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One of my absolute favourite concepts Vedic Sanskrit has introduced me to is the comparison by negation – basically, instead of being introduced by a comparative preposition such as like or as, the compared noun (phrase) is simply negated.

For example, “She, like a wolf, hunted them all down,” is instead “She, not a wolf, hunted them all down” (but in the former meaning).

An example from Rigveda: the Hymn to the Goddess of Night (RV X.127 Rā́trī), verse 4, lines 2 and 3:

नि ते यामन्नविक्ष्महि । वृक्षे न वसतिँ वयः ॥

ní te yā́mann_ávikṣmahi    down into [our] homes we retired, vr̥kṣé ná vasatím̐ váyaḥ     not birds to [their] nests on trees

(→supply like for not for an accurate translation)

The principle being that the comparison is invoked by the mere presence of the noun (phrase) the original thing is compared to, while the negation reinforces the mere comparison as opposed to it being actually real, thus “She, not [literally, but figuratively] a wolf, hunted them all down.”

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why are bats called bats?

because they look like flying mice [Danish: flagermus, German: Fledermaus, Luxembourgish: Fliedermaus, Swedish: fladdermus]

because they look like half mice and half owl [French: chauve-souris]

because they look like half mice and it’s not 100% clear what the other half is [Ladin: utschè-mezmieur, Catalan: rat-penat, Lombard: mezzarat]

because apparently they make a flap flap noise [English: bat]

because they’ve got badass leather wings [Gaelic: sciathàn leathair, Old Norse: leðrblaka]

because they look like cute nocturnal butterflies [Maltese: farflett il-lejl]

because they’re probably, like, blind mice [Serbo-croatian: sismis, Portugese: morcego, Spanish: murcíelago, Arabic: khaffash]

because they fly at night [Italian: pipistrello, Slovenian: netopir, Polish: nietoperz, Greek: nykterides, Farsi: shab parreh]

So bat literally means flapper. You’re welcome.

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If anyone wants to follow a twitter account that shitposts about linguistics in the style of dril, follow /dɹɪl/ at lingwintstics and you’ll be blessed with tweets like 

Anyways please follow lingwintstics

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China’s netizens are all in a twitter over the account of a carpenter who was commissioned to make a cinnabar red high-backed chair with the finials at the top to be “in the shape of dragons’ heads” (chéng lóngtóu 成龍頭).  Unfortunately, he misinterpreted the directions to mean “[in the shape of] Jackie Chan’s head” (“Chénglóng tóu 成龍頭”).

(via Language Log » Reanalysis, Jackie Chan edition)

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I was looking through some old posts on /r/conlangs and found this incredible quip from David J. Peterson on Optimality Theory:

They took a good observation and used it to power a whirling death machine of universal gobbledygook the Onceler would be proud of.

I’ve barely read anything in Optimality Theory and I have no opinions on it myself but I absolutely love that imagery/metaphor

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(Image caption: Vvive la différence. In this case the difference is the position of the lips when making the “oo” sound, as in goose, in English and in French. Credit: Masapollo et. al.)

Study reveals vision’s role in vowel perception

For all talkers, except perhaps the very best ventriloquists, the production of speech is accompanied by visible facial movements. Because speech is more than just sound, researchers set out to ascertain the exact visual information people seek when distinguishing vowel sounds.

“An important and highly debated issue in our field concerns what is it that we are attending to in speech  — what’s the object of perception?” said lead author Matthew Masapollo, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral scholar at Brown University and is a now at Boston University. “Another question that’s debated is whether speech processing is special and distinct from other kinds of auditory processing since it is not purely an acoustic signal.”

Resolving these questions would improve the scientific understanding of how we perceive speech, Masapollo said. That, in turn, could apply to the design of more intelligible online avatars and physical robots, and could even improve computer recognition of human speech and enhance communication devices for the hearing impaired.

While scads of studies have investigated which audible features of speech are important, Masapollo said, far fewer have looked at which visual components are essential, despite evidence from phenomena as intuitive as lip reading that the sights of speech matter, too.

Through a series of experiments at Brown and McGill University in Montreal reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Masapollo and colleagues found that when people perceive speech, they closely watch the form and motion of the lips. If either of those cues is missing, their ability to make subtle distinctions between vowel sounds suffers measurably.

“The findings demonstrate that adults are sensitive to the observable shape and movement patterns that occur when a person talks,” said Masapollo, who did the work as a researcher in the lab of senior author James Morgan, a Brown professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences.

Exploiting differences in speech perception

Earlier this year, Masapollo set the table for the new study when he and co-authors Linda Polka and Lucie Ménard showed in the journal Cognition that people exhibit the same “directional asymmetry” in visually perceiving vowels that they do when hearing vowels: They are better at distinguishing between two versions of the “oo” sound, as in the word “loose,” if the less extremely articulated version occurs first and then the more extreme version second. If the order is switched, they are much less likely to discriminate them — by sight or sound. While these directional effects may seem like a quirky instinct, they reflect a universal bias favoring vowels produced with extreme articulatory maneuvers. Current research is focused on uncovering what salient features or properties of extreme vowels give rise to these perceptual asymmetries.

It turns out that this asymmetry plays out between French and English, being manifest in the bilingual speech of many Canadians. When speaking French, their articulation of “oo” is produced with more visible lip protrusion and tongue positioning than when making the same vowel sound in English.

For the new study, Masapollo realized that this asymmetry in vowel production and perception provided a great opportunity to determine which visual features matter in distinguishing subtle speech differences. He devised and led five experiments to ferret out exactly what visual information was pertinent to this asymmetry.

In the first, with help from Brown graduate student and co-author Lauren Franklin, he employed eye-tracking technology to measure where Brown student volunteers looked when watching videos of a bilingual Canadian woman make “oo” sounds in both French and English. Definitively, people watched the mouth, far more, for instance than the eyes.

But what about the mouth mattered? To determine if motion, rather than simply a particular position, was important, the next experiment presented students with a still frame rather than video. In experiment two, volunteers at McGill tried to distinguish “oo” speech using just still images of the same speaker. Without the cue of motion, the results showed, the asymmetry of French-English or English-French ordering no longer occurred, suggesting that motion is a key component in this instinct of vowel perception.

In the next three experiments, the team continued to investigate which visual aspects of speech perception mattered among groups of Brown or McGill student volunteers. In experiment three, the subjects saw not a face, but an array of four dots in a diamond pattern that moved just like the speaker’s lips did. When the speaker pursed her lips to make the “oo,” the dots moved closer together, for example. Masapollo’s hypothesis was that position and motion might matter together, even if the face isn’t actually represented. In this experiment, people returned to showing the asymmetry suggesting that he was on the right track.

(Image caption: Many methods. Researchers employed many visual representations of lip motion to see which essential features really mattered. Credit: Masapollo et. al.)

Experiment four was exactly the same but the dot pattern was rotated 45 degrees clockwise, showing more of a square than a diamond. Here the asymmetry didn’t occur, suggesting that the orientation of the dots to represent a speech-making mouth matter. In experiment five, the motion was represented by a sideways figure eight that would move in a manner analogous to the speaker’s lips. There, too, without even an essential form of a mouth, people didn’t show their instinctual asymmetry of vowel perception. Mere motion, without the form and position of a mouth, was not enough.

“Overall, the picture that emerges is that perceptual asymmetries appear to be elicited by optical stimuli that depict both lip motion and configural information,” the authors wrote.

To Masapollo, the results demonstrate that vision makes specific contributions to perceiving speech.

“The findings of the present research suggest that the information we are attending to in speech is multimodal, and perhaps gestural, in nature,” Masapollo said. “Our perceptual system appears to treat auditory and visual speech information similarly.”

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Why in the world are the diacritics available on all the default Samsung keyboards so bad

I mean if i literally only want to type modern European languages then sure they're fine but how are people supposed to type out anything else

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The World Phonotactics Database is a searchable database containing information about phonotacticrestrictions of languages of the world. Using it, you can compare and contrast phonotactic patterns in different languages, group languages by features, investigate the frequencies of different settings for different features, and view the areal distribution of such patterns through the use of the interactive map.

The database includes phonotactic data on over 2000 languages, and segmental data for an additional 1700. We aim to continue to improve our coverage. The sample has not been assembled with regard to maintaining a balance of families and regions, but we allow the option of restricting the sample by selecting a parameter designed to balance the numbers of individual languages to achieve a statistically representative dataset on any given search.

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Some general linguistics resources

The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online: Provides expert-based information on 130 grammatical and lexical features of 76 pidgin and creole languages from around the world.

Ethnologue: This site has language maps for every single known language. Every one. You can search by language name, family or country.

Glottopedia: The free encyclopaedia of linguistics

IPA Palette: A Unicode input method for Mac. It allows users of OS X 10.5 and later to insert IPA symbols in any Unicode-enabled text field or editor.

Lexicity: The first and only comprehensive index for ancient language resources.

OLAC Language Resource Catalog: This catalog provides access to a wealth of information about thousands of language, including details of text collection, audio recordings, dictionaries, and software.

The Language Index: This YouTube channel exhibits the languages of the world. It is connected with the two platforms developed by the Virtual Linguistics Campus team of Marburg University, Germany: The Virtual Linguistics Campus and the Language Index.

The Linguistics List: Dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world.

Type IPA Phonetic Symbols: This link is for English, but the site has IPA keyboards for a bunch of other languages.

The Virtual Linguistics Campus: This YouTube channel hosts hundreds of educational videos that are interconnected with the E-Learning units on the Virtual Linguistics Campus, the world’s largest E-learning platform for linguistics hosted by Marburg University, Germany, but can also be used as stand-alone instructional videos.

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Greenlandic-Skolt Saami phrase list

Hopefully all you Greenlanders/Nigerians found my previous Kalaallisut (Greenlandic)-Yorùbá phrase list useful, although with a combined total of 30 million speakers it’s probably a bit mainstream, so I thought I’d offer up a short Greenlandic-Skolt Saami phrase list to commemorate another recent trip I took.  Combined speakers of both languages are about 57,500 (sadly in a ratio of about 115:1), but unlike the last list there are probably a few more things culturally in common between these groups in terms of lifestyle, given their common Northern latitudes.

Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) - Skolt Saami (Nuõrttsäämas) phrase list

Ippernaq ataaseq qasulerpoq.      Õhtt čuõškk levvji. 

Sivisuumik angalavoq.   Mäˊtǩǩ leäi kuˊǩǩ.

Arsarnerit tuttut nerisimavaat.     Kuuskõõzz leˊjje ääld poorrâm. 

Aputeqaqaaq.      Jõnn muõtt lij.

Uinngiarneq inerteqqutaavoq.    Njorggam jiâ sååvaž sij.

—

The sentences are:

A. The journey was long.

B. There is a lot of snow.

C.  One mosquito grew weary.

D. They do not allow whistling.*

(* I should imagine.) 

E. The Northern Lights had eaten the reindeer.

—

All very useful phrases! But they are not in the same order as the Greenlandic - Skolt Saami phrase list above. A special mention to anyone who can solve the challenge and put A-E in the right order!

Note also that the second language on the border sign is Skolt Saami, and it is also the third language on the map. The second language on the map is probably Inari Sami (Anarâš) - I believe Inari Sami has a double “á” but North Sami does not, but would probably need someone else to confirm this.  

(Skolt Saami phrases taken from: A Grammar of Skolt Saami, Feist, T. (2010).    It’s a recommended read!)

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Distribution of Letters in English in relation to their place in the word.

Graphing the distribution of English letters towards the beginning, middle or end of words. From the blog prooffreader. 2014.05.27

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Harrisburg Telegraph, Pennsylvania, March 29, 1881

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Linguistic approaches to language learning: link roundup

I suppose it’s okay to admit after three years of linguistics blogging that I actually am one of those linguists who speaks quite a few languages, and I’ve studied even more at various levels. Here are some of my favourite posts about language learning:

Tips for learning another language

7 ways to fake-pronounce any foreign language

How to learn vocabulary in 12 steps (using science!)

Up-goer five, Taboo and language learning

How to learn a third language (while keeping your second one)

12 ways to stop freezing up when you try to speak a second language

Someone trying to switch into English on you is like them trying to pick up the cheque

How second language acquisition works

Why can’t adults learn languages like children? (video with Tom Scott)

Finding “lost” languages in the brain

Learning languages without conscious effort

How to teach old ears new tricks

Speaking to babies, pets, and language learners

How learning a new language improves tolerance

First lesson in modern versus classical languages

Learning languages linguistically (Lingthusiasm podcast episode)

Learning Indigenous languages

Should linguists or non-Aboriginal people learn Aboriginal languages?

Non-Indigenous people learning Australian Indigenous languages

Benefits of Indigenous language learning

Roadblocks to effective Indigenous language development

OLA - Oral Language Acquisition

CoLang and Breath of Life

Learning less popular and minority languages when resources are hard to find

How to teach when the teacher isn’t fluent

How to make learning materials for conversation and document at the same time

Sk̲wx̱wú7mesh language revitalization house

Europe has indigenous minority languages as well 

Languages and linguistics

Why linguists get annoyed when you ask how many languages they speak

Will learning a second language help me learn linguistics?

Will learning linguistics help with learning a second language?

Using Gricean maxims to deflect the “how many languages do you know?” question in a way that leads to a better conversation

Bonus fun links: Now You’re Just A Language That I Used To Know (parody of that Gotye song) and Language Gothic.

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i just really liked this jug okay

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I would have liked a Translator Breakdown episode where it turns out some of the characters do know one another’s language but only at like a “two years in highschool” level. O'Brien: Tá an ríomhaire briste. Tá fadhbanna againn.

Sisko: The WARP CORE is *points to his own face, frowning* ??

Kira: Fuck! Fuck computer, fuck! *hand gestures* Computer is fuck!

Dax: “Com… computer…” *rubs temples* Ordinateur? Parlez plus lentement s'il vous plaît…. 

Worf: Я раздражен….