Conlangs!

This is a blog for my conlangs and conlanging in general!

[conlangprompts]

“Have you finished the translation yet?”

“Sort of.  It’s a bit unclear.  It’s either ‘If the tomb of the Great King is opened, a great demon shall arise’ or ‘… a great hero shall arise’.  So … yeah.  I don’t know whether to advise that we open the tomb or that we put every security measure we can think of in place around it”

[sannehnagi]

“What? How can it be unclear, it is or it isn’t, right?” “Well, right here where it says yunagunpu’ dziítiš… normally I would expect a different pronoun for a demon, so I think it says a great fighter of evil, but that should be yunaágunpu’, so it says a great fighting evil. See what I mean?” “Hmm. Better safe than sorry, right?”

[conlangprompts]

A gender system based on the traditional Western 4-element cosmology.

[jrallomssconlangingblog]

Hey I've done this

[prokopetz]

In modern English, the word “meat” refers specifically to animal flesh, but originally it meant any solid food, as contrasted to liquid sustenance. This usage survives in the idiom “meat and drink”, as well as in certain compound words, like “sweetmeats” (a collective term for candies and fruit preserves).

So, what I’m wondering is: back when this usage was the norm, did people get into arguments about whether soup should be classified as “meat” or “drink”?

[rewordfully]

would knowing that the Old English word for spoon was metesticca help?

[ainaraoftime-deactivated2025020]

one of my favourite linguistic phenomena/in-jokes is spanish potato chips being “ham-flavored, probably”

[ainaraoftime-deactivated2025020]

y’see because spain and portugal are so close, labels in stuff like food, shampoo, etc often come in portuguese as well as spanish

this brand of chips, Lay’s, displays the flavor in spanish and portuguese, resulting in ham-flavored chips looking like this:

with “jamón” being spanish and “presunto” being portuguese

however, “presunto” is also a spanish adjective, meaning “presumed” (or suspected)

so you have this in-joke going where spanish chips taste like ham, presumably

[mccaine]

[paddysnuffles]

Oh, oh! 

I can actually explain the French one! 

Back in ye olde days before the printing press everything you wanted 2+ copies of had to be copied by hand. So there were these people, known as “copiers”, who would, well, copy stuff. 

Most kings paid by the word, but not the French king. He paid by the letter.

So, naturally, the copiers were like “Fuck it, let’s go nuts” and just stuffed half the alphabet into every word to make some extra cash.

Also, in contrast, no letters in Latin are silent. This is because things were often inscribed on stone, meaning ain’t nobody got time to waste on carving out letters that aren’t being used. 

So Latin may have 7,638 different tenses and moods, but at least you know how to pronounce what’s written.

[thoodleoo]

the proto-indo-european word for horse, ekwos (which shows up in other indo-european languages, such as the latin equus and the greek ἵππος), very possibly comes from an adjective h₁eḱus, meaning “swift”

so basically at some point people were coming up with a word for horse and they were like "it’s the thing that goes nyoom”

[thoodleoo]

proto-indo-european dude #1: hmm what should we call this animal PIE dude #2: let’s call them Speedy Boys cause theyre fast PIE dude #1: shit dude they sure are

[datasoong47]

*wĺ̥kʷos meaning “wolf” is probably derived from the adjective *wl̥kʷós meaning “dangerous”.

So, horses are fast boys and wolves are dangerous boys.

[inlanguagewedontsay]

In Romanian we don’t say “It’s a piece of cake” but “E floare la ureche” which literally translates to “It’s a flower at the ear” and this sounds weird in English but it’s a really nice expression.

Submitted by @andreeasdreams

[terpsikeraunos]

“english doesn’t have a vocative”

that’s what the @ sign is for

[rewordfully]

[spanish-blog]

When people ask me why they should pay a human translator instead of using google translate I show them this picture:

[felderwin]

my favorite thing i’ve learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like “the eight winds cannot move me” blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes “FART” (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says “wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake”

[agnesmontague]

i googled this bc i desperately wanted this to be real, and guess what…it is.

the dude’s name was su dongpo (also known as su shi). his original poem went like this:

稽首天中天，

毫光照大千，

八風吹不動，

端坐紫金蓮

(Humbly bowed my head below all skies Minutest lights shine through my deepest bounds Immovable by strong winds from eight sides Upon purplish gold lotus I seated straightly by the low mound) (x)

on which his friend wrote “放屁” (fart, literally), and you know the rest.

(here’s a chinese source for the skeptics)

[aeorys-deactivated20260131]

this is even funnier because just writing “fart” out of the blue sounds really stupid and random in english, but in chinese, fart (fang pi) is used as a common reply to, well, people talking out of their ass. kind of like how we’d use “bullshit” in context.

[a-singing-dragonfly-deactivated]

IT’S BACK AND IT GOT BETTER

[futboltrash]

glad that’s all cleared up now

[greekgosh]

Language Rant

The thing that really gets me about monolinguals/people uninterested in linguistics is the strange need to label languages as objectively/inherently difficult.

Any linguistic feature that may seem, at the surface level, to be a challenge, is often that much of a challenge to not have. When learners complain that German/Russian/Greek cases are superfluously complicated, they seem to forget that for those who speak using cases natively, it seems like such a limitation to not have them. Suddenly the precision of who is doing what to whom is murky, and word order is now strictly confined to the chains of SVO.

Many are quick to label the tones of east Asian languages as a nonsensical or a confusing system. For those who use tones natively, it would seem absurd not to have them. To avoid them, many languages are required to make use of an extremely vast phonology, and words become quite lengthy to compensate for this diversity. Imagine having this skill for intonation and having to power it down until the occasional tone used for a question arises.

People are quick to label the verbs of romance languages as pesky and convoluted. It is these seemingly daunting conjugations that allow listeners to know precise specifics about who is doing what, in addition to the time and manner, all in a single word. For speakers of other languages, this would require additional mentioning of subject pronouns, grammatical particles, and time/location words, in order to achieve the same clarity.

In the end, it is the absence of features that can be just as irksome, complicated, or intimidating. Language has been created for humans by humans.

If there were a language so inherently difficult that a native speaker couldn’t easily tackle it before puberty, it would probably be quickly replaced, as soon as a language more suitable for humans came into play.

The takeaway here is that these man-made tools are just that. The only meaningful comparison to judge innate difficultly is a comparison to one’s native tongue. Hard for you? Perhaps. So intrinsically difficult that a native-speaking toddler still couldn’t babble in it? Doubtful.

[chapmangamo]

[langsandlit]

Dalla padella alla brace “From the pan to the embers” (Italian)

[spanishskulduggery]

salir del fuego para caer en las brasas

“to leave the fire only to fall on the coals/embers”

Or my personal favorite for Spanish…

de Guatemala a Guatepeor

“to go from Guatemala [Guate-bad] to Guate-worse”

[weeping-wandrian]

why the fuck does english have a word for

but not for “the day after tomorrow”

???

[zeplerfer]

Because you’re not looking hard enough! ;)

Overmorrow = the day after tomorrow

Ereyesterday = the day before yesterday

Example: I defenestrated my brother ereyesterday. I shall defenestrate my sister overmorrow! Because I hate my family and also windows.

[wantcookie]

english has some of the best examples of stupidly specific words, tbh

Rhotacism (n): excessive use of the letter “R”

Lingible (adj): meant to be licked

Whipjack (n): a beggar, specifically one who is pretending to have been shipwrecked

Yerd (v): to beat with an object with a stick

Roddikin (n): the fourth stomach of a cow or a deer

Balbriggan (n): a type of fine cotton, most often used in underwear

and my personal favorite

Cornobble (v): to slap or beat another person with a fish

[allthingslinguistic]

Linguist twitter is pretty excited to watch people refer to the Doctor across regenerations using singular they. 

[dressesandalchemy]

Not gonna lie, the anthropologist in me has been sitting and watching everything related to this announcement with popcorn and 3D glasses.

[prokopetz]

Of all the skills that futurists predicted would become valuable in the era of constant communication, I don’t think anybody saw “conversational multithreading” coming.

No, I don’t mean holding multiple conversations with different people at the same time. I mean holding two or more completely separate conversations with the same person, via the same medium, at the same time.

Like when you’re texting, and the person on the other end asks you a question, then mentally eight-tracks and asks a different, unrelated question before you’ve finished keying in your response to the first one. So you answer the first question, and a conversation based on that answer ensues; then you answer the second question, and a totally different conversation based on that answer ensues, and now you’re having two separate conversations with the same person at the same time, and have to keep track of which responses pertain to which conversation purely from context.

Sometimes I wonder what the generational cutoff for that seeming unusual is - I didn’t pick up the skill until I was like thirty, so there’s always that undercurrent of generational novelty there.

[chandra-nalaar]

@anowon this is us

[mesogeios]

True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the Triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.

John Berger, “Self Portrait” from Confabulations (via linguisten)