m. c. de marco

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 (The answer appears to be no, it’s been replaced by melancholic depression.)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.

The Oxford University Press blog has an excerpt on profanity in science fiction, especially alternate f-words like fug, frell, and frak, from Brave New Words:

Francis Towner Laney coined the fannish slur fugghead around 1950. In the 1960s, Norman Spinrad’s novel Bug Jack Barron was considered so profane that the bookseller W.H. Smith banned sales of the magazine in which it had been serialized. And no doubt as a commentary on this state of affairs, Larry Niven wrote a series of stories in the 1970s in which the words “censored” and “bleep” had themselves become curses.

On the mundane profanity front, Language Log discusses the linguistics of the SNL Sofa King skit and the dangers of taking color terms from old Chinese-English dictionaries.

Today I picked up some books I saw recommended while I was searching the new conlang list archive. The Unfolding of Language is a fascinating, well-written book about language change aimed at the general language-changing public. Historical Linguistics has the nitty-gritty of sound change laws and the like, with plenty of examples.

Via del.icio.us (scifi tag): a Treknobabble generator that generates a long page of babble perfect for your NaNoWriMo novel. If you need a Trek plot to go with your treknobabble, try these random Star Trek plot generators.

Here are some fun and interesting linguistics links I found, starting from this LJ post by Suzette Haden Elgin: Phonosemantic Coherence in English Assonances is an intriguing list of correlations between meaning and initial consonant clusters; How to Make a Linguistic Theory should be titled How Not to Make a Linguistic Theory; and the Chomskybot will make your theory for you.