Advanced English Skills


Гео и язык канала: не указан, Английский
Категория: Психология


#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english

Связанные каналы

Гео и язык канала
не указан, Английский
Категория
Психология
Статистика
Фильтр публикаций


Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ump

umpire

@EngSkills


Word of the Day
sepulcher

Definition: (noun) A chamber that is used as a grave.
Synonyms: burial chamber.
Usage: The archaeologists opened the sepulcher expecting to find ancient artifacts, but the burial chamber turned out to be completely empty.
Discuss

@EngSkills


Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take after

If you take after an older member of your family, you look like them or you have a similar personality to them.

@EngSkills


Language Log
PP attachment ambiguity of the day

Chrisma Madarang, "Man Accusing CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp of Sexual Assault Was Paid $480,000: Report", Rolling Stone 3/27/2024:

Huffman claimed Mrs. Schlapp attempted to “impugn” his character in her response to the allegations against her husband, calling him a “troubled individual,” and alleged he had been dismissed from the campaign after lying on his resume in a group chat with neighbors.
That sentence ends with a sentence "he had been dismissed" embedded as the complement of the verb "alleged", followed by five consecutive prepositional phrases

* from the campaign
* after lying
* on his resume
* in a group chat
* with neighbors

A simplified version of the (I think) correct tree structure for those final 19 words is something like this:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/HuffmanAllegationTree0.png

But there are many alternative parses, including the tangled web at the end of the first garden path I took, which featured the idea that Huffman lied on his resume in a group chat with neighbors. Which was hard to make sense of, since such chats don't involve the exchange of resumes, at least in any neighborhood I've ever lived in.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see what part of the full sentence your favorite LLM thinks that "in a group chat with the neighbors" modifies.

@EngSkills








Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
blast (1)

a great experience, a very enjoyable time

@EngSkills


Word of the Day
rampart

Definition: (noun) A fortification consisting of an embankment, often with a parapet built on top.
Synonyms: bulwark, wall.
Usage: They stormed the ramparts of the city with ladders and catapults.
Discuss

@EngSkills


Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
make up (1)

to invent a story or think of an explanation for something

@EngSkills


Language Log
Cetacean needed

From Philip Taylor:

A nice pun on Wikipedia’s ubiquitous "citation needed"

Wikipedia's list of cetaceans, which reads (in part):
Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin Tursiops erebennus
Cope, 1865 NE Unknown [cetacean needed]
Lovely pun indeed!

Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops erebennus) is a species of bottlenose dolphin that inhabits coastal waters in the eastern United States. This species was previously considered a nearshore variant of the common bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus.

(source)

Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin does indeed belong to the Infraorder Cetacea.
Selected readings

* "Sperm whale talk" (5/15/23)
* "Orca emits speech-like sound; reporters go insane" (1/31/18)
* "Moby Zipf" (6/1/19)
* "Alien encounters" (9/15/16)

@EngSkills


Language Log
Codices of Tetepilco

From Tlacuilolli*, the blog about Mesoamerican writing systems, by Alonso Zamora, on March 21, 2024:

*At the top left of the home page of this blog, there is a tiny seated figure (click to embiggen) with a sharp instrument held vertically in his right hand carving a glyph on a square block held in his left hand.  Emitting from his mouth is a blue, cloud-like puff.  Does that signify recognition the basis of what he is writing is speech?

"New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco"

They are beautiful: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/tetepilco.jpg Figure 1. Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco: a) Map of the Founding of San Andrés Tetepilco;
b) Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco; c) Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco
The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa, and it is now stored at the library of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. It comprises three codices. The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco, as well as lists of toponyms to be found within Culhuacan, Tetepilco, Tepanohuayan, Cohuatlinchan, Xaltocan and Azcapotzalco. The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco, is unique, as [philologist Michel] Oudijk remarks, since it is a pictographic inventory of the church of San Andrés Tetepilco, comprising two pages. Sadly, it is very damaged.

Finally, the third document, now baptised as the Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history in the vein of the Boturini and the Aubin codices, comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603. It seems to belong to the same family as the Boturini, the Aubin, the Ms. 40 and the Ms. 85 of Paris, that is to say, some of the main codices dealing with Aztec imperial history, and Brito considers it as a sort of bridge between the Boturini and the Aubin, since its pictographic style is considerably close to the early colonial one of the former, rather than the late colonial one of the latter. It comprises 20 rectangular pages of amate paper, and contains new and striking iconography, including a spectacular depiction of Hernán Cortés as a Roman soldier. In the Aztec side of things, new iconography of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina during his conquest of Tetepilco is presented (Figure 1).

Of course, new and very interesting examples of Aztec writing are contained throughout all these documents, including old and new toponyms, spellings of Western and Aztec names, and even some information that confirms that some glyphs formerly considered as hapax, as the chi syllabogram in the spelling of the name Motelchiuhtzin in Codex Telleriano-Remensis 43r, discussed in another post of this blog, were not anomalous but possibly conventional. Besides logosyllabic spellings, the presence of pictographs with alphabetic glosses in Nahuatl will be of great help to ascertain the functioning of this still controversial part of the Aztec communication system.

The last sentence quoted above will be of particular interest to historians of writing.  I myself look forward to future communications on this topic. Selected readings

* "Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?" (3/21/24)
* "Polynesian sweet potatoes and jungle chickens: verbal vectors" (1/18/23)

[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]

@EngSkills










Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knackered (1)

very tired, exhausted

@EngSkills


Word of the Day
fleecy

Definition: (adjective) Having soft nap produced by brushing.
Synonyms: napped, brushed.
Usage: Though the train was unbearably cold, she snuggled into the fleecy lining of her coat and promptly fell asleep.
Discuss

@EngSkills


Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
chat up

to talk to someone in the hope of beginning a romantic relationship with them

@EngSkills


Language Log
China Babel

My basement is full of unpublished manuscripts.  I call it the "Dungeon", because it is dark, dank, and crowded with books and papers — much worse than my office, which has achieved a fabled reputation for its crampedness — and very cold in the winter, though it does have a wonderful bay window on the eastern side where I can look out at the flora, fauna, and foliage to rest my eyes and mind from time to time.

Three of the most significant manuscripts in the Dungeon that remained unpublished for decades are:
1. West Eurasian and North African Influences on the Origins of Chinese Writing (tentative title) has been alluded to on Language Log several times during the last couple of decades, but I began to think about its main themes already in the 70s.  The bulk of the research was done during the 80s, after which I locked it away in a strongbox that I've not touched since them, nor do I have any intention of doing so during the foreseeable future.  Why?  Because the intellectual infrastructure for serious consideration of such a paradigm-shifting work simply does not exist.  Too many, I would even say most, scholars simply cannot accept the possibility of long distance cultural interaction.  Back in the 70s and 80s when I laid out my positions, colleagues would say, "You make an interesting case for convincing parallels at the two ends of Eurasia, but how are they connected in the middle?"

When, in the 90s, I brought the Tarim Basin mummies to the attention of the world and undertook deep, broad research on a wide variety of aspects concerning them, I thought that I had discovered the smoking gun in the center of Eurasia.  Our (including J. P. Mallory, Elizabeth J. W. Barber, Han Kangxin, et al.) archeological investigations were complemented by the remarkable, long-running series of studies on east-west exchanges by Yu Taishan that were carried out primarily with the use of Chinese historical sources, which he plumbed in a thoroughgoing way that had never been done before (many are available in English translations in Sino-Platonic Papers, including book-length volumes).  But that was insufficient for the obdurate skeptics who also demanded that the dots connecting the two ends to the middle be filled in more decisively (though, in truth, we thought we had already gone a long way toward meeting that challenge).

Then, during the 00s, the situation improved markedly.  Andrew Sherratt wrote his seminal "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West", which was published posthumously in Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 30-61, that is especially important for the study of the spread of bronze technology from west to east.  A few years later, with a Eurasian-wide purview, the pathbreaking article by Joyce C. White and Elizabeth G. Hamilton, “The transmission of early bronze technology to Thailand: new perspectives”, Journal of World Prehistory 22 (2009), 357–97 (Google Scholar) appeared.

Then came the 10s, which commenced the penetrating studies by Lucas Christopoulos linking up Greek, Central Asian, and East Asian cultural attributes through minute visual and textual comparisons, and the massive treatises of Brian Pellar on the astronomical derivation of the zodiac and writing systems based thereupon.  These researches are bringing us ever closer to the fundamental premises upon which Origins was predicated.

Just this March (2024), while I was preparing this note, two scintillating new works burst upon the scene that tie east and west together more tightly than ever before:

a. Petya Andreeva, Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea:  Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh:  University Press, 2024).

b. Hajni Elias, "The Southwest S[...]

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