Live the Languages

A blog dedicated to my love of languages

[spanishskulduggery]

When your second language is ruining your ability to spell in your native language:

"You wrote responsable. Did you mean responsible?” 

"Ah you’re right. Gracias, Microsoft Palabra. I’ll try to keep that in mente.”

[spanishskulduggery]

Hi! This isn't really a question for homework or an exam or anything, it's just curiosity. Why is it "conmigo" and "contigo" instead of "con mí" and "con ti"? I thought that maybe that was a common thing in Romance languages, but it isn't.

Because it comes from Latin.

What started as me cum and te cum and se cum in Latin turned into mecum, tecum, and secum in Latin. They started to add another cum in front to make it more apparent.

What’s funny is that the cum in Latin turned into con “with” in Spanish. Thus, it became funnily more emphatic: cum mecum, cum tecum, cum secum.

As the C sound in mecum turned into a G over time, and the cum turned to con you ended up with…

conmigo = “with me” = cum mecum

contigo = “with you” = cum tecum

consigo = “with him / her / it / You (formal) / they (plural)” = cum secum

The only pronouns spared that were vosotros and nosotros. 

Actually very old Spanish had forms that are now antiquated: con(n)usco and convusco. They come from cum noscum and cum voscum. I write connusco with the two N’s because I’m more used to seeing it that way, but modern Spanish doesn’t like double letters much (except for RR or LL)… and because it makes it clear it’s Latin. 

These became obsolete between 1100 and 1500. They were totally obsolete once the Renaissance began, only brought up by people who were mastering Latin or very educated; often the clergy.

The reason you still have mí, ti, and sí as dative “for me”, “for you”, “for him/her/it/they” is because there were also dative markers for Spanish.

The Spanish dative markers were influenced by Latin. They were mihi, tibi, sibi, nobis, and vobis. 

Over time they were replaced by the Spanish accusative (direct objects) me, te, se, nos, vos. Except in the cases of a + dative, de + dative, por + dative… generally a preposition + dative still earns a mí, ti or sí because they dropped the final syllable, and nobis and vobis were left out in favor of nosotros and vosotros.

In short: Spanish had dative, but replaced it with accusative. So now Spanish has accusative markers for indirect (dative) AND direct (accusative) objects.

Which I guess makes it easier for people studying Spanish with less to remember. The correlation between me and mihi etc. was probably obvious enough that it didn’t make much difference when me was used for both.

…

The real reason you don’t say con mí is because mí is dative. It implies “for me” and with “with me” there’s no object being acted upon; nothing’s being done for something else so it’s not really dative case.

Which is why it’s conmigo and not con mí.

Same for contigo and consigo.

And with connusco and convusco out of date, they can only use con nosotros and con vosotros.

Teachers generally try to leave the etymology and linguistics out of the discussion of why con mí is wrong because unless you’re studying Latin or German or Russian, case systems aren’t something English speakers really know much about.

Plus big scary linguistics scare the newbies.

[melomanaaaaa]

Spanishskulduggery slaying the Spanish game. you lost me back at accusative & dative because i’m a useless Anglophone and was mondo confused

[spanishskulduggery]

Accusative means “direct objects”; an object that is directly acted upon in a sentence.

Dative means “indirect objects”; something or someone for whom an action is done.

So if you take the sentence, “I send the letter to my mother”… the “letter” is the direct object (accusative) being acted upon, and the “my mother” is the indirect object (dative) for whom the action is being done.

There’s not much of a clear distinction between dative and accusative in modern English with the noticeable exception of “whom”, where “whom” is dative - “to whom”, “for whom”, “with whom” etc.

[thewantsies]

See this? This is a fantastic illustration of why a little linguistics goes a long way with language learning. Instead of just telling students that something is an exception to a rule, tell them why it is that way. Make it make sense, and they won’t have as much trouble with it!

Irish-language teachers should especially take note of this, because Irish-language pedagogy is fucking AWFUL.

[helpimtrappedontheinternet-deac]

I don’t understand why Intro to Linguistics/Ling 101/whatever your school calls it isn’t a requirement for foreign language degrees. In most school it counts as a gen ed requirement anyway, so foreign language major advisers should absolutely be telling their students to take a linguistics course, even if they don’t add it as a requirement to the degree.

[cinco-lenguas-encantadas]

Oh my god, this makes me so happy to learn! I had always wondered why things were, and now I'm studying Russian at uni so I actually ge the whole case thing (if only this had been described to me sooner)

[prototumblinguist]

These aren’t all actually resources. I’m just going through my favorites folders and pasting the links. (I have a lot of favorites so I organized them into folders. There’s Ling, Interesting Things, and Python (the programming language). Within Ling, there’s Linguistics and Languages, and some...

[cinco-lenguas-encantadas]

I seriously love this so much thank you

[apprendre-le-francais]

Les adjectifs et leurs contraires.

[linguadolce]

petition to get the language nerds of tumblr playing neopets in foreign languages

whos with me

[allthelanguages]

omg what did i start

but yea I’m in

[wontletitpassmebyagain]

I was totally addicted to neopets when I was 12…aka 14 years ago. Half tempted to join in on this trend to help with my French.

[laslanguesromanze]

This definitely started tonight.

[langagehumain]

I actually spent a good hour trying to reclaim the account I made like eight years ago, to no avail.

[cinco-lenguas-encantadas]

can we please do this omg/ is this still going on? I have a month before school starts to be a neopet addict once more

[topofrancais]

[arabicway]

Hi guys, do you remember the colors in Arabic?

[languageadventurer]

We learned some colors today in class!

[multilinguatastic-deactivated20]

GUYS!!!

[benkyogo-deactivated20190412]

RESOURCE: USING ANKI TO LEARN JAPANESE EFFECTIVELY

If you haven’t heard of Anki before now, I’m about to introduce you. It will definitely improve your ability to learn Japanese vocabulary, Kanji, and even grammar if used in the right way.

What is Anki SRS?

Anki is a free piece of software that enables you to create ‘decks’ of flashcards. It uses a technique called SRS (Space Repetition System) which basically means that the better you are at recognising a card, the less it will ask you to recall it. This basically does all the hard work for you!

How does it work?

You can either create decks or download one of the many decks available. Here is a preview of some of the downloadable decks available with a search of ‘Japanese’:

On each card there will be 2 ‘sides’. Side A will be, for example, the English word. Side B will be the Japanese equivalent. Think of the answer, then press ‘show answer’. If it was easy to remember, click ‘Easy’ and Anki will take a while to ask you again. If it was hard, click ‘hard’ and it’ll ask you within a few days. Click ‘again’ if you got it wrong entirely, and Anki will ask you within a few minutes.

Anki is also great for learning more complicated things such as sentences and grammar. You can add as much or as little explanation as you like - whatever works best for you.

Anki has enabled me to practice and learn over 300 Kanji in 1 month. I simply made myself write the Kanji when the English word was displayed, and say the reading. I’ve also been using Anki to learn over 4000 vocabulary. It’s really difficult to keep up with Kanji and vocabulary when you aren’t constantly using them in an immersive environment, so Anki is a great way of sustaining this memory.

The best thing about Anki is that it is FREE, it has loads of plugins, you can design cards in many ways and even add images and audio files, and there’s loads of user generated content for Japanese.

The only cons I’ve found is that the iPhone application costs around £20 ($25), and also Anki does require daily use. You need to be committed to it, or your ‘due’ cards will build up.

EXTRA NOTE: You can customize Anki to look awesome like Nihongolog does here.

tl;dr: Download and start using Anki and see if it works for you!

[chillimuffin]

Can’t recommend Anki enough!

[cinco-lenguas-encantadas]

For any of my followers that would like to learn Japanese!

[wearetheshaken]

If you use “quote” as a noun, I am disappointed in you because you are the reason words cannot retain their original meaning.

[digatisdi-deactivated20140324]

Ƿæt! I’m assuming you use “snow” as a verb when it was exclusively a noun until the...

[cleocliche-blog]

YOU NIQQAS WANNA LEARN ELVISH?! HERE YA GO!

[lokidindeed]

this makes me think about the post about the two girls who didn’t want to get caught sendes notes in class so they learned elvish

[allthingslinguistic]

As a linguist, I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with programmers about the similarities between linguistics and coding.

Here’s an example of a simple linguistic tree structure for the sentence “The internet loves cats” (which of…

[aspiringpolyglot-blog]

I’ve always made the comparison for my students that while language can be very open and free there is also a system that works just like in coding.  I always tell them that a language is a catalog, which is a set of libraries, which is a set of folders, a set of documents, a set of … I’ve even, whilst tutoring, made charts that look similar to this (I’ll post pictures later on my blog) in order to help with the use of certain patterns, such as verbs like gustar in Spanish.  I remember a long time ago my sister had to take a coding class in middle school and the program that she used would turn a certain color when she started a line with ( and would not close that color off until she ended with a ) somewhere along the lines.  Even now in Excel, one of my favorite programs in the Microsoft Office set because of this, you can use conditionals and nestled if functions that basically do the same thing.  Even more basic commands, like multiplying “(9*3)+3” or clicking a cell and then multiplying it “(A3*A4)” will be purple and then “+G8” will be green or whatever color.  It is so much fun for me to figure out these “on and off” codes that allow a language to work the way that it does and I am so glad that somebody was able to put this into words for me and that I could elaborate on how I think.

[fuckyeahmylanguage]

Cool, my Spanish teacher in high school used to do what you show in those photos but I didn’t know anything about coding so I never made the connection :p

[allthingslinguistic]

An anaphora joke, from A Walk in the WoRds:

A wife asks her husband, “Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk, and if they have avocados, get 6.” A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk. The wife asks him,…

[fuckyeahmylanguage]

i haven’t even taken a course on anaphora (yet) and i just laughed

[cinco-lenguas-encantadas]

I find this funny too

[megamphetamine-deactivated20191]

So I’ve been trying to learn Greenlandic, and it’s hard to find any resources because it isn’t the most common thing ever. If you have enough determination, you CAN learn it but I figured I’d make your life easier and post some links that have been helpful.

Alphabet…

[markedbysunspots-blog]

Grice’s conversational maxims.

aka, conversational rules that we all break.

[wuglife]

The best way to think about Grice’s Maxims that I’ve ever encountered is that

They are NOT RULES.

They are baseline conventions

Flouting them is adding a layer of meaning, not “breaking a rule”

This means that you aren’t “doing something wrong” when you respond to “How are you doing today?” with “It’s raining.” It means you are actually giving an even more meaningful statement.

Let’s break this down a tad:

Read More

[cinco-lenguas-encantadas]

So I really love this (read the read more, it's amazing)

[laiquendi]

The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word “nosotras,” I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanos use nosotros whether we’re male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.

Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (via guayasamins)

[selchieproductions]

You’re more likely to find a unicorn sporting a tutu while reciting the collected works of Shakespeare in Klingon than you are to find a word that is truly untranslatable.

[translatingforchildrenandya-blog]

Not having a “literal” equivalent doesn’t...