"Zork: The Great Inner Workings"
Zork largely predates me, though of course I'm familiar with it. I played it a bit in college (who didn't? It's an experimental time for so many.) But I recall being fascinated by its functionality and flexibility. This article is a great read into the way which those programmers pulled it off.
Of course it's a Lisp predecessor.
|
Decadence's second meaning
Decadence is also a noun for "a period of decline." - Which, makes sense when you break the word apart.
|
12 months learning Mandarin
I really enjoyed this entry highlighting the author's journey of dedicated study of Mandarin Chinese over the past year. The entry referenced "Bloom's two-sigma" which jumped out to me as something to read more about:
Bloom's 2 sigma problem refers to the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment. It was originally observed by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and reported in 1984 in the journal Educational Researcher. Bloom's paper analyzed the dissertation results of University of Chicago PhD students Joanne Anania and Joseph Arthur Burke. As quoted by Bloom: "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class". Additionally, the variation of the students' achievement changed: "about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20%" of the control class.
|
Some things never change
Back in 2007, when I started ManaNation's website; one of the big subjects of comment spam that the site would regularly get was for house deck/porch construction. The reason for this was simple, the homonym use of 'deck' for Magic: The Gathering (#wotcstaff) and for the home construction project of a 'deck.'
Here it is 17 years later and last night I noticed that X was serving me deck railing ads:
|
"Arborglyphs"
I went through a period where I was rather obsessed with the Basque culture and language. This was started initially by the novel "Shibumi" by Trevanian. The main character assassin makes a point of the Basque culture and it being so unique, and that set me to also delving into it.
In any case, I found this article about the markings on aspen trees from Basque settlers in the American West very interesting.
|
A deep look at North American dialects
A man's hobby has led to this amazing resource that delves into the regions of English around North America, complete with audio samples which exemplify regional dialects.
|
Writing scripts descended from Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Found this nifty infographic which looks at languages which descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs, including the language you're reading this blog in! (Presumably. I suppose there is a non-zero, though very low, possibility of someone coming to my blog and translating it into a non-indoeuropean language.)
The linked post delves into the background of the graphic and also includes several interesting tidbits about the different kind of writing systems - from "true alphabets" such as the Latin alphabet, to alphasyllabary scripts, to logograms and more.
|
Bilingualism affords no cognitive benefits
From the paper's abstract:
Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors. In any case, the size of the positive bilingual effect in the unmatched groups was so small that it would likely have a negligible impact on the cognitive performance of any individual.
|
Side project on my to do list: A website where you enter a word or short phrase and it returns every translation for it possible.
Sometimes I just want to see a word or phrase around the world and not have a specific country or language in mind.
|
Explaining Japanese to Programmers
An interesting blog post which compares the grammar of Japanese to programming. Not revolutionary but still an interesting way to think about the language.
|
50 Psychological & Psychiatric Terms to Avoid
Not just a listicle, it's an academic article and provides explanation for each term on the list. They sort them into five groups: Inaccurate or Misleading, Frequently Misused, Ambiguous, Oxymorons, and Pleonasms.
This isn't a list of terms to avoid for social reasons, it's about real problems the authors of this paper have with usages of these terms in pschological and psychiatric studies and papers. Very interesting stuff.
For example, why they discourage the use of the term 'antidepressant medication' to refer to a wide range of medications, some of which are actually used for treating anxiety, etc.
(2) Antidepressant medication. Medications such as tricyclics, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, are routinely called "antidepressants." Yet there is little evidence that these medications are more efficacious for treating (or preventing relapse for) mood disorders than for several other conditions, such as anxiety-related disorders (e.g., panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder; Donovan et al., 2010) or bulimia nervosa (Tortorella et al., 2014). Hence, their specificity to depression is doubtful, and their name derives more from historical precedence—the initial evidence for their efficacy stemmed from research on depression (France et al., 2007)—than from scientific evidence. Moreover, some authors argue that these medications are considerably less efficacious than commonly claimed, and are beneficial for only severe, but not mild or moderate, depression, rendering the label of "antidepressant" potentially misleading (Antonuccio and Healy, 2012; but see Kramer, 2011, for an alternative view).
|
I finally told my Android phone to forget the word 'abs' - Gone are the days of it thinking I am referring to my core strength instead of the most common conjunction in the English language.
|
|
The oldest sentence ever written: "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
Inscribed on a beard comb in Canaanite over 5,200 years ago.
|
"Stop using 'Latinx' if you really want to be inclusive"
In July 2022, Argentina and Spain released public statements banning the use of Latinx, or any gender-neutral variant. Both governments reasoned that these new terms are violations of the rules of the Spanish language.
Latinx is used as an individual identity for those who are gender-nonconforming, and it can also describe an entire population without using “Latinos,” which is currently the default in Spanish for a group of men and women.
Many academics might feel compelled to continue to use Latinx because they fought hard to have it recognized by their institutions or have already published the term in an academic journal. But there is a much better gender-inclusive alternative, one that's been largely overlooked by the U.S. academic community and is already being used in Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America, especially among young social activists in those countries.
It's "Latine" – pronounced "lah-teen-eh" – and it's far more adaptable to the Spanish language. It can be implemented as articles – "les" instead of "los" or "las," the words for "the." When it comes to pronouns, "elle" can become a singular form of "they" and used in place of the masculine "él" or feminine "ella," which translate to "he" and "she." It can also be readily applied to most nationalities, such as "Mexicane" or "Argentine."
|
"We don't do that here"
Came across this blog post about the use of that phrase in a professional setting and I love it. I'm going to remember it as something to pull out as part of correcting and aligning culture for groups.
|
"‘Parentese’ Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds"
[R]esearchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as “parentese” — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. In the most wide-ranging study of its kind, more than 40 scientists helped to gather and analyze 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet savvy and off the grid, from hunter gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.
|
My library loan of Carlo Rovelli's There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness audiobook ends today. I'm only 2/3rds of the way through it sadly. It's a series of essays, many of which heavily center on the author's Italian heritage and home country.
The book is a series of essays written by Rovelli, many of which have to do with philosophy and science and the intersections there-of. As a result, many famous Italians get mentioned, including Dante. And it was while driving home one day listening to the book, that I realized I want to learn Italian so I can read Dante's Inferno as well as other great books in their native language.
I picked up some Italian in preparation of my trip with my wife back in 2015, and we have plans of going back in the next few years. But I am far from fluent, much more to do. I still want to finish getting a better handle on Spanish though.
|
Explaining the Zulu click sounds
To quote a redditor, "this is an insane amount of linguistics condensed into 3 minutes"
|
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
By Keith Leonard
My students want certainty. They want it
so badly. They respect science and have memorized
complex formulas. I don't know
how to tell my students their parents
are still just as scared. The bullies get bigger
and vaguer and you cannot punch a cloud.
I have eulogies for all my loved ones prepared,
but cannot include this fact in my lesson plans.
The best teacher I ever had told me to meet him
at the basketball court. We played pick-up for hours.
By the end, I lay panting on the hardwood
and couldn't so much as stand.
He told me to describe the pain in my chest,
I tried. I couldn't find the words. Not exactly.
Listen, he said, that's where language ends.
|
Natalie Diaz on the Mojave Language and Where English Fails Us
[Auto Generated Summary]:
While sharing meals throughout our residency discussing literature, politics, and love, Natalie's precision and passion around language was immediately apparent. In addition to teaching at Arizona State University and writing poetry, Natalie actively works to preserve the Mojave language with its last remaining speakers. "My body is its own lexicon and I also fight for a language, in Mojave and English, that helps me to hold it in the space of love." It's an out of time place. Natalie went on to say that this is one of the ways she "Refuses to be prophesied" by the English language and works hard to be capacious in English.
|
What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing
Thanks to my friend Shivam for sharing this on Twitter!
This is very cool and gives an interesting look at the evolution of a natural writing system for an African language.
In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. "Look!" said the spectral visitor. "These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language."
Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed to him. Even so, he gathered the male members of his family together to reverse engineer the concept of writing. Working through the day and into the following night, the men devised a system of 200 symbols, each standing for a word or a syllable of their native Vai language. For millennia, varieties of the Vai language had been passed down from parents to children—but before this moment no speaker had ever recorded a single word in writing.
This took place in about 1833 in a region that would soon become the independent nation of Liberia. Vai, one of about 30 Indigenous languages of Liberia, has nearly 200,000 speakers today in the Cape Mount region that borders Sierra Leone.
|
How similar are the Russian and Ukrainian languages?
One frequently cited figure is that Ukrainian and Russian share about 62% of their vocabulary. This is about the same amount of shared vocabulary that English has with Dutch, according to the same calculations. If you expand your sample by scraping internet data to compare a broader range of words than just those 200 ancient "core" words, the proportion of shared words declines. One computational model suggests that Russian and Ukrainian share about 55% of their vocabulary.
Russian and Ukrainian emerged from the same ancestor language, and, in the grand scheme of things, not very long ago. It is easier for a Russian to learn Ukrainian (or vice versa) than it is for an English speaker trying to master either of those languages. Their shared vocabulary and the fact that even words that have different meanings may look familiar makes it easier for Russian or Ukrainian speakers to "tune into" the other.
The long history of Russia as the dominant political and cultural language of the Soviet Union means that many of Ukraine's citizens -– around 30% by the last census –- are native speakers of Russian, and many more studied Russian to a high level. The reverse has not been true historically, though that is now changing. The languages are close enough and have coexisted long enough that they even have a hybrid called Surzhyk, which is in common use in many parts of Ukraine.
|
