Assorted Language Questions

[Gori the Grey]

Google tried inserting umms and arrs into synthetic speech algorithms to make them more like actual human speech.

Over in the AI thread they show a little robot

The AI Thread

You can easily get ChatGPT to run about shooting stuff If you give it doom, running in Matlab You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself working with GPT-4. And you may ask yourself, "Will GPT-4 run DOOM?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"...

forums.civfanatics.com

and they've given him a little backstep in his voice when he answers certain questions. They're getting better and better at mimicking every little nuance of our vocal patterns.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Over in the AI thread they show a little robot

The AI Thread

You can easily get ChatGPT to run about shooting stuff If you give it doom, running in Matlab You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself working with GPT-4. And you may ask yourself, "Will GPT-4 run DOOM?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"...

forums.civfanatics.com

and they've given him a little backstep in his voice when he answers certain questions. They're getting better and better at mimicking every little nuance of our vocal patterns.

Thanks again. That paper on code-switching showed me how much linguistics has advanced over the last 40 years. And how out of my depth I am!

We usually hand out Koala stamps for such an effort. Instead, here is a rare old Lithuanian saying that you can use (in translation) to be the life of any party.

Dabar ožka ateis prie vežimo!
Now the goat will come to the cart!
The meaning is: Now we're getting going!

I haven't been able to find the origin of the saying. Some oldies here said it could be a Lithuanian Gypsy saying from the 19th century.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Things that are doin' me 'ed in #1 - WEIRD biases in linguistics.

No doubt linguistic students are taught much of this nowadays, but I remember it only started to be taken seriously in anthropology in the 1980s.

Some Papuan post-docs in Canberra went to California and asked similar questions to what anthropologists ask Papuans, but in a kind of "reverse" way.
"Is it true that when you die, you leave all of your wealth to dogs?"
"Do you bury your dead in the ground, so that worms eat their flesh away?
"Do you understand how babies are made?"

The end result was that the subjects felt insulted and belittled and the "study" did not last very long. The Papuans were "told", in effect, but not in so many words: "Listen up, jungle bunny, we're the ones who ask the questions around here!"

But back to language.
Over the last 20 years many linguists have become dissatisfied with Chomsky's generative grammar and his notion of "universal grammar". Chomsky himself found difficulty shoehorning many first nation Australian languages into his framework.

Most of the difficulties in the language models that were developed over the last few decades are related to the underlying assumptions of homogeneity between all languages.

About 15 to 20 years ago, this dissatisfaction led to a very useful but (IMO) rather ugly, forced acronym: WEIRD -
Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies.

It was found that >95% of claims about languages (and anthropology) were based on WEIRD languages. This is despite non-WEIRD languages representing the majority of the world's languages.

The bias is easy to understand - most researchers are at universities and institutions that study WEIRD languages; the individuals that are studied are those who speak WEIRD languages. IOW, follow the (grant) money.
WEIRD bias in IQ tests are well known. (Simple concepts for us, like triangles and other 2D objects are not something familiar to many other cultures. They just don't think in those terms.)

Our concepts of time are expressed in language in terms of past, present and future tense. Some non-WEIRD languages have different ways, e.g. they have only future and non-future tense, some have up to 7 tenses, and some don't have tense at all.

WEIRD languages have many idioms and expressions that encode the passing of time, but they all seem to have the underlying notion
that the past is behind us, and the future lies ahead. "Going forwards" or "A great future lies ahead" etc.
We make small hand gestures pointing forwards, small head movements and other almost imperceptible cues. (Perhaps it is linked to our ideas of "locomotion", we move towards the future, where each instant becomes the present.)

But some non-WEIRD languages don't have a word for time at all.

TL;DR.

And finally, to what's doin' me 'ed in...

There are other cultures who think of time very differently. Their idioms and expressions encode the passage of time very differently to WEIRDos.
For them the past is in front of them because they can see it. The future is still unseen, and so for them it is behind them, out of sight. They make small gestures like pointing with a thumb over their shoulder when talking about the future.

Try it yourself in an idle moment. Every time you think of some future event or hear it on screen, point over your shoulder. It takes some practice and I found it very difficult.
It also gave me that same queasy feeling when slightly dizzy, or if somebody told me that there will be a disco revival in 2025.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The time thing is not as simple as you present here.

Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, show that we (English speakers, but it might hold for WEIRDos) would seem, on the surface, to have two ways of imagining time. One that works as you say, where future time is in front of us. But one where future time sounds like it's behind: "in the following weeks, we will be treated to three Hollywood blockbusters," "after lunch comes dinner."

Their concern in the chapter is to show that this seeming contradiction doesn't subvert their notion that our metaphors for things tend to be coherent. So they show that it's only a seeming contradiction. If one imagines time as, say, a train coming toward one, it coordinates the two expressions in a coherent fashion. Future time is up ahead of you, like the engine of the train, but events that are further in the future still are boxcars behind that engine (will reach you later than the engine).

I seem to remember somewhere learning that the ancient Greeks imagined future time as behind them. Walking backwards into it. We can't see what's in it until it has moved past us and it is past time. And they're WEIRD, the very font of WEIRD, in some accounts.

Anyway, this isn't to challenge the core point in your post. I never did understand Chomsky's universal grammar, and I don't know how well it will hold up to all the non-WEIRD languages, once they're properly studied.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Nice examples!
The possibly late, possibly early, Jim Morrison tried to explain it in non-WEIRD terms:
The future's uncertain
And the end is always near.

I guess he meant that the bus about to hit us could be anywhere just before it runs us over.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Nice examples!

It's all L&J. Great book overall, by the way, we'll worth reading.

The light at the end of the tunnel is sometimes a locomotive headed your way.

By the way, we don't really need "WEIRD" to describe the languages, just "Western"--or better yet "Indo-European." The languages in question, let alone any deep structure of the mind on which they might be based, developed long before industrialization, long before anything we presently think of as "development," long before any culture developed a marked difference from any other in education levels and long before the West was richer than other world cultures. Long before people thought in term of a "West," for what that's worth. That's why, to describe the languages most studied by linguistics, I-E probably better names the bias.

WEIRD describes the disciplinary situation. Probably 95% of linguistics claims are based on I-E languages, for the reasons you state: because linguistics is a practice situated primarily in WEIRD universities. A similar, but not identical, situation holds for anthropological studies; that those tend to run one direction (WEIRD examining non-WEIRD) is a result of the fact that anthropology is a discipline in WEIRD countries.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

It's all L&J. Great book overall, by the way, we'll worth reading.

The light at the end of the tunnel is sometimes a locomotive headed your way.

By the way, we don't really need "WEIRD" to describe the languages, just "Western"--or better yet "Indo-European." The languages in question, let alone any deep structure of the mind on which they might be based, developed long before industrialization, long before anything we presently think of as "development," long before any culture developed a marked difference from any other in education levels and long before the West was richer than other world cultures. Long before people thought in term of a "West," for what that's worth. That's why, to describe the languages most studied by linguistics, I-E probably better names the bias.

WEIRD describes the disciplinary situation. Probably 95% of linguistics claims are based on I-E languages, for the reasons you state: because linguistics is a practice situated primarily in WEIRD universities. A similar, but not identical, situation holds for anthropological studies; that those tend to run one direction (WEIRD examining non-WEIRD) is a result of the fact that anthropology is a discipline in WEIRD countries.

Thanks again, this time for picking me on my slipshod use of some terms.
The example of Greeks you gave was a great counter!
I grabbed L&J 2nd ed. a few minutes ago and I'll ruminate over it and my breakfast and see if there's any more to argue over, or with.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Thanks again, this time for picking me on my slipshod use of some terms.

I can be a bit of a pedant.
What I think you'll thank me more for is the MWLB recommendation. Based on the sensibility you've revealed in your posting so far, I think you're going to like it. Lakoff is a linguist, as the cover blurbs have probably told you, Johnson a philosopher. They take up profound questions of language and mind but write in an an absolutely pellucid style.

 

[Birdjaguar]

[Fluffle]
Once a Joke, Now A Name For Groups Of Bunnies

EASTERTIME naturally evokes thoughts of rabbits, and this Easter, you might notice a menagerie of rabbit photos on Instagram and other social media. One popular image shows some adorable bunnies accompanied by the text, “A group of wild rabbits is called a ‘fluffle’ and I’ve never loved the English language more.”

If you search the Web for the word “fluffle,” you’ll find support for it as the name for a group of rabbits on sites ranging from a Pennsylvania animal hospital to a San Diego archaeology center. In fact, the delightful word “fluffle” has been in existence for less than two decades. And, as it turns out, the word’s current online popularity goes back to a Wikipedia prank pulled by some Canadian undergraduates. “Fluffle” first sent me down a rabbit-hole, as it were, when I started coming across the word last year and was curious about its origins. It seemed plausible enough, a fluffy variation on such animal-based collective nouns as “a gaggle of geese,” “a cackle of hyenas,” “a prickle of porcupines,” or “a dazzle of zebras.”

Some sources on “fluffle” credit the Wikipedia entry for “rabbit,” though the word does not currently appear there. The entry’s edit history reveals a claim was inserted on July 30, 2007: “A group of rabbits or hares are often called a ‘fluffle’ in parts of Northern Canada.” The line was deleted a few years later by a Wikipedia editor who couldn’t confirm its veracity, but in the meantime, “fluffle” had already begun multiplying all over the internet. Despite its removal from Wikipedia, the “fluffle” factoid was kept alive on other sites. In 2013, a Reddit user asked the question, “What’s a fact you know that will cheer me up?” Among the many replies, one was, “A group of bunnies is called a fluffle.” The website Thought Catalog repeated the information, and soon it became of staple of feel-good listicles like Buzzfeed’s “64 Facts That Will Make You Feel Incredibly Happy” from 2014.

A decade later, “fluffle” has become even more entrenched online, shared in countless tweets and Instagram posts. And now the word’s true origins can be told. In February, on the public radio show “A Way With Words,” hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, one listener, Van Credle of Washing-ton, D.C., called in to talk about “fluffle.” Credle revealed that an acquaintance of hers claimed credit for the coinage, along with a group of friends who studied physics as undergrads at the University of Alberta. Through Credle, I got in touch with two of those friends: Danielle Pahud, now an instructor in physics at the University of Manitoba, and Kevin Olsen, a researcher at Oxford University’s physics department. Pahud and Olsen recall having lunch in Edmonton on a sunny day in 2007, comparing the snowshoe hares on campus to the wild rabbits at the University of Victoria, where a few of the friends had attended a physics conference. One friend coined “fluffle” on the spot, and Olsen made the edit on Wikipedia as a mischievous way to enshrine their inside joke.

Over the years, the friends have shared their bemusement at the growing popularity of their word. Olsen says they never expected their joke to be taken seriously. But even though “fluffle” is a wry 21stcentury invention, it’s really not that different from collective nouns coined in the past. Many fanciful names for animal groups, like “a shrewdness of apes” and “a leap of leopards,” date back to a 1486 compendium called The Book of St. Albans.

Those terms have been handed down over the centuries, appearing in books like James Lipton’s 1968 “An Exaltation of Larks,” with each generation adding its own innovations. “Fluffle” is just the latest in this whimsical lineage—and a word that seems destined to keep proliferating, rabbit-style.


WORD ON THE STREET BEN ZIMMER

 

[Gori the Grey]

In the eighties, a comedian named Rich Hall invented a concept called "sniglet," which he defined as a word for something there's no official word for. He made up a bunch of them. In fact, you could buy a book of sniglets.

"Fluffle" is just that, as the article points out. If you can sell it--if it rings right in people's ears--you can create a word. Shakespeare, of course, is famous for coining thousands. (Literary critics are chipping away at the total by finding earlier witnesses for some of them). I think they're better spoken of as "nonce words." He makes them up in a particular dramatic spot, for a particular meaning, irregardlessly of whether they have been used by anyone before, and with no eye for having them catch on (that's why I don't like coinage).

"Disquantity" is a cool one. One of Lear's daughters beseeches him "A little to disquantity your train" [retinue, posse]. Don't know if the litters have stolen that one from him. But I think its a cool word. Sure there's "reduce," but "disquantity" strikes me as meaning "reduce by measurable individual increments" (i.e. dismiss some number of knights, a count noun, from your entourage).

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

In the eighties, a comedian named Rich Hall invented a concept called "sniglet," which he defined as a word for something there's no official word for. He made up a bunch of them. In fact, you could buy a book of sniglets.

"Fluffle" is just that, as the article points out. If you can sell it--if it rings right in people's ears--you can create a word. Shakespeare, of course, is famous for coining thousands. (Literary critics are chipping away at the total by finding earlier witnesses for some of them). I think they're better spoken of as "nonce words." He makes them up in a particular dramatic spot, for a particular meaning, irregardlessly of whether they have been used by anyone before, and with no eye for having them catch on (that's why I don't like coinage).

"Disquantity" is a cool one. One of Lear's daughters beseeches him "A little to disquantity your train" [retinue, posse]. Don't know if the litters have stolen that one from him. But I think its a cool word. Sure there's "reduce," but "disquantity" strikes me as meaning "reduce by measurable individual increments" (i.e. dismiss some number of knights, a count noun, from your entourage).

I'm not as original as I wished I was too.

After reading a recent biology article (which included the wonderful word "blebbing") I thought I would definitely be the first person to think of changing
Apostosis: A type of cell death in which a series of molecular steps in a cell lead to its death.
into
Kpoptosis: Demise of a Korean girl band because one of the members admitted she had a boyfriend.
(or Jpoptosis: see above. Essentially the same thing.)

But somebody already uses it as their online handle.

Looks like I'll just have to keep staring at my own shoes in the kitchen at the next maths party instead of sitting at the cool table.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I just today invented the word "ideologome." On the model of "biome" = region and population in which a particular ideology obtains.

I think some people use the word "Ideologeme" for this, but I think "ideologeme" is better used for "individual unit of a larger ideological structure."

A Google search convinces me that the few English language uses of my new word are typos. That the word has some minimal currency in Croatian, but meaning who knows what?

You can tell your grandchildren you were present at the genesis of a new word.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

That the word has some minimal currency in Croatian, but meaning who knows what?

If you want a really amazing range of meanings, repeat that question in a Serbian chatfroup.

 

[Gori the Grey]

If you want a really amazing range of meanings, repeat that question in a Serbian chatfroup.

I'm crediting you with chatfroup.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I thought my 'faveword' I used in the AI thread was a neologism but Google tells me there are 2.4 thousand Instagram posts using it as a hashtag

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

I'm crediting you with chatfroup.

Sorry, can't claim it - it was a standard one from alt.religion.kibology. (You know, on usenet, where your grandparents probably met online.)

 

[Gori the Grey]

If so, it has left no internet trace. The two Google instances are clearly typos, not parody.

Lexisquat it, dude.

 

[Birdjaguar]

After reading a recent biology article (which included the wonderful word "blebbing")

"Bleb" is a word. When a trabulectomy is performed (eye surgery), it creates a small "bleb" (pocket) under the eyelid to drain fluid and reduce internal pressure.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Here's one of the all time greatest posts from Usenet - The story of the happy little meme that nearly vanished.
Now you can tell your grandchildren the story, and that you helped it survive!

The Stapler is Behind You
At a certain university I used to work at, there was an office where the student technical support folk worked at. Also in the office was a
stapler. The stapler was kept on the case of one of the tech support machines.

Eventually someone decided that it was a bad idea to keep the stapler there as lusers would frequently simply insert their papers into it and smack the top of the stapler; it was felt that allowing people to hit the case of a tech support machine was probably unwise. So the stapler was moved to a table which, if you were a luser looking at where the stapler used to be, was directly behind you.

This of course led to hundreds if not thousands of repetitions of the following:
[Luser walks in, walks up to desk, looks at top of CPU where stapler used to be.]
Luser: Where's the stapler?
Bob: The stapler is behind you.

Finally, one of the bobs got sick of this and taped a brightly-colored sign to the case of the computer where the stapler used to be. The sign said, simply, "THE STAPLER IS BEHIND YOU."

Now whenever anyone wanted the stapler, the following would happen:
[Luser walks in, walks up to desk, looks directly at the sign saying "THE STAPLER IS BEHIND YOU".]
Luser: Where's the stapler?
Bob: The stapler is behind you. [Or point to the sign.]

This little dialogue appeared to happen every bit as often as it did before the sign. Pretty much the best you could hope for was the
following:
[Luser walks in, walks up to desk, looks directly at the sign saying "THE STAPLER IS BEHIND YOU".]
Luser: Where's the stapler?
Bob: The stapler is behind you.
[Something registers with the luser and he/she glances back down at the sign.]
Luser: D'oh!

At some point I proposed "The stapler is behind you" as the official SCP (="Student Consulting Program") motto.

The 'stapler experiment' continued for some time. At some point someone made an appropriately-labeled masking-tape trail from the door of the office to the stapler. This was somewhat effective, but it was felt by management to be insulting to the lusers and was eventually removed.

My analysis of this was that it made total sense. When a luser enters the consulting office to use the stapler, he or she is there to look for the stapler, he or she isn't there to read a sign.

In these situations, the best you can do is realize that no luser will look at a place expecting to see a stapler and bother to see something else instead, even if the stapler is absent.

It was interesting to see the mental reset that occured when a luser was referred to a sign HE OR SHE HAD BEEN STARING DIRECTLY AT to answer the question he or she had asked.

The Enb.

If I had the Latin skillz to translate it, I'd adopt THE STAPLER IS BEHIND YOU as my family motto, if I had the heraldic graphic skillz to design a crest.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

"Bleb" is a word. When a trabulectomy is performed (eye surgery), it creates a small "bleb" (pocket) under the eyelid to drain fluid and reduce internal pressure.

A kidney cell in the early stages of apoptosis shows its hallmark “blebbing” on a colored scanning electron micrograph. Its membrane bubbles and deforms as the cell dismantles its internal structures.
From: Cellular Self-Destruction May Be Ancient. But Why?

Cellular Self-Destruction May Be Ancient. But Why? | Quanta Magazine

How did cells evolve a process to end their own lives? Recent research suggests that apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death, first arose billions of years ago in bacteria with a primitive sociality.

www.quantamagazine.org