Nsyght - Last Bookmarks tagged with "language"

One Minute Languages: learn a language in minutes with the Radio Lingua Network

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:34:52 GMT

Submited by yatot 22, November 2008

Página principal - Lo dia internacional de hablarse portuñol

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:49:21 GMT

Submited by Kleverson 22, November 2008

PSEUDOdictionary

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:43:15 GMT

Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Anagram (Wordsmith)

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:43:07 GMT

Internet Anagram Server / I, Rearrangement Servant : anagram, anagrams, software, anagramme, anagrama, wordplay, word play, creator, solver, finder, generator, maker, unscrambler, crossword, transmogrify, pangram, shuffle
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Wiktionnaire

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:43:03 GMT

Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Wiktionary

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:59 GMT

Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Australian slang dictionary

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:44 GMT

Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Cockney Rhyming Slang

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:44 GMT

London Slang, rhyming slang dictionary
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Slang of the 1920

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:44 GMT

Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Oliver Steele

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:37 GMT

Languages of the real and artificial
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

backchan.nl

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:35 GMT

a multi-site public backchannel system
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Sinosplice

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:36 GMT

Try to understand China. Learn Chinese.
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Nciku 在线词典

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:28 GMT

Chinese characters and pinyin dictionary
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Dictionnaire de la langue française adapté du Littré

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:23 GMT

Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

CEPAS

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:16 GMT

Common English Proficiency Assessment Scheme
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

Idapted

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:09 GMT

Real Language Training with Real People
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

VoxSwap

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:42:09 GMT

The social network for learning languages
Submited by ppmartin 20, November 2008

A Concise Dictionary of Middle English

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

‘Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours’

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:33:34 GMT

Joe Clark now spells out this difference in his new E-book, an electronic book you can read in a Web browser or print.
Submited by veeliam 12, November 2008

English-language verbs ending in "-ish"

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:41:22 GMT

This page lists 43 verbs with the ending "-ish." Here they are: abolish, accomplish, admonish, astonish, banish, blandish, blemish, brandish, burnish, cherish, demolish, diminish, distinguish, embellish, establish, extinguish, famish, finish, fish, flourish, furbish, furnish, garnish, impoverish, languish, lavish, nourish, perish, polish, publish, punish, ravish, relinquish, relish, replenish, squish, swish, tarnish, vanish, vanquish, varnish, whish, wish.
Submited by nbr 22, November 2008

Linguistics 201: History of English

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

English belongs to the Germanic Branch of Indo-European English has changed more than most IE languages
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Rules and Schemas in the Development and Use of the English past Tense

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

Consistent error patterns in English past-tense forms are reported for three age groups: preschoolers, 8-10-year-olds, and adults. It is argued that, although irregular forms are rote-learned, speakers make generalizations about such forms. Such a generalization is defined as a SCHEMA which describes general phonological properties of a morphological class, and is used in organizing and accessing the lexicon. Schemas for the English past tense develop and change with age, yielding implications for both acquisitional and diachronic theory
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Linguistics: An invisible hand

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

Quantitative relationships between how frequently a word is used and how rapidly it changes over time raise intriguing questions about the way individual behaviours determine large-scale linguistic and cultural change. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, linguistics was considered a thoroughly historical science, focusing on how languages such as English or Sanskrit changed through time. By uncovering rules governing phonological change, historical linguists reconstructed dead protolanguages such as Indo-European — an ancestral dialect spoken some 10,000 years ago that diverged into a wide variety of modern languages, including Hindi, Russian, Spanish, English and Gaelic.
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

Greek speakers say "´‘oura", Germans "schwanz" and the French "queue" to describe what English speakers call a 'tail', but all of these languages use a related form of 'two' to describe the number after one. Among more than 100 Indo-European languages and dialects, the words for some meanings (such as 'tail') evolve rapidly, being expressed across languages by dozens of unrelated words, while others evolve much more slowly—such as the number 'two', for which all Indo-European language speakers use the same related word-form1. No general linguistic mechanism has been advanced to explain this striking variation in rates of lexical replacement among meanings. Here we use four large and divergent language corpora (English2, Spanish3, Russian4 and Greek5) and a comparative database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 Indo-European languages6 to show that the frequency with which these words are used in modern language predicts their rate of replacement over thousands of years of Indo-European language evolution. Across all 200 meanings, frequently used words evolve at slower rates and infrequently used words evolve more rapidly. This relationship holds separately and identically across parts of speech for each of the four language corpora, and accounts for approximately 50% of the variation in historical rates of lexical replacement. We propose that the frequency with which specific words are used in everyday language exerts a general and law-like influence on their rates of evolution. Our findings are consistent with social models of word change that emphasize the role of selection, and suggest that owing to the ways that humans use language, some words will evolve slowly and others rapidly across all languages.
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

Human language is based on grammatical rules1, 2, 3, 4. Cultural evolution allows these rules to change over time5. Rules compete with each other: as new rules rise to prominence, old ones die away. To quantify the dynamics of language evolution, we studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Although an elaborate system of productive conjugations existed in English's proto-Germanic ancestor, Modern English uses the dental suffix, '-ed', to signify past tense6. Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. Of these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule.
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Machine prose

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

Given a piece of text in any language, the program called ADIOS - automatic distillation of structure - searches for patterns and structures which it then generalises to produce new and meaningful sentences. The ADIOS algorithm is based on statistical and algebraic methods performed on one of the most basic and versatile objects of mathematics - the graph.
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Speechless maths

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

Here you are, reading an article in a magazine about mathematics. This shows that know how to read and that you are interested in maths. But could you still do maths even if you could not make sense of sentences?
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

The mystery of Zipf

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

In our recent Plus article Tasty maths, we introduced Zipf's law. Zipf's law arose out of an analysis of language by linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who theorised that given a large body of language (that is, a long book — or every word uttered by Plus employees during the day), the frequency of each word is close to inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. That is: $ P_ n \propto 1/n^ a $ where a is close to 1. This is known as a "power law" and suggests that the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, etc. A famous study of the Brown Corpus found that its words accorded to Zipf's law quite well, with "the" being the most frequently occurring word (accounting for nearly 7% of all word occurrences — 69,971 out of slightly over 1 million), and "of" the second most frequent (3.5% of all words).
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Evolutionary maths

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:54:46 GMT

What is it that makes the human mind so unique and us humans so different from the other species we share this planet with? One thing that is universally present throughout human cultures, but absent in all other species, is language. Over the last few decades evolutionary psychologists have become increasingly interested in the role that language might have in enabling other functions in the human behavioural and cognitive repertoire. Some have argued that language is in fact a prerequisite for a whole range of other intellectual activities, including mathematics.
Submited by davidar 22, November 2008

Prophetic Apocalyptic Language

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:08:13 GMT

Submited by a1mega 21, November 2008

Random Word Generator - A utility that generates artificial, random words.

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:15:52 GMT