Conlangs & Tea

I usually sit at my computer studying linguistics, conlanging, and drinking tea.  For the most part, this blog is as social as it gets. I'll post about linguistics humor, my conlangs, and tea. My side/personal blog is My General Failing of Life

[writingquotes-deactivated201509]

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.

James Nicoll (via writingquotes)

[alltimeloe]

social experiment time

reblog and put in the tags what time your school starts and what time you wake up in the morning

[linguisten]

The relationship between orthography and meaning

[by XKCD]

[dialmformara]

There’s an /i/ in /tim/, Cueball, so shut up and cooperate.

[linguisten]

Orthography, not orthoepy. 

[sparkcbc]

Internet Linguistics — Q&A with David Crystal

David Crystal is a world-renowned linguist. He’s the author of over 100 books, and an advocate of what he calls “Internet Linguistics” – an approach to understanding how we use language online. Nora Young interviewed David for Spark 220. This Q&A is a lightly edited version of that interview.

You’ve written about how texting and tweeting are good things for language. Why is that?

Whenever new technology comes along people always get worried about it, as far as language is concerned. It’s not just with the Internet. When telephones arrived in the 19th century, people panicked because they thought it was going to destroy language. Then broadcasting comes along in the 1920s and people panicked because they think everybody’s going to be brainwashed.

Same with the Internet. People panicked because they thought the Internet was going to do devastating things to language.

In each particular case, what you see is an expansion of the expressive richness of language. In other words, new ways of talking and communicating come along. The Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication. Long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguistic possibilities.

One of the most intriguing ideas in Internet Linguistics is that online communication is actually more like speaking than writing. This seems counterintuitive.

It’s a real problem, because we haven’t got the right terminology. Traditionally, we’re so used to talking about speech on the one hand, writing on the other. Then along comes a technology which is essentially through the fingers – and yet we talk about “chat rooms” and we talk about having an email “conversation,” and so on.

It’s been a very uncertain era. But we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The big thing that’s going to happen over the next 10 years is that the Internet is going to become increasingly audio, in all sorts of different ways. The balance is going to change, and I think we’re going to see language on the Internet become increasingly conversational, and spoken, as a result.

In Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, which you published back in 2008, you were responding in part to the concerns that students were using text-speak abbreviation in their essays. What did your research discover about the way students wrote?

There were all sorts of myths surrounding text messaging when it came in in the early 2000s in the UK. The myth was that young people are filling their text messages with abbreviations, that they’re inventing them to keep adults out of their lives, that they can’t spell, that they’re putting them into their homework, and all this.

As the research built up, it showed conclusively that none of these things were happening, that in the average text message only about 10 percent of the words are abbreviated, that most of the abbreviations in texting are ancient – things like LOL, laughing out loud, that’s new – but something like “C” for “see” and “U” for “you” and all of those, they go back hundreds of years in English.

Really?

Queen Victoria used to play rebus games with her kids, and Lewis Carroll used to play games like this, where you’d put up a little puzzle where all the words were shortened in that sort of way.

A famous example from Queen Victoria’s time was in a puzzle magazine where this is what you saw: you saw a number two, and then you saw a little buzzy bee, and then you saw the thing you drive a rowing boat with, and then you see a piece of string tied up, and so on. You have to decode it.

“To be or not to be?”

Exactly.

That’s fun.

Yeah, it’s great fun and it’s all going on 100 years or more before texting was ever invented. Lots of these things go back a long way.

Since you wrote your book Txtng, a lot’s happened; Twitter and smartphones have become mainstream. And of course it’s not just the kids who use these kind of technologies. How have people’s perceptions of online language changed? Do we still have that kind of cultural anxiety, or has that abated?

It’s certainly abated in this country, but it’s part of the novelty of the medium. As soon as a new medium comes along and people start using it, there is this moral panic that associates with it, really.

That seems to have died away an awful lot now, in the UK. I think I notice it still quite strongly in the United States; I don’t know what it feels like in your part of the world.

The panic has deteriorated mainly because people have become more comfortable with it. People realize that there’s a time and a place for everything. They realize that there are different styles, and they see that the original fear – that language was going to alter fundamentally because of these novelties – just hasn’t happened.

It’s taken about 10 years, but they realize, actually, that 99.9 percent of all the language around the world is carrying on just in the same way as it was before the Internet came along in the first place. It’s just that the Internet has expanded the range of opportunities for people, so that if they choose to go on the Internet then they’ll do things they never did before. But the old language stays as strong as it ever was.

Online we have many different types of ways of communicating. We’ve got blogging, we’ve got group chat, we’ve got social networking, we’ve got message boards. Is it like a country with different dialects, where I speak Twitter and you speak Facebook? Or are there things that we can say about all online communication?

My view at the moment, after a lot of research has been done now, is that it’s a group of dialects. It’s very difficult to find even one or two criteria that you will find in every Internet situation, and the reason is that the technology constrains language in individual ways.

You have to respect what the technologists are doing here. In other words, you can’t assume that just because a usage is now, it will be the same in a year or so’s time.

A good example of this is Twitter. Twitter comes along in 2006, and the prompt was, “What are you doing?” so people responded by saying what they were doing. That means lots of first-person pronouns; “I am doing this,” “We are doing this,” lots of present tenses, “are doing,” and that was more or less it.

In November 2009 Twitter changed its prompt. Now we get, “What’s happening?” As soon as you do that, everything changes.

Now it’s about what’s going on so it’s third-person pronouns; “This is happening,” “He’s doing,” “She’s doing.” It’s past tense; “This has just happened.” It’s future; “This is about to happen.”

Have the conventions that people use online had any effect on the way people speak or write offline?

Not that I’ve seen. This is another myth.

Occasionally you get the odd thing that transfers. LOL is a good example. Young people often say, “Hey, LOL,” or something like that to each other, and it’s very cool. But there are not very many examples like that.

It’s a bit too soon to say, though. The whole business has been around, for most of us, less than 20 years, which is an eye-blink when it comes to language change. It could be that some of these new techniques are giving us different preferences, making us perhaps speak in a more succinct way. Maybe even, as some people have argued, altering our attention spans and things of that kind.

Personally, I think a lot of the claims have been a bit premature. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that our thinking processes have been altered by the Internet, but it could be that in the long term something like that does happen.

Do you see the Internet as a particularly playful or experimental place for the use of language, because it’s new?

It’s certainly experimental. Playful? Yes, but all language has a playful dimension. In everyday speech, we play all the time. Everybody plays with language; makes jokes, puns, puts on silly voices, and things of that kind. But most of that never gets recorded anywhere.

In the written form, you don’t see that kind of language play very often, except occasionally when authors write clever things and so on, because the written language was never designed for that sort of thing.

But on the Internet, which is predominantly written at the moment, that kind of playfulness really comes to the fore, and you see it all over the place. I think it’s one of the most fascinating developments on the Internet, to see that kind of thing happening.

A good example is the way in which people are prepared to create new words. This is always one of the most interesting forms of playful language. We invent a new word because it doesn’t exist, and hope that everybody else will use it.

Traditionally, these words would never get into the dictionary, or never be seen in written form, because it’s just an invention by a single person. But on the Internet, take something like the Urban Dictionary… you find millions of new words. I really mean millions. We’re talking about extraordinary diversity of playful uses of language, most of which will last a day or so and then disappear forever, but some of those things will stay for a long time.

Whether they stay or disappear, the point is what you’re seeing there is an extraordinary linguistic creativity on the part of the people who use it.

One thing I’ve been wondering about Internet culture is the way people will often use wordplay to play at being ignorant, especially about the technology itself, as a way of suggesting that they’re actually quite technologically sophisticated. People will say “intertubes” instead of “Internet,” or “interweb” instead of “the web,” or they’ll deliberately spell “the” as “teh.” It’s kind of like a code, in a way. Do you have any sense of what’s going on there?

It’s been there from the very beginning. It was felt to be a very cool piece of developing rapport. There was a study in the 1990s where, in a particular chat group, somebody mistyped the word “computer” as “comptuer” and everybody thought this was fantastic, so everybody in the chat room now uses “comptuer” as the norm for that chat room.

Along comes a newbie into the chat room, who spells “computer” in the right way, and he’s blamed for spelling it wrong. This illustrates a very important point and that is that a group needs to bond. It needs to form its identity and it does this, online especially but generally too, through language.

There’s an old little jingle. “The chief use of slang is to show that you’re one of the gang.”

What that means is that every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there’s a group of lawyers, they have their own slang. If there’s a group of doctors, they have their own slang, and so on. On Facebook, they will have their own slang. On YouTube, and so on.

Whatever the concept is, there will be some way in which people who feel they need to belong will use a form of language that outsiders do not use.

One of the ways in which you can immediately show that you’re belonging to a particular group is by deviating from the norm. It’s not the standard language, so you can be sure that you’ve immediately got an identity marker that is going to make your group feel rather special.

David Crystal is a linguist and author. You can hear Nora Young’s full interview with him at cbc.ca/spark/

[x-fits-y]

What’s not to like as a Language teacher? =^.^=

[danachos-deactivated20211104]

Signed Languages of Canada

Very few people know this, but in Canada we have four to five distinct signed languages. All of which, yes, are distinct, human languages. (So, ASL ≠ English, BSL ≠ English, LSQ ≠ French, etc.). “But, why four to five?” you may ask. Simple, really. We have: American Sign Language (ASL) Langue des signes québécois (LSQ) ᐃᓄᐃᐆᒃ (Inuiuuk or Inuit Sign Language) Plains Sign Language (PSL) Maritime Sign Language (~MSL) The ‘to’ bit is because MSL (not the actual name for it; English just uses “Maritime Sign Language”) is either still its own language or has become a dialect of ASL. But, this I will explain later. Let’s start off with this term: Language Families.

A language family is like a family tree. People and relatives on one family tree are related to one another, and those not on the family tree are not. People not on your family tree share less genetic code and do not exhibit the same traits as people on your family tree do (so red-hair gets passed down as does eye colour and the like).

Languages act the same way: languages in the same tree have similar traits and you can match characteristics even if Great Aunt Mildred shares almost nothing in common with you, you can still find similarities (even if that means going into your genetic code to see if she passed down that rare form of cancer she had).

Ever heard that English was a Germanic language or that French is a Romance language? Those terms are saying that English is in the Germanic Language Family and that French is in the Romance Language Family. What that really means is you can find similarities between German, Dutch, Scots and English in the same way you can find similarities between Spanish, Italian, Romanian and French.

Now, what does this have to do with signed languages? Also, why do you keep saying signed instead of sign? 

Well, personally, I prefer signed over sign language because many hearing people have a tendency to hear sign language and assume it is one, universal language (which is oh so wrong).

Moving on… what do language families and signed languages have in common? Well, we established signed languages are unique, human languages, eh? What that leads us to is that all languages (almost) have brother, sister, cousin, grandmother languages. That is true of these Canadian languages (three of which are as Canadian as English and French, the other two are as Canadian as, well, ever … meaning they are indigenous.

Let’s start with the ‘to’ language: MSL. Why is it a ‘to’?

So, older Maritime Sign (MSL) was a part of the BANZSL language family, meaning it came from old-British Sign Language, or BSL (yes, we love our acronyms). When the UK went on its killing spree–*cough* I mean its colonizing spree, it brought with it Deaf settlers who spoke BSL. Those settlers stayed in the Maritimes (see map below) and their language changed from old-BSL to Maritime Sign Language (similar to how old Latin changed to French).

Now, because ASL is a massive, massive language (spoken by most Americans who sign, excluding Deaf Hawai’ians as well as most Canadians who sign), it is taking over linguistics communities in the Maritimes, where more and more people who would have learnt MSL are now learning ASL.

“Why is this bad?” you ask.

Language colonization and language shift is a real, and scary, occurrence. Languages breed culture and vice versa. Loss of a language means loss of a way of looking at the world, a loss of a culture. Just ask any First Nations, Métis or Inuit individual, and they will tell you the same thing.

So, today, it is known that Maritimers that sign as a first language (S.F.L.; think ESL but with 300% more periods in the word) sign in very different ways (yes, signed languages have accents and dialects) where the accent is super strong and the dialect is different. However, this difference is not known if it is its own language still (most words come from BANZSL origin, structures are from BANZSL, etc.) or if it has taken on so much from ASL that it has become a dialect (you know how English has a shit tonne of French-originating words in it [shit tonne, in this case, = 45%], same thing is happening here).

In total, THAT is why MSL may or may not be the fifth Canadian signed language.

Now, moving on to the four that are known.

Let’s start with American Sign Language or ASL. It is spoken all across Canada and the States except in most of Québec where LSQ is spoken. It tends to be in anglophone areas, but that is because education only really provides Deaf individuals ASL–English support instead of ASL–French support. Additionally, ASL has a lot of English borrowings (like how we borrow French’s à la carte or soup du jour), but that has no bearing on the fact that a francophone communities can also have ASL speakers present (which is the case in some extra-Québec communities, in fact).

(there are not a lot of images or gifs of ASL, so here have the translation for “play” in ASL)

ASL is the most common sign language in the world and super well studied especially because the world’s only Deaf university, located in Washington D.C., is taught in ASL. Because of this, I am going to not talk at length about ASL, even though it is the language I speak.

LSQ! Or Langue des signed québécoise!

(remember how I said there are like no resources for ASL … there are fewer for LSQ. So, here is the gif form of the manually encoded French alphabet in LSQ [same as ASL]. Manually encoded means LSQ needed a way to use French non-orally, so people spell out French words when needing to use French while speaking LSQ, so there are about 24 handshapes encoded to the 26 Latin letters of French)

This language is spoken primarily in Québec (except in Montréal where ASL is beginning to displace LSQ*) as well as Ontario, New Brunswick and certain other parts of Canada. It has legal recognition in Ontario alongside ASL in only educational, legislative and judicial domains (ugh.), but nowhere else. It can be found generally in francophone populations (remember: ASL–English bit… Canadian gov’t still sees LSQ and French/ASL and English attached to one another … which, culturally, is correct, but linguistically not at all)

This is really well known in francophone Canada and a tonne of resources can be found on this language in French. So… yeah.

Now for the two native or Indigenous languages of Canada:

Plains Sign Language (PSL) and ᐃᓄᐃᐆᒃ (Inuiuuk)!

PSL was used as a trade language before Chinook Wawa took over in SW Canada, mainly in the, you guessed it, plains or prairies. The range of this language extended down into the States as well, but it is unknown if there are any speakers left in the US. In fact, there is almost zero data on the language within Canada except a handful of people still speak it. This is because StatsCan only collect information on ASL and LSQ (badly, at that), so any info on other signed languages is lost.

(see all those colours? those are oral language families. see the words inside the colours? those are (oral) languages. Note: this is an outdated map, so many names are offensive. also, sorry for the awkward map photos, best I got)

But, let’s focus on trade language for a sec. A trade language is a language used to communicate across linguistic barriers. In Western Canada, there were not only a metric fuck tonne of languages spoken, there were also language families up the wazoo. What this means is international traders from, let’s say, Musqueam to Blackfoot would not know how to communicate. This is where a trade language steps in! They are taught internationally to children and traders to facilitate communication (like English is used worldwide now). Oftentimes, trade languages like PSL or Chinook were not full-fledged languages and worked just enough, however PSL grew out of that into its own language that survives today amongst some First Nations Deaf.

The thinking is ᐃᓄᐃᐆᒃ was also a similar language, but there is no records or data of that, just some correspondence with word origin in far-removed communities. HOWEVER, that being said, Inuiuuk is a language that exists today and is in the process of being documented and trying to be revived! There are programmes at Arctic College and McGill working with both Deaf and hearing Inuit to secure a bright future for the language. In fact, it is being used on the legislative assembly floor of Nunavut.

While it is looking bright, it is a critically endangered language with only about 50 speakers remaining (even though there is less stigma attached to deafness and Deaf culture in Inuit culture, so… yay).

That out there, it is important to note that neither PSL nor Inuiuuk are being recognized for what they are: important Canadian languages. Unlike First Nations, Métis and Inuit languages which are seen as real and important (to varying degrees), Inuiuuk and PSL are hidden, understudied, under-recognized languages, which is detrimental to those communities as it is known that there are at least Inuiuuk monolingual speakers.

Awesome conclusion time!

Take this knowledge and educate others! Signed languages have a major stigma attached to them already, and few Canadians realize we have multiple, n/Native signed languages within Canada. Spread this around: on Tumblr, to friends, to family, online, on Facebook. This is important!

And, who knows? You may one day run into someone whose first language was Inuiuuk, and, gosh darn, you would just make their day if you knew about their language!

(Or at least some of you may stop assuming signed languages are just signed variants of oral languages or assuming that sign language is universal, which, you know, is also a benefit!)

[levenenleren-deactivated2015091]

I was under the impression that Maritime Sign Language (MSL) wasnt around anymore :/

[danachos-deactivated20211104]

As there is little work in signed language linguistics, it is really not known (and I do not have access to that info :/

From what I have heard is that either it exists as a separate language in several, older speakers (i.e. moribund), OR it exists as a very different dialect of ASL in younger speakers. I am 99% sure it does not exist as a separate language in younger speakers.

[danachos-deactivated20211104]

allthecanadianpolitics : this is not politics, but this is very Canadian ^^

[weboffunny]

Bill Gates counts to 10.

[transdimensionalboundaries]

this is acutally really funny though

[conlangsandtea-blog]

Me: *sea an indian name with t's and d's in the transcription*

Me: *hasn't ever seen that name before*

Me: *doesn't know if it's retroflex or dental*

Me: *just uses American alveolar sounds because I'm trash*

[lingsamplesentences]

wugsandhugs submitted:

Adger, David. Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford University Press, 2003. p. 17.

[science-of-noise]

Unfortunate Mandarin filler word

There’s a Russell Peters skit about this, but this summer I’ve been living it in real time.

My office is in a grad student lab where about 80% of the occupants are Chinese and Mandarin-speaking.  Being young folk, they use a lot of filler words when speaking to each other, like we in English use “uh,” “um,” “like,” etc.

One of the most common, as I understand, is 那个, or na ge, literally meaning “that” but pragmatically filler, which when pronounced in fluent speech sounds like nèi ge, or roughly /nɛ gəː/  For those of you who can read IPA, I’ll leave you to consider how this might be uncomfortable for an American to hear.  However, it’s probably as impossible to cut out of your speech as it would be for an English-speaker to stop saying “um,” or “well.”

[conlangsandtea-blog]

I repeated that several times before I realized

[unpretty]

??? oh my god??

this man went from singing fifties hits in gold lame pants to solving murders with grammar I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN WITH THIS

HE DISCOVERED HIS TRUE CALLING WHILE DECIPHERING RECORD CONTRACTS

THIS IS REALLY INSPIRING HONESTLY

achieve your dreams and then achieve new more niche dreams, nothing can stop you, you too can trade in your pompadour to fight crime

[lizawithazed]

this guy has the best career I’ve ever heard of

[recentgooglesearches]

Meat Romney

[memecucker]

Adobe® is working really hard to make sure that the word “Photoshop”® doesnt become a genericized trademark

[trilobiter]

Good luck with that, Adobe.

[datasoong47]

Perhaps they could use some kleenex to wipe their tears, and maybe some aspirin if they have a headache before hoovering their house.  Maybe they can google some support groups for support groups, but that would just be a band-aid and wouldn’t fix the real problem.

[science-of-noise]

If you don’t want your product to become genericized, don’t make it so good at what it does. Unpopular products don’t become ubiquitous.

[tastefullyoffensive]

Can anyone translate this? (via lanopticx)

[yeah-dd-deactivated20150813]

grammatical gender and sexual gender are NOT the same

I am getting more and more pissed whenever people are talking about this topic when they clearly have no idea of what they are really talking about

Don’t get me wrong: I am totally okay with the support of non-gendered personal pronouns in a language

But if it comes to the articles of nouns like e.g. in the german language (der, die, das) people have to realize that the article doesn’t tell you anything about the sexual gender of the word - because there is no sexual gender! However the grammatical gender helps the speaker to know how to declinate and use the noun correctly. And that’s it!

So don’t talk about things you don’t want to understand with me. Thank you

[science-of-noise]

Like, for real. Having the word for “fire” in your language be feminine is not discrimination. Grammatical gender is usually just another way of saying “noun grouping.” For example, the Ganda language of Uganda contains *ten* genders including “large objects and liquids” as a single category, which at first blush sounds like some weird Tumblr bullshit but all it means is that large objects and liquids behave the same way grammatically. It helps to remember that the word “gender” is a direct Latinate cognate of the word “kind.”

[heylola2]

My sister and I are starting a new conlang

We’re calling it tentlang until we have a real name for it because we’re spending the night in our tent in our backyard

[cracked]

We’re all for getting it where you can, but this seems like it could turn into some kind of  Gary Busey “Gingerdead Man” scenario. Just sexier.

22 Ordinary Words With Terrifying Origins

[maskedlinguist]

*facepalms so hard she gives herself a fucking headache*

IT COMES FROM THE WORD FOR BROTHEL - FORNIX - which, yes derives from a type of arched chamber that resembled ovens (fornus) , but WHO THE FUCK WOULD THINK THESE PEOPLE WERE FUCKING IN OVENS? WHY would you think this was a reasonable fucking interpretation?