Evolutionary forces in language change depend on selective pressure, but also on random chance

A new interesting paper from Nature: Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, by Newberry, Ahern, Clark, and Plotkin (2017). Discovered via Science Daily.

The following are excerpts of materials related to the publication (written by Katherine Unger Baillie), from The University of Pennsylvania:

Examining substantial collections of annotated texts dating from the 12th to the 21st centuries, the researchers found that certain linguistic changes were guided by pressures analogous to natural selection — social, cognitive and other factors — while others seem to have occurred purely by happenstance.

“Linguists usually assume that when a change occurs in

… Read the rest

WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.

The latest improvements added to the Indoeuropean Translator Widget have been included in the simpler WordPress Translation Plugin available in this personal blog.

It now includes links to automatic translations from and into all language pairs offered by Google Translation Engine, apart from other language pairs (from individual languages, like English or Spanish) into other online machine translators, viz Tranexp or Translendium.

Available language pairs now include English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan*, Czech, Chinese (traditional/simplified), Welsh*, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Persian*, French, Hindi, Croatian, Icelandic*, Italian, Hebrew*, Latin*, Korean, Hungarian*, Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese*), Romanian, Russian, … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.”

How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?

For native speakers of most modern Romance languages (apart from some reminiscence of the neuter case), Nordic (Germanic) languages, English, Dutch, or Bulgarian, it is usually considered “difficult” to learn an inflected language like Latin, German or Russian: cases are a priori felt as too strange, too “archaic”, too ‘foreign’ to the own system of expressing ideas. However, for a common German, Baltic, Slavic, Greek speaker, or for non-IE speakers of Basque or Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), cases are the only way to express common concepts and ideas, and it was also the common way of expression for speakers … Read the rest “How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?”

New Version for Spanish Translation Plugin and Translator Widget Released

I don’t have a lot of time to post content on this blog, but at least there are some other WordPress-based websites I have to care of, and they usually include some type of a modified WordPress Translation Plugin.

The Spanish-Catalan translator link didn’t work right, and because of that I substituted it for another translation engine; a Spanish-Galician translator engine has also been added to the plugin, both from the Translendium engine. These two modifications are released with the new Spanish Translator Plugins dnghu_es_h and dnghu_es_v.

Because I have more than 5 (and more than 10) WordPress … Read the rest “New Version for Spanish Translation Plugin and Translator Widget Released”