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pauammaImportant note: I'm planning to point Lingthusiasm here because I'd love to read their take on it. If you comment on this, please state whether you're willing for them to use it in a future podcast episode. (Obviously, I am, both for this and for anything I reply to others' comments with.
This MJD blog post about their own use of "shall" and "will" got me wondering about historical use of them in context. I find that historical graph of English use patterns interesting.
There are 2 clearly separated groups, a high-use group of two ("we shall see" and "you will see") and a low-use group of a dozen or so ("I will see", "You will see" with an uppercase y, "We will see" with an uppercase w, "We shall see" with an uppercase w, "I shall see", "you shall see", "he will see", "ye shall see", "they will see", "You shall see" with an uppercase y, "He will see" with an uppercase y, "they shall see", "They will see" with an uppercase t, "he shall see" (both lowercase and uppercase h), "who shall see", and "who will see"). These two groups and the large separation between them appear to be largely American English, as they're much less visible in British English. As uppercase and lowercase pairs ("You/you" and "We/we") end up split between groups, sentence-initial usage patterns may be different from patterns in other sentence positions.
Frequencies in the high-use group wobble substantially and there's a large intra-group gap between the mid 1950s and the mid 1990s. Frequencies in the low-use group are much steadier and the (much shorter) intra-group gap there is "you shall see" between the mid 1800s and the mid 1810s with a peak in 1809 that's below the high-use group but much closer to it than to the rest of the low-use group. That brief excursion from the low-use group is absent from Google's American English corpus and wholly due to its British corpus, which also shows two excursions up by "you will see", one between 1910 and 1923 peaking halfway between groups in 1918 and the other between 1938 and 1950 peaking in 1944; both might be due to an influx of American English speakers in Great Britain then, although I don't see those peaks having an steadier American English equivalent.
And then there's "we will see", which after being in the low-use group until about 1970, detaches from it then, with its frequency going up sharply, and essentially enters the high-use group between 1980 and 1985 depending on where you place the boundaries of that group. British English also shows you will see splitting off in the early 1920s and ending up alone about half-way between the two groups.
I'm also curious about similar patterns in other regional English corpora. Anyone knowing of any is welcome to explore it and report or discuss their findings in comments. (If you do, please link to them. I don't know nearly enough about English corpora available online.
This MJD blog post about their own use of "shall" and "will" got me wondering about historical use of them in context. I find that historical graph of English use patterns interesting.
There are 2 clearly separated groups, a high-use group of two ("we shall see" and "you will see") and a low-use group of a dozen or so ("I will see", "You will see" with an uppercase y, "We will see" with an uppercase w, "We shall see" with an uppercase w, "I shall see", "you shall see", "he will see", "ye shall see", "they will see", "You shall see" with an uppercase y, "He will see" with an uppercase y, "they shall see", "They will see" with an uppercase t, "he shall see" (both lowercase and uppercase h), "who shall see", and "who will see"). These two groups and the large separation between them appear to be largely American English, as they're much less visible in British English. As uppercase and lowercase pairs ("You/you" and "We/we") end up split between groups, sentence-initial usage patterns may be different from patterns in other sentence positions.
Frequencies in the high-use group wobble substantially and there's a large intra-group gap between the mid 1950s and the mid 1990s. Frequencies in the low-use group are much steadier and the (much shorter) intra-group gap there is "you shall see" between the mid 1800s and the mid 1810s with a peak in 1809 that's below the high-use group but much closer to it than to the rest of the low-use group. That brief excursion from the low-use group is absent from Google's American English corpus and wholly due to its British corpus, which also shows two excursions up by "you will see", one between 1910 and 1923 peaking halfway between groups in 1918 and the other between 1938 and 1950 peaking in 1944; both might be due to an influx of American English speakers in Great Britain then, although I don't see those peaks having an steadier American English equivalent.
And then there's "we will see", which after being in the low-use group until about 1970, detaches from it then, with its frequency going up sharply, and essentially enters the high-use group between 1980 and 1985 depending on where you place the boundaries of that group. British English also shows you will see splitting off in the early 1920s and ending up alone about half-way between the two groups.
I'm also curious about similar patterns in other regional English corpora. Anyone knowing of any is welcome to explore it and report or discuss their findings in comments. (If you do, please link to them. I don't know nearly enough about English corpora available online.
Language identification request
Feb. 5th, 2022 10:48 pmpauammaCan someone more fluent in Russian than me confirm that some of the text in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_typology#/media/File:Beriyn_Poliklinika,_S%C3%B6l%C6%B6a-%C4%A0ala.jpg (specifically, below the caduceus and above the last line) is actually Russian, not Chechen? I want to add an alt= and correct the caption if needed.
(no subject)
Jul. 2nd, 2021 03:25 ampauammaI was today years old when I learned there are corpora - in at least 2 languages - of speech by drunk or high people. Why has no one informed me of that before? I want to speak to Management!
Native speaker valorization?
Feb. 21st, 2020 09:22 pmpauammaI came across https://twitter.com/ervinmalakaj/status/1230855895179022338 and I'm wondering: is that tweet referring to the same principle that says (paraphrased) "for questions of language usage correctness, always defer to native speakers' knowledge of their language"? If so, how does that critique deal with the opposite tendency (I'm not sure whether to call it neocolonialism or cultural imperialism) to mock native speakers of non-Western cultures based on misunderstandings of how their language works, saying in effect "they're not even able to speak their own language properly"?
steorraNepal's mystery language on the verge of extinction
Kusunda is a language isolate in Nepal. As far as I can tell from the article, it has two known fluent speakers: Gyani Maiya Sen, the 75-year-old speaker the article is largely about, and Kamala Khatri, who "left [Nepal] in search of a job"
Ancient language discovered
A clay tablet written in Assyrian cuneiform script has been discovered which contains evidence of an otherwise-unknown language. It has a list of women's names, a very few which can be recognized as coming from known languages, and the rest of which are not recognizably from any known language; it seems likely that they come from another language.
Kusunda is a language isolate in Nepal. As far as I can tell from the article, it has two known fluent speakers: Gyani Maiya Sen, the 75-year-old speaker the article is largely about, and Kamala Khatri, who "left [Nepal] in search of a job"
Ancient language discovered
A clay tablet written in Assyrian cuneiform script has been discovered which contains evidence of an otherwise-unknown language. It has a list of women's names, a very few which can be recognized as coming from known languages, and the rest of which are not recognizably from any known language; it seems likely that they come from another language.
steorraFrom The Economist: Daily chart: Speaking in tongues: Language diversity around the world
Briefly explains an interesting quantification of a country's linguistic diversity, based on the probability of two people chosen at random from that country having the same native language. (If two people chosen at random had 100% chance of having the same native language (i.e., everyone has the same native language), the score would be 0 (North Korea apparently fits here); if two people chosen at random had no chance of having the same language (i.e. no two people share the same native language), the score would be 1 (not actually possible in practice, but Papua New Guinea comes rather close).)
It doesn't explain the scoring in enough detail for me to tell it's as simple as that a score of 0.9 means two people chosen at random would have a 90% chance of having different languages, or if there's a bit more involved in creating the score.
It's also not clear to me if it accounts for people having multiple native languages
Briefly explains an interesting quantification of a country's linguistic diversity, based on the probability of two people chosen at random from that country having the same native language. (If two people chosen at random had 100% chance of having the same native language (i.e., everyone has the same native language), the score would be 0 (North Korea apparently fits here); if two people chosen at random had no chance of having the same language (i.e. no two people share the same native language), the score would be 1 (not actually possible in practice, but Papua New Guinea comes rather close).)
It doesn't explain the scoring in enough detail for me to tell it's as simple as that a score of 0.9 means two people chosen at random would have a 90% chance of having different languages, or if there's a bit more involved in creating the score.
It's also not clear to me if it accounts for people having multiple native languages
Numerals of a Peruvian mystery language
Jan. 24th, 2011 08:26 pmsteorraNumerals of an otherwise-unknown Peruvian language were recently unearthed. They were written down in the early 1600s. It's not Quechua, though some numbers appear to be borrowed from Quechua or one of its relatives.