I've been creating new languages for a few years now. I like to do it in my spare time, which becomes smaller and smaller each year, mostly from proto-languages that already exist. I'm currently working on a Slavic language in Belarus and Ukraine for fun. Anyone else into this stuff or wanna know more about conlanging in general?

I'm interested in patterns and culture. I think it's a fascinating topic from many perspectives. Mathematically there are many tools for pattern analysis and formation, but at the same time philosophically our minds try to make things fit into patterns generally (maybe because it requires more energy to remember a whole thing than a set of rules that describe the thing). A mathematical example of cases where order arises from pure disorder (or maximum entropy) would be Ramsey theory.

I'd like to discuss the cultural influence on our pattern analysis/synthesis, but also explore a bit what is a pattern, whether everything is a pattern or nothing is a pattern, whether patterns are interesting in themselves or not, etc.

I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for readings in this area, or if anyone has an opinion on it. I know of many works regarding a single pattern (for example the different theories of linguistics, the different theories of music, the different theories of cooking... you get the idea) but I've never seen a meta-perspective on why are we so interested on patterns and whether our approach actually makes sense.

Thanks!

There was a recent thread on ~talk about which linguistics habits people find annoying, and much to my horror, I have most of those which were mentioned. After thinking about it a little more, I realized that a lot of these habits were picked up from the media I consume and the people I interact with. I also feel that this problem is exacerbated by my poor knowledge of English grammar.

While I was taught grammar at an elementary level in school, I didn't quite grok it back then, and mostly relied on my instinct, as to what "sounded" right. I have since forgotten most of what I had learnt, and my instinct is failing me - my grammar is atrocious, my punctuation is terrible and I only have auto-correct to thank for my spelling.

I understand that English, like other languages, is constantly evolving. What is wrong now might be right tomorrow. However, I believe that this is no excuse for my shortcomings as there is merit speaking and writing in accordance with what is considered correct in the present day.

I would like to learn English from "first principles", and would greatly appreciate if some users could suggest some books/resources which could help me (bonus points for resources pertaining to British English). Any other suggestions would also be great.

Thanks, and have a nice day.

A series of gender neutral alternatives for the third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) have been proposed throughout the recent years (and maybe decades). I wonder the preferences of fellow users here in that regard. So I'd be glad if you could answer the questions in the title, and maybe elaborate a bit on the reasons of your preference. I'm both interested in this generally, and it could be useful as a means to help me practice quantitative linguistic variation (obviously this would hardly be scientifically usable source of data for actual real research so I'm not asking this for that purposes). I'll add my preference as a comment.

Habits can be good! I mean, if you build the good ones of course. But ya know, sometimes people fall into habits that annoy you. I mean, they probably don't know that they're annoying you. Or that they've fallen into the habit at all! What linguistic habits have you noticed in yourself (or others) that drives you up the wall?

I feel like I'm a bit slow, though I'm gaining practice. I cannot read two moderate or long-ish papers in one day. I guess part of that reason is that the field I'm mostly reading in is a field I'm new to, though in accordance with that what I'm reading often is kindo-of introductory material (linguistics, and Linguistics Handbook ed. Aronoff, 2017). A chapter is around the size of an average paper (around 25-30 pages). Another factor may be that I'm not a native speaker of English, but I think I do have a quite decent command of it especially when reading, enough to read through ~60 A4 pages in five-six hours, but I just can't do it.

So I wonder if I'm too slow or maybe exaggerating it a bit? How long does it take for you, and how many can you read, without skimming/skipping, in a "day"?

Hi! I've recently graduated as a BA of Italian philology. But I am interested in pursuing my further studies and academical career in linguistics, studying language contact and linguistic strata in particular. I was wondering if anybody took a similar path and am interested in advice from such folks and also any other humanists here. I'm studying some online material and will try to partecipate in some local university's linguistics BA as a visiting student (I guess it's called a freemover in English) if I can find an affordable option. Also I have found out recommended reading material from local universities I'm interested in and some papers about my field. Do you know of any useful resources for making the transition smoother? What has been you experience if you've taken a similar path to your studies? Thanks in advance!

For me, it's definitely the topic particles in Japanese. It just seems like a really interesting thing that is a reason enough to want to learn Japanese, even excluding other great features it has. Here some info on them.

Most spaces flying the flag of science are often unfortunately exclusive in their focus on STEM sciences. In order to combat such a monopoly and until such time as Tildes opens up groups for the social sciences and humanities, I'd like to open this place up to discussion around some of the disciplines which have always personally interested me more than, say, astronomy or biology. Is anyone else here interested in sociology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics..? Has anyone pursued work in those fields? Any interesting perspectives to offer or news of recent breakthroughs in any of those areas? All discussion is welcome.

As for myself, I'm particularly interested in sociocultural anthropology and archaeology--in the latter case, specifically as relates to the Neolithic and Bronze Age Near East. I'll soon be pursuing a degree in anthropology with an archaeological orientation at the University of Buenos Aires and hope to be working in the field soon after the end of my studies. I'm also incidentally interested in sociology, philosophy, and literature studies, but don't have any plans at the moment to pursue academic study thereof. Any questions? Feel free to ask.

Three examples :

American English have lost the u in word like "color", because it is closer to its phonetics (the u is silent and there's no particular sound associated with "ou"). The letter u has an anglo-norman root.

Swiss French (and for this particular example Belgian French) differs little from standard French, apart from the numbering system. It is ironically more metric than standard French since it streamlines what's left of the base 20 (vigisimasomething) system, i. e. it's "seventy and eighty" ("septante et huitante*") instead of "sixty-ten and four-twenties" ("soixante-dix et quatre-vingts". Historically people all over the world used some sort of base 20 system, probably because we have twenty toes and fingers.

*no one ever use "octante". Belgian people think the Swiss uses it, while Swiss people thinks the Belgian it. I don't know why its that.

Swiss standard German (not dialect) have ditched the Eszett ligature (ß) in favor of a more simple "ss ". That ligature was more common in the middle age.

With those example in mind, do you find value in the "old" vs the "new" way of writing?

(in other words: spelling reformer partisan and opponent : what goes through your mind?)

Sleeping Giants is a science fiction novel by Sylvain Neuvel in which an unknown interviewer and scientist Rose Franklin attempt to decipher the alien origins and purpose of a giant robotic weapon. Told by way of case files – transcripts, diary entries, and other documents – the novel spans the course of four years, beginning with a prologue set when Rose is 11 years old.

When the novel begins, Rose takes out the bike she has received for her birthday, only to fall into a massive hole near Deadwood, South Dakota, in which is a giant hand. Seventeen years later, Rose now spearheads the effort to determine what the hand is, and to crack the code of the symbols featured on it. At the same time, two American pilots, Kara Resnik and Ryan Mitchell, testing Syrian airspace for radiation, return over Turkey when another body part appears beneath them, activated by the radiation they trail. Because of this, Kara and Ryan are tasked to be a part of Rose’s team. A French-Canadian linguist, Vincent Couture, is brought on board to help decipher the symbols. Scouring the globe, the team completes the robot.

The team is watched over, protected by, and instigated by an unknown interviewer (to whom the files belong and who appears in most of the files speaking to the members of the team). The interviewer has immense power that spans presidential administrations, and indeed he only has two equals: the sitting president and an unidentified subject whom he meets in Washington D.C. The unidentified subject turns out to be the descendant of alien soldiers who came to Earth as the most far-flung colony of their alien empire, to guard it against the threat of invasion using giant war machines. When the danger had passed, they left one robot behind in pieces so that when humanity advanced enough technologically, it could operate the robot on its own and prove worthy of alien contact – or destruction. The ability to master the atom for war is the sign of humanity’s advancement, and progress by the 2010s has allowed the robot to be found, reassembled, and activated, for it uses radioactive material as fuel. The aliens are now watching to see what becomes of the robot they left behind.

Kara and Ryan become pilots for the robot, but they are unable to make much progress because the robot only responds to Kara. When Vincent attempts to operate the robot, he is successful, meaning he and Kara are both descendants of the aliens – the only ones who can operate alien machinery because of their genetics. As a result, Greek geneticist Alyssa Papantoniou is brought on board to study Vincent and Kara. But a testing accident on the robot destroys part of Denver International Airport, kills hundreds (seemingly including Rose), and exposes the top secret project to the world. The United States then goes public with the truth about the robot, and sinks it in the Puerto Rico Trench so no country may harness its destructive power. Secretly, the interviewer oversees a consortium of nations other than America which buy into a project to recover the robot.

The new secret project is overseen by Alyssa. But when the project is exposed because of Alyssa’s incompetence, the United States must intervene – now holding the moral high ground – to take custody of the robot – with everything happening at the workings of the interviewer. The United States then gifts the robot to the UN to form the Earth Defense Corps, a multinational effort to prepare for potential alien invasion. As the novel ends, in an epilogue, Rose wakes up on the side of a road in Ireland, with no memory of the project and no memory of the past four years – though she does remember everything before.

Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For example, ~mazda might have ~cars and ~japan as parents, and ~tolkein might have ~fantasy and ~linguistics as parents. I think this could maintain the benefits of the hierachical system while making it easier to find a group that suits the post.

While potentially complex, a good UI which effectively visualised the DAG to allow a content submitter to hone in on the correct group-node, and potentially create a new one on the fly if none was appropriate, could make this concept reasonably intuitive. This problem has already been tackled by creators of git GUIs, so perhaps some ideas could be adapted from that space.

One issue is that a node in a DAG is much harder to identify with a text string than a node in a tree-based hierachy. One solution would be that the submitter could choose a 'primary path' which would be displayed to readers, which, upon being clicked, would display the full DAG, including all the potentially numerous paths which would lead to that group-node. For example, I might choose ~linguistics.tolkein.quenya as the primary path, but upon clicking, the reader can discover that ~fantasy.tolkein.quenya and ~linguistics.conlangs.quenya and ~writing.worldbuilding.quenya all lead to the same group-node [edit: ugly illustration]. I feel that this solution could potentially be powerful enough to remove the need for tags entirely. Viewing the homepage of any particular group-node on the DAG would aggregate posts to all child groups, meaning that the effects of community fragmentation are mitigated. Even a post to a really specific group-node, like ~cars.mazda.mx5.na, will still enjoy the same status and priority to the readers of the ~cars homepage as a post made directly to the ~cars group-node.