Morgenstern @danimorgenstern - Tumblr Blog

Hello August 💙💚💛

I met a baby the other day who taught me that kids aren’t learning the thumb-and-pinky-out gesture for “phone” anymore. She puts her flat, open palm up to her ear and babbles into it, simulating a flat and rectangular smartphone.

marzipanandminutiae

It’s so interesting that a lot of seemingly obsolete hand motions still exist, though

very few people wear wristwatches, but tapping one’s wrist is still a nearly universal gesture for “what time is it?” or “hurry up”

I used classic corded phones for only a very brief time in my life (before we got those more rectangular-shaped cordless ones for my parents’ landline) and first saw a car without power windows when I was in college, and yet I’ve always used the pinky-and-thumb gesture for “call me” and the circling-fist gesture for “roll down your window.” I’m 24, so my childhood was the late 90s and early 2000s, but I still use gestures that indicate technology either gone or on its way out when I began forming reliable memories

it also makes me wonder how people indicated time or hurrying before wristwatches. did they somehow pantomime a pocket watch? what gestures have we lost as technology marches on? and since video didn’t exist for most of human history, how might we learn what they were? like the contents of the third Georgian spice jar or the location of Punt, nobody would think to write any of it down

I just love history so much

datasoong47

The ASL sign for phone is based on the pinky-and-thumb gesture. Presumably that will continue on for a while, with future generations seeing it as an arbitrary sign.

And then there are words like “rewind” that no longer make literal sense. Filmmakers still use “cut” long after actual physical film that can be cut fell out of use. We talk about cutting and pasting on computers and use a floppy disc icon for “save”.

Fossilized metaphors are the best.

#fossilized metaphors #yougottaloveit

otarsus

fuckyeahlinguisticmisconceptions

"So how many languages do you speak?"

derzwiebel-blog

SpecGram has the right answer for you:

“Archiphonemicist: I speak |language|—that is, an appropriately underspecified version of all of them.

Chomskyan: Universal Grammar shows that all languages are equivalent.

Computational Linguist: There’s Basic, Fortran, Matlab, C++, VHDL, Java, Python, Javascript and, if you’ll excuse my bad language, PHP. Oh, you meant human languages?

Conlanger: Well, I’m not really fluent in any of my languages…

Freelance interpreter: I have two A languages; at least, that’s what I tell my clients.

Historical comparativist: Can I count Romance and Germanic separately?

Historical linguist: I don’t actually speak any, but I have dictionaries and chrestomathies for dozens.

Interpreting Researcher: I have RAs for that.

Morphologist: I’m fluent in prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, and in-frikkin’-fixes.

Phonetician: I don’t speak many, but I can make all their sounds!

Phonologist: Underlyingly, all languages sound the same to me.

Pragmaticist: I can usually infer the true purpose of any utterance, whether I speak the language or not.

Satirical Linguist: I can order a beer in about twenty.

Semanticist: I’m fluent in the logical representation of the propositional content of all languages.

Sign linguist: I am fluent in ASL, Auslan, BSL, DGS, LSF, YS, and РЖЯ. I can converse in DTS, TİD, and ΕΝΓ, and I have lesser degrees of skill in BIM, BISINDO, FSL, LSC, SVK, TSL, МДХ, and ქჟე.

Sociolinguist: Just one, but I’m familiar with 74 dialects, 128 sub-dialects, and 437 distinct social registers.

Staff interpreter: I have six C languages, two Bs and one A. I am hoping to add Amharic as a C and get my German to B next year.

Syntactician: I can properly apply asterisks—in the context of an academic paper—to over 1500 example sentences from over 100 languages. Does that count for anything?

Translation Researcher: I am totally still a practicing translator, really. Just wait until this meeting is done, and this conference and…

Translator: You can speak languages? I mean, I can write five but don’t ask me to hold a conversation in them.

Typologist: I speak one OV language and one VO language, so that pretty much represents them all.”

http://specgram.com/CLXXIX.2/07.spee-curr.languages.html

linguisten

Semantic saturation

saigontimemd

I love this show so much.

datasoong47

One of my favorite linguistic phenomena is rebracketing, which is when a word or words is/are redivided differently, either two words becoming one, one word heard as two, or part of one word interpreted as part of the other. This frequently happens with articles, for example:

apron was originally napron, but “a napron” was interpreted as “an apron”

newt comes from ewt by the same process

In the opposite direction, nickname comes from Middle English nekename which in turn came from ekename (an ekename -> a nekename) where “eke” was an old word meaning “also” or “additional” (so basically “an additional name”)

ammunition comes from an obsolete dialectal French amunition, which came from munition, the phrase la munition being heard as l’amunition.

the nickname Ned comes from Ed, via “mine Ed” being heard as “my Ned” (in archaic English, “my” and “mine” had the same relationship as “a” and “an”), same with several other nicknames like Nell

The word “orange” ulimately derives from the Arabic nāranj, via French “orange”, the n being lost via a similar process involving the indefinite article, e.g., something like French “une norange” becoming “une orange” (it’s unclear which specific Romance language it first happened in)

in the Southern US at least (not sure about elsewhere), “another” is often analyzed as “a nother”, hence the phrase “a whole nother”

omelet has a whole series of interesting changes; it comes from French omelette, earlier alemette (swapping around the /l/ and /m/), from alemelle from an earlier lemelle (la lemelle -> l’alemelle)

Related to this, sometimes two words, especially when borrowed into another language, will be taken as one. Numerous words were borrowed from Arabic with the definite article al- attached to them. Spanish el lagarto became English alligator. An interesting twist is admiral, earlier amiral (the d probably got in there from the influence of words like “administer”) from Arabic amir al- (lord of the ___), particularly the phrase amir al-bahr, literally “lord of the sea”.

Sometimes the opposite happens. A foreign word will look like two words, or like a word with an affix. For example, the Arabic kitaab (book) was borrowed into Swahili as kitabu. ki- happens to be the singular form of one of the Swahili genders, and so it was interpreted as ki-tabu. To form the plural of that gender, you replace ki- with vi-, thus, “books” in Swahili is vitabu. The Greek name Alexander became, in Arabic, Iskander, with the initial al- heard as the article al-.

Similarly, the English word Cherry came from Old Norman French cherise, with the s on the end interpreted as the plural -s. Interestingly enough, that word came from Vulgar Latin ceresia, a feminine singular noun, but originally the plural of the neuter noun ceresium! So a Latin plural was reinterpreted as a singular in Vulgar Latin, which in turn was interpreted as a plural when borrowed into English!

The English suffix -burger used with various foods (e.g., cheeseburger, or more informally chickenburger, etc.) was misanlyzed from Hamburger as Ham-burger, itself from the city of Hamburg

This can happen even with native words. Modern French once is used for the snow leopard, but originally meant “lynx”. In Old French, it was lonce (ultimately from the same source as lynx), which was reinterpreted as l’once! In English, the word “pea” was originally “pease”, but that looked like it had the plural -s on it, and so the word “pea” was created from it. Likewise, the adjective lone came from alone, heard as “a lone”, but alone itself came originally from all one.

mxworthing

One of my favorite personal examples is the old Southern man who would come into work and ask me if I was “being have” (as opposed to the more usual “behaving”).

the-omelas-kid

the word editor predated the word edit - editor was reinterpreted as edit-er, so clearly someone who edits!

prudencepaccard

when your open borders advocacy extends to morpheme boundaries

missalsfromiram-deactivated2020

Don’t forget the Swahili kipilefti (”roundabout”), from English keep left, with a plural vipilefti - and in reverse, singular kideo (”video”) with plural video.

#gottaloveit #linguistics

linguisten

As the result of semantic and cultural shifts, it has become impossible to order a decent cup of tea - a phenomenon that revives the old question about the relationship between language on the one hand and thought and culture on the other.

[by the one and only David GIL]

ruedesarchives

On April 21st 1967, the 100 millionth GM vehicle rolled off the line at the plant in Janesville. A blue, two-door Caprice. There was a big ceremony, speeches. The Lieutenant-Governor even showed up.

Three days later, another car rolled off that same line. No-one gave two craps about her. But they should have. Because this 1967 Chevrolet Impala would turn out to be the most important car - no, the most important object, in pretty much the whole universe.

Happy 50th birthday, Baby.