Light
@light@noc.social  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago

As someone who lives in Wales and likes #linguistics it bothers me how all the @cwtch promotional and explanatory material mispronounces the word.
The vowel is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-close_near-back_rounded_vowel, the vowel in "book", not [ʌ] or whatever sound they are making in the two videos on the front page.
I have never heard a Welsh speaker pronounce it that way.
Natasha Warner
@nwarner@tenforward.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

Yesterday the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics announced that Robin Lakoff, a professor there from 1972 to 2012, has died. I really loved Robin's pragmatics class in grad school. She taught us so much about pragmatics, the history of linguistics, and various other stuff. Partly I thought she was amazing because she was a deeply shy, reclusive person, but she was hilarious in class. And her jokes weren't re-used, they were timely to current events. One thing I learned from her is that lecture can be a performance, like theater. Another important thing I learned from her was from sort of an aside during one lecture: a field can keep expanding the set of questions that are considered reasonable to ask, and this is good. A question that comes across as silly and uninformed, like no actual linguist would ask that, might be a reasonable topic for inquiry 10 years later. She explained how a lot of the questions we were doing research on in the 90's were not considered questions a linguist should ask back when she was in grad school in the 60's or 70's, but by the 90's there were whole conferences on the same questions. Like the kind of questions where the rest of the class might giggle uncomfortably, and your professor would try to steer you back onto something reasonable. That one little aside during a lecture comes back to me often. She also taught us Gricean maxims and conversational implicature and presupposition, in ways that just astounded me sometimes. I only took one class with her and she was never on my committees or things like that, but I really appreciated her and have thought of her often. #linguistics#AcademicChatter
Natasha Warner
@nwarner@tenforward.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

Yesterday the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics announced that Robin Lakoff, a professor there from 1972 to 2012, has died. I really loved Robin's pragmatics class in grad school. She taught us so much about pragmatics, the history of linguistics, and various other stuff. Partly I thought she was amazing because she was a deeply shy, reclusive person, but she was hilarious in class. And her jokes weren't re-used, they were timely to current events. One thing I learned from her is that lecture can be a performance, like theater. Another important thing I learned from her was from sort of an aside during one lecture: a field can keep expanding the set of questions that are considered reasonable to ask, and this is good. A question that comes across as silly and uninformed, like no actual linguist would ask that, might be a reasonable topic for inquiry 10 years later. She explained how a lot of the questions we were doing research on in the 90's were not considered questions a linguist should ask back when she was in grad school in the 60's or 70's, but by the 90's there were whole conferences on the same questions. Like the kind of questions where the rest of the class might giggle uncomfortably, and your professor would try to steer you back onto something reasonable. That one little aside during a lecture comes back to me often. She also taught us Gricean maxims and conversational implicature and presupposition, in ways that just astounded me sometimes. I only took one class with her and she was never on my committees or things like that, but I really appreciated her and have thought of her often. #linguistics#AcademicChatter

¡Abbie!
Anke
¡Abbie! and 1 other boosted
abadidea
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

One of my professors at the Leiden summer school told me something interesting. Historically, many linguistics textbooks and papers have been physically published in Leiden, often featuring ancient or minority writing systems. Before the digital typesetting era, typesetters in Leiden were contractually obligated not to learn any rare writing systems or languages, and to work purely by verifying that the typeset text looked visually identical to the submitted manuscript. This is because when you can read it, you're inevitably going to transcribe what you think you read, not what you actually read, which is a big problem when the entire point is to showcase exactly what ancient people did write and not what we think they should have written

#linguistics #typography #typesetting
abadidea
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

One of my professors at the Leiden summer school told me something interesting. Historically, many linguistics textbooks and papers have been physically published in Leiden, often featuring ancient or minority writing systems. Before the digital typesetting era, typesetters in Leiden were contractually obligated not to learn any rare writing systems or languages, and to work purely by verifying that the typeset text looked visually identical to the submitted manuscript. This is because when you can read it, you're inevitably going to transcribe what you think you read, not what you actually read, which is a big problem when the entire point is to showcase exactly what ancient people did write and not what we think they should have written

#linguistics #typography #typesetting
mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl
@mnl@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

Fellow multilingual people, how strongly do you:

1) “think” in a certain language
2) use a different thinking language
3) feel that you have different thoughts based on the language you think in
4) how related is the language you speak to the way you think ?

Also people who are in the field (cognitive neuroscience? Linguistics?), what’s some good current material on the topic?

I know it’s a lot of weird questions that are probably impossible to answer.

FWIW I can’t really pinpoint if I think in a certain language. I do think my personality changes a bit or rather, I feel like my personality changes (for example the cliche of the rude French person with a proclivity for sexualized language). Certain things are easier to express in a certain language and thus influence the recursive thinking-speaking/writing loop (ever tried to explain something technical in French, or do Deleuze style poetic rambling in English?), but it feels like an externality.

#neuroscience #linguistics #language
Ben Waber
@bwaber@hci.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Next was a fantastic talk by David Chiang on what transformers can and can't do at the USC Information Sciences Institute. I admit I'm a sucker for talks like this, which relate neural networks to well understood formal models to probe their theoretical limits. Here Chiang convincingly demonstrates how a formal logic model is equivalent to some transformers, then showing how they will literally never be able to do certain essential tasks reliably. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVdLh-6wEJo (5/6)
Ben Waber
@bwaber@hci.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Last was "A Myriad of Tongues" by Caleb Everett. This book provides an expansive tour of the breadth of humanity's linguistic repertoire, how linguistic differences relate to culture, and even how speech production biology likely influences language. This is both fascinating and gives deep insight into subtle and not so subtle differences in how different people and cultures interact and perceive the world. Highly recommend

Full review: https://bookwyrm.social/user/bwaber/review/8055557/s/this-is-the-linguistics-anthropology-biology-book-youve-been-looking-for#anchor-8055557 (6/6) #linguistics
Ian O'Byrne
@Wiobyrne@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last month

The twist? As AI gets more sophisticated, success depends MORE on human communication skills, not less. The professionals thriving in 2025 aren't the ones who know how transformers work; they're the ones who can bridge the gap between human intent and machine interpretation.
Ian O'Byrne
@Wiobyrne@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

Bottom line: Treat prompt engineering like any other professional skill.

Who else has noticed this pattern? What's your experience?

💡 Just published a deep dive on this at https://wiobyrne.com/the-linguistics-advantage/.

#AI#Communication#Productivity#ProfessionalDevelopment#Linguistics #PromptEngineering