regional or foreign according to different narratives.
With start-up technologies typically akin to black boxes, we have little information about the tools deployed by Sanas to standardise our way of speaking. However, we know most methods aim to at least partially transform the structure of the sound wave in order to bring certain acoustic cues closer to a perceptive criteria. The technology tweaks vowels, consonants along with parameters such as rhythm, intonation or accentuation. At the same time, the technology will be looking to safeguard as many vocal cues as possible to allow for the recognition of the original speaker’s voice, such as with voice cloning, a process that can result in deepfake vocal scams. These technologies make it possible to dissociate what is speech-related from what is voice-related.
The automatic and real-time processing of speech poses technological difficulties, the main one being the quality of the sound signal to be processed. Software developers have succeeded in overcoming them by basing themselves on deep learning, neural networks, as well as large data bases of speech audio files, which make it possible to better manage the uncertainties in the signal.
In the case of foreign languages, Sylvain Detey, Lionel Fontan and Thomas Pellegrini identify some of the issues inherent in the development of these technologies, including that of which standard to use for comparison, or the role that speech audio files can have in determining them.
The myth of the neutral accent
But accent identification is not limited to acoustics alone. Donald L. Rubin has shown that listeners can recreate the impression of a perceived accent simply by associating faces of supposedly different origins with speech. In fact, absent these other cues, speakers are not so good at recognising accents that they do not regularly hear or that they might stereotypically picture, such as German, which many associate with “aggressive” consonants.
The wishful desire to iron out accents to combat prejudice raises the question of what a “neutral” accent is. Rosina Lippi-Green points out that the ideology of the standard language - the idea that there is a way of expressing oneself that is not marked - holds sway over much of society but has no basis in fact. Vijay Ramjattan further links recent collossal efforts to develop accent “reduction” and “suppression” tools with the neoliberal model, under which people are assigned skills and attributes on which they depend. Recent capitalism perceives language as a skill, and therefore the “wrong accent” is said to lead to reduced opportunities.
Intelligibility thus becomes a pretext for blaming individuals for their lack of skills in tasks requiring oral communication according to Janin Roessel. Rather than forcing individuals with “an accent to reduce it”, researchers such as Munro and Derwing have shown that it is possible to train individuals to adapt their aural abilities to phonological variation. What’s more, it’s not up to individuals to change, but for public policies to better protect those who are discriminated against on the basis of their accent - accentism.
Delete or keep, the chicken or the egg?
In the field of sociology, Wayne Brekhus calls on us to pay specific attention to the invisible, weighing up what isn’t marked as much as what is, the “lack of accent” as well as its reverse. This leads us to reconsider the power relations that exist between individuals and the way in which we homogenise the marked: the one who has (according to others) an accent.
So we are led to Catherine Pascal’s question of how emerging technologies can hone our roles as “citizens” rather than “machines”. To “remove an accent” is to value a dominant type of “accent” while neglecting the fact that other co-factors will participate in the perception of this accent as well as the emergence of discrimination. “Removing the accent” does not remove discrimination. On the contrary, the accent gives voice to identity, thus participating in the phenomena of humanisation, group membership and even empathy: the accent is a channel for otherness.
If technologies such AI and deep learning offers us untapped possibilities, they can also lead to a dystopia where dehumanisation overshadows priorities such as the common good or diversity, as spelt out in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Rather than hiding them, it seems necessary to make recruiters aware of how accents can contribute to customer satisfaction and for politicians to take up this issue.
Research projects such as PROSOPHON at the University of Lorraine (France), which bring together researchers in applied linguistics and work psychology, are aimed at making recruiters more aware of their responsibilities in terms of biais awareness, but also at empowering job applicants “with an accent”. By asking the question “Why isn’t this a beautiful thing?”, companies like SANAS remind us why technologies based on internalized oppressions don’t make people happy at work.
- aeon.co Does language mirror the mind? An intellectual history | Aeon Essays
Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true? History shines a light