linguistics | | Page 4

Squirtle: now with no vowels!

30. June 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: linguistics, video games · Tags: linguistics, phonetics, Pokémon, squirtle, syllabic consonants, vowels

The other day, I was teaching my Intro to Linguistics students about vowelless words. Words like word and bird and church in English don’t actually have any vowels. The R in those words acts like a vowel. And syllables at the ends of words like baker, author, little, bottle and apple are just an L or an R: there’s no vowels in those syllables. These Ls and Rs that act like vowels are called syllabic consonants. This means that some words, like turtle don’t have any vowels at all! The first part of turtle (turt) is kinda like bird or church: just a R instead of a vowel. And the second part is like the second syllable in bottle or apple: just an L. By extension, this means that Squirtle has no vowels!

Given my last three posts, apparently all I blog about is linguistics and video games…

We’re on to you, Peterson.

26. June 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: linguistics, video games · Tags: conlangs, Dothraki, Game of Thrones, language, linguistics, Pikachu, Pokémon

As I prepared to teach Intro to Linguistics this summer, my friend was poring over the Dothraki-English Dictionary, trying to find some morphologically interesting words for me to use in a homework assignment, when he discovered something interesting:

pika: [tʃoo] DP na. choo

The Turing Test was passed this month (sorta)

24. June 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: artificial intelligence, linguistics, technology · Tags: artificial intelligence, cognition, discourse markers, human-computer interaction, linguistics, Turing Test, txtspk

The Turing Test is a measure of artificial intelligence or, perhaps more accurately, linguistic mimicry. The nature of the test is simple: a judge sits at a computer, and chats (as you would on any instant messenger app) for five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the judge decides whether their conversational partner was a human or a computer. The bar to achieve a “passing” grade was set by the creator of the test, Alan Turing: a machine fooling 30% of human judges into thinking it was human would pass. In 1950, Turing predicted that the feat would be achieved by the year 2000.

Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.

Also, Turing committed suicide in 1954. #depressing

However, a few weeks ago, for the first time in history, it was announced that the Turing Test had been passed! More »

Chester Nez passes away

07. June 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: linguistics · Tags: cryptography, history, language, Navajo

Earlier this week, Chester Nez passed away. At 93, he was the last surviving Navajo Code Talker from WWII.

In the first half of the 20th century, linguistics as a science was still in it’s infancy. Outside of the communities where they were spoken, most people didn’t know about Native American languages . So in WWII, the US had a distinct advantage. Instead of making up codes to transmit secret messages over radio waves, only to have their codes cracked by clever enemies, they hired speakers of Native American languages to translate messages. Cracking the “code” of Navajo proved impossible, since it’s a language wholly unlike the European or East Asian languages most people are familiar with.

Does writing in cursive make you smarter?

05. June 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: linguistics, technology · Tags: cognition, cursive, education, handwriting, language, learning, science, txtspk, typing, writing

For centuries, people have bemoaned the downfall of the next generation’s language. The latest rendition of this fear comes in the form of a fear of the digital age. The New York Times just published a piece decrying the lack of handwriting – especially cursive handwriting – in the new Common Core standards. To support their claims, the article cites a study which links handwriting to greater activation in the brain.