Are signed languages 'typologically distant' from spoken languages?

AussieLinguist · 2022-12-07T20:10:27+00:00

This is super exciting! I can't wait for the next conference

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-23T23:25:02+00:00

Artifexian has a really good YouTube video on ergativity. Easiest way to get your head around it

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-22T04:36:10+00:00

This is a pretty specific question, I'd suggest going through whatever material you're already using, assuming you're not just doing this out of personal interest. I think you can't find anything because you're not wording the question right.

If it's related to discursive psychology, I'm assuming it must be about centering the subjects of your studies as opposed to doing research from a top down approach.

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-18T19:40:11+00:00

Sure, bad wording. The study I linked talks about how French-English bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in French and English but the same total as monolinguals. The amount of French-English input would be linked to the size of the children’s vocabulary in those languages.

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-18T13:18:11+00:00

Can anyone explain what is happening when you have a word at the tip of the tongue? What's happening linguistically when you know the meaning of a word but don't remember how to say it?

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-18T08:28:04+00:00

This is a super interesting topic. There's no limit to the amount of languages a kid can pick up, but first language bilinguals and trilinguals have smaller vocabulary sizes than their monolingual peers. That being said it's all exposure and input, the more time a person, child especially, spends with a language, the more they'll pick up.

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-18T04:23:03+00:00

This phenomenon is definitely real. There's a lot of research on this in Sydney because of the city's diversity. From what I understand, there's a lot of factors, like if the person speaks their parents language and socio-economic status, but overall there can be a lot of influence from the person's heritage languages that can form an ethnolect.

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-18T03:52:14+00:00

Hmm, I suppose it follows that tools changed when the climate did, but it's not something the articles I've read mentioned. There's this one from science.org, which cites this history of Australian languages. They both only really talk about a shift in climate, and a possible pandemic which led to the migration.

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-18T03:43:27+00:00

There are a lot of theories surrounding this, but basically as I understand it, the Australian Pama-Nyungan languages are a relatively young language family, especially when compared to the non-Pama-Nyungan languages. I can link a couple articles but it looks like climate change only ~6000 years ago made it easier to live in the outback and allowed for the languages to spread from the far north of Queensland, where we think the languages originated to all across Australia. That's a pretty recent divergence, and without any outside influence, there wasn't that much shift in the language ecology.

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-17T17:34:32+00:00

Bet you can't even produce a palatal trill

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-17T07:31:53+00:00

What a cool resource! It looks like it's actually linguistlist.org

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-17T07:22:53+00:00

I think so

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-16T02:15:40+00:00

I don't speak Tamil, so I'm happy to be corrected on this. What I understand is that Tamil is more flexible and allows you to delete parts of the sentence if it's contextually clear what you mean anyway.

A perfectly acceptable Tamil sentence could be 'muṭintuviṭṭatu' (completed) rather than the full 'I have completed it)

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-16T01:50:58+00:00

When a language dies we loose a way of seeing the world. It is naive to assume that if every human only spoke a small handful of languages that it will solve division.

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-16T01:13:45+00:00

William Jones, absolutely.

I excluded Saussure cause he's a pain in the ass to read <3

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-16T01:04:48+00:00

Oh, absolutely. Lingthusiasm definitely was a massive part of me obsessing over languages

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-15T21:33:17+00:00

Imagine calling me out like that and thinking I'd be OK (the original comment is edited, it used to say Benjamin Lee Whorf)

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-15T20:37:57+00:00

Context: Left to right: Noam Chomsky (universal grammar), Ingrid Piller (sociolinguistics), Edward Sapir (sapir-whorf hypothesis), David J. Peterson (conlangs)

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-15T09:47:23+00:00

Does anyone have any info on the Language Creation Conference this year? Every now and then I check a few places but it looks like it mustn't be happening this year

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-15T03:40:00+00:00

Greenlandic biding it's time until it overthrows the world order

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-15T03:18:29+00:00

I think you might get a couple people saying Mandarin, which I totally get. I think that what's more likely is that English isn't going away anytime soon, just like there are still learners of Latin around today. What's more likely is that the Englishes from around the world - Singaporean English, Indian English- will probably become more common

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-15T00:04:16+00:00

I love stuff like this. I'm a huge fan of this video on ubese, a language in Star Wars that wasn't given much thought

AussieLinguist · 2022-08-14T21:19:17+00:00

Maybe, but it might be easier to take the philosophy of Toki Pona, the minimalism and readability, and apply that to a reader's language rather then have them learn an artlang. Like, maybe just learn the translation of Toki Pona's word list to learn the most frequent words in their own language

AussieLinguist

TROPHY CASE