#linguists — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #linguists, aggregated by home.social.
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Random Wikipedia #criticism (rant?)...
One of the things that bugs me about (English) #Wikipedia is how aspects of it are controlled by, for lack of a better word, #pedants, without consideration of the actual #readers - without considering the purpose of an encyclopedia.
One example of this is how, when an article features aspects of another language or dialect - for instance, something from Old English, or Arabic - where the reader will not be familiar with how to pronounce something presented transliterated to a modern Latin/English alphabet, or with a word shown in a non-Latin script entirely.
It used to be common in reference works to give a simple #pronunciation key that was at least close to the correct pronunciation, but was easily understood by a normal literate reader. You know; the stuff that looked like "ED-joo-KAY-shun" or "SHEH-joo-ull" or whatever.
Well, that's not good enough for Wikipedia most of the time. Instead, they give the pronunciation in International #Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so you get stuff like "æɪ" and "aʊ" and "/ɔː/".
These are absolutely more #accurate guides to how a word should sound. And they are absolutely, completely #useless and #uninformative to 99% of people reading the article.
You know who already knows and is completely comfortable reading #IPA?
#Linguists. Students of language.
You know, the people who *already know* how to #pronounce the words. The people who don't actually need it.
#FFS.
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Random Wikipedia #criticism (rant?)...
One of the things that bugs me about (English) #Wikipedia is how aspects of it are controlled by, for lack of a better word, #pedants, without consideration of the actual #readers - without considering the purpose of an encyclopedia.
One example of this is how, when an article features aspects of another language or dialect - for instance, something from Old English, or Arabic - where the reader will not be familiar with how to pronounce something presented transliterated to a modern Latin/English alphabet, or with a word shown in a non-Latin script entirely.
It used to be common in reference works to give a simple #pronunciation key that was at least close to the correct pronunciation, but was easily understood by a normal literate reader. You know; the stuff that looked like "ED-joo-KAY-shun" or "SHEH-joo-ull" or whatever.
Well, that's not good enough for Wikipedia most of the time. Instead, they give the pronunciation in International #Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so you get stuff like "æɪ" and "aʊ" and "/ɔː/".
These are absolutely more #accurate guides to how a word should sound. And they are absolutely, completely #useless and #uninformative to 99% of people reading the article.
You know who already knows and is completely comfortable reading #IPA?
#Linguists. Students of language.
You know, the people who *already know* how to #pronounce the words. The people who don't actually need it.
#FFS.
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Indo-European Phylogenetic And Linguistic Trees Concur
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https://www.razibkhan.com/p/we-are-what-we-speak-indo-european <-- shared technical article
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https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14317 <-- shared paper
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #language #IndoEuropean #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #linguists #historians #archaeologists #phylogenetic #tree #HumanGenomeProject #genetics #cultures #migration #paleogenomics #genotypes #prehistory #ancient #ancienthumans #DNA #prehistoric #populations #genetictree -
Indo-European Phylogenetic And Linguistic Trees Concur
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https://www.razibkhan.com/p/we-are-what-we-speak-indo-european <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14317 <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #language #IndoEuropean #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #linguists #historians #archaeologists #phylogenetic #tree #HumanGenomeProject #genetics #cultures #migration #paleogenomics #genotypes #prehistory #ancient #ancienthumans #DNA #prehistoric #populations #genetictree -
This virtual workshop will discuss: *common issues in handling right-to-left and left-to-right text *tips & strategies for overcoming challenges with existing translation tools and *how Bidi text functionality is implemented & supported across platforms 💻Register Now: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9817347089794/WN_xFMxBi7GTq2tCOTY083ckA
#Linguists #Localization #Translators #Unicode #Bidi #Unicode