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Category Archives: Language
Book Review — The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
Author: David W. Anthony Publisher: Princeton University Press My first love in linguistics is probably the historical variety. But no one will pay me money to do that so I do all this computational stuff instead. Still, historical linguistics and … Continue reading
Posted in Books, History, Language, Science
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On Linguistics and Public Outreach
Earlier in the week A couple weeks ago, I posted three questions about science communication in the field of linguistics: Who is the Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson of linguistics? In other words, who do we have in linguistics … Continue reading
Posted in Language, Media, Science
Tagged communication, cosmos, linguistics, pr, science
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Statistics Aren’t Enough
There’s a cute quip: statistics don’t lie. There’s an accurate quip: statistics don’t lie, given a well-trained model and a large enough sample. With statistics on your side, you can be 99% sure that you’re right. Unfortunately, people who are … Continue reading
Posted in Language, Science
Tagged computational linguistics, linguistics, statistics, translation
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A Big-Ass Chart of Indo-European Languages
Other people make and eat massive amounts of food over the Thanksgiving weekend. I did that, too, but I also made a chart. A big-ass chart. There are many ways to chart a language family. You can do the traditional … Continue reading
Posted in History, Language
Tagged chart, indo-european, language family, linguistics, tree
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Book Review — Holy Sh*t!: A Brief History of Swearing
Author: Melissa Mohr Publisher: Oxford University Press Every once in a while you come across a book on a bookstore shelf that catches your eye simply because it’s got a dirty word right in the title. So it was with … Continue reading
The Language of Science: it’s OK to be prescriptivist
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Tumblr lately (I also post a lot of these blog posts on Tumblr, so yay!—built-in audience). To my surprise, I’ve discovered a not insignificant number of linguistically-oriented people on there. We talk … Continue reading
Posted in Language, Science
Tagged language, linguistics, prescriptivism, science, semantics
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In Defense of Semantic Quibbling
This is in the Bad Linguistics category, but not an official entry in the series, as I’d prefer to reserve that for scientifically inept interpretations of linguistic evidence, and not just people misunderstanding why linguistics matters, because that would generate … Continue reading
One nation, under God, in English only
You have got to be kidding me. Fury is brewing at Rocky Mountain High School, in Colorado, after a multicultural student group were encouraged to recite the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker in Arabic – replacing ‘one nation under … Continue reading
Posted in Language, Politics, Religion
Tagged Arabic, English, fuckwits, Islam, pledge of allegiance
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Bad Linguistics: purist fallacies
Linguistics is often misunderstood. It’s not a subject that gets taught in eighth grade, so the only people with much experience in it are specialists who pursue it in post-secondary education. As such, a number of fallacies persist among the … Continue reading
U guize u guize i found the gratest thing!!!11
To paraphrase the dad from My Big Fat Greek Wedding: give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is… Hebrew? Enter creationist linguistics. It hasn’t been a thing since Noah Webster in … Continue reading
Posted in Language, Religion, Science
Tagged creationism, fail, language, linguistics
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