Linguistics

As an avid (ab)user of phrases-as-lemmata, I found this interesting.

Today, dinner almost universally refers to the evening meal. But it has had a long etymological history to get to that point.

Bill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into words. All three authors were fortunate enough to have had Bill as our PhD supervisor (Laurel: 2012, Meredith: 2014, Betsy: 2018). We feel that the many hours we spent in his presence and with his work have given us a good insight into who and how he was. We also feel deep love and gratitude for him and for his imprint on the field and on us. As such, this piece is our reflection on Bill as a person, an advisor, and a scholar, from our perspective as three of his students from his later years.

Interesting short text about the history of Finnish, focusing mostly on its interaction with nearby Germanic languages.

Archive link: https://archive.is/20240503184140/https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/133291

I share some of my research about the reasons why English spelling is so inconsistent

This is a lot more sociolinguistics and social history of language than pure linguistics, so I understand if this is a little tangential.

A curated list of open-access descriptive grammars.

Additional links with press coverage: ArcheologyMag, Oxford.

For further info, if anyone is interested, Stephen Bax claimed a decade ago to partially decode the manuscript; here's a video with his reasoning, as well as the paper he released. Sadly Bax passed away in 2017 (may he rest in peace), so the work was left incomplete.

Image A shows Bosnian Cyrillic as used in stone inscriptions.

The Public Domain Review's article about it, with embedded Internet Archive viewer of the book - https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/conjectural-observations/

hello guys! recently i discovered this interesting concept which says that in german theres one dominant dialect which is the german standard german out of germany that dominates and discriminates all other dialects of german, such as austrian german and swiss german. im no linguist so i thought i ask some here about your opinion on this topic.

Discussion at Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69311

https://goodbearcomics.com/2021/09/23/chickens/

A team of archaeologists has discovered in Knossos, on the Greek island of Crete, the longest Linear A inscription found to date. The script appears on a circular ivory object with an attached handle, discovered in a context of clear religious significance within a Neopalatial building. Besides providing the longest inscription in this yet-to-be-deciphered system, the find offers new perspectives on the use of Minoan writing in ceremonial contexts.

Just published "Negation in English and other languages" by Otto Jespersen, edited by Brett Reynolds & Peter Evans

Don't like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like "f" and "v," opening a world of new words.

Mind you this is all very fuzzy, take with salt.

Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.

from Yuri Shevelov's *Prehistory of Slavic* (1964)

The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is interesting. Quick summary:

If there's any mistake please correct me (especially in the hebrew parts, i am only native in arabic and know basic hebrew)

Found this article in the longreads community arguing why "politically correct" terms shouldn't be used. You guys have any thoughts?

We invite participants to benchmark systems for word sense induction (WSI) across multiple languages. Unlike traditional approaches, this task evaluates WSI without relying on predefined sense inventories, offering a more theoretically plausible framework for understanding word meanings.

What a Christmas present!

As W. Labov has passed away, I came across a comment reposting this screenshotted request, along with the paper in question:

William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side.

Source: https://toot.community/@yvanspijk/113629940623815710

Archive link: https://archive.ph/cIz4A