language gremlin

| american | 24 | native english speaker | russian | german | spanish

[official-linguistics-post]

uh oh

"etymologynerd" is at it again and this time i do feel i have to say something. the disability advocates have it covered on addressing the impact, but there's also a serious problem with the linguistics.

in a video shared on may 16, adam aleksic begins by saying: "i think we have to accept the fact that the 'r-word' [retard/retarded] is permanently coming back and it's functionally changed meanings to no longer directly refer to disabled people."

this first sentence alone betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of language change in several points.

this word never went away. what we're seeing now is an attempt at re-normalization by people who sense that they will not be socially punished by openly using this term.

we actually don't have to "accept" its return to mainstream use. for decades, disability advocates have worked to inform the public of the harm caused by casual use of this term. the harm has not disappeared, and neither will this advocacy and its impacts.

now i'm just mad. how tf does it NOT refer to disabled people? the entire point of a pejorative term is that it negatively invokes comparison to a person, group, etc. the assertion that the r-word has changed meanings is categorically false. at most, its primary context has changed from clinical to casually pejorative, but the insult fundamentally rests upon the original reference.

he goes on to refer to the "euphemism treadmill," another concept he misrepresents by extending the metaphor to say that terms which have been sufficiently distanced from their original reference are no longer pejorative. to quote: "...once we sufficiently distance a word from its historical usage, it stops taking on the same offensive power and just becomes colloquial instead."

which... what? what the fuck is he talking about? the words he uses as examples – idiot, imbecile, and moron – are definitely still offensive, if perhaps less impactful. "just becomes colloquial instead" is a nonsense phrase. are offensive words not colloquial? the only english word that comes to mind as having changed so much in definition as to no longer be offensive is "nice," which has been shifting in meaning for more than 700 years and was never a weaponized clinical term.

he ends by saying, "it is undeniably true that the people who are afraid to say the r-word right now are going to get old and die out, while younger generations keep saying it with no knowledge of where it came from." again, fundamentally misunderstanding language change in society over time. it rests on the assumption that we're all going to start or re-start using this slur and never have a conversation about its harms, which just completely ignores both the abovementioned disability advocacy and the fact that people tell each other not to use offensive words. you think i'm just not gonna teach my kids that using slurs is bad??

the whole video is devoid of both empathy and an understanding of long-term semantic change.

tl;dr etymologynerd is wrong, we do NOT "have to accept that the 'r-word' is coming back," and we all need to read more crip linguistics.

[z0ruastudyblr]

The most revolutionary thing I've learned about Blackness is that our English is not at all "broken"

It was 2012 and I was a "white washed" (not real but you know what that means) junior in undergrad and an entire chapter included in this textbook was dedicated to our pidgin/dialect whichever your argument. 14 years later and the amount of borrowing with and without permission of rest of English is truly a marvel to the point where things I know damn well are just AAVE are attributed to wide ranging sources such as "Gen Z/Alpha slang" and "gay lingo" and "internet speak" in general. Our range

These are just a few of our many common grammatical rules:

Habitual "Be": In Standard English "He is working" means right now or generally. In AAVE "He be working" specifically means he works regularly or habitually, a distinction that Standard English can't make without adding extra words.

Copula Deletion: Dropping forms of the verb "to be" in places where Standard English requires them ("She tired" instead of "She is tired" or "They going" instead of "They are going")

Double Negatives: In Standard English, two negatives make a positive. In AAVE, using multiple negatives ("She ain't never going") simply adds emphasis to the negation, a common feature in many of the world's languages.

Metathesis: switching sounds within a word, the most famous example being "ask" as "aks," a pronunciation that has roots in Old English.

Remote "Been": When you say "I been knew that" the stressed "been" means you've known it for a long time, remotely in the past, which doesn't exist in Standard English without adding extra words.

Completive "Done": "I done told you already" is a way of saying the action is finished and the matter is settled with an emphasis on finality or frustration.

Subject-Verb Disagreement: In AAVE verbs are often uninflected for the third person ("She walk" instead of "She walks") to simplify conjugation.

I love being Black, we're so smart! We been developed our slice of language despite the slavery and diaspora

[language-gremlin]

My native language is English which obviously doesn’t have formal/informal you, so I have a question for those whose native languages do have a formal/informal you:

Could a person suddenly switch to formal you to indicate coldness towards someone (in fiction or in real life)? or is that just like not a thing?

[bucephaly]

😭😭

[bucephaly]

There are only around 1,500 native Cherokee speakers left, and most of them are elders

Little Cherokee Seeds is a program where mothers and babies spend all day with first language Cherokee speakers, speaking nothing but Cherokee, so that the babies become a new generation of native speakers. They're also teaching traditional skills and mothering practices to the mothers to pass on.

This is so so important for the survival of the language. These babies are on track to being fluent first language speakers, and they will be able to keep the language going for another lifetime.

I recommend checking out the little cherokee seeds facebook page!!

[queerpunktomatoes]

Okay not to dox myself but I live on Cherokee territory (#landback) and there are a few universities I know of that are working to restore the language among younger Natives. I'm not an expert, but I recommend checking out Dr Sara Snyder Hopkins and the incredible work she's doing to translate old Cherokee writings so we never lose them and Dr Ben Fray who is Cherokee and fluent and teaches it to students as a revitalization effort.

[slutdge]

where are you from and how do you pronounce "Appalachia"

app-a-latch-a

app-a-lay-shuh

some other way???

Voting ended onAug 1, 2024

[thyinum]

Please, when you see something written in Cyrillic, don't assume right away that it's russian. Russian is not the only language that uses Cyrillic. There are also Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Mongolian.

It's a sensitive topic especially for us Ukrainians because russian language is a weapon. It's a colonial language, it's presented like one and only true slavic language, it erases and replaces other languages. Belarusian is literally on the verge of extinction because of russian. Ukrainian has been banned 134 times throughout history, it is still called a "village language", a dialect of russian. Russian colonialism is literally the reason why there are so many russian speaking people in Ukraine (I was one of them btw). Ukrainian is banned on russian occupied territories and people are getting in trouble or even killed for using it there, Ukrainian POWs in russian captivity are getting brutally beaten for speaking Ukrainian.

Like okay, I can get why there's this confusion, so here's a clue to understand that the language you're looking at definitely is not russian — the letter і. If you see ї (like i but with two dots) it's 100% Ukrainian. If you see j it's Serbian. Russian alphabet also doesn't have such letters as Ђ, Љ, Њ, Ў, Џ (dont confuse with Ц ). Yes, it's not always gonna be easy to detect that the language in front of you is not russian, but when you have trouble with it just ask or run it through any translation app and it'll probably tell you the language.

Hope this will be helpful.

[memecucker]

what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”

[ace-and-ranty]

That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?

[memecucker]

Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food

[voxiferous-deactivated20171119]

I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.

(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)

[emphasisonthehomo]

Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

I LOVE learning about stuff like this :D

[oo0owo0oo]

that corned beef and cabbage thing you hear abou irish americans is actually from a similar situation but because they weren’t allowed to eat that stuff due to that artificial famine

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

<3 FOOD HISTORY <3

[capriceandwhimsy]

Everyone knows Korean barbecue, right? It looks like this, right?

Well, this is called a “flanken cut” and was actually unheard of in traditional Korean cooking. In traditional galbi, the bone is cut about two inches long, separated into individual bones, and the meat is butterflied into a long, thin ribbon, like this:

In fact, the style of galbi with the bones cut short across the length is called “LA Galbi,” as in “Los Angeles-style.” So the “traditional Korean barbecue” is actually a Korean-American dish.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. You see, flanken-cut ribs aren’t actually all that popular in American cooking either. Where they are often used however, is in Mexican cooking, for tablitas.

So you have to imagine these Korean-American immigrants in 1970s Los Angeles getting a hankering for their traditional barbecue. Perhaps they end up going to a corner butcher shop to buy short ribs. Perhaps that butcher shop is owned by a Mexican family. Perhaps they end up buying flanken-cut short ribs for tablitas because that’s what’s available. Perhaps they get slightly weirded out by the way the bones are cut so short, but give it a chance anyway. “Holy crap this is delicious, and you can use the bones as a little handle too, so now galbi is finger food!” Soon, they actually come to prefer the flanken cut over the traditional cut: it’s easier to cook, easier to serve, and delicious, to boot! 

Time goes on, Asian fusion becomes popular, and suddenly the flanken cut short rib becomes better known as “Korean BBQ,” when it actually originated as a Korean-Mexican fusion dish!

I don’t know that it actually happened this way, but I like to think it did.

[darkersolstice]

Corned beef and cabbage as we know it today? That came to the Irish immigrants via their Jewish neighbors at kosher delis.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/

The Irish immigrants almost solely bought their meat from kosher butchers. And what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish corned beef thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes. The Jewish population in New York City at the time were relatively new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe. The corned beef they made was from brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow. Since brisket is a tougher cut, the salting and cooking processes transformed the meat into the extremely tender, flavorful corned beef we know of today.

The Irish may have been drawn to settling near Jewish neighborhoods and shopping at Jewish butchers because their cultures had many parallels. Both groups were scattered across the globe to escape oppression, had a sacred lost homeland, discriminated against in the US, and had a love for the arts. There was an understanding between the two groups, which was a comfort to the newly arriving immigrants. This relationship can be seen in Irish, Irish-American and Jewish-American folklore. It is not a coincidence that James Joyce made the main character of his masterpiece Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a man born to Jewish and Irish parents. 

[espanolbot2]

Ahh, similar origin to fish and chips in the UK then.

That meal came about either in London or the North of England where Jewish immigrant fried fish venders decided to team up with the Irish cooked potato sellers to produce the meal everyone associates with the UK.

Because while a bunch of stuff from the UK was lifted and adapted from folks we colonised (Mulligatawny soup for example, was an adaptation of a soup recipe found in India and which British chefs tried to approximate back home), some of it was made by folks who actively moved here (like tikka masala, that originated in a restaurant up in Scotland).

[littlenerdspace]

Super interesting.

[ekjohnston]

And that’s BEFORE we get into replacing a staple crop! So in the Southern US, you have two groups of people, one who used oats and one who used plantains, and they BOTH replace their staples with corn. And then you get Southern food.

[iheartallthethings]

For those interested in a really deep dive on Chinese food in the United States, I cannot over-recommend Jennifer 8 Lee’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

[mapsontheweb]

Mythical Beasts of Germany

by u/NeilParkinsonMakes

[beefstrugglenoff]

I love you dead punctuation marks.

[beefstrugglenoff]

[tomboyhousewife-deactivated2024]

when you're speaking English and you use more "refined" vocabulary

when you try and speak plainly

[kleefkruid]

whenever someone calls USAmerican English the 'movie accent' I remember how somewhere last year I was on a train when suddenly the silence was broken by an american voice behind me somewhere and I immediately thought "Oh no, someones playing their tiktoks out loud again" and automatically turned around to put a face to my annoyance like you do when someones driving bad, and turns out a few rows down were just some actual in the flesh USAmericans having a nice conversation amongst themselves. I am sorry Americans I'm glad they let you out of the phone

[royalturkeyz]

[janmisali]

oh I did a joke version of this before but I should do it for real too

how do you pronounce the stressed syllable in "tomato"?

to-MAY-to (FACE vowel)

to-MAR-to (START vowel)

to-MOT-to (LOT vowel)

to-MAW-to (THOUGHT vowel)

to-MAT-to (TRAP vowel)

none of these

multiple of these

[show results]

Voting ended onDec 30, 2023

[janmisali]

I am unreasonably amused by whenever cot-caught merged american english speakers spell out "tomawto" to indicate the RP pronunciation of tomato, because that spelling makes no sense to someone who uses RP english. they're not saying tomawto they're saying tomarto

[janmisali]

(confused british person voice) "tomorto"? nobody says it like that surely

[language-gremlin]

the difference between the vowel sounds in “lot” and “thought” successfully stunlocked me for about ten minutes

[inkskinned]

i love when words fit right. seize was always supposed to be that word, and so was jester. tuesday isn't quite right but thursday should be thursday, that's a good word for it. daisy has the perfect shape to it, almost like you're laughing when you say it; and tulip is correct most of the time. while keynote is fun to say, it's super wrong - i think they have to change the label for that one. but fox is spot-on.

most words are just, like, good enough, even if what they are describing is lovely. the night sky is a fine term for it but it isn't perfect the way november is the correct term for that month.

it's not just in english because in spanish the phrase eso si que es is correct, it should be that. sometimes other languages are also better than the english words, like how blue is sloped too far downwards but azul is perfect and hangs in the air like glitter. while butterfly is sweet, i think probably papillion is more correct, although for some butterflies féileacán is much better. year is fine but bliain is better. sometimes multiple languages got it right though, like how jueves and Πέμπτη are also the right names for thursday. maybe we as a species are just really good at naming thursdays.

and if we were really bored and had a moment and a picnic to split we could all sit down for a moment and sort out all the words that exist and find all the perfect words in every language. i would show you that while i like the word tree (it makes you smile to say it), i think arbor is correct. you could teach me from your language what words fit the right way, and that would be very exciting (exciting is not correct, it's just fine).

i think probably this is what was happening at the tower of babel, before the languages all got shifted across the world and smudged by the hand of god. by the way, hand isn't quite right, but i do like that the word god is only 3 letters, and that it is shaped like it is reflecting into itself, and that it kind of makes your mouth move into an echoing chapel when you cluck it. but the word god could also fit really well with a coathanger, and i can't explain that. i think donut has (weirdly) the same shape as a toothbrush, but we really got bagel right and i am really grateful for that.

grateful is close, but not like thunder. hopefully one day i am going to figure out how to shape the way i love my friends into a little ceramic (ceramic is very good, almost perfect) pot and when they hold it they can feel the weight of my care for them. they can put a plant in there. maybe a daisy.

[headspace-hotel]

Grateful makes sense. A grate is something you put over a gap to stop things from falling. It is a sense of trying to hold something as it would ordinarily fall.

I think of this a lot with the names of animals. Frog is perfect, as is cheetah and grackle. Some animals are perfectly right only in the plural—wolves and mice for instance. The sharp surliness of wasp, the mellow and open-ended fuzziness of bee, and who could deny the intrinsic bugness of bug?

Fish is right when you see one cold and dead on your plate or next to a tidepool, but has nothing to say for the animals glinting and alive. Skunk is just right. Hawk is close enough, but eagle is missing something. Those things certainly are chickens, but pigeons aren't that at all. We should call them doves again. I can't disagree with quail, pheasant or duck, and plover is absolutely splendid.

With plants sometimes they do not have a real name to themselves, just a name that compares it to something else. Sometimes the scientific name feels like the true name, and sometimes I can't find any true name at all.

Tulip poplar is neither a tulip nor a poplar, but Liriodendron tulipifera seems to capture it. American sycamore's name isn't sycamore, but Platanus occidentalis is just as blatantly wrong.

Sometimes I think there should be different words for a tree and the wood that comes from it, like we have different words for cattle and beef, or pigs and pork.

The correct name for Bradford pears is Callery pear, but I can't stop calling them Bradford pears, because Bradford is much closer to the tree itself than Callery.

I like the word Kudzu. I did a univocal poem in my poetry class, which is one where you use only one vowel throughout the whole poem. It became a project that stretched well beyond the bounds of the class; I compiled huge lists of words based on the vowels they included. Do you know how few multi-syllabic words there are in English that have U as their only vowel? Murmur, susurrus, upchuck, humus, mucus, unfurl, fungus, upthrust, uncut, sunburn, cumulus, tumult, unjust, usurp, suburb, lustful, unhurt, fulcrum, dumbstruck, sulfur. My list doesn't have kudzu yet. I didn't think enough about plants back then.

[e-wifey-deactivated20201128]

people understand that Spanish speakers speak different dialects of the Spanish language but don’t understand that black people speak a dialect of the English language

[yellowjuice-deactivated20190512]

saw a variation of this conversation on twitter earlier

[brainstatic]

I just want to state for the record that this is completely uncontroversial among linguists. It’s the first day of sociolinguistics class.

[needsmoreexplosions]

I love the phrase "they get along like a house on fire". It's perfect. You and me have perfect chemistry and it's setting off the carbon monoxide detectors. People are calling emergency services to get us to stop being so chummy. Someone died

[ihatecispeople]

i love it actually when nonnative speakers make mistakes that reveal how their native languages work.

lots of koreans online say they "eat" drinks which would assume they only have one word which covers the concept of consumption.

arabic immigrants in sweden (my mother included) have a hard time differentiating between "i think/i believe/my opinion is" which suggests that in arabic these different modalities of speaker agency is treated as one or at least interchangeable.

swedish speakers in english will use should/shall/have to/must with much higher nuance precision than native english speakers, to the point where they sound well awkward, because the distinction between these commands in swedish is much clearer than in english. i make mistakes between is/am/are and has/have constantly because swedish only has one pronoun covering all grammatical persons.

i've heard speakers of languages without gendered pronouns (finnish, the chinese dialects, and a tonne more) make he/she mistakes because it's hard(!!) to learn two or more gendered pronouns and when to use them correctly.

how neat is that?! it add a charm to international english usage in particular and make our appreciation of both our native languages and our learnt ones stronger...!!

[aandriskobold]

i love this! one thing i notice with a lot of people (native speakers of polish, romanian, french and others) is no differentiation between present simple (i go) and present continuous (I am going), because those languages only have one present tense to cover both. it's so lovely every time i hear it

i always think one of the most fun things about learning languages is that it teaches you how weird your own is! especially english phrasal verbs (the very different meanings of stand up, stand down, stand off, stand up to), or trying to explain the difference between being up to something and being up for something to my french friend. I love it!

[ihatecispeople]

another tag reminded me of how spanish speakers often mix up /v/ and /b/ because in panish they pronounced identically!

I wish more people had the ability to become bilingual because you're right, it makes you understand your own language at a more intimate and analytical level!!

[katakulio]

People whose native language is heavily gendered often apply gendered pronouns to English words that don't have them. For example, my Brazilian sports coach referred to my knee as "she" instead of "it". It's even more interesting when you realise that Old English did have gendered nouns, much like German, and we've essentially lost that entire element of our language.

[msexcelfractal]

I’m learning Russian by osmosis from classic rock of the USSR. Droog means friend and droog drooga means each other. Isn’t that sweet?