Между фактом и фантазией: ранние источники по ойратской исторической диалектологии

The article presents the results of a linguistic analysis of three early sources on Oirat historical dialectology, Rashīd al-Dīn’s Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles, completed between 1306 and 1311) and the Mongol chronicles Sir-a tuγuǰi (Yellow History, between 1651 and 1662) and Erdeni tunumal neretü sudur (The Jewel Translucent Sūtra, c. 1607). The author concludes that these sources substantially differ in terms of their linguistic value and reliability. The early historical accounts of Oirat lexical differences, provided by Rashīd al-Dīn and the unknown author of the Sir-a tuγuǰi, are most likely to have been obtained from unreliable external sources and based on hearsay evidence, orally transmitted by non-Oirats, at best, only passingly familiar with the Oirat language and its actual features. Both authors probably heard something about distinctive lexical features of the Oirat dialects of their time, but they hardly had a clear idea of what these features were and how to explain them in an adequate manner. On the contrary, the ‘Oirat fragment’ contained in the Erdeni tunumal neretü sudur seems to be much closer to fact than to fantasy. It presents a deliberate and quite reliable attempt to introduce some features of the Oirat dialects spoken at the turn of the seventeenth century. In the absence of earlier internal evidence of the linguistic differences between the Mongolic languages, this may be the oldest known representation of dialectal data in the Mongolian literary tradition. The evidence is of special importance because it includes morphophonological (an innovative colloquial shape of the clitics ni ~ n̠i < *inu and la ~ =la < *ele) and morphosyntactic (the progressive/durative in ‑nA(y)i), rather than lexical, features, which seem to have been considered Oirat by the early seventeenth-century author(s) of the chronicle. These features look more genuinely Oirat, at least for the early 17th century, although their modern distribution is certainly rather wide and non-specific. It may be assumed that the information on Oirat dialects that the Erdeni tunumal neretü sudur contains may have been obtained from an Oirat, or, at least, from an individual well-versed in the language of the time. Thus, one cannot overestimate the importance of the chronicle as a highly valuable source on historical dialectology of Mongolic languages.

A Personal Model of Trumpery: Linguistic Deception Detection in a Real-World High-Stakes Setting

Language use differs between truthful and deceptive statements, but not all differences are consistent across people and contexts, complicating the identification of deceit in individuals. By relying on fact-checked tweets, we showed in three studies (Study 1: 469 tweets; Study 2: 484 tweets; Study 3: 24 models) how well personalized linguistic deception detection performs by developing the first deception model tailored to an individual: the 45th U.S. president. First, we found substantial linguistic differences between factually correct and factually incorrect tweets. We developed a quantitative model and achieved 73% overall accuracy. Second, we tested out-of-sample prediction and achieved 74% overall accuracy. Third, we compared our personalized model with linguistic models previously reported in the literature. Our model outperformed existing models by 5 percentage points, demonstrating the added value of personalized linguistic analysis in real-world settings. Our results indicate that factually incorrect tweets by the U.S. president are not random mistakes of the sender.

Frequency, informativity and word length: Insights from typologically diverse corpora

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) can be more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study, which examines a more diverse sample of languages than in the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish), reveals intriguing cross-linguistic differences, which can be explained by typological properties of the languages. I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters, as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show consistent cross-linguistic differences in the size of correlations between word length and the corpus-based measures. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions.

The Slow Fall of Babel

This is the story of the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. The metaphor of Babel stands for the magnificent edifice of classical culture that was about to reach the sky, but remained self-sufficient and self-contained in its virtual monolingualism – the paradigm within which even Latin was occasionally considered just a dialect of Greek. The gradual erosion of this vision is the slow fall of Babel that took place in the hearts and minds of a good number of early Christian writers and intellectuals who represented various languages and literary traditions. This step-by-step process included the discovery and internalization of the existence of multiple other languages in the world, as well as subsequent attempts to incorporate their speakers meaningfully into the holistic and distinctly Christian picture of the universe.

Plague – ”The Turkish disease”: a traditional Romanian perception (historical, theological, ethnological and epidemiological aspects)

The article addresses the issue of the traditional Romanian perception of the plague as ”Turkish disease” and presents relevant historical, theological, ethnological and epidemiological information. This perception is based on the memory of the frequent wars waged by the Ottomans on Romanian territory; wars during which contagious diseases were recurrent, and implicitly the plague. In historiography, the invocation of the plague epidemics in the context of Ottoman history was nuanced in the works of Mihail Critobul from Imbros, Dimitrie Cantemir, Montesquieu, Constantin Bazili. The reluctance of the natives towards the Turks is explained by the cultural, religious and linguistic differences, by the behavior of the Ottomans and by the non-acceptance of the other’s values. The inhabitants of the principalities believed that the plague also entered through the Ottoman ships coming from Constantinople and moored in the ports of Galați and Brăila. The epidemiological phobias of the natives were amplified by the fact that the Turks, especially those from the royal family, neglected any sanitary restrictions during the plague epidemics. The Ottoman plague’s fatalism is explained by their religious beliefs. The divine factor is also invoked in Romanian folklore, the plague being perceived as God’s punishment sent to the Turks for the misfortunes brought to the Romanians.

Een bouc in walsche, a Book Written in French

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted in local soil. The five contributions collected in this volume demonstrate that while in general issues of ‘otherness’ were resolved without difficulty, at other times (linguistic) differences were perceived as a heartfelt reality.

Deriving four generalizations about nominals in three classifier languages

This squib presents a set of facts concerning nominal structures in Bahnar, Mandarin, and Vietnamese. It proposes an account of these facts which reduces them to cross-linguistic differences with respect to the availability of particular syntactic configurations involving the bare noun and its extended projection. These differences, in turn, are derived from cross-linguistic variations with respect to the availability of items in the functional lexicon.

تقييد اللّفظ المفسَّر بـ (الأمر) و(الشّيء) في المعاجم اللّغويّة

يهدف البحث إلى وصف ظاهرة تقييد اللّفظ المفسَّر بـ (الأمر) و(الشّيء) في المعاجم اللّغويّة وتحليلها، من خلال التّطبيق على لسان العرب لـ (ابن منظور)، إذ تَعْمَدُ المعاجم إلى استخدام التّقييد بهذين القيدين لتوضيح معاني الألفاظ، وهو ما دعا إلى دراسة هذه الظاهرة والبحث في أسبابها وضوابطها. اعتمد البحث على المنهج الوصفيّ التّحليليّ لتحقيق الأهداف الآتية: بيان أهمّيّة التّقييد بـ (الأمر) و(الشّيء)، والكشف عن صور التّقييد بهما في الجانب الصّرفي والتّركيبيّ، وبيان أبرز الفروق بينهما، وأخيرًا تحديد الآفاق التي تضبط عمليّة التّقييد بهما. ومن أبرز نتائج البحث: أنّ استعمال المعاجم لهذين اللّفظين قد اعتمد على ما يتّصفانِ به من إغراق في الإبهام، وتمثيلهما لطرفي الموجودات الماديّة والمعنويّة، وأنّ عملية ضبط استعمالهما تعتمد على شبكة من العلاقات يُقيمها المؤلّف لتحقيق غرضه في عرض الألفاظ وتفسيرها. الكلمات المفتاحيّة: التّقييد اللّغويّ، المعاجم اللّغويّة، الدّلالة المادّية والمعنويّة، الفروق اللّغويّة، العلاقات السّياقيّة Abstract The research aims to describe and analyze the phenomenon of modification of the word interpreted by (Al-Amr –الأمر) and (Ash-shay’ – الشّيء) in the linguistic lexicons, with the use of (Lessan Al Arab) written by (Ibn Manzour) as a model. The lexicons apply these two modifications to clarify the meaning of the words, this is why this phenomenon was studied and its causes and criteria were researched. The research was based on the analytical descriptive approach to reach the following targets: stating the importance of the Modification with (Al-Amr – الأمر) and (Ash-shay’ – الشّيء), the detection of forms of their modification in morphological and structural aspects and stating the most prominent differences between them, and finally, identifying the prospects that control the modification process. The most prominent results of the research are the use of lexicons for these two modifiers depended on the so-called ambiguity of them, and their representation of both sides of tangible and intangible assets and the process of controlling their use depends on relationships with multi-components established by the author to achieve its purpose in displaying and interpreting words. Keywords: Linguistic Modification, Linguistic Lexicons, Tangible and Intangible Semantics, Linguistic Differences, Contextual Relations

Co-Calibration of Cognitive Domains Across Different Countries Without Common Linking Items

Modern psychometric methods allow for cocalibration of cognition across cross-national surveys, given the presence of common tests across studies. For narrow cognitive domains, there may not be common tests due to cultural and linguistic differences in testing. We developed a novel method to facilitate cocalibration that entails (1) identifying a common score across studies highly correlated with the focal domain; (2) deriving scores separately in each study for the domain of interest; and (3) applying stratified equipercentile equating to equate domain scores in (2) to the distribution of the common metric in (1). We tested this method by equating executive functioning in the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocols (HCAP) in the US (N=3496), India (N=4096), and England (N=1273). The method preserves the rank order of executive functioning derived separately (r&gt;0.99 in England; r&gt;0.99 in India), while preserving between-study differences observed in general cognitive functioning. We discuss limitations and future directions.

Francophone Literature in the Low Countries (1200-1600)

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted in local soil. The five contributions collected in this volume demonstrate that while in general issues of ‘otherness’ were resolved without difficulty, at other times (linguistic) differences were perceived as a heartfelt reality. Texts and books in French, Latin, and Dutch were as interrelated and mobile as their authors. As awareness of the francophone literature of the medieval and early modern Low Countries continues to grow, texts in all three languages will be ever more strongly connected in an intricate and multilingual weave.