Category: General Language

Imagine a world in which humans didn’t have Electroreception. None of that electric frisson you get when a predator lurks outside. No ability to use your body as a compass; why, the number of humans that would get lost on hikes! No ability to tell what’s in front of you just by its capacitance or […]

Most metaphors, we’d like to assume, were new once. (Likely not all of them: cognitive metaphor is tied up with cognition.) Some new metaphors, or figurative speech, or just plain collocations, become popular. Others do not. Some of those popular collocations become so popular, they become entirely conventional and characteristic of a genre. And in […]

So… lemme get this straight. A guy who was worked for Google Translate is A2A’ing someone who did a couple of graduate courses on Machine Translation 20 years ago? Once again, Adam, you flatter me. We agree, and I defer to your superior expertise; I’ll just, eh, restate what you said. Machine Translation is AI-hard: […]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-commas-still-matter/2016/10/04/afed2c72-8a74-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?utm_term=.a1a2edc54a4c&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1 Read less Lynn Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) and more David Crystal (Making a Point)! (That was a genius move of Profile Books, btw: to publish both the Punctuation Panic book, and its Refutation.) As Crystal argues compellingly, Internet and SMS discourse don’t make people forget the rules of formal punctuation they have been […]

Please God no. For the sentiment this proposal awakens in the soul of historical linguists, refer: xkcd: Physicists Plenty of people use machine learning on historical linguistics. They usually end up being picked up by science reporters, getting all the publicity that historical linguists don’t. And when they do, historical linguists roll their eyes, and […]

Google Translate, like many machine translation projects, does not maintain [math]n^2[/math] language pairs when adding languages to its bank; it appears to maintain just n:English mappings—so that a translation from, say, Greek to Persian is pretty clearly via English as an interlanguage. That is a clear scalability issue, if you’re going to maintain the number […]

If by scripts you mean “written texts” (and if you do, it’s a misleading way of saying it), languages evolve mostly through the spoken word. However, peculiarities of written registers can influence how people speak—for example, the reemergence of /t/ in often, or the influence of Classical Arabic on the spoken Arabic variants. Written language […]

To my embarrassment, I did not know what the pragmatics wastebasket was, so I did some googling. Pragmatics (textbook account) Out of the Pragmatic Wastebasket (Bar-Hillel’s note) Pragmatics waste-basket The history of linguistics is a succession of scholars saying: X is what we will pay attention to, and Y is crap we can’t be bothered […]

It’s a very insightful question, OP. If an onomatopoeia is a completely transparent mapping of natural sound to human language, then it is an inevitability, and there’s no point attributing it to one coiner or another, one language or another: the onomatopoeia is just there, a sound ready for humans to imitate, and humans will […]

It’s an interesting question, OP. I wonder whether too much similarity will make a word less easy to learn, not more, due to the potential for confusion. There can’t be a categorical difference for when a word switches from similar to dissimilar. It’s not like a distance of 3 means similar and a distance of […]