Linguistics Is Lit

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

[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]

[real-language-facts]

couples costume idea: signifier and signified

[drlinguo]

Barbara Partee „History of semantics“

[jxhn-mulaney]

let's be constituents with mama

[dedalvs]

Any random tips on word order? I tried buying your new edition of The Art of Language Invention but only got the first edition and I would really like to hear your cursory thoughts on syntax.

Weird. I thought you couldn't find the original anymore, unless it was used. Anyway, check out this video on word order and how it correlates with affix placement:

[sentence-arborist]

How would you compare LFG, HPSG, Minimalism, and Construction grammar?

So for starters I'd stress that of these four I'm most familiar with LFG and Minimalism, less familiar with HPSG, and much less familiar with Construction grammar.

Broadly, LFG and HPSG belong to the same "family" of frameworks, in contrast to the other two — they are both lexicalist frameworks which make use of feature structures (represented by AVMs) to express functional relationships between lexical items. LFG captures syntagmatic and dependency relationships through a traditional tree structure, while HPSG captures this information through ordered sets, but that's really a mere formal variation. I'm sure there would be more fundamental differences if I was more familiar with HPSG, and the LFG formal distinction between constituency-based and functional grammatical relations does nicely echo certain findings in the psycholinguistic literature, which I appreciate; but generally a lot of what I've seen of HPSG is very familiar from an LFG perspective.

Minimalism is more in the G&B tradition. Contemporary minimalism is typically non-Lexicalist, making it slightly better at handling languages like Greenlandic and slightly worse at handling Semitic language and other forms of nonconcatenative morphology. It just uses a tree structure, and effectively subsumes all grammatical relations under syntagmatic order and dependency relations, which means you have to have some kind of regular "scrambling" operation to explain away all the languages that don't do that. It's very formally tight, so if you only really care about language qua a purely formal system, it's a decent framework for that.

From what I've seen of it, Construction grammar seems to be a third strand that's doing a bit of it's own thing. I like the way it makes the paradigmatic/syntagmatic distinction very explicit, and it feels like it would play very well with frame approaches to morphology. Definitely looks like it's proponents have some important critiques of both derivational and functional frameworks, so well worth engaging with! From the handful of introductions I've been able to find, it does look like it might run into a bit of an issue of either missing out on generalisations that can be made about related structures, or relying on proposing "constructions" that are so abstract as to amount to little more than grammatical functions under any other name. I'd also love to hear if/how Construction grammar handles discourse-level constraints (given presumably we're not treating whole conversations as Constructions that need to be learned) and differing degrees of freeness in word order (most of the introductions I read seem to treat Constructions as having fixed order of elements, which is fine for English but seems like it's going to struggle with Warlpiri's post-auxiliary region or the German's Mittelfeld).

At the end of the day, none of these frameworks are going to perfectly capture "what human brains really do", so a lot the value of one framework over another is going to depend on what you value in your analysis, and what data each framework is about to satisfactorily account for.

[thelanguagebro]

Fantastic!