#wals

Grambank has been many years in the making, and is now publically available!

The team coded 195 features for 2,467 language varieties, and made this data publically available as part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data-project (CLLD). They plan to continue to release new versions with new languages and features in the future. 

Below are maps for two features I’ve selected that show very different distribution across the world’s languages. The first map codes for whether there are prepositions (in yellow), and we can see really clear clustering of them in Europe, South East Asia and Africa. Languages without prepositions might have postpostions or use some other strategy. The second map shows languages with an existential verb (e.g. there *is* an existential verb, in yellow), we see a different distribution.

What makes Grambank particularly interesting as a user is that there is extensive public documentation of processes and terminology on a companion GitHub site. They also have been very systematic selecting values and coding for them for all the sources that they have. This is a different approach to that taken for the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), which has been the go-to resource for the last two decades. In WALS a single author would collate information on a sample of languages for a feature they were interested in, while in Grambank a single coder would add information on all 195 features for a single grammar they were entering data for. 

Lingthusiasm Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs. 

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic mapping website called GramBank, why auxiliaries get pronounced subtly differently from the words they’re derived from, and how “be” and “have” are the major players of the auxiliary world (but there are other options too, like “do”, “let”, and “go”). We also put a whole bunch of farm animals in our example sentences this episode just so we have an excuse to make a very good wordplay at the end of the episode.  

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements: 

Are there linguistics things you want advice about? Both serious or somewhat silly? We’re going to doing a linguistics advice bonus episode for our 7th anniversary in November 2023, where we’ll answer your linguistics questions! Go here to ask us your questions by September 1st 2023, and join us on Patreon to hear the answers!  In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the jobs that people go on to do after a linguistics degree! We talk about Lauren's new academic article in a fancy linguistics journal about a blog post series she's been running for 8 years, interviewing 80 people who studied linguistics, from a minor to a doctorate level, and their experience and advice for non-academic jobs. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, including our upcoming linguistics advice episode where we answer your questions! You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Etymonline entry for ‘auxiliary’ 

Gretchen’s twitter thread on auxiliaries

Grambank

Grambank Wiki

Martin Haspelmath’s tweet on the history of WALS

‘Tense and Aspectual be in Child African American English’ by Janice E. Jackson & Lisa Green

All Things Linguistics post on ‘habitual be’

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry for ‘Invariant be’

@dietweeterei tweet on the origins of ‘have’ in English and German

Wikipedia entry for ‘habeo’ in Latin

Grambank entry for ‘mood’

Grambank entry for ‘aspect’

Grambank entry for ‘tense’

Grambank entry for ‘negation’

Grambank entry for ‘passive’

‘The Syntax of Auxiliaries From a Cross-linguistic Perspective’ by Bronwyn M. Bjorkman

Wikipedia entry for ‘Nande languge’

‘Auxen’ tweet by Kirby Conrod

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Przemysław Szawłowski

Wrocław

It is not easy to lose someone, and for all the weapons in the world, the feeling always persists that there was more to be done. A thoughtless phrase is often an unexpected goodbye. A normal day suddenly becomes the worst of your life. And the last memories we have of the ones we love are never what we expected. Sometimes they are trying to slay great evil with a silver sword in the first rays of dawn. Sometimes they are serving us pancakes.

Just as stars burn in the universe, just as planets spin and galaxies turn, so does love and loss and memory form part of existence. These private cataclysms, these cosmic griefs are a natural part of our time here, like the rest.

And yet, I am sorry.

Masterlist

An Ambi centric au, yet it also features established Tyrus and Muffy

Description: Before Andi embarked on her high school life at SAVA, Amber and Andi got into an emotional fight the night before she left. No one knows about it but them. One school year later, it is summer and Andi is back. Everyone is happy to see her, but her appearance also causes some tensions between her and a certain someone.

note: this is my first time doing something like this, so if it flops this never happened

Andi Mack:

Amber Kippen and her girlfriend, Lilia:

Cyrus Goodman and TJ Kippen:

Buffy Driscoll and Marty:

Jonah Beck:

More characters will be introduced as I go