A Late Proto-Indo-European self-learning language course

Fernando López-Menchero has just published the first part of his A Practical Guidebook for Modern Indo-European Explorers (2018).

It is a great resource to learn Late Proto-Indo-European as a modern language, from the most basic level up to an intermediate level (estimated B1–B2, depending on one’s previous background in Indo-European and classical languages).

Instead of working on unending details and discussions of the language reconstruction, it takes Late Proto-Indo-European as a learned, modern language that can be used for communication, so that people not used to study with university manuals on comparative grammar can learn almost everything necessary about PIE … Read the rest “A Late Proto-Indo-European self-learning language course”

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

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Forces driving grammatical change are different to those driving lexical change

A new paper at PNAS, Evolutionary dynamics of language systems, by Greenhill et al. (2017).

Significance

Do different aspects of language evolve in different ways? Here, we infer the rates of change in lexical and grammatical data from 81 languages of the Pacific. We show that, in general, grammatical features tend to change faster and have higher amounts of conflicting signal than basic vocabulary. We suggest that subsystems of language show differing patterns of dynamics and propose that modeling this rate variation may allow us to extract more signal, and thus trace language history deeper than has been previously

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When linguistics does not seem to be a science

An interesting essay by Arika Okrent has appeared in Aeon – Is linguistics a science? It concerns the central position of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar to modern Linguistics, and revolves around a story in Tom Wolfe’s book The Kingdom of Speech (2016), Everett’s discovery of the Pirahã culture’s (and language’s) emphasis on the here and now: not embedding one phrase inside another, the simple kinship system, lack of numbers, and absence of fiction or creation myths. Some excerpts of the essay:

This looks suspiciously like defiance of a central feature of the scientific archetype, one first put forward by

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To Dmoz or not to Dmoz, that is the question…

Firstly, I am not a SEO expert. In fact, I am rather bad knowing how the WWW (not to talk about the Internet as a whole) works.

A year ago a (geek) friend of mine told me that to be on the Open Directory Project (Dmoz) was cool to promote our project of Indo-European Language Revival. Now I know that (obviously) it’s mostly a question of Pagerank and Google.

A year ago I sent what we had, our website dnghu.org, which was scarce in its original content, although it was not under construction, and it offered already some material … Read the rest “To Dmoz or not to Dmoz, that is the question…”