I just completed my first guest blogging post over at mind x the + gap where I talked about the mutual history of language and commerce, as well as some thoughts on how that will continue into the future. Since the focus of Mil Joshi’s blog is more towards psychology and economics, the following [...]
Archive for the ‘language change’ Category
28 Jan
It literally still has meaning
I hereby declare that the word literally has not lost its meaning, despite a rash of rumors to the contrary.
What would it even mean for a word to lose its meaning? A word can change from one meaning to another, certainly. Maybe you could argue that a word that has dropped out of usage [...]
26 Feb
The Enormity of Space
Whenever I hear the word enormity used to describe how gi-freakin-normous something is, I always willfully misinterpret it to mean an act of extreme evil or extreme wickedness. Now before you start screaming prescriptivist and throwing Kleenexes drenched in the snot of sociolinguistics at me — I’m not being a prescriptivist. Of course people have [...]
26 Jan
Cognate Identification: Orthographic Methods
In previous posts on cognate identification, I discussed the difference between strict and loose cognates. Loose cognates are words in two languages that have the same or similar written forms. I also described how approaches to cognate identification tend to differ based on whether the data being used is plain text or phonetic [...]
10 Dec
Cognate Identification: Approaches
In my previous post on cognate identification, I gave two definitions for cognates: strict and loose (orthographic). Strict cognates are words in two related languages that descended from the same word in the ancestor language. Loose cognates are words in two languages that are spelled or pronounced similarly (depending on the data [...]
6 Dec
Cognate Identification: Definition
I recently finished a literature review for my Language & Statistics 2 class. The topic was computational models of historical linguistics and my partner and I focused on cognate identification and phylogenetic inference. We split the work and my part was cognate identification. So I decided to blog about it for a [...]
28 Sep
Another think coming
Language Log brought up the usage of the phrase another thing coming today. This is the only way I’ve ever heard it or seen it used. But it turns out, the original is another think coming. The thing version is winning out on the interwebs, but the post on Language Log indicates that the two [...]
7 Sep
White Goods
Language Log has an interesting quiz for speakers of American English: choose the correct meaning of the term white goods. No web searches of any kind allowed before answering.
Goods of any sort that are white in color — flour, paper towels, lilies, emulsion paint, toothpaste, ermine fur, milk, eggs, refined sugar, button [...]
17 Aug
Life Assurance
I came across an interesting difference in usage between British and American versions of the word assurance. The word typically means a promise or a guarantee in American English. So when I came across this ad on the Scotsman it caught my eye. Hell yes I want my life assured! Turns [...]
14 Aug
Enormity
Here is a word that has gone through the wringer in the past few decades. Originally it meant a monstrous offense or excessive wickedness (American Heritage). However, its similarity to the word enormous has caused it to be used by an ever growing number of people to mean immense size. With all [...]
