r/linguistics

A study of Brazil's national AI plan finds that the phrase "for the good of all" masks a structural problem: AI algorithms are built to process people at scale, not as individuals, making the promise of equal benefit harder to deliver than the policy suggests.

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This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

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If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

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“This book contains papers based on some of the talks presented in the workshop Areal Effects in Prehistoric Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European at the international congress of Finno-Ugric studies, Congressus  XIII Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum, held in Vienna in August 2022. The volume at hand highlights different viewpoints on Indo-European–Uralic contacts and hopefully serves as an interesting take on the present state of the field, as well as an inspiration and starting point for future research. One of the most important aims of the volume is to stimulate discussion and produce further conferences and volumes, as well as more concrete research cooperation between scholars working with the history of Uralic and Indo-European language families. Many of the papers open new paths of research rather than provide definite answers to all of the issues that are addressed. The aim of the workshop was to bring scholars of Uralic and Indo-European studies together. The different topics included in the volume highlight the wide span of diachronic contact linguistics. Also, different branches of both language families (Samoyed, Permic, Finnic, Saami; Tocharian, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Germanic) are well represented here, which gives a representative snapshot of the varied research problems that our field is dealing with. The papers present new etymologies, discuss new (or recently discovered) loanword layers, and also revisit old ideas.”