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Entries in the ' linguistics ' category
Written July 13, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, evolution, genetics, language, linguistics, phylogenetics
In today’s, Evolution: Education and Outreach, Anastasia Thanukos takes A Look at Linguistic Evolution:
Anyone who has ever tackled a Shakespeare play knows that English has changed substantially in the 400 years since Elizabeth I ruled England. In fact, Elizabethan English can seem like a completely different language from the one we speak today. Just try describing [...]
Written May 27, 2008 in Uncategorized, anthropology, language, language preservation, linguistics, people
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Written May 22, 2008 in cultural evolution, genetics, language, linguistics, people, phylogenetics
Emma Marris in today’s Nature reviews my field of research, and chats to a number of my friends and colleagues:
In the past five to ten years, more and more non-linguists such as Pagel have used the computational tools with which they model evolution to take a crack at languages. And one can see why. Like [...]
…We have one verb paradigm for this language already, entrusted to us by an ancient linguist who took some notes once when stuck in the wilds of Papua New Guinea due to visa problems.* The verb is “to swim”. We decide to elicit this from our speaker for comparison purposes.
Our speaker insists her language has [...]
In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation’s sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation…
In a wonderful move, the Max Planck Institute and Michael Cysouw have placed their World Atlas of Language Structures online. WALS, for those who don’t know, is a large database of structural information about languages (e.g. phonological, grammatical, lexical).
Here’s the page of info for Maori, and, to choose a feature at random, here’s a map [...]
Written April 12, 2008 in anthropology, austronesian, birds, humor, language, linguistics, people, quotes
William Thurston on the role of humor in language change in his 1987 book “Processes of Change in the languages of North-Western New Britain”:
Many linguistic innovations arise in the context of humor, a common mechanism for mediating interpersonal relationships. For example, in 1978, during my second trip to work with the Anêm, but Goulden’s first, [...]
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