Linguistics

[te-ddybear]

A Home for the Homeless, organized by Sarah Kornblatt

According to the philosopher Maimonides, the highest level of charity is to help a person to b… Sarah Kornblatt needs your support for A Hom

According to the philosopher Maimonides, the highest level of charity is to help a person to become self-sufficient . . . 

The idea is essentially a homeless shelter but one that operates in a very different way from the homeless shelter as we know it. Rather than simply a place to crash for the night, it is sort of a rehabilitative homeless shelter and a community center for homeless people. Its goal is to end homelessness one individual at a time. Residents enrich their lives at the center by volunteering to help with the center’s affairs -- so that it is almost self-sufficient in its operations -- and by taking classes and meeting professionals to improve themselves. Simultaneously, the residents look for jobs so that they may begin to earn income, rely on the center less and less, and eventually move out. However they are of course still always welcome to participate in the center’s programs and even give back to the center if they can. The center is a community. We all know the expression about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish; the idea here is to teach a man to fish but give him fish while he is learning. 

[progressivejudaism]

Reblog this post to SHOW YOUR SUPPORT for Israel!

Am Yisrael Chai! Let’s see how many notes we can get on here!

[hermionerd-studies]

So here is yet another post about Spanish that I hope you all langblrs will like. I present to you 10 words that exist in Spanish but don’t exist in English.

Knowing and using them in your vocabulary shows how fluent you actually are so hopefully this will help you.

1. Chueco/a: 

This can be roughly be translated as “not straight” BUT NOT IN THE SEXUAL ORIENTATION KIND OF WAY. It literally means not being able to do something in a straight line. 

For example: Not able to draw a straight line? You draw chueco/a. Tried kicking a soccer ball in a straight line but it ended up in the far left side of the court? You kick chueco/a.

2. Empalagado/a: 

This is what happens when you eat too much sugar. 

For example: You know that feeling of nausea and awkward fullness after you have eaten like five cupcakes, two chocolate bars and three bottles of soda? THEN is when you feel empalagado/a.

3. Despistado/a: 

So I Google-translated this word and it came out as “lackadaisical”. I don’t think anyone actually uses that word. SO, it means someone who doesn’t pay attention to anything and daydreams most of the time. It is not a permanent feature tho, you can be despistado/a just during your math class. 

For example: If someone asks you a question and you don’t answer because you were too busy thinking about Zac Efron, then you are despistado/a.

4. Tocayo/a: 

It refers to someone who shares name with you. 

For example: Let’s imagine your name is Hermione and suddenly you meet someone whose name is ALSO Hermione. Voilá! That person is now your tocayo/a.

5. Buen provecho: This is not a word but a phrase. It means something like “have a good meal”, it is kinda close to saying “bon appettit” in French. It is frequently used before you start a meal but also as a sign of respect when you run into someone who is currently eating. Also, it is not a phrase used only for “fancy” situations, it actually works whenever someone is eating. 

For example: If you are eating at a restaurant with a group, you say buen provecho before you start eating, but also let’s imagine you are walking around the city and see your boss eating tacos from a food truck, then you also say buen provecho. Freaking good manners.

6. Desgraciado/a: Oh this is a funny one. You might think, at first sight, that this word refers to someone who is not very graceful. WRONG. If you Google-translate the word, it may drive you to think it means “unfortunate”. ALSO WRONG. This is what you call someone who has been a jerk. Someone who didn’t treat you right. Like honestly, someone you really hate. 

For example: Your boyfriend just dumped you on your birthday? He is a desgraciado. Your group-project colleague disappeared during the whole process and just showed up to put her name on the project? She is a desgraciada. It is such a powerful word, I love it.

7. Llorón/Llorona: It refers to someone who cries A LOT. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone who cries but also someone who is very sensitive and gets sad about a lot of things, especially if those things aren’t really important. 

For example: Your sister just cried because she saw a very cute dog? She is a llorona. Your best friend just got VERY upset because he got a 99/100 on a test? He is a llorón (das me tho).

8. Te quiero: This is probably one of the phrases native Spanish speakers miss the most when they start speaking English. This is what you say to someone (and by someone it means a romantic partner most of the time) when you start getting feelings for them but you don’t love them just yet. If you did love them tho you would say “te amo”.  

For example: You have been dating someone for a while now and you know they are amazing but you are not in the “love” point just yet, then you say te quiero to them. No commitment, you guys.

9. Desvelado/a: It refers to someone that hasn’t slept for a while. 

For example: When you pull an all-nighter and show up to class late, with huge bags under your eyes and basically just feeling like a living-dead, you are desvelado/a.

10. Lampiño/a: It literally refers to someone that doesn’t have facial/body hair. 

For example: If you are trying to grow a beard but just can’t seem to grow any hair on your face you are a lampiño/a. Also, if you do not have to shave your legs at all for the summer because you have been blessed with the lack of body hair, then you are lampiño/a.

[fozmeadows]

Watching my toddler figure out how to language is fascinating. Yesterday we were stumped when he kept insisting there was a “Lego winner” behind his bookshelf - it turned out to be a little Lego trophy cup. Not knowing the word for “trophy”, he’d extrapolated a word for “thing you can win”. And then, just now, he held up his empty milk container and said, “Mummy? It’s not rubbish. It’s allowed to be a bottle.” - meaning, effectively, “I want this. Don’t throw it away.” But to an adult ear, there’s something quite lovely about “it’s allowed to be a bottle,” as if we’re acknowledging that the object is entitled to keep its title even in the absence of the original function.

[legit-writing-tips]

Another good post to read for those writing small human characters. 

[jennytrout]

My son was about three when he came to me in the middle of the day and said, “Mommy, there’s a knight behind the bush.” I thought he meant a toy knight or something. So I follow him outside and he goes, “Listen. Do you hear it? It’s night behind the bush.” It was a cricket. A cricket was standing in the little patch of shade under the bush, chirping. So, my son saw this dark area with accompanying nighttime sounds and decided, okay, well, that is a night right there. Their brains are incredible.

[coldlikedeath]

This is lovely

[glintglimmergleam]

Other features of Jewish conversational style include a preference for personal topics, abrupt shifts of topics, unhesitating introduction of new topics and persistence in reintroducing a topic if others don’t immediately pick up on it.

Jews also tend to tell more stories in their conversations, often in rounds; dramatize the point of a story instead of putting it into words; and focus on the emotional experience of it.

People whose regional and ethnic background promotes a different way of conversing may not “get the point” of these rounds of story-sharing with no real plot, [Tannen] said. They also may find the expectation of personal revelation unnervingly intrusive.

I love Deborah Tannen a lot.  I love our rude fast oversharing speech patterns a lot.

[etrogim-deactivated20200109]

🗣 I 🗣 LOVE 🗣 JUDEO 🗣 LINGUISTICS

[sweet-child-of-mine11]

Can you understand native speakers?

Many languages available. One of the hardest audio practice sites I have found. Enjoy!

English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Danish, Hebrew, Latin, Esperanto 

[polyglotswede]

THIS IS LEGIT THE BEST SHIT EVER OMG

[jewish-pride]

How to Learn Yiddish

[linguisticsyall]

Hello! I was wondering if you could help me find a language? A couple of months(?) ago I saw a post on tumblr about an old merchant(?) language which was made in such a manner that anyone could read it. It was a mix of scandinavian, english, french etc., and the post even had a photo of a passage written in that language. It showed words switching from one language to another several times in a sentence. I think it was called an universal language? I'm not sure.. Hope you can help me! Thanks!

Can you help us, friends?

[chavorruco-noventero-deactivate]

Tbh the idea that German is an angry or ugly language is just French propoganda to divert attention away from the fact that French sounds exactly like when your dog is choking on some plastic wrapper he found somehow

[eruhamster]

for the most part german sounds exactly as it looks and their words make sense ie submarine’s logic: ‘boat that goes underwater? let’s call it underwaterboat’ 

french is a hell language that the french are elitist about and act prissy over even though like 50% of the letters that make up any given word don’t even get pronounced

[saijanbulma]

Just to add, as a former opera singer I had the delight of finding that the spoken French I knew was of almost no use when it came to singing because they literally could not sing the way they speak it. We had a fluent French speaker in our year who was advised not to sing in French because learning all the new rules might fuck up her spoken French. French is fucked up.

Btw best language to sing in? Italian, hands down. Best language to speak, German hands down. Best for poetry though? Honestly English, because we have so many different words for the same fucking things, even if most of them are stolen, that means when you’re painting in English you have a bigger pallette.

French is pretty good for sounding fancy, I guess. If you like that sort of thing.

[youngcrappyhungry-deactivated20]

I literally speak French and even I know it’s condescending

The whole thing just comes from rich English snobs using French language and fashion to assert how much better they were than everyone

[curriebelle]

All you have to do to debunk “French is fancy and pretty” is listen to 20 seconds of Quebec French b/c Quebec French sounds like a mean duck doing a bad impression of a duck he doesn’t like.

[wtfduolingo]

Québécois is to French what Chilean is to Spanish this is just a fact

[mynameisgoliath]

Cozy vocab in Hebrew

נְשׁיקַה - kiss (mas, pl. נשיקוֹת) סֵרֵט - movie (mas, pl. סרַטים) סוודֵר - sweater (mas, pl. סוודרים) כַּר - pillow (mas, pl. כרים) קַפַה - coffee גַרבַּיים - socks סֵפֵר - book (mas, pl. ספַרים) נַחָת - comfort שְֹמיכָה - blanket (fem, pl. שמיכוֹת) אַח-fireplace (mas, pl. אחים)

חַתוּלַה - cat (fem, pl. חתולות) חַמימוּת - warmth כּוֹכַבים - stars תֵה - tea

תִיוֹן-tea bag (mas, pl. תיונים) חיבּוּק - hug (mas, pl. חיבוקים) נֵר - candle (mas, pl. נֵרוֹת)

רַך - soft שָׁברירי - delicate מַתוֹק - sweet נוֹחַ - comfortable נַעים - warm

לְנַשֵׁק - to kiss לְחַבֵּק - to hug לִשׁמוֹר עַל מישֵׁהוּ\מישהי - to take care of sb לִשׁכַּב - to lie down לִהִתכַרבֵּל עִם מישהו\מישהי - to cuddle לִקרוֹא - to read ֹלִשׁון - to sleep לַנוּחַ - to rest

Other lists I know of: Maltese, Italian, Finnish, German, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Swedish, Spanish

[nevver]

The alphabet fades away

[madlori]

Would you like to read a book in which this happens?

It’s one of my all-time favorite books.  It’s called Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.  He describes it as an “progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.”

It is written in the form of letters between the citizens of the fictional island of Nollop, an independent nation off the coast of South Carolina and home of Nevin Nollop, who invented the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”  That phrase is written in tiles over a statue of Nollop in their town square, and when one night a storm causes one of the tiles to fall, the council decides that it’s a sign from Nollop that they are no longer allowed to use that letter, in speech or writing, on pain of progressive punishments including public beating and up to banishment.

Then another tile falls.  Then another.

The citizens, who are all very attached to their words and writing, mount a campaign to come up with a phrase that uses all 26 letters but is shorter than Nollop’s, thus proving that he was not divine and negating all the edicts.

Because the novel is told in the form of letters the citizens write, and this is the genius part…the author must also stop using the letters as they fall.  So the book gradually stops using letters until at one point I think they’re down to just five.

The resolution literally made me get up and dance around the room.

It’s clever, creative, and a not-really-veiled-at-all parable about monotheistic oligarchy.  It’s not a long book, you can read it in an afternoon.

GO READ IT RIGHT NOW.

WOW I want to read that book

[braingospinny]

Very rarely is there a book that I must read at any cost This is now one of them

[hamstergal]

Note: locate book

[the-hogfather]

I actually bought this book because of this post and let me tell you, it was a fucking great decision. Besides having a brilliant concept, it’s also so well written that in the beginning you don’t even notice when another letter is removed. There was one part I had to re-read because I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a single ‘d’ in the last five pages. Seriously, this book is fantastic

[ofpagesandink]

I had to read this for high school and I loved it. I have no idea where my copy went though :(

[korakos]

I’ve owned 5 copies of Ella Minnow Pea because the people I’ve loaned it out to have refused to part with it, ha. Ended up investing in a copy for the Kindle where it’ll always be safe. But yes, it is a very cleverly written book!

[creatingaquietmind-deactivated2]

the speech impediment of the 21st century (by Marc Johns)

[lyctorgideon]

I’ll fuck you up buddy this is not a speech impediment it’s linguistic evolution!! the existence of the phrase “Aisha was like” allows the speaker to convey whatever Aisha said without making the listener assume they’re quoting Aisha directly while still maintaining the FEELING of what Aisha said.

ie, Aisha said she didn’t want to go out with me VERSUS Aisha was like, “I’d rather kiss a Wookie”.

the addition of “XYZ was like” lets the speaker be more expressive and efficient and it is a totally valid method of communicating information!!

[corvidaedream]

With the way language has evolved, this is one of the few ways I can even think of to express in casual conversation what someone said. 

“So I said to Aisha,” is certainly used, but if you remove the “so,” which implies casual tone (“and” can be used in the same way), you get

“I said to Aisha,” which is really formal in most English dialects/variations. I don’t know about all, but in New England dialects, you sound like you’re reading aloud from a novel.

“I told Aisha,” is really only used when you continue to describe, not tell, what you told her. Ex: “I told Aisha that James was too punk for her” works while, “I told Aisha, ‘James is too punk for you’” crosses the line back into formalness of the “I said.”

Things like “I asked” or “I answered [with]” are similar levels of casual and efficient to the “So, I said [or say, as many conversations about the past take place in present tense anyway, as if the speaker is giving a play-by-play in the moment]” but are specific to only certain situations. 

“I was like, ‘Marc Johns, what is your obsession with restoring archaic speech patterns and interfering with the natural progression of English from complex to efficient?’” envelopes all of these easily and is accessible and crisp, and allows for more variations on inflection than the others.

Of course, James is probably like, “I already fucking said that.” But eh, I tried adding on.

[axonsandsynapses]

#linguistics #a.k.a. how I learned to stop worrying and love the evolution of the English language without being a discriminatory elitist jerk (via crystalandrock)

[languageloveaffair]

His sign should say “Au Secours”

[lemonadeandlanguages]

How to Cut Words in French

Do you ever have that moment when you’re writing something on a piece of paper and you run out of space on a line before you can fit your whole word in? Well here are the rules to cutting words when writing in French!

DO’S

- Cut between two syllables

e.g.: briser – bri/ser, souris – sou/ris

- Cut between repeated consonnants

e.g. : chauffage – chauf/fage, nettoyage – net/toyage

- Cut after the second of three consonants

e.g.: sculpteur – sculp/teur, obstacle – obs/tacle

EXCEPTION: Cut after the first of three consonants if the third consonant is “r” or “l”

e.g.: marber – mar/brer, encercler – encer/cler

- After the first hyphen

e.g.: cinquante-trois – cinquante-/trois, donne-le-lui – donne-/le-lui

DON’T’S

- Don’t cut between two vowels

e.g.: avion, poésie

EXCEPTION: If a word has a prefix, then it is possible to cut between two vowels as long as the cut is placed after the prefix

e.g.: antiacide – anti/acide, radioactive – radio/actif

- Don’t cut between two consonants that make up a single sound

e.g.: marchand, mignon

- Don’t cut before or after an apostrophe

e.g.: presqu’île, aujourd’hui

- Don’t cut before or after the letters “x” or “y” when these are placed between vowels

e.g.: flexible, joyau

EXCEPTION: If the “x” or “y” represent a single sound, then it is possible to cut before that letter

e.g.: dixième – di/xième, kayak – ka/yak

Other things to avoid

- cutting after a single-letter syllable

- cutting before the last syllable, if that syllable contains a silent “e”

- cutting a small word

- cutting proper names

- cutting the last word of a paragraph

[allthingslinguistic]

Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home.

Today in “linguists are not kidding when they say that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.” (from Atlas Obscura)

[monsieur-hiron]

Important pronunciation note on French:

If you say “plus” and pronounce the S at the end you are describing a quantity that is more as in:

“Il y a plus de chocolat ?” - Is there more chocolate?

However if you pronounce the word plus without the s as in “plu” then the meaning of “plus” changes to no more/not … anymore/no longer as in:

“Il y a plus de chocolat ?” - “Isn’t there any more chocolate?” “Il n'est plus là.” - “He isn’t here anymore/He’s no longer here.”

[beyonceprivilege-deactivated201]

i’m doing all this research on when “like” is used as a filler vs. “um” or “uh” or whatever & i’m really loving this

basically my fav pattern so far is how these teen girls use “like” pretty exclusively when they’re sharing these concepts that are unknown to them or  just guess work, ya know? 

they’ll say “here’s the, um, living room” but then they’ll say “in this picture my brother is, like, howling or something” 

& i love it i mean i love the way they use “like” to express uncertainty and idk pensiveness? “um” expresses a break in a sentence, some disfluency. but “like” holds actual semantic meaning and is an indicator that expresses what follows isn’t gonna be totally accurate but just to the speaker’s best estimation.

i mean, he’s, like, howling or something, right? 

girl talk is cool talk