Posts tagged Grammar

Culturomics Looks at the Birth and Death of Words

infoneer-pulse:

Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper drawing on Google’s massive collection of scanned books. They claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words.

The paper marks an advance in a new field dubbed “Culturomics”: the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Last year a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists, plus the Google Books team, showed off the kinds of things that could be done with Google’s data, which include the contents of five-million-plus books, dating back to 1800.

Published in Science, that paper gave the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has 348,000). More than half of the language, the authors wrote, is “dark matter” that has evaded standard dictionaries.

The paper also tracked word usage through time (each year, for instance, 1% of the world’s English-speaking population switches from “sneaked” to “snuck”). It also showed that we seem to be putting history behind us more quickly, judging by the speed with which terms fall out of use. References to the year “1880” dropped by half in the 32 years after that date, while the half-life of “1973” was a mere decade.

» via The Wall Street Journal (Subscription may be required for some content)

One million words in the English language!

We Interrupt This Program to Bring You Some Grammar

Who, whom, which, that, lay, lie: 20 Common Grammar Mistakes that (Almost) Everyone Makes.

My personal peeve is adding “from” before “whence” and using “penultimate” as the last rather than second to last of a series. — Michael

The Grammar of Social Media

As technology evolves and words become more commonplace, debates emerge about their actual spelling. Blog author Kerry Jones attempts to do something about that:

New words entering common use but not yet part of mainstream language are called neologisms (impress your next dinner party with that one). It can take years before standards are set for a new word, and even then those rules and suggestions may continue changing. For example, within the last year the Associated Press Stylebook made two notable changes to online terms: e-mail is finally email, and Web site is now website (although the former is still acceptable). 

With the addition of “OMG” to the dictionary, it is hard to imagine what the dictionary of the future will look like. 

First evidence that birds tweet using grammar

inothernews:

bringtheruckuss:

They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules.

related link

“Ironically,” said the bird grammarian, “their tweets are generally more than 140 characters.”

For the Lulz.