Hiram Ring
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hiramring.bsky.social
Hiram Ring
@hiramring.bsky.social
Linguist, musician, dabbler in arcane arts.
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“Word length predicts word order” - preprint of a newly submitted paper! arxiv.org/abs/2505.13913

In this paper I show that the length of nouns and verbs correlates with word order crosslinguistically: nouns are longer than verbs in SV lgs & shorter than verbs in VS lgs. 1/6
Word length predicts word order: "Min-max"-ing drives language evolution
Current theories of language propose an innate (Baker 2001; Chomsky 1981) or a functional (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 2007; Hawkins 2014) origin for the surface structures (i.e. word order) that we observe...
arxiv.org
As part of revamping my introductory Python for Linguists course, I'm getting students to work on actual low-resource languages by developing a POS-tagger (hg2051-ntu.github.io/project1). Inspired partly by @rtommccoy.bsky.social’s post back in January, 1/3
HG2051 – HG2051 Project 1: Individual assignment
hg2051-ntu.github.io
July 29, 2025 at 4:34 AM
Reposted by Hiram Ring
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openletter.earth/open-letter-...
June 28, 2025 at 7:52 PM
A new working paper that presents a dependency-annotated version of the *taggedPBC*: arxiv.org/abs/2506.06785 - here I show that for 1500+ languages, dependency relations transferred via English allow for extraction of transitive word order patterns (SVO, VSO, etc)… 1/3
Extending dependencies to the taggedPBC: Word order in transitive clauses
The taggedPBC (Ring 2025a) contains more than 1,800 sentences of pos-tagged parallel text data from over 1,500 languages, representing 133 language families and 111 isolates. While this dwarfs previou...
arxiv.org
June 10, 2025 at 1:38 AM
“Word length predicts word order” - preprint of a newly submitted paper! arxiv.org/abs/2505.13913

In this paper I show that the length of nouns and verbs correlates with word order crosslinguistically: nouns are longer than verbs in SV lgs & shorter than verbs in VS lgs. 1/6
Word length predicts word order: "Min-max"-ing drives language evolution
Current theories of language propose an innate (Baker 2001; Chomsky 1981) or a functional (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 2007; Hawkins 2014) origin for the surface structures (i.e. word order) that we observe...
arxiv.org
May 23, 2025 at 7:09 AM