Linguistics Is Lit

David | TN native | Truman State Linguistics graduate ✌🏻2% milk 98% linguistics

[real-language-facts]

just talked to the spirit of latin and it said "you need to put me down"

[drlinguo]

Source

Linguists and parenting 💁‍♂️

[real-language-facts]

abdomen: latin for Away From The Domen

[real-language-facts]

in the english language there is a word that escapes if you look at it for over 5 seconds

[datasoong47]

““Today’s proverb: Language will evolve, irregardless of your attempt to literally lock it away in a secluded tower. Obvs.””

— - Welcome to Night Vale, Episode 55, The University of What It Is (via intelligentairhead)

[yvanspijk]

Early Latin borrowings: utensils

Over the past few days, I’ve created two infographics on early Germanic loanwords from Latin: one on construction, with words such as kitchen and street, and one on food, with cheese, butter and others.

Today, I’m wrapping up the trilogy with an infographic on utensils. Fork, pan, sack, mint and chest – they were all borrowed into Proto-West Germanic, the ancestor of English, when the Romans controlled large parts of north-western Europe during the early first millennium AD.

How do we know these words were borrowed from Latin? You can read all about it in this article. And this article tells you three ways can you identify early borrowings from Latin.

[real-language-facts]

if pronouns exist does that imply that electrnouns and neunouns are also real

YES!

[real-language-facts]

what if french was good?

this is against the laws of physics

[real-language-facts]

trilabial trill

euphemism for kiss

[onion-souls]

Sorry, Millennials, but recent paleontologist findings and hyolaryngeal apparatus reconstructions no longer support the hypothesis that "rawr" means "I love you" in dinosaur.

[onion-souls]

I made you a bibliography but I eated it :(

[awifubgegbfciebf]

[quoting-my-linguistics-lecturers]

"Undifferenciated lampiness"

- My lecturer trying to decide on the prototypical lamp

[quoting-my-linguistics-lecturers]

"You can contemplate semantics anywhere; I hope you do"

- My semantics lecturer with normal example sentences that have no semantics related agenda.

[quoting-my-linguistics-lecturers]

"John and Mary are always up to something."

- My linguistics lecturer on the frequencies of names in example sentences

[real-language-facts]

my phonetic inventory is full, how do i get more slots

[homunculus-argument]

I once chatted with a guy from Hawaii, we started talking about languages. I mentioned that while I've heard very little of it and hardly seen more of it written down, the Hawaiian language seems to have extremely similar balance of vocals and consonants as Finnish does, so it's actually pretty likely that there are some words that exist in both languages, but mean one thing in Hawaiian and a completely differen thing in Finnish - much like in Japanese.

He didn't find it plausible, so we agreed to disagree. Later on he mentioned that his name is [firstname] Kalani Kanaele, and when I told him what that translates to in Finnish, I had to spend like 20 more minutes trying to convince him that I'm actually not fucking with him.

[homunculus-argument]

Okay so in finnish, "kala" means "fish" - just any fish, fish in general, and "kana" means "chicken". "Ele" is "gesture", as in a physical movement that an animal or human does to nonverbally communicate something. The -ni suffix is a possessive referring to oneself, essentially "my". In finnish, compound words are of the "if it doesn't exist yet, I can make one up on the spot" variety, so almost all nouns can be slapped together to refer to something specific.

So, broken down like this and put back together, this dude's name translates to "the chicken-like gesture that my fish makes."

[silly-jellyghoty]

This is pure poetry

[geeky-fuckery]

Languages are fun

[drlinguo]