insert creative blog title here » Linguistics

Wordles!!!

shelby — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:37:00 +0000

Ok, so this might be the coolest thing ever. Ever ever. EVER. Even cooler than savethewords.org. Because they’re MY words. I made a wordle of my blog and it is so cool! Check it out here .

The Ham-Butt Problem, aka Thank Goodness They Didn’t Shoot All the Horses

shelby — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:38:27 +0000

I realize this title doesn’t make sense, but unlike me, you have not recently watched a TED talk by Erin McKean (you can correct that problem here). Because I like dictionaries, however, I did watch it. And it was cool. Very cool. She suggests the idea that dictionaries are limited by paper and manpower. In other words, there is no way that the people hired to write dictionaries have enough time or paper to realistically write down every new word in the English language, especially given that English is very prone to borrowing and creating new words. So she proposes a solution: the Internet as a dictionary, edited by the masses. I see everyone instantly thinking of urbandictionary.com and the fact that “prostiboots” (boots that are leather, higheeled, and thigh high just like ones found on a prostitute) is probably not a real word. However, McKean argues two excellent points: 1) there is no such thing as a word that is not a real word and 2) in order to create an effective online dictionary, we need to allow all contributions; but they need to be tagged, dated, and accounted for, as in any scientific project. Like any other amateur stumbling on a major discovery, lexicographers, linguists and the like will be there to make sure that everything is going along as planned. As a new word is created, or a word is used in a different form or sense, the beauty of an online dictionary is that whoever was witness to the event is now able to document it.

And, as a sidenote, my link to a classmate’s blog. She’s had some interesting insights into computers and language.

Writing Books About Learning to Read

shelby — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:13:54 +0000

So this post is actually from my notes last week, but hey! now I have internet, so I figured I’d post the notes late rather than never. It’s from the day we talked about windows and books as technology. The idea really clicked once we talked about the difference between literature and literary studies. (Because as long as we can tie it back to English and linguistics, I can understand it. Anything else, no.) Literary studies provide us with a frame in which to study literature, but literature is still independent in itself. It reminded me of this book I saw, called How to Read a Book. It seems conterintuitive. If you can’t read, you can’t learn how to read by reading, and if you can read, why bother? Yet the book exists, and at least one person bought it, so there must be more. In fact, its like a user’s manual for book “technology”. So many people think they know how to read, but are they getting the full potential from their books? It’s the same as Engelbart’s idea that the computer can be so much more than what we are currently using it for. It has the potential to grow exponentially, but no one has tapped into that potential yet. We are, in effect, still learning how to read.

My Week without the Internet

shelby — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:50:05 +0000

So this week I didn’t have any Internet. Not only was it uncomfortable to be sitting in my room, wondering what to do, but I also found that a) my inbox was overflowing and b) I spent a lot more time talking to people. Which got me thinking about the idea of language as a medium. (because that’s what I do) I suppose part of my linguistic mind has always realized that language is a medium, and were I sitting in my Syntax class, the answer would come to my mind immediately. However, for some reason, I have always thought of the Internet as being above or outside of language. A silly idea, given that the Internet is really just an explosion of language available to everyone. But it was curious to me that I seemed to view language as the opposite of technology. Part of me views technology as a decline of the English language, like I’m some sort of linguistic purist stuck in time. But language is the ultimate technology. It’s always changing, being updated and revised, bugs being fixed.

Licklider Is Obviously Moonlighting as a Writer for Will Smith Movies…

shelby — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:23:35 +0000

J. C. R. Licklider’s (3 initials? Really?) article on the man-computer, while somewhat outdated in terms of the modern technology that has now been created, posits some interesting questions about how man and machine might work together. As a linguist, the most interesting of these hypotheses, to me, was the idea that computers could recognize and produce recognizable human speech. In modern times, there are in fact, multiple speech recognition software programs, and computerized speech can be found in GPS navigation systems and various other computerized items. However, the question for me, as a linguist, is how a computer can be truly taught to understand language when we as humans do not fully understand it. English has one of the most expansive vocabularies of any language in the world, and furthermore, it is very adaptable to new words through the addition of prefixes and suffixes. Furthermore, there are a large number of synonyms, homophones, and words with multiple meanings. Intonation, speed, and non-verbal cues also provide a context for definition. Lastly, if one accepts the Universal Grammar hypothesis, language is not a learned behavior but an intuitive one, much like birds learn to fly, in which case, computers cannot be taught intuition. And while one tends to think of the human mind as finite, much like RAM in a computer, language has the ability to be infinite. (I spotted a cat on a mat under the stairs with my binoculars…) Can the computer process infinity? Can it understand odd sentence structure or questions based on intonation rather than wh-movement? I know that they have created computers that can reasonably mimic human language; however, to have the truly symbiotic relationship that Licklider imagines, I cannot envision a computer that is capable of processing language in the same way that humans do.