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#Linguistics
prokopetz · 2 days
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All I'm saying is anybody who thinks the Japanese animation industry commits uniquely baffling crimes upon the English language has not properly appreciated what it does to German.
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max1461 · 2 days
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My sociolinguistics course in undergrad was taught by an L2 AAVE speaker: the professor was half-black and raised in an approximately GenAm speaking environment, but acquired fluency in AAVE later in life. The course was about 1/2 general sociolinguistics, 1/4 sociolinguistics of AAVE specifically, and 1/4 "AAVE for GenAm speakers", which was pretty fun. We were tested on AAVE grammar but I have since forgotten how all the auxiliaries work.
The professor had strong opinions about the 1996 Ebonics controversy, namely that (despite the given justifications by the Oakland school board being linguistically nonsense) teaching black students in AAVE would have been desirable both because it would have lead to better learning outcomes and because it would have increased the prestige of AAVE as a dialect. I think she was probably more or less right on both points. AAVE can be quite divergent from GenAm, and teaching kids in the language they speak generally results in them understanding you better. Of course one runs into practical issues with the availability of textbooks and so on, but that seems pretty solvable (both through writing new textbooks in AAVE and teaching AAVE speakers English as a second language, which would naturally be pretty easy for them).
Anyway. Long story short I think part of her deal is that she was LARPing the better world in which "AAVE as a second language" is a class you could take. And it was quite enjoyable to get to participate.
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tumbler-polls · 22 hours
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Tag your native language!
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usually-main-spend · 2 days
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https://ashley-972.ludgu.top/s/DxLBYj8
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yvanspijk · 2 days
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Duke, -duce, Herzog & ziehen
Duke comes from the Latin word dux (leader). It's related to the verb dūcere (to lead; pull), whence English -duce, for example in to seduce (whose original Latin meaning was 'to lead astray').
The second part of German Herzog (duke) is cognate to dux. This part, -zog, is related to the German verb ziehen (to pull), cognate of dūcere.
Old English had cognates of both words. Its counterpart of Herzog was heretoga (army leader). In Middle English it became heretowe, which would've become modern *hartow. The Old English cognate of ziehen was tēon. This verb would've become *to tee if it had continued to exist. See the infographic for information about its past tense and past participle.
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dedalvs · 15 hours
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Hello David, love your work and i hope you are well! If you are still taking High Valyrian questions, I have one about the words for colors (or should I say color groups in this case...?). Was there a particular inspiration or reasoning behind which colors got grouped together under which word?
Thank you and have a nice day!
We know a lot about how color terms evolve over the years. There are some common patterns regarding when new color terms emerge. In conlanging, the goal is to figure out where on that trajectory your conlang's speakers lie (assuming they're humans and the evolution is more or less natural). The landmark study was done by Berlin and Kay in 1969. The snapshot version of it is this:
STAGE 1: white vs. black
STAGE 2: white, black, red
STAGE 3: white, black, red, green, yellow
STAGE 4: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue
STAGE 5: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown
STAGE 6: everything
High Valyrian is at stage 3. Now, it's very important to remember that we're talking about the development of color terms, not color perception. Individual variation aside, human eyes are the same and perceive things just as well now as they used to. That is, just because a language has fewer color terms doesn't mean those speakers can't distinguish between the two colors. Consider that we can have varying shades of what we would call sky blue and just because we'd call them all "blue" or even call them all "sky blue" doesn't mean we can't pick out a pattern going from dark to light and repeating quite easily. Basically, as differentiating color becomes more commercially important, more terms emerge.
So, long story short, I decided it would be good for High Valyrian to be at stage 3, because then it would be more interesting for the daughter languages. That is, if there's no distinction between blue and green (both kasta), maybe northern daughter languages have kasta as "blue" and take some other word for "green" based on "leaf", or something, while the southwestern languages use kasta for "green", and maybe add iēdar "water" on the front of kasta for "blue", or something like that. Thus the daughter languages can be grouped by the new color terms that developed as their speakers left the Valyrian Peninsula and settled in their new home. If High Valyrian was already stage 6 the result would be far less interesting.
That's the story behind it. :)
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defectivegembrain · 18 hours
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Fascinated by when Jeff describes Britta as "pro-anti". Like that's just two prefixes shoved together with no base! Would be utterly bizarre and paradoxical without context, but we know exactly what he means in reference to Britta! The eternal wonders of morphology!
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kwekstra · 4 months
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Highlights from the conference room where they nominated contenders for Word of the Year 2023:
• They put Skibidi Toilet on the projector to explain what “skibidi” means.
• Baby Gronk was mentioned.
• We discussed the Rizzler.
• “Cunty” was nominated.
• “Enshittification” was suggested for EVERY category.
• “Blue Check” (like from Twitter) was briefly defined as “Someone who will not Shut The Fuck Up”
• The person writing notes briefly defined babygirl as “referencing [The Speaker]”. He is now being called babygirl in the linguist groupchats.
• MULTIPLE people raised their hand to say “I cannot stress this enough: ‘Babygirl’ refers to a GROWN MAN”
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victusinveritas · 13 days
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yeehawpim · 6 months
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when your grammar accidentally transfers
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dndspellgifs · 7 months
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look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,
If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.
Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.
What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.
Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.
Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.
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max1461 · 2 days
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Tense/modal auxiliary on the model of gonna < going to, trynna < trying to, finna < fixing to: tempna < attempting to
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littlemizzlinguistics · 5 months
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Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how "your generation can't speak right/ you're butchering the language" they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn't language wonderful?"
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I mean that about sums it up
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Every single person studying a language when they recognize the most basic word of the language in a text or a video
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janmisali · 7 months
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one of those pop linguistic lists of untranslatable words except they don't tell you what they mean (because they are untranslatable)
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