Peter Solarz
blake kathryn
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
NASA
Sade Olutola
JBB: An Artblog!
Andulka
todays bird
hello vonnie
Mike Driver
Origami Around
No title available
ellievsbear
dirt enthusiast
Keni
noise dept.
Three Goblin Art
Not today Justin
No title available
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Argentina
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from New Zealand
@stuff-lost-in-time
To-Do List: oh no
PRE 1: Change language name from ru'ovaPa to hruˀovaPō
1. Complete "Intro to hruˀovaPō" chapters 1
a. Review and finalize content
b. Add practice exercises and answer keys for self-study
title: answer!
c.Consider making significant changes to irregular verbs, such as 'to be', BEFORE posting the introduction.
2. update chapter 2 : title: ask!
a. continuous
b. future:
i.fated modal verb
i. ought modal verb
c. past tense marker
d. questions.
i love it when italians argue about italian. like we don’t even know how our language really works we just roll with it
Italian is 107 different provincial languages stuck together with spit and half a prayer
My bf lives in another region and we are constantly arguing about regional variations of words and we both live in the fucking north of Italy
one time i saw a map of italy but instead of cities and roads etc it was just covered w different ways you can say the word vagina. it was covered
oh I can think of at least seven ways to say the word vagina right off the top of my head rn. I can’t imagine what I could do if I tried harder
Fjgkahfmangksoajufnajejgnanfjakirjvjjs
this is the Italian Vagina Map, reblog to… I’m not sure actually. Can’t hurt though.
reblog to Italian season your pussy
What is a ‘wug’?
If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?
The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:
“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules—for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:
This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.
Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.
The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:
This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.
This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.
(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)
Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings—to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms—to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words—implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.
The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”
Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:
Sources:
Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic
official linguistics post
tumblr: on languages
The thai for “5″ is pronounced roughly “Ha”, and so where english internets would generally put “lol” or something, they put “555555555″.
I was looking for this post for so long
Finally it has returned
in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other
scale as in „to climb“ comes from the latin scala, for ladder.
scale as in the measuring device comes from the old norse skal, for a drinking vessel sometimes used as a weighing device
scale as in the dermal plating on the skin of some fish and reptiles comes from the old french escale, for shell or husk.
Three languages enter, one language leaves.
official linguistics post
One of the hard things about expressing oneself in English is that there aren't suffixes you can put to make nouns smaller and bigger in the same way as in Portuguese.
For example, you have doido (crazy), doidinho (literally "little crazy"), and doidão (literally, "big crazy") and they all carry very different connotations.
Saying someone is "a little crazy" isn't the same as "doidinho" (which carries a tone of affection) and saying someone is "doidão" (which may or may not have implied affection depending on context) isn't quite the same as saying someone is "very crazy."
Adding the suffix is just so much easier.
Us, arriving to Austria to a tiny family hotel owned by an elderly lady
Us: speak only limited German
Lady: barely speaks English
Us:
Lady:
Lady: Czech? Slovak?
Us: Czech
Lady, to herself: Czech, that's a Slavic language right
Lady: understand Yugoslavian?
Us:
Us: yeah that works
Shit like this can really only happen in Europe. Reminds me of the time I took my best shot at ordering at a restaurant in Spain in spanish. The closest language to spanish that I actually speak is latin.
Waiter: Germany?
Me: No, Czechia.
Waiter, in a heavily accented but intelligible Czech: Why didn’t you say so before! We get you guys here all the time!
Já v roce 2019 na Ukrajině: OK, takže když použiju tohle staročeský slovo, přidám polský sloveso, své chabé znalosti záhoráčtiny a řeknu to s ruskym přízvukem, tak to projde.
[Me in 2019 in Ukraine: ok so if i use this Old Czech word, add a Polish verb, my poor knowledge of the Záhorie dialect of Slovak and say it with a Russian accent, it might pass]
Reminds me of the time when we were in Poland and I tried to order a burger using a truly unholy mix of Slovak, Russian and Ostrava dialect (which in itself is like an unholy mix of Czech and Polish).
I did get the burger
[#my grandpa called this "Slavic Esperanto"]
I know Ukrainians who can do this on purpose and masterfully, and it was mind-blowing to hear a speech as immediately understandable to an audience of native speakers of three different native Slavic languages, not just two languages as is common
During one student exchange I (a Pole) got acquainted with two students from Czechia and Russia. At first we talked in English or German, but after a while we’ve noticed, that we could understand each other’s native languages just fine. And if some word was unknown in one language, another one had the right synonym.
*Each of us talking in their mother tongue*
Me: Bla bla bla.
Russian: I don’t know this “bla”.
Czech: Oh, we have “bla”! We also call it “that”!
Russian: Oh I know “that”! It’s a very old version of “this”.
Me: Oh, we have “this” too, but it means something slightly different.
German acquaintance: Was für nen Scheiß zieht ihr da ab? o_O
the reason there aren't slavic people in the bible is that they wouldn't have been surprised or awed to hear the disciples speak in tongues and be understood by people of many nations at once
Slavs walked away from the Tower of Babel mildly inconvenienced.
I was wondering if “drat” had any particular meaning and apparently it’s a clipping of “god rot”, which sounds to me like a pretty intense thing to say to a person. I’d have to be pretty mad at somebody to say “God rot you”
if someone told me their pronouns were attack/helicopter I would just use them
if attack's serious then attack's probably the funniest person on earth. if not then attack'll have to tell you attacks actual pronouns. there's no losing
Pardon me friend, but I do believe you have misconjugated this particular set of pronouns in your penultimate sentence. In most cases, the slash between words indicates a nominative vs oblique case (cf he/him).
Now, giving only two versions of the pronoun does make it difficult to extrapolate the possessive form (cf he/him/his, which gives us nominative/dative and accusative/possessive). However, lacking any other information, let us assume that attack/helicopter declines similarly to the pronoun "she," which has but two forms, plus a possessive adjective formed by adding -s to the oblique form. To whit:
Attack = nominative (cf "she")
Helicopter = oblique cases (cf "her")
Helicopters = possessive adjective (cf "hers")
Thus, your penultimate sentence would properly read "If not, then attack'll have to tell you helicopters actual pronouns."
Attack will appreciate you getting helicopters pronouns right
One thing I didn’t expect from my new worldbuilding book is the author, roughly my dad’s age, including his opinions on furries
I’m liking this guy more and more
I have a new favorite author.
This is from Mark Rosenfelder of the Language Construction Kit, because of course it is
this guy rules
Spanish is a wonderful language for how it lets you add "-ito" to the end of a word to immediately make it small and cute.
Saw a children's book at work called "Vlad, el vampirito fabuloso" and I spent the rest of the workday going "Vampirito. Vampirito. Vampirito" in my head like a broken record
El fantasmita y el vampirito son muy pequeño y lindo!
[ID: A book with a ghost on the cover. The title is Gustavo: El Fantasmita Tímido by Flavia Z. Drago. End ID]
[ID: A book with a vampire on the cover. The title is Vlad: El Vampirito Fabuloso by Flavia Z. Drago. End ID]
In Yiddish you add -ehluh (לע-) to singular verbs for the same effect so
וואַמפּירלע
... I think I'm right, it might be
וואַמפּירעלע
But in either case it's "vamPEERehluh" which is kind of delightful in how exactly opposite of Spanish it is in the vocal stresses and rhythm.
דער וואַמפּירעלע זוכט ער בערעלע.
Der vampirele zeekt ihr bearele.
The little vampire is looking for his teddy bear.
"Ma'am, your penis is barking"
First two lines of Jabberwocky
I tried figuring out what parts correspond to what. This seems to be more or less a reverse abugida, where vowels are given more importance and consonants are notated with diacritics. Very unnatural. I love it.
I noticed that dots seem to modify a phoneme. Adding one to a voiceless consonant seems make it voiced (eg /s/ to /z/ and /d/ to /b/)
I think it's interesting how /ŋ/ is on the side. This makes sense for English, as that phoneme usually shows up at the end of a word.
I am scared of how consonant clusters might work in this script. I'll get right on to the jabberwocky transliteration.
Yeah you nailed it!
There are a few special diacritics for common consonant-only digraphs like /nd/ and /st/ respectively. And three special glyphs for /the/, /of/, and /and/. But I enjoy how CCCVCCCC words create interesting visually complex symbols.
Consonant clusters are stacked vertically, top to bottom. However, /r/ is special, it can be denoted by putting a little accent on the end of any vowel OR consonant diacritic. Similar to how a dot makes a grapheme voiced, an /r/ dash makes a grapheme rhotic.
Also yeah I accidentally replaced the /and/ in the first line of Jabberwocky with an /in/ because to tell you the truth I am drunk as hell rn.
I think I have a decent transcription here. The question marks mark places that i think were a typo. There's a few other things that I wasn't quite sure if calling a typo would be right. For example, the symbol for /a/ and /æ/ seem to be used interchangeably in some cases. /g/ is also substituted with /ŋ/ in brillig. The r colored vowel /ɚ/ seems to be notated as either the normal rhotic diacritic (a small line, almost horizontal), or a separate character when it is on it's own (as seen in "were"). Also, the diacritic for /n/ in "in" seems to not be the same as it was in the previous text (although maybe it's just not flipped upside down). Also, there's some words like "gyre" and "gimble" that apparently are meant to start with /dʒ/ instead of /g/. It's not what I would have guessed for those words, so I'm not sure if you made the same assumption as I originally did, or if those two phonemes have the same diacritic.
I don't think that these are necessarily bad things though, if they were intentional (also i could have made mistakes too). Since this is called a shorthand, it's actually surprising it retains this much information about the phonemics of the text.
Anyways, this was fun to try and decipher. I wasn't expecting the skills I got in the codebusters science olympiad event to ever be used again, but it did help here with the misspellings. I'll absolutely try writing in this myself. I'd try writing "strengths", but I don't think you've shown how to write /ɛ/ yet.
Well done! As I'm sure you can tell, I'm still working out the kinks. Many of these are just spelling mistskes or oversights on my part lol. Here's how you would graph "Strengths":
/st/ is one of the few special digraphs that gets its own diacritic.
Part of my goal for the script is something that generates distinctly esoteric-looking glyphs. It's why I based it on astrological/alchemical symbols.
Not quite there yet
That's not a sephirot tree it's a neoplatonist emanation diagram based on Greek notarikon and the 2020 IPA vowel chart.
I really like how it accidentally alchemical symbols pronounceable lol. According to this script, the symbol for copper is pronounced /is/
When I studied abroad, I thought my host family just had difficulty pronouncing my name. They didn’t try very hard before deciding that they’d just call me Brahim and be done with it.
This kept happening no matter where I went in Morocco. Even fluent English speakers decided to give me alternative names, and I just shrugged it off as the consequence of one of the syllables being very unusual in Arabic.
That is, until one day I was talking to a shopkeeper in the souk and he asked me my name. I gave him my English one, and explained that I also answer to Brahim (and Daud, and… more than I can remember). He laughed hysterically and looked shocked, calling his friend over from the back of the shop.
“Tell him your name,” he said excitedly. I did so.
The other man’s face cycled through several expressions very quickly—surprise, anger, suspicion, and then exasperation when he realized his friend had set me up.
They very kindly explained to me that my name spoken with a Moroccan accent sounds very much like an Arabic profanity, and that I should definitely introduce myself as Brahim or give an alternative English name when meeting new people, because shaking hands with strangers and saying “Hello, I’m Fuck Your Mother’s Religion” is not a greeting that will win me many friends.
So. Brahim it was.
Another fun story: when I forgot the word for “egg” during dinner and attempted to compliment my host mother’s soft-boiled “Ibn Al-Dajaj”.
Son of the chicken.
When I was working at a Thai restaurant one summer I heard the guys in the kitchen talk/yelling (it’s a kitchen, so… loud) and I thought I heard my name so I stuck my head through the door and asked if they’d called me, and they all stopped and stared for a really long moment and then started laughing like crazy. Turns out my name sounds exactly like the Thai word for garbage.
Language barriers: a source of unlimited hilarity since the evolution of vocal cords.
A loanword is a word taken from another language, such as ‘angst’ or ‘tsunami’ or ‘calque’. A calque is a literal translation of a word from another language, such as rhinestone (from French caillou du Rhine) or blueblood (from Spanish sangre azul) or loanword (from German lehnwort).
official linguistics post
Many books of the Bible that didn't make it to the official canon(s) and other incredibly important pieces of scripture and literature are only known today because they were preserved in the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia. It is very likely that there are lots of other texts dating to the earliest days of Christianity that are still to be "found", only because there aren't enough international scholars who know the Ge'ez script or work in Ethiopia. There are many, but not as much as it deserves. (Important note is that Ge'ez is both a liturgical language, like Latin, and also is a script, much like Latin or Chinese characters, used by many Ethiopian languages, but others can be written and indeed are written in Ge'ez script, this is why it has preserved such a range of literature)
Ge'ez looks like this:
ሀሎ! ይህ በአማርኛ ቋንቋ እና በግእዝ ፊደል የተጻፈ ነው! ለእርስዎ እና ለቤተሰብዎ በረከቶች!
There was briefly a very bad taste meme calling it a "demon language", with people even copypasting random religious literature in Ge'ez thus making it seem more "sinister". I won't comment on how ignorant and offensive that is.
Ge'ez is an important script and language, much like Greek or Latin, because of its connection to major religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ethiopia is a wonderful country with a deep, rich history, and is an example of how Africa has always been part of world history. But like all languages, it's also a cultural heritage on its own, worth cherising, preserving, and learning about, regardless of its importance to the rest of the world. Instead of being ignorant for a racist joke, we could always take our time and learn and appreciate such things.
Ge'ez manuscripts. Enoch on the left, and Matthew on the right.
I always feel like I am made of so many pieces that don't fit together, but the beautiful thing about making my own conlang is that it is mine, and I can use it to write the most cursed smut or translate religious verse.
