No idea about @ but it seems to me that people have been circling letters as part of a personal signature (like if your party name started with an A, you might just sign and circle A) for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s the right answer.

The article explains it, but the origin is from Latin ⟨ad⟩ for, toward, at in the Middle Ages. Faster to write, less paper and ink necessary (those can be expensive).

There’s a bunch other symbols and diacritics that popped up back then, for roughly the same reasons. From what I recall:

• ⟨&⟩ aka ampersand — from Latin ⟨et⟩ “and”
• ⟨º⟩, ⟨ª⟩ aka ordinal indicators — to disambiguate ordinals and cardinals while using Roman numerals; e.g. in Old Italian ⟨X⟩ would stand for ⟨diece⟩* “ten”, ⟨Xª⟩ for ⟨decima⟩ tenth, F and ⟨Xº⟩ for ⟨decimo⟩ tenth, M.
• ⟨~⟩ aka tilde — from a superimposed ⟨n⟩. In Galician and Portuguese it was often used because some scriber forgot to plop an ⟨n⟩, since the /n/ was elided from speech; e.g. Latin ⟨pinum⟩ → ⟨pino⟩ → ⟨pĩo⟩* “pine”. Then in Spanish for old ⟨nn⟩→⟨ñ⟩, that was sounding less and less like /n:/ and more like a single sound, /ɲ/.

*old spellings. Modern ⟨dieci⟩ and ⟨piño⟩ / ⟨pinho⟩ respectively.

No idea about @ but it seems to me that people have been circling letters as part of a personal signature (like if your party name started with an A, you might just sign and circle A) for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s the right answer.

I had to dig quite a bit into the paper to find it:

English and up to 21 other languages (Bengali, Catalan, Danish, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Chinese)

Frankly that’s poor sampling — 18/22 of the languages are Indo-European and/or spoken mostly in Europe.

In Iberia and Latin America the symbol was often used for a unit of weight, the arroba (“arrova” or “rova” in Catalan), between 10kg and 15kg. Nowadays the unit itself is mostly gone*, but the symbol got the name, and it’s used way more nowadays than it used to.

Some also use it nowadays to avoid grammatical gender marks; e.g. Portuguese “@ alun@” for “the student”, instead of “a aluna” (feminine; implied woman) or “o aluno” (masculine). That works in PT/ES because usually the gender marks are -a and -o, and the symbol kind of resembles both.

* The only exception I recall is sales of a few bulk goods; which ones vary from place to place, but it’s stuff like cattle, taters, grains, cocoa etc.

A lot of the underlying message is how language gives you a sense of belonging, of community. Being forbidden to speak Cree, those people got those things stolen from them; and now she’s trying to let people reclaim those for themselves.

“The rock, it’s a spiritual thing for us. It’s our messenger to the Creator, right? So we call it a living thing. Same thing with the trees. That’s a living thing as well.”

This sort of exception (or should I say, additional complexity) pops up quite a bit across languages. Specially when there’s some meaning behind it.

Another aspect of the Cree language is that there is no gender distinction. // “We wouldn’t be able to know if it’s a male or female that we’re talking about,” she said.

Small correction: the animate vs. inanimate distinction is a gender system. It’s just not the same type as in your stereotypical European language, male vs. female vs. neuter. But note how it’s still triggering agreement, like expected from gender:

• niwâpamâw picikwâs I see the apple (picikwâs/apple is animated)
• niwâpahten tehtapiwin I see the chair (tehtapiwin/chair is inanimated)

Yup. I don’t have anything intrinsically against the tech (in fact I love projects like the AI horde), but I think it’s foolish to pretend they’ll replace anyone in the near future.

I am not against opinionated autocorrect, I am against the idea that the dataset and the curators of a high quality dataset aren’t the truly valuable part.

Amen. And it’s kind of weird how things are going: devalue the trade while relying on it, and pretending the automated tools will “soon” reach the same level as professional translation. Machine translation has been a thing for years, and it has come a long way, but like you said it’s still pattern-matching, even in AI times.

I think what is so mysterious about translation of human language is that it is always fraught with grey areas and confounding choices, there is no escaping it to a clean, systematic view that can algorithmically map one word to another.

There’s even an Italian tongue-in-cheek about this: “traduttore, traditore”. Roughly “translator, traitor”, but in English it’s a self-demonstrating example — because that “traditore” isn’t just “traitor”, it’s also “cheater, unfaithful”. It’s like you love the original work, but you can’t not cheat on it, by adding or removing meaning.

And much in the line of the text (Mahadevan translating French “maman” not into the new metalanguage, English, but into Tamil), there’s often situations that cheating is good. Sure, you’re adding meaning not present in the “true” original, but your reader will still enjoy it. My go-to example of that is Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire — the original is good, but the Portuguese translation by Clarice Lispector makes it a literary wonder, because IMO she was better at representing Louis’ introspection than Rice.

We are going through a period where the art […]

Yup, fully agree.

I work as a translator; and at least at the start, I was willing to use some AI tools; mostly for ideas on how to translate specially problematic excerpts*. I stopped doing it because the AI translations are consistently tone deaf, no matter how much context you give it or if you ask it for a [polite, rude, bored, etc.] translation.

*never copypasting the output, mind you; I might not be a good translator but I still have my pride. Using a weird dictionary is fine, telling it to do your work is not.

People often take for granted, that literature should be either created in the native language of the place, or the lingua franca of the moment. But some works transcend space and time.

I’m being a bit cheeky with the above, but seriously: often this sort of work is a gem. Because the author doesn’t just bring the language into the work; they also bring bits of the culture associated with it. And often, because this sort of author has a wider view over the world, as they went out of their way to learn another language.

There’s some amazing info on crow communication here: part 1, part 2. Not actual language* yet, but it shows they’re doing far more than caw-ing at each other, and they do associate meaning with specific calls.

The first link even mentions crows raised by a human tend to repeat their names if they’re looking for the human; that’s really close to what the parrots do, it’s more like they have a name for the relationship than for themselves.

*so far the closest I’ve seen was cetaceans using some sort of phoneme equivalent, and chimps pairing vocalisations for subtler meaning (e.g. up+threat = flying predator).

Related: Alex the “genius” grey parrot. He already showed by himself parrots aren’t simply parroting (eh) words, they have a good sense that specific vocalisations refer to specific entities or even attributes. And it’s well known some other birds (like crows) have rather good cognition, except parrots have the vocal “apparatus” to do it in a way that resembles human speech.

I went at length on this topic in !ethology@mander.xyz (the comm about animal behaviour). Here’s a link. But, to keep it short:

As far as we know, cetacean communication is **proto-**linguistic. Not quite Language yet, but not too far from it. The article shows abstraction of smaller units, but it doesn’t show the recursion Language shows, of blocks building block-building blocks.

And that recursion is damn important. It’s what allows us to pick a finite number of elements, and create an effectively infinite number of utterances out of them.

[Note this is all just conjecture, not solid info.]

Under the hypothesis there was some pressure to remake the dual pronouns, I think neither would happen. It would take some time for “you both” to collapse into a single word, and get rid of the “bo”; by then “youth” would be also evolving.

Plus I think the [əʊ]~[oʊ] would interact with the preceding vowel, before being gone; English has a tendency to open diphthongs so it’ll likely end as [äʊ] or [ɑʊ] later on, so the [u]~[ə] (dialect-dependent) from the “you” might get lowered. You might end with something like [ʒɑf]; in contrast “youth” would end as [ʒuf], I think. (I’m predicting [j]→[ʒ] as it’s a really common sound change, and [θ]→[f] aka TH-fronting is spreading in English.)

Interpreting it as “you both blame” is fun.

English is almost regenerating the singular/plural distinction for 2nd person pronouns, given how common expressions like “you guys”, “you all” etc. are. And they’re often shortened into a single word; e.g. “yall”. Theoretically nothing prevents it from happening with “we both”, “you both” and “they both”, provided there’s enough semantic pressure to do so. Basically you’d need people treating sets of two elements as something intrinsically different from many.

(A shame that, if this ever happens, the “bo” in “both” might get eroded into nothing. Even if it’s one of the few leftovers of that dual.)

\o/ Ten years of an amazing (and free!) resource. I really love their goal as a “general linguistics” journal — no matter your specialisation, you’ll find good stuff there.

Direct link to the articles, if anyone wants to dig through them: https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/

From Wikipedia:

• white - encoding the numbers 1 to 10 in binary code
• purple - 1, 6, 7, 8, 15. Atomic numbers of H, C, N, O, P; the five main elements of DNA.
• green - some atomic formulas for DNA nucleotides
• white and blue - average human height and Earth population back (4 billions)
• red - human
• yellow - Solar system, from Mercury to Pluto
• purple, white, blue - the telescope sending the signal

…it’s cute. But frankly, I don’t think even we humans would be able to re-decode it, if we lost the original meaning. There’s simply not enough context to do it.

Possible, but “better diet” on its own should apply to all five.

Another interesting bit in that pic is India. It was in a rather steep curve up from before '85 to ~'92[?]. Then it dropped, stagnated, started climbing back.

Mao died in '76. This wasn’t some great achievement, but the end of one of the most catastrophic policies any country has submitted its own population to.

Nah. Even if we eyeball the start of the curve, like I did, it clearly starts way before 1976+19 = 1995:

And upon further inspection even my eyeballed 1991 is a bit too late; 1969+19 = 1988 would make a better fit. It’s something that happened before the 70s.

Improved health conditions. The start of the curve is around '91, and given this graph is for 19yos it’s probably some change around '72. I don’t know which change.

Yeah. In other words he has no grounds to claim anything. At most he could relay what Everett said, that’s it.

I casually browsed the text. If I got this right: Everett was unable to navigate through the Brazilian bureaucracy, that is most of the time byzantine and annoying and soul-crushing, but in this specific case exists for a damn good reason *to curb down exploitative behaviour).

And (again, if I got this right), Pullum sounds like a notorious piece of shit. One does not simply randomly assume = lie = make shit up about who’s to blame, dammit.