Unaffiliated Academic

I spent the last 17 years of my buried in coursework, so now I’m just trying to figure out what it is exactly that I understand. Which, to clarify, is nothing.

[hazel3017]

So I’ve been working with a lot of Brits lately, and inevitably, they’ll ask about Norwegian phrases (being that we’re in Norway), and someone recently pointed out that a lot of them seemed rooted in fruits and vegetables after I had called him a potato as a compliment. He was not, in fact, very accepting of this compliment, as he thought I meant he was a couch potato, which apparently means something entirely different than what I was trying to say.

So having to clear up that whole thing, I made a list of some of my favourite Norwegian words and expressions based on fruits and vegetables that might not translate well in English!

Du er litt potet, du - You’re a bit of a potato: Compliment, meaning you can do a bit of everything. Like the potato, you’re versatile.

Din løk - You onion: Insult, meaning someone is a bit dim. Like the onion, if you peel it all away there’ll be nothing there.

Det er bare blåbær - It’s just blueberries: Expression, meaning something is simple, or something is only a minor issue.

Bite i det sure eplet - Take a bite of the sour apple: Expression, meaning having to do or accept something you don’t want to or like.

Borte som ei sviske - Gone like a prune: Expression, meaning something has completely disappeared.

Dra dit pepper’n gror - Go where the pepper grows. Insult, meaning ‘go to hell’.

Fotsopp - Mushroom foot: Medical condition, meaning athlete’s foot.

Eplekjekk - Apple handsome: Expression, meaning someone who is being cocky.

Ferskenhud - Peach skin: Compliment, meaning soft, nice skin.

Få mye pepper - Get a lot of pepper: Expression, meaning getting a lot of criticism/being reprimanded.

Høy på pæra - High on pears: Expression, meaning someone who is arrogant (head gets so big it looks like a pear)

Som plommen i egget - Like the yolk in the egg. Expression, meaning someone is perfectly relaxed and comfortable.

Nappe seg i løken - Yank the onion: Expression, meaning a man who masturbates.

Smårips - Little redcurrant: Expression, meaning young girls. Often in connection with an older person taking a romantic/sexual interest in someone significantly younger and/or underage.

Sur som en sitron - Sour like a lemon: Expression, meaning someone is angry.

Tråkke i salaten - Step in the salad: Expression, meaning having done something inappropriate or something foolish.

Tyttebærpoliti - The lingonberry police: Expression with a negative connotation, meaning a security guard. Originated with the private security firm Securitas because of the logo.

Være på bærtur - To be picking berries: Expression, meaning someone is completely lost/wrong.

Slippe en bønne - Release a bean: Expression, meaning someone farted.

Prinsessen på erten - The princess on the pea: Insult (sort of), meaning someone is high maintenance. A reference to the fairy tale the Princess and the Pea.

[unaffiliatedacademic]

There’s the language(s) you are born speaking and the language(s) you are meant to speak. I am meant to speak Norwegian.

[linguistlist-blog]

Qs: Request For Participation

Dear all, My name is Mahdis Mirzadeh, M.A. Student in tehran, Iran. Currently I'm writing my master thesis titled” A Typological and Psychological Study of image schema in Indio-European Languages”. For this purpose I selected languages such as “Russian, Indian, Dutch, French, and Greek, English, Persian” and collected English concepts which should be made available to the other language’s native speaker to see whether those concepts are in the form of idiomatic expression in those languages http://dlvr.it/R8Xtzy

[unaffiliatedacademic]

They needs “Russian, Indian [they mean Hindi] and French native speakers who are bilingual (because the corpus has been provided in English)” to complete a survey which can be found using this link

LINGUIST List 30.2778: Qs: Request For Participation

The LINGUIST List issue 30.2778, topic: Queries, title: Qs: Request For Participation

[allthingslinguistic]

How VERY ONLINE People Revolutionized The English Language, episode #299 of The Cracked Podcast on Earwolf

You: “Emoji are killing the English language.” Me: “eMoJi ArE kIlLiNg ThE eNgLiSh LaNgUaGe” plus a specific screencap of SpongeBob Squarepants acting like a chicken. If you understand the above text, this might be your favorite episode of The Cracked Podcast.

I’m interviewed in this new episode of The Cracked Podcast about internet linguistics and my upcoming book about internet language! 

You: “Emoji are killing the English language.”  Me: “eMoJi ArE kIlLiNg ThE eNgLiSh LaNgUaGe” plus a specific screencap of SpongeBob Squarepants acting like a chicken.

If you understand the above text, this might be your favorite episode of The Cracked Podcast. If you don’t understand that text, this WILL be your favorite episode of The Cracked Podcast, because everything you read online is about to make more sense.

On this week’s show, Alex Schmidt is joined by linguist Gretchen McCulloch for a dig into her revelatory new book ‘Because Internet: Understanding The New Rules Of Language’. They’ll explore how the past few decades contain several distinct generations of Internet users, each contributing to a worldwide linguistic sea-change. You’ll discover which online generation you’re a part of. You’ll learn how 4 billion people work together to remake our writing and speaking every day. And yes: you WILL discover why emoji are a valuable format that makes our writing richer.

Listen to the episode here or your favourite podcast app, and check out the shownotes for more information. 

Because Internet is out in 15 days, and you can preorder it here! 

[unaffiliatedacademic]

It’s not just Scottish twitter impacting language, it’s ev👏🏻ry👏🏻thing👏🏻

[allthingslinguistic]

Yer da sells Avon: how the Scots language found a new home on Twitter

Young Scots have spoken in their own languages for decades. Now they’re finding an authentic voice online, thanks to social media. And blowing yersel up tae fuck in a microwave.

A great article about the Scots language on twitter. Excerpt: 

Clas­sic con­tri­bu­tions includ­ing Kings­ley the Partick This­tle mas­cot; ​‘yer maw’ jokes; ​‘yer da sells Avon’ jokes; any­thing Lewis Capal­di tweets, and ​“maw bought aldi show­er gel that smells like fairy liq­uid so I’ve been cut­ting about all day smelling like a fuck­ing plate” (@adamfraser14, August 2015).

For many peo­ple both out­side Scot­land and with­in, Twit­ter has pro­vid­ed a brand new view into the Scots lan­guage and its vari­eties in all their sweary, hys­ter­i­cal, some­times incom­pre­hen­si­ble glo­ry. Has the plat­form spear­head­ed a resur­gence amongst its young users or is this some­thing more pro­found altogether?

The Scots lan­guage has been spo­ken in Scot­land for cen­turies and still exists across the coun­try today. It’s com­prised of numer­ous dif­fer­ent dialects – which can dif­fer from each oth­er quite dra­mat­i­cal­ly – and is one of three offi­cial lan­guages in Scot­land, along­side Eng­lish and Gael­ic. In 2001 it was offi­cial­ly recog­nised under the Euro­pean Char­ter for Minor­i­ty Languages.

“Scots was the nation­al lan­guage of a coun­try that doesn’t exist any­more,” explains writer and pre­sen­ter Alis­tair Heather, who writes a Scots col­umn in Scotland’s The Nation­al news­pa­per. ​“As Scot­land was amal­ga­mat­ed into Great Britain, Scots fell away from being a nation­al lan­guage because it didn’t have a nation anymore.

Read the whole thing. 

[unaffiliatedacademic]

Scottish Twitter is not just a great place to find the best jokes on the internet, it’s also Scots (i.e. Scottish People) using Scots (i.e. the Scots language) to express their identity and communicate in their own langauge with the fun side effect of documenting the language for future generations (because, you know, England and history and erasure of identity)(and also for linguists to study).

[sociolinguo]

When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic Independence? | JSTOR Daily

By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, did colonial Americans still sound like their British counterparts?

[cipi127]

“Morpheme is the Smallest Meaningful Unit in a Language“

is the linguistic equivalent of

“Mitochondria is the Powerhouse of the Cell”

[linguistlist-blog]

Books: The Oxford Handbook of Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics is a young and highly interdisciplinary field, with influences from psycholinguistics, psychology, aphasiology, and (cognitive) neuroscience, as well as other fields. Neurolinguistics, like psycholinguistics, covers aspects of language processing; but unlike psycholinguistics, it draws on data from patients with damage to language processing capacities, or the use of modern neuroimaging technologies such as fMRI, TMS, or both. The burgeoning interest in neurolinguistics reflects http://dlvr.it/R7SCxX

[unaffiliatedacademic]

[ayeforscotland]

[unaffiliatedacademic]

Are We Being Framed? | JSTOR Daily

How the linguistic trick of framing shapes meaning--and can lead to deception.

“Perhaps fewer people really understand that when it comes to language itself, just the act of speaking is not “transparent and innocent” as many people believe. We don’t say exactly what we mean, we naturally frame our language and make linguistic choices, even unknowingly, that reflect how we see the world. Using language is rarely just neutral.”

[unaffiliatedacademic]

Verb-Answer

Do other VSO languages use the Verb-Answer strategy like Scots Gaelic and Irish do?

Example (Irish)

Question:

An raibh tú riamh i nDún na nGall?

C be.V you ever to Donegal?

“Have you ever been to Donegal?

Option 1:

Bhí

Be.V (first person singular)

“Yes”

Option 2:

Ní raibh

Neg. be.V

“No”

I wrote about it for a term paper based on Gary Thoms’ work and he mentions that it has been referenced before in a work on Scots Gaelic, but not if it is possible in non-Celtic languages. I am curious to know if it’s also possible in other VSO languages.

[unaffiliatedacademic]

Early Morning Thoughts

This is the kind of quality content you can come to expect from me.

It came to my attention once in a seminar that people my age often make nouns into adjectives by adding -y even when an adjective exists.

Examples

I thought you would do something more science-y

They look stalker-y.

My classmate made a word, which is now lost to me, into an adjective using -y, to which my professor responded, “Is that how we describe things now?” We, the students, tested it on a few words and decided that yes, that is how we describe things now.

The actual suffix -y wiktionary (the dictionary version of wikipedia, which we all use so calm down) traces back to at least Old English and to a few proto languages. It’s not an uncommon suffix in English, we use it all the time to make nouns into adjectives (e.g. bloody, angry, skinny). We also have been known to do it with other adjectives (e.g. crispy). So, it’s not entirely unreasonable that we would (a) take words that already have an adjectival form and make a new one or (b) freely make new adjectives with it.

In conclusion, I think about this conversation often, making adjectives in English is fun, and I hope in 50 years that I will be able to find “science-y” in the dictionary.

[unaffiliatedacademic]

Unaffiliated? Yup. Academic? Eh.

So. I, like most people I know, have been in classes from kindergarten to the completion of my undergraduate degree which was 17 years of my life (!), which is roughly 75% of my life (!!), or, based on what I can remember of my life, 95% of my life (!!!). This has left me with significant time on my hands which I have largely filled with television shows and movies; however, even that is beginning to bore me. As an attempt to find a better way of spending my time than re-watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I have resolved to read a few academic articles, essays, etc. a week to start using all the knowledge I learned in college (or re-learn it, I’m actually not convinced I learned anything in college). Therefore, I have decided to start a blog to keep track of the things I (re: start a blog to motivate myself to) read. What will I read? “Who’s to say?” (Mulaney 2015). Probable topics include, but are not limited to

Linguistics - I was a linguistics major (does that make me a linguist now?) and am probably (re: maybe?) going to pursue a graduate degree in the field or a related field. I find it fascinating even despite the consecutive sleepless nights I spent trying to figure out what Chomsky was saying or trying to remember what exactly I thought was so interesting about verb-answers when I proposed the topic for my term paper. Linguistic categories are likely to include: syntax and neurolinguistics OR anything involving Arabic, Irish, Gaelic, French, Turkish, or English. Maybe German.

The “Middle East” - I was also a Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies major as well and while this was largely because I studied Arabic, I also, you know, dedicated a lot of brain energy to the topic and would like to continue. The quotation marks on Middle East are for all of you who get the joke. 

Religion - I spent  a  l o t  of time talking about religious literacy while in college and have a lot of thoughts on it. It is likely these thoughts will also show up here.

I am by no means the smartest person I know and I also am not an expert in any of the topics on which I have thoughts. Thus, I cannot guarantee this blog will be interesting. or informative. It will, however, be something.

tl;dr I don’t know what to do with my time now that I no longer have coursework, so I’ve started a blog.