Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'linguistics'

The Spread of Writing

October 12, 2022 • #

The spread of written language around the world, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to today.

4 Amazing Things About Language

September 25, 2019 • #

Dialect expert Erik Singer is back with a short video on some fascinating features of language:

I find anything about language or linguistics immensely fascinating. Itā€™s amazing the way humans so naturally develop the ability to convert random noise into patterns for communication by age 3.

In this video he talks about the Great Vowel Shift, a slow wandering of the pronunciation of English over the past few hundred years. Now stretch this back a thousand more years and think about how many different...

Weekend Reading: Brains and Language, Hillshading in Blender, and Antifragility

April 13, 2019 • #

šŸ§  Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language

ā€œIt may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,ā€ the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a...

Linguistic Relativity

April 7, 2019 • #

The linguist John McWhorter has written a plethora of books on the English language. For an academic (heā€™s a professor at Columbia University), he has a very progressive view of Englishā€™s evolution, a supporter of the vernacular and everyday grammar with all its quickly-developing trendy figures of speech over the conservative, traditionalist approaches of Strunk and White. Many linguists of tend toward preservation, pushing standardization of grammar and even teaching ā€œproperā€ usage that no modern speaker would say out loud. But McWhorter has a different perspective and supports change in usage with...

Language and Progress

December 11, 2018 • #

A wide-ranging conversation on linguistics, human scientific advancement, and enlightenment thinking with Steven Pinker and John McWhorter.

Linguistics is endlessly fascinating.

I might be an outlier, but I absolutely love YouTube as a medium for this kind of content. This sort of long form video is an example of a fantastic new thing that couldnā€™t exist or thrive prior to YouTube.

Technique Critique

October 12, 2018 • #

This series with dialect coach Erik Singer is great, I could watch dozens of these. He critiques renditions of different accents, some of them specific regional dialects:

Maybe itā€™s related to my interest in geography, but Iā€™m always curious to learn how to differentiate accents from different countries and localities.

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