… Dina Lipkind, at the time Tchernichovski’s post-doctoral student, explained a method she had developed for teaching zebra finches two songs. (Ordinarily, a zebra finch learns only one song in its lifetime.) She had discovered that by switching the song of a tutor bird at precisely the right moment, a juvenile bird could learn a second, new song after it had mastered the first one.
Thinking about bilingualism and some puzzles I had encountered in my own lab, I suggested that Lipkind’s method could be useful in casting light on the question of how a creature—any creature—learns to put linguistic elements together. We mapped out an experiment that day: birds would learn one “grammar” in which every phrase followed the form of ABCABC, and then we would switch things up, giving them a new target, ACBACB (the As, Bs, and Cs were certain stereotyped chirps and peeps).
The results were thrilling: most of the birds could accomplish the task. But it was clearly difficult—it took several weeks for them to learn the new grammar—and it was challenging in a particular way. While the birds showed no sign of needing to relearn individual sounds, the connections between individual syllables, known as “transitions,” proved incredibly difficult. The birds proceeded slowly and systematically, incrementally working out each transition (e.g., from C to B, and B to A). They could not freely move syllables around, and did not engage in trial and error, either. Instead, they undertook a systematic struggle to learn particular connections between specific, individual syllables. The moment they mastered the third transition of the sequence, they were able to produce the entire grammar. Never, to my knowledge, had the process of learning any sort of grammar been so precisely articulated… (» more)
Above: Three zebra finches. Photograph by Joel Sartore/National Geographic/Getty.
fun demonyms
some demonyms:
Cantabrigian (Cambridge)
Cypriot (Cyprus)
Glaswegian (Glasgow)
Madrilenian (Madrid)
Mancunian (Manchester)
Manx (Isle of Man)
Melburnian (Melbourne)
Monégasque (Monaco)
Moose Javian (Moose Jaw)
Muscovite (Moscow)
The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) | Empirical Zeal 
In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating ‘go’ in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost in translation? This visual conundrum has its roots in the history of language.
Blue and green are similar in hue. They sit next to each other in a rainbow, which means that, to our eyes, light can blend smoothly from blue to green or vice-versa, without going past any other color in between. Before the modern period, Japanese had just one word, Ao, for both blue and green. The wall that divides these colors hadn’t been erected as yet. As the language evolved, in the Heian period around the year 1000, something interesting happened. A new word popped into being –midori – and it described a sort of greenish end of blue. Midori was a shade of ao, it wasn’t really a new color in its own right.
One of the first fences in this color continuum came from an unlikely place – crayons. In 1917, the first crayons were imported into Japan, and they brought with them a way of dividing a seamless visual spread into neat, discrete chunks. There were different crayons for green (midori) and blue (ao), and children started to adopt these names. But the real change came during the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II, when new educational material started to circulate. In 1951, teaching guidelines for first grade teachers distinguished blue from green, and the word midori was shoehorned to fit this new purpose…
I find this fascinating, because it highlights a powerful idea about how we might see the world. After all, what really is a color? Just like the crayons, we’re taking something that has no natural boundaries – the frequencies of visible light – and dividing into convenient packages that we give a name… (» more)
My linguistics tag is one of my favorite tags.
// inegales
The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, New York.
(Wiki) Singular they
I don’t like singular they.
Singular they is the use of they (or its inflected forms, such as them or their) to refer to an entity that is not plural, or not necessarily plural. Though singular they is widespread in everyday English and has a long history of usage, debate continues about its acceptability. It occurs in two main situations:
- Indeterminate gender – when they refers to an individual person of unknown or unspecified sex, as in, for example, “One student failed their exam”. This usage is known as epicene they.
- Indeterminate number – when they has no definite antecedent, or can be interpreted as referring to either a singular or plural entity. This usage is also known as generic they. For example, in “Anyone who thinks they have been affected should contact their doctor”, they and their are within the scope of the universal, distributive quantifier anyone,[1] and can be interpreted as referring to an unspecified individual or to people in general (notwithstanding the fact that “anyone” is strictly grammatically singular).
In some cases, they is used even when both the number and gender of the subject are known, but the identity of the person is generic, e.g. “If some guy beat me up, I’d leave them.”
Though semantically singular or ambiguous, singular they remains morphologically and syntactically plural (e.g. it still takes plural forms of verbs).
(» more)
(Wiki) Gender differences in spoken Japanese
The Japanese language is unusual among major languages in the high degree to which the speech of women collectively differs from that of men. Differences in the ways that girls and boys use language have been detected in children as young as three years old.
Such differences are sometimes called “gendered language.” In Japanese, speech patterns peculiar to women are sometimes referred to as onna kotoba (女言葉, “women’s words”) or joseigo (女性語, “women’s language”). The use of “gender” here refers to gender roles, not grammatical gender. A man using feminine speech might be considered effeminate, but his utterances would not be considered grammatically incorrect. In general, the words and speech patterns considered masculine are also seen as rough, vulgar, or abrupt, while the feminine words and patterns make a sentence more polite, more deferential, or “softer” (countering abruptness). Some linguists consider the rough/soft continuum more accurate than the male/female continuum – for example, Eleanor Harz Jorden in Japanese: The Spoken Language refers to the styles as blunt/gentle, rather than male/female.
There are no gender differences in written Japanese (except in quoted speech), and almost no differences in polite speech (teineigo), since males take on “softer” speech, except for occasional use of wa (and except for the fact that women may be more likely to use polite speech in the first place). (» more)
Brevity: Twtr | The Economist
Though ubiquity and flexibility may give English hegemony, Twitter is also helping smaller and struggling languages. Basque- and Gaelic-speakers tweet to connect with other far-flung speakers. Kevin Scannell, a professor at St Louis University, Missouri, has found 500 languages in use on Twitter and has set up a website to track them. Gamilaraay, an indigenous Australian language, is thought to have only three living speakers. One of them is tweeting—handy for revivalists. (» more)
Whiskey (with an e) and scotch are the usual styles, but Scotch whisky gets special treatment; yet bourbon is lower-case, even though it springs from Bourbon County, Kentucky. The Reuben sandwich (for which dueling Reubens claim credit) keeps its capital letter, but the bloody mary, named for Mary I (or possibly Mary Pickford), is lower-case. Waldorf salad, after the hotel, is capped; graham cracker, for Sylvester Graham, is not.
Fillet and filet are another traditional bone of contention. Though they’re variant spellings of the same word, some editors have chosen to use fillet for fish and filet for meat. But not the AP: Here it’s fillet (“a boneless cut”) either way, except in filet mignon and, of course, Filet-O-Fish.
Differences among languages: True untranslatability | The Economist
…When most people tell you some very unusual word “can’t be translated”, they usually mean words like these “Relationship words that aren’t translatable into English”: shockingly specific single words in other languages like mamihlapinatapei, which is apparently Yagan for “the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start.” But of course mamihlapinatapei is translatable into English. It’s ”the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start.” Needing several words for one isn’t the same as untranslatability. (» more)
“Subtraction (Startling),” by Tauba Auerbach, 2007
You can remove one letter at a time from startling and still form a word.
Bay Area artist Tauba Auerbach is currently exhibiting new text-based works at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco. Auerbach investigates semantic systems, playfully combining letters to create new meanings, while challenging the limitations of typography and language. Employing elements of hard-edged abstraction, the artist is able to use her experiences as a sign painter to explore the function of lettering and text in society, insightfully inquiring into the meaning of the seemingly random shapes of the alphabet. Auerbach often uses eye charts, binary systems and elementary design to reveal the extensional functions of language. The artist is a graduate of Stanford University in San Francisco (2003) and was featured in her first New York City solo exhibition this past fall at the Deitch Projects. Auerbach, a previous DailyServing feature, also received a review in Artforum for her San Francisco exhibition this month.
