Universal motifs in color naming
World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity:
We analyzed the color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS), a large color-naming database obtained from informants of mostly unwritten languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures that have had limited contact with modern, industrialized society. The color naming idiolects of 2,367 WCS informants fall into three to six “motifs,” where each motif is a different color-naming system based on a subset of a universal glossary of 11 color terms. These motifs are universal in that they occur worldwide, with some individual variation, in completely unrelated languages.
Strikingly, these few motifs are distributed across the WCS informants in such a way that multiple motifs occur in most languages. Thus, the culture a speaker comes from does not completely determine how he or she will use color terms. An analysis of the modern patterns of motif usage in the WCS languages, based on the assumption that they reflect historical patterns of color term evolution, suggests that color lexicons have changed over time in a complex but orderly way.
The worldwide distribution of the motifs and the cooccurrence of multiple motifs within languages suggest that universal processes control the naming of colors.
Wednesday Wiki: A list of languages by first written accounts
A List of languages by first written accounts.
This is a list of languages by first written accounts which consists of the approximate dates for the first written accounts that are known for various languages.
Because of the way languages change gradually, it is usually impossible to pinpoint when a given language began to be spoken with any precision. In many cases, some form of the language had already been spoken (and even written) considerably earlier than the dates of the earliest extant samples provided here.
Kiwi accent rated one of the most attractive forms of English
The kiwi "fush and chups" came seven places ahead of Australia's "sex and Seedney" - and nine ahead of the American accent in terms of attractiveness.
Scottish and Irish accents topped the list of preferred British accents.
Building social cognitive models of language change
Out in the latest issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences is a paper entitled "Building social cognitive models of language change" (preprint) by Daniel Hruschka and colleagues:
Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evolutionary process among competing linguistic variants. We argue that a crucial and unifying element of this framework is the use of probabilistic, data-driven models both to infer change and to compare competing claims about social and cognitive influences on language change.
Wednesday Wiki: Decipherment of rongorongo
There have been numerous attempts to decipher the rongorongo script of Easter Island since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. As with most undeciphered scripts, many of the proposals have been fanciful. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment: the small number of remaining texts, comprising only 15,000 legible glyphs; the lack of context in which to interpret the texts, such as illustrations or parallels to texts which can be read; and the fact that the modern Rapanui language is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets—especially if they record a specialized register such as incantations—while the few remaining examples of the old language are heavily restricted in genre and may not correspond well to the tablets either
_edit1.jpg "Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.")
Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.
Computational Linguistics goes open access… almost.
Good news: The journal Computational Linguistics is going open access in 2009.
Bad news: The announcement that the journal Computational Linguistics is going open access in 2009, isn't open access. Oh well, at least their hearts are in the right place!