There's also some fun circumstantial and anecdotal evidence that one of the Kham plateau dialects of Tibetan is possibly related to Navajo.
There have been attempts to connect the Athabaskan languages (well, the larger Na-Dene family of which Athabaskan is a branch) to Sino-Tibetan languages. Actually, it's a broader proposal, called Dene-Caucasian that also includes the North Caucasian languages, Basque, and assorted other families and isolates... The overwhelming majority of linguists reject this proposal as unsubstantiated and really wish people (esp. non-specialists) would stop talking about it.
That being said, this year there has been work demonstrating a link between Na-Dene and an Old World language family: the Yeniseian languages of Siberia. It's too soon to call Dene-Yeniseian a generally recognized language family, but the reaction from historical linguists has been generally positive. The Wikipedia article has a link to Vajda's paper so you can check it out for yourselves. This is arguably the biggest news in historical linguistics in years.
'John be [sic] tripping. He always [sic] doin' shit like that.'
In this case, the [sic] denotes the use of the infinitive of the copula verb in African-American English Vernacular (AAEV) to mean a habitual action; the second is used to mark the elision of the copula verb in the sentence.
Using sic for grammatical differences between the quotee's dialect and your own seem like really poor form to me. Particularly as people would probably only do it for dialects they consider less prestigious. For example, you'd never see the following in an American publication:
(1) I've [sic] a lot of money.
(2) He goes to university [sic].
(3) John smokes a lot any more [sic].
(1) and (2) are definitely not Standard American English, but the way those Brits talk is just so sexy!
I find (3) baffling, and I believe most American English speakers agree. (Positive 'anymore' is actually my favorite example of a dialectical difference. On one hand, it's a pretty dramatic grammatical difference. When I first noticed it, I was really surprised and assumed I must not have heard the 'not'. At the same time, it's a difference with no social significance attached to it. It's not looked down upon or thought prestigious. It's not culturally associated with any group. (With good reason. Positive 'anymore' is distributed pretty erratically.) People don't generally notice it. When you ask people if they can say it, they either (a) get confused - of course, why wouldn't they be able to? - or (b) get confused - of course not, no one says that!)
If you're going to pepper quotes from blacks, American Southerners, English Northerners, etc. with a "look at how funny they talk!" marker, you should probably do it for every quote that doesn't conform to your country's standard variety of English. People with different dialects aren't getting things wrong, they're playing by different rules. You wouldn't put a sic after every word in a Spanish quote, right?
I'd like to reserve sic for actual errors of some sort: disfluencies, spelling and punctuation mistakes (not separate spelling traditions, like 'organize' vs. 'organise'), typos, and maybe using the wrong word or name for something (not just a term used regularly by people other than yourself like 'pop' vs. 'soda'; an individual mistake: 'His brother was the mayor [sic] of Florida!'). If a writer or speaker is regularly following some linguistic community's rules, they should be spared the dreaded sic.
The web was invented at CERN, so if you're Swiss you can be proud of that. It was an evolution of Gopher, however, which came from the University of Minnesota. Go gophers!:)
While Gopher "got big" (to the extent it did...) before the Web, Tim B-L started work on the web in 1989 and had a working server and browser by the end of 1990; Gopher was released in 1991. The two projects were pretty much independent creations. And, really, they weren't that similar conceptually - menus vs. hypertext.
There's actually something we can do right now to make the US patent system a little less bad. If you're an American - or someone who does business in the US or the like - write your senators and tell them to support the Patent Reform Act of 2007, S. 1145.
It's essentially a bill to make the lives of patent trolls harder. By limiting damages, making prior art defenses easier, and preventing a lot of the forum shopping we currently see, it should reduce the incentive to game the system. (The fact that its opponents are bemoaning it as "patent repeal, not patent reform" and "patent deform" is enough for me to be positively inclined towards it.) Hurting patent trolls seems esp. important given the virtual desktop patent suit that was recently filed against Red Hat and Novell.
Now, this bill isn't a panacea; it won't fix the USPTO. Will this do much to stop large companies (that actually, you know, make stuff) from filing bogus patents like this one, defensively or otherwise? I don't know. Nevertheless, it should decrease the incentives for filing gazillions of patents and the incentives for actually threatening or taking legal action. And that's a good step.
The bill passed the House and seems to have decent support in the Senate. But there's intense lobbying against it by some patent lawyers and especially the pharmaceutical industry. (Drug patents are a rather different beast than other sorts of patents. I kind of wish the law didn't treat them the same.) So we all need to write our senators to tell them we support clamping down on patent trolls and making the patent system a bit less of a minefield.
Come on, Slashdot, channel your patent-anger at Congress!
Slashdot Mirror
There's also some fun circumstantial and anecdotal evidence that one of the Kham plateau dialects of Tibetan is possibly related to Navajo.
There have been attempts to connect the Athabaskan languages (well, the larger Na-Dene family of which Athabaskan is a branch) to Sino-Tibetan languages. Actually, it's a broader proposal, called Dene-Caucasian that also includes the North Caucasian languages, Basque, and assorted other families and isolates... The overwhelming majority of linguists reject this proposal as unsubstantiated and really wish people (esp. non-specialists) would stop talking about it.
That being said, this year there has been work demonstrating a link between Na-Dene and an Old World language family: the Yeniseian languages of Siberia. It's too soon to call Dene-Yeniseian a generally recognized language family, but the reaction from historical linguists has been generally positive. The Wikipedia article has a link to Vajda's paper so you can check it out for yourselves. This is arguably the biggest news in historical linguistics in years.
For example,
'John be [sic] tripping. He always [sic] doin' shit like that.'
In this case, the [sic] denotes the use of the infinitive of the copula verb in African-American English Vernacular (AAEV) to mean a habitual action; the second is used to mark the elision of the copula verb in the sentence.
Using sic for grammatical differences between the quotee's dialect and your own seem like really poor form to me. Particularly as people would probably only do it for dialects they consider less prestigious. For example, you'd never see the following in an American publication:
(1) I've [sic] a lot of money.
(2) He goes to university [sic].
(3) John smokes a lot any more [sic].
(1) and (2) are definitely not Standard American English, but the way those Brits talk is just so sexy!
I find (3) baffling, and I believe most American English speakers agree. (Positive 'anymore' is actually my favorite example of a dialectical difference. On one hand, it's a pretty dramatic grammatical difference. When I first noticed it, I was really surprised and assumed I must not have heard the 'not'. At the same time, it's a difference with no social significance attached to it. It's not looked down upon or thought prestigious. It's not culturally associated with any group. (With good reason. Positive 'anymore' is distributed pretty erratically.) People don't generally notice it. When you ask people if they can say it, they either (a) get confused - of course, why wouldn't they be able to? - or (b) get confused - of course not, no one says that!)
If you're going to pepper quotes from blacks, American Southerners, English Northerners, etc. with a "look at how funny they talk!" marker, you should probably do it for every quote that doesn't conform to your country's standard variety of English. People with different dialects aren't getting things wrong, they're playing by different rules. You wouldn't put a sic after every word in a Spanish quote, right?
I'd like to reserve sic for actual errors of some sort: disfluencies, spelling and punctuation mistakes (not separate spelling traditions, like 'organize' vs. 'organise'), typos, and maybe using the wrong word or name for something (not just a term used regularly by people other than yourself like 'pop' vs. 'soda'; an individual mistake: 'His brother was the mayor [sic] of Florida!'). If a writer or speaker is regularly following some linguistic community's rules, they should be spared the dreaded sic.
While Gopher "got big" (to the extent it did...) before the Web, Tim B-L started work on the web in 1989 and had a working server and browser by the end of 1990; Gopher was released in 1991. The two projects were pretty much independent creations. And, really, they weren't that similar conceptually - menus vs. hypertext.
There's actually something we can do right now to make the US patent system a little less bad. If you're an American - or someone who does business in the US or the like - write your senators and tell them to support the Patent Reform Act of 2007, S. 1145.
It's essentially a bill to make the lives of patent trolls harder. By limiting damages, making prior art defenses easier, and preventing a lot of the forum shopping we currently see, it should reduce the incentive to game the system. (The fact that its opponents are bemoaning it as "patent repeal, not patent reform" and "patent deform" is enough for me to be positively inclined towards it.) Hurting patent trolls seems esp. important given the virtual desktop patent suit that was recently filed against Red Hat and Novell.
Now, this bill isn't a panacea; it won't fix the USPTO. Will this do much to stop large companies (that actually, you know, make stuff) from filing bogus patents like this one, defensively or otherwise? I don't know. Nevertheless, it should decrease the incentives for filing gazillions of patents and the incentives for actually threatening or taking legal action. And that's a good step.
The bill passed the House and seems to have decent support in the Senate. But there's intense lobbying against it by some patent lawyers and especially the pharmaceutical industry. (Drug patents are a rather different beast than other sorts of patents. I kind of wish the law didn't treat them the same.) So we all need to write our senators to tell them we support clamping down on patent trolls and making the patent system a bit less of a minefield.
Come on, Slashdot, channel your patent-anger at Congress!