#languageposting

[tragedykery]

I love you phonetics I love you descriptivism I love you minority languages I love you dialects I love you accents I love you suffixes and prefixes I love you fossil words I love you outdated letters and pronouns I love you etymology I love you preservation of endangered languages I love you visible remnants of the way a language used to be I love you linguistics

#where are the linguistics enthusiast mutuals #elli rambles #language #linguistics #this post is brought to you by me being sad it will take a year longer for me to begin studying linguistics #love it when your disabilities get in the way of your dreams 🙃 #repetition #m #languageposting #breached containment (derogatory)

[werewolfetone]

Something very annoying to me is the number of posts on this site where (presumably?) monolingual anglophone users take a word from a language that does not identically share english pronunciation, such as french or irish, and make fun of the way it's pronounced because it doesn't identically share english pronunciation

#languageposting #jory.txt

[videogames-i-wish-were-real]

Videogames I wish were real #27

You know that trope of a character getting isekai'd to another world? Well, in this game that happens to you. You get teleported into another world but you have no idea why you are there because...

YOU. DON'T. SPEAK. THE. LANGUAGE.

The characters speak an entirely made up language. At the start of the game you select what language you (the player) speak, and the modes in which you want to play. The game has several modes both for languages and for story: Easy, Normal, Hard, Extreme and Realistic (the difficulties of both modes are independent, you can pick easy language mode but hard story mode and such)

Language modes:

Easy mode: the language spoken by the characters has a very similar grammar and rules to your native language (the equivalent of a Spanish speaker trying to learn Italian). Characters don't mind repeating stuff several times. An npc points at a tree, says a word and you get several options and need to choose what you think the word they said meant. In this mode, once you learn a word, the translation will be featured under it in any in-game texts.

Normal mode: the grammar and rules of the language spoken by the characters are noticeably different from your native language (the equivalent of an French speaker trying to learn German). Characters will only repeat stuff two times. Instead of choosing what a word means from several options, you need to type your guess. You will still get the translation of a word under it once you learn it, but instead of always being visible, you need to activate the subtitles by pressing a button.

Hard mode: the grammar and rules of the the language spoken by the characters are very different to your native language. Characters don't repeat stuff. No subtitles with translations or menus that ask you to guess what a world means. If you want to remember what something means, you will need to rely entirely on your memory or take notes.

Extreme mode: extremely different grammar and rules, and, on top of that, a different alphabet (the equivalent of an English speaker trying to learn Japanese). Characters don't repeat things. No subtitles with translations or menus that ask you to guess what a world means. You will need to take notes, a lot of notes.

Realistic mode: why is it called realistic? Well, because a world were people only speak one language would be unrealistic, right? So... in this mode, the people speak different languages, and as you travel through the world, you might need to learn more than one language to get by.

Story modes:

Easy mode: you get taken in by a family of farmers in a small village. The family you live with provide you with food and shelter in exchange for a small part of the wages you earn by helping them around the farm or doing errands for the townspeople. Everyone in the village is kind and eager to help you learn their language. As your language skills progress, so does the story.

Normal mode: an innkeeper in a medium sized village offers you work in their inn. Half your wages go to cover your food and room. As the days progress, so does the story, regardless of your progress in learning the language.

Hard mode: you appear in a city and need to fend for yourself since day one, doing whatever is necessary to get by. You will need to pay for your own food and shelter, but finding a job in a foreign world where you don't speak the language won't be easy, so at first you might need to resort to trickery or thievery to survive.

Extreme mode: you will appear in a war torn area and be forced to pick a side in the conflict, but you won't know which one is the good one, if there is any. You can choose to stay there or gather resources to earn enough money to travel to other areas untouched by the war.

Realistic mode: you will appear in a random location, it might be the middle of a forest, a quiet little village, the middle of a battlefield, a pirate ship... In previous story modes your actions and decisions could change the story. The same will happen here, however, the story won't wait for you, and you will be able to reject the call. You might be the prophesied hero destined to stop an evil wizard, but you might find out too late to stop them from conquering half the continent, or you might not feel like risking your life and opt for a quiet existence in a farm.

While the game is supposed to be about the player being transported to a different world where they speak languages different from our own, if you want to, you can select a real language to learn it through the game.

Similar videogames that actually exist: Terra Alia (suggested by anon)

#i've been playing totk so that got me into thinking about open world games and the languages people speak there and... this post happened #unlike duolingo i would never miss a day in this game #viwwr #language #lingustics #languageposting #language learning #educational games #open world games #isekai #videogames #video games #videogames i wish were real #writeblr #writers on tumblr #concepts #game design

[existencebringsonlypain]

insufferable is such a fantastic word

#i cannot suffer this. i cannot bear it #existenceunrelateds #words #languageposting #?

[de-sterren-nacht]

one of my favourite language facts is that the names mary and mario are entirely unrelated

mario comes from latin marius, the masculine form of the gens (roman clan) maria, possibly deriving from mars, the god of war, "mas-" meaning male (as in "masculine") or "mare" (ocean), which had the plural form of "maria" albeit pronounced differently, /'marɪ.a/ for the gens and uhh. /ˈmär.i.ə/ for the ocean i think?

mary comes from miriam (מִרְיָם‎), a hebrew name (possibly deriving from egyptian mr, meaning love), via its aramaic form mariam (ܡܪܝܡ), the name of the virgin mary, which was written by the early apostles in koine greek as Μαριάμ

#incoherent rambling #languageposting

[wuxianphobic]

complex chinese descriptive complements my beloathed

#WE ARE ENEMIES. #languageposting #mine

[violetreminder]

British people: You claim to hate the French, yet you refuse to free yourself from all their superfluous vowels and silent consonants, curious.

#languageposting #im doing my civic duty as a true francophone-hating american to reduce both vowel and individual word count #eachother is one word #the germans have the right idea on compound words #in case any weirdos find this post its (mostly) a joke

[xxxswaglord420xxx]

maybe i should just learn a russian language at least it wouldn't have german's problem of having Too Many Fucking Articles and also i could learn things to say other than privyet tovarich

#languageposting

[the-history-chap]

Yes, your city is a mess, but is it so bad that its name becomes synonymous with unorganized operations in completely different language?

#languageposting #saigon #ho chi minh #it comes from unorganized defence of Saigon during Vietnam War #vietnam war #fall of saigon

[ravenwolfie97]

hm. okay. i have a language complaint about genshin again

so like. english uses a lot of french words because there's a lot of french influence in the language, and i've said before that there's been a bit of a bias in the french terms used with and towards fontaine's characters in genshin

my complaint is that the french words we have in english aren't pronounced exactly like they would be in french - they're anglicized, pronounced slightly differently to match our accent

and seeing as fontaine is based pretty squarely on france, and many of the characters have names derived from french, it would be a little difficult to pronounce some of the phonemes used in the french language in english. though french is a lot more pedestrian to an english speaker than, say, chinese

so the real root of my complaint comes from a few certain examples, chief among them being the pronunciation of Monsieur Neuvillette. it's a name that pops up rather frequently, and is one of if not the most french names of any of the characters. and people really try their best to pronounce it right, and i know the directors try to help with that, but the tip they use is flawed, and i know just what it is

in french, the "eu" in something like Neuvillette's name isn't just an "oo" sound; a similar thing can be found in german words with the letter "ü". the tip that most language guides provide is to purse your lips like you're making an "oo" sound but place your tongue like you would when saying an "r" sound. that is at least a close approximation to how that phoneme is pronounced

However. where a lot of people slip up. Especially in genshin. is that they just say it with an "r" sound. like his name is "Nurvillette". which it is not. it is still a vowel. it's just not a straight "oo" sound like a mono-english speaker would expect it to be

i had heard this same thing happen again with the npc "Jurieu", where another character says his name like "Jurier". which, again, is incorrect. and it just really, really bothers me

main thing i dislike is that the many voice actors in fontaine either go too hard on pronouncing the french words 100% correctly in french accent and all OR butcher it completely by taking the shortcuts too literally. it doesn't have to be that hard. anglicize the word so that it sounds natural in english but still retains the sound as it would in french. i dunno. i'm way too distracted by this

#genshin impact #oh look at that raven is languageposting again with their amateur knowledge of language stuff #yeah i know but this has bothered me since the beginning of fontaine and really ticked me off just now with jurieu #i dislike the inconsistencies in pronunciation but i can expect that from person to person but it happens take to take as well #and i just. idk i don't think it should be that difficult to figure out but people are different and don't process language the same way

[tragedykery]

getting sad thinking about the dialects I would have known/spoken had it not been for the devaluation of “non-standard” variations of a language

#another reason why prescriptivism is the devil #it’s just. both my grandparents on my dad’s side speak/spoke dialects but they didn’t really pass them on to my dad bc it would have #hindered him in school. but bc he knows so little of them he doesn’t really feel connected to them either and didn’t pass the bits he does #know on to me either #also bc my mum is a prescriptivist with a capital letter and thinks dialects aren’t ‘good dutch’ #which. girl. you literally didn’t learn your ancestors’ (for lack of better word) dialect either #oh also. I didn’t learn the dialect of the city I was born in either bc we moved away before I could #elli rambles #it just. makes me sad #all this linguistic diversity harmed by standardisation and the idea that the only purpose of a language is to communicate with as many #people as possible. while it’s such an important part of culture too #etc etc sorry I’m rambling #languageposting #why is this getting notes

[werewolfetone]

Can't believe that if I want to learn a language I have to actually learn it & put effort into memorisation and continued use of the vocabulary rather than just waking up one day suddenly completely and permanently fluent. just unfair

#gripping the sink. in 17 months and approximately 2 weeks I will be able to look into actually learning irish for real. on a cosmic scale #that is an insignificant amount of time. absolutely miniscule. it's not very long. it's not. it's n #languageposting #jory.txt

[wariocompany]

Promo Q for Astérix gay sex to become canon in L'Iris Blanc and for languageposting!

#Please I NEED NEW MUTUALS

[natequarter]

sorry to the 2+ people who followed me for fandom and got extensive languageposting instead

[de-sterren-nacht]

< girl who can read ipa

#incoherent rambling #my mom works in speech language pathology so i just sort of picked it up #and also im autistic about linguistics #languageposting

[disaster-vampire]

two porn bots have followed my language sideblog that i barely use bc i always be languageposting on main and they're literally the only notifs i have on that blog