Languages For The Win !/Un poco sobre español

Blog dedicated to the science of languages and to languages themselves (mostly French, Spanish, English, German and Italian though all languages are welcomed). I also post stuff I like from time to time lol.

[nemesisparadis]

Funeral dancers for hire- BBC News

De aquí salió el maravilloso meme de los portadores de ataúdes bailarines, el mejor meme de todos los tiempos. Y aunque nunca he querido un funeral, ahora quiero que ellos bailen en el mío.

[mapsontheweb]

Etymologies of African Currencies.

[linguisticalities]

The Loudness Of Vowels Helps The Brain Break Down Speech Into Syl-La-Bles

Syllables are the building blocks of spoken language. And now a study of brain activity hints at how we extract them from a stream of speech

[fullpraxisnow]

“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience store food, which — in addition to its nutritional deficits — is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times more than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor — especially with children to support and care for — is a perpetual high-wire act.”

— It Is Expensive to Be Poor | The Atlantic

[linguisten]

The priceless racism of the Duke of Edinburgh

Prince Philip has done the world an extraordinary service by exposing the racist hypocrisy of "Western civilisation".

A good lesson on journalism, too, and about how to do things with words.

[alex333ccc]

Traducir o no traducir ‘impeachment’, esa es la cuestión (lingüística)

Fundéu recomienda usar proceso de destitución .

[thegayreich]

LGBTQ Mexicans arrested 1935 x Plus LGBTQ Mexicans in the 1940s

A set of pictures of Mexicans, purportedly arrested for homosexuality in 1935. The photo belongs to the collection of the National Photo Library of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico.

Very little is known about the detainees themselves, except these pictures are dated around 1940. These pictures come from Lecumberri prison in Mexico City. Up until 1976, gay men were imprisoned in the prison ward J, or Jota. Joto(s) is still a common homophobic slur in Mexico.

[alex333ccc]

Las mujeres llevan siglos liderando el cambio lingüístico

Las “líderes lingüísticas” están en contacto con personas de diferentes clases sociales y generaciones.

[superlinguo]

2019 Australian 50c coin celebrates International Year of Indigenous Languages

Every year Australia produces a 50c coin to celebrate the theme of the UN International Year. This year it’s the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and a coin has been created with a design that includes the word for ‘coin’ or ‘money’ in 14 different languages.

(image via indigenous.gov.au)

I’ll be keeping my eye out for one, in the mean time there’s an interactive page at the Mint that lets you click on each of the words and learn more about the language. And if you want to make sure some coin goes towards Indigenous languages you could donate to AIATSIS or RNLD.

[alex333ccc]

Palabras Domingueras #2

trémulo, la

Del lat. tremŭlus.

1. adj. Que tiembla.

2. adj. Dicho de una cosa: Que tiene un movimiento o agitación semejante al temblor; como la luz de una vela.

[alex333ccc]

Palabras Domingueras #1

cosmogonía

Del gr. κοσμογονία kosmogonía.

1. f. Relato mítico relativo a los orígenes del mundo.

2. f. Teoría científica que trata del origen y la evolución del universo.

[linguafandom]

English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet

However it originated, though, the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: “It means something like ‘I’m so busy being totally absorbed by X that I don’t need to explain further, and you should know about this because it’s a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing’”). It conveys brevity (Carey: “It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone” “It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone”).

But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, “The talks broke down because politics,” I’m not just describing a circumstance. I’m also describing a category. I’m making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I’m offering an explanation and rolling my eyes — and I’m able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language.

[allthingslinguistic]

Many grammatical systems can cause translation mismatches

The theme of this year’s NAACL, which ended last week, was data bias and privacy, topics of great social consequence. On the former, many…

A very good overview by Adina Williams of why machine translation is hard and why it’s useful to have humans (and especially linguists) in the loop to know which things require more context. Excerpt: 

So, now we’ve seen three new examples of where translations fail. They are very well controlled: in each example of a translation mismatch, we’re translating only a single sentence with only one grammatical system. In reality, pairs of languages may differ across numerous grammatical systems, even within the same sentence. We could have wanted to translate Turkish sentences with both “genderless” pronouns and evidentiality into English, and then we would multiple the potential translation alternatives. 

These three examples are just the three I could think up off the top of my head post-NAACL (as I write this, I’m reminded of others to try: we could look at translation mismatches in case, determiners and definites, question particles, clusivity, numeral classifiers, and this list could definitely go on and on).

Read the whole thing. 

[thewordhord]

[the-bibrarian]

[sgribhisg]

What it’s like being black in the Scottish Gaelic community | gal-dem

In Scottish Gaelic, to ask where someone is from you ask Cò às a tha thu? – which roughly translates as who are your people? Most of Scotland’s Gaelic speaking population are based in the Highlands and Western Isles, a smattering of islands to the top left of the mainland. Gaelic is considered an endangered language, with a speaking population of around 60,000 according to the last census. Scotland’s relationship with the Gaelic language is fraught and self-destructive, from the legacy of the ethnolinguistic genocide of the Highland Clearances, to the modern-day upward battle to restore the language in mainstream Scottish society. But like wider Scotland, the Gaelic world projects an image of post-racial homogeneity and fails to address the whiteness that stifles the community. This means that speakers of colour are pushed to the fringe and regarded not only as uncommon, but abnormal.

[linguisten]

How Language and Climate Connect | JSTOR Daily

While we’re losing biological diversity, we’re also losing linguistic and cultural diversity at the same time. This is no coincidence.

[allthingslinguistic]

Wikipedia Is Helping Keep Welsh Alive Online

Welsh and other smaller language movements on Wikimedia projects suggest there may be ways to train technology to allow for cultural differences.

An article in Slate about the role of Wikipedia in creating language tools. Excerpt: 

Although Alexa still does not speak or understand Welsh, the Celtic language’s presence in tech has increased dramatically within a short period. Google announced in February that it had expanded its offerings in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive to include Welsh. And Google Translate—infamous since 2009 for its Scymraeg, or scummy Welsh—has, according to the BBC, recently taken a great leap forward in terms of the accuracy and quality of its Welsh translations. Morlais and others attribute this in part to the fact that there are now more than 100,000 articles on the Welsh version of Wikipedia, known as Wicipedia.

Like other language editions, Wicipedia is a separate website with its own content, not simply a translation of English Wikipedia, a distinction that matters for both users and big tech companies. Back in 2017, Morlais observed, “There appears to be an indication that there is a link between the languages with the most Wikipedia articles or pages and the languages that are supported by the digital giants.” Google Translate and other technologies use artificial neural networks to learn from example, training themselves with language data from rich internet sources like Welsh Wikipedia.

The Welsh community is not alone in using wiki-technology to promote its language. This year’s Celtic Knot conference in Cornwall, England, included several indigenous languages with their own Wikipedia editions. The original idea, as the name suggests, was to focus on Celtic languages, including Irish, Scots, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish, which was declared extinct merely a decade ago. But as word got out about a Wikipedia minority language conference, others began to join, representing, for example, the Sámi language spoken in parts of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia; the Berber family of languages spoken in Northern Africa; and the Basque and Catalan communities. (In his 2017 presentation, Morlais noted that Catalan was one of the few minority languages supported by Google search, an accomplishment he linked to the fact that Catalan already had more than 500,000 articles on its language edition of Wikipedia.)

Read the whole thing.