Linguistics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51758910

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In the name of promoting inter-ethnic harmony, China is to force dozens of ethnic minorities within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to assimilate into Han-dominated society by enacting a landmark law during the upcoming fourth session of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) which opens on Mar 5. The law will require ethnic minorities to use Mandarin Chinese as their main language of instruction, overturning decades-old policies that date back to the era of Mao Zedong, noted ft.com Mar 3.

[...]

The sweeping law marks the latest effort in a signature “Sinicization” campaign under Chinese leader Xi Jinping and prescribes legal action against anyone, inside or outside the country, who undermines “national unity” or provokes “separatism”.

The so-called Han majority accounts for more than 90% of the PRC’s population of 1.4 billion and the country’s constitution recognises 55 ethnic minorities, and a dozen languages — some with their own written scripts — and hundreds of dialects.

Under the new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, while minority languages may still be taught as a second language, groups such as Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongolians will no longer be entitled to use their native tongues for core subjects in schools and universities, the report noted.

[...]

The new law “overturns the multicultural promises upon which China was founded”, moving from “an idea of unity through difference or unity through pluralism, to one of unity through sameness, through the elimination of difference”, Benno Weiner, a historian of modern China, Tibet and Inner Asia at Carnegie Mellon University, has said.

“The conclusion that Xi Jinping and others seem to have come to is that diversity is dangerous.”

[...]

Worryingly, one clause in the new law is cited as saying only the state has the right to promote “a system of symbols of Chinese civilisation”, which can be used “in public facilities and architectural design, scenic area exhibitions, place naming and public activities”. Such policies, if enforced, meant there was “no way” that non-Han people would be able to safely express “any type of discontent without being accused of being essentially separatists or terrorists,” Weiner has said.

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For more than sixty years, Charles Hockett’s ‘design features’ have been widely used as a framework for defining what distinguishes human language from other forms of communication. These features were long treated as a checklist of properties that set language apart.

However, a new study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences argues that this traditional view is no longer sufficient. The researchers contend that language cannot be captured by a fixed inventory of traits, but is better understood as a flexible system shaped by social interaction, situational context, and human creativity.

In a new reassessment of Hockett’s classic “design features” of language—ideas such as arbitrariness, duality of patterning, and displacement—an international team of linguists and cognitive scientists argues that current research requires a fundamental rethink of what language is and how it evolved.

Their central claim is clear: language is not merely a spoken code. Instead, it is a dynamic, multimodal, socially grounded system shaped through interaction, culture, and shared meaning

Popular-level article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516606-stone-age-symbols-may-push-back-the-earliest-form-of-writing/

Archive link. It's a 40kyo figurine of a mammoth carved in ivory, marked with crosses and dots. The marks are as complex as proto-cuneiform acc. to the researchers.

The 32 signs that von Petzinger has catalogued in Ice Age cave art across Europe. They account for the vast majority of non-figurative imagery found across the continent during this 30,000-year time span, suggesting that they were used with purpose and were meaningful to their creators. Each of the 32 signs has their own distinct pattern of use. Courtesy Genevieve von Petzinger.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42431878

Credit: en:User:ish ishwar

CC BY 2.0

Hello.

I had an idea to make English, but each phoneme is swapped for an opposite. This is easy to do for vowels - for example, /i/ and /u/ are opposites, because one is front and the other is back. I tried to figure out a similar system for consonants and have been stuck ever since. So, how would you calculate an opposite for /m/, or /h/, or /r/? I'm sure there must be a way to do it, but for the life of me I can't figure it out.

Key points:

• The word surzhyk (суржик) ['surʒek] in Ukrainian originally refers to a mix of grains, or a flour made with that mix. It's being used to refer to a "mixed" Ukrainian + Russian linguistic variety. Kind of like Spanglish, but more like Portuñol.
• The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows people in central and eastern Ukraine using surzhyk more, and Russian less.
• Acc. to the text the surzhyk being used nowadays is markedly different from the one used in the 30s, as if the mix was originally "some Ukrainian with lots of Russian" and nowadays "some Russian with lots of Ukrainian".
• Attitudes towards surzhyk seem to be changing, too; from negative to positive.

Note: there's no way around politics, when it comes to language; it's an intrinsically political topic. However, I'd like to ask other users here to keep any potential discussion on-topic for this community. Also, please do not conflate populations with governments, OK?

Quick summary: excavations from the Boğazköy-Hattusha archaeological site (present-day Turkey) unearthed a tablet. That tablet is written mostly in Hittite, but it mentions an idiom from another language, "of the land of Kalašma", that would be spoken in the northwest of the Hittite empire (also in what's today Turkey).

Said language would be an Anatolian language; so it's a close-ish relative to Hittite (and Luwian, Palaic, etc.), and ultimately related to Russian, English, Italian, Hindi etc. (it's all Indo-European).

EDIT: @chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world linked an even better source. Enjoy!

I'm trying to make a single comprehensive IPA chart for all the phones, since trying to find everything in the official charts means looking across several charts that aren't all easy to find (really, i have no idea how to get to the ExtIPA chart from the IPA's website). As of now, my chart has parity with the chart here, and it'll continue to grow.

Wikipedia's charts are still better if you need audio samples with the chart, i haven't done that yet.

My chart can be found here.

The Great Vowel Shift still impacts our experience of English dramatically. In this video I use animation to illustrate the GVS and its continuing developments to the present day.

See also

• Category:English cognate expressions
• Category:English reduplicated coordinated pairs

I never talked much to people that use a lot of expressions, and the usage of Spanish terms, like "nada" or "amigo", as I could observe from the outside, felt inconsistent. And upon thinking on that, it got me curious, is it common to use such expressions or not?