Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the fact that Greek culture (and consequently Roman as well) was intensely language conscious, the systematic investigation of language, its origin, its structure, and its varieties was a relative late bloomer in the ancient world. This is bound to surprise us. To be sure, there were reflections on the relation between speech and its objects from early on among the poets, the Presocratic philosophers, and especially among the sophists, the first professional rhetoricians and teachers of ‘how to do things with words’. That such concern did not immediately lead to the development of language as a field of research seems to be due to several factors. Though the Greeks were aware of the existence of different languages, the acquisition of a foreign language was not part of even an elite education in the Greek world, but was left, rather, to professional interpreters. Furthermore, despite a great wealth of speculation on the origin of culture, language was not a major topic in those considerations. Though there is a host of stories of divine gifts of craftsmanship to human beings, including the civic virtues as a means of survival and the Promethean clandestine handing down of fire, there is no parallel depiction of a miraculous distribution of language to a miserable horde of speechless primitive men. The lack of a mythological account of the origin of language is certainly no accident in a religious culture that presupposes that there is a language common to gods and men: such a mythical background quite unreflectively presupposes that language has ‘always’ been around, even before the creation of humankind (if such a creation was part of the common lore).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.435 | 0.293 |
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".