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Lahjoita puhetta: a large-scale corpus of spoken Finnish with some benchmarks
The Donate Speech campaign has so far succeeded in gathering approximately 3600 h of ordinary, colloquial Finnish speech into the Lahjoita puhetta (Donate Speech) corpus. The corpus includes over twenty thousand speakers from all the regions of Finland and from all age brackets. The primary goals of the collection were to create a representative, large-scale resource to study spontaneous spoken Finnish and to accelerate the development of language technology and speech-based services. In this paper, we present the collection process and the collected corpus, and showcase its versatility through multiple use cases. The evaluated use cases include: automatic speech recognition of spontaneous speech, detection of age, gender, dialect and topic and metadata analysis. We provide benchmarks for the use cases, as well downloadable, trained baseline systems with open-source code for reproducibility. One further use case is to verify the metadata and transcripts given in this corpus itself, and to suggest artificial metadata and transcripts for the part of the corpus where it is missing.
Journal Article
Latin : story of a world language
The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries afterward, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this \"dead language\" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt offers the story of the first \"world language\", from antiquity to the present.
eBook
The Language of Táng Poetry as Entryway into the Spoken Language of the Táng: A Preliminary Exploration
This study examines features of the living colloquial language of the Táng Dynasty as found to be reflected in Táng poetry. The operating postulate for this study is that Táng poetry and its prosody had a strong orality, and hence also had a connection to the spoken language that went beyond the formulaic and codified system of Middle Chinese phonology. A corollary to this postulate is that across and between regional varieties, or dialects, of the Táng spoken language there also was a prestige koine, that had evolved out of those spoken dialects and that had wide currency in the Táng empire. Within that linguistic environment, colloquial elements are found in Táng poems that fall outside the received phonology or that comprise words not found in Chinese prior to the Táng. These colloquial elements are of particular utility in characterizing the colloquial and regional nature of the Táng language. Such colloquial forms can be uncovered, for example, where a syllable is found in an unexpected tone category in order to fit a poem's expected prosody. This study considers examples of these kinds of unexpected forms that are identified in passages cited by Jiǎng Shàoyú 蒋绍愚 in his 1990 study, Tángshī yǔyán yánjiū 唐诗语言研究. The examination finds that while Táng prosody is more closely reflected in the modern southern dialects, colloquial words and elements that made their way into poetry in Táng times more commonly originated in the regional northern dialects of the period, or in the Táng koine, or in both. Finally, two appendices are included following the main body of this study. The first is a detailed and annotated translation of a short passage discussing tone variants in Táng poety in Jiǎng Shàoyú 1990. The second is a brief outline of Táng poetic prosody that provides some background to the issues of tone that underly the analysis.
Journal Article
Preface
Vernacular Victoria: The Queen in the Languages of South Asia began life as an international online colloquium hosted by the Department of English at Ashoka University, Haryana, in collaboration with the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad (India). Participants were invited to give papers based on an archive of vernacular eulogies, addresses, memorials, and biographies collected by Miles Taylor during the course of research for his book Empress: Queen Victoria and India (Yale University Press, 2018). Following the colloquium of April 26–27, 2021, further commissions were undertaken as the editors broadened the scope of the project.
Journal Article
Lives of the Milanese Tyrants
Decembrio's model was Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, whose translation into the vernacular he supervised as part of a general Milanese cultural project that was designed to praise a political system that was based on strong leadership provided by an exceptional individual. The Deeds was part of his effort to get into the good graces of the Milanese leader, which he hoped to do before Filelfo's officially sanctioned biographical history was finished, but Decembrio's work was not well received and the desired biography was ultimately produced by Giovanni Simonetta, who had access to the internal documents that Decembrio did not. [...]these two volumes meet the same high standards as the eighty-six that preceded them.
Journal Article
LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS ON TRIAL: HEARING RACHEL JEANTEL (AND OTHER VERNACULAR SPEAKERS) IN THE COURTROOM AND BEYOND
Rachel Jeantel was the leading prosecution witness when George Zimmerman was tried for killing Trayvon Martin, but she spoke in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and her crucial testimony was dismissed as incomprehensible and not credible. The disregard for her speech in court and the media is familiar to vernacular speakers and puts Linguistics itself on trial: following Saussure, how do we dispel such 'prejudices' and 'fictions'? We show that Jeantel speaks a highly systematic AAVE, with possible Caribbean influence. We also discuss voice quality and other factors that bedeviled her testimony, including dialect unfamiliarity and institutionalized racism. Finally, we suggest strategies for linguists to help vernacular speakers be better heard in courtrooms and beyond.
Journal Article
Social Variation and the Latin Language
Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.
eBook
Spoken Language Corpus and Linguistic Informatics
Linguistic Informatics is a research field named by the Center of Excellence (COE) Program: Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI), which aims to systematically integrate studies in computer science, linguistics, and language education. The first part of this volume contains three lectures on spoken language analysis and corpus linguistics delivered at the Second International Conference on Linguistic Informatics held on December 10, 2005. The nine contributions in the second part come from the Collaboration Workshop on spoken language corpora between UBLI and C-ORAL-ROM, a consortium researching the spoken Romance languages. In the third part, four studies representative of Linguistic Informatics are presented. These studies deal with (1) Corpus-based analysis of linguistic usages, (2) Typological study of different languages, (3) Effective integration of e-learning and task-based face-to-face teaching and (4) Fosterage of language education researchers with expertise in the field of Linguistic Informatics.
eBook
Social media in second and foreign language teaching and learning: Blogs, wikis, and social networking
This review surveys and synthesizes the findings of 87 focal pieces, published primarily since 2009 and mid 2018, on the formal and informal use of social media—blogs, wikis, and social networking—for second and foreign language teaching and learning (L2TL), including studies on the use of educational sites like Livemocha and Busuu and vernacular sites like Facebook and Twitter. The article frames the review in the development of social media and the history of social computer-assisted language learning (CALL) research. Synthesis identifies common findings, including that social media can afford the development of intercultural, sociopragmatic, and audience awareness, language learner and user identities, and particular literacies. Presentation of the focal pieces and common findings is intertwined with discussion of problematic issues, and each section concludes with a summary and implications for future research and practice.
Journal Article