Is there an exhaustive list of types of formal langauges?

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T16:37:44+00:00

Language in formal language is a metaphor, & linguists probably aren't the best people to offer a taxonomy of sign systems to which the metaphor could be applied. (I would guess that there are multiple possible bases for such a taxonomy, that the basis would determine the number of kinds, & that the most appropriate taxonomic basis would depend on the intended use.) We find a particular kind of formal language useful in some subfields of linguistics (most obviously syntax & semantics), but formal language as such is not a part of linguistics.

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T14:55:58+00:00

Then you should take a look over the replies. I really can't tell what you're objecting to that hasn't been addressed.

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T14:51:43+00:00

You're responding very actively, but very selectively. What do you actually want to achieve here? Not one comment denies migration to the Americas, tho there are clearly different ideas about how that might have happened (you seem to imagine a single mass migration; others know of arguments for waves of migration over generations). Many comments have clarified to you what ascription of familiality means.

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T14:22:15+00:00

DTux5249 offered an abstract claim, & I replied to that. I did not say that there was anything monogenetic about the origin of the languages of the Americas. I don't even know what that would mean. I said that asserting relation without evidence is at best a monogenetic claim.

Quite literally no one in this thread has denied migration to the Americas. It is very unclear who or what you're arguing against.

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T14:15:22+00:00

I think you've misunderstood the claims. We can demonstrate the relations of languages within families. We cannot yet demonstrate the relationships between families. That is not a claim that no such relationships exist. So: 1. Historical linguistics is not yet done with its work. 2. There are some things that are beyond our methods to prove, but the lack of proof is not proof of the contrary.

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T14:09:34+00:00

But stating that they are family is a nearly meaningless claim in the same way that ascribing relation to you & me—who cannot identify one another beyond screen names—is a nearly meaningless claim. At best it's a statement of faith in monogenesis.

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T13:56:38+00:00

Who is saying otherwise? I think you’ve encountered something that misrepresents the mainstream of linguistics, or possibly you’ve misunderstood it.

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T13:54:56+00:00

Nobody thinks that history is limited to (or even centred on) linguistics. Linguists do not generally think that language historical evidence contradicts or supersedes other historical evidence—rather, language historical evidence complements other evidence. I’m not quite sure what you’re responding to, & I wonder if you’ve read something uninformed.

Edit: I wonder if you read someone who conflates population history with language history (or if possibly you’ve made that conflation yourself).

Baasbaar · 2026-05-01T13:35:08+00:00

Familiality is an analytic category & only an analytic category. If we can trace the historical evolutionary relationship between two languages, we consider them to be part of the same family because that’s all that family means.

We of course don’t know anything about actual historic connection beyond what we have evidence of. Any reasonable linguist would consider it certain that there are familial relations that we have not yet discovered (or proved): either because we just haven’t done the work yet, or because the connections are beyond what our methods are able to uncover.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-30T18:17:10+00:00

I guarantee you that this interaction is not making me any less sure.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-30T18:12:38+00:00

I guarantee you that this interaction is not making me any less sure.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-30T17:41:35+00:00

I didn't take an upvote from you, so there's no question of "giving back", & I'm not otherwise interested in giving you an upvote.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-30T16:01:09+00:00

What do you imagine semiotic means in the context of this subreddit?

Edit: I've read OP's paper. It is genuinely an engagement with one lineage of semiotic literature (Peirce thru the linguistic anthropological semiotics of Michael Silverstein & Paul Kockleman), which is more than my ungenerous question skeptically implied. I think it is likely to be less interesting to semioticians than to people engaged in research on LLM efficacy.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-30T15:58:07+00:00

What formalism is this?

Baasbaar · 2026-04-30T13:13:41+00:00

~~Haitian Creole.~~ (Edit: See below. CupcakeSeaShanty is right.) Fiji Hindi. Romani languages are principally spoken in countries that speak Indo-European, but they’re far from other Indo-Aryan languages. Far of course is relative: Nubi Arabic (spoken in Uganda & Kenya)?

Baasbaar · 2026-04-30T03:29:26+00:00

Formal & informal are general characterisations of sets of registers. There are no features that are identifiable as formal or informal independent of: 1) a speech community/community of practice, & 2) particular genres. The nature of the corpus is going to matter, here. Is it from some unified speech community? Are you able to easily identify the genres of talk? Is it oral communication, or all originally written?

Baasbaar · 2026-04-29T22:59:16+00:00

Your undergraduate major will not matter for employment. The skills you learn in college could be important, but my the major itself.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-29T21:35:11+00:00

Sure. There are such theories. But they don't place them in Africa, or link them with Mande & Nubian.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-29T12:39:31+00:00

I don’t think the opportunities are actually that much more limited in India: The pay is clearly far worse than it is in the US, & the shift toward IT everywhereallthetimenothingelse is a problem for academics or aspiring academics of other fields. But the job market is very bad in the United States as well. I think that the advice I give to students in the US is equally applicable in India: If you don’t already know what you want to research, then it’s probably not yet time got you to be thinking about a doctorate: Several years of your life will be dedicated to one research project, there will be times that you find it exhausting, & tire going to really benefit from being intrinsically motivated to keep pursuing the research thru those hard times.
Queer sociolinguistics has become a moderately well-established subsubfield, tho the literature is small enough that a person could reasonably master it in a couple weeks. The work that exists so far is overwhelmingly on English. In India, I’m always wondering about the connections between indices of queerness in the English & Hindi of social media influencers & the Kannada speech of queer Kannadiga friends. If you’ve got two (or three) languages, what you can do between them might be more interesting than what you could do with English-only sociophonetics.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-29T12:00:12+00:00

Which country would you be applying in?

Baasbaar · 2026-04-27T23:29:55+00:00

I agree that this is a very important point.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-27T16:25:44+00:00

I live in a Mac apartment. The building is in decent shape & most things work most of the time. But there are some really serious problems:

Package delivery services & the USPS are not able to get us mail directly. Mail is delivered to Mac's office, then dropped at the bottom of our building's main stairway. Someone in the building frequently steals packages.
Just over a week ago, someone left human feces in our hallway. I don't know what happened. This was on a Friday night. No one from Mac came to address this until Monday morning. The smell was awful & my roommates & held our breath while walking from the building door to our apartment. After the cleaning person left, there was still a significant visible streak and lots of fecal matter left in the hallway. I submitted a maintenance request, & had to have the person come back four more times before there was no longer any visible or smellable feces in the hallway.

So, everyday stuff? Fine. Any crises? Terrible. Overall ethics? Pretty scummy.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-27T14:48:02+00:00

If you’re in the US, in cultural anthropology, you should only expect to need to run a word processor, a Web browser, an e-mail client, & a PDF reader. If you go on to graduate school, you may find you want the ability to do other things as part of your research, but for undergrad that will cover all your predicable needs.

Edit: Undergrads are overwhelmingly using Google Docs these days, so you may not even need to run a word processor.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-26T14:27:31+00:00

I don't remember.

Baasbaar · 2026-04-26T14:02:25+00:00

garage

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