Posts tagged language
When Nouns Grew Genitals
Slate explores why many languages have masculine and feminine classes for nouns but not English. In this first of a series of podcasts on the roots of language, they try to figure out what gendered nouns mean for the way we look at the world.
Mapping Wikipedia
Via Tracemedia:
Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualisation of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa…
…The project was developed using the excellent Open Layers. To display the large number of articles we wrote a subclass of the Open Layers Canvas renderer, and optimised for point plotting. As a fallback for browsers that don’t support canvas we included the FlashCanvas shim.
The Google basemap was produced using the Styled Map Wizard
To glue everything together we used jQuery.
Image: English, by Wordcount in Europe. Via Tracemedia.
H/T: Flowing Data
The Secret Life of "Dude"
Though [“dude”] seems distinctly American, it had an interesting birth: one of its first written appearances came in 1883, in the American magazine, which referred to “the social ‘dude’ who affects English dress and the English drawl”. The teenage American republic was already a growing power, with the economy booming and the conquest of the West well under way. But Americans in cities often aped the dress and ways of Europe, especially Britain. Hence dude as a dismissive term: a dandy, someone so insecure in his Americanness that he felt the need to act British. It’s not clear where the word’s origins lay. Perhaps its mouth-feel was enough to make it sound dismissive.
From the specific sense of dandy, dude spread out to mean an easterner, a city slicker, especially one visiting the West. Many westerners resented the dude, but some catered to him. Entrepreneurial ranchers set up ranches for tourists to visit and stay and pretend to be cowboys themselves, giving rise to the “dude ranch”.
By the 1950s or 1960s, dude had been bleached of specific meaning. In black culture, it meant almost any male; one sociologist wrote in 1967 of a group of urban blacks he was studying that “these were the local ‘dudes’, their term meaning not the fancy city slickers but simply ‘the boys’, ‘fellas’, the ‘cool people’.”
From the black world it moved to hip whites, and so on to its enduring associations today—California, youth, cool. In “Easy Rider” (1969) Peter Fonda explains it to the square Jack Nicholson: “Dude means nice guy. Dude means a regular sort of person.” And from this new, broader, gentler meaning, dude went vocative.
H/T: 3 Quarks Daily
The Life and Death of Words
Words, like plants and animals, fight for survival and an international group of scientists studying English, Spanish and Hebrew believe that many — in general — are dying off.
Their killer? Editors.
Via Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death (PDF):
The modern era of publishing, which is characterized by more strict editing procedures at publishing houses, computerized word editing and automatic spell-checking technology, shows a drastic increase in the death rate of words. Using visual inspection we verify most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10–20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words.
The Guardian clarifies this a bit by killing off some difficult words of their own and getting straight to the point about how words live and how words die:
But it is not only “defective” words that die: sometimes words are driven to extinction by aggressive competitors. The word “Roentgenogram”, for example, deriving from the discoverer of the x-ray, William Röntgen, was widely used for several decades in the 20th century, but, challenged by “x-ray” and “radiogram”, has now fallen out of use entirely. X-ray had beaten off its synonyms by 1980, speculate the academics, owing to its “efficient short word length” and since the English language is generally used for scientific publication. “Each of the words is competing to be a monopoly on who gets to be the name,” [Joel] Tenenbaum told the American Physical Society.
The phrase “the great war”, meanwhile, used for a period to describe the first world war, fell out of use around 1939 when another war of equal proportions hit the world.
Takeaway: Language is a giant Darwinian battle for linguistic supremacy. Choose yours selectively.
Video: MIT’s Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel illustrate what we can learn from analyzing 500 billion words via Google Books and its related Ngram Viewer which gives us the ability to enter words and phrases into a search engine in order to view their frequency over time.
Language Maps, Then and Now
(via Utne Reader)
The Proposed United States of Greater Austria
By the middle of the 19th century, Europeans were beginning to identify more with their own nationality and language than with their imperial governments… and a lot of this had to do with language. The maps themselves are pretty telling. The boundary between, say, Russia and Austria is a single red line, thin and elegant. But large colored sections with labels like Ukrainian and White Russian straddle the borders, and form large, amorphous blobs across much of Eastern Europe. Because people are less predictable than countries—or at least less tidy—there seems to be little rhyme or reason… From this information, it’s clear in hindsight that big changes were in store for Europe.
Twitter Languages Across Europe
Today, borders are a lot less important. Innovations like the Schengen Area have made a ghost of centuries of European warfare, and trade pacts around the world further delegitimize official boundaries. A lot of this change is based on communication. By the numbers, Facebook is the third largest country on earth, and Verizon is (economically) bigger than Peru. Aside from their sheer size, it’s also clear that social media networks, like European languages, are making political boundaries even less significant.
Images via Utne Reader and Big Think
Poetry of Code Meets Code of Poetry
Via Wired:
Artist and engineer Ishac Bertran has launched a project that invites people to submit poetry written in any coding language. These code poems will be considered for publication in a book.
A code poem is simply a poem written in any programming language including C++, HTML, C#, SQL, Objective C, Applescript and Java. Bertran had the idea when he was discussing with friends how it was possible to recognize the author of a piece of code from their programming style.
“I thought this was not far from traditional literature, where writers develop their own style,” Bertran told Wired.co.uk. “Following the connection, code language is very much like any other language — it has its own rules and it serves to communicate, with computers in that case. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to use code to communicate with humans, in a very traditional and evocative way: code in a poetry book.
Code poets can submit their masterworks to Code Poems. Criteria is that the are under .5k and that they actually compile.
The exact details of the buyout, technically a voluntary Separation Incentive Program, will come later.
Memo to Washington Post staff that the newspaper plans to lay off — err, offer a Separation Incentive Program to — 200 20* people. Via the New York Times.
*Correction: WaPo is cutting 20 positions.
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 Great Debate: Geek Versus Nerd
Interesting etymological notes from Wikipedia:
Formerly, in 18th century Austria-Hungary, Gecken were freaks shown by some circuses. In 19th century, in North-America, the term geek referred to a freak in circus side-shows (see also freak show). In some cases, its performance included biting the head off a live chicken. The 1976 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary included only the definition regarding geek shows.
“Nerd” entered the English language via Dr. Seuss’ If I Ran The Zoo with this line: ”And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo/And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo/A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!”
Image: Detail from Geek Vs Nerd via Memeburn.
Missed this the other day but Merriam-Webster’s 2011 word of the year is “pragmatic”.
Via Merriam-Webster:
The list reflects the interests and attitudes of visitors from around the world to Merriam-Webster.com and LearnersDictionary.com and is determined by the volume of user look-ups on those sites.
Topping the list is pragmatic, meaning “practical as opposed to idealistic,” which received an unprecedented number of user lookups throughout 2011. Pragmatic is not associated with any one event but instead describes “an admirable quality that people value in themselves and wish for in others, especially in their leaders and their policies,” said Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large at Merriam-Webster. “It’s a word that resonates with society as a whole; something people want to understand fully.”
Number two on the list was ambivalence…
In 2010, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was “Austerity”. 2009 saw “Admonish” and “Bailout” was all the rage in 2008.
2007 harkened back to more optimistic times. Back then, “W00t” topped the list.
Image via CBS News.
Would You Like Some Technology with your Language?
A is for antivirus. B is for blogosphere. L is for LOL. And P is for pwned.
From lolcat to textspeak: How technology is shaping our language.
Speaking of lolcats, perhaps you’ve seen the LOLCat Bible Translation Project?
It kicks off, naturally enough, with Genesis, Chapter 1:
Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs
Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!
Arabic fastest growing language on Twitter.
In October 2011, more than 2 million public messages were posted every day on Twitter in Arabic, from about 30 000 in July 2010, a study of 5.6 billion tweets reveals….
The volume of Arabic messages has multiplied by 22 (+2 146%) in the last 12 months. Arabic is now the 8th most used language on Twitter, and Arabic messages represent 1.2% of all public tweets (2.2M per day). With recent events, Twitter has grown exceptionally fast in the Middle East. Although they are not part of the top 10 most used languages, Farsi (+350% in one year, but only 50K messages per day) and Turkish (+290%, 0.8% of all tweets) have also grown fast over the period.
Thai, the 9th most used language on Twitter, also increased significantly (+470% in one year).
Noteworthily, Twitter’s website, translated into 17 languages, is not available in Thai nor Arabic yet.
As English takes over the world, it’s splintering and changing — and soon, we may not recognize it at all — Salon.
Salon excerpts “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English,” a new book by Heny Hitchens:
We excerpt Salon:
In places where English is used as a second language, its users often perceive it as free from the limitations of their native languages. They associate it with power and social status, and see it as a supple and sensuous medium for self-expression. It symbolizes choice and liberty. But while many of those who do not have a grasp of the language aspire to learn it, there are many others who perceive it as an instrument of oppression, associated not only with imperialism but also with the predations of capitalism and Christianity. (It is mainly thanks to Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet about imperialism and capitalism that the two words have come to be pretty much synonymous.) The Australian scholar Alastair Pennycook neatly sums up English’s paradoxical status as ‘a language of threat, desire, destruction and opportunity’. Its spread can be seen as a homogenizing (some would say, Americanizing) force, eroding the integrity of other cultures. Yet it is striking that the language is appropriated locally in quite distinct ways. Some times it is used against the very powers and ideologies it is alleged to represent. Listening to Somali or Indonesian rappers, for instance, it seems sloppy to say that the use of English in their lyrics is a craven homage to the commercial and cultural might of America.
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