All Things Linguistic

If only I spoke enough English to understand this video! Oder...

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:30:47 -0400

If only I spoke enough English to understand this video! Oder gar Deutsch!

More seriously, I’ve never quite seen the point of teaching someone how to say “I don’t speak language X” in fluent language X, because surely one’s look of complete and utter confusion would also convey the same message.

1 year of All Things Linguistic

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:31:09 -0400

It’s my 1-year blogiversary! (And that’s totally a word.) To celebrate, some of my favourite posts of the past year.

Explaining linguistics:

Learning and teaching linguistics:

IPA Bingo
Venn diagram of phonemes
Protolinguistics: 6 ways to do linguistics in high school
What and who is a protolinguist?
(and the entire protolinguist series)

Learning a language:

General fun:

Quadrilabial clicks
When two wugs love each other very much…
Speaking in IPA
Linguistics tumblr jokes
(and everything tagged linguist humour)

And finally, a picture of linguistics cupcakes, shamelessly cribbed from thewantsies, although they look so delicious that now I want to make my own.

I feel obliged to bring to everyone’s attention that there is a terrible lack of pictures of linguistics baked goods on google image search. In fact, this was the only one that I could find. Anyone want to help fix this problem?

The difference between phonetics (top picture) and phonology...

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:30:52 -0400

Phonetics

Phonology

The difference between phonetics (top picture) and phonology (bottom picture), (images from SpecGram).

Phonetics: the study of the physical properties of speech sounds, including their perception, transmission, and production.

Phonology: the study of the abstract properties of speech sounds, and their relationship with each other and with meaning.

In both illustrations, the knight is saying “take that you scoundrel”.

More phonetics and phonology resources.

Morphological Typology (illustrations from...

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:30:38 -0400

Morphological Typology (illustrations from SpecGram)

Descriptions adapted from The Lingua File:

Analytic languages: also known as isolating languages because they’re composed of isolated, or free, morphemes. Free morphemes can be words on their own, such as cat or happy. Languages that are purely analytic in structure don’t use any prefixes or suffixes, ever. However, it’s rare to find a language that is purely analytic or synthetic since most languages have characteristics of both. Morphological typology is like a spectrum in which languages fit in somewhere from analytic to polysynthetic (a subtype of synthetic languages we’ll get to in a moment).

Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese are good examples of analytic languages. […] English, on the other hand, is one of the most analytic Indo-European languages, but is still usually classified as a synthetic language. […]

Types of synthetic language (i.e. languages that have prefixes/suffixes):

Agglutinating Languages:With these languages, morphemes within words are usually clearly recognizable in a way that makes it easy to tell where the morpheme boundaries are. Their affixes usually only have a single meaning. Turkish,Korean, Hungarian, Japanese, and Finnish are all in this group.

Fusional Languages: Similar to agglutinating languages, except that the morpheme boundaries are much more difficult to discern. Affixes are often fused with the stems, and can have multiple meanings. A prime example of a fusional language is Spanish, especially when it comes to verbs. In the wordhablo ”I speak”, the -o morpheme tells us that we’re dealing with a subject that is singular, first person, and in the present tense. It’s difficult to find a morpheme that means “speak”, however, since habl- is not a morpheme. Fusional languages can be tricky!

Polysynthetic Languages: These languages are undoubtedly some of the most difficult to learn. They often have verbs that can express the entirety of a typical sentence in English, which they do by incorporating nouns into verbs forms. For example, the Sora language of India has one word that means “I will catch a tiger”. Many Native American languages are polysynthetic.

superlinguo: In Canada, the Nunavut Official Languages Act came...

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:30:50 -0400

superlinguo:

In Canada, the Nunavut Official Languages Act came into force this month. This means the Inuit language will be given equal status to English and French, as official languages.

You can read more about this excellent recognition of Indigenous language here, at Language Magazine:

“All three official languages will enjoy equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in territorial institutions — namely in the Legislative Assembly, the courts, and the departments of the government of Nunavut — and public agencies.”

In the previous piece of relevant legislation (now superceded), the Inuit language was considered secondary (alongside six other Aboriginal languages) to French and English.

Down here in Australia, I think it would be fantastic to see us move towards recognition of Aboriginal languages. A few months ago our friends over at Crikey.com’s Fully(Sic) blog talked about the current political climate of constitutional recognition of Australia’s first peoples and their languages. It’s interesting to note their take on Aboriginal languages being considered official (or “national”) languages - blog post here.

I mean, it’s great to see the Inuit language being recognized, but the language has been spoken in the area for thousands of years before Nunavut became a territory in 1999, as well as in the Northwest Territories and elsewhere in Northern Canada, so I can’t help but think this is a bit late. Not to mention all of the other Aboriginal languages that are spoken in Canada. Hopefully this is the first step of a broader trend.

The writing system in the stop sign above is Inuktitut syllabics, which is related to Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, used to write Cree, Oji-Cree, and Ojibwe. The basic principle is rotating a consonant symbol to reflect which vowel comes after it, as can be seen in the table below.

Anaphora Jokes

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:30:43 -0400

An anaphora joke, from A Walk in the WoRds:

A wife asks her husband, “Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk, and if they have avocados, get 6.”

A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk.

The wife asks him, “Why did you buy 6 cartons of milk?”

He replies, “They had avocados.”

What makes the above joke humorous is actually called zero anaphora or gapping. [more explanation]

A wife asks her husband, “Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk, and if they have avocados, get 6 [gap].”

The gap leaves open the possibility of referring back to either noun phrase, “avocados” or “one carton of milk”. However, it makes more sense to start the anaphora resolution process by looking at the nearest antecedent first.

Ambiguities of anaphora and reference are fairly often the source of humour. An example from Literal Minded:

Wife: Jim kisses his wife goodbye before he leaves for work every morning. Why don’t you do that?
Husband: Because Jim wouldn’t like it!

And several examples from Ruslan Mitkov (with explanations):

There is a pile of inflammable trash next to your car. You’ll have to get rid of it.
Fried eggs should be cooked properly and if there are frail or elderly people in the house, they should be hard-boiled.
Autumn leaves may cause a problem for the elderly, especially when they fall and become a wet and soggy mess on the ground.
If these shoes don’t fit your feet, you can exchange them.
If the baby does not thrive on raw milk, boil it.
If an incendiary bomb drops near you, don’t lose your head. Put it in a bucket and cover it with sand.
There will be a Moscow Exhibition of Arts by 150,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors. These were executed over the past two years.

Eunoia, by Christian Bök

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:30:41 -0400

Eunoia, by Christian Bök:

The word eunoia, which literally means beautiful thinking, is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Eunoia is a five-chapter book by Christian Bök in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram (the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter only E, etc.). Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (Bök actually retells the entire Iliad in Chapter E; you have to read it to believe it).

It’s interesting to see just how far language can be stretched without breaking; in this case, by only using one vowel per chapter (but 98% of the available vocabulary). The entire book Eunoia is available to read free at the link, and it’s well worth clicking around even though I doubt that most people read the whole thing.

wuglife: markedbysunspots: Grice’s conversational maxims. aka,...

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:30:45 -0400

wuglife:

markedbysunspots:

Grice’s conversational maxims.

aka, conversational rules that we all break.

The best way to think about Grice’s Maxims that I’ve ever encountered is that

They are NOT RULES.

They are baseline conventions

Flouting them is adding a layer of meaning, not “breaking a rule”

This means that you aren’t “doing something wrong” when you respond to “How are you doing today?” with “It’s raining.” It means you are actually giving an even more meaningful statement.

Let’s break this down a tad:

Read More

This is a great explanation. I like to think of Grice’s Maxims as rules for the hearer, more than rules for the speaker. So whenever you hear someone saying something, you assume that they are following the maxims and you interpret their speech as if they are. So if something looks like it violates a particular maxim, you assume that the speaker had some good reason to do so and try to figure out what additional meaning they were trying to add.

For example, if you ask someone what’s for dinner, they might reply “food”, which violates the maxim of quantity (it’s not as informative as the answer you’re looking for). But because they didn’t give a more specific answer, you can interpret that to mean that they don’t know or they don’t want to tell you, so you’ve still gotten a relevant answer. Flouting a Gricean Maxim is the first step to inferring a layer of additional meaning, not a sign of bad speech!

Free Lectures on Language Evolution

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:31:11 -0400

Free Lectures on Language Evolution:

There is not currently a coursera on Language Evolution, so as a vague substitute, I thought I’d do a run down of places on the internet you can find some pretty decent free lectures on the evolution of language…

Interesting-looking lectures at the link, including: “Towards Language Acquisition by Cognitive Developmental Robotics” by Minoru Asada, “Outgroup: The Study of Chimpanzees to Know the Human Mind” by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, and “Out of the Brains of Babes: Domain-general Learning Mechanisms and Domain-specific Systems” by Jenny Saffran.

I haven’t watched them yet, but I’d wager they’re much more accurate than that language reconstruction article that’s been widely criticized.

An Open Letter To The Red Squiggles Under "Imput"

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:30:32 -0400

Dear Red Squiggles,

I understand why you correct me when I try to spell the opposite of “output” as “imput”.

I understand but I object.

I know that this word comes from in + put, but you see, English has a grand and noble tradition of changing n to m in front of p, because both m and p are pronounced with the lips, while n is said with the tongue.

Indeed, countless other English words have been persuaded by the sleek economy of producing with a single mouth-gesture the two sounds mp instead of the clumsy double-speak of np.

Think imp and amp and ump, sympathy and empathy, important and impatient and imperial.

Why should input be the only exception to this elegant pattern?

In fact, the n is already losing. I defy anyone to say input five times fast and not end up saying imput instead.

Input imput imput imput imput.

Red Squiggles, I don’t want it to be completely over between us. I still want you under other words in my life. I want to keep you under “aslo” and “becasue” and “recieve” and “theyre” and “i’ts”. And many others.

But not imput.

It’s time for writing to catch up to speech. It’s time for us as a society to embrace the spelling that has hitherto been the practice of merely a bold few. It’s time to stop pretending that imput is a typo, when it is in fact logically superior.

The collective usage of speakers determines the norms of a language. So if enough people start writing imput it will get added to the dictionaries and yes, even spellcheck.

Red Squiggles Under Imput, this is war.

The Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny Theory of Language...

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:30:33 -0400

The Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny Theory of Language Origin

Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny (also known as Recapitulation Theory) is a theory of evolution that suggests that as an organism develops (ontology) it follows the same developmental steps as its whole species followed in evolution (phylogeny). For example, a cluster of cells becomes a fish-like organism becomes a mammal.

This theory is not generally accepted anymore for animal evolution, but some people still propose it for the origin of language. By this account, children’s gradual development of more and more complex expressions mirrors how human language as a whole grew gradually more complex, so studying child language acquisition might provide insight into how early humans began speaking.

However, not everyone agrees that language complexity happened gradually, since modern examples of new languages formation are creoles, which are made fully complex by the first generation of child speakers. This being said, circumstances like brain development and linguistic input are definitely different between modern children in a creole situation versus the earliest humans, so this might also account for some differences. It’s still an open question.

A really inaccurate way to use ontology recapitulates phylogeny in language development is to assume that every speaker of a language must know everything about the language’s history in order to speak it. Reasoning along this line is often used to argue that the etymology of a word is its only meaning (which can, incidentally be used to prove that black is white), or that inflectional processes from one language must be used when its words are borrowed into another (see cactus, cacti).

Linguistics Databasing Tools

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:30:53 -0400

lhaasiri replied to your post: What is LaTeX and why do linguists love it?

Does this also allow you to make a lexicon/lexical database? I know toolbox does but it’s… not easy.

Nope, LaTeX is a typesetting method (think substitute for Word), not a databasing method like Toolbox.

Other linguistic databasing tools that I’m aware of:

FLEx and Lexique Pro, which like Toolbox are free programs by SIL
Filemaker Pro, which is a proprietary program
TshwaneLex, also a proprietary program
TypeCraft, which is a wiki-like website by linguists
OLD (Online Linguistics Database), which is self-descriptive
LingSync, which is a Chrome/Android web app by linguists still in development (full disclosure: I’ve been involved in testing it)
I think some people also use spreadsheets or lightly marked-up text files?
ELAN and Audacity are also useful free programs for working with sound files, although they aren’t databasing programs per se.

More links to documentation tools and other resources. Making really good language databasing tools is quite a hard problem that I think people are still working on solving.

thelegalizeddeafies: Map of the principal sign language...

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:30:46 -0400

thelegalizeddeafies:

Map of the principal sign language families of the world!

A few other sign languages that aren’t on this map (which I think are isolates?) are Hawaiian Sign Language, which was only recently recognized as distinct from ASL, and Nicaraguan Sign Language, which is often cited in linguistics courses as evidence of an innate human language ability.

And another language family to overlap with all that red in North America is Plains Indian Sign Languages (PISL).

When non-linguists publish "linguistics" papers

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:30:34 -0400

An excellent and through takedown from Language Log of the proto-Euroasiatic article that’s been making the rounds: Ultraconserved Words? Really??

Sally Thomason’s conclusion:

If the reconstructions used by Pagel et al. for their statistical analyses are not reliable in either form or meaning, then the statistical results of comparing these reconstructions cannot provide any evidence for distant relationships among the seven groups they compare. If the selection procedure for choosing among several candidate proto-words to use for the statistical analysis is flawed, then there may be problems with the statistics as well. But even if there are no statistical flaws, the Pagel et al. paper is yet another sad example of major scientific publications accepting and publishing articles on historical linguistics without bothering to ask any competent historical linguists to review the papers in advance.

There is a larger moral here too. Early in their paper, Pagel et al. report, correctly, that after 5,000-9,000 years, `most words are thought to suffer from too much semantic and phonetic erosion to allow secure identification of true cognates’, in particular (though they don’t emphasize this point) because of the decay and loss of `the sound and meaning correspondences…which are thought to indicate that they derive from common ancestral words.’ The authors intend their statistical method to provide evidence for relatedness of languages that are beyond the reach of the Comparative Method. Like other long-rangers with dreams of discovering bigger and bigger family groupings — maybe even the ur-human language, what the late Joseph Greenberg called Proto-Sapiens — Pagel et al. believe that abandoning the one method that is known (not just “thought”) to be reliable can achieve the goal. But you still can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

This reminds me of the Language Log and Replicated Typo commentary/rebuttal on another big-news language story, this one about whether a language’s future-tense marking affects speaker’s saving behaviour, which was by an economist and also not peer-reviewed by linguists.

Excerpt by Geoffrey Pullum:

Chen uses descriptive data on languages that emanate from Östen Dahl’s EUROTYP project, and adopts a classification of English as strong FTR. But English notoriously uses present tense for future time reference all over the place:

Meg’s mother arrives tomorrow.
If the phone rings, don’t answer it.
My flight takes off at 8:30.
IBM is declaring its fourth-quarter profits tomorrow.

The very example that Berreby gives involves English I am going to + Verb, purportedly illustrating grammatical marking of the future; but of course am is the present tense, so one would have to argue that use of the motion verb go in its idiomatic impending-future sense counts as a grammatical tense marker, which leads to questions about whether the same must be said of am about to and am on the point of and so on. If English has future tense markers at all, it has at least a dozen of different ones; but simple use of the present tense is a very prominent way of referring to future time, so what do we make of that? For my part, I have no confidence at all that English is accurately described as “strong FTR”. Nearly all traditional grammarians report English as having a tense system that includes a future tense, but that isn’t really true; will is a modal auxiliary that has various other uses too. If the facts are shaky for English, how likely are they to be accurate on languages that have not been studied nearly so intensively?

I don’t think that a PhD in linguistics should be a requirement before writing papers that claim things about linguistics (for one thing, it would be pretty frustrating for grad students), but it really doesn’t seem too much to ask that a linguist or two peer-review such articles before they’re published in scientific journals. And maybe the journalists could find a linguistics prof to comment on news stories like these, instead of just publishing the authors’ press releases. I have a feeling that some people on Language Log might be willing to provide a quote or two…

What is LaTeX and why do linguists love it?

Thu, 09 May 2013 18:30:00 -0400

I’ve been posting recently about how I use LaTeX for drawing syntax trees and typing IPA symbols, but I realize that not everyone is familiar with it. I’ve only been using LaTeX for all my linguistics stuff for a year and a half, but I was a huge fan within weeks and I wish I’d started earlier. I’m still learning as I go, but here are some things about LaTeX, getting started, and why/how linguists use it.

What is LaTeX?

LaTeX, pronounced /ˈlɑːtɛk/ or /ˈleɪtɛk/, not /ˈleɪtɛks/, is a totally free method of typesetting that produces advanced, customizable, and very nice-looking documents. You format your document in LaTeX’s markup syntax (like writing in HTML, Markdown, or wiki syntax) and then you use a compiler to output a pdf (like you would output a webpage using HTML etc).

This means that you need to use commands (which begin with a backslash: \) instead of buttons/menus like a word processor, but it also means that you can do lots more cool things and people can write extra packages and share them for even more advanced functions.

How to use LaTeX

Probably the easiest way to see what LaTeX looks like is by looking at a demo document from a free online LaTeX editor like writelatex.com (Try it! It won’t bite!). If you plan to actually use LaTeX a lot, you probably want to download a free program bundle (MacTeX for Mac or MikTeX for Windows) instead. You can also read more complete guides to LaTeX made by other people, but I think it’s better to try things first than to try to read a whole guide.

I’ve made a sample document with a few demos of things that linguists do in LaTeX, which you can download here as .tex (input) and here as .pdf (output). (Test things out for yourself by deleting the demo writelatex source file and copy-pasting my tex file in there instead).

Why do linguists use LaTeX?

You may have noticed that it’s easier to take notes about linguistics by hand than it is on a computer, because there are so many symbols and diagrams that are used in linguistics that are really difficult to make in a word processor.

But because LaTeX is free, open-source, and highly customizable, many wonderful people have written packages for anyone to use that let you type linguistics symbols (IPA and semantics), draw trees, and make automatically formatted and numbered example sentences.(See a sample document here.)

LaTeX is also popular among academics in general, particularly scientists, because it’s very good at displaying mathematical symbols and many academic journals use it for typesetting. You may spend a fair bit of time googling your problems at first (there are lots of resources to google for!), but you will probably spend less time in the long run fiddling with multiple programs and dragging things over by 1 pixel.

If you’re just starting out in linguistics and doing problem sets, you probably don’t want to bother with LaTeX, but if you’re writing papers or a thesis, particularly something that has several drafts, then it might be something to consider.

(Note: I’m not going to volunteer to answer LaTeX tech-support questions here, since there really are a ton of resources out there and everything I learned I discovered from googling, so you can too. There’s also a great LaTeX forum at StackExchange where you can post questions. Google is pretty good at knowing that you’re interested in the typesetting program, but unfortunately tumblr tags aren’t case-sensitive so…you’ll probably have better luck elsewhere.)

When does a linguist become a linguist?

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:17:00 -0400

fortheloveoflanguages:

Out of interest - when do you consider yourself, or someone else, a linguist? I’ve seen a few posts and blogs referring to themselves and others as linguists and I’m just super curious as to where the line is drawn.

Intense personal interest and knowledge? A formal qualification? A teaching position? Etc. :)

I started tentatively thinking of myself as a linguist when I started meeting peers who did so, which was when I went to my first few linguistics undergrad conferences. (Conferences are great and I’d encourage everyone to go to them. You don’t even have to present, just go meet people.) And by the time I was weighing grad schools I was pretty solid about this identification. In my experience, linguistics grad students generally do consider themselves linguists, and it’s mixed among ling undergrads. People definitely don’t wait until they have a teaching position!

Before considering myself a linguist proper, I considered myself “someone who was really interested in linguistics”, which I’ve retrospectively named a protolinguist (and which I’ve written about fairly extensively). I’ve also heard from other people who now consider themselves protolinguists and this makes me incredibly happy :)

(Edit: I think a tumblinguist is basically anyone who knows what a tumblinguist is though. Recursion!)

Note to self: don’t hire Randall Munroe’s skywriter...

Wed, 08 May 2013 18:30:48 -0400

Note to self: don’t hire Randall Munroe’s skywriter to write a dramatic message in IPA. Unicode support is important.

superlinguo: Wuglife and others on the #Tumblinguistics tag...

Tue, 07 May 2013 18:30:38 -0400

superlinguo:

Wuglife and others on the #Tumblinguistics tag have been talking about syntax trees, and good programs with which to make them. It’s got me thinking about all the software I use in my day-to-day linguistics work, and I thought that I’d start sharing them with you. Some of them might be useful if you’re just getting into linguists, and some of them I find useful for other things as well.

The first thing I want to introduce you to is a website that I use so often it’s almost permanently open on my computer. The IPA character picker is the easiest way I’ve found of locating some of the fiddlier characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet. You just click on the characters to build your word and copy the Unicode font from the bottom. Easy as that! I love that it’s arranged like an IPA chart, with vowels in one box and consonants in another. Also, if you’ve forgotten what some of them more esoteric forms are you can hover over them to get a reminder!

There are also character pickers for other alphabets. I often use the Devanagari and Tibetan pickers - but there are over 20 different scripts on Ishda’s website (and if the one you want isn’t there - tell them!).

Although you won’t want to be writing long texts using these, they’re more accessible than many language-specific keyboard designs (although I’ll talk about that next week!). There is a way to save the webpage offline, which means you can even use it when you’re not about to connect to the internet!

And if phonetics isn’t your thing, you can use it to make the most impressive ˠːʢǂɸsparkly unicorn punctuationɸǂʡːˠ ever.

I have 3 main ways of typing IPA characters, which all have advantages and disadvantages.

1. IPA Palette is a free tiny program for Mac that’s very similar in spirit to IPA character picker, as far as symbols being organized according to the IPA chart, but not online. I believe IPA character map is a similar program for PC. Advantage: works for basically any text field. Disadvantage: you have to open a separate program.

2. The insert-symbol menu (go to Latin: IPA or IPA extension), which can be found in Word or Google docs. Advantage: doesn’t require special knowledge or software. Disadvantage: menus are tedious and only works in word-processing programs.

3. LaTeX (again). Have I mentioned that LaTeX is awesome? Using the package TIPA, you can type IPA symbols using fairly intuitive text commands such as \textschwa or \@ within the \textipa environment, both of which will produce schwa. Advantage: you can do it all within one program, without copy-pasting. Disadvantage: doesn’t work if you’re writing outside LaTeX, and you may have to look up how to make a symbol.

If I were a phonetician/phonologist or if I worked with a language that regularly used non-Roman characters, then I might have a more unified solution, but this is what works for me.

thecatspajama: Linguists identify 15,000-year-old...

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:01:35 -0400

thecatspajama:

Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’

You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!

It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.

That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then. …

The search for Proto-World, or even the slightly less ambitious search for an ur-language that several proto-languages have in common, is both fascinating and incredibly difficult.

It’s like trying to reconstruct the original mammal that all the other mammals evolved from by comparing an abstraction of all rodents, plus an abstraction of all felines, plus an abstraction of all canines, plus an abstraction of all primates, plus an abstraction of all cetaceans, plus an abstraction of all marsupials, plus an abstraction of all ungulates, plus whatever the heck the platypus is descended from, etc.

But it’s harder than just that, because none of these languages were written down until long after they’d all split off, because writing systems only started being used around 3200 BCE in very few locations, whereas language has been around since sometime between 5 million and 50 000 years ago (we don’t even know).

So imagine trying to figure out that the common ancestor of chickens and iguanas was actually a dinosaur. Without having any fossils.

I love these studies, but they need to be taken with so many grains of salt because the data that they’re working with is an abstraction of an abstraction. But that’s the only way to study this until we invent time travel.

wuglife: I’ve seen a lot of hate in the #linguistics tag...

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:30:51 -0400

wuglife:

I’ve seen a lot of hate in the #linguistics tag recently, especially concerning drawing syntax trees. The program I recommend to budding syntacticians and linguists for drawing trees is called TreeForm (by Donal Derrick, available for free on SourceForge).

It’s a drag-and-drop style program and you can use to produce images of trees, and go back and edit them later. It’s great for learning what kinds of structures to build, as well as building super-complex structures that would get confusing in markup languages like LaTeX or online sources like PhP Syntax Tree.

Actually, both of these other options are great, too. I would only recommend them for more advanced syntacticians and (proto-)linguists with a proclivity for programming or markup. In any case, happy tree-drawing!

Wow, TreeForm looks really nifty and easy to use. I wish I’d known about it earlier!

I used to use PhP Syntax Tree, which is better than using the line-drawing tool in Word (don’t do this! you’ll waste so much time!) but it still has quite a lot of limitations, like not supporting arrows or alternative fonts. The major annoyance that I found with it was having to re-download my trees as pngs every time I wanted to make one tiny change.

These days I use LaTeX, specifically the qtree package although I’ve heard that other packages are good too. Since I make all my linguistics docs in LaTeX, this lets me edit them right from within the document, which saves a lot of time.

It would be cool if TreeForm let you output some LaTeX code that you could copy-paste into a LaTeX file and tweak from there if necessary. So I probably won’t be using TreeForm myself for this reason, but I’d definitely recommend it to people who don’t use LaTeX.