my silly little langblr blog

where i don't actually study, only reblog german (native), english (my baby), french (my toxic relationship), italian (my angel), learning romanian and polish

[missyfrs]

to be a fly on the wall for a conversation between these two

[hellotailor]

New York Post unethical vs. New York Times unethical

[ziggyplayedd]

things that made me stop wanting to die that require no effort whatsoever

change the color used to highlight text on your laptop

move the pictures on your wall

stack whatever clutter is in your room into piles even if you don’t have time to clean it all

slightly vary your commute, even just by one street

change where you sit and scroll aimlessly on your phone even if it’s only to the chair in your room instead of your bed

drink water or juice out of a wine glass in the morning because nothing is real

shower with the lights off, without music

buy $3 flowers at trader joe’s—they look bad next to the more expensive ones but they look so good in your room

start typing things you don’t post into your notes. your thoughts can be worth documenting even if you don’t deem them worth sharing

wake up super early just once. you don’t have to make it a habit it’s just extra satisfying to go to bed that night

listen to the entirety of your favorite album from 2015

[sandersstudies]

Almost all of these are about variety. Humans need stimulation! We need enrichment! We literally cannot do the same thing every day!

The other day I was feeling miserable, so I hopped on a bus and rode it all the way back to where I’d started, and my brain, which had finally had some proper stimulation via new environments, was suddenly ready to go again!

This is why taking walks/drives and trying new hobbies are good for you! Don’t turn yourself into a sad zoo animal! You need some pumpkins to roll around in your enclosure!

[yippeeepenid]

ITS BACK!!!!!

god i fucking love the quote “dont turn yourself into a sad zoo animal” it has really inspired me!

[coto524]

as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan

[saethwr-blog]

and please, enough with the “keyboard smashing” jokes. not original, not funny.

[coto524]

“ #okay but can any of y'all even pronounce your own town names tho? #bye”

yeah, we can actually because the spelling is phonetic. meanwhile english folks have placenames like bicester or keighley or beaulieu, which you have to learn the pronunciation for individually because the rules are so inconsistent. i mean people can’t even agree how to pronounce marylebone but sure welsh place names are the weird ones

[coto524]

“#But are you aware your language literally looks like a potato rolled across a keyboard”

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

fun fact: the english have been taking the piss out of welsh for years, just like they’ve been doing for irish, and scots gaelic, and cornish, and british sign language, and a hundred and one other languages, because evidently the fact that the whole world isn’t anglophone and monocultured and Still Part Of The Empire is a problem, and something that needs to be corrected

[universeleads]

I explained the concept of "blorbo from my shows" to my 71 year old immigrant grandfather because I referenced it in passing and I thought nothing of it, until today when he said "I think I'll watch peaky blinders tonight and see my blorbo from my shows" referring, of course, to Cillian Murphy playing Tommy Shelby

[universeleads]

English isn't his first language so he's not super in touch with modern slang, so I've been accidentally teaching him to talk like a tumblr user. His favorite thing to say lately is "me when I'm a little hater" when he's like talking shit about the neighbor's son

[overwhelmedfernfrond]

I explained the “x before gta6” meme to my immigrant father and he, in turn, explained to me how back in his day in Romania, they had the same type of joke, except instead of it being gta6, it was about the imminent death of a singer named Gică Petrescu, who everyone was continuously shocked by because he refused to die. Every time a momentous event happened people would say, in essence: “This happened and Gică Petrescu hasn’t even died yet?!?”

So. He understood the gta6 meme immediately because they apparently had the same thing in Romania when he was young, except way, way more morbid

[sunday-sapphire]

This is very funny to me as a Romanian, because this expression is very much old fashioned, considering Gică Petrescu died in 2006 (it makes sense that the immigrant parent of a Tumblr user would be old enough to still use it.)

Interestingly, the phrase didn't stop being used with Petrescu's death, and instead people of both younger and older generations just replaced him with our former president Ion Iliescu, born in 1930, saying "And Iliescu still hasn't died??"

Last year, he too passed at the age of 95, so the saying may be replaced again, but I find it interesting to think there are Romanians out there in the world that haven't received the "update" of this phrase.

[the-last-teabender]

A little something for Linguistics Tumblr.

So the Crunchyroll newsroom isn't a "room" so much as a Slack channel. We have news writers all over the US, in Australia, and in Japan. This means we have something akin to 'round-the-clock coverage, but it also means that our schedules respective to each other are skewed. For example, when the East Coast contingent is starting their day, the Japan contingent is shutting down for the evening.

Because of that, we started experimenting with greetings that could apply when Party A was coming in for the morning and Party B was leaving for the night. One person came up with "konbarning": a combination of "good morning" and "konban wa" ("good evening" in Japanese). It stuck.

Over the following months, "konbarning" got shortened to "barning" and other permutations. Now, a year or some later, this is how we announce our arrival:

[celtib]

a ‘hot minute’ can be both a very short period of time, and a very long one. however, a hot minute in the past (“It's been a hot minute since I've seen you!”) is most often a long duration, while a hot minute in the future (“I'll be with you in a hot minute!”) is most often a short duration. this suggests some very strange things about the temperature of time.

[jessaerys]

hate when im reading and theres a word i dont know so i search it in the dictionary and its like: beuperer. noun. a person who beupers. i'll fucking kill you

[satanicsoda]

Bet there are etymologist and linguist vampires who take bets on which words will fall out of use and which words will evolve by the century

[anthro-apology]

Anne Carson (2009)

Arthur S. Way (1898)

George Theodoridis (2010)

Ian C. Johnston (2010)

E.P. Coleridge (1910)

Theodore Alois Buckley (1892)

John Peck, Frank Nisetich (1995)

R. Potter (1906)

M. L. West (1987)

William Arrowsmith (1958)

Philip Vellacott (1972)

Michael Wodhull (1782)

Kenneth McLeish (1997)

David Kovacs (2002)

Andrew Wilson (1993)

Euripides - Original (408 BCE)

[goatsandgangsters]

an interesting linguistics find! so I'm reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing "hp" in the context of "not being at full hp" "applying your full hp to a task" etc

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

language is amazing

[vulpinesaint]

saying "question mark?" and "however comma," out loud are game changers. punctuation on the go. and it's always the funniest thing that anyone around you has ever heard

[lilaclupin]

Today we were talking about how words can mean different things to different communities, and that people outside the community wouldn't understand. Like how a non-poker player wouldn't understand poker jargon the way other poker players would. Anyway, then my professor said he was gonna show us his "favourite example" and wrote a single word on the board that gave me instant psychic damage: beta.

Apparently sport climbers use this word with a meaning of "technique, method." But for a horrifying, horrifying second there was the possibility in my mind that we were gonna talk about ABO in my fucking linguistics class

[muffinlance]

Professor Betas Georg, who writes 50k omegaverse fics during office hours, boldy wrote "beta" on the board while observing which of his students went dead. still.

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[existencebringsonlypain]

guys look at this wonderful thing i just made

swug

[kosmogrl]

everybody needs to read more. read all the time. read every day. read read read

[ayeforscotland]

Gaidhlig and Scots become official languages in Scotland today with the Scottish Languages Act coming into force after it was voted on back in June.

Key parts of the legislation includes the right for parents to request Gaelic schools for their local area, and will help with standardisation of language teaching across the board.

Good signs for the future. In the future would be very interested to see parents (and everyone else) getting access to the same learning materials so they can learn alongside their kids.

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[homunculus-argument]

If the only way you could get your ass to studying is to put on a full-ass Dark Academia outfit that may or may not include a black turtleneck, tweed jacket and brown leather shoes you otherwise never wear, and taking your books and ass to the nearest library to have an aggressively performatively aesthetic study session with maybe a paper cup of black coffee or something, that's what you gotta do.

If you've got shit to do that you have to get done, you're allowed to be ridiculous about it if that's what it takes to get there. As a treat.

[janmisali]

one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet

[foone]

There are so many fucking different American accents where the people who have them love to go "oh I've just got a generic American accent!" and NO YOU DO NOT, and THAT ISN'T A THING.

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post