🇩🇰

Home is where your heart is. Danish, English. Learning German, French, Dutch and Swedish.

[shabbytigers]

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

Levels of understanding other slavic languages

oh we also have X and it means the same!

that looks like X but misspelled

that's just the archaic variant of X

this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X

this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology

what

okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal

I wanted to ask for X and accidentally called someone a whore

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

I don't even have to look at the blog and I just know this is from a Pole about Czechs

suffering

[byrons]

KAKAOVY CHLEBICEK???!!!???

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

hissing growling scratching you etc etc

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

for example

(Polish: are you looking for a squirrel?, Slovak: excuse me, he is doing what to the squirrel?)

(also "hladna pića" means "cold drinks" in Croatian. means "hungry cunt" in Slovak and Czech)

("you're weird" in Czech is the same as "you're amazing" in Croatian, while "you're amazing" in Czech is the same as "you're terrible" in Croatian)

[poetka]

My favourite recent-ish example of #8:

[visloka]

[czto-nebud-blog]

Don't forget this:

And of course pomoć (help) vs pomoč (ordering you to piss on something)

[czto-nebud-blog]

Also remembered this shop from my trip to Croatia (piko means meth in czech and slovak)

[kaazdalena]

przepraszam w CZYM ta restauracja????

[choccy-zefirka-deactivated20251]

@lindenmori

[saltylangblr]

whenever I see someone use the quote marks „ “ im like aha. german speaker spotted

[linguistness]

Guilty

[german-enthusiast]

wäre es nicht so lustig, wenn die Geste für Anführungszeichen sprachspezifisch „korrekt” wäre?

und was machen franzosen dann? ein liegendes « v » bei dem sie die Hände schnell bewegen?

[german-enthusiast]

artistic rendition to show what i mean

[victusinveritas]

[mysharona1987]

Writing agent Jonny Geller gives advice to young writers. 

[pocket-size-cthulhu]

I'm so fascinated by languages with different levels of formality built in because it immediately introduces such complex social dynamics. The social distance between people is palpable when it's built right into the language, in a way it's not really palpable in English.

So for example. I speak Spanish, and i was taught to address everyone formally unless specifically invited otherwise. People explained to me that "usted" was formal, for use with strangers, bosses, and other people you respect or are distant from, while "tú" is used most often between family and good friends.

That's pretty straightforward, but it gets interesting when you see people using "tú" as a form of address for flirting with strangers, or for picking a fight or intimidating someone. In other languages I've sometimes heard people switch to formal address with partners, friends or family to show when they are upset. That's just so interesting! You're indicating social and emotional space and hierarchy just in the words you choose to address the other person as "you"!!

Not to mention the "what form of address should I use for you...?" conversation which, idk how other people feel about it, but to me it always felt awkward as heck, like a DTR but with someone you're only just becoming comfortable with. "You can use tú with me" always felt... Weirdly intimate? Like, i am comfortable around you, i consider you a friend. Like what a vulnerable thing to say to a person. (That's probably also just a function of how i was strictly told to use formal address when i was learning. Maybe others don't feel so weird about it?)

And if you aren't going to have a conversation about it and you're just going to switch, how do you know when? If you switch too soon it might feel overly familiar and pushy but if you don't switch soon enough you might seem cold??? It's so interesting.

Anyway. As an English-speaking American (even if i can speak a bit of Spanish), i feel like i just don't have a sense for social distance and hierarchy, really, simply because there isn't really language for it in my mother tongue. The fact that others can be keenly aware of that all the time just because they have words to describe it blows my mind!

[kurganfilledwithbearbones]

But you do have it! because American English has titles and also hierarchical treatment of last names (if your name is Jeremy Jefferson, there's a huge semantic weight difference between Jerry, Jeremy, Mr. Jeremy, and Mr. Jefferson, for example). English marks hierarchy and familiarity even if it doesn't do it in more grammatical terms. Think of being a kid and your parents yelling your full name across the house when you were in trouble.

I speak Icelandic. Icelandic doesn't have titles or last names or everyday use of a formal plural or any other obvious markers of formality and intimacy. Formality is still marked, just in non-grammatical lexical terms...but because it's not marked in ways I as a L1 English speaker recognize, it's harder for me to reproduce.

The reason you feel like this doesn't exist in English to the point where it exists in Spanish is because it's easier to spot for a L2 learner who has to think about categorizing the new language in a way that makes sense in the L1, and unless you have some more in depth information about language registers and intimacy marking and whatever it's easy to consider this as a novel phenomenon in the L2. But a lot of this semantic stuff is pretty universal, just marked in different ways.

[lunalingua]

THANK YOU. This is a misconception. Speaking from my experience of living in Japan and studying Japanese while being a native speaker of American English:

1. For folks who don't know, Japanese words/grammar change depending on formality, the genders of the speaker and listener, the age of the speaker and listener, etc.

2. But English words/grammar ALSO change depending on the above contexts described. It's just not formalized in grammar books. Consider the differences:

A. "The honor of your presence is requested for dinner this evening."

B. "I would like to invite you to dinner."

C. "Do you want to get dinner together?"

D. "Wanna grab a bite to eat?"

E. "Yo, bro, you want a burger?"

Etc. People will be like "it's wild that Japanese has different words for 'meal' depending on formality!! Gohan? Omeshi? Crazy!!!" But ENGLISH IS THE SAME WAY.

And this actually makes it harder for speakers of languages like Japanese to learn natural English, because they've been taught that there's no difference in tone between telling a waiter "I'd like a coffee" and "I want coffee." Since one of those feels easier to learn, they'll choose the option that makes them sound weirdly dickish to the waitstaff.

In short: English has levels of formality! Conveniently, saying otherwise fits the stereotypes of rigidly hierarchal East Asians, refined and sophisticated Europeans, and lawless/casual Americans and Australians—but us not recognizing these differences makes it harder for ESL speakers to learn real English

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[chthonic-isabelleadjani-deactiv]

The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there's no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that's used to fill the empty spaces between languages

[carnivorine]

Ok English is my native language and unfortunatly the only one I know yet, but this reminds me so much of that passage in Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

[theaudientvoid]

[theaudientvoid]

Specifically, to “swash a buckler” referred to the act of pounding a buckler (small shield) against one’s own chest as a sort of macho display.

[hvlthgxth-deactivated20241124]

What about fuckface?

[thescreechowl]

Ignoring the joke (sorry), that IS a curious one because! Any of the compound words mentioned above would, if switched from exocentric to reg compound, have the boring-ass -er ending and the noun positions would trade places, right? I.e. thriftspender, pocketpicker etc. The meaning remains the same.

So fuckface would turn into Facefucker. Buuuut. That changes the meaning entirely! It implies that the target… let’s call him Wulfric, is a fucker of faces. However og Fuckface means Wulfric’s face is the face in need of a thorough fucking, and definitely on the receiving end. Poor (lucky?) Wulfric. So would that still make it a true exocentric compound noun? Since it doesn’t keep its meaning? SO FASCINATING!!!

As an aside, the German word for Fuckface is Backpfeifengesicht, meaning a face in need of a slapping. While less severe, it’s endlessly more delightful and pleasing to say.

Carry on.

[mapsontheweb]

Map of the World’s Writing Systems

by futuresponJ_

[powerburial]

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

[3liza]

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

[bourtange]

specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)

[cryptotheism]

The closer a language is to yours, the easier it is to understand, the further it is from you, the harder it is to understand. But there's a sort of uncanny valley right in the middle that makes a language sound silly.

I'm an English speaker. German sounds similar, I can even find cognates sometimes. Mandarin Chinese sounds completely alien, but I can understand that it is a language.

But Dutch, Dutch sounds hilarious. Dutch sounds like a clown version of English. I wonder why that is.

I've heard Spanish speakers say similar things about Portuguese, which makes me think there's some sort of linguistic Silly Zone.

[cryptotheism]

Y'all are already doing this but I am fascinated. Tag this with your native language, and what languages are in the Silly Zone for you.

[pompadourpink]

Hi! Yours is actually the best langblr in existence. I have been studing French for quite some time now and it would be a great help if you could recommend some reading material. Thanks!

Aw shucks, thanks darling! Here’s some stuff:

Books:

Children’s books

Short stories

Graphic novels/comics

Poems

Fairy tales

Classic literature by century (2/2 is still in progress)

Free ebooks websites (I like Wikisource)

If ya queer

If ya black

My personal favourites

Online, not books:

Social media

Subreddits

Fanfictions

News

MOOCS

Hope this helps! x

[avelera]

Fun fact, “blond” is one of the few words in English that technically maintains its French-rooted gender-based spelling breakdown.

Blond = a male with blond hair

Blonde = a female with blonde hair

Blonds = more than one male blond or a mixed gender group of blonds

Blondes = and all-female group of blondes

Very few people follow this rule anymore. I doubt anyone but the worst pedant would dock you points for it if you got it wrong. But technically the rule is there. And I notice it. And try to get it right in my prose.

(Yes it applies to brunet vs brunette too)

(Now excuse me, I wrote “blond” so much that the word lost meaning to me. Blond. Blonde. Blondondondonnnddd…)

[salvadorbonaparte]

Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

[salvadorbonaparte]

**UPDATE**

I have restructured the folders to make them easier to use and managed to add almost all languages requested and then some

Please let me know any further suggestions

[salvadorbonaparte]

[clockworktardis]

….holy shit. You found the holy grail.

[kittydesade]

….. is this a DIFFERENT person keeping gigabytes worth of language books on google drive? Holy crap.

[wyvyrn]

This. This here. Is why I love Tumblr.❤️❤️❤️

[bard-llama]

Update from OP:

UPDATE because apparently not everyone has seen this yet the new and improved version of this is a MEGA folder: https://mega.nz/folder/kQBXHKwA#-osWRLNCXAsd62ln8wKa8w

2411 files and 819 subfolders

[flootzavut]

Holy shit. OP you are a wonderful human being.

[surohsopsisofclouds]

O.O Linguistic Holy Grail…

[thoughtkick]

“A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”

— Noam Chomsky

[janmisali]

it's mildly annoying when people compare emoji to hieroglyphs. like I get where the misconception comes from, but it's still a little bit frustrating to see

[janmisali]

egyptian hieroglyphs were not a system of pictograms, and this becomes readily apparent from looking at any substantial amount of text. some specific concepts had one-character ideographs to represent them, but most things would be spelled out phonetically (but with a similar-ish semantic character next to it to imply the general category that the word you're spelling belongs to)

[definitely-not-an-alias]

Couldja explain more? I know very little of hieroglyphics, and you seem knowledgeable.

[janmisali]

sure.

so as an example, the ancient egyptian word for "cat" was written like this:

or, using unicode characters your device may or may not display correctly, "𓏇𓇋𓅱𓃠". this was pronounced something like /mi(ʀ)juw/, transliterated as mjw (the similarity to "mew" is not a coincidence.)

this word consists of a sequence of four characters. the first three represent the three consonant sounds in the word, with the first character covering the first two consonants together. then the fourth character is a cat, because this word means "cat".

so, together, this word is spelled something like my-y-w-[cat]. there's both a phonetic component and a semantic component. it's very cool!

[adhd-languages]

It is cool! Does a similar concept apply to verbs or other parts of speech, or is this mostly for nouns? Was this a way to avoid homonyms causing confusion? Also, you mentioned that the first three represented consonants — do they not write vowel sounds?

(I know very little about Egyptian hieroglyphics, so forgive me if these are a silly questions)

[lemonadeandlanguages]

Love chatting with coworkers from other provinces, it really puts some things into perspective

Like how having a language police to enforce the use of French in the province is a batshit idea

[swrrt]

From an academic view of language policy (as in the studies done on this over time both here and abroad like in Luxembourg, German/French boarder towns, etc.) I understand the why of the rules per social policy trends and social acceptance/success rates. However as a linguist I love looking at everything QC does in language policy and laughing because I know what will/won’t work, and just how well it will/won’t work with a pretty small margin of error. It’s like laughing at L’Académie Française trying to ban the word hashtag or cool.

-hold on wait what is #pastagate

[lemonadeandlanguages]

Oh man, pastagate is my fave oqlf fuckup because it made them look so stupid lmao

Basically, in 2013, they sent an Italian restaurant a warning notice (which is standard procedure when a business doesn't respect the law) for having Italian words such as antipasto, calamari and even pasta in their menu instead of the French equivalent

And it basically generated public and international outcry ("Quebec wants to ban the word pasta!" etc) and it ended with the head of the language police resigning partly because it was just such a ridiculous complaint and partly because it had also come out that the oqlf had been harassing business owners for years

After that they stopped being so strict with the language enforcement or so they say