#amateur linguist

[tlaquetzqui]

So now we know why reading comprehension is piss poor: the education establishment refused to listen to linguists and neuroscientists about how learning to read an alphabet actually works.

#things that ain't so #salty amateur linguist

[eloquentsisyphianturmoil]

hm so I don’t know this lore but I can’t be bothered to look it up; I’ve seen suffix -ion used as ‘son of’ (uncertain if gender neutral?) and noticed telperion sort of means ‘son/child of silver’, possible laurelin means ‘daughter of gold’ where -in prefix is feminine? (In archaic Quenya mind)

long story short is it grammatically correct to call Galadriel finarfinin and can I do it anyway because it’s hilarious

#Silm #the silm fandom #the silmarillion #if I had any real interest I would solve this problem myself #No instead I’m here screaming into the vois #Silmarilion #the silm #silm fandom #artanis ig #Linguistics #tolkien #tolkien lore #Proper nerds help me out I’m like #A casual nerd #an amateur nerd

[triflesandparsnips]

My gf is doing a research project on sixteenth century recipe books (building a tool to help people read/understand them) and this weekend she was telling me about an ingredient that showed up in one of them that she could not figure out what it was. I have read the soap post (which is SO COOL, btw, I am so excited to see how the wash balls turn out) and I’m wondering if you might know what it actually is.

She first saw it written as venus bolearmonack, but we found several different spellings for it when we both went down internet rabbit holes: bolearmonack, bolarmonack, bolarmonicke. We think it’s maybe some sort of dirt or clay? But it keeps bothering me that we couldn’t figure it out, and reading your post made me wonder if you would know.

OKAY SO:

From Charas's The Royal Pharmacopœea, we know that:

By Minerals I understand all Metals, Half-metals, and what belongs to Metals. All sorts of Earths, and Bole-Armoniack; all Stones, Marbles, Flints, Porphyries, Jaspers, Chrystals, Jacinths, Emraulds, Saphirs, Granats, Blood-stones, Diamonds, and all sorts of Jewels: Sulphurs, Vitriols, Allums, Sal Gem, Bay-salt, Water, Rain, Snow, Ice, Hail, Thunder-bolts, Dew, Manna of several sorts, Morter, Lime, Brick, Oyl of Naphta Amber-griece white and yellow; Jet, Sea-coal and all Bitumens. Talk, Chalk, Bismuth, Zink, and all Marcasites, the ordinary Earth, Sand, Clay; and in general whatever is drawn out of the Bowels of the Earth, or Sea; or descends from the Air, being without Life.

This is Moyse Charas telling us what a shorthand (Minerals) means -- so apparently, Bole-Armoniack (another spelling!) wasn't a shorthand for something else the way, say, "the four greater Cold seeds" are. I also included the full paragraph because that also gives a hint as to what Bole-Armoniack isn't -- or at least, they didn't think it was... which means nope, not clay or dirt.

Later we find out in the same book that it's something you gotta crush the shit outta in a mortar before you can use it, but when you do it'll reduce to an extremely fine powder the way precious stones and amber will.

Lémery's A Course of Chemistry clarifies for a recipe for, ta da, gonorrhea, that:

Litharge, which is a Lead Calcined [a heated lead], Alom, and Bole-Armenick, are so many considerable Astringents, that do no hurt in this composition.

Which is to say, bole-armenick (ANOTHER SPELLING), when powdered, can be heated up to be used in this mix and was added because it was thought to draw together or contract skin tissue. It's also interesting that Lémery bothered to define litharge (which is fairly common in recipes I've seen), but, again, not the bole-armenick.

Finally, on a hunch, I did a search for just "armenick", and hit enough paydirt that I suspect y'all can dig further using it to confirm the results-- Pettus's 1683 glossary supplement to Ercker's Fleta Minor lists the following:

ARMENICK▪ See Armoniack.

ARMONIACK, T. gives it the Latine Name, Bolus Armeni, and we Bole Armoniack, and I find these words of kin, both in their Orthography and Pronuntiation, viz. Amoniack Armenick and Armoniack. The first Pliny tell us, is a Gum which he calls Gumma Amoniaci, of a glutinous nature (like other Gums) and so may be used for Metallick Vessels. The second viz. Armenick; I find the word Sal always joyned with it, and so called Sal Armenicus, and this Salt was antiently accounted a natural Salt, but that being now unknown to us, we use the Armenicus, which is made of the Urine of Elephants or Camels (as 'tis said) boyled to a Lixivium or Salt, and called Sal Armenius or Armeniacus, and this is of great use for purifying and refining of Metals. To the third Armoniacus the word Bole is added, I suppose for distinction sake: Pliny, c. 35. mentions a Stone, which he calls Lapis Armeni, of which he counts several sorts, but the best of those he saith, are of a blew colour, and calls it verd de Azure (being of great price and esteem with Painters, but the common Armoniack he calls Synoper (and we Synople) from a City of that name, where it was plentiful, and 'tis probable this is the same which we call Bole Armoniack, being of a reddish colour, and this is oft used by our Author, and for distinction the word Gum is put to the first, Salt to the other, and Bolus to this: which I write to prevent Errors in Medicines or Metallick Experiments.

So with Pettus's definitions, triangulated with Charas's shorthand notes and Lémery's preparation instructions, we arrive at your "venus bolearmonack" probably being sinople, a "ferruginous quartz that is blood-red or brownish red sometimes with a tinge of yellow" which "occurs in small but very perfect crystals, and in masses that resemble some varieties of jasper."

All that being said, though: always try and get at least one other source to confirm a definition. My beloved Simon Barbe says that benzoin is also myrrh, and that's... that's not right, babe. So double-check, but-- here's a reasonable direction!

#history #linguistics #trifles the amateur history enthusiast strikes again

[aurora-nova-fic]

Inspired by one of @joshuaalbert​‘s posts, I went to Memory Alpha to look up Bajoran writing, and came across a startling minimal amount of evolution in their written language.

Here is a user-created composite based on the Reckoning tablet and the modern translation. In 30,000 years, the script went from this

to this.

That’s staggeringly similar for a period of thirty thousand years. In real history, cuneiform evolved considerably more over a tenth of that time (sources here and here).

Now, skipping aside the matter of the planet having only one language, as that’s a whole other issue, this suggests a certain level of cultural stagnation. You have to try to keep your language this similar over such a long period of time.

#ds9 #bajorans #amateur linguistic analysis of Star Trek

[aetheistics]

dreaming in a foreign language fluent as the river's current I hear you I feel you

a.f.

#fluent in a language I never learned to speak #8-8-6 #poetry #poesie #iambus #iambic tetrameter #poem of the day #short poem #amateur poetry #mine #creative writing #dark academia #romantic poetry #molossus #diambic #a.f. #nature #elements of nature #linguistics #prose #feral metrical foot

[utilitycaster]

It’s unclear if the use of the term “Aboreal Calix”, which takes its roots (pun unintended) from Latin, is indicative that the similarly Latin-inspired Aeorian language was an influence in some way and used elsewhere (Latin as the language of the arcane that Aeor spoke as a mother tongue but other societies used more sparingly?) or if it’s just coincidence and/or the DM urge to use Latin roots to communicate the idea of an ancient, advanced society that has since collapsed.

#excelsior too for that matter #the character names are a mix of ancient languages and made-up things but do skew latinate #critical role spoilers #critical role #exu calamity #amateur exandrian linguistics

[radio--katsuyu]

An Observation about (Scholastic) Latin

When I got into reading some of the Scholastic writers, I observed painfully diverse their use of Latin was. Specifically, the difference between Duns Scotus and Aquinas or Bonaventure. There's an undeniable Englishness in Scotus' Latin, of course, but more than that, his use of the lexicon is innovative, to say the least. And he uses it -- and I say this as someone with experience in language teaching and learning -- almost the way one would play around with a new language when they had a decent amount of Semantic and Syntactic experience, but not yet a full grasp of the Pragmatic.

Another thing I observed was how mutable was Latin and how clearly it was able to show us the workings of someone's mind. Jerome is a linguistic nerd, Aquinas is a logician, Bonaventure is a natural, humoured teacher and Scotus is a metaphysician with a silly, unpredictable side. And to be clear, I have no formal training in Latin hermeneutics (my only formal training in Latin was during my first two years of high school), so I suspect that it is the property of the language to shine the character through.

#linguistics #latin #scholastic #aquinas #duns scotus #bonaventure #language #amateur linguistics

[bread-tab]

wud'f we all sed skroo thuh dikshinairy an sdardid typing funedikly in ar own aksen's. thuh things we'd lirn yall. it wood also bee very difikult tuh read but y'kant hav ev'rything

#linguistics #amateur linguistics hour #silliness #sleep deprived #aaron earned an iron urn

[tlaquetzqui]

“This person used emoji to convey a message, they’ve reinvented hieroglyphic!”

No they’ve reinvented Nsibidi. That’s proto-writing. True writing, like hieroglyphic, involves actually conveying the specific words of a specific phrase, with no more ambiguity to a reader of that script than there would be if you heard someone say it out loud.

For example, 🤴⚔️🐉 conveys the general idea of a king fighting a dragon. But in hieroglyphs you would write something like 🪿🤴⚔️🌊🐍👄🪿🐉 “The king warred against the dragon”, because Egyptian has articles (in the Late period and Coptic); it inflects verbs for person, gender, and tense; and it has to use prepositions to express the object of intransitive verbs like “to war”.

All those extra emoji represent the extra grammatical information: many hieroglyphs were used solely as phonetic signs to show inflections, like if the hiragana parts of Japanese were still written as the man-yogana kanji they derive from. (I chose those symbols because the Late Egyptian masculine definite article was written with a goose, albeit in flight; the third person masculine singular verb ending was little waves; the past tense was a snake; and “against” was a mouth.)

#berserk button #salty amateur linguist #linguistics

[animeomelette]

Thinking about how /hʌŋ/ is a valid word in English phonotactics but /ŋʌh/ isn't, and having some observations about attempting to pronounce such a sequence.

Trying to pronounce /ŋʌ/ takes a small amount of practice to learn to stop saying /n̩ˈgʌ/ (saying /nʌ/ first and then attempting /ŋʌ/ makes it easier), although as an onset rather than a coda my pronunciation inconsistently wanders between [ɳ], [ɲ], and [ŋ] with [ɲ] immediately sounding incorrect to my ears.

Trying to pronounce any syllable with a /h/ as the coda is essentially impossible for me. My brain simply refuses to accept that /ʌh/ is a different thing to /ʌ/ and any attempt to force it either just makes me change the vowel quality or results in me saying something similar to /ʌx/. (Trying this with different vowels produces similar results)

#english phonology #language #linguistics #extremely amateur linguistics which is probably riddled with errors #english phonotactics #phonology #phonotactics

[calandrinon]

"democracy is a verb not a noun"

like I see where you're coming from but it is very much a noun

even if you democracy your way into making it a verb it will still be a noun as well

also an adjective

that's how language works gdi

#this post brought to you by cranky amateur linguist gang #'democracy is a thing you do' yes! perfect! but it is a noun #you can't just de-noun something just so you can do a pithy rhetoric #someone else please draw the parallels to democracy itself #i have to do a thing

[theweirdshoelace]

While I'm no stranger to the unorthodox ways romance writers describe sex, I do like to be surprised. Today's unexpected phrase: 'I was as hard as advanced calculus'.

#absurdity and whimsy #amateur linguistics

[modernmutiny]

Language is so cool bc I'm writing in English rn to talk about how i was yelling italian commentary at a video of a woman speaking indonesian that i understood through french subtitles. All of this would have been unthinkable for a random 20something just thirty years ago but now with social media and the ubiquitousness of the internet that's just a regular fucking Tuesday and the world is just So Cool

#teddy talks #i dont speak much italian just enough to swear lol #but the fact that i could do that? i could speak english about italian to an indonesian woman through french...... just wow #as a amateur linguist im just floored by this realisation #go back to the 70s or even 90s and that kind of experience would be reserved only for the most elite academics and politicians #and now im doing this thru my phone in my pjs #so. cool.

[tiikerikani]

So here’s NOT summer vacation project 2022. In case it isn’t super-obvious (and there are subtitles again), the whole thing is... very personal? Like the lyrics and the imagery and all. Also, you get to see a bit of my infamous dancing!

I’ll try to get the link to Senpai when I see them again in a couple of weeks, but considering how long he took to get back to me last time, I decided I wouldn’t withhold it from my friends/the fanclub/everybody.

I actually found this more challenging to sing than Turisti:

There are no harmony parts to tell me that I'm out of tune, and having either a ton more or very little movement in the accompaniment also makes it harder to notice when I’m off. I mean, I can fix some of it but it's better to be (more) correct to begin with, and/or to be able to catch it early on.

Having the higher notes in the chorus, so I have to pull it off nicely multiple times (instead of like only in the bridge section last time)

Related to the above, generally it’s harder to move upwards stepwise than it is to go downwards.

Other little linguistic things I noticed (not necessarily for the first time) while making this:

Diphthongs are hard to get right in Finnish, because they work slightly differently than in English. In Finnish you want to evenly split the time between the two vowels, while in English you tend to spend more time on the first vowel.

You also have to pay extra attention to non-diphthong vowel combinations, since the same principle applies there too. For example, I had to really really exaggerate word-final /ie/ to actually hear both vowels (so like /ije/). It’s not so different from the treatment for the ий /ij/ combination when singing in Russian (and Ukrainian), where you kind of add a schwa to the end. (Just something I remember from choir, where nobody ever remembers to do this loudly enough.)

Word final /n/ is also difficult to enunciate clearly; in some circumstances it’s not a huge deal since it is also very weak in spoken Finnish. Other times it can mess with understanding the text, though.

Non-linguistic observations:

Dramatic protagonist walk is 50% the speed of normal walk.

The dance bits are at 70% the actual speed, which is kind of interesting considering I did those to the original song (which is the same tempo as my cover). This jibes with the time people were impressed/weirded out by how I tend to move faster to a song than they would. (It’s kind of the reverse of how pop music people count bpm vs how classical music people count it. Weird in any case.)

YouTube is (apparently?) able to flag specifically when you’re doing cover songs. This didn’t happen last time—but then, it has always been very hit-or-miss. Sometimes it doesn’t even manage to flag the original track :D

Random trivia:

There was a random discarded couch at the top of the stairs.

#music #music video #cover songs #singing #linguist problems #vesterinen yhtyeineen #sitting in the grass is probably going to become one of my tropes #amateurs gonna amateur #NOT summer vacation project 2022