Phoneme Synthesis is a nifty little website that converts International Phonetic Alphabet notation to synthesized speech.Â
It only works for IPA as found in English so far, but it still seems like a very handy tool for checking your IPA transcriptions, making guides for pronouncing words, and more.Â
I tested âall things linguisticâ with the transcription /Él θɪĹz lÉŞĹgwÉŞstÉŞk/ and it produced the audio you can hear above. Robotic but accurate!Â
What a fabulous resource for students and researchers! I can imagine this being a great tool for piloting experiments with phonetic manipulations (like for toy grammars)!
Babies are as primed to learn a visual language as they are a spoken one. Thatâs the conclusion of research presented here today at the annual meeting of AAAS, which publishes Science.
Parents and scientists know babies are learning sponges that can pick up any language theyâre born into. But not as much is known about whether that includes visual language. To find out if infants are sensitive to visual language, Rain Bosworth, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, tracked 6-month-oldsâ and 1-year-oldsâ eye movements as they watched a video of a woman performing self-grooming gestures, such as tucking her hair behind her ear, and signing. The infants watched the signs 20% more than the 1-year-old children did.
That means babies can distinguish between whatâs language and whatâs not, even when itâs not spoken, but 1-year-olds canât. Thatâs consistent with what researchers know about how babies learn spoken language. Six-month-olds home in on their native language and lose sensitivity to languages theyâre not exposed to, but by 12 months old thatâs more or less gone, Bosworth says.
The researchers also watched babiesâ gazes as they observed a signer âfingerspelling,â spelling out words with individually signed letters. The signer executed the fingerspelling cleanly or sloppily. Again, researchers found the 6-month-old babies, who had never seen sign language before, favored the well-formed letters, whereas the 12-month-olds did not show a preference.
Together that means thereâs a critical developmental window for picking up even nonverbal languages. As 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, they are at risk for developmental delays because they need that language exposure early on, the scientists say.
âBabies can spot language, even when itâs not spokenâ in Science. The original presentation, âEyetracking Reveals That Infants Know Whatâs Language and Whatâs Notâ by Deaf scientist Rain Bosworth.
(via allthingslinguistic)
The First Conference on PokĂŠmonastics is to be held at Keio University from May 26 (Sat) to 27 (Sun)! Recent studies (âPokeĚmonasticsâ) have identified sound symbolic relationships in Japanese PokeĚmon names (Kawahara et al, to appear; Kawahara & Kumagai to appear). More specifically, both mora counts and number of voiced obstruents in their name seemâŚ
I just thought you all needed to know that there is a whole conference about the linguistics of PokĂŠmon names, aka PokĂŠmonastics, happening next spring in Tokyo.Â
The First Conference on PokĂŠmonastics is to be held at Keio University from May 26 (Sat) to 27 (Sun)!
Recent studies (âPokeĚmonasticsâ) have identified sound symbolic relationships in Japanese PokeĚmon names (Kawahara et al, to appear; Kawahara & Kumagai to appear). More specifically, both mora counts and number of voiced obstruents in their name seem to, albeit stochastically, affect PokeĚmon charactersâ size, weight, and strength parameters. Vowel quality in initial syllables seems to have a tangible effect as well.
A natural question that arises is whether these sorts of sound symbolic patterns hold in Pokemon names in other languages. Another open question is whether there are other types of sound symbolic patterns.
We invite researchers addressing these questions in English, Chinese and Russian. Our hope is that based on cross-linguistic PokeĚmonastic research we can explore important questions about sound-meaning relationship in natural languages, such as language-specificity and universality of sound symbolism.
Looking for gift ideas for a linguistics major, linguistics grad student, or linguistics professor in your life? Are you a linguist and want to help your friends and family with linguistic gift suggestions for you? Here are some ideas!Â
From top to bottom, left to right, the items in the pictures above are:Â
IPA scarf (also available in red and olive)
NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT mug (also available as a tote bag, zippered pouch, two notebooks, and t-shirt (classic, fitted, and relaxed cuts).Â
i [t-shirt] recursion t-shirt (available in multiple colours)
Talk to me, Iâm in a critical period baby onesie (another cute onesie in a similar theme is: help, Iâm losing phonemes as you speak!)
Ainât no party like a fricative party, cause a fricative party donât stop sticker (other linguistics stickers also available)
Wug stickers, 10 pack (also as a notebook and notepaper)
Always Ask Your Local Linguist poster (other posters also available)Â
Other gift ideas, not pictured:Â
These vocal tract shoes
Make your own schwa cookie cutter with these 3D printer instructionsÂ
Get someone a gift subscription (and bonus episodes or other swag) to their favourite linguistics podcast, such as Lingthusiasm, History of English, the Allusionist, or Talk the Talk. Â
Other linguistics merch lists and gift guides:Â
A very long list of pop linguistics books and lingfic
A very long list of linguistics movies, documentaries, and TV show episodes
2015 Linguistics Merch list (including schwa earrings, which I now own)Â
2016 Linguistics Gift Guide (including The Ling Spaceâs ugly linguistics holiday sweater/cushion, which continues to be great)Â
A bumper crop of linguist Halloween costumes this year!Â
Christine Schreyer and Robyn Giffen as a Ling-witch-tic anthropologist and âcool like schwaâ.Â
Jessi Grieser as the pin-pen merger (Iâve now also heard of a previous yearâs group costume consisting of merry, Mary, and marry!)Â
A group costume of the North Carolina State linguistics department dressed up as all of the Wells Lexical Sets, and arranged in a trapezoid. The corners are (polar) FLEECE, (mouse) TRAP, PALM (tree), and GOOSE. (Note Walt Wolfram near the centre as the PRICE diphthong, and see the twitter thread for individual photos of each costume and several mergers!)
Plus a few bonus sketches of schwa trying to dress up for Halloween.Â
See also the linguistics Halloween costumes from previous years.Â
Funny story: I didnât meant to post that yet⌠whoops. Hadnât had a chance to spell check or read through for clarity! I wonât delete it, but I am going to edit it (in case you want to reblog the fixed version instead)
This Meowth appears to be able to converse with the trainer
Meowth* says that it is in fact only saying its name, thus behaving as all other PokĂŠmon
*thus it is not actually a âMeowthâ but a species of a name that consists of every utterance it ever said or will say
If its linguistic behavior is indistinguishable from a humanâs linguistic behavior, who is to say that humans arenât also only saying their species name over the course of their lifetime?
One of the reasons this is brilliant is because âinfinite utterances with finite resourcesâ is a key tenet of human language. We (humans) can respond to unexpected situations with novel, unexpected, and unique utterances. In other words, how could every single utterance be pre-programmed into us, when (at our birth), there are words that donât yet exist that we will use in our lifetime? Concepts we canât imagine now? Things that donât exist yet?
(remember this? who could have predicted this headline when you were born?)
For instance, PokĂŠmon: PokĂŠmon was released in 1996. If you were born before then, there would have to be a remarkable coincidence in genetics and biology for your pre-programmed linguistic behavior to include that word (as so many other people also, coincidentally, had that word programmed into them).
This isnât logical.
Unless, the universe itself is pre-programmed. Freaking out yet?
Donât worry, quantum physics suggests that this canât be the case (or at least is highly implausible). The universe is too unpredictable to be pre-programmed. So what does that leave us with?
If something can produce linguistic behavior (i.e., utterances) that are indistinguishably similar to humansâ linguistic behaviors, this means that it can (seemingly) respond appropriately to otherwise unexpected circumstances. After all, the endangered ferrets can be discussed, as can PokĂŠmon, as can whatever else is going on in the news. If the universe is too unpredictable to be preprogrammed, then utterances canât be preprogrammed in our genetic code or in our brains. Unless weâre all just very lucky all the timeâŚ?
Anyway, this is a great demonstration of how a thought experiment can help you test hypotheses about language. Itâs not 100% conclusive, but itâs a good way to start thinking about how one might test a hypothesis, or what one would need to find in order to support or disprove a hypothesis.
This is fantastic! Hereâs a pre-print PDF version you can read for free.
Synesthesia is not well understood, but there are more and more studies showing there can be systematic properties of cross-sense linking. Mostly, people study how colors are associated with graphemes (like letters and numbers, or other shapes that are used for writing) because itâs one of the easiest types of synesthesia to study. But, until recently, synesthesia associated with non-Latinate writing systems was all but unstudied! This is cutting edge!
One reason this type of work is more than just âcoolâ is that it can give us a unique view into how color perception and orthographic symbol perception are organized in the mind.
One answer might come from considering again the relationship between colour perception and physical size. Although both radicals are smaller within compounds than in isolation (see above), the right-side radical takes up comparably more space within the compound than the left (cf. ć¨ + 台 = 捝). In other words, where we find luminance is linked to the right-most radical, it may instead be linked to whichever radical is comparatively the largest. Psychophysical studies of colour perception show that luminance levels may be more detectable in objects that are larger in size (Dixon, Shapiro, & Lu, 2012; Osaka, 1977). It may therefore be that the comparably larger right radical enters the compound with its own levels of luminance being more detectable than the left radical, and this is why the compound tends to assume a closer level of luminance to the right- rather than left-hand radical.Â
Radicals are components of the character that are smaller and often derived from full-sized characters of similar shapes. They can contribute specific meanings or sometimes even sounds to their main character. Luminance is a combination of hue and saturation. So, it seems that the larger component of the character tends to have more distinct luminance for synesthetes, which goes along with what we know about luminance in the external world, too. Somehow, then, the synesthetic association is not completely arbitrary, but has some properties that are found in nature outside of the mind!
It has come to my attention that colourful vocal tract shoes are a real thing that exist. I have no idea whoâs made them and why theyâre only marketing to speech pathologists, but here they are so you can see them for yourself.Â
I think my favorite part is how the first three are totally comprehensible to a modern reader, and then the fourth one is just âWait, what?â You can practically see where William the Conqueror came crashing into linguistic history like the Kool-Aid Man, hollering about French grammar and the letter Q.
Predicting what language will look like in the future is so difficult because so much of language change has to do with minuscule, hardly noticeable variation. Except sometimes, a massive change sweeps across the population (see, for example: William the Conquerer and his invasion of England). These big events are impossible to predict (not that the small events are more likely to predict).
That said, I am in love with @denchgangâs humorous modern (British? MLE? Slang?) rendition. Can you imagine how this sort of linguistic register might sound in 100 or 200 years? While I donât expect it will sound formal, per se, it would likely sound very antiquated, like how slang from the late 1800s/early 1900s sounds to our ears.
Speculation about the future is just that: speculation. But we can also use what we know about historic changes to anticipate some of the changes that could happen in the future. For instance, we know vowels can shift (and are shifting). Some consonants change, get lost, or are created. Tone comes and goes. Slang and vocabulary is invented and falls out of favor. All that said, we still canât truly predict where itâs going next.
Iâm rewatching The West Wing right now, because who doesn't love fantasy escapism? In any case, in the first episode there is an excellent moment where Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) and Laurie (Lisa Edelstein) are talking about a message Sam got on his pager:
Laurie: "Tell your friend POTUS he's got a funny name, and he should learn how to ride a bicycle."
Sam: "I would, but he's not my friend, he's my boss. And it's not his name, it's his title."
Laurie: "POTUS?"
Sam: "President of the United States."
The beat at the end is pretty potent, but only if you don't already know what POTUS means. This episode aired on September 22, 1999, so apparently the term 'POTUS' was sufficiently unknown then that it would be believable that Laurie, a law student (and part-time bartender and escort) in Washington DC, wouldn't be familiar with it.
The term POTUS was coined in 1879, so it's hardly new. But, it seems that it wasn't used outside of the behind-the-scenes work done by journalists (along with 'SCOTUS' â Supreme Court of the United States), and may have even been abandoned for a while after the technology changed in the 1940s. 'FLOTUS' for the First Lady was coined in 1983, but only became commonplace around 2012âŚ
Here's a rough distribution of when FLOTUS is used, according to the GloWbE corpus (Corpus of Global Web-based English: http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/):
You can see that the only types of writing that use FLOTUS with any frequency are magazines and newspapers, which suggest that this term is only really used in a very specific genre. I'd have to guess political journalism. Also notably, almost all of the instances are from 2010-2015, while Michelle Obama was the First Lady. Personally, I don't ever recall any other First Lady being called FLOTUS, so this is unsurprising to me, but it's nice to have independent confirmation.
SCOTUS has a very different distribution in time. Turns out that most instances of 'SCOTUS' are in academic texts. I would have to speculate that popular writing (like magazines, blogs, fiction, newspapers) doesn't really talk much about the Supreme Court very often. Maybe only in times when a SCOTUS nomination is relevant?
Now, on to POTUS.Â
According to the GloWbE search (which isn't very fine-grained), POTUS use peaked in 2000-2004 (Dubyaâs first term). It's much more frequent overall, and it occurs in all the genres listed. Curiously, POTUS is also most common in the fiction genre. Looking to Google ngrams, which measures frequency a word in print sources that are catalogued by Google Books, there's a more fine-grained pattern we can interpret. Looking only at the past three decades, there's a major increase in the use of POTUS in print during the 1990s.
Based on the line from The West Wing, then, it could make sense that Laurie wouldn't necessarily recognize what POTUS meant right away. Even as something increases in writing, it doesn't mean that everyone reads everything that's being written. Particularly, The West Wing is a TV show, the audience in 1999 (who, by and large, were not policy wonks, politics nerds, or residents of DC), so they would have had even less exposure to the acronym.
Mystery solved?
Not entirely â I'd love to have found a more detailed way to check usage by year, but I do think it gives us a rough timeline of when POTUS became commonplace enough to use casually. If any of you have the chops and the time, I'd expect an analysis of tweets since Twitter started in 2006 to give us an interesting perspective. Although I don't have any evidence, I wouldn't be surprised if the use of Twitter by politicians (for instance, @POTUS and @FLOTUS) was a major catalyst in the increase and spread of the use of these terms.
New clues to an old mystery about Inca writing aren't etched in stone. They're tied in knots.
A discovery made in a remote mountain village high in the Peruvian Andes suggests that the ancient Inca used accounting devices made of knotted, colored strings for more than accounting.
The devices, called khipus (pronounced kee-poos), used combinations of knots to represent numbers and were used to inventory stores of corn, beans, and other provisions. Spanish accounts from colonial times claim that Inca khipus also encoded history, biographies, and letters, but researchers have yet to decipher any non-numerical meaning in the chords and knots.
Now a pair of khipus protected by Andean elders since colonial times may offer fresh clues for understanding how more elaborate versions of the devices could have stored and relayed information.
Anthropologist Sabine Hyland studies a khipu board, a colonial-era invention that incorporated earlier Inca technology.
âWhat we found is a series of complex color combinations between the chords,â says Sabine Hyland, professor of anthropology at St. Andrews University in Scotland and a National Geographic Explorer. âThe chords have 14 different colors that allow for 95 unique chord patterns. That number is within the range of symbols in logosyllabic writing systems.â
Hyland theorizes that specific combinations of colored strings and knots may have represented syllables or words. Her analysis of the khipus appears in the journal Current Anthropology.
SECRET MESSAGES
Hyland made her discovery in the Andean village of San Juan de Collata when village elders invited her to study two khipus the community has carefully preserved for generations. Village leaders said the khipus were ânarrative epistles about warfare created by local chiefs,â Hyland reports.
The khipus were stored in a wooden box that until recently was kept secret from outsiders. In addition to the khipus, the box contained dozens of letters dating to the 17th and 18th centuries. Most of the documents are official correspondence between village leaders and the Spanish colonial government concerning land rights.
Spanish chroniclers noted that Inca runners carried khipus as letters, and evidence suggests that the Inca composed khipu letters to ensure secrecy during rebellions against the Spanish, according to Hyland.
A khipu from the Andean village of San Juan de Collata may contain information about the villageâs history.
âThe Collata khipus are the first khipus ever reliably identified as narrative epistles by the descendants of their creators,â Hyland writes in her analysis. She notes that they are larger and more complex than typical accounting versions, and unlike most khipus, which were made of cotton, the Collata khipus were made from the hair and fibers of Andean animals, including vicuna, alpaca, guanaco, llama, deer, and the rodent vizcacha.
Animal fibers accept and retain dyes better than cotton, and so they provided a more suitable medium for khipus that used color as well as knots to store and convey information.
In fact several variablesâincluding color, fiber type, even the direction of the chordsâ weave or plyâencode information, villagers told Hyland, so that reading the khipus requires touch as well as sight.
Hyland cites a Spanish chronicler who claimed that khupus made from animal fiber âexhibited a diversity of vivid colors and could record historical narratives with the same ease as European books.â
THE BIG QUESTION
The Collata khipus are believed to date from the mid-18th century, more than 200 years after Spanish colonizers first arrived in 1532. This raises the question whether they are a relatively recent innovation, spurred on by contact with alphabetic writing, or whether they bear a close similarity to earlier narrative khipus.
âThese findings are historically very interesting, but time is a big problem,â says Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton. âWhether or not we can take these findings and project them into the past, that remains the big question.â
A few years ago, Urton and Peruvian archaeologist Alejandro Chudiscovered a trove of khipus in what may have been a khipu workshop or possibly a repository of Inca records.
[VIDEO AT NAT GEO WEBSITE]
Deciphering patterns hidden within the devices may eventually become the work of computers, Urton says. He and his Harvard colleagues maintain a digital repository called the Khipu Database that categorizes images, descriptions, and comparisons of more than 500 of the artifacts.
The Inca at their height may have made thousands of khipus, perhaps even hundreds of thousands. But archaeologists suspect that natural deterioration and European colonizers destroyed most of the devices. Fewer than 1,000 are known to exist today.
Hyland plans to return to Peru in July to resume her research. Last summer, on her last day of fieldwork, she met an elderly woman who said she remembered using khipus as a young girl. But before Hyland could ask more questions, the woman darted away to tend to her livestock.
Hylandâs goal is not only to solve a historical mystery, she says, but also to bring to light the âincredible intellectual accomplishments of Native American people.â
So far, one of the most notable linguistics things about living in England (besides the difference in accents and brands and driving conventions), is the term for an egress.
In the United States, the term is universally EXIT, whereas in the UK (or at least in England) it seems to be predominantly WAY OUT. It's certainly descriptive and easy to interpret, but it's got three extra characters, making the signs much longer than in the US. Why? Whence the difference?
I did a quick Google search and found no convincing answers, albeit a lot of opinions. Here are some:
1. "Exit" is Latin for 'he/she/it leaves', so using "way out" is better because it's English.
Counterpoint: Exit is now English, too. English adopts words from lots of languages, particularly Latin.
2. "Exit" is a verb, and "way out" is a noun, which points to a concrete thing.
Counterpoint: Exit is also noun, way out is a noun+preposition phrase. Even if exit were only a verb, it would be an instruction for how to leave the area, which could potentially be more instructive than just pointing to the actual door. Maybe?
3. "Exit" is an uncommon word and learners of English might get confused and not understand it. "Way out" is much easier for learners of English to interpret.
Counterpoint: People traveling to a country that doesnât speak their language might get the chance to learn a few helpful words, in which case 'exit' might be among them.
Counter-counterpoint: If the country has only used 'way out', then there would be no impetus to learn 'exit' so learners might be unfamiliar with it, thus making it less helpful to *change* way out to exit.
4. "Way out" is what has always been used since the opening of the Tube in London. If it's always been done that way, why do it any other way (even if other English-speaking countries do?).
Counterpoint: No counterpoint. This seems the most likely reason. Many things I've noticed here that are different from (or âdifferent toâ) what I'm used to are not due to differences in geographical location or proximity to continental Europe or anything like that. They're things that have always been done that way, so there's no reason to change them and confuse people. As an American, that's a new way of living for me, but as a twitter and tumblr user, I can very much appreciate things that don't change -- especially just for the sake of change!
But this leaves me with one last question: if [British] people have such strong feelings about not using the word âexitâ for an egress, why is âBrexitâ such a successful word?
The Quest for Gender-Neutrality (in personal names)
photo source
The Linguistic Society of America has guidelines for inclusive language, including what one might consider when writing example sentences:
âThe use of âgender-neutralâ names such as Chris, Dana, Kim, Lee, and Pat can help avoid stereotyping either males or females.â
But how neutral are these names, really? It probably depends, and it probably changes over time. Meredith used to be âa boyâs nameâ, but I donât know of any men named Meredith these days, and I know a lot of women named Meredith.
To choose the most gender-neutral name, one has to know what names are out there, when they were being used, and how their use is distributed. Truly, parents donât really know the gender of their child at birth (and letâs not even get into sex), but assignments are often made, and names are chosen and registered... and in this database, only âmaleâ and âfemaleâ categories were available.
From a list of baby names registered in England and Wales from 1996 to 2000, I was able to pull together the graph below (see the top picture for high-res). The x-axis (horizontal) is the number of male-designated babies who were registered, and the y-axis (vertical) is the number of female-designated babies who were registered. The black diagonal line (x=y) shows where the number of female and male babies are equal. So, if 100 female babies were given the name âLeeâ and 100 male babies were given the name âLeeâ during this time frame, the name âLeeâ would appear directly over the black line. The color of the name indicates how many total babies (of any designation) were given the name.
Jordan is by far the most common name over all, although Ashleigh and Courtney were given to more female-designated babies (though, note that Ashley is overlapping Tyler on the male-biased side). The names that are optimally the most âneutralâ and popular seem to by Morgan (about 1403 per year) and Taylor (909). Cody (174) and Devon (164) are also very neutral, but they are much rarer. Rio (114) and Mackenzie (122) are neutral as well, but they are super-rare because they arenât attested ever year. The less common a name is, the less likely someone is to have met people of any gender who have that name. If youâve only ever met a Jamie who is a girl, you might think itâs a girlâs name, even though itâs pretty far to the right in the âmale-biasedâ space.
So if you have to write an example sentence and you want to choose a name that doesnât evoke any particular gender, Iâd recommend choosing Taylor or Morgan, which are optimally balanced and common.
(At least, for people who are 16 to 21 years old living in England and Wales!)
This is a survey by Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic, based on an initial twitter poll https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/832681971075526656
I started asking people on twitter how they used the winky face emoticon or emoji, and found a surprising amount of disagreement about whether it indicates flirting, simply joking, both, or something else.Â
So I decided to make a survey with a couple extra questions to see if we can figure out what correlates with each meaning.Â
You can see other peopleâs responses as soon as you fill it out.
