Brumguistics

My year abroad in Birmingham, UK. Thoughts on language, my current studies, and travels in and around the UK

[brumguistics]

Very interesting

[brumguistics]

Studying abroad is a great opportunity and I recommend it highly. It offers insight into other cultures, languages, and bridges communications. Sadly, with the high price of international student tuition, economic inequality can be a limiting factor making study abroad inaccessible. Hopefully, increased opportunities can be made to us students that are interested in studying overseas.

[brumguistics]

New learner corpus just posted on the Corpus Linguistics facebook group.

[brumguistics]

Recommended journal article: Anne Frances Wysocki - awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs

Article here.  Sadly this article may not be available to everyone.

I think this article would be particularly interesting to those in new media studies and anyone interested in visual design in general in the age of new media.  

Reflecting on this article, it would be interesting if students could put together academic work in the form of a website rather than using the traditional written essay.  

Some ideas running through my head after reading:

Hyperlinks to citation sources (pop-up windows to blurb from source)

Rich colorful multimedia to support research (photos, animations, video clips)

Different design structure rather than standard 'traditional page layout'

Usage of xml and stylesheets so that format/structure/visual is kept independent of text.  Stylesheet implementation would allow structure to be selectable and customizable to the user.  

Metadata tagging for increased searchability

Creative Commons licenses to encourage reading/remarking/sharing

Annotation features so that users can 'mark up' media.

This could bring up some interesting issues in accessibility, copyright, validity, and technological know how of readers and authors.  Time constraints and access to proper viewers or technology could play a role in how usable some design would be as well and why some designs may stay 'unavailable' relative to certain genres.

Check out the article and see what thoughts come to your mind.  New media is an interesting area of study that I need to read a lot more in and am glad I have taken up a module on the subject this past semester.

Source:   Anne Frances Wysocki, awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs, Computers and Composition, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 55-62, ISSN 8755-4615, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.011.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S875546150400074X) Keywords: Affordances; Available design; Image; New media; Space; Visual representation; Visual rhetoric

[brumguistics]

To Duolingo users

Any fellow Duolingo users out there? I’d like to follow/befriend more users in the hopes that it will increase my language learning motivation.  My username on duolingo is fizion.  Feel free to follow me.

Also, in regards to Duolingo, what other resources do you use to supplement your Duolingo practice?

[ubungmachtdenmeister]

So you know how every language has that word/phrase/sentence that native speakers can pronounce just fine, but foreigners can almost never pronounce it correctly? And the natives have a lot of fun telling the foreigners to try and say it and laughing at their attempts?

They’re called Shibboleths, and wikipedia has a whole article on them.  Even better, wikipedia has a whole article on examples of them.

Some of them are ridiculous, I can’t stop reading this article.

[brumguistics]

Just learned what the term shibboleth means from this article. It's a spoken word or phrase used by a language community to differentiate if speakers of a language are inside or outside of said language community (think native speaker vs foreign/second language speaker/regional dialects). There are some interesting ones mentioned and the wiki entry is definitely worth a browse.

[brumguistics]

What We Mean When We Say Hello [Source: The Atlantic]

The curious geography of American greetings

Article on conversation starters based on geographic regions and how people from different states interpreted, “Where are you from?”  I think typically for some of us in NY, its either ’the city’ then going into specifics of which borough, ’the island’ then going into specific county, ‘upstate’, or some of the counties a little bit outside of Manhattan like Westchester,, Rockland, etc.  

[brumguistics]

Copenhagen- 20140208-09, a set on Flickr.

Here are some photos from a trip to Copenhagen. It was short but lots of fun. The highlights of the trip for me were the Rundetaarn, seeing Nyhavn in person, bakfiets, and the Carlsberg Brewery. The weather was slightly better than England at this time of the year (February) but it would be lovely to visit again in the summer time.

[brumguistics]

Scientific method: Statistical errors

P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume.

Funny enough I read this just as we've begun learning about the usage of statistics in our research and how to apply statistical p values to support the accuracy of our findings.

[brumguistics]

Using photography as a tool for facilitating vocabulary acquisition in a language learning classroom

I just read an awesome research project on the implications of photography based activities in language learning and vocabulary acquisition.  Being an avid fan of photography in in general, I thought the implications of using photography in language learning are huge and could be used in a variety of ways.  This has deeply sparked my interest and might be interesting to conduct some classes of my own in the future with photography used as a tool to help facilitate increased language acquisition.  There are a few other articles on the subject but it seems like an area rich for more exploration.

Source: Sánchez Gómez, Jesús Ariel, and Ken Beatty. "Impact of Photography-based Language Learning Activities in the Acquisition of School Related Vocabulary by Young Learners." (2013).

Full research project can be read here: http://intellectum.unisabana.edu.co:8080/jspui/handle/10818/8288

  Photo by John Ibarra ©2009

[brumguistics]

Ser vs estar and translations dilemmas in Spanish to English.

[brumguistics]

Inspiration to learn new languages from Benny Lewis.

[allthingslinguistic]

Jabberwocky: how do you translate a word that doesn't mean anything?

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!”

[allthingslinguistic]

Does a nonsense word still have the same type of nonsense meaning without the same language and culture as context? 

Read More

[brumguistics]

We actually discussed this in my Describing Language: Lexis class just the other day.  In groups, we came up with our own interpretations as to what we though "gyre and gimble","mimsy were the borogroves", etc.  It was tough for many of the students who spoke English as their second language.

One of the discussions that it got us started on was talking about phonaesthemes (or phonesthemes to the Americans like myself) which I'd like to look into more.  

What are phonaesthemes?  They are a term first coined by a British linguist by the name of J.R. Firth referring to associations between sounds and meanings.

For an example, take a look at the word "slithy" in the Jabberwocky.  We see it begins with the consonant cluster /sl/.  Pronounce this and think of what kinds of words come to mind.  What kind of connotations do they have?  Do you see any relationships between any of the words you thought of? 

Can you think of any other phonaesthemes in English and what meanings may be associated with them?  How about in a different language?  Do these exist in other languages like they do in English?

[fuckyeahmylanguage]

http://visual.ly/monolingual-vs-bilingual go here for a larger version of this graphic about monolingualism vs. bilingualism. Click on the graphic at the link to make it even bigger!

[prototumblinguist]

It makes me so sad that I’m not bilingual

And even worse that so few of my peers want to be

[brumguistics]

I definitely think that everyone should be able to speak another language. I believe the benefits outweigh any disadvantages.

On another note, right now as I'm typing this out I am listening to Spanish speakers from Valencia communicating completely in English just for the sake of speaking another language.

[brumguistics]

Showing the problems with a welfare state through a hilarious short.  This is a clip from a mockumentary that went viral last year on Youtube.  You might have to watch it more than once to get everything.  She is speaking in a heavy Black Country accent.  The Black Country accent/dialect (however you'd like to call it) will be a post for another time.

[brumguistics]

From Youtube:

Steven Pinker - Psychologist, Cognitive Scientist, and Linguist at Harvard University

How did humans acquire language? In this lecture, best-selling author Steven Pinker introduces you to linguistics, the evolution of spoken language, and the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar. He also explores why language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human evolution. Finally, Pinker touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature.

This was the highlight of my Friday evening.  If you would like to get a basic introduction to all things linguistics and have 50 minutes to spare, watch it.