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‪Pedant‬ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Pedantic) Jump to: navigation, search This article is about a person who is excessively concerned with formalism and precision. For the piece of jewellery, see pendant. A pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes an ostentatious and arrogant show of learning.

Contents  [hide] 1 Etymology 2 Connotation 3 Medical conditions 4 Quotations 5 Pedants in literature and fiction 6 References

Etymology[edit] The English language word "pedant" comes from the French pédant (used in 1566 in Darme & Hatzfeldster's Dictionnaire général de la langue française) or its older mid-15th century Italian source pedante, "teacher, schoolmaster". (Compare the Spanish pedante.) The origin of the Italian pedante is uncertain, but several dictionaries suggest that it was contracted from the medieval Latin pædagogans, present participle of pædagogare, "to act as pedagogue, to teach" (Du Cange).[1] The Latin word is derived from Greek παιδαγωγός, paidagōgós, παιδ- "child" + ἀγειν "to lead", which originally referred to a slave who escorted children to and from school but later meant "a source of instruction or guidance".[2][3] Connotation[edit] The term in English is typically used with a negative connotation to refer to someone who is overly concerned with minutiae and whose tone is condescending.[4] Thomas Nashe wrote in Have with you to Saffron-walden (1596), page 43: "O, tis a precious apothegmaticall [terse] Pedant, who will finde matter inough to dilate a whole daye of the first inuention [invention] of Fy, fa, fum". However, when the word was first used by Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost (1598), it simply meant "teacher". Medical conditions[edit] Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is also in part characterized by a form of pedantry that is overly concerned with the correct following of rules, procedures and practices.[5] Sometimes the rules that OCPD sufferers obsessively follow are of their own devising, or are corruptions or re-interpretations of the letter of actual rules. Pedantry can also be an indication of specific developmental disorders. In particular, person's with Asperger's syndrome often have behaviour characterized by pedantic speech.[6] Quotations[edit] •	"A Man who has been brought up among Books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is what we call a Pedant. But, methinks, we should enlarge the Title, and give it to every one that does not know how to think out of his Profession and particular way of Life."—Joseph Addison, Spectator 1711.[7] •	"Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgements of one another."—Desiderius Erasmus[8] •	"The pedant is he who finds it impossible to read criticism of himself without immediately reaching for his pen and replying to the effect that the accusation is a gross insult to his person. He is, in effect, a man unable to laugh at himself."—Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id. •	"Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and sot"—Thomas Macaulay, describing James Boswell •	"The term, then, is obviously a relative one: my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education and someone else’s ignorance."—H. W. Fowler, Modern English Usage •	"Pedantic, I?"—Alexei Sayle •	"If you're the kind of person who insists on this or that 'correct' use... abandon your pedantry as I did mine. Dive into the open flowing waters and leave the stagnant canals be... Above all, let there be pleasure!"—Stephen Fry •	"Ben is a crossword-doer, a dictionary-lover, a pedant."-Julian Barnes Pedants in literature and fiction[edit] •	Barton Fink in Barton Fink •	Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire •	Paul Bates in Midnight in Paris •	Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory •	Maura Isles in Rizzoli and Isles •	Temperance "Bones" Brennan in Bones References[edit]

Look up pedant in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: pedantry 1.	Jump up  ^ The American Heritage Dictionary

Giving Myself A Hard Time Here, Excuse Me.

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. By an extension, the term "the etymology of [a word]" means the origin of the particular word. For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods of their history and when they entered the languages in question. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information to be available. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots have been found that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family. Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, currently much etymological research is done on language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian. The word etymology is derived from the Greek word ἐτυμολογία, etymologia, itself from ἔτυμον, etymon, meaning "true sense" and the suffix -logia, denoting "the study of".[1][2] Etymon is also used in English to refer to the source word of a given word. For example, Latin candidus, which means "white", is the etymon of English candid.

Nomenclature[edit] Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attested in 1716,[14] was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.[15][16] Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted[17] and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States[18] (where philology has never been very popularly considered as the "science of language").[19] Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,[20] the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847.[20] It is now the common academic term in English for the scientific study of language. Today, the term linguist applies to someone who studies language or is a researcher within the field, or to someone who uses the tools of the discipline to describe and analyze specific languages.

‪Union of UEA Students‬ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2008) Union of UEA Students Institution University of East Anglia Location Union House, University of East Anglia Established 1969 Members c. 15,000 Affiliations National Union of Students Website http://www.ueastudent.com The Union of UEA Students is the students' union of the University of East Anglia. All students of the university and some INTO UEA students automatically become members of the Union, but do have the right to opt out of membership. Membership confers the ability to take part in the Union's activities such as Clubs and Societies, and being involved in the democratic processes of the Union. The Union is a democratic organisation run by its members via an elected student officer committee and student council. It is affiliated to the National Union of Students. The Union follows its constitution[1] and its policies.[2]

Contents  [hide] 1 Democratic structure 1.1 Union Council 1.2 Referenda 1.3 Student Officer Committee (SOC) 2 Campaigns 3 Membership Services 3.1 Representation 3.2 Advice Centre 3.3 Sports Clubs 3.4 Societies 3.5 Volunteering 3.6 Media 3.7 Peer Support Groups 4 Commercial services 5 References 6 External links

Democratic structure[edit]

Democratic Structures of the Union of UEA Students Union Council[edit] The Union Council, whose members are elected student representatives from each school of the University and the clubs and societies of the Union, in addition to the student officer committee, meets a minimum of eight times a year and sets the policy of the Union and confirms the actions of the Student Officer Committee. The decisions of the Union Council may only be overturned by a ballot of all members of the Union, or by the Union's trustee board in the case of certain decisions, normally where the legal implications are more serious. Referenda[edit] The decisions of the Union Council may only be overturned by a ballot of all members of the union. A referendum may be called by the Student Officer Committee, by the Union Council, Student Officer Committee or by a petition of 500 members (1/30 of the membership). The question must be balanced and is approved by Union Council. Every member may vote in a referendum - a straightforward majority will set new policy for the union. Policy passed by referendum cannot be overturned except by another referendum, although as with all union policy it is considered lapsed after two academic years. A referendum can be called for any reason, not only in response to a decision of the Union Council. Student Officer Committee (SOC)[edit] The members of the Union elect annually a Student Officer Committee of four full-time sabbatical officers and thirteen non-sabbatical officers. The Union does not currently have a post of "President" on the Student Officer Committee.

‪Linguistics‬ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the field of study. For the journal, see Linguistics (journal). "Linguist" redirects here. For other uses, see Linguist (disambiguation).

Linguistics is the scientific[1] study of language.[2] There are broadly three aspects to the study, which include language form, language meaning, and language in context.[3] The earliest known activities in the description of language have been attributed to Pāṇini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.[4] Language can be understood as an interplay of sound and meaning.[5] The discipline that studies linguistic sound is termed as phonetics, which is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. The study of language meaning, on the other hand, is concerned with how languages employ logic and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. This in turn includes the study of semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).[6] There is a system of rules (known as grammar) which govern the communication between members of a particular speech community. Grammar is influenced by both sound and meaning, and includes morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems).[7] Through corpus linguistics, large chunks of text can be analysed for possible occurrences of certain linguistic features, and for stylistic patterns within a written or spoken discourse.[8]

History[edit] A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication by Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis of Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English in 1967, a work based on the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of current American English, totalling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources. Kucera and Francis subjected it to a variety of computational analyses, from which they compiled a rich and variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, language teaching, psychology, statistics, and sociology. A further key publication was Randolph Quirk's 'Towards a description of English Usage' (1960)[3] in which he introduced The Survey of English Usage. Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kucera to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary, the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics. The AHD took the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language should be used) with descriptive information (how it actually is used). Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' COBUILD monolingual learner's dictionary, designed for users learning English as a foreign language, was compiled using the Bank of English. The Survey of English Usage Corpus was used in the development of one of the most important Corpus-based Grammars, the Comprehensive Grammar of English (Quirk et al. 1985).[4] The Brown Corpus has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the LOB Corpus (1960s British English), Kolhapur (Indian English), Wellington (New Zealand English), Australian Corpus of English (Australian English), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s American English), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many languages, varieties and modes, and include the International Corpus of English, and the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities (Oxford and Lancaster) and the British Library. For contemporary American English, work has stalled on the American National Corpus, but the 400+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–present) is now available through a web interface. The first computerized corpus of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project,[5] containing one million words, which inspired Shana Poplack's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area.[6] Besides these corpora of living languages, computerized corpora have also been made of collections of texts in ancient languages. An example is the Andersen-Forbes database of the Hebrew Bible, developed since the 1970s, in which every clause is parsed using graphs representing up to seven levels of syntax, and every segment tagged with seven fields of information.[7][8] The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated corpus for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran. This is a recent project with multiple layers of annotation including morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar.[9]

Methods[edit] Corpus Linguistics has generated a number of research methods, attempting to trace a path from data to theory. Wallis and Nelson (2001)[10] first introduced what they called the 3A perspective: Annotation, Abstraction and Analysis. •	Annotation consists of the application of a scheme to texts. Annotations may include structural markup, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and numerous other representations. •	Abstraction consists of the translation (mapping) of terms in the scheme to terms in a theoretically motivated model or dataset. Abstraction typically includes linguist-directed search but may include e.g., rule-learning for parsers. •	Analysis consists of statistically probing, manipulating and generalising from the dataset. Analysis might include statistical evaluations, optimisation of rule-bases or knowledge discovery methods. Most lexical corpora today are part-of-speech-tagged (POS-tagged). However even corpus linguists who work with 'unannotated plain text' inevitably apply some method to isolate salient terms. In such situations annotation and abstraction are combined in a lexical search. The advantage of publishing an annotated corpus is that other users can then perform experiments on the corpus. Linguists with other interests and differing perspectives than the originators' can exploit this work. By sharing data, corpus linguists are able to treat the corpus as a locus of linguistic debate, rather than as an exhaustive fount of knowledge.

— An engraving from the 1772 edition of the Encyclopédie; Truth, in the top center, is surrounded by light and unveiled by the figures to the right, Philosophy and Reason.

Wikipedia for World Heritage From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Wikipedia for World Heritage" – books · scholar · JSTOR · free images (August 2012)

A visual presented supporting Wikipedia's listing at the Wikimedia Conference Berlin 2011 Wikipedia for World Heritage refers to the efforts put forth to get Wikipedia listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The idea was originally proposed to the Wikipedia chapter by Wikimedia at the 2011 Wikimedia Conference in Berlin.[1][2] An online petition was started at the German Wikipedia on May 23, 2011.[3] The bid is considered to be the first for a digital entity and is expected to be controversial with the list's maintainers who are notably conservative.[2]

Jimbo Wales has stated that "the basic idea is to recognize that Wikipedia is this amazing global cultural phenomena that has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people."[2]

If Wikipedia fails to get listed as a World Heritage Site, it has been suggested that they apply for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists.[3]

Antiquity[edit] Across cultures, the early history of linguistics is associated with a need to disambiguate discourse, especially for ritual texts or in arguments. This often led to explorations of sound-meaning mappings, and the debate over conventional versus naturalistic origins for these symbols. Finally this led to the processes by which larger structures are formed from units. India[edit] Main articles: Vyakarana, Tolkāppiyam, and Kavirajamarga Linguistics in ancient India derives its impetus from the need to correctly recite and interpret the Vedic texts. Already in the oldest Indian text, the Rigveda, vāk ("speech") is deified. By 1200 BCE,[1] the oral performance of these texts becomes standardized, and treatises on ritual recitation suggest splitting up the Sanskrit compounds into words, stems, and phonetic units, providing an impetus for morphology and phonetics. Over the next few centuries, clarity was reached in the organization of sound units, and the stop consonants were organized in a 5x5 square (c. 800 BCE, Pratisakhyas), eventually leading to a systematic alphabet, Brāhmī, around the 6th century BCE. In semantics, the early Sanskrit grammarian Śākaṭāyana (before c. 500 BCE) proposes that verbs represent ontologically prior categories, and that all nouns are etymologically derived from actions. The etymologist Yāska (c. 5th century BCE) posits that meaning inheres in the sentence, and that word meanings are derived based on sentential usage. He also provides four categories of words—nouns, verbs, pre-verbs, and particles/invariants—and a test for nouns both concrete and abstract: words which can be indicated by the pronoun that. Pāṇini (c. 4th century BCE) opposes the Yāska view that sentences are primary, and proposes a grammar for composing semantics from morphemic roots. Transcending the ritual text to consider living language, Pāṇini specifies a comprehensive set of about 4,000 aphoristic rules (sutras) that: 1.	Map the semantics of verb argument structures into thematic roles 2.	Provide morphosyntactic rules for creating verb forms and nominal forms whose seven cases are called karaka (similar to case) that generate the morphology 3.	Take these morphological structures and consider phonological processes (e.g., root or stem modification) by which the final phonological form is obtained In addition, the Pāṇinian school also provides a list of 2000 verb roots which form the objects on which these rules are applied, a list of sounds (the so-called Shiva-sutras), and a list of 260 words not derivable by the rules. The extremely succinct specification of these rules and their complex interactions led to considerable commentary and extrapolation over the following centuries. The phonological structure includes defining a notion of sound universals similar to the modern phoneme, the systematization of consonants based on oral cavity constriction, and vowels based on height and duration. However, it is the ambition of mapping these from morpheme to semantics that is truly remarkable in modern terms. Grammarians following Pāṇini include Kātyāyana (c. 3rd century BCE), who wrote aphorisms on Pāṇini (the Varttika) and advanced mathematics; Patañjali (2nd century BCE), known for his commentary on selected topics in Pāṇini's grammar (the Mahabhasya) and on Kātyāyana's aphorisms, as well as, according to some, the author of the Yoga Sutras, and Pingala, with his mathematical approach to prosody. Several debates ranged over centuries, for example, on whether word-meaning mappings were conventional (Vaisheshika-Nyaya) or eternal (Kātyāyana-Patañjali-Mīmāṃsā). The Nyaya Sutras specified three types of meaning: the individual (this cow), the type universal (cowhood), and the image (draw the cow). That the sound of a word also forms a class (sound-universal) was observed by Bhartṛhari (c. 500 CE), who also posits that language-universals are the units of thought, close to the nominalist or even the linguistic determinism position. Bhartṛhari also considers the sentence to be ontologically primary (word meanings are learned given their sentential use). Of the six canonical texts or Vedangas that formed the core syllabus in Brahminic education from the 1st century CE until the 18th century, four dealt with language: •	Shiksha (śikṣā): phonetics and phonology (sandhi), Gārgeya and commentators •	Chandas (chandas): prosody or meter, Pingala and commentators •	Vyakarana (vyākaraṇa): grammar, Pāṇini and commentators •	Nirukta (nirukta): etymology, Yāska and commentators Bhartrihari around 500 CE introduced a philosophy of meaning with his sphoṭa doctrine. This body of work became known in 19th-century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pāṇini. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal[2] discussed the possible European impact of Indian ideas on language. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal posits the theory that the idea of formal rules in language, first proposed by de Saussure in 1894, and finally developed by Chomsky in 1957, based on which formal rules were also introduced in computational languages, may indeed lie in the European exposure to the formal rules of Paninian grammar. In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of signifier-signified in the sign is somewhat similar to the notion of Sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics, may itself have been catalyzed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians. The Pali Grammar of Kacchayana, dated to the early centuries CE, describes the language of the Buddhist canon. The Tolkāppiyam (dated to 3rd century BCE) presents a grammar of Tamil, derivatives of which are still used today.--MrAlwaysOrForever (talk) 04:18, 17 April 2014 (UTC)