The Argot

An online symposium on language.

[from-student-to-teacher]

81-Year-Old Woman, Last Fluent Speaker of Her Language, Learns to Type to Make a Dictionary

Marie Wilcox, an octogenarian Native American woman from the San Joaquin Valley in California, was born on Thanksgiving in 1933; she grew up in a one-room house with the grandmother who delivered her and spoke her native Wukchumni, and I believe this video will assure you—Marie is better than you or I will ever be.

[theargot]

Noted Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi today slammed Home Minister Rajnath Singh's remarks on secularism saying that his suggestion to replace the literal tr...

The Hindi poet, whose works have been translated in several Indian and foreign languages, said translation in itself was an “exercise towards tolerance because it enables an understanding of others writing and viewpoints.”

“There is a great amount of intolerance at present in this country and many of us are fighting against it and voicing our opinions and one of the roles that translation plays is spreading tolerance. Because it spreads understanding that others are not really others.. they are yourself,” he said.

[mesogeios]

“Paraguay has two national languages- Spanish and the indigenous Guaraní. Guaraní proved to be the language of intimacy, while Spanish is for acquaintances. Guaraní is the language of the country, Spanish is more likely in town. So what language do you speak with a barefoot woman? Guaraní, of course. With an unknown man wearing a suit? Spanish. And with a woman wearing a long skirt and smoking a big black cigar? 89 out of 91 people said Guaraní.”

- Allan Bell, Excerpt from ‘The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics’

[fyp-philosophy]

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

Emil Cioran, Strangled Thoughts 

[allthingslinguistic]

A video about various linguistics concepts from vsauceblog, including contrastive focus reduplication, retronyms, early emoticons, and rebracketing. As with many issues of unclear definitions, I’d say that the question about whether cereal is soup could be answered using Prototype Theory. 

[afterlogic]

I conquer the world with words, conquer the mother tongue, verbs, nouns, syntax. I sweep away the beginning of things and with a new language that has the music of water the message of fire I light the coming age and stop time in your eyes and wipe away the line that separates time from this single moment.

Nizar Qabbani (I Conquer The World With Words)

[intellectys]

I’m preparing to do AP Spanish this year, having passed Spanish 4 last year with nothing under a 98% the whole year and 100% on my final, so I thought I’d write up a masterpost about studying Spanish!

Resources I Used:

Quizlet- without a doubt, Quizlet is amazing. It lets you make online flashcards (and the app works offline), and it also allows you to play games with them. It’s really useful and I used it for a tonne of vocab.

Duolingo- if you’re trying to learn Spanish alone, or complement basic Spanish in class, Duolingo’s very helpful as a language learning tool.

SpanishDict- this word of the day is super helpful for building vocab! Keeping a vocab journal and recording the word of the day is useful for simple practice.

WordReference- without a doubt, it’s the best Spanish-English dictionary, although it does many other languages as well. It also has verb conjugation charts and forums if you need them!

Colby College- this website offers some great Spanish practice videos & passages to use.

Conjuguemos- here, you can practice conjugating Spanish verbs, and sort them by regular/irregular, and mix tenses! It’s great for just drilling your mastery of different verbs.

StudySpanish- you can find almost anything Spanish related on here, including conjugation drills, and note summaries on every area of Spanish grammar. It’s really useful for reviewing something you didn’t get in class!

Other Study Tips:

To improve your listening skills, try using podcasts. Here’s a link to a site which recommends 5 really helpful podcasts to help your Spanish!

If your class has a lot of typing assignments, don’t waste time copypasting the accents. Here’s a website which will help you work out how to use keyboard shortcuts or other programs on your operating system.

Practice speaking! Even if you can do everything else Spanish-related, speaking’s often the most difficult part. Try and practice with a native speaker if you can, or someone more experienced!

Learn about the culture, but not just Spanish culture. Much of South America also speaks Spanish, and it’s just as important to learn about Peru or Chile.

Enjoy Spanish! It really is a lovely language, and just enjoying learning about the rich culture and fascinating language will help your study time fly past.

[teded]

When we talk about ‘English’, we often think of it as a single language. But English has evolved over many generations, making the story of the roots of the English language a complex one.

Just as French, Spanish, and other romance languages descended from Latin, English, Swedish, German and many other languages descended from their own common ancestor, Proto-Germanic, spoken around 500 B.C.E. Because this historical language was never written down, we can only reconstruct it by comparing its descendants. 

Proto-Germanic can be traced to Proto-Indo-European, spoken about 6000 years ago in modern day Ukraine and Russia. This is the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European family, which includes nearly all languages historically spoken in Europe, as well as large parts of Southern and Western Asia.

From the TED-Ed Lesson Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern

Animation by Patrick Smith

[darksilenceinsuburbia]

Catarina Sobral

Tempo

2013

[free-parking-blog]

Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent, 1969, rubber stamp on four sheets of paper

[theargot]

Comment: If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different

By Larry Taylor, Northumbria University, Newcastle "By six to ten months children have already learned to be sensitive to the basic sounds, known as phonemes, that matter in their native language. Yet different languages differ profoundly in the sounds that are important for communication.Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language in which the same basic sounds can refer to vastly different things based on the tone with which it is spoken. In a non-tonal language such as English, tone might convey emotional information about the speaker, but indicates nothing about the meaning of the word that is spoken.Now a group of Chinese researchers, led by Jianqiao Ge at Peking University, Beijing, has found that these differences between Mandarin Chinese and English change the way the brain’s networks work.The researchers took advantage of the basic differences between Mandarin Chinese and English to investigate the differences between the language networks of native speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages. Thirty native Chinese speakers were matched on age, gender, and handedness (they were all right-handed) with a sample of native English speakers. All participants listened to intelligible and unintelligible speech and were asked to judge the gender of the speaker.

Both groups of speakers showed activation of the brain’s classic go-to areas for speech – including Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas – on the left side of the brain. But two important differences emerged. The first difference was the operation of the brain networks shared by English and Chinese speakers. English speakers showed stronger connectivity leading from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s area. This increased connectivity was attributed to English relying more heavily on phonological information, or sounds rather than tones. Meanwhile, Chinese speakers had stronger connections leading from an area of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus – which has been identified as a “semantic hub” critical in supporting language – to both Broca’s and Wernicke’s area. This increased connectivity is attributed to the enhanced mapping of sound and meaning going on in people who speak tonal languages.The second difference showed activation in an area of the brain’s right hemisphere, but only among the Chinese speakers. This brain area, the right superior temporal pole, has been implicated in Chinese tones before but – perhaps more importantly – has until now been considered completely separate from the classic language network in the left hemisphere.The findings emphasise the importance of developing a bilateral network between the two brain hemispheres to speak and understand languages, particularly for tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese.

Provocative though the results might be, they raise questions for future research. Tone matters in English, just not to the same extent as in Chinese. For example, think of how your delivery might change the meaning of the question “Where have you been?” to convey suspicion, surprise, curiosity, or jealousy. Language might be among our most important windows to human thought, but research has barely scratched the surface of this complex and curiously unique human ability."

[mapsontheweb]

Evolution of the most popular First Names in France along the years - boys (top) and girls (bottom).

More name maps >>

[theparisreview]

Our definite article is endangered. Linguists have crunched the numbers, and over the course of the twentieth century, our use of the plummeted. If you treasure the the as I do, join the campaign to employ the the as often as the circumstances allow. (We started by putting it in the title of our magazine.)

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

[theargot]

'I'll kill you/buy you dinner' and other Arabic gaffes - Opinion

Speaking one dialect of Arabic to an interlocutor of another background can get you into all sorts of trouble. Whether these dialects should even be considered one language is not only a question of linguistics, but of history and politics too.

"As any frustrated foreign learner of Arabic can tell you, speaking the classical language can make you sound like you've stepped out of a TV period drama about, say, Saladin, or give people the impression that you're a newscaster - in other words, it's just not natural.

But when it comes to the dozens of Arabic dialects, some would surely qualify as a foreign language. If the definition of a language is that its speakers can understand each other, then Arabic fails this test, since some of its dialects are mutually unintelligible."

[irisharchaeology]

From a 9th century Irish manuscript, the phrase ‘massive hangover’ (Latheirt) written in the ancient Irish text Ogham. The monk must have been having a very rough day…..

Source 

[dipthatpen-blog]

Another three pages of progress from The History of You, an infographic. 

[allthingslinguistic]

“One of the things that linguists have noticed is that if you want to combine two things with “and”, they have to be the same part of speech: two nouns, two verbs, etc. So it’s fine to say: Wash the dishes and sweep the floor. (2 verbs+objects) Wash the dishes and the floor. (2 nouns) Clean and press these pants. (2 verbs, same object) But when it comes to fuck, things get, well, fucked up: *Wash the dishes and fuck you. *Fuck you and sweep the floor. *Describe and fuck communism. (Remember, this was written in the sixties.)”

—

A Linguist Explains the Syntax of “Fuck”

I’m on The Toast talking about the classic article “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject" and several further investigations into the syntax of "fuck" and other swears.