After watching “Arrival” last night, I’m fixated on the idea of nonlinear memory. It must be disorienting, and incredibly strange to remember your entire life when you haven’t fully lived it yet.
It's dragonlanging day again! We are going to return to the writing system now. We have some more consonant symbols to create, then some work to do on how to handle consonant clusters before we can fully wrap Ndăkaga.
How the Brain Processes Different Components of Language - Moving beyond neural localization of language. Posted May 28, 2024
"...This is in line with recent ideas about a "cortical mosaic" architecture for linguistic structure within overlapping portions of posterior temporal and inferior frontal cortices for processing demands that bias syntactic and semantic computations, whereby, for example, effects of composition can be found within a narrow strip of tissue within the broader lexicality-sensitive cortical sites (a spatial mosaic), or where different demands of sentence-level inferential semantics can be detected over closely overlapping temporal windows within a small area of cortex (a spatiotemporal mosaic)..."
I’m thrilled to announce that I will be moving to #Philadelphia for a fellowship at the American Philosophical Society, where I will continue working on locating, building, and analyzing a corpus of #Tunica language documentation, as well as gathering all information I can on the history and culture of the Tunica-Biloxi people.
Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?
Blame Tolkien and time - by Eric Grundhauser December 7, 2016
"...Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures & histories to speak them... In the case of the ever-present Elvish in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men & hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm & Moria.
“When dwarves actually talk, they don’t sound Scottish at all,” says Olsen. “They sound like Arabic or Hebrew.”...As radio & film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent..."
When people tell me they read one of my books and found it “quite good”, I like to assume they’re from the US where “quite” apparently means “very” 😊
As opposed to the UK/Aus, where “quite good” is just damning with faint praise.
Unless you say it was “really quite good”. That’s when you mean “very good”.
If you say “quite good, really”, that means you’re surprised it was any good.
And if you say “Oh, I say, that is quite, quite remarkable”, you’re an 18th-century Earl confronted by a tempestuous highland beauty who is tossing her raven-black locks and flashing her sapphire-blue eyes at you because you’re enclosing her commons 😉
Where you live/grew up, what is the word for the natural path between two points that often goes near a more formal walkway/sidewalk?
The formal English word is “desire path” which always gave me the ick. In german it was technically “Trampelpfad” (trampel path) but colloquially in the areas I grew up it was usually Gänsenpfad (goose path) or “Ziegenpfad” (goat path), usually dependent on which small livestock was more common to the region. #linguistics
It seems contradictory to me that at many schools, you can get a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science in the same field. Which is it? Is the field an art or science? #RandomThoughts#Linguistics#Academia
Diseases are used for swearing in Dutch – but how does that work? @sesquiotic analyses the idiom "sjouw me de tering" in a new post on the Strong Language blog:
this is an important article for his focus on the cognitive #linguistics of protests:
«"I believe the “Cease-fire now” slogan is most important. On a college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of “Free speech.” If I were in your situation, I would say “Free Gaza, free speech”...»
I've been earwormed by this song a lot and I love the translation of the delightful lyrics, but I'm going to write the title as "Gender Queer" going forward as that is more faithful to the lyrics than the literal title "雌雄同體" (by 五月天/Mayday) and the English translation of that phrase is potentially offensive to intersex people.
Here, the ChatGPT C-LARA-Instance, Belinda Chiera, Cathy Chua, Chadi Raheb, Manny Rayner, Annika Simonsen, Zhengkang Xiang, and Rina Zviel-Girshin use the #OpenSource#CLARA platform to evaluate #GPT4's ability to perform #linguistics#NLP tasks such as #segmentation, #lemmatization and #glossing.