Of all the fields of study to which human beings have devoted themselves, linguistics could lay claim to being the most conservative. Two thousand five hundred years ago, Panini began it by describing an individual human language, and describing individual languages is what the majority of linguists are still doing. Even during the last couple of decades, in which linguists have begun to be int…
One of the unsung successes in standardization in computer science has been the regular expression (often shortened to regex), a language for specifying text search regular expression strings. This practical language is used in every computer language, word processor, and text processing tools like the Unix tools grep or Emacs. Formally, a regular expression is an algebraic notation for charact…
The termhate speechrecognises a wide range of harmful social practices anddiscourses. Let us take, for instance, Islamophobic blogs, cross burnings, racialepithets, or dehumanising pictures of Jews. If all these social activities fallunder hate speech, they must have certain elements or features in common. Itmight therefore be reasonable to think that a definition of hate speech shouldcomprise …
his is a grammatical sketch of Pondi [ISO 639-3 lnm, Glottocode lang1328], a severely endangered language spoken by fewer than 300 people, almost all of whom live in a single village in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Pondi is a non-Austronesian (i.e. Papuan) language, belonging to the Ulmapo branch of the Keram family. In this introductory chapter,…
Eating and talking are universal human traits. Every healthy human being eats and talks; every society or group eats and talks. Both language and food are culturally dependent and vary according to factors such as gender, age, or situational context, or even lifestyle. There are vast differences both in the food-related behavior of different cultures as well as in the lan…
This book is primarily concerned with the history of linguistics, but it is notsimplyaboutthe history of linguistics. For one thing, positions are taken belowon issues which (while they arise in a historical context) are discussed for theirown sake, such as the motivation for assuming a significant level of phoneticrepresentation in linguistics. Further, while the text traces the development of…
At this moment in time, many people inhabit two worlds. One is the world as we know it, the “real” world that we inhabit and that physically surrounds us. The world that we can touch and feel. The other is a more distant world in the material sense, namely the world online with which we engage via technology. While these two worlds a…
This book is a manifesto promoting language diversity as a human advantage and human right. As such, it is addressed to policymakers, especially in the field of education, but also more broadly with respect to multilingualism in our societies. Diversity of languages needs to be supported as a rich source of creativity in the arts, and recognized for its vital importance …
In his 1980 book Language: The Loaded Weapon, Dwight Bolinger decries the number of ‘shamans,’ as he calls them, who comment without authority (and usually without recourse to evidence) on the use of language. The problem, he says, is that ‘they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble, and someone must answer the …
Alor, disebut juga Nusa Kenari, adalah pulau yang penuh eksotisme. Di sana, keragaman bahasa dan budaya masyarakat sama indahnya dengan keelokan alam yang mewujud pada laut, bentangan garis pantai, dan gunung berliku tiada putus. Bahasa dan budaya, sebagai olah rasa dan hasrat manusia pun mewujud menyesuaikan tempat tinggal dan garis keturunannya. Puluhan bahasa sebagai produk terpenting kebuda…