Linguistics

As English as you can get in America... and probably around the world
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-that-speaks-elizabethan-english
@linguistics

Discussed are things like why kids say someone's been "unalived", some surprising etymologies (and how incel terminology is widespread on TikTok), why cottagecore exploded from nothing, and whether we're cooked.

I did find his weird movements distracting - there's not many slides so you can just listen and not miss anything.

Apparently he's better known as the Etymology Nerd online, so you may know the name already.

Don't like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like "f" and "v," opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Proto-Indo-European patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows "that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language," says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel's lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues "expected to prove Hockett wrong."

First, the six researchers used computer modeling to show that with an overbite, producing labiodentals takes 29% less effort than with an edge-to-edge bite. Then, they scrutinized the world's languages and found that hunter-gatherer languages have only about one-fourth as many labiodentals as languages from farming societies. Finally, they looked at the relationships among languages, and found that labiodentals can spread quickly, so that the sounds could go from being rare to common in the 8000 years since the widespread adoption of agriculture and new food processing methods such as grinding grain into flour.

Bickel suggests that as more adults developed overbites, they accidentally began to use "f" and "v" more. In ancient India and Rome, labiodentals may have been a mark of status, signaling a softer diet and wealth, he says. Those consonants also spread through other language groups; today, they appear in 76% of Indo-European languages.

Linguist Nicholas Evans of Australian National University in Canberra finds the study's "multimethod approach to the problem" convincing. Ian Maddieson, an emeritus linguist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, isn't sure researchers tallied the labiodentals correctly but agrees that the study shows external factors like diet can alter the sounds of speech.

The findings also suggest our facility with f-words comes at a cost. As we lost our ancestral edge-to-edge bite, "we got new sounds but maybe it wasn't so great for us," Moran says. "Our lower jaws are shorter, we have impacted wisdom teeth, more crowding—and cavities."

*Correction, 15 March, 11:10 a.m.: This story erroneously stated that the newly favored consonants led to the replacement of the Latin patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago. Patēr came not from Latin, but from the Proto-Indo-European language that gave rise to Latin and other languages in Europe and Asia.

Mind you this is all very fuzzy, take with salt.

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Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.

"The authors found that whale song showed the same key statistical properties present in all known human languages" - my guess is that the author talks about Zipf's Law, that applies to both phoneme frequency and word frequency in human languages.

[Dr. Garland] "Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language." - so while it is not language yet it's considerably closer to language than we'd expect, specially from non-primates.

from Yuri Shevelov's Prehistory of Slavic (1964)

The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is interesting. Quick summary:

A new ancient population was recognised, based on genetic data. This population has been called the Caucasus-Lower Volga population, or "CLV". They were from 4500~3500BCE, tech-wise from the Copper Age, and lived in the steppes between the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga. .

About 80% of the Yamnaya population comes from those people; and at least 10% of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, where Hittite was spoken, also comes from the CLV population. The hypothesis being raised is that the CLV population was composed of Early Proto-Indo-European speakers (the text calls it "Indo-Anatolian").

I'd like to begin by saying I'm no linguist. However, I've come to notice that memes and expressions are pretty similar.

• Expressions are sentences (or sometimes just words) that are repeated, with their own meaning and backstory.

• Internet memes can be an image, a sentence or a behaviour that is spread through the internet.

I know it can easily be explained by the fact that cultures spread, but it's more the repetitive nature of both that got me curious. Are they related in some way?

Found this article in the longreads community arguing why "politically correct" terms shouldn't be used. You guys have any thoughts?

We invite participants to benchmark systems for word sense induction (WSI) across multiple languages. Unlike traditional approaches, this task evaluates WSI without relying on predefined sense inventories, offering a more theoretically plausible framework for understanding word meanings.

Participants will be provided with:

• A set of polysemous target headwords.
• Sentences containing these words in diverse contexts.

The goal is to cluster the sentences according to the sense in which the target word is used.

A different set of headwords and contexts will be provided for each of the following languages: English, Czech, German, Spanish, Estonian, Chinese

For each language, there will be approximately 25 headwords with 1500+ contexts each.

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/1499265

What a Christmas present!

Italo-Celtic is a hypothetical branch of the Indo-European languages. If that branch is real, it means that the Italic and Celtic languages are closer to each other than to other Indo-European languages.

This hypothesis has been raised multiple times in the past, due to a few shared morphological features between Italic and Celtic languages; for example, the *-ism̥mo- superlative. But that's on its own weak evidence, so this genomic data makes wonders to reinforce this hypothesis.

And also to bury the competing (IMO rather silly) Italo-Germanic one.

Graeco-Armenian is similar to the above, but between the Hellenic languages and Armenian. There were lots of competing hypotheses "tying" both branches to other "random" Indo-European branches; for example I've seen Indo-Greek, Italo-Greek, Armeno-Germanic, Armeno-Albanian...

As W. Labov has passed away, I came across a comment reposting this screenshotted request, along with the paper in question:

https://betsysneller.github.io/pdfs/Labov1966-Rabbit.pdf

The paper is quite a rollercoaster, ranging from describing of disturbingly racist ideas about native Hawaiian and Black children that some scientists still pushed at the time (1970!*), to Labov's own disarmingly cute and humane solution to the issue of testing children's language abilities.

Edit: *1970 - according to the article itself, which is apparently based on Labov's 1970 talk; however, the URL suggests that the article was published in 1966, which is contradictory. I'll try to find out where and when this was actually published...

Edit 2: It looks like it is from 1970, from Working Papers in Communication, vol. 1 (Honolulu: Pacific Speech Association). It is surprising that a recently published book also claims that it's from 1966, probably the authors got the file from the same URL with the wrong year.

Edit 3: The original Twitter thread: https://xcancel.com/betsysneller/status/1516848959284678656

William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side.

Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is working on a longer, more detailed appreciation.

Source: https://toot.community/@yvanspijk/113629940623815710