#linguistics dissertation

[official-linguistics-post]

on reconstruction and historical linguistics

to follow up on today's reblog, i want to comment briefly on the apparent misapprehension that linguistic reconstruction is just guesswork with a fancy name, because that's not accurate!

reconstruction is based on specific, well-attested constraints of linguistic development. we know from centuries of investigation that languages tend to change in predictable ways. we also have a decent understanding of the complexities introduced by phenomena like language contact, which can result in borrowing on multiple structural levels. our methods are well established and borne out by evidence.

comparative reconstruction involves applying these known constraints ("rules") in reverse on a collected body of words in related descendant languages. when possible, we also incorporate historical written evidence, which often provides midpoint references for changes in progress. it is always recognized by historical linguists that reconstruction can be imperfect; we cannot know what information has been lost.

the results of reconstruction can be mixed, but i'll let campbell (2013:144) explain:

How Realistic are Reconstructed Proto-languages? The success of any given reconstruction depends on the material at hand to work with and the ability of the comparative linguist to figure out what happened in the history of the languages being compared. In cases where the daughter languages preserve clear evidence of what the parent language had, a reconstruction can be very successful, matching closely the actual spoken ancestral language from which the compared daughters descend. However, there are many cases in which all the daughters lose or merge formerly contrasting sounds or eliminate earlier alternations through analogy, or lose morphological categories due to changes of various sorts. We cannot recover things about the proto-language via the comparative method if the daughters simply do not preserve evidence of them. In cases where the evidence is severely limited or unclear, we often make mistakes. We make the best inferences we can based on the evidence available and on everything we know about the nature of human languages and linguistic change. We do the best we can with what we have to work with. Often the results are very good; sometimes they are less complete. In general, the longer in the past the proto-language split up, the more linguistic changes will have accumulated and the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct with full success. (emphasis mine)

or, to quote labov's (1982:20) pithier if less optimistic approach:

Historical linguistics may be characterized as the art of making the best use of bad data, in the sense that the fragments of the literary record that remain are the results of historical accidents beyond the control of the investigator.

in sum, historical linguists are very realistic about what we can achieve, but the confidence we do have is genuinely well earned, because linguistics is a scientific field and we treat our investigations with rigor.

---

Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Labov, William. 1982. "Building on Empirical Foundations." In Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Winifred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel, eds. Pp. 17-92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

[ultrvmonogamy]

doctoral dissertation on the potential n probable psychosociological ramifications of changing cunt to !cunt so that in speech one must perform an alveolar click at the start of each spoken instance

[awfullybigwardrobe44]

Was messaging a friend from church who moved away and crossed out the text in my message because I was trying to do the whole "this means I'm whispering" tone thing that crossing out text means

She messaged back like "Why is there a line through your message?" (fyi if you didn't know you can cross out text in messenger lol)

I had to (very ashamedly) reveal that it Means something in the way I communicate with my friends

But my dudes, is this not code switching? The linguistic concept? Especially the fact that I was embarrassed at having used the crossed-out-text tone indicator with a person who would not understand it?

Tagging @tzarina-alexandra because I thought of you haha

[latinthusiast]

who’s hotter?

one shirtless esc 2023 champ with a bowl cut

(photo cred https://www.facebook.com/CristinaGregoriPhotos)

or the morphology of his language

[estelle-speaks]

One of the main researchers in my favourite niche area of linguistics is doing a talk at my university this week!! Guys I’m so excited you don’t even understand

[ghostjelliess]

Mood and Modality in Hurrian

Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations | University of Chicago | Chicago, IL | March 2007

This dissertation is how I learned of the Hittite myth of the fat deer (which connects to the Bible via Deut 32:15 and scratched an itch I've had since Bible school)

The story goes some variation of this:

A deer is happy on a mountain, but the mountain kicks him off ("expels him"). Frantically, the deer finds a new, more welcoming mountain, where he grows happy, content, then fat and "quarrelsome." The deer begins to curse the new mountain, casually hoping Teššub might strike and fire burn it down. The mountain responds with a much more active command to ["let the hunters kill you and take your meat and the birds raid your fur for nests that are more valuable than you [bitch]."]

[proto-language]

writing a dissertation is so hard. like this all makes perfect sense in my head. why do i have to set it out in linear words for other people who are unable to simply perceive my vision.

[waitineedaname]

the fun thing about getting into an academic niche is that when you're doing research, the same names start popping up like recurring characters

[complementaryhalves]

when you find a paper on english and globalisation and it's by skutnabb-kangas & phillipson you just know you're in for a treat. absolute banger of an analysis, never a bad take

[ipswichtowns]

love it when you find papers that have exactly the information you need for your research :))

[escapismkidnappedme]

Anyways fuck MLA format Chicago style is so much better and I hate that MLA is taught as the 'only correct' format because it's largely inconsequential if you're writing an actual dissertation.

[jonquilandlace]

I just want to pop in to say: the first thing I was taught in my master's programme was how to read early modern handwriting. And we had to do it twice, technically! I'm not looking at my notes and my memory is a bit foggy so pardon me if I use the wrong words, but they had both an italic and a secretary hand. Now, italic is probably the style you recognize in name. But that said, you are going to hate me for what I'm about to reveal about how it looked (all images I'm about to use are straight off google images, sorry for mediocre sourcing):

Look me in the eye and tell me you could read this without having to stop to think about it. I mean, it's definitely in Latin (and russian I think?), so I don't blame you for not knowing what I means, but if you give it a chance, other than a few bits and pieces, you could parse some of the letters, at least. If I told you the "uncrossed-f" shape meant "s" (which it does), you can pretty clearly make out the phrase "platonem scripsere quod plotum dixit" in the first line, for instance.

This is an admittedly bit unfriendly of an example, but you see what I mean—it's clearly similar to how our handwriting is shaped today, but even then, it's tricky. I will admit I was surprised by italic hand—largely because, once we started learning it, I discovered a lot of the little "I write this letter 'wrong' but it feels better to me" things I've done since learning handwriting actually were common in italic hand, but that's neither here nor there for this commentary, just a fun fact about me.

Now secretary hand, on the other hand—

She is the It Girl of early modern handwriting. She is mean to read, fun to write, absolutely gorgeous on paper—and looks quite a bit like cursive.

Secretary hand died out in favor of italic by the end of the period, and you can admittedly kind of see why—the letter forms of some of these letters were far too similar for easy reading; people literally had to be trained to write in this handwriting style, where italic looked more like the printed text people tended to learn to read off of with the increasing popularity of the printing press, and—like modern manuscript—was quicker to write.

In other words: secretary hand is the equivalent of our modern cursive.

So why am I saying this all? Good question! I'm not 100% sure myself; just following a gut instinct! But I think there's two main points to be seen here:

First: sometimes ways of writing are devalued and die out. Sometimes it's a slow thing—like how the "uncrossed-f = s" I was talking about has just been straight up replaced by the normal "s" shape. Other times, it is institutional. There were no need for scribes with the printing press, so the scribal profession died out, and the secretary hand with it. There's no need for cursive with the computer, so cursive dies out. It's a tragedy, sure; a whole art form is lost in the pursuit of efficiency—but it's cyclical. It has happened before. It's probably going to happen again. On that note, however— Second: Even if it dies from common usage, and this is the important part: people will still figure out how to read them, and there will always be people who want to learn. The knowledge becomes more precious, more scarce, sure. There are still pieces of early modern literature no one has translated; none of my professors or peers know what it's supposed to say. But the physical media has outlived the mechanism itself, the people who wrote it! It still exists, and it can still be discovered again! On this note, I want to talk about something I don't have enough authority not to cite—the marui-ji handwriting of Japanese girls in the 1970s.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you've seen this picture before, actually. This has gone viral before, in a post about how that handwriting style got "so excessively cute that schools had to ban it" (that's not a direct quote but to that point).

But that's exactly the point I want to make here—handwriting trends will always change, and it will always be possible to have fun with your writing.

As Zui in the article linked above describes, this is "[a]n example of cute handwriting in 1985, documented by Yamane Kazuma. Note the heavily stylised characters and exaggerated rounding of some strokes, and the abnormal placement of the dakuten for the character で in the bottom-right corner."

Some link the advent of this writing style to the advent of mechanical pencils, allowing for thinner lines. Others (my own opinion among them) link it to Japan's "kawaii" movement, or the reclamation of "cute" culture by young girls seeking freedom from traditional patriarchal roles in the same way the West embraced punk culture. But the point remains: from a standard beginning point, an entire new paeleographical style was born.

So on the topic of cursive again, and coming back to my second point: change is inevitable, but it doesn't have to be permanent. It may die out now, sure, only to be rediscovered like secretary hand before it.

But just like art itself won't die, even if techniques change, art in handwriting won't be gone forever, either.

So keep a record, for the historians who want to read cursive. Tutorial the hell out of it, even. But even if cursive dies—keep having fun when you write. Make your handwriting your own, and just enjoy yourself. Losing access to one thing doesn't mean you can't make something else in its place. Also writing in secretary hand is fun, too, send tweet, okay byeeee

On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.

On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can't read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.

And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn't efficient enough for today's world to put up with.

Like... if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what's going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?

Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you're a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting

[avetruth]

Mei Guo. Sarı Uygur Türkçesinin ağızları. Doktora tezi (2017)

Mei Guo. Sarı Uygur Türkçesinin ağızları. Doktora tezi (2017) https://www.avetruthbooks.com/2023/09/mei-guo-sari-uygur-turkcesinin-agizlari-doktora-tezi-2017.html?feed_id=17375

[ghostjelliess]

I know it's a meme and it's funny or whatever, but the US-Americans are commentating the games for an audience watching it with them, while other American commentators are doing so for a variety of fans, including a large listening audience.

[big-urchin-energy]

[ID 1: tumblr comment by veerani which reads "i wish i could believe this was fake but i know [redacted] school you're at really is just Like That"

ID 2: tumblr comment by faerygardenparty which reads "I go to art school too and I once had someone try to convince me that Elmo and scooby doo are problematic so I fully understand what you're feeling here".

ID 3: inhaling seagull meme where the screaming image has the words "suicide", "sex", "kill", "rape" and "pedophile" around it in all caps. End ID]

we have GOT to kill tiktok/twitter self-censorship i just witnessed a grown adult say the word “smex” out loud to our professor