language « Tikkunista!

Bird’s Eye: Language is the tool with which we think, and so the question of who controls language is, as Orwell correctly noted 65 years ago, a vital political question. We start our exploration by looking at the significance of the increasing legitimization of slang, explore a fascinating Scientific American article on comparative cultures and languages, and look back in sorrow on the classic prescriptive writing manual: Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style”.

* English: It’s A Neologism Thang, Innit? Sarah Churchwell The Guardian

You can feel the collective shudder among language purists: “innit”, “grrl” and “thang” have been admitted into the Collins Scrabble Dictionary. Admission into any dictionary is the first step on the road to legitimation, thus raising the question of whether mispronunciation constitutes a genuine neologism. I hate to admit it, but historically speaking the answer to that question is yes.

…We all know that language is mutable, that it must either evolve or wither away: there’s no language so pure as a dead one. Babylonian is untroubled by the intrusion of new slang, as it is untroubled by speakers. The word “slang” is itself illustrative: it was first recorded in 1756, I learn from the OED, which offers a wonderfully sniffy definition: “The special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character.” Language thus signals not education, but character: not what you know, but who you are. And who you are, linguistically speaking, is all about class, innit?

* How Language Shapes Thought Scientific American (via Reddit)

I am standing next to a five-year old girl in pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right. Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the same request of an audience of distinguished scholars—winners of science medals and genius prizes. Some of them have come to this very room to hear lectures for more than 40 years. I ask them to close their eyes (so they don’t cheat) and point north. Many refuse; they do not know the answer. Those who do point take a while to think about it and then aim in all possible directions. I have repeated this exercise at Harvard and Princeton and in Moscow, London and Beijing, always with the same results.

A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease that eminent scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a big difference in cognitive ability. What could explain it? The surprising answer, it turns out, may be language.

* Strunk & White Turn Fifty Geoff Pullum

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won’t be celebrating. The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

…. What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses…. I have been told several times, by both students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing instructors who think every occurrence of “be” is to be condemned for being “passive.” No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent of an action. (They think “a bus exploded” is passive because it doesn’t say whether terrorists did it.)

7. Language

Apr-22-2011 | Comments (1)

Bird’s Eye: We have a sense now of where language came from, and we can even see how symbols such as the ‘&’ evolved. But can you speak to animals in their languages in different countries? Did you know that an English Bulldog says, “Bow Wow”; a French Poodle says, “Ouah-ouah”; and a German Shepherd says , “Wuff-wuff?” After you read through this, you’ll be a regular Dr. Dolittle.

* Languages Grew From a Seed in Africa New York Times

Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa

* The Evolution of the Ampersand

* Derek Abbott’s Animal Noise Page Adelaide University

In different languages what do we say to mimic animal sounds? Below is the world’s biggest multilingual list. A guiding principle behind this list is to visualise a comic book, in your language, and imagine what would be written in the text balloon coming from the mouth of an animal.