linguists? English spelling quirks... what if

quoting from boingboing.net today: what if English were to follow the Dutch example 200 years ago when they changed spellings to get rid of exceptions to the rule, so that each spelling combination had only one pronunciation.

Japanese is a hard language to learn, but one of the easy parts is its generally phonetic consistency. English is also hard language to learn, and it's made harder because letters and letter combinations are pronounced differently depending on the word they are in. An example that illustrates this is "ghoti," a made up word that is pronounced "fish." The "gh" is pronounced like the "f" sound in "tough," the "o" is the "i" sound in "women," "ti" is the "sh" sound in "fiction."

Aaron Alon made a video that shows what English would sound like if each vowel had one, and only one, pronunciation. The result sounds like an American pretending to have a weird pan-European accent.     https://youtu.be/A8zWWp0akUU

What If English Were Phonetically Consistent? youtu.be Learn more about Aaron Alon's music, writing, and films at aaronalon.com.

online course to see the length and breadth of Cross-cultural Methods

[excerpt of webpage, http://hraf.yale.edu/ccc/] Introducing Cross-Cultural Research

This online course is a brief introduction to the world of ethnography-based cross-cultural research. The course outlines the logic of cross-cultural research and various aspects of the research process from start to finish, including the steps involved in framing a research question, deriving hypotheses from theory, design of measures, coding procedures, sampling, reliability, and the use of statistics to analyze results.

Looking for Iron Age locations

The dry summer days show off structures ordinarily not visible at ground level, or even like this from the air when all is well watered at other seasons and even during the summer of a typical rainfall year. Here are a few structures in the vicinity of Eire's giant New Grange stone building of millennia ago, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mythicalireland/41635425520/in/explore-2018-07-16/

No doubt these will contribute to the mapped locations and finds across the hilltops through the British Isles around the time that implements and weapons of iron overtook the weaker points of bronze (admixing copper with tin) and before that the artifacts of copper alone.

New henge discovery near Newgrange I was at the centre of a major archaeological discovery in the Boyne Valley last week. Using a drone, I found a massive crop mark which is believed to be the footprint of a huge late Neolithic henge or enclosure. I was flying with Ken Williams at the time. The markings are only visible because of the prolonged drought in the area.

dry weather reveals subsurface structures (aerial view; drone uses)

Low tide lines in the long-term water cycle, as well as droughts bring opportunities for Space Archaeologists and aerial spotting of human activity in places normally obscured by water tideline or surface vegetation. Here are examples of crop marks in the fields around Wales:

Cropmarks 2018 (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales)

language tuning (Singapore English)

Wikipedia has entries for some of the most prolific blends of English and other languages: Spanglish (Spanish), Frangalis (French), Chinglish - Japlish - Konglish (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Here is Singapore's effort to rectify local habits of English on the island, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/singlish-singapore-government-campaign

The Government Campaign to Get Rid of Singapore's Unofficial Language www.atlasobscura.com Singlish, a creole, is spoken all over the country, but politicians want citizens to "speak good English."

anthro eye in the private sector - seeing what people say & do

The power of empirical, fieldwork-based observation and participant-observation has been recognized in companies big and small, USA and other countries' businesses.

This June 2018 radio story features a conversation with future anthropologists seeking possible careers away from campus settings.

~~from Marketplace featuring Rebekah Park (ReD) and Elizabeth Briody (Cultural Keys).
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/06262018-us-edition

ancient role of grandmothering - radio story, June 2018

Babysitters, tuber-diggers: Studies show the rise of grandmas helped babies thrive — and evolve

For decades, a "man the hunter" theory of early humans prevailed, with the image of societies and interactions revolving around bagging big game. But new research suggests that women likely brought home a lot more food. When grandmothers were added to the mix, babies ate better and may have developed better social skills to manage their multiple caregivers.

"Human children are adapted for cooperation … in ways that apes aren't," says a psychologist.

language, identity, existential environment

Perils of speaking (and speaking about) Tibetan language and society; whether linguistic fluency, social proficiency, or cultural literacy,

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/22/tibetan-man-gets-five-years-in.html

Tibetan man gets five years in prison for speaking about his native language boingboing.net Tibetan man gets five years in prison for speaking about his native language

what happens when country shifts print from Cyrillic to Latin-based alphabet

Kazakhstan's commitment to change, following the 1928 example of Turkey's own shift from Arabic script to Latin-based alphabet.

www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180424-the-cost-of-changing-an-entire-countrys-alphabet

BBC - Capital - The cost of changing an entire country's ... www.bbc.com The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic script to the Latin-based style favoured by the West. What are the economics of such a change?

migrating from NE Asia to North America - news story

Two infant remains from the last Ice Age excavated in Alaska; DNA patterns suggest many Asia linkages and various branches sometime after settling in N. America, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/03/575326694/ancient-human-remains-document-migration-from-asia-to-america