Bilabial Fricative

MA in linguistics. You probably don't know as much about language as you think you do. Quintus canem pulsavit

[orteil42]

there should be more phoneme shifts happening… more rebracketings… there's still time for the english language to evolve… i hope to see the advent of "I wrote a nardicle" in my lifetime

[real-language-facts]

one may think "language" is french or spinach for "the nguage". this is a folk etymology myth, it is actually more like mile -> mileage. "How much language are you getting out ofthose words"

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[homoquartz]

i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.

[piratedgender]

[themisally]

[dramatic-dolphin]

i keep trying to phrase a post as like a helpful tip for people who like worldbuilding but. i have to be honest with myself. it is not a helpful tip because no one asked for it. i just want to rant about kinship terminologies.

[dramatic-dolphin]

i can't even phrase it, my brain rn is basically just. "THIS! LOOK AT THIS!"

^^ LOOK AT IT ^^

[dramatic-dolphin]

i am also presenting anyone who wants with the wikipedia page for australian aboriginal kinship. btw. if you care.

[thatdisasterauthor]

Oh, this is fascinating!

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

‘roofs’ looks unbelievably stupid typed out. why can we not say ‘rooves.’ clown language with clown plurals

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

If the plural of roof were rooves, the singular of grooves would have to be groof. Is that what you want?

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

point taken I’ll do anything to avoid groof

[monidoll]

instant loss 2koma

[prokopetz]

The really funny part is that many modern sources that want to gas up Sparta will bring up this specific anecdote, but stop at the "if" and just not mention what happened immediately afterwards.

[elucubrare]

similarly, "μολὼν λαβέ" (come and take them) is a really cool thing to say, made significantly less cool by having them taken

[cabbageheadgames]

[bilabialfricative]

You may notice that they call Sparta "Laconia" in that quotation and that kind of short, terse, blunt type of response is exactly why we get the term "Laconic" from this name for Sparta

[thekinglemingle]

I referred to something as a "real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment" in conversation with someone who has never seen TNG, and let me tell you, that was a real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment

[patricia-taxxon]

i love explaining the etymology of the word "rickroll" because the story starts with "ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone's posts that changed the word egg to duck"

[maple-cloak]

[finnlongman]

You know, I've seen manuscript abbreviations that looked like text-speak, but hand-drawing emojis to stand in for the word ceann (head) in a passage about Cú Chulainn being beheaded is taking that all to a new level

(The line from another manuscript: "Is ann sin d'éirgedar datha aille iongantacha do cheann Choingculoinn")

Manuscript is RIA 23 H 10, Oidheadh Con Culainn, written in 1808.

[finnlongman]

BREAKING NEWS HE DID IT AGAIN

"a cheann do bheith ar an ngad" but obviously when talking about heads on sticks we should just draw a ☹️ instead

[finnlongman]

He just keeps doing it. Every time somebody gets beheaded in this text, the word "ceann" gets replaced with 😐 And a lot of people get beheaded in this text (thanks Conall), so this happens a lot.

"Do bhain an 😐 de" He struck the head from him

[prokopetz]

Settle an argument: where do you infix "fucking" in the name of Kalamazoo, Michigan?

Kalafuckingmazoo

Kalamafuckingzoo

Other (I'm a big weirdo)

I have no strong opinions about fucking Kalamazoo

Voting ended onSep 17, 2025

[archipithecus]

people are saying in the tags that the rule is the expletive goes before the stressed syllable, but clearly none of them have read McCarthy 1982 “Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation”, or else they’d know the rule is “an infix may only lodge at the edge of a foot”

since Kalamazoo has an unstressed third syllable which isn’t part of a trochaic foot, the expletive can come either before or after, although it is interesting that tumblr is (currently) showing a strong but not overwhelming preference for Kalama-fucking-zoo. maybe people prefer to group the third syllable with the initial foot, maybe the binary choice is exaggerating the data

[selfmaderibcageman]

few understand just how many such cases there are

[kutyozh]

@schmilsson HELLO?

[greenteaforbreakfast]

@official-linguistics-post

[qubesos-official]

[transfemme-shelterdog]

French people when you call it bukake and not "nut a la visage" and shibari instead of "corde attacher l'submissive"

[transfemme-shelterdog]

Pisse? In le pantalons???

Mon tabarnak j'vais te décâlisser la yeule, câlice!

[pusheenthenerdcat]

hell yeah always reblog academie slander

[acquired-elfroot]

@icharchivist

[mymissalicorne]

Keeping prev tags because they're pretty useful

[ohnofixit]

As stated above, this parody has unfortunately lost its context

The article being parodied

French officials told to abandon gaming Anglicisms

Use “jeu video de competition” instead of "e-sports", language watchdog the Académie Française says.

[goatsandgangsters]

an interesting linguistics find! so I'm reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing "hp" in the context of "not being at full hp" "applying your full hp to a task" etc

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

language is amazing

[ryanestradadotcom-deactivated20]

[theserif]

Oh hey it’s back on my dash perfect!  I was just thinking of this the other day!

[historiaantiqua]

OHOHOHO wow the Korean alphabet is awesome. The people who designed it were geniuses and were obviously incredibly schooled in the morphology and phonology of their language. HNNGGG

[ask-feather-dae]

wow

[adhd-languages]

i’m obsessed with these…

(From DepthOfWikipedia on Instagram)

[unfavorableinstigation]

Canadian anglophones will say we have "cereal-box French".

[booksandchainmail]

The one I've always seen is "la plume de ma tante"

[tinsnip]

Parker le truck dans le garage

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

my favorite thing right now is how mad the official french language people are that parts of african languages are getting mixed into french

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

a huge percentage of the world's french speakers are in africa, and language evolves, so there's a lot of african phrases and speech patterns being incoorperated into french. the french language academy is losing their shit because european french people pick up african french from social media and are ruining the fancy shmancy purity of the language. it's hilarious

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

the best part of this post is the french people responding with rants about how much they fucking loath l'académie française

[targetedknowledge]