Just read that animals use icons and signs to communicate but not symbols. I guess the first question would be whether ‘use’ also implies ‘understanding’, but, aren’t the words we use for commands symbols? I am not saying animals use ‘language’ but I wouldn’t say they don’t use any symbols…heeelp!! @linguistics@anthropology#linguistics#language#animals
"In applied linguistics generally and bilingualism research in particular, psychological variables remain a much under-investigated sub-category of individual differences compared with cognitive ones. To better understand the under-researched psychological effects of bilingualism, this study investigated well-being, a psychological construct, based on a big-data survey."
"We analyze the average sonority of basic words of nearly three-quarters of the world’s languages, and confirm a positive correlation between sonority and local temperature. Our findings suggest that lower temperatures, over the course of many centuries, lead to decreased sonority. Our research provides further evidence that climate plays a role in shaping the evolution of human languages."
"We analyze the average sonority of basic words of nearly three-quarters of the world’s languages, and confirm a positive correlation between sonority and local temperature. Our findings suggest that lower temperatures, over the course of many centuries, lead to decreased sonority. Our research provides further evidence that climate plays a role in shaping the evolution of human languages."
"The present article is then concerned with the standardisation of the apostrophe in the English orthographic system in the period 1600–1900 and pursues the following objectives: (a) to study the use and omission of the apostrophe in the expression of the past tense, the genitive case and the nominative plural in the period; (b) to assess the relationship between the three uses and their likely connections; and (c) to evaluate the likely participation of grammarians in the adoption and the rejection of each of these phenomena in English."
So does anyone else kinda not like #Duolingo? Like, it’s a nice and easy way to begin #learning a #language and it seems a lot of my friends also use it, the problem is instead of getting real people to do the voices they use text-to speech, which means you often do not get the correct #pronunciation. Like, often you get both a normal speed and a slow speed recordings of the pronunciation to pick from, and the two versions will often use completely different #TTS voices that not only have diffent quality, but also very different #pronunciations despite being the same words or sentences. It seems like the wrong way to learn a language. Also, what is up with the #owl? @actuallyautistic
"The Syriac language has, among all the Aramaic varieties, by far the largest number of terms for ‘comet’ or ‘meteor’. Is there a simple explanation for this fact?"
Humans instinctively form words by weaving patterns of meaningless speech elements. Moreover, we do so in specific, regular ways. We contrast dogs and gods, favour blogs to lbogs. We begin forming sound-patterns at birth and, like songbirds, we do so spontaneously, even in the absence of an adult model.
hey @languagelovers! I finished up my #Japanese resources list on my neocities here (https://a-jade-by-any-other-name.neocities.org/languages2#japanese). to many people, you might see familiar names, but hopefully, I've added something new for everyone! if I'm missing something, feel free to reply; this list will always continue growing as I find more resources.
> There are thousands of languages in the world, 1,000 to 2,000 of them in Africa alone: it’s estimated that the continent accounts for one-third of the world’s languages. But though native speakers of English make up just 5% of the global population, the language dominates the web—and has now come to dominate AI tools, too.
I'm in the #Humanities Commons instance, and we have free profiles like https://hcommons.org/members/stevemccartyinjapan that include a link to the old blue bird of Twitter, and members are increasingly leaving, so our admins at @hello might want to reconsider having that item in the next version of profiles.
🇬🇧 "This article recovers some of the classical, constitutional, and religious languages of empire in early-modern Britain by a consideration of the period between the end of the first Anglo-Dutch war in 1654 and the calling of the second Protectoral Parliament in 1656."
Language, Thought and Reality
Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak.
"We conclude that linguistic enhancement of color contrasts provides targets with a head start in accessing visual consciousness. Our native language is thus one of the forces that determine what we consciously perceive."
"Here, using an experimental paradigm able to separate variation within a language from variation between languages, we tested the use of spatial demonstratives—the most fundamental and frequent spatial terms across languages."
#Image attribution: naturalearthdata.com, offered to the Public Domain per Terms of Use, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_geographical_(drab).png
"After introducing plural logic and its main applications, the book provides a systematic analysis of the relation between this logic and other theoretical frameworks such as set theory, mereology, higher-order logic, and modal logic."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"Experts have been selected to create a multidisciplinary volume with a thematic approach to the vast subject, tackling administration, army, economy, law, mobility, religion (local and imperial religions and Christianity), social status, and urbanism. They situate the phenomena of Latinization, literacy, bi-, and multilingualism within local and broader social developments and draw together materials and arguments that have not before been coordinated in a single volume."
"This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology."