Posts Tagged ‘linguistics’
“X marks the spot”*…
A reprise (because it’s just so much fun): the challenge facing pre-20th century alphabet book authors…
In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, a groundbreaking moment in medical history which would lead to myriad improvements to people’s health. Perhaps one overlooked benefit though was in relation to mental health, specifically of those tasked with making alphabet books. How did they represent the letter X before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of “xylophone”) until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?
As we see… in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there’s also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too…
Many more amusing examples: “X is for...” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we wrestle with representation, we might spare a thought for Thomas Young; he died on this date 1829. A polmath described as “the last man who knew everything,” he made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, musical harmony, and Egyptology. His work influenced that of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. Young is credited with establishing Christiaan Huygens’ wave theory of light (in contrast to the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton).
Further, Young was an astute student of languages. He noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. He went further, analyzing 400 languages spread across continents and millennia and proved that the overlap between some of them was too extensive to be an accident. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. He named it “Indo-European.”
And Young was instrumental in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
“Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it.”*…
Liz Tracey on Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language— and the way that it declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies…
Sometimes, a dictionary is more than just words and definitions—it may be intended to serve as a declaration of linguistic independence. When Noah Webster’s first edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language was published in April 1828, it held 70,000 words, 12,000 of which were making their first appearance in dictionary form. Webster’s goals for the work were grand: “to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.”
Noah Webster’s roles in the formation of the early United States were manifold: editor of the Federalist Papers, owner and editor of the first American daily newspaper [see below], textbook author, a founder of Amherst College, promoter of the first US copyright laws, and author of one of the first works on epidemiology, used by nineteenth-century medical schools.
But his 1828 dictionary is what he’s remembered for, coming at a tremendous personal cost: twenty-one years invested, and a lifelong struggle with debt. In his preface to the three-volume work, he writes of his hopes that the dictionary will result in his fellow Americans’ “improvement and their happiness; and for the continued increase of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation of character, and the glory of my country.”…
More at: “Webster’s Dictionary 1828: Annotated,” from @liztracey in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
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As we vindicate vernacular, we might recall that it was on this date in 1846 that the first edition of the Cambridge Chronicle was published. One of the earliest weeklies in the U.S., it served the newly-incorporated city of Cambridge, MA– using language consistent with Webster’s dictionary. (Nearby Boston was home to the first U.S. newspaper, the Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which was founded in 1690 (albeit short-lived).
The Cambridge Chronicle is technically the longest continuously-published weekly newspaper in the U.S… though it ceased original serving up original content in 2022, after being purchased by Gannett. It now re-publishes regional stories from other Gannett papers.
As for Webster, he began his journalistic career in 1779, writing articles for New England newspapers justifying the Revolutionary War. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton recruited him to edit the leading Federalist Party newspaper; then in December of that year, Webster founded New York’s (and the new American nation’s) first daily newspaper American Minerva, later renamed the Commercial Advertiser, which he edited for four years (writing the equivalent of 20 volumes of articles and editorials).
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”*…
And as Gail Sherman observes, that principle operates at a pretty basic level…
There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is—a particular sequence to use when more than one adjective precedes a noun. There are exceptions, of course, because English is three languages in a trenchcoat. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, in general, the proper order is:
Opinion
Size
Physical quality
Shape
Age
Color
Origin
Material
Type
PurposeMost people couldn’t tell you this rule, but everyone follows it. If you use the wrong order, it just sounds weird. If you have a fancy new blue metal lunchbox but call it a metal new fancy blue lunchbox, people might be worried you are having a stroke…
“There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is,” from @CambridgeWords via @BoingBoing.
* Tom Stoppard
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As we parse, we might send powerfully-phrased birthday greetings to a spare but graceful user of adjectives, Seymour Wilson “Budd” Schulberg; he was born on this date in 1914. A screenwriter, television producer, novelist, and sportswriter, Schulberg is best remembered for his novels What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and The Harder They Fall (1947), as well as his screenplays for On the Waterfront (1954, for which he received an Academy Award) and A Face in the Crowd (1957).
As a sportswriter, Schulberg was most famously chief boxing correspondent for Sports Illustrated. He wrote some well-received books on boxing, including Sparring with Hemingway and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame (in 2002).
The son of B. P. Schulberg, head of Paramount Studios in its golden age, Budd wrote Moving Pictures: Memoirs of a Hollywood Prince, an autobiography covering his youth in Hollywood, growing up in the 1920s and 1930s among the famous.
“The evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today”*…
Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. As Kurt Kleiner reports, a controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer…
Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.
Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Along the way, they’ve come up with theories about who its original speakers were, where and how they lived, and how their language spread so widely.
Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.
The computational technique used in the new analysis is hotly disputed among linguists. But its proponents say it promises to bring more quantitative rigor to the field, and could possibly push key dates further into the past, much as radiocarbon dating did in the field of archaeology…
Fascinating– both for what it suggests about our linguistic roots and for the epistemological questions it raises: “A new look at our linguistic roots,” from @kgkleiner in @KnowableMag.
Apposite: “Flow of time: reality or illusion?” (on language and our experience of time)
* Richard Leakey
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As we untangle tongues, we might spare a thought for Leonard Woolley; he died on this date in 1960. An archaeologist, he is best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia— for which he is recognized as one of the first “modern” archaeologists, who excavated in a methodical way, keeping careful records, and using them to reconstruct ancient life and history.
His work greatly advanced knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, enabling scholars to trace the history of the city from its final days during the 4th century BC back to its prehistoric beginnings (c. 4000 BC). His finds revealed much about everyday life, art, architecture, government, religion– and relevantly to the piece above, language and literature– in this “cradle of civilization.”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”*…
In an excerpt from his book A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think, Caleb Everett on the underappreciated importance of syntax and recursion in our languages…
Words are combined into phrases and sentences in a dazzling array of patterns, collectively referred to as syntax. The complexity of syntax has long confounded researchers. Consider, for example, the previous sentence. There are all sorts of patterns in the order of the words of that sentence, patterns that are familiar to you and me and other speakers of English. Those patterns are critical to the transmission of meaning and to how we think as we create sentences. It was no coincidence that I put “complexity” after “the,” or “syntax” after “of,” or “researchers” after “confounded,” to cite just three examples of many in that sentence alone. You and I know that “researchers” should follow the main verb of this particular sentence, in this case “confounded.” If I put that word somewhere else it would change the sentence’s meaning or make it confusing. And we know that articles like “the” should precede nouns, as should prepositions like “of.” These and other patterns, sometimes referred to as “rules” as though they represented inviolable edicts voted on by a committee, help to give English sentences a predictable ordering of words. It is this predictable ordering that is usually referred to when linguists talk about a language’s syntax.
Without syntax, it would seem, statements could not be understood, because they would be transferred from speaker to hearer in a jumbled mess of words. This is, it turns out, a bit of an oversimplification since a number of the world’s languages do not have rule-governed word order to the extent that English does. Still, let us stick with the oversimplification for now, because it hints at something meaningful about speech…
An illuminating read: “What Makes Language Human?” via @lithub.
* George Orwell, 1984
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As we contemplate cogitation and communication, we might spare a thought for Sigismund Schlomo “Sigmund” Freud; he died on this date in 1939. A neurologist, he was the founder of psychoanalysis– a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Freud’s psychoanalysis further complicated our thinking about language: In his theory dreams are instigated by the daily occurrences and thoughts of everyday life. In what Freud called the “dream-work”, these “secondary process” thoughts (“word presentations”), governed by the rules of language and the reality principle, become subject to the “primary process” of unconscious thought (“thing presentations”) governed by the pleasure principle, wish gratification, and the repressed sexual scenarios of childhood.
Jacques Lacan built on Freud’s approach, emphasizing linguistics and literature. Lacan believed that most of Freud’s essential work had been done before 1905 and concerned the interpretation of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and slips, which had been based on a revolutionary way of understanding language and its relation to experience and subjectivity, and that ego psychology and object relations theory were based upon misreadings of Freud’s work. For Lacan (as, in a way, for the author above), the determinative dimension of human experience is neither the self (as in ego psychology) nor relations with others (as in object relations theory), but language.
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