3 items tagged “linguistics”
2022
I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language (via) Dylan Black talks ChatGPT through the process of inventing a new language, with its own grammar. Really fun example of what happens when someone with a deep understanding of both the capabilities of language models and some other field (in this case linguistics) can achieve with an extended prompting session. # 6th December 2022, 7:30 pm
2017
I am currently documenting a language called Seenku, spoken by fewer than 15,000 people in the rolling hills of southwestern Burkina Faso in West Africa. Like Chinese, it is a tonal language, meaning the pitch on which a word is pronounced can radically alter its meaning. For instance, tsu can mean “thatch” when pronounced with an extra low pitch, but “hippopotamus” when pronounced with falling pitch. In fact, pitch plays such a huge role in Seenku that it can be “spoken” through music alone, most notably on the traditional xylophone.
— Laura McPherson # 22nd October 2017, 12:49 pm
2007
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (via) See also: Wikipedia’s “List of linguistic example sentences”. # 28th October 2007, 6:12 pm