m. c. de marco

At Language Log: Mark Liberman contemplates the question, Is irony universal? The answer: if it’s in Pirahã, it must be everywhere.

The SFWA blog begins a series on how linguistics can help you by Juliette Wade with how articulatory phonetics can help you:

I had an alien with a long muzzle and tongue, so I decided that there were a lot of different kinds of “l” and “r” sounds in this language.

Via Language Log: a Guardian story about former missionary Daniel Everett’s life-changing study of Pirahã, which cost him two faiths and a marriage:

“It’s wrong to try and convert tribal societies,” he says.

Via del.icio.us: CNN reports on the growing popularity of frak, the four-letter word coined for the original Battlestar Galactica and revived with the remake.

The word has even appeared in the funny pages where Dilbert muttered a disconsolate “frack” — the original spelling before producers of the current show changed it to a four-letter word — after a particularly dumb order from his evil twit of a boss.

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams calls the word “pure genius.”

Thanks to Geoff Jacoby for the link to this MIT news release about Pirahã, now with even fewer numbers:

The work builds on a study published in 2004, which found that the Piraha had words to express the quantities “one,” “two,” and “many.” The MIT researchers observed the same phenomenon when they asked Piraha speakers to describe sets of objects as they were added, from one to 10.

However, the MIT team decided to add a new twist—they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the word previously thought to mean “two” when as many as five or six objects were present, and they used the word for “one” for any quantity between one and four.

Someone mentioned melancholy on a mailing list, meaning by it nothing distinct from depression, but my ear picked it up and I wondered whether melancholy was still a legitimate affliction. (The answer appears to be no, it’s been replaced by melancholic depression.)

Via Language Log: the World Atlas of Language Structures from the Max Planck Digital Library is now freely available online, with Google Maps integration. For example, here’s a map of the velar nasal (?) in Europe. Note the dot for England; that’s the ng in sing.