There has *got* to be a word for that pause you take before hitting Send, to make sure that #autocorrect isn’t going to change the last word you typed.

Got any suggestions?

Happy #GeologistsDay! The early history of the field of geology is fascinating, and surprisingly explosive – and we explored it in our video on the word “Fossil”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9yNwRBlKtU

Yet another reason why #AI #MachineTranslation will never replace us #translation and #localization workers.

they can only dream of trying to get on our levels of slang

"Interest-based sociality, preferred in autistic spaces, entails that interactions and exchanges are based on, and motivated by, a genuine interest in a topic. Conversely, socially based sociality, based on phatic communion and small talk, may be exhausting or serve little purpose in autistic spaces."

https://academic.oup.com/applij/advance-article/doi/10.1093/applin/amaf006/8015533

Autistics don't do phatic communion.

On the subject of thorough research.

The Far Side by Gary Larson
#comicbook #thefarside #garylarson #Farsidecomics #farside #research #linguistics

Has anybody used #Glottolog data?

It is a database of languoids, that is, it contains information on dialects, languages and language families globally, their geographical "ranges", and inter-language relations, and has potential for some pretty cool analyses. Awesome #OpenData for sure. However, I am unsure how it compares to #WALS or #Ethnologue data.

The sound of "heart beating" in Chinese!
#language #linguistics #onomatopoeia #maps

Ha! This is interesting. What it's basically saying is that Malay lost the word for earthquake (which is still extant in other Austronesian language cousins eg Indonesian languages for example, like Javanese) that we had to re-import it from Sanskrit because we have so few of it

#TIL that the word "transmogrify" has been around since the 1600s. And here I always thought Bill Watterson invented it just for #CalvinAndHobbes.

#transmogrification
#etymology
#EtymologyNerd
#EtymologyForever
#language
#linguistics

I bring you the most important paper ever contributed to the especially crackpot-prone field of Minoan studies. A paper that will defeat Reviewer 2 once and for all. A paper that I definitely didn't write based on ideas I had while direly ill with a flu.

academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/128559713/The_Utterly_Unhinged_Elamo_Minoan_Hypothesis_April_Fools_

clean direct pdf: https://0xabad1dea.github.io/bin/Utterly-Unhinged-Elamo-Minoan-Hypothesis.pdf

Translating software apps. Interesting points by @rennerocha on a meaningful way to contribute to open source application projects, even if you are not a software developer.

And a niche area of #linguistics that may deserve more attention.

https://rennerocha.com/posts/things-i-learned-from-translating-free-software-projects/

#linguistics #language @languagelovers

Is French grammatical number dying? I often hear native speakers from all around the world inflect both numbers in singular, even for words that supposedly have a different pronunciation in the plural inflexion.

I entered the #ComputationalLinguistics field in 2018 by enrolling for a Bachelor's degree.

Since then, a lot has changed. Almost all the things we learned about, programmed in practice and did research on are now nearly irrelevant in our day-to-day.

Everything is #LLMs now. Every paper, every course, every student project.

And the newly enrolled students changed, too. They're no longer language nerds, they're #AI bros.

I miss #CompLing before ChatGPT.

The sound of "laughter" in German!
#language #linguistics #onomatopoeia #maps

I have a fan theory about the Irish imperative mood. I wonder if actual linguists know of relevant papers on that subject.

The theory is that there once was a particle for the positive imperative mood, in addition to the negative particle "ná" (as in "Ná habair é!").

The particle was later forgotten, similar to how the past tense used to be marked with "do" (as in "do bhí mé ann") but is now marked just by lenition that "do" used to cause.
The positive particle didn't cause any mutation, or caused gemination/aspiration, like the negative one.

Here's the reasoning.

Old Irish had absolute and conjunct forms for all verbs (conjunct = for use with particles).
"Berthae libru" — "you all carry books" (absolute, 2nd pl).
"Ní beirid libru" — "you all do not carry books" (conjunct, 2nd pl).

"You all, don't carry books!" would be "Ná beirid libru" — "ná" is a particle and requires a conjunct form.
But the positive imperative "you all, carry books!" was "Beirid libru!" — the form looks like a conjunct form, even though there's no particle.

An alternative hypothesis is that conjunct forms evolved from imperative forms.
However, there's an argument against that in the imperative forms of compound verbs.
Old Irish compound verbs are kinda like English phrase verbs: "as-berid" is probably a combination of "as" ("from", "out of") and the verb "to carry" but the real meaning of "as-berid" is "you all speak". Their prefixes act like pseudo-particles: they require conjunct forms of the original verb, and remain unstressed, which is why those forms are called "deuterotonic" (second-[syllable]-stressed).
When used with a normal particle, the stress shifts to the pseudo-particle and that mangles the original verb really hard: "you (all) do not speak" is not "ní as-berid" but "ní eprid". That "twice-conjunct" form is called "prototonic".

"You all, speak!" is "Eprid!" — the form is prototonic, and we know it evolved from "as-beirid", which disproves the alternative hypothesis. It's more likely that people used to say something like "*Só eprid!" (random guess).

But whether there's enough data anywhere to prove that a positive imperative conjunct particle ever existed is a different story.