Lingcharts

Linguistic Charts (profile and background images not OC) including numbers, colors, greetings and days of the week with more to follow!

[aardwolfpack]

A sample of the Georgian language written in the three Georgian alphabets: Asomtavruli (top), Nuskhuri (middle), and Mkhedruli (bottom).  See the complete alphabets and more information at Omniglot’s Georgian page.

[glintglimmergleam]

חג חנוכה שמח

a freilichen chanukah

hanukka alegre

هانوكا سعيد

 حَنوکا مبارک

frohes chanukka

joyeux hanouka

buon chanukkà

bon hanukkà

feliz janucá

vrolijk chanoeka

mutlu hanuka

с счастливой Хануки

срећна Ханука  

Χαρούμενο Χανουκά

修殿節 快樂

हनुका मुबारक हो

happy hanukkah

however you say or spell it, tumblr, may yours be filled with joy and light

[awardwinningbread]

Here it is in ASL aswell!

[mapsontheweb]

What to say to someone who leaves the door open after coming in in European languages.

[quasi-normalcy]

I keep waiting for someone to ask me whether I was born in barn so that I can reply, without skipping a beat, “In a manger, actually.”

[suilesbian]

What is Madrid’s problem

[lingcharts]

Do you live in the Colosseum

[mapsontheweb]

Map Of Chinese Dialects

[mapsontheweb]

How to say the name “John” in Europe.

[tealingual]

Langblr/lingblr promo [part 2]

nyahongo: English, Arabic, French, Japanese wonderful-language-sounds: English, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic lang0weilig: Spanish, English, German, Italian aro-langblr: English, Spanish, German, Japanese, Lithuanian linguisten: linguistics athensstudies: German, Latin, Italian balloons-and-shadows: Swedish gwendolynlerman: Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin; linguistics slimestudying: Japanese dasistnichtsehrpunkrockvondir: English, Tamil, German, French, Luxembourgish latenightlangblrs: Italian, English, German, Arabic, Russian incipitinterpreter: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic tulunnguaq: Greenlandic zefiiri: English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Finnish bubbleteakoala: Korean, French, Chinese sagittarius-studies: Turkish, English, Italian, German, Greek, Korean culmaer: Afrikaans, English, French, Dutch, Yiddish, German, Persian, Xhosa kahu-learns: Japanese, Italian, Te Reo Māori huangcha: English, Polish, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin segledepericles: Catalan, Spanish, English, Italian, Latin

[jothstrap]

my friend Alicia made this video to show you the correct way to pronounce "axolotl"! it's a Nahuatl word that gets mispronounced so often, often for puns right here on tumblr dot com, so I wanted to share this with you all because it's important to respect Indigenous languages. you can find her artwork here!

[mapsontheweb]

Languages of the British Isles throughout history.

by u/CountZapolai

[mapsontheweb]

Meat ball in German dialects.

[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 potentially (more info to come) 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.

[feministakari]

This is awful first of all, but how can you completely write that many Wikipedia page translations in a bastardized language without getting caught sooner? I know Wikipedia is open to edit many pages, but there’s got to be some checks right? The fact that nobody caught this seems like a bigger problem. Even if that one kid didn’t do this, it could have been done to many other vulnerable languages by anyone else.

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

Apparently, at some point he was somehow granted moderator power, but there’s so far no detail as to how. Scots Wikipedia isn’t exactly a bustling business. There aren’t many moderators, and unless they were combing through tens of thousands of articles continually, these ones could be missed among the rest.

Apparently, the kid was using online Scots dictionaries (not a reliable way to translate a language) so that at a glance or to a non-speaker, enough words…..looked like they were being used in the APPROXIMATELY correct place. That combined with a small number of moderators and tens of thousands of articles to look after let this non-speaker edit and moderate pages despite being caught a few times and questioned by speakers.

That’s all I know.

It’s a mess. And you’re right. Hopefully nothing like this happens (or is already happening) to other vulnerable languages.

[somni-omni]

Native speakers are organising an edit-a-thon. One of the organisers reached out to the person that caused all this and said they were on board with actually learning Scots. They later tweeted they were concerned for the person due to the harassment they were getting. The teenager is okay with being banned from the wiki:

Teenager’s statement: “Honestly, I don’t mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles, and ban me from the wiki for good. I’ve already found out that my “contributions” have angered countless people, and to me that’s all the devastation I can be given, after years of my thinking I was doing good (and yes, obsessively editing). I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can’t see that the habit you’ve developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older. I don’t care about defending myself, I only want to stop being harassed on my social medias (and to stop my other friends who have nothing to do with the wiki from being harassed as well). Whether peace can be achieved by scowiki being kept like it is or extensively reformed to wipe my influence from it makes no difference to me now that I know that I’ve done no good anyway.”

It should be noted, it is possible to selectively delete pages started by a specific user and also roll back their edits. It was started by native speakers and there are still native speakers writing pages. The whole thing doesn’t have to be deleted.

While I may seem unreasonably sympathetic to this person, I’m doing so because so many of the native Scots speakers who have been or plan to contribute to scowiki, and the Reddit OP, have been surprisingly very sympathetic. It’s obvious this wasn’t done for “teh lullz” like many are assuming. If that’s their decision on how to proceed then I certainly won’t go against that.

[wingedcatgirl]

I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can’t see that the habit you’ve developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older.

Yeah, that definitely tracks… glad the guy is at least cognizant of what he’s done and willing to help resolve the problem.

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

Good things to hear on this situation!

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

From my other post:

Y’all I reblogged that post with additional information yesterday hoping simply to explain what Scots language is and what had happened with only the developing information I had available in that moment. I didn’t call for and don’t approve of the excessive and graphic descriptions of violence and doxxing threats in the notes of that post.

I understand people are angry, but plenty of native Scots speakers are optimistically looking ahead to how this attention can be used to create a strong Scots language resource moving forward.

Michael Dempster, the director of the Scots Language Centre based in Perth, takes a more ameliorative approach and says he is now in conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation about the prospect of properly re-editing the teenager’s contributions.

“We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure. It’s a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. It has the potential to be a great online focus for the language in the future.” (Source)

Even the person who originally discovered the fiasco and started the Reddit post has asked people to stop harassing the person responsible and his friends who were not even involved:

EDIT : I’ve been told that the editor I’ve written about has received some harassment for what they’ve done. This should go without saying but I don’t condone this at all. They screwed up and I’m sure they know that by now. They seem like a nice enough person who made a mistake when they were a young child, a mistake which nobody ever bothered to correct, so it’s hardly their fault. They’re clearly very passionate and dedicated, and with any luck maybe they can use this as an opportunity to learn the language properly and make a positive contribution. If you’re reading this I hope you’re doing alright and that you’re not taking it too personally. (Source).

The guy himself has apologized, explained that he thought he was doing a good thing, and has agreed to both leave the wiki AND to start actually learning Scots.

If the people who have to clean up this mess and organize the translation corrections can give this guy some grace, I think that’s the path to follow.

I won’t tell Scottish people and Scots speakers how to feel about all of this, but I’ll ask other people in the notes, especially the outraged Americans, who are posting extremely aggressive and sometimes violent reactions to consider putting that energy into supporting the speakers who are going to fix this.

The main takeaway from this mess is that now other vulnerable language resources can check their own weak spots to hopefully avoid this from happening to them, and it seems that now the woefully understaffed (not their fault, they’ve been doing their best!) Scots Wiki is getting the attention and volunteer work it deserves to build a reliable language source on strong foundations.

[lingcharts]

Days of the week in some languages of Iberia.

Spanish, Galician and Portuguese are Ibero-Romance languages from the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. Catalán is also a Western Romance language, but in the Gallo-Romance group. Basque is a language isolate.

Note: spelling and/or full words may differ according to region or locale.

[lingcharts]

Colors in some languages of East Africa.

Swahili is a Bantu language of the Sabaki branch of the Northeast Coast Bantu family, spoken by 10-15 million people as a first language and about 90 million as a second language as a lingua-franca in about a dozen countries in East Africa.

Kikuyu is another Bantu language and is from the Northeast Bantu group. It is spoken by 6.6 million speakers in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Somali is a Cushitic language from the Somali language family. It is spoken by about 16 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

Oromo is an Oromoid language from the Cushitic language family with about 35 million speakers, primarily in Ethiopia with some Kenyan and Somalian speakers.

Amharic comes from the Ethiopian branch of the Semitic language family and is spoken by 22 million people in Ethiopia.

Note: spelling, pronunciation and/or full words may differ according to region or locale.

[languagesandpomegranates]

● Language Colour Moodboard ● Purple in languages I’m learning or want to learn ● 🇩🇪🇫🇷🇧🇦🇵🇱🇹🇷🇱🇺🇬🇪🇪🇸🇧

● inspired by @woailanguages 💞

[wanderlustlanguages]

TEDTalks related to language (learning)

because (sometimes) they motivate me

How language shapes the way we think | Lera Boroditsky

The secrets of learning a new language | Lýdia Machová

How to learn any language in six months | Chris Lonsdale | TEDxLingnanUniversity

Learning a language? Speak it like you’re playing a video game | Marianna Pascal | TEDxPenangRoad

Why We Struggle Learning Languages | Gabriel Wyner | TEDxNewBedford

5 techniques to speak any language | Sid Efromovich | TEDxUpperEastSide

Breaking the language barrier | Tim Doner | TEDxTeen 2014

How to learn any language easily | Matthew Youlden | TEDxClapham

The Irish Language and Beauty | Dónall Ó Héalaí | TEDxBerkeley

How to Talk Like a Native Speaker | Marc Green | TEDxHeidelberg

How the language you speak affects your thoughts

Hacking Language Learning: Dr. Conor Quinn at TEDxDirigo

How learning German taught me the link between maths and poetry | Harry Baker | TEDxVienna

We'r Needin tae Talk Aboot Wir Language | Michael Dempster | TEDxInverness

One Simple Method to Learn Any Language | Scott Young & Vat Jaiswal | TEDxEastsidePrep

Learning a Second Language | Shinyoung Grace Kim | TEDxYouth@AISR

Let me know if I missed your favourite!

[lingcharts]

Numbers in Languages of Central Asia. 

Kazakh is one of the main languages of Kazakhstan, alongside Russian, and is spoken by over 5 million people within the country. It is from the Kipchak-Nogai branch of the Kipchak family of Common Turkic, in the Turkic language family. It can be seen written in the Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets.

Uzbek is the official language of Uzbekistan, with about 27 million speakers. It comes from the Karluk branch of Common Turkic in the Turkic language family. It is typically written in the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet.

Turkmen, the official language of Turkmenistan, is spoken by about 6.7 million people. It comes from the Eastern Oghuz branch of the Oghuz languages within Common Turkic. It can be seen written in Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic script.

Kyrgyz is the official language of Kyrgyzstan and is spoken by over four million people. Like Kazakh, it is from the Kipchak branch of Common Turkic, belongs to the Kyrgyz-Kipchak subgroup. Kyrgyz can be written in Person-Arabic script or Cyrillic script.

Tajik, the official language of Tajikistan, is spoken by about 8.4 million people and comes from a completely different linguistic family as the languages previously described. It is actually an Indo-European language, from the Persian subgroup of the Iranian languages. Tajik can be written in the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet.

Dari, also known as Farsi, is an official language of Afghanistan and is spoken by 12.5 million people. It is also a Persian language from the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It uses the Persian alphabet.

Pashto is the other official language of Afghanistan, mostly spoken southeast of the Dari speaking area by 58 million people. It is also an Iranian language, but comes from the Eastern Iranian branch rather than the Western Iranian branch (from which Persian languages originated). It is written in Person-Arabic script.

Note: Spelling, pronunciation or full words may differ according to region or locale.

[russiawave]

kot - a regular cat

koshka - a regular female cat

kote (internet slang) - a cute chubby little guy, every single cute cat on the internet

kisa -  a pretty, flirtatious, graceful, cranky and haughty lady

kisunya - an extra pretty, flirtatious, graceful, cranky and haughty lady

kis’ - just a dork, controlled by aliens

kotik - a bit more disney version of a regulat cat

koten’ka - cuddly little fella, will purr and knead you to death 

kotofei - usually a big, old, extra fluffy cat, who knows a lot of bed time stories

kotyandra - fast, thin and slinky, we not sure if it’s even a cat 

koshak - a tough street guy, dogs fear him

kotyara - extra round, exrta big, kind ass fella. 

[catsuggest]

So importante

[lingcharts]

Numbers in some native languages of Mexico. 

The Zapotec languages belong to the Zapotecan branch of the Oto-Manguean family and are spoken in the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Veracruz, Guerrero and Puebla with about 450,000 speakers. Isthmus Zapotec is the most widely spoken of this group, by about 85,000 people in the state of Oaxaca. 

Mixtec is a part of the Mixtecan branch of the Oto-Manguean family, which is difficult to classify into different individual languages or dialects because of the complexity of its dialect continuum boundaries. There are about 480,000 speakers of Mixtec in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero.

Mixe, not to be confused with Mixtec, belongs to the Mixean branch of the Mixe-Zoquean family. It is spoken by about 133,000 people in the state of Oaxaca, with about 3,600 speakers of Ayulta Mixe.

The Tarahumara language is part of the Tarahumaran branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, spoken by around 70,000 people in the state of Chihuahua.

Kiliwa is a severely endangered Yuman language spoken in Baja California. In 2018 there were only 4 native speakers.

The Totonac languages form a branch of the Totonacan (or Totonac-Tepehua) family and are spoken by about 280,000 people in Puebla, Veracruz, and Zacatlán. Upper Nexaca Totonac is spoken by around 3,400 people in Puebla and is considered endangered.

Purépecha is a language isolate spoken by about 125,000 people in the state of Michoacán.

Note: spellings and/or full words may differ according to dialect or locale.

Other, more specific note: if you are wondering, “where are the Mayan languages?” they’re on Part II, which will be up soon