official-linguistics-post

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Can you tag your "chat is a pronoun" tangents? Sorry if this is condescending or cruel ^-^

i'm gonna do some fucking linguistics on "sorry if this is condescending or cruel ^-^" i can tell you that much.

your options here:

unfollow me

use xkit to block the root posts

use tumblr's native block settings to catch the phrase "chat is a pronoun" within posts

#curate your own goddamn experience

[official-linguistics-post]

to address some of the comments i've seen:

pronouns generally are a closed lexical category in english. that's part of why i talked about neopronouns, because they're attempting to innovate in a space that doesn't typically accept new forms and facing barriers because of both that fact and social pushback. anon's tone does not make the information incorrect.

"closed class" is a descriptive property, not a mandate.

Why did you include neopronouns in your linguistic course? If you did, I hope you specified that neopronouns are neologisms (at least in English) and that pronouns are a pretty closed class category of words in English.

i really hope you didn't intend this to seem as condescending as it turned out <3

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So like i've heard english is 3 languages in a trenchcoat pretending to be one is that true?

it's greatly overexaggerated.

english is structurally a germanic language. it had a large influx of french vocabulary following the norman conquest, and it's picked up a lot of lexical items from other languages too, sometimes with their original morphology still attached (like pluralizing "addendum" as "addenda" the latin way, rather than english +(e)s plural).

so it's more like one language that really likes to accessorize and maybe kept the fancy suit that old norman left at its house one time.

#the suit is fancy because it was a prestige language btw

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the truth is that i danced around the classroom twirling my mustache and forcibly assigned every student a set of neopronouns that they are legally obligated to use for the rest of their natural lives

Why did you include neopronouns in your linguistic course? If you did, I hope you specified that neopronouns are neologisms (at least in English) and that pronouns are a pretty closed class category of words in English.

i really hope you didn't intend this to seem as condescending as it turned out <3

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does anyone know how 're' became the suffix for denoting when something is done multiple times? return, revisit, remember, revolve etc.

yep, here's the etymonline entry!

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Why did you include neopronouns in your linguistic course? If you did, I hope you specified that neopronouns are neologisms (at least in English) and that pronouns are a pretty closed class category of words in English.

i really hope you didn't intend this to seem as condescending as it turned out <3

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

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THERE WE GO.

out of curiosity do you know where/why peter t daniels separates scripts into 'true' alphabets, abugidas, and abjads? ive always found issue with this

hang on lemme borrow the book from archive.org for an hour and get back to you

#you'd think i might remember this but it's been fully a decade since i took a writing systems course beyond my specialty

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im sorry to bother you about smth you’re probably extremely sick of hearing about but can you reccomend any good papers/resources about what probouns are?afaik they can replace a noun and that’s pretty much it

i really can't, especially not on a layman's level - i'm not a syntactician and i don't have a broad grasp of the literature, i can just understand the things that i happen to grab. anybody have recs?

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no that's also kind of the sense i got from this book, albeit implied and not explicit, based on the specificity of saying that signs in a syllabary aren't graphically related. but then it never got followed up on re:abugida and i succumbed to doubt.

out of curiosity do you know where/why peter t daniels separates scripts into 'true' alphabets, abugidas, and abjads? ive always found issue with this

hang on lemme borrow the book from archive.org for an hour and get back to you

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ok that was faster than expected, thank you OCR gods. from page 4 of the world's writing systems (daniels and bright, 1996):

alphabet = characters represent individual consonants and vowels

abjad = characters represent consonants only

abugida = characters represent 1 consonant + 1 specific vowel

however i'd like to note that syllabaries can also have the abugida specification of a CV shape, so i guess a syllabary could also be an abugida...? don't quote me on that.

out of curiosity do you know where/why peter t daniels separates scripts into 'true' alphabets, abugidas, and abjads? ive always found issue with this

hang on lemme borrow the book from archive.org for an hour and get back to you

[official-linguistics-post]

out of curiosity do you know where/why peter t daniels separates scripts into 'true' alphabets, abugidas, and abjads? ive always found issue with this

hang on lemme borrow the book from archive.org for an hour and get back to you

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Just to clarify - I do not believe that chat is a pronoun, but that has got me thinking, what even defines a pronoun? At which point does a noun end and a pronoun begin?

just. glance through this chapter and please god maybe people will begin to understand why i cannot answer this in a simple and punchy post.

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The linguistics world feels so delightfully small sometimes. I recognise 80% of researcher names I come across now and it always makes me laugh

it's all fun and games until you're trying to track down sources but the source appears to be "an email chain from the 90s that led to 5 different publications"

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Just submitted my MA final exam answers (went with the non-thesis route) and damn is my brain exhausted. Well i can probably still talk at length about the different syntactic models for control structures

oh i feel that. i was useless for like 3 weeks after submitting my dissertation to the committee but could've given a presentation about it on autopilot anyway. congrats!!

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to reiterate: chat is a noun being used as a collective term of address, like "guys." the reason "you" can fill the same spot is because "you" is, in fact, a pronoun, meaning that it can replace a noun.

"chat is a pronoun" has officially joined my list of internet linguistics pet peeves. "emojis are hieroglyphs" is welcoming them to the club.

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your battle against chat is never ending. i salute you brave soldier

i wish it need not have happened in my time.......

#i let out the DEEPEST sigh at every new fucking note on that post that has clearly refused to go interrogate their assumption