Category Archives: Linguistics

Snow Crash – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Snow Crash – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson‘s third novel, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson’s other novels it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology,religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.

Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay In the Beginning… was the Command Line as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that “When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a ‘snow crash’ ”.

The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).

“Twitter” Has Changed a Lot Since the 1700s

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via “Twitter” Has Changed a Lot Since the 1700s.

Nowadays, we use words like “twitter” all the time to talk about our everyday social meda-ing. In the 1800s, they said “twitter” too, but it meant something a little different. So did “pin.” The times, they have a-changed.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which tracks trends like this over time, “twitter” wasn’t quite the same word it is today, but the relation is pretty obvious.

twitter
-One who twits; dial. a tale-bearer.
1854: “Don’t tell him anything, he’s a twitter.”

-A condition of twittering or tremulous excitement (from eager desire, fear, etc.); a state of agitation; a flutter, a tremble. Now chiefly dial.
1869: “[She] was in a twitter, partly of expectation, and partly..of fear.”

-A suppressed laugh, a titter; a fit of laughter. dial.
1736: “He is in a mighty twitter.”

-An act or the action of twittering, as a bird; light tremulous chirping. Also transf. a sound resembling this.
1871: “A mere swallow-twitter of inarticulate jargon.”

“Pin” on the other hand, as explained by John Camden Hotten’s 1874 The Slang Dictionary, meant something completely different. At least as slang.

“to put in the pin,” to refrain from drinking. From the ancient peg tankard, which was furnished with a row of pins, or pegs, to regulate the amount which each person was to drink. Drunken people are often requested to “put in the pin,” from some remote connexion between their unsteadiness and that of a carriage wheel which has lost its linch-pin. The popular cry, “put in the pin,” can have no connexion with the drinking pin or peg now, whatever it may originally have had. A merry pin, a roysterer

Of course, plenty of other words have changed as well, with many just picking up verb functionality, like “friend” and “favorite.” Still others, like “search,” mean the same basic thing, in a completely different context. Who knows what words might get bastardized by social media next, but with any luck someday you’ll be able regale your grandchildren with tales of when “sexts” were something exciting. [h/t Boing Boing]

A Shimmering, Tweet-Based Langauge Map of NYC

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via A Shimmering, Tweet-Based Langauge Map of NYC.

If you’ve ever wondered which languages are spoken where in NYC, here’s the map for you. This visualization shows exactly which languages are used in tweets across the city.

Put together by James Cheshire, Ed Manley and Oliver O’Brien from University College London,the map builds on 8.5 million tweets, captured between January 2010 and February 2013, which were all analyzed for language content. As you’d expect, it’s quite the melting pot, and the highest concentration of different languages seems to be around the Theatre District and Times Square. Best put that down to tourists, eh? Check out the full, interactive map here.[UCL viaGuardian]

Post Position » Lede, Based on a True Story

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Post Position » Lede, Based on a True Story.
“Sometimes I encounter language that sounds like it was computer-generated, or that sounds like it would be even better if it was. Hence, the slapdash “Lede,” which is based on the first sentence (no, not the whole first paragraph) of a news story that was brought to my attention on ifMUD.

This very simple system does incorporate one minor innovation, the function “fresh(),” which picks from all but the first element of an array and swaps the selection out so that it ends up at the beginning of the array. This means that it doesn’t ever pick the same selection twice in a row.”

Characters in Earthsea – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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In Earthsea one character often has several names.

 

 

This is because in Earthsea, the true name of a person has power, and a wizard can wield total power over someone whose name he knows. Consequently, any person guards his true name closely, and only shares it with those whom he or she can totally trust. Through childhood up to puberty, children are known by a child-name; at their rite of Passage, about the age of thirteen, children are given a true name in the Old Speech, usually by a wizard, that they will keep for the rest of their lives. In the Kargad lands this is not done, and a name given to a child functions as that person’s name for life; it may, or may not, be the person’s true name.

In dealings with most people, the Hardic peoples of Earthsea use a “use-name”, usually a common word in the Hardic language (rendered into English) by which they are identified. Use-names are often words referring to animals (Dragonfly, Goha, Hare, Hawk, Hound, Lark, Murre, Otak, Otter, Sparrowhawk, Tern), plants (Alder, Apple, Aspen, Beech, Hemlock, Heather, Ivy, Lily, Littleash, Moss, Rose, Rowan, Vetch, Yarrow), stones and other substances (Diamond, Flint, Golden, Ivory, Jasper, Onyx); but some are simply sequences of sound without obvious meaning.

A person may keep one use-name all his or her life, or may change it at whim, or may be known to one group of people by one name, and to others by another name. While each true name only refers to one person, use-names may be shared by several people;

via Characters in Earthsea – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Peirce’s Theory of Signs Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Peirce’s Sign Theory, or Semiotic, is an account of signification, representation, reference and meaning. Although sign theories have a long history, Peirce’s accounts are distinctive and innovative for their breadth and complexity, and for capturing the importance of interpretation to signification. For Peirce, developing a thoroughgoing theory of signs was a central philosophical and intellectual preoccupation. The importance of semiotic for Peirce is wide ranging. As he himself said, “[…] it has never been in my power to study anything,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic”. (SS 1977, 85–6). Peirce also treated sign theory as central to his work on logic, as the medium for inquiry and the process of scientific discovery, and even as one possible means for ‘proving’ his pragmatism. Its importance in Peirce’s philosophy, then, cannot be underestimated.

Peirce’s Theory of Signs Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.