Wind Direction Words in the Sydney Language: A Case Study in Semantic Reconstitution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The wind direction terms in the Sydney Language differ in the various sources (from the First Fleeters onwards), and at first sight look confused. After some sifting it emerges that the early sources fall into two sets partly relatable by a quarter-turn in the terms for the four cardinal directions. There are also terms for intermediate directions and probably sea and land breezes, and terms relatable to the sun and tides. A recent treatment of the wind direction data by Gibson, who draws as well on work by Troy, interprets the records as indicating that some word meanings shift so much according to context that he questions whether the Sydney Language had words at all. However, there is order discernible here, fitting with regional evidence for the salience of cardinal directions. The main four directions may have been aligned to axes offset from the cardinal directions, or else participate in a kind of location-dependent quarter-turn rotation. I conclude with brief remarks on the methods for detecting order in patchy historical data, and on the public communication of linguistic findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".