Notes about linguistics

February 19, 2022 permalink

Max Planck Society: Glyph →

Getting burned out on playing Wordle? Want something that’s more about the letters individually? Want to play around with taxonomies of multicultural letterforms for the sake of science? (who wouldn’t??)

Glyph is a newly-launched game that will help researchers better understand how crowdsourced individuals around the word perceive the shapes, texture, and patterns of letters from 45 different written languages. The video below explains how it works:

February 19, 2022 permalink

Why Are Letters Shaped the Way They Are? →

Over on Vice, an interesting write-up on a growing movement in the field of linguistics: that the sounds of words or letterforms themselves can have direct relationships to their referent:

The Color Game did more than show how languages form over time, it violated a long-standing rule in linguistics: the rule of arbitrariness. In the subject of semiotics, or the use of signs and symbols to convey meaning, most students are taught about the theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He wrote that the letters and words in many writing and language systems have no relationship to what they refer to. The word “cat” doesn’t have anything particularly cat-like about it. The reason that “cat” means cat is because English speakers have decided so—it’s a social convention, not anything ingrained in the letters c-a-t. […] But the idea that words, or other signs, do actually relate to what they’re describing has been gaining ground. This is called iconicity: when a spoken or written word, or a gestured sign, is iconic in some way to what it’s referring to.

Aside from familiar English onomatopoeia like bang, chirp, etc., see the takete/maluma effect or bouba/kiki effect, as examples of words that “sound” like something. From the Vice article:

This effect extends beyond made up words. In 2021, researchers wrote about how words in English like ball, globe, balloon and hoop have more round vowels and sounds, compared to angular or spiky objects, such as spike, fork, cactus and shrapnel.

Now I’m also thinking of:

August 9, 2020 permalink

On Animalese, Localization, and Video Game “Beep Speech”

I’ve long wanted a name for the dot-dot-dot-dot sound effects that have stood in for speech in video games since the early NES days — here described as “beep speech” which works for me! This video is a great roundup on how those beeps function, how they’ve been used over the years (up through Simlish and the even more recent Animal Crossing hybrid speech, which is actual vocalization skewed into psuedo-gibberish), and how they’ve been tweaked when games are translated and localized for different cultures’ languages.

January 12, 2014 permalink

The color gray in full bloom – OUPblog →

“In A Descriptive Handbook of Modern Water Colours, by J. Scott Taylor…. London: Winsor and Newton, 1887, neutral tint is described as ‘A compound shadow colour of a cool neutral character. It is not very permanent, as the gray is apt to become grey by exposure’. Has anyone besides this author ever made a distinction of meaning between gray and grey? I do not know how the distinction is to be converted in speaking unless the words are differently pronounced” (1897).

Glad to know that the gray / grey split in English has been confusing people for well over 115 years. What’s going on in pigment company Winsor & Newton’s world where gray turns into grey eventually? An interesting read about the etymology of the mysterious color and it’s uncertain linguistic origins.

August 20, 2011 permalink

On gunpowder, ice cream, and sound symbolism

From the post Language of Food: Ice Cream, a fascinating article linking the history of gunpowder, ice cream, linguistics, and even a bit of marketing insight:

Something similarly beautiful was created as saltpeter and snow, sherbet and salt, were passed along and extended from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Mughals to the Neapolitans, to create the sweet lusciousness of ice cream. And it’s a nice thought that saltpeter, applied originally to war, became the key hundreds of years later to inventing something that makes us all smile on a hot summer day.

If you like food, language, or science, the full post is worth a read.

(Via Language Log)

September 27, 2010 permalink

The accent of elision

Probably one of the very worst things about the English writing system (and it has a huge long list of bad things about it) is that it very clearly employs 27 letters in the spelling of words but there is a huge and long-standing conspiracy to market it as having only 26. Insane, but that’s what English has done.

From an appropriately enigmatic post on Language Log regarding our forgotten letter.

November 27, 2009 permalink

But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.