294 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. Office Organisation, of which the work here discussed forms part, 2has been considerably modified within recent years, and Avhatis called the " card system " has now come very much into vogue.

      The nebulous, but colloquial "card system" was a common, but now lost moniker for the use of a card index in business settings in the early 1900s.

    1. Read [[Martha S. Jones]] in Sleuthing the Card Catalog

    2. The Library of Congress discontinued the use of “Negroes” as a subject heading in 1976.
    3. I fingered my way through where I thought I’d find entries: African American, Afro-American, Black. Nothing there. I had to then brainstorm like it was 1999, or was it 1989, 1979, or even earlier, to discover the right term. As far back as 1984, the Library of Congress, whose subject headings most research libraries in the United States utilize, admitted that it was “frustrating” to search for Black people in its catalog because two terms were simultaneously in use: “Afro-Americans” and “Blacks.”1 Neither term made it into the old Peabody Library catalog, so perhaps it and the terminology it reflected dated from an even earlier time.

      Research on keywords and their shifting meanings over time can make things difficult for the novice researcher. This example from Martha S. Jones certainly highlights this perspective even in under a century of semantic shift.

  2. Feb 2024
    1. The random selection of words by volunteers often resulted in themchoosing the same words with similar dates, and produced gaps in thequotation paragraphs, which Murray and his assistants had to fill by their ownmanual searching. This must have been like trying to find a needle in ahaystack. It was remarkable how successful Murray’s small team was at fillingthose gaps and finding earliest or latest quotations. Murray told thePhilological Society that this manual trawling for words had to be done forthe majority of words: ‘For more than five-sixths of the words we have tosearch out and find additional quotations in order to complete their historyand illustrate the senses; for every word we have to make a general search todiscover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses,exist.’
    2. Readers were asked to choose words they considered ‘rare’ and the choice ofthese words was random – they were not guided by Murray on what wasneeded. This resulted in a dearth of quotations for common words whichultimately had to be found by Murray and his assistants. In the first part of theDictionary alone, ‘nearly the whole quotations for about, after, all, also, and,in Part I, and for any, as, in Part II, have had to be found by myself and myassistants’, he explained to the Philological Society. If he had his time again,he said that he would have directed his Readers differently, with theinstructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do not strike you as rare,peculiar, or peculiarly used.’
    3. Miss Clowes of Ipswich and Miss Wheaton of Bloomsbury Square‘threw up’ (gave up)
    1. https://pages.oup.com/ol/cus/1646173949115570121/submit-words-and-evidence-to-the-oed

      The modern day digital version of an OED contribution slip includes database fields for the following:

      • Submission type (new word or sense of a word; information about origin/etymology; other)
      • the word or phrase itself
      • the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, other)
      • pronunciation (recording, IPA, rhyming words, etc.)
      • the definition or sense number as defined in the OED
      • quotation evidence with full text, and bibliographical references/links)
      • additional notes

      Only the first two fields are mandatory.

  3. Jan 2024
    1. Some of Newton's notes come from a 1654 edition of: Gregory, Francis. Ονομαστικὸν βραχύ; sive, Nomenclatura brevis, Anglo-Latino-Græca, in usum Scholæ Westmonasteriensis. Per F. G. [i.e. Francis Gregory.] Editio vigesima secunda, etc. John Meredith, in trust for Royston and Elizabeth Meredith, 1710.

  4. johnhalbrooks.substack.com johnhalbrooks.substack.com
    1. I have left the word wyrd untranslated from the Old English. It means something like “fate” or “doom.” It is the ancestor of the modern English word weird. When Shakespeare refers to the witches in Macbeth as the “weird sisters,” he doesn’t mean that they are strange (though they are), but rather that they have to do with fate. Weird in its modern sense (meaning “strange” or “uncanny”) is probably connected to the mysterious or “weird” nature of fate.
  5. Dec 2023
    1. 漢字很麻煩。多麻煩?從食物就可以看得出來。台灣有一道宴客名菜叫「雞卷」(ㄐ一 ㄐㄩㄢˇ),步驟繁瑣,是可以擺上過年和婚宴桌上的手路菜。

      字與音的互染

      最初:燒雞卷(卷,名詞,管子,因像雞脖子)

      The evolution is like the Telephone game, also known as "Chinese whispers" 電話遊戲,又稱中國話耳語

  6. Nov 2023
    1. GRMacGirl · 3 days agoSame. I journal them in a Commonplace Book. If I feel the need to keep a note IN the book for some reason I write it on a separate piece of paper and tuck it between the pages. Exception: cooking/recipe books where I need to have the information right there any time I’m cooking the food.

      Interesting use of the verb "journal" to indicate placing something into a commonplace book.

    1. The role of stylistic indicators of temporal andspatial location and orientation—those “pointing words”that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to thecreation of this general effect.

      Deixis is the use of words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context. Usually their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on contextual cues of time and/or place.

      Examples include the do-, ko-, so-, a- progression (dore, kore, sore, are; docchi, kocchi, socchi, acchi, etc.) serve this function of distance from the speaker.

  7. Oct 2023
    1. Biblical Hebrew has an unusually small vocabulary clustered around an even smaller number of three-letter roots, most of them denoting concrete actions or things, and the Bible achieves its mimetic effects partly through the skillful repetition of these few vivid words.
    1. Alter knows it ain’t Jesus.

      The colloquial use of the word "ain't" here very specifically pegs James Bruce, the author, as writing his argument for an audience of Christians in the Southern part of the United States. It's even more stark as most of his review is of a broadly scholarly nature where the word "ain't" or others of its register would never be used.

      How does the shift in translation really negate room for Jesus? If it was a truism that it stood for Jesus, then couldn't one just as simply re-translate the New Testament to make sure that the space for him is still there? Small shifts in meaning and translation shouldn't undermine the support for Jesus so easily as Bruce suggests, otherwise there are terrible problems with these underpinnings of Christianity.

      If one follows Bruce's general logic, then there's a hell of a religion based on Nostradamus' work we're all going out of our way to ignore.

      What would historical linguistics have to say about this translation?

    1. Ogilvie uncovers the story of Anna Thorpe Wetherill, an anti-slavery activist who hid escaped enslaved people in her house in Philadelphia. Mrs Thorpe focused her efforts in the slips she sent to Oxford on recording the language of slavery, submitting definitions for ‘abhorrent’, ‘abolition’, ‘accursed’ and ‘attack’. Like Margaret Murray’s, her work ensured that the language of colonisation appeared in the dictionary not just as the lingua franca of jingoistic imperialism but shaded with the stories and the voices of the colonised.
    1. Boroditsky, Lera. How Language Shapes the Way We Think. Streaming Video. TED | TEDWomen 2017, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think.

      See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k

    2. Kuuk Thaayorre language (Australia) orients everything with respect to cardinal directions or is mapped onto their terrain/land. Even their perception of time (chronology) is mapped onto the land with respect to their bodies.

    3. Perception of events can differ dramatically in different languages based on their constructions and what those constructions dictate.

      Example: Accidents in different languages are seen differently. In English, focus is on the actor who receives blame while in Spanish, there is more focus on the action and intention rather than what English would view as "perpetrator". Spanish eyewitness are less likely to remember the actor for testimony versus in English.

    4. Do languages change the way we think?

    1. If it requires too many words, you have not seen theunity but a multiplicity.

      How are they defining "multiplicity" here? There seems to be a tacit definition with respect to being in opposition to "unity" (of a work), but not an explicit one. It also seems to be a shaded meaning with respect to the more common one.

      unity: essence, core, coherence, oneness

      They use the word "multiplicity" in the usual sense of large number or multitude on p55: "The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not a plurality of distinct habits."

      They also revisit it in the upcoming section: "Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book" on p88

      Perhaps its just me but there's a linguistic "softness" of the uses of unity and multiplicity here with respect to 2023. Though these two opposites fit the dictionary definitions of their words, is it possible that this softness is the result of a sort of historical linguistic shift I'm feeling in these words? I can't quite put my finger on it, but perhaps it's the relationship of unity to religion? Neither seem to be frequently used these days.

      The Ngram Viewer shows peaks for the use of unity in 1660 and 1960 of almost 75% higher usage compared to a broader historical average. It is generally waning since. Multiplicity has about 1/4 the use of unity and has remained flat over time. What caused the peaks in the use of "unity" during these periods? This 1972 use was on the downslope of the 1960s peak. Was it used in the 1940 version?

      The 20th century increase in the use of unity begins around 1914 and may have been related to political shades of meaning going into WWI with another marked rise in the lead up to WW2.

  8. Aug 2023
  9. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
    1. Compositionality is defined here as the property whereby “the meaning of anexpression is a monotonic function of the meaning of its parts and the way they are puttogether.” (Cann 1993:4) Recursion is “the phenomenon by which a constituent of a sen-tence dominates another instance of the same syntactic category . . . recursion is the principlereason that the number of sentences in a natural language is normally taken to be infinite”(Trask 1993:229-230)

      Kirby defines two fundamental properties of language. For one, language is compositional. The meaning of each part of a sentence, as well as the order in which these individual pieces appear, defines the overall meaning of that sentence. Language is also recursive (and therefore infinite). Each constituent in a phrase may contain one or more child constituents of the same syntactic category.

    1. "in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"

      vim<br /> 2023 definition: energy; enthusiasm

      vim is rarely ever seen outside of the context of the phrase "vim and vigor" and seems to be a calcified word within this phrase.

      vigor<br /> 2023 definition: physical strength and good health

    2. "in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"

      Do calcified words eventually cease to have any definition over time? That is they have a stand alone definition, then a definition within their calcified phrase, then they cease to have any stand alone definition at all though they continue existence only in those calcified phrases.

    1. There's something interesting and unique going on in Mark Sample's use of the N+7 dictionary replacement of Hacking the Academy which still makes broad sense from a grammatical and semantic sense. What levels of transformation would one have to do within a language to loose all semblance of meaning? What do these sorts of transformations, deformations, or deformances indicate about linguistics and semantic meaning within a language?

      How far must change go before it is incomprehensible?

  10. Jun 2023
    1. The German word 'Arbeit', work, descends from Porto-Germanic *arbaidiz, which meant hardship or suffering. Going a couple of thousand years further back in time, the ancestor of arbaidiz was Porto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos, which mean orphan or slave. 'Orphan' has the same root via Latin. So Arbeit <> orphan: distant cousins. 'Arbeit' did have a relative in Old English too: it was 'earfoþe', difficult, hard
    1. Commentators insisted that gossip was the province of women. Originally meaning ‘godparent’, ‘gossip’ shifted its meaning across the early modern period. It became commonplace to accuse women of gossiping and of being gossips, and a set of meanings crystallised around the word that reflected men’s anxiety about what women were saying about them behind their backs.
  11. Apr 2023
    1. I decided to translate the German “Zettelkasten” as “Zettelkasten” since I consider this an established term.

      An example of a bi-lingual German-English speaker/writer specifically translating and using Zettelkasten as an established word in English.

  12. Mar 2023
    1. Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809.

      https://www.jstor.org/stable/498809

      ...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

      This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

      I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.

      Update: even better, this has introduced me to a massive new ZK: Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache!


      Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

    1. Abb. 9 Im Normalfall erarbeitete man jedoch eine detaillierte interne Feinsortierung des Belegmaterials häufiger Wörter. Naturgemäß hätte jede Dimension der Analyse (chronologisch, grammatisch, semantisch, graphisch) die Grundlage einer eigenen Sortierordnung bilden können.

      Alternate sort orders for the slips for the Wb include chronological, grammatical, semantic, and graphic, but for teasing out the meanings the original sort order was sufficient. Certainly other sort orders may reveal additional subtleties.

    2. Die Auswertung solcher Materialmengen erwies sich als prekär, und im Falle der häufigsten Wörter, z.B. mancher Präpositionen (allein das Wort m "in" ist über 60.000 Mal belegt) oder elementarer Verben mußte man vor den Schwierigkeiten kapitulieren und das Material aussondern.

      The preposition m "in" appears more than 60,000 times in the corpus, a fact which becomes a bit overwhelming to analyze.

    3. Textmaterials war zunächst ein technisches Problem. Angelehnt an die Praxis des Thesaurus Linguae Latinae wurde ein ausgeklügeltes Verzettelungssystem entworfen. Die gesammelten Texte wurden dazu in Passagen von jeweils etwa 30 Wörtern Länge unterteilt und in hieroglyphischer Form auf Zettel im Postkartenformat geschrieben. Die Bezeichnung des verzettelten Texts und der aktuellen Textpassage wurden in der Kopfzeile notiert. Wo erforderlich, sind auch Notizen zum szenischen Kontext einer Inschrift beigefügt, und meistens wurde der Versuch gemacht, eine Übersetzung der Textpassage zu geben. Gerade die Lückenhaftigkeit dieser Übersetzungen zeigt deutlich, wie unsicher man sich damals noch an vielen Stellen sein mußte. Die gesamte primäre Textaufnahme hatte bis zu einem gewissen Grade vorläufigen Charakter und war nicht als abschließende Analyse der Textstelle, sondern als Ausgangspunkt eines vertiefenden, vergleichenden Studiums gedacht. Dass heute viele der damals problematischen Passagen keine Schwierigkeiten mehr machen, ist zuallererst ein Verdienst des Wörterbuches und belegt, wie dieses das philologische Textverständnis auf ein neues Niveau gehoben hat.

      The structure of the filing system for the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache was designed based on the work done for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae started in 1894. Texts in the collection were roughly divided into passages of about 30 words and written in hieroglyphic form on postcard-sized slips of paper. The heading contained the designation of the text and the body included the texts' context (inscriptions, etc.) as well as a preliminary translation of the passage.

      These passages were then cross-referenced with other occurrences of the hieroglyphics to provide better progressive translations which ultimately appeared in the final manuscript. As a result some of the translations on the cards were incomplete as work proceeded and cross-comparisons of individual words were puzzled out.

      A slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of project leader Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".

    1. Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809.

      Tagged this because it's the first appearance of Zettelkasten in an English language setting in the JSTOR repository.

      see also: https://hypothes.is/a/RYZOssqXEe2H5wtABI0puA

      Started on 2023-03-24; finished on 2023-03-27.

    2. Allavailable earlier copies and parallel texts havebeen diligently consulted and compared with thepresent versions and the authors have also availedthemselves of the invaluable material contained inthe Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der

      ägyptischen Sprache.

      This is the first use of the word Zettelkasten in an English (non-German) context in JSTOR that I've been able to find.

      Still likely not the first appearance, but reasonably early...

    1. Review: [Untitled] Roman und Satire im 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik by Jörg Schönert Review by: J. D. Workman Monatshefte, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1970), pp. 420-421 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30156502

      ...form of the period for which there are no classical "rules." Schinert musters his evidence in an interesting and generally very lucid manner, although at times he may seem somewhat overzealous, if not indeed repetitious, in assembling all the data: at times one detects the faint odor of the Zettelkasten...

      faint odor! ha! and in an English language document.

    1. In Memoriam: Josef Körner (9 May 1950) Robert L. Kahn The Modern Language Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1963), pp. 38-59 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3720394

      ...of German letters long before Heine, impudently naive and imprudently honest, though always in- dustrious, 'griindlich' (and was it not Korner who 'discovered' the numerous un- published notebooks of Friedrich Schlegel and, in turn, left behind some twenty ' Zettelkasten ' which were recently acquired by Bonn University, a unique 'Fund-...

      example of use of zettelkasten in English here in 1963 specifically as a loan word from German...

    1. Review: [Untitled] Historical Records of Rameses III by William F. Edgerton, John A. Wilson Review by: William C. Hayes American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1936), pp. 558-559

      ...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

      This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

      I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.


      Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

    1. My Ten Years With Michel Thomas - Dr. Harold Goodman

      https://youtu.be/askAFNzI9Rc

      Michel Thomas taught languages conversationally in both languages by creating absolutely no pressure or worry and always keeping students in the "now".

      Find:<br /> Kaplan, Howard. “The Language Master.” The Jerusalem Report, August 11, 1994.

      Watch:<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

    1. Isuwans

      Isuwa (transcribed Išuwa and sometimes rendered Ishuwa) was the ancient Hittite name for one of its neighboring Anatolian kingdoms to the east. Isuwa is the origin of our word 'Asia'.

    1. Seen in a Hoskins business equipment advertisement in Business magazine (1903) for card index:

      YOUR BUSINESS AT YOUR FINGER ENDS

      Close to the phrase "at your finger tips". Would it have appeared before or after this?

      Business: The Magazine for Office, Store and Factory. Vol. 16. Business Man’s Publishing Company, 1903. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Business/QKaxezfHjL0C?hl=en&gbpv=0.

  13. Feb 2023
    1. Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ by [[Taylor Lorenz]]

      shifts in language and meaning of words and symbols as the result of algorithmic content moderation

      instead of slow semantic shifts, content moderation is actively pushing shifts of words and their meanings


      article suggested by this week's Dan Allosso Book club on Pirate Enlightenment

    2. In January, Kendra Calhoun, a postdoctoral researcher in linguistic anthropology at UCLA, and Alexia Fawcett, a doctoral student in linguistics at UC Santa Barbara, gave a presentation about language on TikTok. They outlined how, by self-censoring words in the captions of TikToks, new algospeak code words emerged.

      follow up on this for the relevant forthcoming paper....

    1. The application is powered by LaMDA, one of the latest generation of large language models. At its core, LaMDA is a simple machine — it's trained to predict the most likely next word given a textual prompt. But because the model is so large and has been trained on a massive amount of text, it's able to learn higher-level concepts.

      Is LaMDA really able to "learn higher-level concepts" or is it just a large, straight-forward information theoretic-based prediction engine?

    1. Rhetoric of encomium

      How do institutions form around notions of merit?

      Me: what about blurbs as evidence of implied social networks? Who blurbs whom? How are these invitations sent/received and by whom?

      diachronic: how blurbs evolve over time

      Signals, can blurbs predict: - the field of the work - gender - other

      Emergence or decrease of signals with respect to time

      Imitation of styles and choices. - how does this happen? contagion - I'm reminded of George Mathew Dutcher admonition:

      Imitation to be avoided. Avoid the mannerisms and personal peculiarities of method or style of well-known writers, such as Carlyle or Macaulay. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/ROR3VCDEEe2sZNOy4rwRgQ )

      Systematic studies of related words within corpora. (this idea should have a clever name) word2vec, word correlations, information theory

      How does praise work?

      metaphors within blurbs (eg: light, scintillating, brilliant, new lens, etc.)

    1. Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (Hrsg.): «Keine Ostergrüsse mehr! Die geheime Gästekartei des Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera». Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.Der reich bebilderte Band bietet eine spannende Reise in ein Stück Schweizer Tourismusgeschichte: Die Herausgeber haben die 20'000 Karteikarten aus den Jahren 1920-1960 sehr sorgfältig kuratiert, nach Themen gegliedert und in einen grösseren, gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhang gestellt.Die Leserinnen und Leser erfahren viel über die Klientel im Hotel Waldhaus, zum Teil sogar in kleinen biografischen Porträts; und sie können an konkreten Beispielen verfolgen, wie sich der Sprachgebrauch der Concierges im Laufe der Zeit verändert – gerade zum Beispiel im Zusammenhang mit jüdischen Gästen.

      Google Translate:

      Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (editors): «No more Easter greetings! The secret guest file of the Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera". Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

      The richly illustrated volume offers an exciting journey into a piece of Swiss tourism history: the editors have very carefully curated the 20,000 index cards from the years 1920-1960, structured them by topic and placed them in a larger, social context.

      The readers learn a lot about the clientele in the Hotel Waldhaus, sometimes even in small biographical portraits; and they can use concrete examples to follow how the concierge's use of language has changed over time - especially in connection with Jewish guests, for example.

  14. Jan 2023
    1. Semantic leadership   Extent to which word usage by one entity is subsequently adopted by others. Specifically, Klein measures how often novel semantic usage in a given newspaper is mirrored by other newspapers. When a newspaper is a semantic leader, its semantic usage better predicts the later usage of that word in other newspapers compared to those other newspapers' own, earlier usage of the word.

      How might this leadership happen within the social epidemic view of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point framework?

      • the law of the few,
      • the stickiness factor, and
      • the power of context

      and with respect to mavens, connectors, and salespeople?

      • Llyn Bochlwyd (lake gray cheek)
      • Foel Fawr
      • Coed Llugwy
      • Cwm Cneifion

      Erasure of culture

      Memory and place names

      "A nation which forgets its past has no future." - Winston Churchill (check quote and provenance)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLQ6XlG0MQ4

    1. The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈwɔːrf/, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity


      link to Toki Pona as a conlang


      Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

    1. a common technique in natural language processing is to operationalize certain semantic concepts (e.g., "synonym") in terms of syntactic structure (two words that tend to occur nearby in a sentence are more likely to be synonyms, etc). This is what word2vec does.

      Can I use some of these sorts of methods with respect to corpus linguistics over time to better identified calcified words or archaic phrases that stick with the language, but are heavily limited to narrower(ing) contexts?

    1. For the time being, my writing app of choice is Ulysses, but plenty of others are available—even, heaven help you, Micros✽ft W✽rd.

      Multiple interesting things going on here with the use of "Micros✽ft W✽rd".

      He's simultaneously: - Voldemorting the phrase to some extent so that it doesn't show up easily or at all in digital search. - He's visually marring the phrase to show active dislike of the software and its general use - By using the symbols, he's effectively turning the word into a form of profanity the way many have used the top row of symbols on typewriters to indicate swear words in the 20th century. Examples: sh@t, dmn, he!!, or any set of four symbols like &%^ to generally indicate a "four letter word" as many profane words typically have four letters.

    1. Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/index.html

    2. What is Coptic?Coptic is the name of the last phase (ca. 300 CE - 1300 CE) of the longest-attested human language yet available to linguistic study, the Ancient Egyptian lan­guage. Closely connected to the Christian population of Egypt, Coptic is one of the most important languages of ancient Christian literature, alongside Greek, Latin and Syriac. A great deal of Biblical and early Christian literature was translated into Coptic for Egyptian consumption, while an autochthnous Coptic Christian literature flourished for centuries.
    1. If it interests you, GPC lists phrases like dysgu ar gof. This page then gives the example, "Yn yr hen ddyddiau byddai pobl yn dysgu cerddi ar gof" - like saying "to learn by heart" in English.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

      Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

      Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

      Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

      If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

    1. An additional affordance of <Y> is that it may be the first known example of an ‘action‘ word, i.e. a verb (‘to give birth’), although we acknowledge that this is ambiguous: it could function as a noun, ‘birth’, or ‘place of birth’.
    1. Fried-berg Judeo-Arabic Project, accessible at http://fjms.genizah.org. This projectmaintains a digital corpus of Judeo-Arabic texts that can be searched and an-alyzed.

      The Friedberg Judeo-Arabic Project contains a large corpus of Judeo-Arabic text which can be manually searched to help improve translations of texts, but it might also be profitably mined using information theoretic and corpus linguistic methods to provide larger group textual translations and suggestions at a grander scale.

    2. More recent ad-ditions to the website include a “jigsaw puzzle” screen that lets users viewseveral items while playing with them to check whether they are “joins.” An-other useful feature permits the user to split the screen into several panelsand, thus, examine several items simultaneously (useful, e.g., when compar-ing handwriting in several documents). Finally, the “join suggestions” screenprovides the results of a technologically groundbreaking computerized anal-ysis of paleographic and codiocological features that suggests possible joinsor items written by the same scribe or belonging to the same codex. 35

      Computer means can potentially be used to check or suggest potential "joins" of fragments of historical documents.

      An example of some of this work can be seen in the Friedberg Genizah Project and their digital tools.

  15. Dec 2022
    1. Asian Memory Methods : Secret Memory Techniques, Kyoto 1771

      reply to LynneKelly at https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/asian-memory-methods-secret-memory-techniques-kyoto-1771/79217

      Thanks for this Lynne! I've ordered a copy.

      I've been working on-again, off-again at learning Japanese and spent quite a while looking at mnemonic techniques with respect to it and kanji in particular. I've done a reasonably thorough, though not exhaustive search on the topic with respect to titles in English.

      I had come across Rowley's book along with a few others, though generally they've only got a few hundred examples, usually meant for early learners. One of my favorite more comprehensive texts was:

      Henshall, Kenneth G. A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. 1st ed, 7th Printing. Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1988.

      It is much more comprehensive and has some incredibly useful descriptions of kanji, how they relate to other kanji (pictographically), as well as additional subtle meanings and what I would almost call "mini-stories" about the words, origins and their development over time, which for me made them much easier to recall and use. These descriptions also included some scholarly mentions as well as interesting Japanese historical and cultural context that also slowly build up to something bigger over time. He cleverly links and interlinks various words together to build up meanings over time as well. In addition to this, he included specific mnemonic phrases to make the kanji easier to remember. (Many of these become cumulative and rely on knowledge of previous words and pictograms.) I'll note that later editions were somewhat similar, but the incredibly rich stories were significantly pared down or removed making them less valuable, at least to me. He covers 1,945 kanji including those up to the sixth grade and general use kanji which he individually numbers within the text (so one could also more easily create and cross link them within their own memory palace/journey/songline.) Given the relationship of Japanese with Chinese, perhaps similar texts may exist for Chinese?

      As an illustrative example of the work in the text, here's a link to a picture from a random page of the book: https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/wp-1672269705369-scaled.jpg that may be helpful.

    1. Whether you want to call them mottos, memes, or manifestos, words can be the building blocks of how we think and transmit ideas. You can also gauge how well someone is grasping your concepts—or at least making an effort to—by the language they’re responding to you with as well.

      You can use the way that a person responds to your concepts as a metric for how well they understand you. If they don't understand chances are they will retreat back to jargon to try to hide the fact that they're struggling. If they're getting on well they might have an insightful way to extend your metaphor

  16. Nov 2022
    1. “pattern language” to describe the show’s plot formulas, which they and ultimately other users would then apply to a variety of programs.

      Tropes are shorthand storytelling methods that rely on a common storytelling grammar or pattern language to quickly relay information to the viewer or listener.

    1. Lilienfeld, S. O., Sauvigné, K. C., Lynn, S. J., Cautin, R. L., Latzman, R. D., & Waldman, I. D. (2014). Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01100

    1. The final thing I will say is, we have the 2016 model in our mind that, if there's a normie Republican, they get crushed by Donald Trump. Why should a Mike DeWine, not that he's going to run, but why — normie Republicans did way better than the performative Republicans.

      https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-the-midterm-results-and-what-it-means-trumps-role-in-the-gop#transcript

      video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Km_Vyhvww

      David Brooks here (coins?) uses the phrase "normie Republican" to describe Republicans who tend to center rather than to the far right, Christian right, or who are Trump Republicans. Some of those people might describe these normie Republicans as Rhinos (Republicans in name only.)

      Typically I've only seen "normie" used by those who identify as ADHD, Aspergers, or otherwise on the (neurodiverse) spectrum to describe average people who don't display those behaviors.


      Judy Woodruff: So, I just want to be clear. We're using the word normie, as in — this is a David Brooks word, right? (LAUGHTER)

      David Brooks: No, this — I did not invent this. I think two generations below me invented that word. (LAUGHTER)

      Brooks admits he learned the word from others, but he's also using it with a different meaning and context than the original "normie" unadorned.

    1. Robert Amsler is a retired computational lexicology, computational linguist, information scientist. His P.D. was from UT-Austin in 1980. His primary work was in the area of understanding how machine-readable dictionaries could be used to create a taxonomy of dictionary word senses (which served as the motivation for the creation of WordNet) and in understanding how lexicon can be extracted from text corpora. He also invented a new technique in citation analysis that bears his name. His work is mentioned in Wikipedia articles on Machine-Readable dictionary, Computational lexicology, Bibliographic coupling, and Text mining. He currently lives in Vienna, VA and reads email at robert.amsler at utexas. edu. He is currenly interested in chronological studies of vocabulary, esp. computer terms.

      https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Amsler

      Apparently follow my blog. :)

      Makes me wonder how we might better process and semantically parse peoples' personal notes, particularly when they're atomic and cross-linked?

  17. view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org
    1. The word “kafala” in Arabic has traditionally been used to describe a social and moral “responsibility to another.”  Researchers Ray Jureidini and Said Fares Hassan write, “kafala contracts were used to protect the weak and vulnerable by instituting the patronage of a prominent local who provided whatever protection was required.” Think of raising an orphaned child, for example. In business, kafala originally referred to contracts where a guarantor assumes liability for another person (e.g. a cosigner for a loan).    Kafala nowadays is often used to describe the legal relationship between businesses and migrant workers. Employers, typically citizens, act as sponsors for workers and assume legal responsibility for their movement and actions in exchange for their right to work in a geographic area. 

      The use of kafala shows a shift from a meaning of social responsibility into a meaning co-opted by capitalism and social contract.

    1. To create accurate animations, we generate the speech, run it through our in-house speech recognition and pronunciation models, and get the timing for each word and phoneme (speech sound). Each sound is mapped onto a visual representation, or viseme, in a set we designed based on linguistic features.

      viseme, an atomic speech visualization of a particular phoneme

    1. Originally blogs were called weblogs: a log of activity that you wrote to the web. Peter Merholz jokingly split the term into two words to make it an activity: we blog. Ev Williams started to use it as a verb and a noun: to blog. And the rest is history.
    1. https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/848/zettelizers

      A thread about what to call those who have a zettelkasten or those who practice the method.

    2. Being an English only speaker I love the mystery invoked by the German term "Zettelkasten".

      Example of someone who sees "mystery" in the idea of Zettelkasten, which becomes part of the draw into using it.

  18. Oct 2022
    1. All materials available will be evaluated: Dictionaries, glossaries, and texts of a literary and non-literary nature. The slip box presently contains 1.5 million slips referring to 12 million references; the slips are supplemented by means of digital material.

      Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF) is a dictionary built out of a slip box containing 1.5 million slipswith over 12 million references.

    1. Intellectual readiness involves a minimumlevel of visual perception such that the child can take in andremember an entire word and the letters that combine to formit. Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly andto use several sentences in correct order.

      Just as predictive means may be used on the level of letters, words, and even whole sentences within information theory at the level of specific languages, does early orality sophistication in children help them to become predictive readers at earlier ages?

      How could one go about testing this, particularly in a broad, neurodiverse group?

  19. Sep 2022
    1. One shibboleth, or highly marked feature, of North-East Scots is that “wh” is in fact pronounced “f”.
    2. “Doric” is a term used across Europe during the Renaissance to refer to rougher, but more genuine forms of language, in comparison to the “Attic” of the cities, smart but corrupt.
    1. https://twitter.com/inkasrain/status/1566410516721016833

      Does anyone know what exactly this is? A friend gave it to me years ago when they visited Jerusalem. I don't read Hebrew. Is it something harmless or should it be shamshed(jew magic)? (attached photo of a mezuzah)

      The idea of "magic" here within a modern religious context is interesting in that it shows the divergence of religion and magic as concepts with respect to cultural practices.

      The phrasing also has a sense of othering the unknown culture with a sense of fear in the idea that the object should be smashed. There's also a lack of basic science knowledge and tinge of superstition implied by the fact that they think that smashing will somehow dissipate the unknown magic.

      So many different cultural indicators of various things going on here...

  20. Aug 2022
    1. for example, having occasion to make thousandsof brief records of such small matters as the spelling or pronunciation of a word, might well prefera slip no larger than 2x4. On the other hand, anyperson writing a coarse or heavy hand wouldprobably not care for a very small slip, whateverhis interests.

      I haven't seen 2 x 4" slips suggested before!

      Dow suggests the possibility of various small sizes based on the individual researchers' needs. Linguists might have very little and benefit from a 2 x 4" slip. Though once chosen, he does caution consistency of that size for easy manipulation.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. A-over-A principle that was proposed as the basis for an explanation of suchphenomena as are illustrated by examples 44–58.
    2. The most challenging theoretical problem in linguistics is that of discoveringthe principles of universal grammar that interweave with the rules of particulargrammars to provide explanations for phenomena that appear arbitrary andchaotic.
    3. Suppose that“persuaded” in 19 is replaced by one of the following words: 1322 expected, hired, tired, pleased, happy, lucky, eager, certain, easyWith “expected” replacing “persuaded,” the sentence can mean roughly thatthe fact of John’s leaving was expected; but it is impossible to speak of the factof John’s leaving being persuaded.

      Does this point to different classes of verbs based on their replaceability or not?

    4. I use the asterisk in the conventional way, to indicate a sentence that deviates in some respectfrom grammatical rule.
    5. In practice, the linguist is always involved in the study of both universal andparticular grammar.
    6. Correspondingly,the far-reaching studies of language that were carried out under the influence ofCartesian rationalism suffered from a failure to appreciate either the abstractnessof those structures that are “present to the mind” when an utterance is producedor understood, or the length and complexity of the chain of operations that relatethe mental structures expressing the semantic content of the utterance to thephysical realization.

      What are the simple building blocks of thought and speech that make it so complex in aggregate?

    7. Saussure echoed an important critique of Humbold-tian linguistic theory by the distinguished American linguist William DwightWhitney, who evidently greatly influenced Saussure.
    8. yntagmatic – that is,patterns of literal succession in the stream of speech – or paradigmatic – that is,relations among units that occupy the same position in the stream of speech.
    9. Thegreat Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who at the turn of the century laidthe groundwork for modern structural linguistics, put forth the view that theonly proper methods of linguistic analysis are segmentation and classification.
    10. the writings of the Spanish physician JuanHuarte, who in the late sixteenth century published a widely translated studyon the nature of human intelligence. In the course of his investigations, Huartecame to wonder at the fact that the word for “intelligence,” ingenio, seems tohave the same Latin root as various words meaning “engender” or “generate.”
    11. I recall being told by a distinguishedanthropological linguist, in 1953, that he had no intention of working througha vast collection of materials that he had assembled because within a few yearsit would surely be possible to program a computer to construct a grammar froma large corpus of data by the use of techniques that were already fairly wellformalized.

      rose colored glasses...

    12. particular branch of cognitive psychologyknown as linguistics

      Chomsky categorized linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology.

    13. What contri-bution can the study of language make to our understanding of human nature?
    1. We might learn something new, if we understood both sides.

      Allosso is using "both sides" in a broadly journalistic fashion the way it had traditionally meant in the mid to late 21st century until Donald J. Trump's overtly racist comment on Aug. 15, 2017 "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." following the Charlottesville, VA protests.

      Perhaps it might be useful if people quit using the "both sides" as if there were only two perspectives on an issue (for or against), when in reality there is often a spectrum of thoughts and feelings, not all mutually exclusive, about issues?

    1. The use o f t h ediphthong is becoming rare.

      Interesting that he notices this and explicitly calls it out in a handbook on writing.

    2. Mechanical form.Use standard size (8t/,xll in.) type-writer pa er or the essay paper in standard use a t the in-stitution. %or typing, use an unruled bond paper of goodquality, such as “Paragon Linen” or “Old Hampshire Mills.”At the left of the page leave a margin of 1% to l’/e inches;and a t the top, bottom, and right of the page, a margin of1 inch. Write only on one side of the paper. In ty in thelines should be double-spaced. Each chapter shouyd feginon a new page. Theses for honors and degrees must be typed;other essays may be typed or legibly written in ink. Whetherthe essay is typed or written, the use of black ink is prefer-able. The original typewritten copy must be presented. Incase two copies of a thesis are required, the second copymust be the first carbon and must be on the same quality ofpaper as the original.

      Definitely a paragraph aimed at the student in the manner of a syllabus, but also an interesting tidbit on the potential evolution of writing forms over time.


      How does language over time change with respect to the types and styles of writing forms, particularly when they're prescribed or generally standardized over time? How do these same standards evolve over time and change things at the level of the larger pictures?

    3. The use ofhyphens in compound words is becoming less frequent exceptwhen essential for clarity of meaning. The customary prac-tice is to write such words as coordinate with the dieresisrather than the hyphen.
    1. Quine's book Word and Object (p. 3f) made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea (cf. Ship of Theseus): .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
    1. https://forum.saysomethingin.com/t/grasshoppers/36340

      Variations of the word grasshopper in Welsh:<br /> * Ceiliog y gwair * Sioncyn y gwair * Robin sbonciwr * Sbonciwr y gwair * Ceiliog y rhedyn

      Note that the last one translates as cockerel of the fern and is probably related to kilhog-raden (in Bretton) and kulyek reden (in Cornish).

      The verb (y)sboncio means to spring/leap/jump<br /> thus sbonciwr is someone/something that springs, leaps or jumps and is also related to sboncen (the game squash).

      gwair translates as grass

  21. Jul 2022
    1. @hannahnahnah1 :P because were too barbiecore to be anything else :D

      Earliest extant public use of Barbiecore on Twitter 2009-09-01

      @hannahnahnah1 :P because were too barbiecore to be anything else :D

      — jules (@coolworrier) September 2, 2009
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. there has been a tendency in popular discussion to confuse “deep structure”with “generative grammar” or with “universal grammar.” And a number of pro-fessional linguists have repeatedly confused what I refer to here as “the creativeaspect of language use” with the recursive property of generative grammars, avery different matter.

      Noam Chomsky felt that there was a tendency for people to confuse the ideas of deep structure with the ideas of either generative grammar or universal grammar. He also thought that professional linguists confused what he called "the creative aspect of language use" with the recursive property of generative grammars.

  22. Jun 2022
    1. For Jerome Bruner, the place to begin is clear: “One starts somewhere—where the learner is.”

      One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

      Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

      Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

      Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

      Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"


      aside on serendipity

      As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

    1. So, i started researching where the capitalization of said pronoun came from and was quite stunned to find that it was always capitalized because it always appeared as the first word in a sentence, never stuck in the middle. And then, when it started appearing in the middle, it started getting capitalized out of convention and because people worried that it would get lost in script. Of course, "It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case" (journalist Sydney J. Harris).

      If it's true that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized instead of the more commonly capitalized "you", does this help to underline some of the self-centeredness show by most of the English speaking West?

    1. before you can think out of the box, you have tostart with a box

      Can it be?! Twyla Tharp has an entire chapter in her book on creativity that covers a variation of the zettelkasten note taking concept!!!


      Does the phrase "thinking outside of the box" make a tacit nod to the idea of using a card index (or the German zettelkasten) for note taking, sense making, and thinking?

    1. In linguistics this is sometimes called presupposition failure. The classic example is due to Bertrand Russell: "Is the King of France bald" can't be answered yes or no, (resp. "The King of France is bald" is neither true nor false), because it contains a false presupposition, namely that there is a King of France. Presupposition failure is often seen with definite descriptions, and that's common when programming. E.g. "The head of a list" has a presupposition failure when a list is empty, and then it's appropriate to throw an exception.

      Presupposition failure is a term from linguistics. The classical example is from Bertrand Russel and pertains to the questions: Is the King of France bald? It contains a false presupposition, since there is no King of France. So the answer is neither true nor false.

  23. May 2022
    1. The decision not to refer primary school children to online language resources such as AustLang and the Gambay map was appropriate as it would create difficulties for both those readers and their teachers. Those resources are usually used by Indigenous language speakers and experts with a sound training in linguistics.
    1. Blackwood Magazine most likely introduced the term in 1819, but Edgar Allan Poe popularized it some 25 years later with some of his published material: Marginalia. Since then, authors have had varying degrees of success creating their own collections of published marginalia. Among them is Walter Benjamin, who struggled after 13 years of research, leaving behind The Arcades Project: "the theater," he called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas"

      Blackwood Magazine most likely introduced the term marginalia in 1819. Edgar Allen Poe popularized the term with some of his published material entitled Marginalia.


      What other (popular) published examples of marginalia exist?

      Source for the Blackwood Magazine assertion?

    1. zany noun plural zanies Definition of zany (Entry 2 of 2) 1 : a subordinate clown or acrobat in old comedies who mimics ludicrously the tricks of the principal : merry-andrew 2 archaic : a person who fawns over another person : a servile follower : toady … must have known the falsehood of the slander which they encouraged their zanies to propagate.— William Gifford 3a : one who acts the buffoon to amuse others b : nut, kook

      I love this older definition of a zany.

      h/t:

      Vintage alphabet with images of food, flora, fauna, household items, various sundry items, and a murder clown. pic.twitter.com/MqWYKcmjzt

      — Michelle Krell Kydd (@glasspetalsmoke) May 25, 2021
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. #webmention is just...magic. Instead of getting comments on twitter, substack, your blog, etc etc. It just all comes to one place? I'm actually surprised @SubstackInc doesn't have support already: anytime someone blogs or substacks about your newsletter, you get a mention?

      #webmention is just...magic. Instead of getting comments on twitter, substack, your blog, etc etc. It just all comes to one place? I'm actually surprised @SubstackInc doesn't have support already: anytime someone blogs or substacks about your newsletter, you get a mention? 👌👌

      — person72443 (@person72443) May 9, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      The linguist in me notes that the tweet above from @person72443 is the first time I've seen someone verbify Substack as "substacks"

    1. : low land that is covered wholly or partly with water unless artificially drained and that usually has peaty alkaline soil and characteristic flora (as of sedges and reeds)

      fen

      often heard in the phrase forests and fens

    1. Where everyone can manipulate code like we manipulate word

      Reminds me a gain of Roam.

      What if humans spoke in compilable code? What if we thought in that? What if we do?

  24. Apr 2022
    1. allow Jakobson to explain why the first person and its cognates are both thelast linguistic acquisition of the child and the first linguistic loss of the aphasiac.Jakobson’s first essays to be translated into French came out in 1963. Barthesrefers to them, the very same year, in the preface to the Critical Essays where heidentifies (if one may say so) both positively and negatively with those two invalidspeaking subjects whom, for not having yet (or having no longer) access to thefirst person, he promotes as models or examples for the writer, granted one differ-ence: the writer takes responsibility for not uttering the “I” that both the childand the aphasiac are constitutionally unable to use.

      Is it broadly true that the first person and cognates are the last acquisitions of children and among the first losses of aphasiacs?

    1. Yeshiva teaching in the modern period famously relied on memorization of the most important texts, but a few medieval Hebrew manu-scripts from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries include examples of alphabetical lists of words with the biblical phrases in which they occurred, but without pre-cise locations in the Bible—presumably because the learned would know them.

      Prior to concordances of the Christian Bible there are examples of Hebrew manuscripts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that have lists of words and sentences or phrases in which they occurred. They didn't include exact locations with the presumption being that most scholars would know the texts well enough to quickly find them based on the phrases used.


      Early concordances were later made unnecessary as tools as digital search could dramatically decrease the load. However these tools might miss the value found in the serendipity of searching through broad word lists.

      Has anyone made a concordance search and display tool to automatically generate concordances of any particular texts? Do professional indexers use these? What might be the implications of overlapping concordances of seminal texts within the corpus linguistics space?

      Fun tools like the Bible Munger now exist to play around with find and replace functionality. https://biblemunger.micahrl.com/munge

      Online tools also have multi-translation versions that will show translational differences between the seemingly ever-growing number of English translations of the Bible.

  25. Mar 2022
    1. glas is a very old word, and while the more modern gwyrdd is used for green, glas can in fact be both blue and green, depending on context. The idea behind glas is not so much a colour itself, but the attribute you’d give to plants that are alive. The opposite is llwyd, which is connected to “dead” things like rocks, so naturally you’d translate it as gray, but sometimes it’s used as brown, too. (Again, the Welsh word brown is much newer than llwyd.)

      The older Welsh words 'glas' and 'llwyd' designate both colors (green/blue and gray/brown respectively) but also indicate the idea of 'being alive' (like plants) or 'dead' (like rocks).

      These words can sometimes be translated differently than the more modern words gwyrdd (green), glas (blue), llwyd (grey), brown (brown).

      Irish is somewhat similar, where 'glas' is green, but usually for the less vivid greens of the natural world (seaweed might be called 'glas') versus artificial vivid green (the green on the Irish flag would be 'uaine'). However a 'madra glas' is not a green or blue dog, but a grey one.

      Glasgow / Glaschu (the place name) means "green hollow".

    1. But it’s also the calculation a woman makes before responding to the e-mail of the failson who was just promoted ahead of her, or the calculation I make when a white executive comments on my Twitter feed but not my published columns.

      Noting the rise in the use of the word failson.

    1. Topic A topic was once a spot not a subjecttopic. to ̆p’ı ̆k. n. 1. The subject of a speech, essay, thesis, or discourse. 2. A subject of discussion or con-versation. 3. A subdivision of a theme, thesis, or outline.*With no teleprompter, index cards, or even sheets of paper at their disposal, ancient Greek and Roman orators often had to rely on their memories for holding a great deal of information. Given the limi-tations of memory, the points they chose to make had to be clustered in some meaningful way. A popular and quite reliable method for remembering information was known as loci (see Chapter 9), where loci was Latin for “place.” It involved picking a house you knew well, imagining it in your mind’s eye, and then associating the facts you wanted to recall with specifi c places inside of that house. Using this method, a skillful orator could mentally fi ll up numerous houses with the ideas he needed to recall and then simply “visit” them whenever he spoke about a particular subject. The clusters of informa-tion that speakers used routinely came to be known as commonplaces, loci communes in Latin and koinos topos in Greek. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle referred to them simply as topos, meaning “places.” And that’s how we came to use topic to refer to subject or grouping of information.**

      Even in the western tradition, the earliest methods of mnemonics tied ideas to locations, from whence we get the ideas of loci communes (in Latin) and thence commonplaces and commonplace books. The idea of loci communes was koinos topos in Greek from whence we have derived the word 'topic'.

      Was this a carryover from other local oral traditions or a new innovation? Given the prevalence of very similar Indigenous methods around the world, it was assuredly not an innovation. Perhaps it was a rediscovery after the loss of some of these traditions locally in societies that were less reliant on orality and moving towards more reliance on literacy for their memories.

    1. I need to #indieweb my photos though

      A real shame for what it’s now become, I’ve stopped uploading a while ago and stopped paying when they doubled the price - I wasn’t getting any value out of it. I need to #indieweb my photos though

      — Serdar Kiliç (@serdar) March 18, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Use of IndieWeb as a verb in the wild.

      The only older use I can think of is "indiewebify" stemming from the website https://indiewebify.me.

    1. Anything’s a CMS if you indieweb it hard enough!

      Anything’s a CMS if you indieweb it hard enough!<br><br>This is super cool.

      — MWDelaney (@MichaelWDelaney) March 19, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Use of IndieWeb as a verb in the wild.

    1. I might call such a tool memex 2.0, to suggest an upgrade of Bush's memex, but I prefer genex, to indicate an orientation towa rds generating excellence. (Footnote: The closeness of genex to genetics and to generation-X is coincidental.)
    1. https://lithub.com/how-the-inca-used-knots-to-tell-stories/

      If this is the extent of the quipu material in this book, it's probably not quite for me, though the broader subject is very interesting. Other direct sources may be more illustrative for me.

    2. Harvard’s Gary Urton, with his Khipu Database (KDB), seems to have pinpointed the name of a village, Puruchuco, represented by a sequence of three numbers, like a kind of zip code. We can’t rule out the possibility that this is a richly phonetic system, but we’re still a long way from proving it.

      Quipu may potentially be a phonetic system, but the state of the art of research indicates we're far from a proof. Several digital catalogues have been created including Gary Urton's Khipu Database (KDB).

    3. To fully understand quipu, we must shed our preconceived notions of what defines writing.

      We need to get rid of conceived notions of what constitutes writing to be able to better understand quipu.

    4. Semasiography is a system of conventional symbols— iconic, abstract—that carry information, though not in any specific language. The bond between sign and sound is variable, loose, unbound by precise rules. It’s a nonphonetic system (in the most technical, glottographic sense). Think about mathematical formulas, or music notes, or the buttons on your washing machine: these are all semasiographic systems. We understand them thanks to the conventions that regulate the way we interpret their meaning, but we can read them in any language. They are metalinguistic systems, in sum, not phonetic systems.

      Semasiography are iconic and abstract symbols and languages not based on spoken words, but which carry information.

      Mathematical formulas, musical notation, computer icons, emoji, buttons on washing machines, and quipu are considered semasiographic systems which communicate information without speech as an intermediary.

      semasiography from - Greek: σημασία (semasia) "signification, meaning" - Greek: γραφία (graphia) "writing") is "writing with signs"

    1. Back then, Macedonia foundherself increasingly frustrated with the conventional format of foreign-languagecourses: a lot of sitting, listening, and writing. That’s not how anyone learnstheir native language, she notes. Young children encounter new words in a richsensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch theshiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh andsmelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing fromthe second-language classroom.

      Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.

    2. Studies show that children whose parents gesture a lot proceed togesture frequently themselves, and eventually to acquire expansive spoken-wordvocabularies.

      Studies show the importance of gesturing in developing children as a precursor to language. Adults who gesture more have children who gesture more as well. There also seems to be a direct correlation to the gestural vocabulary of children at 14 months and their verbal vocabulary at 4 and 1/2 years of age.

    3. Children can typically understand and act on a request to point to theirnose, for example, a full six months before they are able to form the spokenword “nose.”

      Many children are also able to begin using sign language for their needs prior to being able to use spoken language as well.

  26. Feb 2022
    1. Together: responsive, inline “autocomplete” pow­ered by an RNN trained on a cor­pus of old sci-fi stories.

      I can't help but think, what if one used their own collected corpus of ideas based on their ever-growing commonplace book to create a text generator? Then by taking notes, highlighting other work, and doing your own work, you're creating a corpus of material that's imminently interesting to you. This also means that by subsuming text over time in making your own notes, the artificial intelligence will more likely also be using your own prior thought patterns to make something that from an information theoretic standpoint look and sound more like you. It would have your "hand" so to speak.

  27. Jan 2022
    1. https://vimeo.com/232545219

      from: Eyeo Conference 2017

      Description

      Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

      Notes

      Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

      Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

      Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary


      Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4


      Writing using the adjacent possible.


      Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

      Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

      Open questions

      How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

      What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

      Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

      What sources would you use to train your model?

      References:

      • Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
      • Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
      • Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
      • Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production
    1. Survivals of this spatially oriented technique still mark our language when we say “in the first place” and “passing on to the next point.”

      The use of mnemonic techniques through history have been crystalized into our language with phrases like "in the first place" and "passing on to the next point".

  28. Dec 2021
    1. There was a Web 2.0 and people spoke of Web 3.0. Now it all seems to be moving to the moniker web3. Perhaps because of the ability to search for the name or to turn it into a hashtag? #Web3.0 just doesn't work on Twitter which wants to treat the decimal as a period.

  29. Nov 2021
    1. Huang, who has a background in paleography, warns that many characters do not function as a “signific,” a linguistic term indicating a relationship to the word’s meaning. Additionally, the meanings of numerous characters changed over time, or they were “loaned” to other words with separate meanings. Even though more than 86 percent of characters have radicals that also function as significs, Huang encourages teachers to understand some of the exceptions, saying, “It is all right for Chinese teachers not to lecture on these, but they have to know them because students may ask.”

      More than 86% of characters in Chinese function as significs, a linguistic term indicating an association to the word's meaning. Sometimes these meanings can change with time and drift from original meanings.

      The drift can be interesting and important from the perspective of historical linguistics as well as to give clues to changes in culture.

      An example in English might be the use in computer user interfaces that include telephone handset images or old 3.5" floppy disk images used to respectively indicate "call" or "save" despite the fact that these items have either changed shape or are no longer commonly used.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet

      I was sort of hoping that there would be a more linguistic structured correspondence between the alphabet and numbers as a potential precursor of the phonetic major system, but alas no.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Chris Aldrich</span> in Chris Aldrich on Twitter: "@HeghnarW Great job on at the "Loss" conference! I'm curious about the alphabetic correspondence to numbers you mentioned in the canon tables of the Zeytun Gospels. Is it a 1 to 1 alphabetic correspondence as in Hebrew or 1-A, 2-B, 3-C, etc. or more complex? #sberg" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>11/19/2021 10:42:31</time>)</cite></small>

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Heghnar Watenpaugh</span> in Heghnar Watenpaugh on Twitter: "@ChrisAldrich Chris, thanks so much for your interest! a table of the numerical values of the Armenian alphabet is here: https://t.co/cB1qFgNI3i" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>11/19/2021 10:42:31</time>)</cite></small>

    1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2296962-origins-of-japanese-and-turkish-language-family-traced-back-9000-years/

      Martine Robbeets et al have used linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence to show that millet farming communities in north-east China 10,000 years ago may have given rise to the Transeurasian language families that became Japanese, Mongolian, Korean, and Turkish.

      Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04108-8

    1. As when a man buries a burning log in a black ash heapon the island of the Phaiakiansin a remote place in the country, where none live near as neighbors, 490and saves the seed of fire, having no other place to get a light from, soOdysseus buried himself in the leaves, and Athene shed a sleep on his eyesso as most quickly to quit him,by veiling his eyes, from the exhaustion of his hard labors.

      Wonderful analogy, particularly given the value of storing the heat and spark of fire in the wilderness at the time of the poem's composition.

      This is an interesting use of the verb "to quit". I'm curious what the sense of the original Greek was. Who/what is quitting who/what?

      Also interesting given his weakened state that he would need the help of Athene to fall asleep.

    1. Which is precisely what got some of these people into trouble, because the definition of acceptable has radically changed in the past few years.

      acceptable

    1. In one particularly ingenious entry, she explains the demise of the full stop (or, in American English, the “period”). If you have ever wondered why putting such once-crucial punctation in emails, phone messages or tweets now feels so awkward, here is the answer: “The period can feel so emphatic as to sound sarcastic, the internet’s version of ‘puh-leeze’ and ‘no, thank you’ and ‘srsly’ rolled into one tiny dot.” It can easily come across as passive-aggressive. Exclamation marks, moreover, “now convey warmth and sincerity”; failing to use them runs the risk of making the person you are messaging feel uncertain and anxious.
    1. Homer’s Greek is an amalgam of dialects from various regions and eras. It includes words and grammatical forms that were already puzzling Athenians in the fifth century B.C., when students had to read Homer in school.

      The Greek in Homer is an amalgamation of dialects which is an indicator that the works were aggregated from many sources and turned into a final finished work.

    2. Ultimately, the only evidence that such a person as Homer ever lived is the existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves.

      This makes me wonder what the linguistic origin of the name Homer is? Was it common/uncommon? Does it's root indicate anything about who Homer may have been?

  30. Oct 2021
    1. If it seems that some young people are more adept than their elders at handling multiple streams of information—at, say, doing their homework while also emailing, texting, Googling, Digging, iTuning, and Angry Birding—that may be a developmental difference rather than a cultural one.

      An uncommon verbing of iTunes as well as Angry Birds.

    2. Who’s Afraid of Digital Natives? Let’s not get intimidated by kids and their Internet savvy.

      This is a common trope/stereotype which since has generally turned out not to be true. While some of the generation at this time were more digitally savvy, on the whole it turns out that they aren't always as savvy as we thought or expected them to be.

      Note that this was written in 2011.

      When did the phrase "digital native" originate?

      Cross reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_nativen which indicates:

      Native–immigrant analogy terms, referring to age groups' relationships with and understanding of the Internet, were used as early as 1995 by John Perry Barlow in an interview,[9] and used again in 1996 as part of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

      The specific terms "digital native" and "digital immigrant" were popularized by education consultant Marc Prensky in his 2001 article entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, in which he relates the contemporary decline in American education to educators' failure to understand the needs of modern students.

  31. Sep 2021
    1. The weird way you tap or push a whole image of a page to the side—it’s the uncanny valley of page turning, not a simulation or replacement of it.

      This may be the first time I've seen uncanny valley applied to a topic other than recognizing people versus robots or related simulacra.

    1. -lit hours.60 There are few trades which are not described as honouring Saint Monday: shoemakers, tailors, colliers, printing workers, potters, weavers, hosiery workers, cutlers, all Cockneys. Despite the full employment of many London trades during the Napoleonic Wars, a witness complained that "we see Saint Monday so religiously kept in this great city.. . in general followed by a Saint Tuesday a

      Saint Monday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Monday

      I've frequently heard people say they hate Mondays, but I've never heard of the cultural phenomenon of Saint Monday.

    2. nabled Tristram to date his conception very exactly. It also provoked The Clockmaker's Outcry against the Author: The directions I had for making several clocks for the country are counter- manded; because no modest lady now dares to mention a word about winding- up a clock, without exposing herself to the sly leers and jokes of the family ... Nay, the common expression of street-walkers is, "Sir, will you have your clock wound up

      It also provoked The Clockmaker's Outcry against the author:

      [...] Nay, the common expression of street-walkers is, "Sir, will you have your clock wound up?"

      I've actually heard the euphemism clock in a sexual setting in my youth, but never heard the origin. This is the likely source. It's been 20 years or more since I've heard this in common speech though.

    1. Tran Ngoc, herself a musician, speculates that this is because flutists are trained to use sounds like t and k to help articulate notes crisply. “So there’s this link with language that might not be present for other instruments,” she says.

      I was taught something relatively similar for bits of kazoo and harmonica. I wonder if these effects would be seen in those settings as well?

    2. “With whistling, it was more like, let’s see what people did naturally to simplify the signal. What did they keep?” she says.
    3. In practice, almost every whistled tonal language chooses to use pitch to encode the tones.

      Why is pitch encoding of tones more prevalent in tonal languages? What is the efficiency and outcome of the speech and the information that can be encoded?

    4. Whistlers of tonal languages thus face a dilemma: Should they whistle the tones, or the vowels and consonants? “In whistling, you can produce only one of the two. They have to choose,” says Meyer.

      Non-tonal speech is easy to transfer into whistling language, but tonal languages have to choose between whistling the tones or the vowels and consonants as one can only produce one of the two with whistling.

      What effect does this tell us about the information content and density of languages, particularly tonal languages and whistling?

    5. Whistled languages are almost always developed by traditional cultures that live in rugged, mountainous terrain or in dense forest. That’s because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting, says Julien Meyer, a linguist and bioacoustician at CNRS, the French national research center, who explores the topic of whistled languages in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics.

      Rugged mountainous terrain and dense forests show a marked increase in the use of whistled languages as a means of carrying the sound further than ordinary speech or even shouting.

      Who'd have thought that geography would have such an influence on language outside of language spread?

    6. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'> Josh Cohen </span> in "More Than 80 Cultures Still Speak in Whistles" - Language Learning - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>09/01/2021 12:48:40</time>)</cite></small>