Discover Top Posts Tagged with #language!

haitian créole has my entire heart

#the straightforwardness.....the sass...#absolutely scrumptious #as they should...as they should😌🤚🏼#jay speaks #linguistics #language!

screaming, crying, throwing up etc. but Friends of Tonga just released a literacy app with both English and Tongan language books [see my laments about access to books in Tongan a few weeks back]. these are books that were being written and illustrated over a decade ago and being passed around our schools as photocopies of photocopies of photocopies.

cannot oversell what an incredible resource this is both for kids in Tonga and for the broader diaspora who often don't have the resources that make learning the language accessible. mirror books and not just window books.

The first reading apps built for the Kingdom of Tonga. Available in English and Tongan, Tau Laukonga ("Let's Read") is a force multiplier fo

#tongan #lea fakatonga #language!

Ok I have a question and as both a words person and a classics person you seem as good as anybody to ask. The idiom "don't look a gift horse in the mouth", I get that it means don't question good things, just accept them. But that makes no sense to me in context of the Trojan horse. If you're given a supposed gift that actually has a bunch of soldiers waiting to kill you inside of it, wouldn't you *want* to look closer so you can find out right away instead of being surprised???? I feel like by not looking the gift horse in the mouth, you're just asking to be killed by Odysseus's men later when you're sleeping. Am I just being too autistic about this and taking it too literally lol? Usually I don't have trouble with idioms but this one has always bugged me

There is a very simple answer to this and it's that the gift horse idiom has nothing to do with the Trojan horse! However it is unfortunately close to the idiom that does: beware Greeks bearing gifts*, with which it is often conflated/confused/paired despite being unrelated.

The gift horse whose mouth we are not to look in is a (hypothetical) flesh-and-blood horse. We're meant to leave the inside of its mouth a mystery because one of the things you look at when buying a horse is how good its teeth are. The thing being advised against is really to avoid treating the giving and receiving of gifts as transactional (but it has taken on the sense of not worrying about the details of a windfall** and accepting it as it is) (and been further watered down to simply mean one shouldn't complain about unavoidable circumstances, which are the metaphorical 'gift' in this [ironic] usage).

*(my personal experience with Greeks is that their gifts are usually of delicious food so I ignore this one)

**(bonus: a 'windfall' is an apple that's fallen out of a tree due to the wind, which means you don't have to climb a tree to get it.)

#ask and ye shall receive #holy parentheses batman but you get my point #language!