The acceptance of spelling variants as symbols of Croatian spelling changes (1994–2013)

This paper discusses the impact of several spelling changes in Croatian on the level of the literacy of native speakers. Since 1986, there have been five official recommendations for usage that pertain to five different orthographic manuals. This research focuses on three spelling points with considerable identity-related repercussions among the public and the media, which are sometimes named the spelling symbols of Croatian. A questionnaire-survey comprised of 36 tests was completed among 1063 students on a technical study programme each year for eight consecutive academic years. Eight generations of first-year undergraduates, who do not study language in an educational setting, have accepted the new spellings, contingent on a frequency principle. The more frequent a spelling variant occurs, the less the chance that the new spelling variant is accepted, and vice versa. Given the lack of established and enduring spelling norms, combined with ideological oppositions between the old and new spelling forms, students have been guided mainly by their capacity to write the most common form.

Corn Belt as an Enterprise-Naming Custom in the United States

Enterprises, be they for-profit businesses or not-for-profit organizations, require names to differentiate themselves from other entities. Over a span of more than a hundred years entrepreneurs, corporate boards, and organizational founders have chosen to use Corn Belt or some spelling variant to identify their enterprises, perhaps believing that naming after this admired agricultural region will bless their enterprise with its longevity, productivity, and favorable image. This essay looks at the beginnings of Corn Belt as a vernacular term for an agricultural region, picks up the earliest uses of Corn Belt as an inspiration for enterprise names, tracks Corn Belt enterprises through time at one of the core locations of the naming practice, and presents the enterprises that in 2020 greeted the public with Corn Belt in their names.

ԲԱԼԹԻԱԿԱՆ ԼԵԶՈՒՆԵՐԻ ՀԱՅԵՐԵՆ ԱՆՈՒՆՆԵՐԻ ՏԱՐԲԵՐԱԿԱՅՆՈՒԹՅԱՆ ՄԱՍԻՆ

TOWARDS THE VARIANTS OF THE ARMENIAN NAMES OF THE BALTIC LANGUAGES The word լեթթերեն (German: Lettisch, French: letton) is found in the Armenian linguistic literature in the first half of the 20th century, in particular in the etymological dictionary and in other works of R. Acharyan. It is an archaism, recorded only in terminological dictionaries. The variant լատիշերեն "Latvian", the lexical base of which is directly related to the Latvian self-name latvieš, was formed in Soviet times under the influence of the Russian language. It is found in university and school textbooks, and is registered in explanatory dictionaries. It has a high frequency of use compared to other variants. The lexical basis of the լատվերեն "Latvian"is the name of the country - Լատվիա (Latvia), from which the particle -իա dropped out. It is used in scientific literature, the second variant most frequently used after լատիշերեն "Latvian". The word-formation base of the word լատվիերեն "Latvian" is the name of the Latvian people - լատվիացի, the suffix of which has dropped out. It is registered in academic dictionaries (explanatory and Armenian-Russian) and in various translation dictionaries of the Eastern Armenian and the Western Armenian languages. In this formation, the connection with the name of the country and the ethnonym is obvious. In the first half of the 20th century, R. Acharyan used the word լիթվաներեն (English: Lithuanian language), which is a spelling variant of the currently used լիտվաներեն "Lithuanian" (French: Lituanien), but the lexical base of լիտվան is already outdated, giving way to լիտվացի "Lithuanian person". Variant լիտվերեն was formed from the word լիտվացի "Lithuanian person". Since the second half of the 20th century, it is often used in linguistic literature, and in translation dictionaries it appears as the only name for the Lithuanian language. The variant լիտավերեն (German: Litauisch) is based on the toponym Litava. It is found only in the "Linguistic Dictionary", and լիտովցերեն (< լիտովցի "Lithuanian person") is not a recommended variant, although other variants refer to it in the academic explanatory dictionary. Variant լիտովերեն is formed on the lexical basis լիտով (cf. with the Russian литовский). These variants are not used currently. Taking into account the word-formation tradition, frequency of use in the present period, dictionary records and other factors, with the aim of maintaining consistency in the field of names of languages, it is proposed to adopt a single name for each Baltic language: լատվերեն "Latvian" and լիտվերեն "Lithuanian".

PROTEST AMERICAN ENGLISH INFLUENCE OR PROTEST AGAINST IT? CHANGING PREPOSITIONS IN NIGERIAN TWITTER ENGLISH

According to Alo and Mesthrie (2008), Nigerian English (NigE) becomes increasingly more influenced by American English (AmE), due to contact with American-trained professionals among other factors (cf. Gut 2008, Jowitt 1991). The online micro-blogging service Twitter offers potential communication with a vast number of English natives around the globe, using English in a vernacular usage domain, among other domains (or genres such as a news tweet vs a private tweet). With its foundation in 2006, Twitter is a new communication technology, which may indicate that it is used predominantly by “younger” urban people, and which may influence linguistic choices. The question I attempt to answer is whether Twitter influences NigE such that the British English (BrE) heritage of the country is contested by AmE influence. In this paper, I focus on the usage of prepositions and orthographic realizations of lemmata ending in -o(u)r, which can be categorized as BrE and AmE origin, respectively, in a NigE Twitter Corpus compiled in 2016-17 (13 mill. words). These features’ frequencies are contrasted with those of the Nigerian component of GloWbE (Davies 2013). Results from chi-squared tests suggest that AmE prepositions increasingly enter NigE Twitter discourse. Differences in spelling tend towards American English, but are not statistically significant. The only exception is the lemma labour, which is more often used in its British English spelling variant (χ2 = 26.30; df = 1; p one-tailed < 0.001).

«Қазақ» гэх нэрийн дөрвөн хэлний дуудлагын тухай өгүүлэх нь (= Произношение этнонима ‘қазақ’ в монгольском, казахском, китайском и русском языках)

Introduction. Kazakhs are a Turkic people dominant in present-day Republic of Kazakhstan. The former also reside in adjacent territories of China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and Turkey. Ancient written sources employed quite a number of ethnonyms — including the endonym қазақ (Qazaq) — to denote the ethnos. And the issue of etymology is still debatable. According to the main version, the word қазақ stands for a ‘free, unrestricted, independent person’. Goals. The paper seeks to examine spelling variants of the ethnonym in national languages of bordering countries — Mongolian, Chinese, and Russian. Results. The ethnonym has two spelling variants in Mongolian, namely: хасаг and казак. The former is the traditional spelling adopted by Mongols since ancient times. In Mongolian, the first syllable ка- (ka-) turns into ха- (kha-), which thus gave rise to the mentioned form. The second spelling variant was borrowed in the mid-to-late 20th century from Russian, and is a neologism. The Chinese hasake is as transformed as other ethnonyms, e.g., монгол (Mongol) — menggu, русский (Russian) — eluosi, ойрат (Oirat) — weilate, elute. Russians tended to call Kazakhs ‘Kirghiz-Kaisaks’, or ‘Kirghizes’ till the early 20th century. The latter ethnonym was replaced by қазақ (Qazaq), and further the spelling казах (Kazakh) was officially accepted.

CORPUS-DRIVEN BAMBARA SPELLING DICTIONARY

A model for the development of a corpus-driven spelling dictionary for the Bambara language is described. First, a list of about 4,000 lexemes characterized by spelling variability is extracted from an electronic BambaraFrench dictionary. At the next stage, a script is applied to determine the number of occurrences of each spelling variant in the Bambara Reference Corpus, separately for the entire Corpus (more than 11 million words) and for its disambiguated subcorpus (about 1.5 million words). Statistics on the diversity of sources and authors are also obtained automatically. The statistical data are then sorted manually into two lists of lexemes: those whose standard spelling can be established statistically, and those requiring evaluation by expert linguists. Some difficult cases are discussed in the paper. At the final stage, a representative expert commission will discuss all those lexemes for which statistical data alone do not suffice to define a standard spelling variant, before taking a final decision on each. The resulting Bambara spelling dictionary will be published electronically and on paper.

Deep neural networks ensemble for detecting medication mentions in tweets

Objective Twitter posts are now recognized as an important source of patient-generated data, providing unique insights into population health. A fundamental step toward incorporating Twitter data in pharmacoepidemiologic research is to automatically recognize medication mentions in tweets. Given that lexical searches for medication names suffer from low recall due to misspellings or ambiguity with common words, we propose a more advanced method to recognize them. Materials and Methods We present Kusuri, an Ensemble Learning classifier able to identify tweets mentioning drug products and dietary supplements. Kusuri (薬, “medication” in Japanese) is composed of 2 modules: first, 4 different classifiers (lexicon based, spelling variant based, pattern based, and a weakly trained neural network) are applied in parallel to discover tweets potentially containing medication names; second, an ensemble of deep neural networks encoding morphological, semantic, and long-range dependencies of important words in the tweets makes the final decision. Results On a class-balanced (50-50) corpus of 15 005 tweets, Kusuri demonstrated performances close to human annotators with an F1 score of 93.7%, the best score achieved thus far on this corpus. On a corpus made of all tweets posted by 112 Twitter users (98 959 tweets, with only 0.26% mentioning medications), Kusuri obtained an F1 score of 78.8%. To the best of our knowledge, Kusuri is the first system to achieve this score on such an extremely imbalanced dataset. Conclusions The system identifies tweets mentioning drug names with performance high enough to ensure its usefulness, and is ready to be integrated in pharmacovigilance, toxicovigilance, or more generally, public health pipelines that depend on medication name mentions.

Exploring Meaning

In this paper, the authors explore the hyphenated spelling variant on papers taken from the Business Source Complete (BSC) repository. This paper finds that the hyphenated spelling variant is popular with more recent authors and that in total, socio-technical article publishing has recently recovered from the relative decline of the 1980s and 1990s. Within the socio-technical area, the topics of Work and Technology are receiving increased attention and studies of Behaviour, Change and major Stakeholder Groups are waning. The authors have critiqued the articles that indicated in their BSC Subject terms that their contents are related to Methodology but have found that few actually consider the socio-technical methodologies. Systems and socio-technical theory papers are critiqued, including papers by Enid Mumford and her work. Also discussed are lessons learned when using online repositories, such as the need to save search results to manage the surprising level of volatility of such academic databases. Finally, opportunities for future analysis are discussed, including trends; changes of emphasis within topics; researching into other academic search engines; and US based analysis.

Exploring Meaning The Implications of a Hyphen for Socio-Technical Theory and Practice

In this paper, the authors explore the hyphenated spelling variant on papers taken from the Business Source Complete (BSC) repository. This paper finds that the hyphenated spelling variant is popular with more recent authors and that in total, socio-technical article publishing has recently recovered from the relative decline of the 1980s and 1990s. Within the socio-technical area, the topics of Work and Technology are receiving increased attention and studies of Behaviour, Change and major Stakeholder Groups are waning. The authors have critiqued the articles that indicated in their BSC Subject terms that their contents are related to Methodology but have found that few actually consider the socio-technical methodologies. Systems and socio-technical theory papers are critiqued, including papers by Enid Mumford and her work. Also discussed are lessons learned when using online repositories, such as the need to save search results to manage the surprising level of volatility of such academic databases. Finally, opportunities for future analysis are discussed, including trends; changes of emphasis within topics; researching into other academic search engines; and US based analysis.