Slashdot Mirror
The Evolution of Language
TaeKwonDood writes "We all know language has evolved but mathematicians are trying to take how it has changed in the past to predict what it will be like in the future." From the article: "Mathematical analysis of this linguistic evolution reveals that irregular verb conjugations behave in an extremely regular way -- one that can yield predictions and insights into the future stages of a verb's evolutionary trajectory," says Lieberman, a graduate student in applied mathematics in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and an affiliate of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. "We measured something no one really thought could be measured, and got a striking and beautiful result.""
It's fuck that, suck this, screw that.
Verbs, verbs, verbs, that's all anyone thinks about.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
All I'd like to know is how in the hell did Boston become Bawstan and Chowder become Chowda? And what's with the cities around Massachusetts, anyway? Worcester is pronounced Wusta ... ?!?!? They haven't just evolved - they've completely morphed!
Larp no! Why the loomp would I be quinking of Gundam?
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
...is that you?
am glad I getted the chance to welcome our new, regularly-conjugated overlords.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
I predict we will "loose" a lot of words and have them replaced by ones with similar spelling.
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev alojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
double plus ungood ?
I predict they're gonna make a new word for how useless and impossible it is to predict how language will change. The most common basic causes of changes in language are unpredictable circumstances and events.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
It's already happening with commas and lists of words. The final comma in a list, the one before "and", is too often left out when it should be present. (Bugs the crap out of me, too.)
Quite a few are probably thinking about German group sex according to the words 'an', 'auf', 'hinter', 'in', 'neben', 'über', 'unter', 'vor' and 'zwichen'.
Sorry, o(oooo)ld joke, but it just seemed to fit in.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
I for one welcome our cromulent new verbs!
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
(Zonk has, of course, given up hope on regularizing "to be".)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
PC language is just another example of Orwell's NewSpeak.
This isn't really news. We linguists have known this for a long time, as the article mentions, and we've known why: a child learning a language tends to regularize irregular forms. If he or she then hears the irregular form enough, the child reverts to the irregular form. This is why you'll hear children learning English go through a stage in which their knowledge of verb forms is skimpy but they have irregular forms like "brought", because they are memorizing individual forms, then through a stage in which they produce incorrect but regular forms, which they could not have learned from adults, like "bringed", because they have learned the rule, and through a third stage in which they learn the exceptions to the rule and the irregular forms like "brought" return. Irregular forms will only be learnable if they are sufficiently frequent. The only novelty of this research is the computational ability to carry out an accurate simulation.
As for predicting the future of the language, that's silly. There is a lot more to language change than what happens to irregular verbs.
As much as that annoys me, I must say that they taught that as a valid way of doing things in my elementary school English classes. Then again, I'm one of those Americans that prefers the British style of punctuating quotes. In other words, I write something like: ;)
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store".
whereas the American style is:
Johnny said, "Bill went to the store."
Obviously the former makes more sense because it nests properly: (sentence begins) (quote begins) (quote ends) (sentence ends).
That said, I refuse to put unnecessary u's in words like armor.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Admittedly, while it doesn't directly relate to the mathematical analysis of language the ideas behind the study of them are similar. After all, before now mapping out the general patterns of human civilization through mathematical formulas sounded just as absurd as mapping out language patterns using math. And yet, here's an article describing how scientists may have discovered patterns to language. Any thoughts?
Brief history of psychohistory for those who haven't read The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov:
Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science, which combined history, sociology, and mathematical statistics, in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, to create a (nearly) exact science of the actions of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire.
From Wikipedia, obviously:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory/
And as predicted 31 years ago (damn I'm old), the IM'ers of the future will use the Decibet:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75rdecabet.phtml
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a book -- I think it was _The Futurological Congress_ -- which included people who predicted future inventions by predicting possible words. The theory being: things won't be popular unless they have a good name, so by thinking of good names, and then considering what might have those names, you can predict future developments.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
You learn to use the ." format if you program.
I was going to call you on that last apostrophe but by gosh you used it properly. You learn something every day.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
HAHAHA, I'm in love, you bastards! I'm going on another date with the most wonderful girl I could possibly imagine tomorrow, and I want to tell the whole world!!!!!!!! I've never felt so happy in my whole bloody life!!! HAHAHAHAHAAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Neat discovery, but it's hardly the first time researchers have been able to view trends in linguistic evolution. Check out Grimm's Law.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
the missing point in TFA, i think, is where these researchers are drawing their data from. one of the things that's a recurrent problem in charting/predicting linguistic evolutionary trends is what you base whatever new Model #234a you've come up with on. most researchers doing this kind of modeling work use one or a few of the existing databases of english language text, but the question to ask is where exactly this text is drawn from. some databases draw heavily on samples of textual english--books, magazines, websites, etc--to put together their information on forms and usage, simply because it's the easiest way to go.
for example: the problem with that kind of sampling, as most any linguist will probably tell you, is that while it gives you a bloody enormous body of coherent linguistic data to work with, textual language is 1) different in a bunch of important contextual ways from spoken language and 2) is not actually where linguistic innovation and change often happens. linguistic change is almost always a bottom up phenomenon; lower class influences upper class, spoken language is both a hotbed of innovation (think about street slang), and one of the most powerful influences in what actually becomes accepted as normal usage over time. so what happens in great frequency off of the radar of these databases of recorded text could be running counter to the trends they identified, or might even underline those trends and reinforce them.
i have no idea whether or not this study is actually drawing on text-only data, or what kind of sampling they used, but it sure would be helpful to know, yeah?
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
As I gather from the TFA, they have studied 177 irregular verbs from Old English. What I am interested in:
1) How did they measure the frequency of use of these verbs? Especially now when English is being used as a second language for almost every literate person?
2) What about other languages? Explicitly German, from which English derived, and where a lot of irregular verbs are still being used? (borrowing of verbs from English is not as common in German as it is in other languages)
and all his analysis of the word "chingar" in El laberinto de la soledad.
Jesus Fuck, your linked post should have been +5 Funny/Informative.
Best grammar Nazi post seen yet.
Now if you'll pardon me I have to get to what I was "beed" doing.
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I'm not sure what fancy-pants sources these guys are using, but 'shirve' and 'smite' are definitely not low frequency verbs in my crowd. I say keep the 'mote' in smote. They will rue the day when 'smitted' crosses my lips!
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
im in ur internetz, evolving ur languages
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Yes, I cry and cry when people forget the Harvard comma.
Oh wait, no I don't, it's a useless extra comma that isn't necessary.
A blog about stuff.
...everyone will speak as lolcats.
I can haz language?
Languages are 'derived', sure - they evolve as derivations of other languages and/or common usage that pushes some words into popularity while others fall into history. All languages but one...
:)
The Korean language that has been in use for the last four hundred years is the only 'human' invented language on the planet. At one time, when the country was unified by one King, it became clear that the multiplicity of dialects in use around the country were barriers prohibiting trade, mobility, communication, learning from each other, etc.
The top thinkers were gathered and ordered to design a language that was simple to learn and speak...read and write. Once this was done, the King simply decreed that all citizens adopt it, shedding their separate dialects.
Of course, foreigners still need to train their tongues to make correct sounds, but if you already speak Chinese or Japanese, as examples, you can pick Korean up in short order. Reading and writing are similarly learned.
My point is that the future of language lies not only in continued evolution. What say we follow the Korean lead and build a new one everyone can use...or perhaps just use Korean
TFA is short on details, but they must've used a historical corpus (that's linguistese for "a database of texts").
This of course raises the question of what kind of language the corpus is representative of, and what kind of language is is not representative of. The bodies of text we have for Old and Middle English are far less representative than what we have for contemporary English; e.g., we don't have a lot of transcribed recordings of phone conversations between family members from back in Chaucer's day.
Of course, it's kind of hard to criticise this study without looking at it. The only thing that strikes me so far: none of the authors seems to be a linguist.
Are you adequate?
I mean no disrespect to the researchers involved here, however this seems an appropriate topic for this question.
I occasionally see algorithms used to predict future outcomes of a system where the algorithm appears to have been manipulated to fit the data rather than actually attempt to model the system in question. A prime example is one where the "novelty" of the universe is plotted over time and spikes appear in correlation with historic events. My question: Is there a specific term to describe this type of shenanigans?
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Grocken Zie Greek?
Seriously folks, now all they need is a study to predict which comes first - the "regularization" of irregular verbs (you'd think they'd just eat-all bran) versus their seriously overdue death.
- smite
- shrive
Aside from their archive of "least used verbs throughout history" where else do you find these words?Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
...that Rudolf Flesch doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
Are you adequate?
I predict a language where some words take on many meanings, for example fuck will one day be more than a noun, an adjective, a verb, an adverb and pronoun.
What the fuck?
Stop fucking doing that!
I was fucking...
We were going fucking fast!
Thats fucking cool!
Wit da wordz dat survive, we'll abbr. dem, soz we can text fzter.
Eventually, we'll replace most common words with more common vulgar or shorter ones. And all our plants will get their electrolytes! Cuz its what plants need!
Are you aware of any historical linguistics research that makes quantitative hypotheses about the relationship between word frequency and morphological regularization? I don't know if there are any (and I wouldn't be surprised either way), but whether this study is "news" depends on the answer to that question, not on the all-too-well known fact that children learn regular inflectional paradigms before they learn irregular ones.
Are you adequate?
"we will "loose" a lot of words"
;)
Why would the words fall apart? I guess you already lost "lose"...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I shudder to think what someone from 50 years ago would have imagined if they heard the phrase "Internet domain squatting". It sounds like some kind of hobby for fecephiliac landowners.
I prdct nglsh lnguge n grmr bcm mre efcnt n snsbl lk txt msgs
Seriously thongh i think this is what will happen. As everyone starts using mobile phones and internet messaging theyl get so used to it they'l wonder why they dont do it all the time, and then as the majority of the population is less educated and doesnt understand the beauty and possibility a complex language creates eventually knowledge of english as we know it today will be restricted to a select few with people with the others either ignoring it or bastardizing the words. the same has already happend. e.g. There are four meanings to the word "Imperative". Most people will struggle to give you one.
Also watch idiocracy, it shows you what will probably happen in the near future.
"Whycome you dont have a tattoo?" lol
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"Well, I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Aside from their archive of "least used verbs throughout history" where else do you find these words?
That is a grievous insult to the English language - shrive yourself or I will smite your ass!
(ok, so I don't have occasion to use "shrive" too often, but "smite" is a very useful word)
sic transit gloria mundi
According to half a dozen dictionaries, "wedded" is already an acceptable past tense for "wed", and is already in use.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The only way that COBOL may ever end is when English changes so much that COBOL no longer reads as English.
Table-ized A.I.
Been done, I think...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Loose lips lose spit.
"the beauty and possibility a complex language"
Be that as it may, 99% of that beauty and complexity is useless. Just because something is nice doesn't mean it should be used on a daily basis, Latin is nice sounding but I don't want to give a speech in it, English is much better for that purpose.
Now then spelling might change as a result of text messaging, but speech probably won't since 99% of people pronounce the words (except lol, which gets you ridiculed if you say it but confuses people if you spell it out (laugh out loud?)) as the real word. The written language will probably be hugely affected by text messaging, but speech will be mostly unaffected (besides the addition of a few new words, acronyms, which has been happening for a long time now, ASAP, AWOL etc). It's going to be something else that changes speech.
As for Imperative, I highly doubt that most people can't link Imperative to Important, especially with it being used a good amount in games/movies. It's other meanings aren't well known (I only had a fuzzy recall of it off-hand) but that's because they're not important to anyone besides an English Major. Imperative has a 5th meaning I'd bet you don't know, it's a form of Computer programming (similar to Procedural programming). Just because people don't know something doesn't imply that knowledge is being lost, most people have no need to learn what Imperative means for grammar, just as most don't need to know what it means in programming.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
I hope you will not object if I also offer the Doctor my most enthusiastic contrafribularities.
(apol: blackadder)
At least for Indo-European languages, the pattern seems to have been deevolution rather than evolution. Compare any of the "ancient" languages to their derivates (examining Romance, Germanic, Slavic languages, Greek, etc..) and you know what I am talking about.
What then of the commonly heard "brang" and "brung"? How would this fit into this pattern? Perhaps there is some intuitive understanding of how strong verbs conjugate that is then misapplied in such cases as this?
I'm also intrigued by the similarity of strong verb conjugation with the way Semitic consonantal roots derive new words through vowel changes -- though admittedly I know very little about Semitic languages. But the similarity does make me wonder if it's one of the basic linguistic paradigms for word formation -- vowel change, vs. consonant change. Vowel change shows up in Japanese (more my area of familiarity) to some extent as well, with koro koro and kuru kuru both denoting a rolling motion, for instance, from which may be derived korogaru "to roll, intransitive" and kuruma "car or carriage"...
< sigh. > More evidence that I should get off my duff, make some time in my schedule, and actually get around to reading up on linguistics. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"We all know language has evolved"? No, we don't. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. Language poofed into existence.
... . It is also argued that by the very nature of the thing it can only have been the work of a single inventor."
... Yet the discerning Kipling, taking a hard common-sense look at the official solution, found it simply absurd. It is the same hpyothesis that we now dare to question ... ."
As described by Hugh Nibley in Genesis of the Written Word (from Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless): "Many scholars have pointed out that the alphabet is the miracle of miracles, the greatest of all inventions, by which even the television and jet-planes pale in comparison, and as such a thing absolutely unique in time and place
From the preface of the same essay: "And in all of science there never was a more open-and-shut case than the origin of writing: intuitively we know it must have begun with pictures, and traditionally we know it can have developed in only one way - very slowly and gradually from simple to more complex forms, and all that.
So, no, we don't know that language evolved.
As a fluent Japanese speaker and part-time studier of Korean, I can vouch for the grammatical similarities -- most intriguing. And also as a part-time studier of Chinese, I can vouch that Chinese and Korean are about as similar as English and Korean -- Korean has borrowed words from both languages, but structurally resembles neither. Okay, so Chinese influenced Korean (and Japanese too) in terms of how counters are used (words like "brace" in "a brace of ducks", or "murder" in "a murder of crows", or "loaf" in "three loaves of bread"), but otherwise Chinese and Korean have pitifully little to do with each other. For that matter, Chinese is closer to English structurally speaking than it is to Korean, so there. ;)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Now here's someone who gets both their history *and* their linguistics right. Kudos to Sr. Martínez. And with a name like Stanislav as well -- Slavs in Spain, there's got to be an interesting story there somewhere. ;)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Dude, wtf?
Either you're trolling, or you seriously have to let me know where you bought your stash.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Interestingly, a friend of mine who seriously studied Old English married a Dutch fellow who's mother was from Friesland. She can understand Fries, though her husband cannot (he was raised elsewhere in Holland, speaking standard Dutch, and never learned Fries). There's also considerable archaeological evidence suggesting that the Angle ethnicity arose from an area around the southern end of the Jutland (Danish) peninsula -- i.e., right around Friesland. I'm not in any way saying that Fries is Old English, but rather pointing out that Fries is a closer relative than German -- but then all three come from the same roots. It's a bit like English and Fries being cousins, with German as that other cousin twice removed on your uncle's side. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
What's sick? The evolution of language? I suppose you would prefer to speak Esperanto since it's "Intelligently Designed?" Go ahead. I won't stop you. ;)
Put identity in the browser.
The version I heard was about a wombat. For those who don't know, a wombat is smallish four legged burrowing marsipual which eats roots and leaves.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Yes language evolution has evolved greatly. I for one would love to read Shakespeare with a "bootylicious" thrown in occasionally. Or would have loved to have read about F Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby performing a "crunk" at one of his parties that are populated by "celebutantes".
...a wombat is smallish four legged burrowing marsipual which eats bush, roots and leaves. There, corrected that for you.- "The three of us ordered steak, fish and chips, and ribs." You immediately know that "fish and chips" are not separate elements of the list, even before reaching the next comma. You know that ribs is separate from chips.
- "The three of us ordered steak, fish and chips and ribs." You don't know (except through convention) whether "fish and chips" is the second element or "chips and steak" is the third element. Longer lists with more complicated syntax get even more confusing, requiring rereading two or three times to clarify. Some sentences will never be clear without the Harvard comma.
The argument against the Harvard comma is that it isn't necessary in most instances. If you could choose one of the rules, which would you choose? I'd go with the one that makes the language clearer and easier to understand. Consistent use of the comma makes things immediately clear which wouldn't be in casual, required-only use of it.Put identity in the browser.
I understand this has pretty much nothing to do with the article but my prediction for the evolution of language is something a little closer to New Speak... just look at text messaging- Surely the written word can not take such a grievous blow without some damage spilling over into the spoken word. Just you wait... the future of language is double plus ungood!
When you are quoting a sentence, that's not how the nesting works at all. When you are quoting a few words, it is a different story. I hate seeing words spelled incorrectly! "Color" is not a word, at least not in English!
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Are there any other verbs that are turning into an irregular form for specific phrases? What's the rate for those?
I think the examples on that page illustrate well why the serial comma can be both good and bad, depending on the situation.
Personally, I hate linguistic prescriptivists. I'll use whichever format is less ambiguous; it's stupid to create a rule just for the sake of having a rule, if it produces a stupid result some the time.
The only good "rule" is to try to be unambiguous wherever possible, unless ambiguity is the desired effect. Simply picking one or the other and then dogmatically sticking to it, even when the result is inferior, is the mark of a small mind.
I feel the same way about punctuation and quotation marks. I'll include punctuation within quotation marks when the punctuation is part of the quote (when, for example, I'm quoting a statement that really is the end of a sentence), but I think it borders on intellectual dishonesty to insert anything into the quotation marks that wasn't actually in the quoted text, and that includes terminal punctuation. The placement of a full stop can drastically change the tone or meaning of a statement; it's trivial to use American-style quotation rules to perform what's technically not a misquotation but is certainly out of context or misleading.
Also, when doing technical writing (e.g. documentation), where you are using quotes to distinguish something in an interface from the rest of the body text, including punctuation in the quotes can be confusing. What should be in the quotes is literally what's on the screen, nothing else.
The American-style quotation rules are a leftover from old typesetting methods that are no longer in use or relevant; it's time that we retired them in favor of greater precision and flexibility for the writer.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I dunno, is it anything like this?
TFA is fascinating. They predict that the irregular form of "be" will persist for tens of thousands of years. But consider the usage by inner-city blacks in America of the phrase "we be," as in "We be leaving," to mean "We are leaving." The basic verb is "be" and the irregular plural present tense is "are." I know that TFA focused on past tense, but could this be an example of a verb becoming regularized right under our noses?
These whriters alwhays fohrget the cahse ohf sihlent H. Mohre, ohr fewher? Their modelh ihs silehnt onh this ihssue.
No, but in USish it is! ;)
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
Since we're on the subject, will someone in the know please enlighten me a bit. I often see people write sentences like "It is a big, red, house.", which bug me to no end because in any grammar lessons I've had in my OWN language, you only ever put commas between adjectives in a list like that, not between an adjective and a noun. Is it different in english, or do so many people really just not grasp the function of the comma in that case?
I've seen a few programs here get caught by the color/colour bug. Haven't had or seen any problems with the -ize suffix yet, but I'm sure it will hit me one day.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Seriously, in (geographically) larger projects, and most certainly in open APIs - it tends to be a good idea to define constants twice (eg GL_COLOR and GL_COLOUR in OpenGL). You never know what those pesky Europeans will come up with otherwise.
Ooops, I'm a European. Well, we learned Oxfordish in school when I was a kid, and I suspect they still do. In a year or two, I'll find out.
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
I'm a mathematician, not a linguist, and to me the article is quite newsworthy, even though the mathematics used in the study (that is, statistics) lies outside my research area. It's possible that the majority of linguists (such as you) may not be able to appreciate the novelty of this discovery, because they lack the mathematical background to evaluate the relative strength of this particular statistical characterization compared with other ones that have appeared in analogous studies.
The computation carried out in the article is not merely a matter of "ability", nor is it fair to characterize it as a simulation. If you read the original article, you'll find that they derive the square-root law for verb decay using two intrinsically different approaches (three if you count the zipfian extrapolation). The most dramatic difference is that the first approach does not on the historical dates of Old and Middle English, whereas the second one does. There is no mathematics-based reason in general why these two approaches would even yield a square-root law at all. The fact that they both produce the same square root law, with coefficient values within three percent of each other, is actually (from a mathematics perspective) quite shocking. It indicates very strongly that their quantification of decay rates is right and likely to hold for future centures (much more strongly than if they had merely presented one statistical fit, which is the norm in most articles).
A crucial observation is that the data set that they use is not self-selected or biased in any way -- it is simply a complete list of all the irregular verbs in the English language for which documentation of the Old English forms could be found. In my experience it is quite rare for a naturally occurring data set such as this one to conform to two distinct statistical models in exactly the same way.
This means in future, we will see or actually hear more use of the words "Such as" and "like"
Every morning I hear the US exchange students (espacially the female ones) in the metro talk, and partly annoyed how the word "like" is used as the every fourth word.
Those who don't have the opportunity to do it, talk about it.
I, for one, have been welcoming our new, irregular, old verb laws.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
A fictional science!
I could care less...........
(no really, I could)
For anyone who liked this:
It's taken from a book written by Lynne Truss published in the UK roughly 3 years ago.
Amazon Link
u wnt lng evl2n? wid e # of moronz uzng sms syntax online & evn in exam pprs v're doomed 2 idiocracy. v're all fkd.
I have always wondered why some languages evolve much faster than others. Someone knowing modern Greek can read 2,000+ year-old text with comparable difficulty to someone knowing modern English reading Chaucer. Similarly Italians can read latin (an Italian once told me that the Latin used by Thomas Aquinas read very like a Piedmont dialect!), and Tamils can read ancient Tamil. However we cannot understand more than a couple of words from Beowulf, which is a mere 1300 years old! Why the difference in speed of change?
"Aside from their archive of "least used verbs throughout history" where else do you find these words?"
Wow, I think this is the first example of 'self-negating prophecy' I've ever seen.
1) Announce to the world that 'shrive' and 'smite' are least used verbs.
2) World starts to use said verbs.
3) ???
4) Prophet! Err, Non-prophet!
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Well, TFA points that natural languages evolve towards being more like Esperanto (in other words, school kids are lazy and they simplify by ignorance, foreigners substitute lack of linguistic knowledge with "common sense"). I don't see the point of your reply to GP, who seems to abhor regularization, not existing irregularities.
Harvard comma? It's an Oxford comma, you bally colonials!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Just bullshit. I wish I got paid to make shit up like that.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Language couldn't possibly have evolved on it's own. It's far too complex. It must have been intelligently designed about 4000 years ago by some higher being...
Yon means something akin to "that" or "over there" in some dialects. Thus one could confuse a method of water softening with a building where shares or commodities are traded, and which is visble but distant.
I for one think that's too much of a risk.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Are you sure you haven't perhaps learned an Ogg Swordfish English instead?
Well regardless of whether Korean is an invented language, Esperanto certainly is, and *is in use*, albeit on a rather small scale. I'm interested how widespread Chinese-speaking will alter English. "You all today good, question"
What is interesting about Japanese in this context, is that they have a total of 6 or so irregular verbs. Mind you, half of those are irregular only because they skip a double consonant where they stricktly speaking should have had one.
And it is indeed the most used ones, "to do, to come, to go". I'm not at all surprosed by TFA.
Agree with TFA that language hooks into culture and social rules. For Japan, the stereotype is certainly "Follow the rules. Irregularity is bad". And without the mental overhead of managing irregularities, they could have the mental overhead of managing politeness and hierarchy instead.
Anyhow, languages are amazing things. Wish I had time to study more of them, understanding how and why languages work gives some very interesting insight into how our human brains actually operate.
I lost my sig.
Since you bring up commas, and the misuse thereof -- the weirdest punctuation habit I've seen is the tendency to insert multiple commas in a series. I know several people who do this, all of whom are otherwise fairly well-educated and relatively competent communicators, and it bothers me to an unreasonable degree. What I find especially odd about it is that, apparently, the number of commas appears to denote the length of the pause they want you to read into whatever they've written. I speak face-to-face with a couple people who do this, and I've started to notice they put more than the usual amount of emphasis and "enhanced timing" in different parts of their spoken dialog. They do this with variations of cadence and the length of pauses. Consequently I've concluded the weird comma-trains are an attempt to capture in writing that element of spoken language that is otherwise difficult to represent. Still,,,,, it's distracting as hell.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Now may be your last chance to be a 'newly wed'
While I understand how they came to this conclusion, I doubt people will start to say "newly wedded" anytime soon. Why? Cause "newly wed" is an expression, and also because Newlyweds is an awesome reality TV show. I can't imagine people 50 or 100 years from now ignoring that fact.
You just got troll'd!
Whoosh!
It was already an old joke when Truss adopted it as the title of her book.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
That, too. I was following the lead of the GP, using his terminology. Either will do for me, or I'll just accept "the comma before and in a list of stuff." I don't really care.
Put identity in the browser.
It was an evolution vs. intelligent design joke. Nevermind.
Put identity in the browser.
Darwin showed that adaptation is much larger in small isolated communities than in larger ones. English already changes a lot slower than, say, Dutch. If the internet turns the world into one big English speaking community than I wonder of their predictions based on past data hold.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
What do they mean, 'new verbs entering English, such as "google," are universally regular.'? Everyone knows that it's
I google
I gaigle
I have googlen
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
n/t
Long before the book came out, I heard a rather naughtier version - "eats bush and leaves".
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
OK, languages and english get simpler over time. But, if we go back in time, why were languages more complex?
Latin is more complex than french or spanish. Then, were the ancestors of latin (indogermanic) super-complex? This is odd, as I guess that prehistoric societies were more primitiv and there was no literature, so why would they have had such complex languages?
Or look at the commas as list in this way: "It is big. It is red. It is a house."
Or as a substitute for and as in "It is big AND red AND a house"
The comma provides more emphasis, other wise it's simply a factualy statement. "It is a big, red house." Great!
Even in the small world of English speakers, English has devolved to an almost incomprehensible point, thusly:
The Go Phenomenon : substituting forms of "to go" for verbs of communication, e.g.
"So he goes, 'What do you mean?'"
The Like Syndrome : c.f. The Go Phenomenon using "like", e.g.
"So I'm like hi, and he's like hi."
Dearth of Punctuation : obfuscation of meaning in written communication by lack
of clear punctuation, e.g.
"What do you smell?" vs. "What, do you smell?"
Tense Aphasia : using the wrong verb form in compound tenses, e.g.
"Should have GONE there, " instead of "Should have WENT there."
Subjunctive Interruptus : using and losing the mood, e.g.
"If she were there, we would have gone." (unreal condition) being replaced by
"If she was there, we would have gone."
The Ubiquitous Atrocities : To/Two/Too, Where/Were, They're/There/Their, Than/Then
Combinations of these mistakes abound.
Pejorative Indifference : using "whatever" to mean "Frac off, I have no regard for what
you just said."
Number Bewilderment : confusing singular and plural use of words, e.g.
"We was," vs. "We were."
Abject Sloth : being so lazy as to think that it's easier to type "njoy" for "enjoy,"
and using more abbreviations than necessary
A nasty example of the preceding errata compounded together in a single utterance:
"so hes like she goes to bad he dogs her if she was there he coulda went
there but im like whatever we was were she was more then there bfs"
And the excuse I hear frequently is, "It's just online, so grammar and spelling don't matter, " or "She understands what I mean! I don't have to talk good online. This isn't school." (even when she doesn't)
As for what I do, my rule is that you are responsible for conveying your intended meaning clearly, and that if I have to parse and reparse your sentences more than once, then I will quietly discard them, and assume you said nothing. For me, it is simply an annoyance. For you, it means you might be ignored during a critical situation. <smug>After all, if you are so lazy and bratty that you can't take the time to be understood by people whose help you might need, then your situation -- and you -- can't be all that important.</smug>
"When communication fails to be important, then communication fails." - me
I too heard a rude version before I heard Truss's cleaned-up version, but as that meaning of "bush" is still relatively rare in the UK the version I heard depended on an alternative reading of "shoots".
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
On the one hand...
> Longer lists with more complicated syntax get even more confusing, requiring rereading two
> or three times to clarify. Some sentences will never be clear without the Harvard comma.
This is why we have semicolons, so we can include entries in a list that themselves contain commas: The sandwich selection included ham and cheese on rye; bacon, lettuce, and tomato; egg and grilled onion; and reuben.
On the other hand...
> The argument against the Harvard comma is that it isn't necessary in most instances.
Yes, and that's an extremely poor argument. For *most* of the things we use commas for, they aren't necessary for clarity in most instances. Aposition, for instance, would usually be clear enough without being set off by commas, but we set it off because the normal conventions for punctuating the English language call for that.
Until very recently, there was no debate about the last comma in a list: one simply always included it. I'm not sure exactly where the change came from, but I view it as an unnecessary and unwarranted change and an impediment to clarity.
However, I think it's already too far gone to stop. Almost a third of the population, perhaps more, are now writing lists without the last comma, exclusively. The convention almost certainly cannot be restored to its former near-universal state.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I believe the original reason for putting the punctuation inside the quotes was a mechanical one. The insertion of a quotation mark leaves the fragile comma or dot exposed, causing breakage on the printing plate.
I prefer the format myself, but for [a]esthetic reasons.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
> I often see people write sentences like "It is a big, red, house."
On the internet, you will see all kinds of weird punctuation. I've never seen that particular usage in a book, and every set of English punctuation rules I've ever seen would consider it incorrect, at least in the usual case.
However, comma usage in English does tend to be pretty lax, and in fact some sets of rules even explicitely say, in effect, "if any of these rules causes a lack of clarity in your sentence, then break it".
The other poster, who says that some style guides forbid the comma here and others mandate it, is confusing adjective separation with the comma-separated list. The instance he's talking about is more like "We painted the house red, green, and blue", which some style guides insist should be "We painted the house red, green and blue". There's a lot of disagreement over that one, but in the case you were talking about, I've never seen a style guide suggest, much less mandate, separating the adjectives with a comma from the noun they modify. That's just a punctuation mistake, plain and simple. But if you read English mostly on the internet, you will see a lot of punctuation mistakes. Most people don't bother proofreading what they write on the internet, much less getting it checked by an editor.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Ah.
So it will become more like Arabic and Hebrew.
Ignore this signature. By order.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_the_needful
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I've read that the end punctuation being inside the quotes is a throw-back to early printing days, where the spacing around the symbols made it look better that way around.
Could be true or not, but it it sounds suitably plausible.
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / xenogamous.com / transference.org / quantam sufficit ]
Well George Orwell already took this to task, and NewSpeak will become our new language!
ourwelcome bb anteJaggernauts newspeak! (our something like this...)
Shawn
Yeh that's how I read it too. I think the emphasis with the extra comma helps you to visualise what is being described better in the sentence. I think little nuances like that are what make English such a powerful language. The extra comma can make a subtle difference to the interpretation of what is being read without the general meaning being changed.
Barbara: "Excuse me Stewardess, but I speak Jive."
Stewardess: "Oh, good. Please tell him that I'll be right back with some medicine."
Barbara: (to man) "Jus hang loose blood, she gonna catch you on the rebound with some medicide..."
Man: "Whatchu talkin' bout momma, my momma didn't raise no dummies, I dug her rap!"
Barbara: "Cut me some slack jack! (arguing in Jive) Jive-ass fool ain't got no brains... anyhow."
(Forgive me if I missed a part, trying to do it from memory here....)
And they said zombies weren't real!
I work at a detention facility school.
We get cussed out on a regular basis.
Sometimes the kids get restrained by trained staff and they will say something like, "I can't fucking breathe." This they know is a magic phrase. We had a teacher recently go in and tell a student:
You cannot use a gerund with an intransitive verb. You should say I can't fucking. Or I can't breathe. You cannot use I can't fucking breathe. Make up your mind you are either not fucking or not breathing!
Well this is what happens when english teachers have way to much caffeine.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
My first reaction to the article was sudo vi /etc/hosts
Here's a good guide to American vs. British word use
The obvious ones are:
'o' vs 'ou' as in color/favorite/honor vs. colour/favourite/honour
'ze' vs 'se' as in analyze/criticize/memorize vs. analyse/criticise/memorise
'er' vs 're' as in center/meter/theater vs. centre/metre/theatre
More interesting, they have a list of irregular verbs. I tried writing down word I would use, and there no bias either way. Although I did try the word 'lept' for leaping, and 'stroved' for striving.
to dream dreamed vs dreamt
to leap leaped vs leapt
to learn learned vs learnt
to fit fit vs fitted
to forecast forecast vs forecasted
to wed wed vs wedded
to knit knit vs knitted
to light lit vs lighted
to strive strove vs strived
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The argument against the Harvard comma is that it isn't necessary in most instances.
No, the argument against it is that it can also introduce ambiguity. See the Wikipedia article.
If you could choose one of the rules, which would you choose? I'd go with the one that makes the language clearer and easier to understand.
The obvious answer is to choose which one is clearer depending on the context. It doesn't have to be always one or the other.
umansHay! Iyay amyay omfray ethay uturefay! oDay otnay ytray otay understandyay ymay advancedyay uturisticfay anguagelay. Youryay imativepray ainsbray ancay otnay oncievecay ofyay ouryay advancedyay ordsway andyay uffstay. owBay ownday otay youryay igusticlylay uperiorsay overloardsyay!!!
After R-ing TFA, I cannot avoid wondering how the environment changes the rules they observed. While I agree the general principle that less-used constructions may change faster, the environment in which a language exists changes around it and has a huge impact on the mechanisms that effect such change.
A thousand years ago, written language was much less present than it is today and remained so until about a couple centuries back. The greater the body of older written materials available or the older it is at any given time, the more "exposed" the constructs are and the slower they evolve. Also a factor is the recent arrival of recorded speech that could very well have an impact on how people speak and write for generations to come.
I will be interesting to watch how language continues to evolve in this environment.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
You might have done better if you'd told it in Esperanto. :)
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
My mini review of that book was that it was awful. It is an interesting and even important subject... but the writing style is so irritating and preachy that it just made me want to spell poorly and use bad grammar to annoy the woman that wrote that book.
I read the entirety of the Wiki article before posting, thank you.
The only possible ambiguity mentioned is one where a comma can make an item appear to be an indeterminate clause. The issue is easily fixed by not omitting the optional who/which/that is. In reality, the ambiguity is caused by taking a shortcut in the indeterminate clause, not by the choice of using the comma, therefore the situation mentioned is not the comma's introduction of ambiguity, but the shortcut's.
In fact, almost all American style references suggest its use, except for newspapers and journals, who delete it specifically to save space in narrow columns.1&2
Put identity in the browser.
In English, the word 'fuck' is a general purpose accentuator. It's used to increase the emotional intensity of the words surrounding it. It gets its power to do this through its being proscribed in normal and polite conversation and its legal prohibition from general public media.
The ability to construct coherent sentences using only variations of this word results from the ability of the English language to have any word become any part of speech often unchanged according to its placement in the sentence. English is unique in this regard among the world's common languages.
The word 'fuck' in English is one of the few words in that language that shares with Chinese the ability to completely change its meaning according to its accent. The word has different subtle connotations depending on whether it is spoken with a rising, falling, flat, or modulated tone.
A note of caution here; this word, since it has no clear meaning, can and does invoke strong emotional states in its use. Its use among violent people often serves as an signal to initiate violence, especially around Americans.
Further study of this linguistic curiosity can be done by viewing Hollywood films of the late 1990's. Recommended are films staring Samuel Jackson (except the second Star Wars trilogy) and Quentin Tarentino.
U's right about those unnecessary u's.
Write like Prince.
Sing like Prince.
Fuck like Prince.
Disappear like Prince.
Au revoir, Prince.
I thought languages were moving in all directions - some simiflying grammar and becoming more analytical while others are becoming more grammatically complex. Biological evolution moves in both directions too- simplification and complexification. We usually just think of the complex organisms, but there has never been as many parasites (viruses, leeches, prions, etc) as there have been now too.
One direction current languages are moving toward is increasing vocabulary. They add terms to capture the more activities and things in modern society. Some of these are technical and only understood by sub-populations. Others synonyms with subtle nuances. English is rich in synonyms - the old german one, the french term, maybe a modern greco-latin term, etc.
Korean and Japanese only appear to be totally isolated from each other because of the political elements that seem to inevitably taint any comparison of the two. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that Japanese was demonstrably related to some degree to Baekje, an older and now extinct Korean dialect that did not survive the Silla consolidation of the peninsula. There is also considerable archaeological evidence that the Yayoi cultural shift in the Japanese archipelago from around 200BCE - 200CE, wherein the previous Jmon hunter-gatherer culture with its relatively unstratified society was overtaken by a very different hierarchical culture replete with all the regalia of mounted warfare, was brought about by a large-scale immigration from the Korean peninsula. This repeated itself to some extent around 400 years later, around 660CE, when the Silla kingdom attacked and overwhelmed the Baekje kingdom, whereupon the Baekje (or at least their elite) fled to Japan, which had been helping the Baekje out militarily off and on for the preceding 250 years or so.
Anyway, to sum up, Korean and Japanese are only as "totally isolated" from each other as the nationalists and xenophobes in both cultures insist that they are.
With regard to their relation to other languages, that's more of an open question, but there is some (at least anecdotal) evidence suggesting that Korean (and by extension Japanese) might well be related to Mongolic languages and the rest of the greater Turkic grouping, though admittedly not all agree with the Mongolic-Turkic connection. What's needed is more linguistically trained people familiar with these languages, who are not also hell-bent on making political statements. We need more serious application of the scientific method, rather than nationalistic jingoism about how one group or the other couldn't possibly be related to 'that rabble' over there.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
-- Julie
Microsoft Subnet: the independent voice of Microsoft customers
When I'm writing in a conversational manner, I use commas for short pauses......and I use a trail of elipses to indicate a longer pause.
When I write formally, I use more appropriate punctuation. Longer pauses turn into either new clauses or new sentances.
Layne
Best. Explaination. Ever. (Purposefully using CBG form to emphasize/emphasise alternate ways of adding emphasis and pause.)
But I still disagree with using commas for this non-traditional insertion of pauses. An elipse makes a better indicator.
It's a big...red...house.
Layne
You missed out, man! Have a look at this important online English lesson. Sample sentence:
"That fucking fucker's fucking fucked!"
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I'm not sure if the past evolution of languages is a good guide to what will happen in the future. The last hundred years are unique in human history in that we can (and do) go back and hear exactly how people talked twenty, forty, a hundred years ago. I suspect that this will have a retarding effect on the rate of language change.
The cake is a pie
Actually, Korean resembles Japanese as far as grammatical structure (but not in terms of conjugation.)
What do you mean by "oldest"?
You'd have an argument there if you'd said "most frequent" instead of "oldest." Other people have pointed out how you messed up Russian (and dear God, can't you look up stuff before you spout off?).
You know, idly making hypotheses about stuff you don't know anything about, and then demanding that others do the hard work of testing them for you, hardly qualifies as "good scientific methodology."
The question is ill-defined anyway, since you give us no criterion for deciding which words in other languages count as "to be." Do both ser and estar in Spanish qualify? Ok, that one might not be a problem, because they are both "irregular" (but more on that below). Does Cape Verdean Creole é (as in Mi é bu amigu 'I am your friend') count as a verb? That one doesn't vary with person or number, but its grammar is otherwise very odd compared to other verbs (long story).
An even more profound question: how do we decide if a verb is "irregular"? For example, in the traditional grammars of Romance languages, most verbs are classified as belonging into one of a handful of conjugation groups. In Spanish, for example, these are the verbs that end in -ar, -er and -ir; in French, -er, -ir and -re. Verbs that can't be correctly conjugated just by applying the rules appropriate to one of these classes are called "irregular."
Now the problem is that these definitions of "irregular" are language-specific; the definition of "irregular verb" for Spanish is no use for Turkish. Therefore, the results that you obtain for one language may not be comparable to those you obtain for another.
Are you adequate?
gh making the "fff" sound as in tough
o making the "eh" sound as in women
ti making the "shh" sound as in nation
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Please re-read my comment -- I meant that Korean has borrowed words from both *Chinese and English*, but structurally resembles neither. I'm personally very much convinced that Korean and Japanese share (at least some of) the same origins, you'll find no argument from me there. And I happily consent that the vocabularies don't have much in common, but then I've not been much of a fan of Swadesh lists on the whole when it comes to non-IE languages; they're a fun analysis tool, but vocabulary differences alone don't strike me as enough evidence to prove unrelatedness, as it were, especially when underlying intrinsic language structures show so much similarity.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of my personal favorites is how I've heard them use the word "tension."
When negotiations for a car deal were getting complex: "this is quite a lot of tension."
The reference here was not to interpersonal tension, but tension can refer to complexity or bureaucracy.
Forget, the, Harvard, comma, what, about, the, Shatner, comma?
Bloody hell, it is annoying! Get an account, log in, go to Preferences:Comments, and click on "Normal" under "Discussion Style."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Man, I'm going to report you to the SPCA! What did that donkey ever do to you?
See what I've been reading.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A bit on a sensationalistic side, as people working in the field of quantitative and experimental psycholinguistics have been working on measuring various aspects of language for some time now.
The real problem in this field is not measuring itself, but getting good material to make measures on and a proper theoretical framework (i.e. you need to figure out what kind of quantity is relevant).
It is now possible to predict reaction times on certain grammar forms with ~99% precision based on frequency of those forms in language (I'm to lazy to give links, google it if you are interested, the research was mostly done by Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). The problem was finding a relevant way of grounding grammar into information theory framework—once that was solved mathematics was trivial.
The value of the Harvard research is that it is probably the first to give some exact measurments on phenomena that has been, so far, only qualitatively noted in the historical perspective of language development. Good work.
It is also another validation of the idea that frequency (amount of information) of a given linguistic entity is the property that is the most relevant (maybe even the only relevant) for the way our brain processes language.
'Lieberman, Michel, and their co-authors project that the next word to regularize will likely be "wed."' It is obvious that because of their relationship issues, they've banded together to try and make references to marriage scarce, and themselves (hypothetically) happier. When we banish the irregular forms of 'wed' from our lexicon, they will see their mistake and start using it again, only to be laughed at by their wedded peers. Duh?
For what it's worth, I first heard that joke over 20 years ago.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Y'all know that in Australia, a wombat is someone who eats, roots and leaves. That's not too polite, especially on a first date.
The GP is right to let "it is a big, red, house" bug him, because it's completely incorrect.
... there is no universal standard, either in British or American English. (Personally I find it is easier to accidentally form confusing sentences if you leave the comma out, but leaving it out does not automatically make the sentence confusing.)
The serial comma, on the other hand, is still optional. You can either say "it was red, white and blue" or "it was red, white, and blue"
Breakfast served all day!
The version we used to hear was a bit more crass, and involved relationships:
A kiwi eats roots shoots and leaves.
Ok, I stand corrected - 15th century puts it 700 years ago. From elsewhere on the 'net... "unlike almost every other alphabet in the world, the Korean alphabet did not evolve. It was invented in 1443 (promulgated in 1446) by a team of linguists and intellectuals commissioned by King Sejong the Great."
:)
My comments concerning English versus Korean are based on the differences in how the mouth, tongue, pallate, throat and nasal cavities are employed. While native English speakers are capable of making individual sounds, the correct sounds needed to imitate a native Korean speaker require distinctly different combinations of throat and tongue, using the rear of the mouth, instead of the teeth, as an example. Koreans rarely combine the tongue and front teeth when making the short list of sounds needed to express themselves - native English speakers, however, (USA) rely constantly on THIS TYPE of lip, front teeth and tip of tongue expression. For a native english speaker to sound like a Korean to a Korean takes time and practice, as the use of the tongue in the back of the throat and softer tones made with lips, tongue and nasal breathing are not something their mouths are used to.
Beyond the date, the rest if your rattling, however, is anecdotal and apparently suffers from your creative imagination
More from the net, such as Wikipedia... "The Korean alphabet, invented in the years 1443-46, is the only true alphabet native to the Far East." Not derived, evolved, bastardized or co-mingled.
The Korean script which is now generally called Han-gul was invented in 1443 under the reign of Hing Sejong (r. 1418-1450), the fourth king of the Choson Dynasty. It was then called Hunmin Chong-um, or proper sounds to instruct the people. However, evidence for a script version did not appear until 1446 when Hunmin Chong-um appeared in a written document. The motivation behind the invention of the Korean script, according to King Sejong's preface to the above book, was to enable the Korean people to write their own language without the use of Chinese characters. Until the introduction of Hunmin Chong-um, Chinese characters were used by the upper classes, and Idu letters, a kind of Chinese-based Korean character system, were used by the populace. There also seems to have been a second motivation behind the development of Korean script: to represent the "proper" sound associated with each Chinese character.
In attempting to invent a Korean writing system, King Sejong and the scholars who assisted him probably looked to several writing systems known to them at the time, such as Chinese old seal characters, the Uighur script and the Mongolian scripts. The system that they came up with, however, is predominantly based upon their phonological studies. Above all, they developed a theory of tripartite division of the syllable into initial, medial and final, as opposed to the bipartite division of traditional Chinese phonology.
The initial sounds (consonants) are represented by 17 letters of which there are five basic forms. The other initial letters were derived by adding strokes to the basic letters. No letters were invented for the final sounds, the initial letters being used for that purpose. The original Humin Chong-um text also explains that the medial sounds (vowels) are represented by 11 letters of which there are three basic forms.
After the promulgation of the Korean alphabet, its popularity gradually increased, particularly in modern times, to the point where it has replaced Chinese characters as the primary writing system altogether.
One of the more interesting characteristics of the Korean script is its syllabic grouping of the initial, medial and final letters. However, the Korean script is essentially different from such syllabic writing systems as Japanese Kana. It is an alphabetic system which is characterized by syllabic grouping.
Please see reply above, thanks.
...and the futility of trying to communicate with close-minded ignorant folks in the world, I guess you either think you have more knowledge about Chinese than the authors' of the Chinese linguistic books I read or suffer from some other kind of misconception.
First, Cantonese is a spoken language. Yes, you can write Chinese and a Cantonese speaker can read it using Cantonese words, but my former girlfriend says it is like listening to a person at a scientific conference reading a scholarly paper; it doesn't convey the essence of Cantonese. Mandarin has more structure and is less dynamic than Cantonese. Written Chinese conveys the essentials of Mandarin very well.
All languages are spoken. The writing that accompanies the language is not the language. It is only a representation of the language. In English, we have an alphabet that we arrange to convey a concept such as "dog" and it takes three letters with whatever number of strokes each letter takes, depending on the handwriting. In Chinese, the concept of "dog" is represented by a single symbol, and the strokes are all essential to conveying the concept. By that I mean that in English I could remove a symbol and still possibly lead a person to reconstruct the concept of "dog" by adding a placeholder, as in "_og" (a pet), but in Chinese, removing any of the strokes destroys the meaning of the concept conveyed.
You might be able to find an older paperback copy of "An Introduction to Linguistics and Language", by Christopher Hall. This book introduces the history and study of Linguistics, and You wouldn't be such an ignorant sap if you read it or any of the other fine books on Linguistics available.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
A driving force in evolution (linguistic and otherwise) is isolation. Population isolation allows for a subgroup to drift from the global average by preventing the dilution of mutated genes (or memes) into the larger population. Historically, much linguistic evolution can be attributed to the isolation of communities from one another, and this evolution has contributed to the regularization of verbs, as well as the introduction of new irregularities borrowed from neighboring languages, etc. But now, with global communication, language standardization, and a much heavier reliance on the written word, might not the ways in which language evolves change? Global communication adds a lot of inertia to a language (although it does increase cross-breeding between languages). I think it is bold (and inaccurate) to extrapolate from past linguistic mutations to the future in the light of the fundamental changes that have occurred in communication.
The Aussie version is "Why do they nickname him "Wombat"? Because he eats, roots, shoots and leaves.
This has been around since the 1960's.
A note for our American cousins. If a woman is "rooting for her team", she is not waving her hands around but spreading her legs (among other things). Elvis singing "Tuttie Fruitie, I want a rootie" is just plain disgusting.
I wouldn't neccessarily write off the irregularity of verbs as useless. Irregularity comes with the price that it is hard to learn, but the different forms serve as guideposts. Imagine listening to someone tell you something in a crowded room where everyone was talking and music was playing. If you hear the was, were, be, been, is, are then you know what to expect, and can often fill in the missing ( mis/un-heard ) bits because the irregularities help you narrow what could have been said. The more often an irregular verb is used, the more opportunities there are for the weirdness to be valuable. If a word is hardly ever used then the effort-cost of learning the weirdness, outweighs the benefits it gives in understanding/being better understood.
...
Another evolution of the language that really gets me is the death of the adverb, as in the article:
"...a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast."
That's right -- it should be "quickly" or some other adverb to modify the verb "evolve." "Fast," which is an adjective, should only be used to describe a noun.
Am I the only person still bothered by this? I remember at least 10 years ago running across a web site devoted to saving the adverb, but I can't find it any more. Perhaps it simply perished, along with my hopes for my grand children ever using adverbs.
Of course, my hopes are further dashed by the fact that a Harvard mathematician of all people said, "The data hasn't changed," when we all know that the word "data" is the plural of "datum," so if the data haven't changed, that's what he should have said!
*sigh*
Well, the fact that the large majority of verbs -arent- irregular is also proof that there's nothing much lost by being regular. Noisy environments are a special case, and one where irregular verbs or not doesn't really make much of a difference.
And at the same time the irregularities make it much harder to learn correct english, which is a significant impediment.
Do you have any particular books you would recommend to someone who wants a serious intro to Linguistics?
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.