Thyme waits for Noam, man.
I have been reading Brandom's work on Hegel and have been hitting a rather large vocabulary wall. I have listed some samples of the unfamiliar vocabulary. I know that these kinds of terms are important in analytic philosophy of language, so I was wondering if someone could recommend some articles about things like "indexicals" "tokens" and "types."
Although, for the most part, I grasp the meanings of these words, I want to make sure I understand how they are deployed, their history, and the important papers that develop them (or at least some good SEP articles on the debates surrounding this kind of stuff).
Also, are there any good general introductions to what analytic philosophers mean by "semantics?"
Just would love some stuff to read up on so I can better assess this material.
Edit Thank you all for such an enormous resource list
When scrolling through this subreddit I get the impression, that most of you like to focus on phonetics and phonology or historical linguistics the most. To test this assumption I created this poll:
What field of linguistics are most interested about?
Because I couldn't extend the poll further you can upvote my comment for psycho- and neurolinguistics.
Thanks for your time. (I hope my field subdivision make sense to you)
There is a vast amount of long lectures on high level Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and so on but almost no systemic lecture series on Linguistics. That's very strange. What's going on? Am I missing something?
tl;dr - I assume linguistics is a relatively unpopular field. Why? Can we change this? How? (I hope this isn't too off topic for r/linguistics, it's a bit meta; I also hope that it doesn't come off as soapboxing, I'm genuinely interested in hearing people's thoughts.)
Compare the number of members in r/linguistics to r/philosophy or r/psychology. Compare the number of undergraduate majors across these three fields, or the number of academic departments specializing in these and related fields at universities and colleges across North America and perhaps the world. Most don't even offer a linguistics major, let alone have a dedicated linguistics department staffed by actual linguists. Given all this, I take it for granted that linguistics is a relatively unpopular field.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that language itself is very popular. People love learning factoids about the world's languages or etymology, they love riddles and language puzzles (crosswords, wordle!), they love language jokes and puns, they love creative uses of language (poetry, rap and other song lyrics, literature/fiction, aphorisms, inspiring oration).
One reason I am asking: I'm wondering whether our field is doomed to obscurity, or if we can turn this around. I.e. is this for deep and immutable reasons, or maybe just because our field is young (see point 1 below)?
I'm interested in hearing your thoughts, prescriptions, and possible objections to the presupposition of the question. And also if you're aware of any discussions of this elsewhere. Here are some of my own hunches:
1 - Linguistics is still a young field and just needs time to come into its own. Maybe competing frameworks within linguistics and the sometimes vicious debate between them makes the field look bad from the outside and turns people off? (That said, I'm a pluralist, it's good to have lots of competing ideas.)
2 - Linguistics is too hard. Trying to uncover truth in this field requires very careful thought, and the fact of the matter is, most people don't want to think hard (or they're too busy thinking hard about other stuff). (This could interact with 4.)
3 - The language/math dichotomy: Whether this is caused by our current education system, or is due to something deeper in the human folk taxonomy of areas of study, many school children seem to identify early as either a math and science person, or a creative person, with lovers of language being a subtype of creative person that can further manife
... keep reading on reddit β‘
I want to whistle. I study phonetics/phonology, I understand sagittal diagrams, at this point I can articulate at least 80% of the IPA - but whistling is beyond me. All the tutorials I've seen don't tell me exactly what the placement of my lips or tongue should be and I feel like I have all the tools necessary to learn, IF someone were to just contextualize it in linguistic terms.
TEACH ME TO WHISTLE!!! I feel like the closest I've gotten is articulating a long /Κ/ with rounded lips but I still sound like a snake's imitation of a kettle just starting to boil.
Edit: Oh my god. I didn't think it could happen but I just whistled. I knew studying linguistics would pay off. It's super high pitched and I can only sustain it for about a second before I lose my posture but holy frick you guys are wizards.
I once read something on here about how a professor of Spanish Linguistics was able to prove that someone had been murdered rather than killed themselves because they examined the "suicide" letter (written in English) and proved that the mistakes made were too irregular for a native Spanish speaker whose only other language was English.
Kind of like how a nurse could identify your symptoms on the spot or an engineer could estimate how long it will take for a pot to fill up with water, what "magic tricks" can a linguist pull in real life that can dazzle people?
I've been saying how "comb" is related to the OCS *z[o]mbΡ for years now. Gotta get some new material.
EDIT: I don't remember the exact story! This was years ago and it's not really important, it just serves as a vehicle to stimulate thinking! Please post whatever corrections to the story you have down below if you want.
Looking more for other people's opinions/experiences/thoughts and less for advice at this point. That being said, here's the place I'm coming from in this discussion--
My partner (27NB) and I (26NB) both seem to have independently started using "we" instead of "I" several months after we moved out of a housemate living situation and into our own place (we'd been living with each other and 2-3 others for 2 years). Examples: I recently told the vet that "we" are feeding "our" cats x brand of food when I took my cats to the vet, and they recently told a mechanic that "we" needed to get "our" car fixed when their car broke down and they were on the phone. This is something I've definitely noticed monogamous/highly enmeshed couples doing before, and I'm not certain how comfortable I am with the implications here--I'm not inherently uncomfortable but am definitely on the fence.
We both feel secure in our relationship but tend avoidant under stress in past relationships, and prefer our relationship to avoid certain forms of attachment/intimacy--have our own bedrooms, do not have shared finances, do not really spend time with each other's family, etc. When we began this relationship we were both already partnered and poly, but now consider each other to be primary partners. Obviously, we wouldn't dream of dating together, and consider each other's partners to be off-limits for romantic attachment. But after 2 years of a pandemic, they consider themselves polysaturated with just one partner and are not actively looking, and I have one other casual partner but am not seeking out other connections either, so we're much less "actively" poly than we used to be.
I keep going back and forth on what to make of this! Is it a concern that we've picked up this habit, and does it mean that I'll have issues forming new relationships later on? Or is this a perfectly normal thing for nesting partners to do and my avoidant tendencies are coming out because I'm not used to this level of intimacy? Or is it something in between?
I have been researching a lot about the history of Telugu language and Dravidian languages recently and I've realised there is a lot to know and honesty its very Interesting.
I'm very surprised to see that still like 80% of people think that Telugu is decended from Sanskrit and people straight away decline that the Steppe Pastoralist Migration (Infamously called the "Aryan Migration") ever happened. People literally think that every language on earth came from Sanskrit. On the other hand there are Tamil nationalists who believe Tamil is the oldest language and Telugu came from it, which is again false as Telugu and Tamil decended from a common language not one from another.
more specifically gramatical features
Hi All -
I am not a linguistic. I am a tech person getting in research. I am struggling to find the correct academic term to describe a scenario.
Example: two people or 1 person and 1 machine are having a conversation about breakfast. Half way through the conversation, person A makes a statement "I don't like apples". Person B says "I thought we were talking about breakfast". Person A's statement was talking about apples in the context of breakfast, but B just didn't understand that i.e. didn't get the inference...
Ok - clumsy example. But if this sort of thing presupposition? It could perhaps be anaphora as person A didn't say "I don't like apples for breakfast". or maybe it is called something else related to conversational context?
Appreciate any help. Regards,
I'm not someone who'd wield a sword and roam around with 'Kannada matadi' but man, it gets me furious when Bangalore representation is reduced to 'maccha, da, di, chumma' in pop culture.
What even happened to maga etc?
Yeah there's an influx of other cultures here but that doesn't mean that's our identity, I'm tired of being misrepresentated allll the time.
From my understanding, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Romanian, and Turkish are all examples of languages that have had significant portions of their vocabulary altered, or there has been an attempt to create "pure" forms of the language.
What other languages have gone through similar vocabulary reforms? I heard Finnish removed some Swedish words, and that Korean has removed some Japanese words? Also, that Hindi replaced Persian and Arab words with Sanskrit equivalents?
I know that Greece no longer uses their hyper-conservative form of Greek, but the other languages still use standard forms that had vocabulary reforms.
As a German, I sometimes overhear funny wordings in Swiss German. So what is your favourite and of course if something similar exists in French/Italian/Romansh, be very welcome to share your experience.
Edit: To be more specific, I'm thinking of expressions in Swiss Standard German. Grammar differences are still welcome, thou...
Or conversely, what feature do you wish English didnβt have?
I'm thinking of things like, hamburger meat, ATM machine and the one that really makes me scratch my head, "breast milk." As opposed to nose milk?
Edit: American poster. I understand these phrases, I'm just asking about what ones you know of and if you use them.
I'm an aspiring polyglot who's never got past the novelty phase in any language (French, Finnish, Japanese, Russian) because I'm just terrible at managing my time and committing to stuff because I have pretty severe ADHD, is there anything I can do that can help with routine management, stimulation, and learning at the same time?
Any general advice for learning languages with ADHD is also welcome.
Edit: Thank you everyone for all the responses and advice! I will put it all to good use.
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