LING 270 Language, Technology and Society Unit 1

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LING 270Language, Technology and SocietyUnit 1

• Richard Sproat
• URL http//catarina.ai.uiuc.edu/L270/

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Overview of Course

• Writing
• Printing
• Language and speech technology
• Speech synthesis (talking machines)
• Speech recognition
• Language translation
• Societal impact of language technology

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Course structure

• Attendance participation in class (10)
• Enforced with quick writes
• (Roughly) weekly homeworks (60)
• Midterm final (each 15)

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Materials

• Textbooks
• Andrew Robinson. The Story of Writing. Thames
  Hudson
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat. How Writing Came About.
  University of Texas Press Abridged edition
• William Hannas. 2003. The Writing on the Wall
  How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity.
  Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Stork, David. 1996. HAL's Legacy 2001's Computer
  as Dream and Reality. MIT Press.
• Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the Internet.
  Cambridge University Press.
• Online Library course reserves
• Additional online readings
• The course webpage http//catarina.ai.uiuc.edu/L27
  0 with links to the lecture slides, and the
  (evolving) coursenotes (http//catarina.ai.uiuc.ed
  u/L270/coursenotes.pdf)

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What is writing?
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The Golden Record
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The Golden Record revealed
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Non-linguistic semasiograms
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More
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Heraldry example
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Sampsons infamous Yukaghir love letter
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Blissymbolics
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An envelope from Nuzi
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Tokens
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Complex tokens
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Token distribution
Mureybet
(Schmandt-Besserat, map 2)
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Envelopes
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Envelope distribution
Schmandt-Besserat, map 3
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Impressed tablet
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Solid clay tablets
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Tokens into signs
(Schmandt-Besserat, p69)
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Tokens into signs
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Numerical symbols
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Chinese oracle bones
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Chinese oracle bones
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Oracle bone interpretation