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Tag Archives: linguistics
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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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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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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Research update #2 and the Softest Hard Science
I’m writing an annotation specification. If that sounds really tedious and science-y, it probably is, but I think that when most people think “linguistics,” the first free-association word isn’t “science.” But depending on how you look at it, linguistics is … Continue reading
Holy crap, I want to work on this!
UC Berkley is welding two of my linguistic loves: large amounts of data and dead languages. I have to try and bring this kind of thing to Brandeis. We love large amounts of properly formatted data. I’ve always had a … Continue reading
Posted in Language
Tagged corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, linguistics, machine learning
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Sexist pronouns
There’s a problem with English. Okay, there are lots of problems with English, from a spelling system that hasn’t been made sense since the 15th century to an undue love of Latin grammatical standards in a language that wasn’t made … Continue reading