Today I have finally started on a programming idea I had a while ago - something that uses the Python Natural Language Toolkit to mess around with poetry ( Read more... )

I have only just discovered that along with the many other science and mathematical Olympiads, there is an International Linguistics Olympiad. The sample questions are amazing.

Unlike another Olympiad I never heard of at school (the International Olympiad in Informatics - we knew about the Chemistry, Physics and Maths ones, and I assumed there was ( Read more... )

Following a conversation with a housemate in which he asked what the proper linguistic term for things like "saxamaphone" and "tramapoline" was, I share with you the following article: Reduplication in English Homeric Infixation.

(Yes, that Homer. Yes, it has some phonology in there; the Wikipedia page on Optimality Theory might be interesting, or ( Read more... )

So far, Through the Language Glass has been enlightening. (I am on page 126, nearly done with the first part.)

The author's account of studies of how languages deal with colour starts at least a century before Berlin and Kay, and points out that their work wasn't the first to come to its conclusions, just the better known one ( Read more... )

How many of you learned code languages like this at school to have secret conversations with friends? What sort of codes were they? How easy or hard did you find it to learn ( Read more... )

For speech it selfe is artificiall and made by man, and the more pleasing it is, the more it preuaileth to such purpose as it is intended for: but speech by meeter is a kind of vtterance, more cleanly couched and more delicate to the eare then prose is, because it is more currant and slipper vpon the tongue, and withal tunable and melodious, as a ( Read more... )

I have a soft spot for crackpot theories. And Edo Nyland's theory of why all languages evolved from Basque, a language which is commonly taken to be an isolate among languages spoken in Europe, is a great example of such ( Read more... )

And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech." So the LORD dispersed them from there ( Read more... )

Two bottles of Lucozade have enough caffeine to make my hands hurt, and keep me up way too late. Thus, instead of sleep, you get my notes for an essay about metaphysical reasons for a game system to have a single language (as opposed to the OOC reason of "it is far, far easier to physrep").

( Notes. Should be relatively free of FOIP, unless 'Bluebottle was a linguist once upon a time' is FOIP. )

I've found a new blog to read - Higgaion, which is mostly about Biblical scholarship (and occasionally about the Mac).

And, as a bonus, it had a link to a fun quiz on there, to find out which ancient language you are.

This is posted mostly for rochvelleth's benefit. As you can see, ( it includes Linear B in there... )