wɜrdz ən ʃɪt

Kelsey, she/her, 21, US, BS in Linguistics I like the etymologies of weird english words and conlanging. My main blog is avenginginsanity.

[marlynnofmany]

This is such a cool idea. What other info could it be? Careers, hobbies, economic status, lifelong ambitions? Orientation, single/taken/etc status? Insect-style role in the hive (worker/drone etc)?

If human languages are based on primitive monkey-brain ideas of whether or not the person we’re talking about is a potential mate, then what different considerations might an alien race make?

Maybe they have two drastically different body types that need to pair off to defend from predators. Maybe their civilization depends on cultivating plants that grow best when sung to, and a range of different vocal tones per household is best. Maybe some are nocturnal and some are diurnal.

What else??

[whydoeseveryonethinkiamaskeleto]

pronouns are based on age and they change throughout an individual’s life

[the-queer-demon]

*translated from alien*

Hello everybody! This is Xarthaborf, he’s-”

“Actually, it’s she now.”

“Oh my god! You finally turned 500! Congrats!”

[marlynnofmany]

XD  Fantastic, I love it! 

[mantha-has-fallen]

I’ve read through the suggestions and I’m a little surprised I’m the only one thinking of this:

Pronouns based on proximity.

What’s better at saying “that one” than saying exactly where they are? Different pronouns for if they’re 5 feet away vs. 20 feet away. Did you turn your back on somebody in the middle of a conversation? They have different pronouns now.

After a while, humans try to maintain the same distance from others when conversing (lol try doing that while walking together) so their translators don’t freak out on them.

I presume there might be a completely different set of nuanced ‘pronouns’ when describing inanimate objects, which makes everything even more confusing to the humans.

How useful.

[marlynnofmany]

#You know how you can describe a chess board with b7 or e5 and everybody knows what that means? I’m imagining something similar Except each position has a different set of pronouns Or at least a different pre- or suffix from each other Maybe children use pronouns without the -fixes until they can understand the nuance Human translator tech is still rough And doesn’t understand the nuance So occasionally it’ll run into a prefix or suffix it doesn’t know And just leave it there Iks-them Or they-rith Because it’s not gendered pronouns

That would be fascinating. I imagine the humans would have quite a time wrapping their brains around it! There’s probably a “position unknown/unspecified” pronoun that the humans want to use all the time (like “they”), but the aliens insist that nope it sounds wrong to use just that one.

“Why did you say ‘iks’ when rith is right in front of you? Do we need to break out the children’s educational materials and start from the beginning?”

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Okay, but based on relationship proximity.

Different pronouns depending on whether you’re talking about a parent, a sibling, partner, a lover, a friend, an aquaintance, a coworker… imagine the drama potential.

People switching up to friend or lover pronouns too early in a relationship and getting rejected.

Stranger pronouns being literally only okay if you’re using them to describe somebody you just met and will never see again, because any closer degree of relationship than that will have its own pronouns, and not using them is a calculated insult.

Specific pronouns to refer to mortal enemies that pretty much nobody ever uses outside of works of fiction, because using them to describe somebody is like openly admitting that you’re probably planning to kill that person.

This concept possibly getting watered down though as time goes on. Like how swear words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ have kind of lost their power over the years, young people start using mortal enemy pronouns to refer to like, people who are mildly annoying, or public figures they don’t like (both of which previously had their own pronouns). Older generations getting really offended by this.

Separate pronouns for fictional characters.

A classic sitcom trope is somebody assuming they’re being referred to with certain pronouns that suggest dramatic changes in their relationship with the person talking about them, only for them to find out at the end of the episode that the person was actually referring to somebody else.

Everybody knowing the moment shit has gone down because “I just saw Skrith and Jarn in the cafeteria this morning. I know you said friend seemed okay last night, but you won’t believe which pronouns friend used to refer to enemy-of-friend!”

Actually, pronouns denoting other people’s relationships to people in relation to you. You might not know X that well, but they’re your friend Y’s close friend, so you can either use aquaintance or friend-of-friend pronouns.

Sibling, parent, child, cousin, etc. pronouns originally only being used for blood family or adopted children, but gradually getting used to refer to any relationship that fills that role in your life. “Oh no, child isn’t actually a relative, but I looked after child while child’s parents were on research trips, and friends were okay with child using parent pronouns for me if child wanted to.”

Human translation devices really not being able to keep up with this, because how the fuck is the software supposed to know how close you are to this person? Humans who actually try and learn the language not faring much better, because not only are there a lot of pronouns to learn, but the nuances of when exactly you’re meant to change are very culturally specific.

Aliens meanwhile being kind of horrified that most humans will use the same two or three pronouns to refer to everyone they encounter. Do they all hate each other? Or, conversely, are they all super close? What is wrong with these people?

They end up just straight up creating a new pronoun meaning ‘member of X species’ for all other species to use to refer to them, because the alternative is having fistfights break out on ships because the humans don’t understand why it’s so fucking offensive to refer to a coworker with aquaintance pronouns.

[parkchanwoohoo]

I love Twitter bc everyone is dumb

[perestroika-hilton]

Just pronouns in general

[deadboytryingtosurvive]

Are- are you trying to tell me "no one" is a pronoun? Is that what this is saying??

[parkchanwoohoo]

Yes

[summerstormsandnoodles]

So if I choose to go by nobody/no one are those nemo-pronouns

[parkchanwoohoo]

i see through your tricks, odysseus

[sunflowerbutch]

linguistics major is like the math major of being an english major. but it’s like the classics major of being a stem major

[sunflowerbutch]

linguistics is the spreadsheets of anthropology

[nathanielthecurious]

i think you should be allowed to cite scholars who are bad people but only if you put the word (oof) or (yikes) after their name

like Parker (yikes, 1989) or Obbink (big oof, 2007)

[allthingslinguistic]

I got sent a review copy of The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos, so here are a few sneak peek images from the inside. 

It’s thicker than I was expecting (400 pages, including over 100 puzzles from the linguistics olympiads, with the creators and languages indexed, plus an additional few pages of context and solutions for each puzzle), so I haven’t read the whole thing yet but I think it’ll make a great “sudoku for language lovers” gift. 

So far it’s only being published in the UK, so if you want it and you live somewhere else, I’d suggest ordering it from UK book-buying websites. 

[thatdisasterauthor]

Watching the world of Very Professional Paleontologists decend into meme communication because the biggest paleo conference of the year accidentally censored the words “Hell” and “Bone” has been a highlight of my day.

All hail Heck Creek and BOOOOONE.

[feanor-the-dragon]

Wha... what???

[tall-glass-of-nope]

[parksanddeserts]

Heartbroken.

[lesbianshepard]

 i recommend learning other alphabets if for no other reason than it’s very fun to see people replace latin alphabet letters with complete nonsense for Aesthetic

[lesbianshepard]

as julius caesar famously said: “vspph vphdph vphcph”

[wizardlyghost]

as brutus said, tase him again

[gaphic]

‘pop’ is pretty heinous but like, I’ll accept it, yknow? it’s just the other half of ‘soda-pop,’ like how ‘cab’ and ‘taxi’ are the two halves of ‘taxicab.’ it’s fine. it’s chill.

but coke? that’s a fucking brand name! of a specific drink with a specific flavor! that shits RUDE, it’s CONFUSING, it’s DOWNRIGHT NONSENSICAL! fuckin misusing the art of language to confound your fellow man! the gall! learn some fucking respect

[saturniidae-served-cold]

No it just happens sometimes. Its like jell-o, kleenex, popsicle, scotch tape. It just happens.

[mothric]

But that’s not a good parallel at all. You can’t compare calling Sprite “coke” like a lawless heathen to the classic linguistic phenomenon of generic trademarks / proprietary eponyms, and I’ll tell you why:

‘Jell-o’ is a brand name under which multiple flavours of gelatin (and pudding/custard) are produced. There isn’t just “Jell-o” and then special “strawberry Jell-o”; the name has never denoted just one specific flavour.

‘Popsicle’ is the same as Jello, it was never a name for just one flavour of popsicle.  

‘Kleenex’ is a specific brand of tissues, but it’s not inherently that distinct from other tissues. They are all lightweight tissues used to blow your nose.

‘Scotch tape’ is used to refer to any tape that is like the original scotch tape, i.e., clear, thin, small, sticky on one side. We don’t call all tape ‘scotch tape’. Electric tape, duct tape, and packing tape are all their own things, and anybody who calls any of them ‘scotch tape’ has no regard for their fellow man and ought to be thrown into the sea.

MEANWHILE, Coca-Cola is a specific kind of soda with its own distinct flavour. When Coca-Cola makes other flavours, they’re called “vanilla Coke,” “cherry Coke,” etc. but “Coke” is still its own standalone flavour, a wholly other Thing apart from the “special” flavours the company produces. 

It would make far more sense if people used ‘coke’ the way we use ‘scotch tape’; that is, to denote only those sodas that are similar in appearance and taste to Coca-Cola (Pepsi, RC, Shasta Cola, etc.). I could see all of those being lumped in under a generic term ‘coke’. I could even see it being extended to all brown sodas, even though comparing Root Beer to Coke is like comparing a badger to a zebra just because they’re both black-and-white mammals. You’re on thin fucking ice but at least there’s still some semblance of logic.

But no. You southerners, who bask in your sun and heat and chew upon your wheat stems with the indifference of an armadillo in the face of oncoming traffic, you who revel in lawlessness and chaos, you linguistic delinquents who fear neither God nor man, 

you are really going to look at a list of drinks that includes such variety in taste and apperance as Sprite, Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew Code Red, Orange Fanta, and Dr. Pepper, and call it all “Coke.” 

You’re going to picture, in your mind, a clear, lemon-lime fizzy drink and request “coke.” And then when asked “what kind?” you will not say “Coke Zero,” “Diet Coke,” or “Cherry Coke,” no. You will answer “Sprite,” like an animal, like a feral possum who knows the ways of right and wrong and chooses wrong just to spite its creator. 

And then you have the gall to say it’s an eponym as valid as ‘Jello’. No. You tossed your logic into the dumpster fires of the underworld long ago, you cannot justify it now. You cannot tell me you don’t know your own crimes. “It’s all coke,” you say, and you taste the sin of it on your tongue, and you laugh. Know this, that you are inviting judgment upon yourself and one day you will be devoured by the sun.

[agardenandlibrary]

As a southerner, this is the funniest damn thing I’ve ever read.

[finnglas]

I’m from Alabama. Members of my family have ordered Coke, and when asked, “What kind?” replied, “Sweet tea.” Where is your God now?

[yespumpkindoodlesthings]

I actually grew up in NC saying “soft drink” as the generic umbrella term and didn’t realize until I was 30 that a “soft drink” = a drink without alcohol in it, whereas, a hard drink has alcohol, e.g., “hard liquor.”

[neestudies]

Chrome extensions for language learning

TransOver: translates any word you find on a website. Provides multiple definitions for a single word, and has a lot of useful settings, such as font size, the option to chose which websites you don’t want it to translate on, or which websites you want it to exclusively translate on. 

Readlang: translates any word you find on a website. Allows you to save words into a list that you can learn from later, along with the option to memorize them through pre-made flashcards. This extension only works if the website you’re visiting is of your target language. 

Google Translate: similar to both extensions listed above, has less features, but more languages.

Language Learning With YouTube: this is an extension for learning a language while watching YouTube videos that already have subtitles or auto-captions. Its features include a pop-up dictionary, suggestions for the most important words to learn, and the option to have two subtitles playing at the same time.

Language Learning With Netflix: this extension is for learning a language while watching Netflix. It has the same features as Language Learning With YouTube; a pop-up dictionary, suggestions for the most important words to learn, and the option to have two subtitles playing at the same time.

[nostrem]

I’m posting this here because I’m honestly so sick and tired of this kind of thing. Especially in regards to endangered languages

[nostrem]

But yeah. so funny

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

For those who don’t know, Scots language is not the same as Scottish Gaelic. They are unique from each other. Some people know Scots language better as being referred to as a dialect, so if you’ve heard about the Scots dialect before online, they’re probably referring to Scots language. 

UNESCO recognizes it as a vulnerable language (Gaelic is considered more severely as “endangered”).

The Scots Wikipedia is exactly what it sounds like, an alternate wikipedia where the articles are all written in Scots. There are other wikipedias that provide content for other languages the same way. It helps preserve and give access to a threatened and underrepresented language, which is invaluable.

About 16 hours ago, it was discovered that an American teenager has been editing and writing articles not in Scots, but in an American’s disrespectful phonetic take on what he thinks Scots sounds like. 

“The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. “

This problem isn’t unique to this incident. Frequently on tumblr I see Americans making jokes about Scottish actors making what they’ve called “garbled Scottish sounds” and attempting (and failing) to type in Scots. Scottish languages have been decimated over the centuries, and Scots Wikipedia should be an amazing language resource.

The worst part? He’s apparently been at this for YEARS. He’s edited or penned nearly 1/3 of Scots Wikipedia. Apparently when Scots speakers have corrected him in the past, he’s had a “haughty attitude,” claiming that other Scots speakers (who were never present, unsurprisingly) approved of his failed attempts at writing in Scots.

The damage is heart wrenching:

“Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own, all because they were exposed to a mangled rendering of English being called Scots by this person and by this person alone.

They wrote such a massive volume of this pretend Scots that anyone writing in genuine Scots would have their work drowned out by rubbish. Or, even worse, edited to be more in line with said rubbish.

Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling language. Instead, it’s just become another source of ammunition for people wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as wanting to properly learn it.”

Even worse, many people are praising this kid as the all-time most dedicate “troll,” as funny, etc. It’s inexcusable.

They’re hoping Scots speakers will volunteer to help fix all of the nonsense articles he’s put up.

[linguisten]

Hi there, I've been following your blog for a while now and since I have to write a 15 page research paper - and was able to brow beat my teacher into a linguistic topic - I was wondering if you could recommend any (scientific) books on to evolution of language, etymology or linguistics in general. The specific topic is how technology changes our language - googeln, cookies and co. Thank you!

Hi, a classic on the topic is AITCHISON: Language Change, first published in the 1990s, My current favourite is TRUDGILL: Millennia of language change, published earlier this year. Also worth reading: CRYSTAL: Language and the Internet; MCCULLOUGH (@allthingslinguistic) Because Internet; MAURAIS/MORRIS: Languages in a globalizing world. 

[arrghigiveup]

Putting the full text of the NYT article that the first tweet was responding to underneath the cut.

Link to the original tweet: https://twitter.com/speechleyish/status/1275990670663012352

Link to a couple of more serious threads about exactly why the biennial “Durian: the Freakshow Fruit” articles are so annoying:

https://twitter.com/amirulruslan/status/1276088736296472577

https://twitter.com/amirulruslan/status/1276313332492845056

Keep reading

[augustdementhe]

They. Went. INNNNN.

[levourdalak]

“Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.” If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider. But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable. I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems. There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.””

— “The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems” by Courtney Martin

[finelythreadedsky]

the myth of persephone is about the trauma of the separation of mothers and daughters by marriage and this is the hill i will die on

[finelythreadedsky]

To be clear I’m not against retellings that reinterpret the relationship between Hades and Persephone and present it as consensual and healthy– I do think there’s something incredibly powerful about looking at a story that’s been passed down to us through millennia about a girl being kidnapped and raped and saying “no. No, that’s not the kind of story I want to hear, that’s not the kind of story I want to tell, and that’s certainly not the kind of story I want my daughters to grow up on.” (Although I think it’s disappointing that these are now the only sorts of Persephone retellings we get, and at this point it’s really not a particularly revolutionary take, given how often it’s been done.)

But I also think we do a great disservice to the women of the ancient world by not remembering how this story, in that form, mirrored their very real pain. I’ve been thinking recently about how we can tell that women participated in the formation of their culture’s folklore because women’s trauma is embedded in it. (In Greek terms, the stories of Leto and Alcmene very clearly come out of women’s traumatic experiences with childbirth, and there are elements of women’s traumatic experiences of sexual assault embedded in, for example, the stories of Daphne or Callisto or Artemis and Actaeon) And the story of Persephone comes out of women’s experiences of being permanently separated from their mothers and daughters at marriage. (See also this post from @gardenvarietycrime.​)

For an ancient woman sending her daughter off to be married, knowing that she will see her only rarely and that the odds of death in childbirth were high, Persephone meant something. For an ancient girl leaving her mother and her entire world for a man she may never have met knowing the same, Persephone meant something. I do think a lot of the conflation of death and marriage in the ancient world comes out of this: that a girl is dead to her mother and her family whether she leaves them to go to a husband’s house or the house of Hades. Maybe it’s a consolation to know that someone else has done this before you, to know that a goddess once lost her daughter and a goddess once lost her mother the same way you are losing yours. And that they survived it.

Essentially I think we need to remember that this myth (like all myths and all folklore) is not necessarily entirely the product of men, that women’s voices and women’s trauma remain embedded in it despite all of our written sources being men’s tellings of the story. And when we retell it we risk losing those voices if we are not careful and if we dismiss the myth as it survives today as solely men’s version of the story.

[liaroflesbos]

@spiritspodcast

[hedgehog-moss]

Just finished a book by philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff in which she dissects at one point a contradiction that often raises its head when people demand social change: the issue is dismissed as simultaneously too big and consequential to allow change, and too small and inconsequential to deserve change. I’m sure modern examples can be found but the one she gives is when 1970s French feminists wanted to have the national motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité changed to Liberté, Égalité, Solidarité so as not to have the word “brotherhood” in there. They were told changing the national motto is impossible due to its prominence and historical weight, but also that this is a trivial concern and don’t feminists have more important fights than nitpicking over a word? Le Dœuff’s rebuttal is “Either this matter is big and significant, and therefore it’s imperative to change it to reflect more egalitarian values, or it’s small and insignificant, and therefore it costs nothing to change it to reflect more egalitarian values.”

[rafawriter]

[linguisten]

how to do things with words