Several linguists criticize prescriptivism. Stephen Pinker is probably the one to have made the strongest case against it. But, is their criticism based on a methodological principle (the abstraction of value judgements) or is it a statement of fact (that everything has the same value)?
For exa...
He doesn't look like he would bite anyone's nose off for making up fake Latin! Oh no no no! dangles toy in front of paws and keeps nose at safe distance
@Cerberus scratches behind ears Tha's a good widdle hellhound, he is.
So big and strong and protecting that doggie door from all those nasty-wasty intruders already.
Dear Persephone, look at the time! I must quit being a computer zombie. I don't know what you're doing awake, either, puppies. Sun must be up on your side of the earth, or nearly!
For example, Latin is used as a source language for scientific terms in many European languages, and English is used as a source for technology-related terms in other languages
@Cerberus: you've used "advise" as a noun instead of "advice" in your answer linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/155/… - i can't suggest it because it's only one character, and there are already heaps of big comments
It used to be (warning, I am not unbiased and the lists are not exhaustive):
UG-crowd:
We can learn everything there is to know about language by studying the English of people with linguistics doctorates and English as their L1.
Corpora only shows performance and performance is irrelevant.
M...
It is generally accepted that the nominal forms in the Romance languages represent reflexes of the Latin accusative rather than the nominative. (This is even true for those languages that have masculine plurals in -i, which is actually a regular reflex of -os.)
However, I'm aware of exactly one ...
@hippietrail It's not just to sound important, it's to make it sound like something is actually going to get done ;) ("going forward" is one of my pet peeves too)
The concept of lexical set is a useful technique for differentiating accents or dialects within a language. A lexical set is a set of all words/syllables that are pronounced with the same vowel. These sets partition the syllables in the language, and then how different sets might merge (like the ...
The linguistics wars as defined on Wikipedia was not over when I left academe some five years ago.
It used to be (warning, I am not unbiased and the lists are not exhaustive):
Universal Grammar-crowd:
We can learn everything there is to know about language by studying the English of people w...
hopefully people will read my comments before putting the last close vote in. or at least help to formulate a new question that does work after closing it
Are /ɕ/ and /ʑ/ simply shorthand for /sʲ/ and /zʲ/ as with many of the possible diacritic combinations in IPA or are they different sounds? If they are the same, is there any good reason to use one over the other? If not, how are they different?
@hippietrail I agree also; I think you said something to this effect earlier in chat or on meta, with which I agreed. This is why I have not thrown in to close, but I'm also struggling to think how this particular question could be reframed in a way that is not very broad and discussion-like
hasty or overzealous stuff between well meaning contributors cost us a very good guy during the japanese l&u beta, ended up deleting all his contributions and leaving
@hippietrail Some of the interesting points I see raised by that question are: -What were the key differences between UG/generative grammar involved in the 'linguistics wars'? -What are the current schools of thought or theories used in studying linguistics?
@Cerberus I love finding dupes though. It's like some perverse satisfaction from acting as a human search engine
one thing i hate is how the dupe text specifically goes out of its way to say "exact" dupe but many closed dupes are set vs. subset which is specifically not an exact dupe
@hippietrail I always try to just link them as related things in a comment when they're really really subset-y, but sometimes people want to close them anyway
I once found three questions that were each a subset of a question asking about like, once, twice, thrice or something like that. That day was a triumph
@hippietrail That, and I am very sceptical about the positive results of closing questions that aren't just low quality. I don't believe in the "science" that Jeff etc. seem to believe in.
@aediaλ Don't you find searching for duplicates tedious? I always have the feeling that it takes forever, that I'm probably still missing many others, and that there are loads of other questions that also have duplicates, but that no-one ever has the time to research. It's just not really feasible.
I once suggested compiling a list of Very Common Questions, by hand, which would be displayed next to the box where you type a new question. That should weed out most of the dupes.
@hippietrail Those are good examples of vagueness. "Off topic", perhaps the most common closing reason, is also vague, and very arbitrary and inconsistent to boot. shrug But that's the way things are.
@Evpok Hah, now that looks like Mohammed scolding Christ...
that's why downvotes and close votes should be accompanied with constructive messages. sometimes though i just upvote a constructive message somebody already made
@Cerberus A little, but if there's already a good answer to one that exists, and I post a comment telling someone that it's related to their question, I feel like that may help (especially if I can't write a good answer to their question). I dunno... I guess I feel like if I know of a helpful thing, and I have time, I have some sort of duty to tell people about it.
@Evpok Someone called Chomskeyism a religion here. I was calling your monitor Mohammed for being categorically against anything Chomskeyan... I didn't mean any of that seriously, of course!
on SO i want very definite answers and sometimes you don't know the terminology so how the question has been asked before could be very different in ways you couldn't guess
@Cerberus Ah. Well, that's a weird comparison but I think I understand. Fact is Chomskian theories might be useful for some advanced syntax theories, but for NLP, since we don't expect to have the computation power the demand in near future.
Ah, I had forgotten the sociolinguists, of course. The half of Labov's first book is about bashing GG.
@hippietrail Yes. It's called computational linguistics by some. Actually everything we do in NLP is like this. We devise an elegant, exhaustive and powerful solution to a given issue, only to find that no computer has the power to use it. Then we fall back to twisted workarounds and partial solutions.
i was in a bar in mexico and we lost electricity. the owner lit candles and closed the front door so more people wouldn't come. one of the other guys there was welsh. we drank. he taught. i learned.
I'm trying to build a cognitive model of how people learn a event representation from a sentence describing the event, based on St. John & McClelland's Sentence Gestalt Model.
However, while that model generated its own sentences based on the event to be described, I'm hoping to find a cor...
Is there a difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative consonant cluster?
According to wikipedia, there is a difference between a plosive+fricative sequence, as in the following example
catch it /kæt.ʃɪt/
cat shit /kæt͡ʃ.ɪt/
But I honestly can't hear the phonetic difference unles...
phonology vs phonetics would probably be worth doing, I think. It seems to me we should consider visitors with no training in linguistics, and that question is likely to come up
Oh, it's an expert site? I retract, then... All my observations should be taken with a healthy dollop of consideration of my newbishness to this particular site :)
I could imagine a very good answer to that question developing, especially if it's a community wiki question. Such an answer would be of benefit to a lot of new students of linguistics
I've run across a couple answers where the phonology/phonetics came up in the answer
For almost 400 years, Britain was a Roman province. During that period, naturally, Latin was an important language in the region. When the Germanic tribes invaded the British Isles (around the 5th century), they brought with them several Germanic dialects that ended up becoming the predominant la...
Having practiced armchair linguistics for some years I should be able to sum up the difference off the top of my head, yet often I don't know which term to use.
And looking them up on Wikipedia doesn't help a lot...
Wikipedia on phonology:
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline o...
I certainly think there is no clear-cut answer, as in "it is because of x, period"; you'd probably need a book to describe the relevant centuries to answer it. But that doesn't mean there aren't certain important points from this hypothetical book (it may in fact exist) that are more or less consensual.
My guess would be that immigration from the heart of the Empire to Britain was much less than that to Gaul and Spain. Robusto's point that it belonged to the Empire for a much shorter time also plays a part. Then religion might be of importance: it is possible that Britain was still mostly heathen when it was lost to the barbarians, as opposed to Gaul; that gave Britain one opportunity less to preserve certain aspects of its Roman culture, like the Latin language.
@OtavioMacedo @AlainPannetier provided me some on a related topic. His sources claims that English is not quite Germanic, but rather a creole of British (celtic) / Germanic. It may or may not answer your question.
i hadn't heard it about celtic+germanic=english before though. i wonder if there's a new trend of analysing modern langauges as mixed languages, they're different from creoles aren't they?
But I really think the most relevant information is to be found in the degree of Romanization before Britain was lost, the degree of continuity in societal structures afterwards, and the practices of the various invaders.
Historical questions like these usually depend on various details in local circumstances that cannot be guessed at a glance.
@hippietrail I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but afaik mixed languages stem from contact area between two languages, with languages of equal status and creole from contacts between the languages of dominant/dominated
:Not to be confused with Pigeon. For the instant messaging client, see Pidgin (software).
A pidgin (), or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside (but where there is no common language between the groups). Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as it is constructed impromptu, or by conventi...
@Cerberus Yes. French phonological system also owes much to Germanic and Celtic. see french.stackexchange.com/questions/887/…. And some particularities in grammar.
A creole is defined as a pidgin (or trading language) which becomes a full language after being used by a new generation as their first language. Generally they take most of their grammar from one parent langauge and most of their vocabulary from the other.
But recently I have heard of a term "m...
Suppose that, in some hypothetical language, there were two different words:
/tump/
/tump/
What's the difference?, you might ask. In the first one, the word is one syllable long. In the second one, the word is two syllables long because the /m/ is syllabic.
How do you express this difference...
It's common for the language of an area to have replaced an older language previously spoken there. The new language typically will have a few words which can be traced to the old language and the old language will be called a "substrate". For instance Romanian has several words believed to be fr...
For example, Latin is used as a source language for scientific terms in many European languages, and English is used as a source for technology-related terms in other languages
It used to be (warning, I am not unbiased and the lists are not exhaustive):
UG-crowd:
We can learn everything there is to know about language by studying the English of people with linguistics doctorates and English as their L1.
Corpora only shows performance and performance is irrelevant.
M...
Are /ɕ/ and /ʑ/ simply shorthand for /sʲ/ and /zʲ/ as with many of the possible diacritic combinations in IPA or are they different sounds? If they are the same, is there any good reason to use one over the other? If not, how are they different?
I'm trying to build a cognitive model of how people learn a event representation from a sentence describing the event, based on St. John & McClelland's Sentence Gestalt Model.
However, while that model generated its own sentences based on the event to be described, I'm hoping to find a cor...
lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks
lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks