Paul Payak of the Global Language Monitor is claiming the 1 millionth English word is coming soon. He says a new English word is coined every 98 minutes, so the 1 million marker will arrive about 15 days hence. The CBS article that tipped me off to this is pretty amusing in the quotes it [...]
Posts Tagged ‘linguistics’
The One Millionth English Word is ‘Rubbish’
Posted: 26 May 2009 in UncategorizedTags: bullshit, english, hype, language, linguistics, words
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Language, Commerce and Google Translate
Posted: 10 February 2009 in UncategorizedTags: commerce, creoles, economics, google translate, guest blogging, history, language, language change, linguistic homogenization, linguistics, machine translation, pidgins, trade
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 is [...]
It literally still has meaning
Posted: 28 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: american heritage dictionary, dictionaries, etymology, language change, linguistic data, linguistics, literally, meaning, twitter, words
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 [...]
Linguistic Homogenization and Power
Posted: 12 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: black iron prison, english, history, language, linguistic homogenization, linguistics, philip k dick, power, sociolinguistics, thought, uniformitarianism
This is a subject much larger than the treatment I am about to give it. Linguistic homogenization occurs in modern states where regional dialects are marginalized and a standard dialect is advanced as the primary method for acceptable public communication. The powerful favoring a single dialect is nothing new, but now more than ever, states [...]
NACLO 2009
Posted: 15 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: announcements, cfp, computational linguistics, high school, linguistics, NACLO, outreach
The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad has been announced for 2009. It’s a great outreach program to high school students to increase interest in general and computational linguistics. I’ve talked about it before here. I have reproduced the announcement below the jump.
Does NACLO need a better name?
Posted: 22 June 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, high school, language, linguistics, logic, NACLO, outreach, problem solving
The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad is an annual competition open to US high school students that introduces kids to computational linguistics at a much younger age than people normally hear about it. I didn’t hear about CL until I was three years into my undergrad program. The instant I did hear about it, I [...]
Xenolinguistics
Posted: 19 April 2008 in UncategorizedTags: alien languages, aliens, books, klingon, linguistics, lord of the rings, xenolinguistics
I have been interested in alien (invented) languages since my first brush with elven in the Lord of the Rings. I checked out The Klingon Dictionary from the library in high school and currently own a copy of it and The Languages of Middle Earth. During high school, I nerdily amused myself by attempting to [...]
What the Deuce?
Posted: 16 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: books, deuce, etymology, family guy, folk etymology, german, henry james, information needs, linguistics, movies, openephyra, the golden bowl
While watching the 2000 version of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, I heard the once-common phrase “The deuce only knows…” I’m always looking for vintage profanity, and this appealed to me strongly. I’ve heard it hundreds or thousands of times before, of course, but here it was brought to the fore of my attention. After [...]
Cognate Identification: Orthographic Methods
Posted: 26 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: algorithms, cognate identification, cognates, computational linguistics, historical linguistics, language change, linguistics, machine translation, natural language processing, orthography, string matching
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 transcriptions. The [...]
