My personal opinion also is that third person is very bad writing style, since it offloads responsibility for the presented results to some external entity. As if it wasn’t me who made the stupid decision to push that other guy from the cliff, but the guy was (somehow) pushed from the cliff. In my opinion, “we” solves that problem only a little bit, because now the writer admits a bit of responsibility for the act, but still dilutes it by taking into the game somebody else (either the reader, or the abstract research community). Saying “I did this and that and by doing it I personally found this and that” for me is fully taking responsibility for my results ..
Go Figure. Donald Trump Is Capable of Making a Change When Needed.
Not an easy task, but you probably have a better shot with the guy who worked, in one role or another, in every Republican nominee’s presidential campaign from 1976 to 2008. Sure, Manafort spent the last few years hanging around with deposed Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, but it’s worth seeing how things work with Manafort having a larger role — and whether the style of the Trump campaign can change, or whether it’s “baked in the cake” of the candidate’s personality.
.. Cruz’s campaign had defined such pools for each of his major opponents as part of what was known internally as the Oorlog Project, named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for “war” translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest.
Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason
The French government tried very hard to resist American loanwords like e-mail, promoting in its place messagerie électronique or courriel. They’d formed a whole agency for this purpose. Laws were passed and enforced. And yet e-mail prevailed—it was simply more efficient. But Sally was especially excited about languages that resist such borrowing, even in the face of extraordinary cultural influence and dominance. Montana Salish was one such language. Our conversations followed a pattern: I arrived expecting one thing and ended up somewhere entirely distinct, thinking differently about language and human culture.
.. The most famous story is in the Bible—the people at the bridge saying shibboleth. And that was a case where they were both speaking dialects of Hebrew, I guess it was, and if you couldn’t say shibboleth because you didn’t have the sh sound, they’d kill you.
.. Every generation of teenagers will invent their own words because the whole point of teenage slang is to have in-group vocabulary that outsiders, like old people, can’t understand very well. And a lot of those words are ephemeral. The next generation comes along, gets their own words, the old words disappear.
.. But looking at the ones that did hang on is interesting because it tells you that they turned out to be useful. Mob—the word mob used to be a slang word. It’s a reduced form of a Latin word, mobile. But now it’s a really useful word. It’s interesting to see which words turn out to be useful.
.. But imagine a society—and again, these are mostly hunter-gatherer societies, but there are still a lot of those around—where the people practice exogamy, meaning you have to find a marriage partner outside your own group. Often the criterion is whether they speak the same language as you.
.. It’s a wonderful language. I like consonants, and they have thirty-eight consonants. I like big, long, complicated words, and they have huge, long, complicated words.
.. The word they use for automobile means “that it has wrinkled feet,” which is, incidentally, an example of how the words you have reflect your culture. If you’re a tracker, you’re going to be noticing the tire tracks—the focus of that particular word. And the word for telephone means “you whisper into it.”
.. The only totally successful case of language revival is still Hebrew. Having your language serve as a vehicle for a major world religion is very useful if you’re trying to revitalize it.
.. The other is Hawaiian. Both used a strategy called Language Nest where you get kids, preschool kids, in a setting where nobody speaks to them in any language but the language they want to revitalize, and because you’re getting them so early you’ve got a good chance of making them fluent.
Chomsky’s Revolutionary Methodological Preliminaries
No linguists today think Aspectspresents the right way to design grammars for human languages. The book did not present discoveries about language that have since been confirmed as correct by subsequent scientific work. I’m skeptical even of its general approach in some respects. Yet it was truly a wonder. Not for what it claimed in detail, but for what it led to.