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Three amazing stories about language: "We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago." (also, the transcript is here: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/)

i'm enjoying it right now! check out the video, too. i'll try to bookmark it (my first!).

Ahh...I see Ryan found it first! Thanks, Ryan!

Graphically compare the popularity of phrases over time.

This would be great for someone's field research--thanks, Ryan!

Google's own book corpus tool

"Welcome to Popular Linguistics Magazine, the monthly online magazine that brings language- and linguistics-focused stories and research to the masses!"

Ryan, thanks! What would I do without you?! Keep posting!

"A new study of word frequencies in political blogs finds that equations describing earthquake evolution fit the eruption of topics onto political blogs."

Thanks, Ryan! We're going to read this for homework, since it relates to what we've been doing with computational tools and language.

By George Lakoff. Includes indexes of conceptual metaphors, e.g., - A force is a moving object- A problem is a body of water- Psychological forces are physical forces- Time is a landscape we move through- Words are weapons Includes examples for each. E.g., for "A problem is a body of water": - He dived right into the problem.- The murky waters of the investigation frustrated him.- He'd been fishing for the answer for weeks.- Finally the answer surfaced.- The answer's just floating around out there.

AHH! We needed this. Thanks, Ryan!

Fox TV news comedy that has a similar format to The Daily Show. It's interesting to see which of the two shows you find more funny, and what that says about your enthymemes, especially your suppressed premises. (Thanks to Michael Sylvester for identifying this.)

The Charles Lutwidge Dodgson poem which gave the English language such portmanteau words as "chortle" and "burble" has also been put into other languages -- including Klingon and Esperanto (four versions). One also in Choctaw. How *does* one translate meaningless words?

thanks for joining us, Mr. Wagenseller!

Singular "they," the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening. In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over "thanks, Obama," ammosexual, "on fleek," and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year. Singular they, which The Washington Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: "Everyone wants their cat to succeed." Earlier, the so-called proper way to say it would have been, "Everyone wants his or her cat to succeed."But what gave this word new prominence was its usefulness as a way to refer to people who don't want to be called "he" or "she." "We know about singular they already - we use it everyday without thinking about it, so this is bringing it to the fore in a more conscious way, and also playing into emerging ideas about gender identity," said linguist Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who presided over the voting this Friday afternoon.

JRR Tolkien's classic, _The Hobbit_, is about to be issued in `ōlelo Hawai`i, thanks to the work of translator, Keao NeSmith. Hawaiian is one of the most endangered of the Polynesian languages. It's hoped that "Ka Hopita" will legitimize Hawaiian as an everyday language and boost the efforts of a new generation of Hawaiian speakers. "Ka Hopita," which is set to be published on March 25 (a date important to Tolkien fans because it's the day that Bilbo Baggins came home from his adventures), is the first Tolkien novel to appear in an indigenous language of the United States.

"Everyone's entitled to their opinion regarding pronoun acceptability." The use of singular "they" has always been a bit disreputable - you might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come. A few months ago, the Washington Post style guide accepted it. And it's been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that "he" and "she" don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their personal pronoun. And so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like "Wish them a happy birthday." This use of "they" has been around for a long time. It shows up in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Jane Austen was always saying things like "everybody has their failing." But the Victorian grammarians made it a matter of schoolroom dogma that one could only say "Everybody has his failing," with the understanding that "he" stood in for both sexes. That rule wasn't really discredited until the 1970s, when the second-wave feminists made the generic masculine the paradigm of sexism in language. Male critics ridiculed their complaints as a "libspeak tantrum" and accused them of suffering from "pronoun envy." But most writers now realize that the so-called gender-neutral "he" is anything but. Nobody would ever say, "Every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary." When you utter "he," you always bring a male to mind. But once the generic masculine fell out of favor, what were we going to replace it with? People weren't about to adopt a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun the way they were adopting gender-neutral job descriptions. "He or she" was impossibly clunky. It was time to restore singular "they" to respectability. And that's been happening, even in edited books and the media.

It's an ethos so culturally ingrained in us that it's hard to see beyond: Self-reliance is paramount, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to solve your own problems is a matter of character. Of course, that's not quite how the world works. All of us need help from time to time, and the ability to ask is a learnable skill we seldom think about but one that can have a monumental impact on our goals and lives. So, how to ask? 4 tips: 1. Make sure the person you want to ask realizes you need help. Thanks to a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, we're programmed to have the ability to take in and process only so much information, ignoring the rest. 2. Make a clear request. Otherwise your potential helper might fall victim to audience inhibition, or the fear of "looking foolish in front of other people," which can prevent people from offering help because they doubt their own intuition that you need help. 3. Ge specific with your request and make sure your helper knows why you're specifically asking him or her. This will make them feel invested in your success and actually want to help. 4. Make sure the person you're asking has the time and resources to help.

This article talked about different ways to handle a difficult situation, particularly on Thanksgiving. The reason for it being Thanksgiving, is because the midterm elections just happened recently, making the possibility of conversations to be about politics very likely. This article dove into why some people may want to converse about this, and why it's very hard to deal with tough conversations, particularly on a day where it's all about family and thankfulness.

This article really perplexed me at first. We always talk about how we have to save Hawaiian, and yet, according to this article by the Honolulu Magazine, there are much more keiki speaking 'Olelo Hawaii than in the 1980's. We have made a great leap forward regarding the spread of Hawaiian language and culture, but this article delves into whether this spread is enough.

While more people do speak Hawaiian now than 30 years ago, thanks to revitalization efforts, the question is whether formal language training alone can help truly revitalize a language, especially since the native speaker population is dying out. As you know, for a language to truly live, it should not just be surviving in academic contexts, but be utilized in normal, everyday contexts. Weʻre a long way from that point--but thereʻs hope. :-) E ola mau ka `Ōlelo Hawai`i!

Although an opinion piece, this New York Times article, written by Arthur C. Brooks, cites several studies talking about how actively practicing gratitude can positively bolster our mood and outlook.

This website, five years in the making, documents humorous uses of Chinglish: spoken or written English that reflects L1= Chinese influence. Radtke's collection of signage has been documented in two books: _Chinglish: Found in Translation_ and _More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues_. Thanks to Kayla LaRieu for sharing!

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once opined, "There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes." Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types - you could call them archetypes - that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are: 1. Rags to riches - a steady rise from bad to good fortune 2. Riches to rags - a fall from good to bad, a tragedy 3. Icarus - a rise then a fall in fortune 4. Oedipus - a fall, a rise then a fall again 5. Cinderella - rise, fall, rise 6. Man in a hole - fall, rise The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data - a statistical technique often used by marketeers to analyse social media posts in which each word is allocated a particular 'sentiment score', based on crowdsourced data. Depending on the lexicon chosen, a word can be categorised as positive (happy) or negative (sad), or it can be associated with one or more of eight more subtle emotions, including fear, joy, surprise and anticipation. For example, the word 'happy' is positive, and associated with joy, trust and anticipation. The word 'abolish' is negative and associated with anger. Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it's possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool - it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context - it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text

Language is not static but dynamic, constantly evolving to suit the fashions of the time and this results in shifts in pronunciation and pitch. In the UK, for instance, far fewer people talk with "received pronunciation" these days - and even Queen Elizabeth II's voice has lost some of the cut-glass vowels of her youth. This is thought to reflect a more general shake-up in Britain's social hierarchies, leading to a kind of linguistic cross-pollination between the classes that has even reached Her Majesty. Women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.

Good find, Kathryn--thanks!

The brain's language regions work together as a co-ordinated network, with some parts involved in multiple functions and a level of redundancy in some processing pathways. So it's not simply a matter of one brain region doing one thing in isolation. Brain-imaging methods have revealed that much more of our brain is involved in language processing than previously thought. Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that numerous regions in every major lobe (frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal lobes; and the cerebellum, an area at the bottom of the brain) are involved in our ability to produce and comprehend language.