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祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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@apunninglinguist
“I suffer from Dysania” sounds way better than “oh me and my lazy ass are late for work again”. I am so gonna use it…
Nurdle is my new favourite word.
Henceforth all my students will be taught the word “overmorrow”. 明後日 does have an English equivalent.
I dunno, we’ve always called the foam on beer a ‘head’.
Learning modern languages: Hello! How are you? My name is Josh. I am happy today. Where is the bathroom please?
Learning ancient languages: Life is long and unbearably hard. Each day barbarians slaughter another member of my family. Pirates, sailing swiftly across the wine-dark sea, have kidnapped my sister and stolen our grain. We are starving. Oh immortal gods! Soon we all will die.
What did the intransitive verb say when told it was pretty?
Nothing. Intransitive verbs can’t take a complement.
Hello
Hello Allow me to introduce myself One of myself The self I made special Just for you because I thought you would like it. But not too special You see I make one for everyone I just like this one the best Because I wore the idea Of a me that was made for you Like a favorite sweater You know Sentimental value and all that.
You don’t like it do you? Don’t lie, your eyes already told me everything. Don’t worry I’ll just make another one You’re bound to like one of me.
Hello Allow me to introduce myself I am a storm A force of nature A force to be reckoned with My surgewater soul My hurricane heart Will drag you out to sea And keep you there Tossing, no, rocking you Natural disasters have no notion of tenderness I guess no one ever told you Storms are only beautiful From a safe distance and in concept.
What’s that? You can’t swim? You should have mentioned that back at shore.
Hello Allow me to introduce myself I am a disease of the most virulent kind I will infect you With my bacteria-self The microbes of me Will make homes of your eyes Until you hallucinate a reality in which this is healthy While I tiptoe through your veins Seep into your heart I’ll eat you from the inside out Consume you cell by cell And the worst of it is You won’t even realize I’m killing you.
Did I mention The only solution is amputation? What are you doing with that knife?
Hello Allow me to introduce myself I am a hope you had for a better life I am everything you need An ocean of understanding The very embodiment Of lightheartedness and grace In whose soul sits a songbird. I am not shattered into A thousand shards of me My thoughts are not Slicing me apart like razorblades I’m one whole person about one day a week. The rest of the time I’m just everything else.
Wait a minute You wanted me to be me all the time? Well at least we have that much in common.
Hello Allow me to introduce myself I am nothing Before I become a thing you regret The least of your worries Until suddenly I’m all of them The antidote until One day I am the poison You won’t remember How it began It wasn’t nearly so remarkable As the magnificence of the flames in which it ended Maybe the fire Will finally reduce me to something simple.
Could you love me If I was simple? If I was boiled away To just one thing Could you still call it me?
Hello Allow me to introduce myself and myself and myself. I am too much Too many I have to go now
Goodbye.
There’s probably a German compound word for that feeling you get at 2am when you’re single in your mid twenties and the creeping doubt that you’ve somehow missed your only chance at love because you didn’t meet someone in college and now it’s too late
The german word you are looking for is ‘Torschusspanik’
ah, i found the title of my autobiography
How would you incorporate mirrors into your clothing?
It is remarkable just how many questions I am able to answer with this photo.
The time is upon me to reblog this post.
I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive. So why is dog-sorting intuitive?
Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things - whether animals, words, situations or experiences - our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before - whether first-hand or through a story - then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy * Specific!! Squawking noise!! * The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye * Patriotism?!? * CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD
Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs * Meat Eater * Soft friend * Doggo-ness???? * Walkies * An Snout, * BORK BORK
Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely - seems to be self-propelled.) * Alien? (Unlikely - no real alien ever experienced.) * Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.) * Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!) * Very fluffy cat? (Maybe - but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!) * Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type) * Robotic toy? (Unlikely - too complex and convincing.) * alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a … * DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space! * Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game. * Best doggo. * PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.
And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
Re dyed my friends hair yesterday ✨💥
The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.
If any of my followers are interested in doing some cool language conservation work in June or July, you should check out this link. It’s field research on one of a number of Native American languages (Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and Dakota), based in one of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.
“Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds” [Wikipedia]
Does this apply to when you’re trying to listen to things but they stop making sense at some point even though you know you should be capable of understanding it?
(Because that happens to me in french on bad days)
Changes in understanding for audio cues can be due to the semantic satiation (“I’m hearing ‘crayon’ but that set of sounds means nothing anymore.”) or something called verbal transformation effect where the speaker is producing the same sounds but your analysis/interpretation starts morphing unconsciously (“They’re saying crayon, crayon, crayon, cram, crane, Krang, *carm, grand, gram…”). Either could lead to that “I know I knew this, but it makes no sense right now” feeling.
A cool Language Log post with resources
Reading the Entire English Dictionary in One Video!
Linguistic and academic valentines, via twitter.
(More context on Stroop tests, grue, “i lik the bred”, and the stress system of English poetry.)
A basic schematic of why the Korean alphabet is so cool, from Wright House:
Unlike almost every other alphabet in the world, the Korean alphabet did not evolve. It was invented in 1443 (promulgated in 1446) by a team of linguists and intellectuals commissioned by King Sejong the Great.
In the diagram [above], the Korean consonants are arranged into five main linguistic groups (one per row), depending on where in the mouth contact is made. Notice that there is a graphic element common to all the consonants in a particular row. The first consonant in each row is the most basic and is graphically the simplest; this representative consonant for each group is the building block for the other characters in that group. Certain of these modifications are systematic, and yield similarly modified characters in several groups, such as adding a horizontal line to a simple consonant (a “stop” consonant–such as t/d or p/b–rather than a nasal consonant) to form the aspirated consonants (those made with extra air) and doubling simple consonants to form “tense” consonants (no real equivalent in English).
Notice that the five representative consonants (the ones in the first column in the upper part of the diagram) are also depicted in the drawings that make up the lower part of the diagram showing the relevant part of the mouth involved. Ingeniously, each of these representative consonants is a kind of simplified schematic diagram showing the position of the mouth in forming those consonants.
More details, including subsequent historical changes to Hangul, in the Wikipedia article.
Life goal achieved - be fit enough to intimidate dude bro guys.
A little over a year ago I decided I wanted to get hench so that I could intimidate men. I have now been accepted as ‘one of the guys’ at the gym of the hotel I’m currently staying in, and today someone singled me out as the most worthy opponent for a challenge he called “The Man-Maker”. I beat him. Alongside the usual comments I seem to get whenever I exercise/exist corporeally, such as “You must work out a lot” and the ever popular “How are you doing that with your body?”, I also god “Fuck you’re scary”. Excellent, my plan seems to be working.
þ!
A feature of English which I think is stupid,
If we’re carrying on with this game,
Is how we abolished the thorn and replaced it,
With two letters that meant the same.
The þ was a letter, amazing, astounding,
Perfect in every respect,
Representing the ‘th’ sound and shortening words,
The one thing it didn’t expect;
One day T and H went and burgled its meaning,
And then, thanks to the printing press,
Its symbol mutated and morphed into Y,
Which is pointless, I must confess.
Þoughtlessly, the þ was forgotten,
Þreatened as the language evolved,
Þankful for þose who knew of old English,
A topic where it was involved.
It only survived in Modern Icelandic,
In English it’s treated with scorn,
And as barely anyone knows it exists,
Please try to remember the thorn.
ð!
Saving the thorn from obscurity is surely a laudable aim but if this letter deserves our praise the eth should receive the same.
The scribes of the Anglo-Saxons interchanged the eth and thorn until the first one fell from use and the second was left forlorn,
But for the modern Icelander their roles are more defined and could improve our English texts if we were so inclined.
The thorn (Þ, þ) denotes a voiceless dental fricative as in the English ‘think’ or ‘thresh’ but not the ‘th’ in ‘hither,’ whereas the eth (Ð, ð) is a voiced dental fricative perfect for ‘this’ and ‘that’ and most especially for ‘thither.’
So I propose ðey boþ be used in the Icelandic manner; ðen students won’t be loaþ to learn our spelling and our grammar.
To þink we’ve never fixed ðis mess is really quite astounding. One letter cluster for two sounds? Ðat’s damnably confounding!
Linguistics, my old friend.
I grew some new colours this week
